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In the domain of scholarly communication lifecycle, recommender systems have been built to provide research papers for researchers’ explicit and implicit information needs. Previous studies (Jardine, 2014; Mcnee, 2006) have employed an algorithmic approach of providing solutions to researcher’s tasks. The characteristics of the tasks, their inter-relationships and intra-relationships with algorithms have been largely ignored since the focus has mainly been to propose different recommendation techniques on top of a variety of algorithms. Driven by these research gaps, the overarching goal of this research is to build an assistive system for helping researchers in finding papers for key Literature Review (LR) and Manuscript Preparatory (MP) tasks. To achieve this goal, two research objectives are proposed. The first objective is to identify an appropriate method to map the identified LR and MP tasks to relevant algorithms. The deliverable for this objective is a prototype assistive system that provides recommendations for three tasks. The second research objective is to evaluate whether the performance of the proposed recommendation techniques and the overall system are at the expected level. To address the research objectives, the research is divided into two interrelated studies. In Study I, a university-wide survey was conducted on the topic of Inadequate and Omitted Citations in manuscripts (IOC). The 207 survey respondents were classified into manuscript reviewer and author groups. Survey results indicated that manuscript authors frequently miss citing seminal and topically-similar papers in journal manuscripts. The lack of experience in a specific research area was perceived as a major reason for IOC, followed by lack of overall research experience and the scenario of working in interdisciplinary research projects. Authors frequently needed external assistance in finding interdisciplinary and topically-similar papers for LR. Based on the findings, two LR search tasks of building reading list and finding topically similar papers were shortlisted. A third task meant to help researchers in identifying unique and important papers from their final reading list was selected, thereby making it a total of three tasks for the assistive system. A prototype called Rec4LRW (Recommendations for Literature Review and Writing) system was developed for providing recommendations for the shortlisted three tasks. The system development was guided a threefold intervention framework comprising of (i) task redesign for addressing the algorithmic improvements, (ii) task interconnectivity addressing the management of papers between the tasks and (iii) informational display features in the system’s user-interface for expediting researcher’s relevance judgment decisions. The second research objective is addressed in Study II. As a part of Study II, an offline evaluation experiment and a user evaluation study were conducted. An extract of papers from the ACM Digital Library was used as the corpus for the evaluations. A total of 119 researchers who had experience in authoring research papers, participated in the user study. Predictors and correlates for the output quality measures were identified for each task. This study established the effectiveness of the three interventions in providing relevant recommendations. Graduate students and novice researchers found the recommendations and the overall system to be more useful and effective. ​Doctor of Philosophy (WKWSCI)

This research investigates the ways in which differences between authentic and fictitious reviews on the Internet are related to users’ perceived review authenticity. To accomplish the goal, it addresses two research questions. The first deals with actual review authenticity while the second focuses on humans’ perceived review authenticity. A theoretical model of authentic and fictitious reviews is developed. Guided by the model, this research examines actual differences between authentic and fictitious reviews using computational techniques. A dataset of 1,800 reviews (900 authentic + 900 fictitious) was used for investigation. Next, it examines humans’ perceived differences between authentic and fictitious reviews by surveying 380 participants. This research finds that authentic reviews are different from fictitious entries in terms of the linguistic cues of exaggeration and specificity. Moreover, humans’ perceptions of exaggeration and specificity are related to perceived authenticity. The relations tend to be particularly strong among individuals who believe that the authenticity of information cannot be justified easily. However, humans remain generally sub-par in discerning review authenticity. Overall, this research shows that even though authentic and fictitious reviews are distinguishable, human ability to discern authenticity is not overly promising. Therefore, it develops a guideline based on the actual differences between authentic and fictitious reviews to teach humans how to discern authenticity. The guideline is used as an intervention in an experimental design involving 240 participants. It is found to improve human ability to perceive differences between authentic and fictitious reviews. ​Doctor of Philosophy (WKWSCI)

The Special Education (SPED) industry in Singapore is segregated from the mainstream education system and has long endured a reputation deemed to be less illustrious compared to its counterpart. In recent times, however, the sector has begun to receive more attention from the overseeing ministries in a bid to enhance the quality of education given to students with special needs. Such efforts will entail the provision of proper support for SPED teachers even as they manage the growing demands required of the profession in an increasingly complex information landscape. Given this backdrop, an investigation into the information-seeking behaviour of SPED teachers will contribute towards the planning of their professional development. The objectives of this study involve identifying the information needs of SPED teachers, the types of information sources preferred, the barriers encountered in information-seeking, as well as the level of needs satisfaction with their endeavours. A total of 110 SPED teachers participated in the study by submitting their responses through an online survey questionnaire. The findings of the study indicate that the main information needs of SPED teachers pertain to tasks involving the direct practice of classroom teaching such as lesson planning and classroom management. Accessibility and ease of use are important considerations in the selection of their information sources, which are most frequently derived from colleagues, syllabus documents and website articles. While the use of digital resources is common, print remains the format of choice for information sources. The main barrier to information-seeking encountered by SPED teachers is the lack of available time during working hours, which negatively correlates to the perception of success in meeting their information needs. In general, however, SPED teachers appear to be well satisfied with the selection of information sources in meeting their needs. It is felt that the understanding gained from this study will provide a useful foundation for further explorations on the information behaviour of SPED teachers, as well as the future development of the profession. Master of Science (Information Studies)

In this paper, we introduce Rec4LRW, a recommender system (RS) for assisting researchers in finding research papers for their literature review and writing purposes. This system focuses on three researcher tasks – (1) Building a reading list of research papers, (2) Finding similar papers based on a set of papers, and (3) Shortlisting papers from the final reading list for inclusion in manuscript based on article type. A set of intermediate criteria are proposed to capture the relations between a research paper and its bibliography. The recommendation techniques for the three tasks in Rec4LRW are specifically devised on top of the intermediate criteria. The Rec4LRW workflow along with the screen designs for the three tasks is provided in this paper. The recommendation techniques in the system will be evaluated with state-of-the-art approaches along with user-based evaluation in subsequent studies. NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore) Accepted version

As more libraries adopt web-scale discovery services, many now find themselves offering two options for searching their holdings: the new discovery tool and the traditional OPAC. Are both necessary? Or does a discovery system by itself provide an adequate search environment, making the catalog superfluous? In this installment of “Taking Issues,” Dianne Cmor argues that investing in two search tools is an unwise use of limited resources. Rory Litwin counters that the direct control traditional OPACs offer is a necessity for librarians and other advanced researchers. Accepted version

In today’s context, social networking sites (SNSs) are widely adopted by the students. The information shared by students over these sites is significant. With the high volume of information sharing and communications taking place, the students could have identified SNSs as a platform to hunt for information. Hence, their online information seeking activities will no longer be limited to conventional channels such as search engine and libraries services. The objective of this study is to seek understanding on usage and implications of using SNSs as a channel for information seeking by Singapore university students. This study also investigates their information seeking preference for academic and non-academic information needs. In addition, trust and privacy issues are also investigated too. A total of 408 students responses were collected through a questionnaire. The key findings of this study were: 1) search engines remained as the students most preferred channels regardless of information types, 2) the students’ information seeking activities through SNSs were mainly for non-academic information compared to libraries for academic use, 3) the students acknowledged SNSs ease of use and good functionality for searching information, 4) the students positively expressed using SNSs for “communications over course-related topic” and “knowledge sharing”, 5) there were indications of a lack of trust on the information sought, and 6) there were concerns over information and activity privacy over SNSs. According to the findings, SNSs could potentially become a good channel for information seeking if the concerns are adequately addressed. Some of the suggestions are: 1) increase presence of professionals, instructors and lecturers to raise students’ trust on the information sought through SNSs, 2) educate students on privacy issues to address and reduce their privacy concerns, and 3) improve libraries and faculty communication and engagement in SNSs to address the students’ information needs. With the understanding gained from this study, academic or non-academic organisations will be able to leverage on SNSs (where students are already active in) as a better channel to address their information seeking activities. Master of Science (Information Studies)

The objective of this study is to develop a web search engine for the Myanmar language. Despite the increase in volume of information available in the Myanmar language on the web, Information Retrieval (IR) for the Myanmar language is still inefficient due to the lack of support for the language by the major search engines. The study reviewed literatures on design and architecture of general web search engines and language specific web search engines to acquire the knowledge to develop a web search engine for the Myanmar language. The study also reviewed literatures on the Myanmar language, Myanmar encoding systems and syllable segmentation algorithms for the Myanmar language. In order to adopt a suitable segmentation approach, the study reviewed literatures on segmentation approaches and its effect on IR. Master of Science (Information Studies)

Query clustering and query classification aim to capture the intended meaning of queries in order to improve the efficiency of search engines. This research explored the relationship between the query clustering and the query classification approaches and proposed new query classification approaches named Single Learning and Iterative Learning. The intuition of the Single Learning approach is that given a set of queries categorized under a subject, the subject then can be defined as a cluster of queries. The query cluster gives the semantic description for the subject. If a query Q is similar to a cluster of queries categorized under a subject S, then the query Q can be categorized under the subject S. The Single Learning approach makes use of the Web as a knowledge base to build up the term-weight vectors representing the queries. The subject can then be represented by the query cluster-centroid vector. The similarity SIM (S,Q) between the query cluster S and the query Q is computed and compared to a threshold Teta. If SIM(S,Q) >= Teta then the query Q is categorized under the subject S with the degree of Teta. Master of Science (Information Systems)

Implementation of a web-based user interface for displaying images with embedded geographical information. Master of Science (Information Studies)

Our study hypothesizes that incorporating linguistic knowledge and domain knowledge into query clustering can improve to some extent the quality of query clusters. In our research, we used a database of six month’s worth of query log from the Nanyang Technological University digital library. Using the Wordnet lexical database, each query term in the query log was replaced with corresponding synonym synsets. These synonym synsets are identified as features which are different from the contentbased approach where features are constructed from the query terms. The synsets were weighted to reflect their importance in a query and similarities between pairs of queries computed using the cosine similarity measure. Our clustering algorithm placed two queries in the same cluster whenever the similarity between them exceeded a certain threshold. In this way, clusters were created for four different thresholds to facilitate comparison between them. The quality of the clusters were evaluated using five different performance measures of average cluster size, coverage, precision, recall and the F-measure against the judgments of two human evaluators on a sample of clusters. A comparison of the current study and previous study conducted by Chandrani (2004) show that the performance measures were lower at all the four thresholds in terms of coverage, precision, recall and F-measure. We identified two key reasons for the lower values in these performance measures due to the additional preprocessing that reduced the query log size and also the clusters formed were mainly engineering related subjects. The evaluation is further extended to incorporate domain knowledge element into the evaluators. The three performance measures were computed in terms of the average cluster size, coverage and precision and the results were compared with the current study and the previous study conducted by Chandrani (2004). Overall, there is an improvement in terms of precision contributed by the importance of domain knowledge of the evaluators. We propose that further preprocessing and finding ways to extract the elements of domain knowledge to feed into the clustering process can significantly improve the precision, which is left as future work. Master of Science (Information Studies)

The purpose of this dissertation is to study, explore and design a user interface that is conducive for the management of geocoded images in a map-centric environment. A prototype application was implemented and evaluated as part of the study. Experiences and findings will be also be shared and discussed. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This dissertation provided an appreciation of whether Internet search engines appropriately provided an adequate number of relevant search engine results to its Internet users which were also free from any untoward legality. An empirical study was conducted to address the following research questions: (1) whether Internet search engines have failed to adequately retrieve and rank content-relevant search results despite their claim; (2) whether these search results were free from the effects of search engine spam and other means of tweaking web pages to raise their rankings in the search results; and (3) whether search engines retrieved search results that conveniently pointed users to sources of illegal copies of multimedia content. Master of Science (Information Studies)

Subjective relevance (SR) is defined as usefulness of documents for tasks. Using digital libraries as examples of IR systems, this paper enhances objective relevance and tackles its limitations by conducting a quantitative study to understand students’ perceptions of features for supporting evaluations of subjective relevance of documents. Data was analyzed using factor analysis to identify groups of features that supported students’ document evaluations during IR interaction stages to provide design implications for an IR interface supporting students’ evaluations of documents. Findings seemed to suggest an implied order of importance amongst groups of features for each interaction stage. The paper concludes by discussing groups of features, its implied order of importance, and support for information seeking activities to provide design implications for IR interfaces supporting SR for academic research. Accepted version

Previous research has shown that graphical visualisations can assist users to more efficiently and effectively understand large volumes of information. The task of searching for documents is becoming more challenging as the volumes of data stored on computers continues to increase. The objective of this research project was to investigate the use of novel visualisations in a desktop search tool to assist users in the search process. The research premise was that no single visualisation could support all the tasks in the searching process. Therefore, it was proposed that a combination of visualisations integrated into a single search tool could provide a more useful tool to assist users in the searching process. A number of novel visualisations were developed to support reviewing the results of a query and to assist the user in query reformulation. These were integrated into a desktop search tool developed using Java based technology. The visualisations provided a hierarchical view of the search results (Tree View), an overview of the query terms and the results files (Map View), a multi-dimensional chart of potential document relevance (Bubble view), a size-based relevance display (Tile View) and a word cloud of document contents to assist in query reformulation (Cloud View). An initial evaluation of this search tool was undertaken to gauge its potential usefulness and to detect usability issues with its interface and graphical presentations. A large-scale questionnaire-based survey was conducted using 94 evaluators to undertake a review of the search tool. Master of Science (Information Studies)

The study of information seeking behavior reveals that collaboration with other people is an important part in the process of information seeking and use, especially in the initial phase of query formulation. Given this idea, collaborative querying aims to support collaboration among people during the process of query formulation when they search for information on the Web, digital libraries or other information-rich environments. Put differently, collaborative querying helps users formulate queries to an information retrieval system by sharing expert knowledge or other users' search experiences with each other. Doctor of Philosophy (SCI)

94 p. The paper within discusses the design and implementation of a system which attempts to automate the cataloguing process of digital images. This is accomplished through the use of metadata that is native to digital images and created by the digital cameras themselves. There are various portions of metadata within the digital image and each of them has various applications for cataloguing and subsequent retrieval. Master of Science (Information Studies)

A transaction log analysis of the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) OPAC was conducted to identify query and search failure patterns with the goal of identifying areas of improvement for the system. One semester’s worth of OPAC transaction logs were obtained and from these, 641 991 queries were extracted and used for this work. Issues investigated included query length, frequency and type of search options and Boolean operators used as well as their relationships with search failure. Among other findings, results indicate that a majority of the queries were simple, with short query lengths and a low usage of Boolean operators. Failure analysis revealed that on average, users had an almost equal chance of obtaining no records or at least one record to a submitted query. We propose enhancements and suggest future areas of work to improve the users’ search experience with the NTU OPAC. Published version

This thesis is about design and development of a pre-processing application for query logs. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This study was conducted to determine the information needs and seeking behaviour of litigation lawyers. The purpose was to investigate the types of information sources and the preferences of lawyers in selecting different information sources. It also investigates the different types of information required at various stages of a case and tries to understand the adequacy of information to the lawyers. Master of Science (Information Studies)

The goals of building this ontology are to determine the effectiveness of UMLS in predicting the extracted concept relationships and consequently enrich the seed ontology based on the extracted concept and semantic relationships. The UMLS semantic network is an extensive knowledge source that is useful in the medical domain. However, it was found that information extraction using UMLS concepts and semantic types were not sufficient to predict the relationships. This is due to the fact that only half of the semantic relationships extracted hold true based on UMLS. In addition, some semantic types in UMLS were found to be too general and its definitions are too broad. Therefore, subclasses are created to have a more specific categorization of two of the semantic types. In general, the effectiveness of the UMLS knowledge source could be further enhanced with the above findings. The generated ontology is hoped to be used as a domain knowledge base for medical digital library application. In addition, it would provide faster retrieval of relevant and useful information for treatment of colon cancer. Master of Science (Information Studies)

To design and implement an Information Retrieval Portal, which serves as a web-based source code sharing repository and information management environment for both students and academic staff to share knowledge in the field of information retrieval. The portal was implemented using Jetspeed, which is an open source project from the Apache Software Foundation. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This study investigates the information needs and information seeking behaviour of primary school children for project work at a local government primary school in Singapore. Master of Science (Information Studies)

Most research in image retrieval focus on devising new techniques to extract relevant image clues through the use of complex algorithms. In this study, a different approach will be taken. Instead of looking at ways to index and extract images, we will look at how a user interface can help to improve the search process. This prototype makes use of textual descriptions to present a simple and logical way in retrieving images. In addition, this study also looks into ways to present retrieved results. Research in image retrieval has overlooked the importance of having a user-oriented interface and the presentation of retrieved results. In this study, a web-based client/server prototype for interactive search that allows the users to input and refine their search terms is presented. Once a set of images meeting the users' queries has been identified, the system will dynamically build a virtual environment that allows users to explore and view these images interactively at their own pace. The display of the images exploits VRML technology. This study also includes examining whether the use of desktop virtual reality will help users in lightening their cognitive overheads and provides a better presentation of the retrieved results. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This dissertation analyses the transaction logs of the NTU OPAC system to uncover interesting usage patterns of its users. The results indicate that a high proportion of NTU OPAC users are “Novices” who apply longer query lengths, limited use of Boolean operators and perform more consecutive queries than “Experts”. Master of Science (Knowledge Management)

Through focus group and online survey, some key demographic characteristics of an online health searcher, the motivational factors for using the Internet for health-related matters, as well as how the Internet is perceived as a source of health information was revealed. ​Master of Mass Communication

This study focuses on Internet users' online information seeking and disseminating behaviours. By exploring how individuals are using the Internet for their everyday informational and communication needs, this research aims to identify Internet users' motivations for passing on online information, and establish an explanatory framework in which those motivations map onto the range of information disseminating processes that lead to information circulation in cyberspace. ​Master of Mass Communication

Collaborative search using query clustering helps users make use of others' queries to refine their search. Clustering queries based on their content is not very useful as users tend to use different words to express their information need. Hence, in this study, a thesaurus is used to incorporate linguistic knowledge into query clustering. Master of Science (Information Studies)

Screen-capture files of 40 subjects interacting with two university Web-based library catalogue interfaces are analysed to identify basic mouse/cursor movements that indicate usability issues. The possible explanations of the behaviour are described from cognitive and mental model perspectives. This study seeks to observe the mouse/cursor movements and find out the cognitive reasons for such behaviours. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This thesis aims to explore the applicability of data mining to the discovery of unexpected patterns hidden in questionnaire data from a survey conducted in 2001 about Internet usage in Singapore and its social impact. In particular, the thesis aims to discover interesting associations among the various items in the data using the Apriori algorithm. Master of Science (Information Systems)

The study compared the effectiveness of users’ subject searching in Web-based online library catalogue interfaces versus an Expert System Interface called E-Referencer. Master of Science (Information Studies)

Information Extraction (IE) is a method to extract relevant and useful information from the documents. The objectives of this study are to develop an information extraction method using relational database operations and develop an information extraction system to extract information for free-text documents. The pattern-matching method is developed through three stages using sequential Oracle SQL scripts. Master of Science (Knowledge Management)

Find the common similarities among four database systems (DialogWeb, Lexis-Nexis, NTU OPAC, NUS OPAC) and to add some intelligence into the common query translation system in the form of translation rules. XML and XSLT are used in this development. Master of Science (Information Studies)

Develop a common user interface to search the different Web information systems using .NET technology and develop a generic template for different Web information systems and query languages using a relational database. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This study was conducted to determine the information needs and seeking behaviour of bank managers. The purose was to investigate the types and usage level of different information sources, preferred business information resources, importance and use of various electronic information sources by the managers. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This research work explores the use of an alternative method to formulate query statements based on the Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) to query multiple Web Information Systems. The XML query statements formulated according the rules that are developed by this work and are processed accordingly to suit different informations but yet producing the same results. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This thesis explores the effectiveness and comprehension of icons utilised across a range ofcommonly used and not so common software applications. The results are primarily measured against computer experience and gender of the surveyed demographics. The survey method through questionnaires will be deployed in this study. Master of Science (Information Studies)

The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the perceptions of the importance of different information needs, frequency and reasons of using different information sources, their preferred information formats, frequency of sharing information, preferred modes of sharing information and the perceptions of barriers to information sharing within and with other departments. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This dissertation looked at the data warehousing implementation in a Singapore bank. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This study explores the use of artificial neural network for combining multiple sources of evidence and different weighting schemes for the purpose of improving the retrieval performance. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This project successfully demonstrated how XML-based application can be employed to drive a real estate information system in a web-enabled environment through the design and development of a prototype system. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This project establishes that there is a lack of nutritional information on Asian food by carrying out various keyword searches on five popular search engines. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This thesis addresses a problem common in the area of computational linguistics: anaphora or reference resolution in text. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This paper attempts to identify the characteristics, the differences and similarities, and the trends of data warehouse and digital library technologies, so as to determine whether they are merging or emerging technology. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This project examines six search engines with either multilingual or bilingual language capabilities, and review the English and Chinese language version. The study will cover their collection coverage, compare their search capabilities, and their retrieval performance (precision and response time) using some sample search queries in both languages. Master of Science (Information Studies)

A survey of the users at the Tampines Regional Library (TRL)multimedia stations was carried out to study the users' searching habits and the problems faced by these users. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This study investigate the information needs and seeking behavior of computer engineering students at the Nanyang Technological University. The purpose was to investigate the types and level of usage of different information sources, and their preferred information formats, importance and reasons for using certain information. Master of Science (Information Studies)

In the face of the information explosion fuelled by the phenomenal growth of the Web, researchers are increasingly turning to information systems based on user relevance feedback for the answer to better retrieval tools, making research on user relevance especially timely. This research is an attempt to provide some insight into the way the user makes relevance judgement. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This study is in the area of automatic query expansion - automatically expanding query terms with related terms for the purpose of improving retrieval effectiveness. The most common approach to automatic query expansion is to expand each query term with statistically co-occuring terms - terms that tend to co-occur in the same document as the query term but it has met with little success. Master of Science (Information Studies)

This study is to investigate the common characteristics of commercial web pages. This will then lead to the development of a set of criteria to effectively filter commercial web pages that are considered to be of little value or interest to searchers on the WWW. Master of Science (Information Studies)

The objective of this study is to evaluate the relevance ranking effectiveness of six search engines. Relevance has been identified as measuring the closeness of a document's content or the extent to which the document matches a query while relevance searching in search engines is a process where results are ranked according to certain criteria as specified by each search engine. Relevance ranking criteria used by many search engines such as term weighting, indexing of web pages and source authority varied between the search engines. Various studies conducted placed different emphasis on the various aspects of search engines such as measuring links validation and significance testing while others measured relevancy using different methods such as the types and numbers of queries used. Master of Science (Information Studies)