Shared Reflection - Case Study on a Conference Support Website

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Software Technology

Shared Reflection - Case Study on a

Conference Support Website

Norzima Elbegbayan

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Software Technology

P.O. Box 3058 Macau

Shared Reflection - Case Study on a

Conference Support Website

Norzima Elbegbayan

Abstract

Most of the people attending a conference or workshop experience problems in meeting the right people to discuss their ideas due to reasons, e.g. sociality, prejudice, inadequate experience, etc. This thesis project aims to make a beforehand and empirical research for an online interactive tool that enables people communicate and share their thoughts and reactions on a shared event despite community size and geographic distribution. Existing online mass interaction systems and tools are evaluated, and potential users and organizers are interviewed. Following the functional requirement architecture, a design prototype is outlined briefly. An original idea of a matchmaking tool/module of the system will be introduced with aspect of Natural Language Processing.

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Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my Master’s thesis supervisor and examiner Bengt Lennartsson, from ITN, Link¨oping University, for giving me a chance to work on this project and contributing ideas and Antonio Cerone, my supervisor at UNU-IIST, for his support and valuable comments.

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1 Introduction

1.1 Background

Imagine a conference attended by hundreds of people, who are full of ideas and plans, and willing to share them with others. Most attendees experience problem in meeting the right people to discuss their ideas. Possible reasons are that some people are attending a conference for the first time and are ”lost” to some extent, some wait for others to come and engage in a conversation and some are looking for people with the same background. All conference attendees have to depend on their own personality, sociability and perhaps reputation. How can we build a system that helps people to find their ”match” during a conference without wasting their valuable time on trying to start a conversation with ”not so interesting” people?

1.2 Purpose

The main purpose of this thesis project is to make a beforehand research for an online interactive tool that enables people communicate and share their thoughts and reactions on a shared event (a lecture, a TV show, etc.) despite community size and geographic distribution with possibility of idea matchmaking module1_.

As a starting point we will study existing online mass interaction2 _{systems and tools and}

eval-uate them from usability point of view to extract system requirement specifications on ”shared reflection” for our anticipated system. During this stage we will hold interviews with some potential users and organizers with experience in conferencing and in the Internet. Further we would suggest a design prototype which combines existing system features and recommended improvements and also reflects the above mentioned specifications on ”shared reflection” and matchmaking.

Another purpose of the thesis is to outline a matchmaking tool/module of the system, which greatly involves information extraction and retrieval, branches of Natural Language Processing (NLP), as a basic survey. We should assume that the input data to our system are not only conference attendees’ personal and academic information but also their ideas and opinions. When one’s opinion is discussed, it is not straightforward to use query techniques like key phrase/string matching or indexing. Key phrase matching will result in ambiguous or vague matches if the input texts are on a same particular topic and are seen as bag-of-words. How NLP handles such idea extraction from text and further match them will be discussed in brief.

1_{The meaning of module could also be regarded as component.}

2_{Please notice the distinction between Interaction systems and Interactive systems. For term ’mass interaction}

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1.3 Problems/Tasks

We started our project by creating a list of problem statements and setting goals. What are the problems we want to solve? What are the goals we want to achieve? The list follows.

• Identify user expectations and system characteristics

• What kinds of systems and tools for mass interaction are available on the Internet

to-day? What features and functionalities do these tools provide and what advantages and disadvantages do they have?

• What would be the user requirements and expectations on a system for sharing reflections

on something experienced jointly (a conference)?

• What would be the added value for the organizer (school, university, movie distributor,

telecommunication operator, travel agent, etc.) when using such a support system?

• Develop system design specifications and functional requirements.

• Develop a prototype according to the specified design requirements. What are the

moti-vations?

• What is the initiative of embedding idea matchmaking module? How could natural

lan-guage processing be used in this module?

2 Related Research

As my search shows not much was done specifically on how to match shared reflections on a jointly experienced event, which was our main project interest. However interactive systems that support virtual communities and their shared interest were ubiquitous.

ZENO [11], a mediating system with graphical interface and which was originally designed to support online mediation of discussions about political and planning issues [12], has a discussion forum component. The system acts as an intelligent assistant to human mediators, facilitators, arbitrators and other ”trusted third partie” by providing an issue-based discussion forum or conferencing system, building on decision theory and a formal model of argumentation. The approach is not limited to a particular school of argumentation, class of problems, or type of domain with its effort to provide variations and identify adequate parameters, both conceptually and technically. Users place issues, positions and arguments into a ’picture’ using the graphical interface, which facilitates the browsing and retrieval of relevant past contributions to make the discussion richer, more precise and focused than the ”thread” mechanism typical of news groups. Using reason maintenance and constraint satisfaction procedures, the preferences expressed in the arguments brought forward by the participants are summarized.

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Delphi [31] is a method for structuring a group communication process so that the process is effective in allowing a group of individuals, as a whole, to deal with a complex problem. Usually Delphi undergoes four distinct phases. The first phase is characterized by exploration of the subject under discussion, wherein each individual contributes the additional information he feels is pertinent to the issue. The second phase involves the process of reaching an understanding of how the group views the issue (i.e., where the members agree or disagree and what they mean by relative terms such as importance, desirability, or feasibility). If there is significant disagreement, then that disagreement is explored in the third phase to bring out the underlying reasons for the differences and possibly to evaluate them. The last phase, a final evaluation, occurs when all previously gathered information has been initially analyzed and the evaluations have been fed back for consideration. Delphi has been used in various applications, including evaluation of policy issues, identification of political events and analysis of the risk associated with these events, identification of software project risks, and development of an explanation facility in a knowledge based system [5].

Some of attempts to use computer mediated communication as conference or event supporting tools were made recently are McCarthy’s [20] use of IRC3 _{as digital backchannels in a shared}

physical space, an academic conference. As seen from his study on statistics of logs recorded during the conference and interviews with attendees, the digital backchannels were ”provoca-tive and valuable, helping [the attendees] get acquainted with other attendee”, but having the backchannels simultaneously during the conference resulted in confusion and further inattention. Interactive Collaborative Environments Lab4 _{at Swedish Institute of Computer Science}5 _setup

mBlog (mobile weblog) to run live during the SITI Winter Conference 20036_{, enabling attendees}

to post an entry at any time from a mobile phone (MMS, SMS, e-mail, WAP forms, etc.) and to read at any time using a number of mobile outputs (WAP browser, speech synthesis). Similar research was done by Sumi et al. [27] which supported people to meet persons who have same interests and share information using mobile computers and web applications. Jacucci et al. [16] developed mGroup, a mobile group media application, that supports creating and sharing group experiences.

3 System Characteristics and Study of Existing Applications

3.1 Methodology

The first purpose of the project was to identify our desired system’s usage and behavior and then assess existing practical applications’ similarity to them. After developing a list of tasks and requirements we moved on to evaluating existing applications.

3_{Internet Relay Chat (http://www.mIRC.com) Oikarinen, J. and D. Reed, Internet Relay Chat Protocol, RFC}

1459, May 1993.

4_{http://ada.sics.se/newice/} 5_{http://www.sics.se}

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3.1.1 Identifying system usage

We collected our ideas on why we need the system and started to identify user’s expectations from the system. Who are the system users and how will they use the system and what are their requirements? The actual need for the system arose with the planning of a particular conference; therefore the system is likely to be tested during this conference. Having this concrete idea and need, we began documenting possible uses and environments. We compiled a simple scenario expressing possible uses of the system and used this scenario to define user expectations and system behavior.

3.1.2 Defining system characteristics

We had identified our usage of the system and goals we want to achieve. Building on those assumptions we had outlined our system characteristics. Our system had to have several key characteristics and features in order to achieve the goals initially set, and each characteristic could have a group of applications to be assessed correspondingly.

3.1.3 Reviewing relevant applications

We started by listing existing applications which we thought of having any similarity to the characteristics of our system. These applications were designed and used for diverse purposes and had different functionalities, for each of them was chosen against a single characteristic distinctly.

After brief review on the applications’ goals, tasks and usage, we assessed every application group’s similarities to our system characteristics and its performance result. Underlying tech-nology and usability of the systems were also reviewed for later use in a prototype design and development process.

3.1.4 Interviewing potential users

During the evaluation process we interviewed several potential users with various backgrounds. The main intention of conducting these interviews was to explore the interviewees’ practical uses and experience with any kind of conference support tool. We also tried to discover possible design and usage expectations by real potential users.

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3.1.5 System usage and behavior

The idea came about by a professor who is planning a conference which will take place in 2007 requiring the system to be implemented and tested during the conference. As an experienced conference attendee and planner he/she was exposed to some lack of concurrent interaction between participants. An interaction system for participants to share their reflections on lectures and meet other people regarding their thoughts and opinions was needed before, after and during the conference.

3.2 Scenario

A potential user is about to attend a big conference with more than hundred participants. There are series of lectures and seminars on various topics. The user will only attend lectures that are of interest to him. After a lecture or speech he/she would like to meet some people to discuss his/her reaction with, people who either might be working on the same project as him or have same reflection on the topic. A lecture usually involves a large number of attendees and every single attendee could have different opinion on the topic. In series of lectures participants don’t have possibility to communicate with every other person and ask for their opinions. Therefore he/she decides to initiate communication and search for people to meet while he/she is at the conference.

There is an online system for sharing opinions and reactions of lectures or other events that will be (or was) held during the conference and the system is available on the conference web site. The web site contains (possibly) all information on the conference including list of lectures and events as well. People started sharing their thoughts and opinions well before the conference and in a wide scope.

The user goes to the web site and scans through list of events and lectures. (... ) Then he/she chooses the topic he/she would like to discuss his ideas on and by clicking in the link (lecture title) goes to interaction module. There he/she reads on lecture notes or abstract and some recent posts to get a general view of other people’s reaction. The posts have nested structure and a user can post either a reply message to one of previous message or a new comment. When a post is submitted he/she will have list of matching opinions sorted by their relevance to his/her opinion. The author of the first match in the list will be considered to have (almost) the same opinion as the poster. If he/she desires he/she can decide to initiate a communication with any of the recommended posters or just browse through to read all messages if the number of messages is reasonably small. Every post, including replies will have a link to a page, where their matching posts are displayed. In overview, a user can read posts by other visitors to the site, post a new post or comment/reply to a post, look for matching posts of any single post.

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3.3 System Characteristics

As a result of the analysis on the scenario, the following list of characteristics was developed.

Available online The system should be available on the Internet so users can access the system from anywhere. The advantage of a such system is that users could access it using not only computers but also various technologies including SMS (Short Messaging Service) and any other methods that browses the Internet such as WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). To make it possible for different users to browse the system from different browsers, the server and client technology might need more complex structures.

Interactive system Users should be able to use the system interactively. Users will have access to interactive tools such as browsing through and posting a message etc. The system will respond to and take action depending on user’s behavior. How will interaction be handled between users and system?

Text message as communication mode All communication will be performed by means of text messages. Size and content of the text is up to user’s preference. How is the information exchanged between users and system? What could be possible alternatives and extensions?

Asynchronous system with centralized database The interaction mode is supposed to be asynchronous. For the system to be able to match people using their data there must be centralized server/database and client architecture. Text messages should also be archived in the database and available for other people to read some other time. What is the advantage of being centralized? Is it possible to be decentralized? How is the information stored and retrieved in a database? What should we save in database?

Conference support tool The original idea of the system is to support and enhance user interactivity during a shared event such as a conference. What conference support tools (not only for user interaction) are previously developed and tested and how is the user experience?

Matchmaking and Dating One of key features of our system is going to be ”matchmaking”. The system will perform a particular matchmaking action on text posted by users. The system should be able to help a user to find people with similar thought or opinion on a shared experience by matching messages and possibly arrange a date or meeting. What kinds of matchmaking do systems carry out? How do these systems do the matching? What techniques do they use? How efficient is the matching?

3.4 Practical Applications and Interviewees

”Share and discuss your ideas and opinions” systems The list of applications to evaluate began with systems we use in everyday life; the ones we use to communicate with other people to share our opinions, ideas and experiences. The mostly and frequently used applications in our

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daily life are e-mail, instant messaging systems and possibly web forum. Web forum is discussed only when our thought is set to a particular topic. We listed every application and added similar products that we do not use ourselves but are generally exposed to.

We populated our list with the help of results from search engines to include as many systems as possible. While doing that we began to apply our characteristics as keywords. The key-words were ”share/discuss your idea/thought/reflection, online interaction systems, text based communication, computer mediated communication, mass communication, asynchronous com-munication, conference support tool, intelligent matchmaking/dating system” etc. with slight changes with their synonyms.

Available online As a result of growing Internet technology, most of today’s interaction system are available online or at least use the technology (except telephone systems, of course). There-fore we did not have to specify the systems to be online during our search. However the systems we collected were both centralized (with server and client architecture) and decentralized (peer to peer).

Interactive system In order to express one’s reflection on a topic, users should be able to use the system interactively by posting data to the system and the system should respond to them. These systems included chat rooms, newsgroups and online games excluding above mentioned applications.

Text message as communication mode Possible modes of communication on the Internet are text, images, audio and video. For example, weblog and e-mail system use both text and images and contemporary chat rooms have audio and video conferencing possibility.

Asynchronous system with centralized database Examples of asynchronous systems are e-mail and discussion forums. We, however, included some synchronous systems such as chat rooms and instant messaging, because these systems were big candidates of interaction systems and essentially they have databases, may be not for solely archiving messages but for other purposes.

Matchmaking and Dating The term matchmaking usually refers to matching a pair of people based on their profiles for purpose of a romantic relationship and further initiating a meeting or date. We added the word ”intelligent” in search key phrase for matchmaking systems, we wanted to omit numerous online dating services and their scripts and include as many idea matching systems as possible in our search results. However the results were not encouraging for main techniques dealing with the intelligent matchmaking systems were about network ”crawling”.

Applications As a result of our search we had the following list of applications to evaluate.

• E-mail

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• Newsgroups • Web blogging

• Multi user dungeons (MUD) • Instant messaging

• Chat rooms

• Classical) online dating services

While evaluating the systems we tried to assess which system is most suitable for our ”Sharing reflections on a shared experience” goal.

3.5 Interviewees

The list of people to interview was compiled with the help of Professor Lennartsson, because he could use his social network to find a good potential user with adequate experience in confer-encing while I did not have any formal connection with many people in Sweden. The following questions were asked.

• What is his/her experience of sharing his/her ideas on a conference (big and small), how

does he/she handle it?

• What is his/her experience using any support tools on a conference?

• What does he/she think of such conference support tool? Does it seem either a good idea

or a duplicate? If it is a duplicate, what could make it original?

• What is his/her expectation from such a tool? What are his/her ground requirements if

he/she was the customer ordering the tool (to be developed)?

• Any idea on how else the tool can be used, other than in a conference? (in his/her own

case)

• If the tool is proven to be useful, what are the chances that it will be successful on the

market (such as institutions and companies)?

• Is there any (formal or informal) standard/requirement set by institutions for a new tool

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3.6 Interactive Systems Evaluation Results

While evaluating applications and systems, our scope was enlarged with more features and similar products. As a result we started also review new, advanced and promising features in the applications (concerning our characteristics)?

3.6.1 Electronic mail (e-mail) and newsgroups

Electronic mail, abbreviated email or e-mail, is asynchronous method of composing, sending, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. While the basic technology is designed to pass simple messages between two people, even relatively basic e-mail systems today typically include interesting features for forwarding messages, filing messages, creating mailing groups, and attaching files with a message. These messages range from personal messages to professional announcements, contributions to mailing lists, and even advertisements [33].

Newsgroups and electronic mailing lists are similar to e-mail systems except that they are in-tended for messages among large groups of people instead of one-to-one communication. In newsgroups messages are posted like they are on a bulletin board and membership is not re-quired to view messages. In practice the main difference between newsgroups and mailing lists is that newsgroups only show messages to a user when they are explicitly requested, while mailing lists deliver messages as they become available. However, shortcomings with electronic mailing lists are information overload and security problems such as spams and virus threats.

Both are ways of gathering group of people with similar interests and distributing news and information to such a particular group. Thus they can act as discussion and information sharing methods among group of people who explicitly want to share their reflection on shared event. In addition to above mentioned drawbacks of e-mail systems, a large amount of work required to build and maintain both the list and necessary software, should be taken into consideration if such lists and groups are used. An alternative approach to mailing lists was suggested by Schwartz and Wood [24] using a heuristic algorithm to discover shared interests by analyzing e-mail communication history.

3.6.2 Web forum

A web forum is web application software for holding discussions allowing people to post messages and comment on other messages; and could be described as web version of newsgroups or mailing lists. Web forums are also commonly referred to as message boards, discussion boards, discussion groups, bulletin boards or simply forums.

One significant difference between web forums and mailing lists is that mailing lists automatically deliver new messages to the subscriber, while web forums require the member to visit the website,

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and check for new posts (same as newsgroups). The main difference between newsgroups and forums is that additional software is usually required to participate in newsgroups, a newsreader. Visiting and participating in forums normally requires no additional software beyond the web browser. However, a web forum system can have different newsgroups or individual mailing lists, and usually provides more than one forum, dedicated to a particular topic. Therefore forums (and newsgroups) are often arranged into hierarchies and implies newsgroups and mailing lists.

3.6.3 Online chat rooms

A chat room is a real time, online application where people can ”chat” by sending messages to people in the same ”room”. There are several different types of chat rooms: open chats, where people discuss anything; topic-focused chat rooms, where people discuss a particular topic, like a TV show or a sports team; and moderated chats that feature a speaker who leads a discussion. Some chat rooms are moderated either by limiting who is allowed to speak, or by having moderation volunteers patrol the room watching for disruptive or otherwise undesirable behavior.

Most chat systems are text based, where conversation is typed like text messages bouncing back and forward between a group of people in the same room and appearing immediately on their screens. Some chat rooms incorporate audio and video based chat, which makes the conversation almost real. 2D or 3D graphical chat interfaces, such as The Palace [15] and Comic Chat [18], have been developed recently as alternatives to a text based chat. These graphical environments make use of avatars7, pictures, drawings or icons that users choose to represent themselves to convey social presence and identity [32].

Many web sites now have online chat rooms. Although the World Wide Web’s initial protocols were not conducive to live interaction, the advent of Java has made Web-based chat rooms increasingly popular. The drawback of these chats is they only work with newer, Java-enabled browsers. There are sites which offer a wide variety of ”chat rooms”, or a page might offer just one room.

3.6.4 Instant messaging

Instant messaging (IM) is an interaction tool that allows users to communicate by sending text messages to each other. IM is almost real time communication with a fast network transmission. Users can also have access to advanced features like file transfer, audio and video chat and various online services and data such as media, news and weather report etc. However, each user has to use the same program to talk, and the programs are currently not compatible with each other.

Unlike chat rooms, users don’t join a room to start a conversation; instead they ”call” each other 7_{an icon or representation of a user in a shared virtual reality [35]}

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individually and exchange their text messages on one-to-one basis and several conversations could take place at the same time concurrently. Some IM systems allow multiparty communication, but it is still based on call individually model.

IM is generally Internet based and communications are client-server based. For example, the architecture of Jabber8_{, an XML based IM system, is extremely similar to e-mail. However,}

whereas e-mail is a store-and-forward system, Jabber servers deliver messages in close to real time.

3.6.5 Multi user dungeons (MUD)

MUD was originally designed as online games in which players are involved in fantasy adventures that they create together as the game progresses [4]. Traditional MUDs are text-based systems where users connect to a central server. In a MUD environment, users can be logged on at the same time and give commands to interact with one another. Once connected, they enter any number of different rooms, chat with other users in those rooms, and create and modify artifacts in the rooms. Though primarily used socially, MUDs have been used to support collaborative work, though their text-only presentation has been proved limiting. Advanced versions of the MUD, systems like Jupiter system [7] and the wOrlds system [28], enhance a traditional MUD with audio/video conferencing tools and shared whiteboards. TeamRooms [23] does not directly support audio or video and emphasizes applets more suitable for real-time collaboration.

3.6.6 Weblog

A weblog, or simply blog, is a web site for writing messages on regular basis as a personal diary. Blog is set up using a specially-designed interactive tool and created and run by a single person, who is referred as an author, sometimes anonymously. The posts are usually text with links, but some blogs place emphasis on including other forms of media such as images, audio and video and every post is archived on the blog. Some other emerging forms of blogging are MP3-blog for in posting music from specific genres and mblog for ”mobile blog”. In a blog new posts are shown at the top, so visitors can read what’s new and they can comment on it or link to it or e-mail the author. There could be several categories in a blog and correspondingly several blog threads on a site.

As stated in [36], the difference of blogs from web forums or newsgroups is that only one person or group can create new subjects for discussion on their blog. A network of blogs can function like a forum in that every entity in the blog network can create subjects of their choosing for others to discuss. Moreover blog is easier to set up and maintain and express its owner’s attitude and point of view.

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3.6.7 Conclusion

As seen from the Table 1, the most outstanding candidates similar to our system are web forum and weblog. However, weblog usually has one dominating author and reflects only his/her opin-ions. Furthermore the design choice is very limited with weblog due to its limited functionalities.

Discussion forum on the other hand has more potential to be adopted. It offers almost every characteristics and functionalities we want from our system. There are groups of people, called virtual community, who use both discussion forum and weblog at the same time.

3.7 Online Dating Services

A dating system is a specialized meeting system where the objective of the meeting is to go on a live date with someone, usually with romantic implications using any means of technology such as Internet and phone etc. One form of such a system, online or Internet dating service, allows individuals, couples and groups to meet online and possibly develop a social, romantic or sexual relationship. Online dating systems usually archive personal profiles documenting their members’ gender, age, build, religion, smoking and drinking habits, self-description, and characteristics preferences in a potential date.

Fiore et al. [9] categorizes online dating systems into search/sort/match (1), personality match-ing (2) and social network (3) systems. In the search systems, users specify their criteria such as age, interest, and religion, and can search the set of profiles. The matching systems ”pair users by comparing their profile descriptors to the descriptors of others, usually the constrained descriptors, because contemporary techniques for clustering or otherwise identifying similarity work better with clearly defined features than with free text” [9]. Personality matching systems give personality test to their users and use the results to match their compatibility. In the paper, it is also noted that social networks ’encourage users to bring their friends onto the system and then suggest matches between members of their social networks’ and they offer features such as automatic address book updates, viewable profiles, the ability to form new links through ”introduction services”, and other forms of online social connections.

In contrast to other systems that support online communities, online dating systems usually lack a common forum, where everyone can read what everyone contributes and are designed for styles of interaction different from those of the well-known computer-mediated communication environments [2]. However, people can browse through other members’ profiles before deciding to communicate and stay anonymous during the communication. Online dating services allow members from a variety of backgrounds looking for different types of relationships, while some are more specific and may differ in type of members, and their interests, location, or relationship desired.

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E-mail list Newsgroup W eb forum Chat ro om IM W eblog Cen tralized serv er (online) Y es Y es Y es Y es/No Y es/No Y es Clien t soft w are required Y es/No Y es No Y es/No Y es No v User in teractivit y lev el Medium Medium High High High Lo w T ext supp ort Y es Y es Y es Y es Y es Y es Supp orts group discussion Y es/No Y es/No Y es Y es Y es/No No Async hronous Y es Y es Y es No Y es/No Y es T able 1: F unctionalit y and supp ort assessmen t of the applications

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3.8 Interview Results

The interviews were held in informal environment. Conversations were recorded and saved as audio files and were useful for a follow up. Many useful notions and concepts were suggested and ideas came up during the interviews.

The first interviewee was Mr. Jan Jonson from Avesta. Mr. Jonson was from steel industry and had experience in both planning and attending a conference. He was a member of planning committee of Conference on Thinking 20079_.

He was frequent conference attendee and however did not have previous experience using any support tools. During a conference he usually awaits people to come and start a conversation. The notions from an interview with Mr. Jonson on conference support tool for shared reflection are as follows.

• Classification of lectures and speeches according to their subject and attendees according

to their interest and backgrounds etc.

• In order to classify attendees of a conference, each attendee should have a profile of

key-words of their interested subject.

• These profile subjects should be formalized because informal keywords and profile setup

could be followed by insufficient or misleading search and match results.

• Such a conference support tool should be designed for earlier stage of communication

between conference attendees. The attendees should have possibility to plan their meetings before the conference. People do not have time to use any system during a conference even if the system were superbly designed simply because they would be busy with the conference but not with the system going through all the stages of creating a profile of themselves and browsing through and typing in some texts to search other people’s ideas on the system.

• Accordingly the tool could be used after a conference and become a communication and

interaction platform for conference follow ups and results

The second interviewee was Ivan Rankin from the Department of Science and technology at Link¨oping University10. Mr. Rankin is experienced conference attendee and has computer science background.

There are incidents that list of the people coming to a conference or workshop is not revealed and perhaps even not generated. It would be nice if the system could collect all the information about the people who are to attend the conference. Then one will not have to spend half of the

9_{http://www.liu.se/thinkingconference/} 10_{http://www.itn.liu.se/english/}

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time at the conference looking for someone with same interest or background. Young people with less experience in conferences and public and social events could also benefit from the system.

He also agrees with Mr. Johsson on that there should be a user profile based on keywords and the system should be used for all stages of the conference, including earlier, middle and later. He would be willing to use the system during the conference (while he is back at his hotel) if it contains as much information as needed. Other possible uses of the system are for personal purposes. For example, his ”personal contact” wanted to go to an opera and could not get a ticket while attending a conference in Rome. After some vain search on the Internet, he tried some people at the conference and got the ticket instantly.

4 Functional Requirements and A Design Prototype

4.1 Methodology

The second purpose of the project was to develop and recommend functional and non-functional requirements and design choices on the basis of studies in the previous step. As starting point for designing a prototype we developed several use case for our system. Use cases manifest how the system should be used and behave. Before developing the use cases we also had to consider our previously developed scenario again and revise it according to our evaluation results. Each use case was illustrated by an activity diagram and its requirement table. Secondly, we formulated non functional or general requirements such as design and usability specifications. Lastly, with functionalities and design specifications and requirements in hand, we materialized the design prototype.

4.2 Functional Requirements and Use Cases

Functional requirements try to capture and express the intended behavior of the system and are described by a use case diagram. The behavior include the services, tasks and functions the system is required to perform. Use case diagrams are based on scenarios. A use case defines a goal-oriented set of interactions between external actors and the system under consideration. Actors are parties outside the system that interact with the system [13].

4.2.1 Scenario

A potential user is about to attend a big conference with more than one hundred participants. There are series of lectures and seminars on various topics. The user will attend lectures that are of interest only to him. After a lecture or speech he/she would like to meet some people to discuss his/her reaction, people who might either be working on the same project as him or have

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the same thought about the topic. A lecture usually involves large number of attendees and every single attendee could have different opinions on the topic. In series of lectures participants don’t have possibility to communicate with every other person and ask their opinions. Therefore he/she decides to search and initiate communications before attending the conference and meet while he/she is at the conference.

There is an online system for conference attendees, where registered users can setup their own profile and keywords so that matching is made possible. The system’s intention is to help people meet and share their opinions and reactions on lectures or other events that will be (or was) held during the conference and the system is available on the conference web site. The web site contains (possibly) all information on the conference including list of lectures and events as well. People have already started sharing their thoughts and opinions well before the conference. The user goes to the web site and scans through the list of events and lectures. By logging in he/she can setup his/her own profile and choose his/her keywords, which are essential for matchmaking. The keywords will be generated and assembled by the system administrator or another add-on module using information extraction. In addition to choosing keywords from a previously compiled list, he/she should be able to put his/her own keywords. The own keywords could be either unstructured words or a text paragraph. The keyword generating module will use information extraction technique and be able generate keywords directly from lecture notes and publications etc. Afterwards he/she can search other members by keywords and fields such as name, location etc.

Then user chooses the topic on which he/she would like to discuss his ideas and, by clicking the link (lecture title), goes to the interaction module. There he/she reads on lecture notes or abstract and some recent posts to get a general view of other people’s reaction. The posts have nested structure and the user can post a reply message to one of previous message or post a new comment. When the post is submitted he/she will have list of matching opinions sorted by their relevance to his/her opinion. The author of the first match in the list will be considered to have (almost) the same opinion as the poster. If he/she desires he/she can decide to initiate a communication with any of the recommended posters or just browse through to read all messages if the number of messages is reasonably small. Every post, including replies because they are considered as a post too, will have a link where their matching posts are displayed. In overview, the user can read posts by other visitors to the site, post a new post or comment/reply to a post, look for matching posts of any single post. The matching module will use the same technique as the keyword generator and, after parsing the text posts, it can match the results.

4.2.2 Use cases

The actors in the Use case diagram (Figure 1) are users and the matchmaking module. The matchmaking module is supposed to be an external component or code that could be attached into the system. Thus the module can easily be developed, updated and refined. In this section, we are prototyping the web interface without the module.

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Roles Goal

Submit profile Create a user profile, introduce oneself to other users Post message(s) Express one’s reflection on a topic or a message (reply) Enter search criteria Search for people by their user profile and posted or keyword message(s)

Browse the web site Navigate and acquire knowledge and information

Table 2: User

Roles Goal

Extract a text (message) Create a set of keywords

Match messages by extracts Find other messages with similar ideas

Table 3: Matchmaking module

Roles Goal

Display information Present information such as text, user, idea etc. Discussion forum Function as a discussion forum

Steer user Help users navigate through the interface and acquire information

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Figure 1: Use case diagram

4.2.3 User registration and login

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Use case Register/Login

Description The web interface suggests users to register. When user

chooses to register himself/herself and submits required information, the system will contact update its database accordingly.

Similarly when a registered user submits his identification, the system verifies and authenticates.

Actors User, Web interface (System), Matchmaking module

Assumption Web interface steers the user through the steps before and during the registration process by displaying all the necessary information informing the user his/her whereabouts etc and responding user inputs. Completeness of the information submitted by the user is handled by the system by prompting before the verification.

Steps 1.User submits his/her identification 2.The system verifies the identification IF new user THEN

3.Consult the matchmaking module and generate keywords from submitted information

4.Update user profile database ELSE IF incorrect id THEN

5.Reject the user and GOTO the first step 6.User is logged in

Verification The user is logged in successfully.

Variations #1. User might submit new information with intention to update his profile, which will be handled in steps the same as

registering new user.

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4.2.4 Browsing and searching user profiles

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Use case Browse and search user profiles

Description The user browses through user profiles and he/she may choose either to read one particular profile or to search by entering

a set of keywords. When reading a profile, he/she decides to contact the owner of the profile or start over again or find other users with similar ideas. When keyword is entered, the system searches user profile database and returns matching users list.

Actors User, Web interface (System)

Assumption User is already logged in. The browsing list and results list are sorted and grouped according to the user’s choice of criteria, e.g. by registration date, user location, etc.

Steps 1.The user browses users list

IF the user chooses to read a profile THEN 2.Read the profile

IF the user wants to start over THEN 3.GOTO the first step

ELSE IF the user wants to contact the user 4.Initiate a communication and STOP ELSE

5.Search users database and return matching users list and go to the first step.

ELSE IF the user wants to search by entering a keyword THEN 6.Enter keyword

7.Search users database and return matching users list and go to the first step.

Verification The user finds an interested user and initiates a communication.

Variations #1. The user might not actually browse through the list, however the browsing list will still be presented. And the list could be either default list or results list.

#4. The STOP means terminating only browsing/searching activity.

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4.2.5 Browsing and searching discussion forum

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Use case Browsing, searching and posting on discussion forum

Description The user browses through the discussion forum and can search for posts and post his/her own message. Messages can be searched by entered keywords. Every newly posted message or post is extracted by the Matchmaking module. Then, when the user searches for messages with similar ideas, these extracts will be compared. The idea of the extraction and how it can be done is explained in Chapter 5.

Actors User, Web interface (System), Matchmaking module

Assumption User is already logged in. Writing of comments or replies to previous posts are not distinguished here and will be handled as posting a new message. When displayed the message identification and categorization reference will be the filter.

Steps 1.The user browses discussion forum

IF the user chooses to read a post THEN 2.Read the post IF the user wants to start over THEN 3.GOTO the first step ELSE IF the user wants to see the author’s profile THEN 4.STOP ELSE 5.Search forum database and return matching posts list and go to the first step.

ELSE IF the user wants to search by keyword THEN 6.Enter keyword 7.Search forum database and return matching posts list

and go to the first step.

IF the user posts a message THEN 8.Extract the post 9.Search forum database and return matching posts list and go to the first step.

Verification The user finds an interesting message and starts browsing its author profile (STOP).

Variations #1. The user might not actually browse through the list, however the browsing list will still be presented. And the list could be either default list or results list.

#4. User can choose to terminate the action completely and start another activity such as browsing users list. It is displayed in whole system’s activity diagram (Appendix A)

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4.3 General or Non-functional Requirements

Usability/User interface The system must be easy to use regarding learnability and effi-ciency. The complexity of the interface should be acceptable for any level of user’s browsing and interacting skill. The system should not discourage users with its deficient or inconvenient operability.

Availability The system should be available anytime and anywhere (assuming that user has a web browser)

Share your reflection The system should support the user in sharing his/her reflection. The user should be able to express his/her ideas and thoughts liberally with the help of and by interacting with the system.

Conference support tool The term conference is used here to support its initial idea and future test implementation and further it would be referred merely as the event. Other alternatives are events and environments such as a TV broadcast and sports games that are widely experienced by public.

Information providing The system should provide all details on the particular event which it is being used for. For example, users should be able to locate the conference agenda or information on lectures and may be lecture notes. Moreover the user should be informed about the information he has entered and where he/she is and is going next.

Support for idea matchmaking The system should help users find their matches by their interests or backgrounds, so that they can share their ideas and interests before the event and consequently reactions and reflections afterwards. Sharing their ideas before the event will encourage users to meet personally during the event while latter will act as discussion platform.

The system should be available online The system should be available on the Internet as a website, so that users would be able to access the system regardless of time and distance.

4.4 Design Prototype

miniBB11 _{was used as a web forum discussion prototype. miniBB (minimalist bulletin board)}

is a flat-type (not threaded) free web forum and discussion software, open source PHP bulletin board, written in PHP and using MySQL or another PHP-compatible database as data back-end. Yet miniBB is easy to use, easy to make change.

User registration page (Figure 5) was changed to accommodate additional fields according to the event the system is being used, e.g. a user title, institution, and list of publications, etc for

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Figure 5: User registration screen shot

an academic conference. Keywords will be generated automatically, still user should be able to enter his/her own.

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Figure 6: Admin panel screen shot

Modify keyword section was added to the Admin panel page (Figure 6). Keywords are to be generated by matchmaking module. However, authorized users can create, edit and delete the keywords.

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Message Match function (Figure 7) will match the message with other people’s messages and give results list of messages sorted by their relevancy. User then can choose to read from the messages and consequently contact and discuss the idea with authors.

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5 Matchmaking Module and Natural Language Processing

5.1 Background

The matchmaking module, according to our system architecture, is a component that extracts excerpts from any text and matches and retrieves these texts. The term text matching usually refers to comparing pair of texts as strings or by their extracted keywords. However, let us assume the following very simple messages that have been posted by three authors who attended the same lecture.

The lecture was OK. I liked it.

I am glad I was here.

We can tell that the authors liked the lecture just by looking at them. Can the machine do that?

If we assume that all the input text will be saved in a database, query techniques like key phrase/string matching or indexing can not be efficient enough. However automatic keyword extraction approaches using language model [29] and learning algorithms [30] could be considered in situations dealing with a large amount of texts.

Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of both artificial intelligence (AI) and linguistics and is sometimes referred to as computational linguistics. NLP applications are required to have knowledge of language or to understand natural human languages. However, this knowledge may vary depending on the purpose of the application considered. A very simple example is the spell checking tool that comes with most document processing applications. The only things this tool needs to know are what is a word (technically) and whether the word exists in its dictionary. A good guide to basics of NLP is a book by Jurafsky and Martin [17] that covers everything related to the field.

5.2 State of the Art

Most of online ”intelligent” matchmaking systems mainly use AI techniques such as intelligent middle-agents and they match services rather than extracted knowledge. For example, Yenta [10] is a distributed multi-agent system that matches people by their interest and taste with the help of information extracted merely from users’ Internet navigation and search history and can arrange possible communication between matched users or agents. While Yenta is decentralized and based on user’s web browsing pattern, Ringo [25] is a centralized and e-mail like system where users sign up to the central server and send their own data by rating music they like

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and dislike. Ringo matches user profiles and then makes music recommendations from matched profile.

Nasukawa and Nagano [21] have developed TAKMI (Text Analysis and Knowledge MIning), a system which finds valuable patterns and rules in a text, the rules that indicate trends and significant features about specific topics when applied to large textual data. The system makes use of intention analysis and dependency analysis to extract concepts or text representations from given data. Statistical analysis functions were applied afterwards on these concepts and results could be analyzed interactively with graphics. Richardson [22] identifies similarity patterns of semantic relations between words, that are already tagged by a natural language parser for a dictionary, by assigning weights to the relation.

5.3 Information Retrieval (IR)

Information retrieval (IR) is a branch of NLP that retrieves documents and other types of data specified by a query within a database, Internet or a domain. Document retrieval (DR) and text retrieval (TR) are different practices with different theories and IR is a global term that covers both and others. While DR retrieves (online and offline) documents, such as articles and journals, TR supplies users with end text.

Text REtrieval Conference12 (TREC), part of the TIPSTER text program13, is the leading community that experiments information retrieval systems in different domains with different aims to provide the infrastructure for evaluation of text retrieval methodologies. IR task is ”accomplished using statistical methods that (a) select terms (words, phrases, and other units) from documents that are deemed to best represent their content, and (b) create an inverted index file that provides an easy access to documents containing these terms” [26].

5.4 Information Extraction (IE)

Information Extraction (IE), also a branch of NLP, is a technology that analyzes and transforms natural language text into structured format and thereby reducing the information in the doc-ument to a tabular structure in order to extract snippets of information [8, 14]. The process takes texts as input and produces fixed-format, unambiguous data as output.

An example from [1], which looks very similar to our case study and could explain some motiva-tions of pursuing IE is ”an IE system designed to monitor technical articles about Information Science [that] could pull out the names of professors, research studies, topics of interest, con-ferences, forthcoming publications from press releases, news stories, or e-mails and encode this information in a database. End-users can then search across this database by textual attributes

12_{http://trec.nist.gov/}

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or features. A typical search could be for all forthcoming publications about information retrieval or to locate all conference presentations on a specific information science topic. In addition, the structured information contained within a database could be ordered into a taxonomy” [1]. The difference of IE from Information Retrieval (IR) is that IR system finds relevant texts and presents them to the user as a whole (documents), while IE system analyzes texts and extracts only the specific information, or the facts, that the user is interested in. Therefore IE systems require predefined queries as to what kind of information the user wants extracted from a text. While the documents returned by information retrieval systems have to be read and analyzed by humans, the database entries returned by information extraction systems can be processed by data processing programs [14].

Information extraction involves tasks such as entities recognition (persons, locations, time, etc.), coreference recognition, establishing relationships between entities and events and domain spe-cific inference. Domain spespe-cific IE systems have better performance due to accuracy in results returned and ease of development. For more on IE, start with AI TOPICS14 _{by the American}

Association for Artificial Intelligence15_.

5.5 Performance Level

Several research projects, sponsored by U.S. Navy, were on track of extracting naval messages in the late 1980s and led to a new research field, IE. Later on, Message Understanding Conference (MUC) was started to evaluate IE systems and compare their performance. Human performance was considered as a point of comparison when evaluating IE systems test results. Participating IE systems are evaluated by completing defined tasks on test sets of text documents and extracted information is compared and scored against information manually extracted by human analysts.

The Automatic Content Extraction program16_{, a successor to MUC, has been running since}

1999. The ACE tasks are more complex than their MUC counterparts and evaluation results are not public.

Evaluation metrics of IE, recall and precision, were adopted from IR metrics. Recall measures how much information was extracted, while precision measures how much information extracted was correct. Both metrics are on the interval [0, 1] and inversely related to each other. Both should be considered when comparing IE systems. However it is not straightforward to compare the two parameters at the same time and, as a roundabout, various combination methods have been proposed, such as F-measure [8].

14_{http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/info.html} 15_{http://www.aaai.org}

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5.6 IE Tasks

IE is split into five tasks [19]:

• Named Entity recognition (NE) finds and classifies person names, places etc. Multi-Lingual

Entity recognition (ME) is optional variant for Chinese and Japanese language set.

• Coreference resolution (CO) identifies identity relations between entities.

• Template Element construction (TE) adds descriptive information to NE results (using

CO).

• Template Relation construction (TR) finds relations between TE entities.

• Scenario Template production (ST) fits TE and TR results into specified event scenarios.

Consider these sentences:

Telephone providers Verizon Communications and AT&T Inc. on Thursday posted financial result. Stifel Nicolaus analyst Chris King said it showed promising growth.17

NE discovers that the entities present are the Verizon Communications, AT&T Inc., Thursday, result, Stifel Nicolaus, Chris King, growth. CO discovers that it refers to the result. TE discovers that the Verizon Communications and AT&T Inc. are telephone providers, result are financial results and the growth was promising. TR discovers that Chris King works for Stifel Nicolaus. ST discovers that there was a financial result posted by the companies and Chris King said something about the result.

ACE combines these 5 tasks into only three tasks. The NE and CO tasks become a single Entity Detection and Tracking (EDT) task in ACE, and the TE and TR tasks a single Relation Detection and Tracking task. The ST task is renamed Event Detection and Characterization.

5.7 IE Systems

The following paragraph is excerpted from a tutorial by Appelt and Isreal [3], which demonstrates IE systems and its debate.

There are two basic approaches to the design of IE systems, which are labeled as the Knowledge Engineering Approach and the Automatic Training Approach. In knowledge engineering ap-proach, information parsing and extracting rules are defined by knowledge engineer or domain

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expert. The expert will formulate his rules based on pre-defined and usually domain specific text and his own knowledge in the domain. Despite its disadvantage that it is highly dependent on the knowledge and expertise of the engineer, most of the well performing IE systems are based on this approach. On the other hand, the automatic training approach does not require human knowledge but labor. The system will be fed by training corpora, a set of domain relevant texts, to acquire grammar annotations and then a learning algorithm is run resulting in information needed for further analysis.

OpenNLP18 is an online list of open source projects in NLP including IE and IR, available for both scientists and developers. For example, MinorThird [6], a collection of open source Java classes, has a number of learning methods that extracts text and label text documents. The most popular of IE projects is General Architecture for Text Engineering19(GATE), which offers not only classes and components but also a software development architecture and component development tools. The Natural Language Processing Research Group at the University of Sheffield, UK20 and Information Sciences Institute21 have also bunch of links to IE projects.

6 Conclusion

In this study we searched for a system to share our reflections and ideas on a shared experience or event with other people. Chat rooms? Instant messaging? or Discussion boards? We have reviewed several types of mass interaction systems and assessed their similarity to our desired system. With the rapid development of the Internet, computer mediated communication is evolving more rapidly. From evaluated applications, web discussion forum turns out to be the most versatile method of sharing reflection during an event. Potential conference organizers and attendees were interviewed and gave their view on the conference support tool, shared reflection and shared their own experiences. Based on evaluation results, system functional and non-functional requirements were structured and design prototype was outlined. Finally, the matchmaking module was discussed and Natural Language Processing and its subbranches were suggested for the implementation.

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Shared Reflection - Case Study on a Conference Support Website

Shared Reflection - Case Study on a

Conference Support Website

Norzima Elbegbayan

Shared Reflection - Case Study on a

Conference Support Website

Norzima Elbegbayan

Contents

Acknowledgement

1

Introduction

2

Related Research

3

System Characteristics and Study of Existing Applications

4

Functional Requirements and A Design Prototype

5

Matchmaking Module and Natural Language Processing

6

Conclusion

References