Annotation Tool for Enhancing E-Learning Courses

One of the most popular forms of learning is through reading and for years we have used hard copy documents as the main material to learn. With
the advent of the Internet and the fast development of new technologies, new tools have been developed to assist the learning process. However,
reading is still the main learning method that is an individual activity. In this paper we propose a highlighting tool that enables the reading
and learning process to become a collaborative and shared activity. In other words, the highlighting tool supports the so-called active-reading,
a well-known and efficient means of learning. The highlighting tool brings to the digital environment the same metaphor of the traditional
highlight marker and puts it in a social context. It enables users to emphasize certain portions of digital learning objects. Furthermore, it
provides students, tutors, course coordinators and educational institutions new possibilities in the teaching and learning process. In this work
we expose the first quantitative and qualitative results regarding the use of the highlight tool by over 750 students through 8 weeks of
courses.

Venue: ICWL2012

Authors:  Bernardo Pereira Nunes, Ricardo Kawase, Stefan Dietze, Gilda Helena Bernardino de Campos and Wolfgang Nejdl

Beyond the Usual Suspects: Context-Aware Revisitation Support

Ricardo Kawase @HT2011

A considerable amount of our activities on the Web involves revisits to pages or sites. Reasons for revisiting include active monitoring of content, verification of information, regular use of online services, and reoccurring tasks. Browsers support for revisitation is mainly focused on frequently and recently visited pages. In this paper we present a dynamic browser toolbar that provides recommendations beyond these usual suspects, balancing diversity and relevance. The recommendation method used is a combination of ranking and propagation methods. Experimental outcomes show that this algorithm performs significantly better than the baseline method. Further experiments address the question whether it is more appropriate to recommend specific pages or rather (portal pages of) Web sites. We conducted two user studies with a dynamic toolbar that relies on our recommendation algorithm. In this context, the outcomes confirm that users appreciate and use the contextual recommendations provided by the toolbar.

Venue: HT2011

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, George Papadakis, Eelco Herder and Wolfgang Nejdl

Award:  Engelbart Best Paper Award (HT2011)

PDF: kawase-ht2011

A Layered Approach to Revisitation Prediction

Session chair Daniel Schwabe and presenter Ricardo Kawase @ICWE2011

Web browser users return to Web pages for various reasons. Apart from pages visited due to backtracking, they typically have a number of favorite/important pages that they monitor or tasks that reoccur on an infrequent basis. In this paper, we introduce the architecture of a system that facilitates revisitations through the effective prediction of the next page request. It consists of three layers, each dealing with a specific aspect of revisitation patterns: the first one estimates the value of each page by balancing the recency and the frequency of its requests; the second one captures the contextual regularities in users’ navigational activity in order to promote related pages, and the third one dynamically adapts the page associations of the second layer to the constant drift in the interests of users. For each layer, we introduce several methods, and evaluate them over a large, real-world dataset. The outcomes of our experimental evaluation suggest a significant improvement over other methods typically used in this context.

Venue: ICWE2011

Authors:  George Papadakis, Ricardo Kawase, Eelco Herder and Claudia Niederée

PDF: kawase-icwe2011

Supporting revisitation with contextual suggestions

Web browsers provide only little support for users to revisit pages that they do not visit very often. We developed a browser toolbar that reminds users of visited pages related to the page that they currently viewing. The recommendation method combines ranking with propagation methods. A user evaluation shows that on average 22.7% of the revisits were triggered by the toolbar, a considerable change on the participants’ revisitation routines. In this paper we discuss the value of the recommendations and the implications derived from the evaluation.

Venue: JCDL2011

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, George Papadakis and Eelco Herder

PDF: kawase-jcdl2011b

Leveraging Search and Content Exploration by Exploiting Context in Folksonomy Systems

With the advent of Web 2.0 tagging became a popular feature in social media systems. People tag diverse kinds of content, e.g. products at Amazon, music at Last.fm, images at Flickr, etc. In the last years several researchers analyzed the impact of tags on information retrieval. Most works focused on tags only and ignored context information. In this article we present context-aware approaches for learning semantics and improve personalized information retrieval in tagging systems. We investigate how explorative search, initialized by clicking on tags, can be enhanced with automatically produced context information so that search results better fit to the actual information needs of the users. We introduce the SocialHITS algorithm and present an experiment where we compare different algorithms for ranking users, tags, and resources in a contextualized way. We showcase our approaches in the domain of images and present the TagMe! system that enables users to explore and tag Flickr pictures. In TagMe! we further demonstrate how advanced context information can easily be generated: TagMe! allows users to attach tag assignments to a specific area within an image and to categorize tag assignments. In our corresponding evaluation we show that those additional facets of tag assignments gain valuable semantics, which can be applied to improve existing search and ranking algorithms significantly.

Venue: The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 2010

Authors: Fabian Abel, Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Nicola Henze, Ricardo Kawase, Daniel Krause and Viviana Patti

PDF: abel-nrhm2010

In-Context Annotations for Refinding and Sharing

Annotations support understanding, interpretation, sensemaking and scannability. As valuable as in paper-based contexts, digital online annotations provide several benefits for annotators and collaborators. To further explore the real benefits of online annotations, we implemented a simple Web Annotation tool, SpreadCrumbs, to support our studies. The tool provides a simple annotation mechanism, simulating real-world paper-based annotations. In addition, the tool supports search, sharing capabilities and social navigation. We conducted a series of user studies that empirically demonstrates the benefits of “in-context” annotations for refinding and sharing.

Venue: WEBIST2010 (Selected Papers)

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Eelco Herder, George Papadakis and Wolfgang Nejdl

PDF: kawase-webist-selected2010

TagMe!: Enhancing Social Tagging with Spatial Context

TagMe! is a tagging and exploration front-end for Flickr images, which enables users to annotate specific areas of an image, i.e. users can attach tag assignments to a specific area within an image and further categorize the tag assignments. Additionally, TagMe! automatically maps tags and categories to DBpedia URIs to clearly define the meaning. In this work we discuss the differences between tags and categories and show how both facets can be applied to learn semantic relations between concepts referenced by tags and categories. We also expose the benefits of the visual (spatial) context of the tag assignments, with respect to ranking algorithms for search and retrieval of relevant items. We do so by analyzing metrics of size and position of the annotated areas. Finally, in our experiments we compare different strategies to realize semantic mappings and show that already lightweight approaches map tags and categories with high precisions (86.85% and 93.77% respectively). The TagMe! system is currently available at http://tagme.groupme.org .

Venue: WEBIST2010 (Selected Papers)

Authors:  Fabian Abel, Nicola Henze, Ricardo Kawase, Daniel Krause and Patrick Siehndel

PDF: abel-webist-selected2010

Leveraging multi-faceted tagging to improve search in folksonomy systems

In this paper we present ranking algorithms for folksonomy systems that exploit additional contextual information attached to tag assignments available. We evaluate the algorithms in the TagMe! system, a tagging front-end for Flickr, and show that our algorithms, which exploit categories, spatial information, and URIs describing the semantics of tag assignments, perform significantly better than the FolkRank that does not consider such contextual information.

Venue: HT2010

Authors: Fabian Abel, Ricardo Kawase and Daniel Krause

PDF: abel-ht2010

A Straightforward Approach for Online Annotations: SpreadCrumbs – Enhancing and Simplifying Online Collaboration.

Countless user studies and everyday observations have shown that individuals make annotations while reading – highlighting, circling and underlining important parts of the text, moreover adding written comments. Since the Web became the biggest accessible source of information, many of the reading activities happens online in the browser. In this sense, it is expected that the individuals would keep their annotation behaviors, provided that the appropriate tools are available. Although several Web annotation projects currently exist, it is difficult to identify the most prominent in the field. With SpreadCrumbs, we simplify the annotations actions and the social navigation support. SpreadCrumbs users can add in-context annotations to any webpage with minimum cognition load, as they would do when reading a paper; in addition SpreadCrumbs enhances online collaboration and provides mechanisms to support social navigation by means of existing social networks. It allows the users to freely express themselves and to add any desirable substance to the resources. Technically, annotations carry valuable information about the content, more than bookmarks or tags, having a greater impact on collaboration and search for re-finding. SpreadCrumbs exploits all these advantages with an intuitive and easy-to-use user interface.

Venue:  WEBIST2009

Authors: Ricardo Kawase and Wolfgang Nejdl

PDF: kawase-webist2009a