Paul Semaan

Youssef Bassil, Paul Semaan

With the advent of the Internet, a new era of digital information exchange has begun. Currently, the Internet encompasses more than five billion online sites and this number is exponentially increasing every day. Fundamentally, Information Retrieval (IR) is the science and practice of storing documents and retrieving information from within these documents. Mathematically, IR systems are at the core based on a feature vector model coupled with a term weighting scheme that weights terms in a document according to their significance with respect to the context in which they appear. Practically, Vector Space Model (VSM), Term Frequency (TF), and Inverse Term Frequency (IDF) are among other long-established techniques employed in mainstream IR systems. However, present IR models only target generic-type text documents, in that, they do not consider specific formats of files such as HTML web documents. This paper proposes a new semantic-sensitive web information retrieval model for HTML documents. It consists of a vector model called SWVM and a weighting scheme called BTF-IDF, particularly designed to support the indexing and retrieval of HTML web documents. The chief advantage of the proposed model is that it assigns extra weights for terms that appear in certain pre-specified HTML tags that are correlated to the semantics of the document. Additionally, the model is semantic-sensitive as it generates synonyms for every term being indexed and later weights them appropriately to increase the likelihood of retrieving documents with similar context but different vocabulary terms. Experiments conducted, revealed a momentous enhancement in the precision of web IR systems and a radical increase in the number of relevant documents being retrieved. As further research, the proposed model is to be upgraded so as to support the indexing and retrieval of web images in multimedia-rich web documents.

Youssef Bassil, Paul Semaan

At the present time, computers are employed to solve complex tasks and problems ranging from simple calculations to intensive digital image processing and intricate algorithmic optimization problems to computationally-demanding weather forecasting problems. ASR short for Automatic Speech Recognition is yet another type of computational problem whose purpose is to recognize human spoken speech and convert it into text that can be processed by a computer. Despite that ASR has many versatile and pervasive real-world applications,it is still relatively erroneous and not perfectly solved as it is prone to produce spelling errors in the recognized text, especially if the ASR system is operating in a noisy environment, its vocabulary size is limited, and its input speech is of bad or low quality. This paper proposes a post-editing ASR error correction method based on MicrosoftN-Gram dataset for detecting and correcting spelling errors generated by ASR systems. The proposed method comprises an error detection algorithm for detecting word errors; a candidate corrections generation algorithm for generating correction suggestions for the detected word errors; and a context-sensitive error correction algorithm for selecting the best candidate for correction. The virtue of using the Microsoft N-Gram dataset is that it contains real-world data and word sequences extracted from the web which canmimica comprehensive dictionary of words having a large and all-inclusive vocabulary. Experiments conducted on numerous speeches, performed by different speakers, showed a remarkable reduction in ASR errors. Future research can improve upon the proposed algorithm so much so that it can be parallelized to take advantage of multiprocessor and distributed systems.