Detecting context factors in Wikipedia search tasks Articles in information portals like Wikipedia contain not only text, but also images, graphics, lists and navigational information. To investigate the usage of those content elements in different search scenarios we describe a lab study aiming at identifying the users' preferences for varying media types in the different search situations.

Searching information by using search engines and browsers is a tedious task for users. Navigational and informational search tasks are complicated by the fact that web servers always provide complete web pages and do not tailor their content to the user's current information need. In this paper, we present a proposal for the application of contextaware recommendation techniques to simulate human decision making when selecting elements of content to be included in an answer to an information need. As a first step towards live generation of content, we present results on our experimental study to capture decision criteria for this selection problem that web users apply in choosing content. These preferences could then later be formalized in terms of a knowledge-based context-aware and personalized model for recommending content during information search.

No abstract

The paper provides an empirical analysis of the macroeconomic factors that enhance revenue gap in South Africa using the multivariate cointegration techniques for the period 1965 to 2012. The results from the cointegration analysis indicate that the revenue gap in South Africa is negatively associated with the level of imports while positively related to external debt and underground economy. The former finding is consistent with the notion that imports are subjected to more taxation than domestic activities because of certain features of international trade that tend to make tax evasion difficult. On the other hand, the positive relationship between external debt and tax gap shows that the South African government relies upon external debt to finance its budget deficit resulting from missing revenues. Furthermore, the observed negative effect of the post-apartheid dummy confirms that the tax policy reforms that South Africa introduced following the liberation in 1994 have led to a reduction in missing revenues. The results from the Granger causality test also show that there is a unidirectional causality running from imports and underground economy to revenue gap, while revenue gap on the other hand is found to Granger-cause national income and external debt in South Africa.

Abstract:Searching information on web pages is a tedious task for users as web servers provide complete web pages and do not tailor their content to the user's current information need. This leaves an enormous amount of workload for the user and influences his emotional attitude towards the whole task even if a search engine has filtered pages that are relevant to a user query. In this paper, we propose an approach to adapt the response to queries to user preferences for his reading experience in order to leverage the problem of information overload. With these preferences, it is possible to select the most preferred content from a web page. In our view, the preferences are a quantitative way to express conversational maxims. We present our experimental approach to learn these preferences from annotated browsing sessions and introduce a decision strategy for the selection of content on the basis of the learned preferences.