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Publications

Publications by HumanISE

2020

Studying How Health Literacy Influences Attention during Online Information Seeking

Authors
Lopes, CT; Ramos, E;

Publication
CHIIR'20: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2020 CONFERENCE ON HUMAN INFORMATION INTERACTION AND RETRIEVAL

Abstract
Health literacy affects how people understand health information and, therefore, should be considered by search engines in health searches. In this work, we analyze how the level of health literacy is related to the eye movements of users searching the web for health information. We performed a user study with 30 participants that were asked to search online in the context of three work task situations defined by the authors. Their eye interactions with the Search Results Page and the Result Pages were logged using an eye-tracker and later analyzed. When searching online for health information, people with adequate health literacy spend more time and have more fixations on Search Result Pages. In this type of page, they also pay more attention to the results' hyperlink and snippet and click in more results too. In Result Pages, adequate health literacy users spend more time analyzing textual content than people with lower health literacy. We found statistical differences in terms of clicks, fixations, and time spent that could be used as a starting point for further research. That we know of, this is the first work to use an eye-tracker to explore how users with different health literacy search online for health-related information. As traditional instruments are too intrusive to be used by search engines, an automatic prediction of health literacy would be very useful for this type of system.

2020

Generating Query Suggestions for Cross-language and Cross-terminology Health Information Retrieval

Authors
Santos, PM; Lopes, CT;

Publication
Advances in Information Retrieval - 42nd European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2020, Lisbon, Portugal, April 14-17, 2020, Proceedings, Part II

Abstract
Medico-scientific concepts are not easily understood by laypeople that frequently use lay synonyms. For this reason, strategies that help users formulate health queries are essential. Health Suggestions is an existing extension for Google Chrome that provides suggestions in lay and medico-scientific terminologies, both in English and Portuguese. This work proposes, evaluates, and compares further strategies for generating suggestions based on the initial consumer query, using multi-concept recognition and the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). The evaluation was done with an English and a Portuguese test collection, considering as baseline the suggestions initially provided by Health Suggestions. Given the importance of understandability, we used measures that combine relevance and understandability, namely, uRBP and uRBPgr. Our best method merges the Consumer Health Vocabulary (CHV)-preferred expression for each concept identified in the initial query for lay suggestions and the UMLS-preferred expressions for medico-scientific suggestions. Multi-concept recognition was critical for this improvement. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.

2020

Proposal and Comparison of Health Specific Features for the Automatic Assessment of Readability

Authors
Antunes, H; Lopes, CT;

Publication
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 43RD INTERNATIONAL ACM SIGIR CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL (SIGIR '20)

Abstract
Looking for health information is one of the most popular activities online. However, the specificity of language on this domain is frequently an obstacle to comprehension, especially for the ones with lower levels of health literacy. For this reason, search engines should consider the readability of health content and, if possible, adapt it to the user behind the search. In this work, we explore methods to assess the readability of health content automatically. We propose features capable of measuring the specificity of a medical text and estimate the knowledge necessary to comprehend it. The features are based on information retrieval metrics and the log-likelihood of a text with lay and medico-scientific language models. To evaluate our methods, we built and used a dataset composed of health articles of Simple English Wikipedia and the respective documents in ordinary Wikipedia. We achieved a maximum accuracy of 88% in binary classifications (easy versus hard-to-read). We found out that the machine learning algorithm does not significantly interfere with performance. We also experimented and compared different features combinations. The features using the values of the log-likelihood of a text with lay and medico-scientific language models perform better than all the others.

2020

Management of Research Data in Image Format: An Exploratory Study on Current Practices

Authors
Fernandes, M; Rodrigues, J; Lopes, CT;

Publication
Digital Libraries for Open Knowledge - 24th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL 2020, Lyon, France, August 25-27, 2020, Proceedings

Abstract
Research data management is the basis for making data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. In this context, little attention is given to research data in image format. This article presents the preliminary results of a study on the habits related to the management of images in research. We collected 107 answers from researchers using a questionnaire. These researchers were PhD students, fellows and university professors from Life and Health Sciences, Exact Sciences and Engineering, Natural and Environmental Sciences and Social Sciences and Humanities. This study shows that 83.2% of researcher use images as research data, however, its use is generally not accompanied by a guidance document such as a research data management plan. These results provide valuable insights into the processes and habits regarding the production and use of images in the research context. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

2020

Scheduling in Cloud and Fog Architecture: Identification of Limitations and Suggestion of Improvement Perspectives

Authors
Barros, C; Rocio, V; Sousa, A; Paredes, H;

Publication
Journal of Information Systems Engineering and Management

Abstract
Application execution required in cloud and fog architectures are generally heterogeneous in terms of device and application contexts. Scaling these requirements on these architectures is an optimization problem with multiple restrictions. Despite countless efforts, task scheduling in these architectures continue to present some enticing challenges that can lead us to the question how tasks are routed between different physical devices, fog nodes and cloud. In fog, due to its density and heterogeneity of devices, the scheduling is very complex and in the literature, there are still few studies that have been conducted. However, scheduling in the cloud has been widely studied. Nonetheless, many surveys address this issue from the perspective of service providers or optimize application quality of service (QoS) levels. Also, they ignore contextual information at the level of the device and end users and their user experiences. In this paper, we conducted a systematic review of the literature on the main task by: scheduling algorithms in the existing cloud and fog architecture; studying and discussing their limitations, and we explored and suggested some perspectives for improvement.

2020

Going to the core of hard resource-constrained project scheduling instances

Authors
Coelho, J; Vanhoucke, M;

Publication
COMPUTERS & OPERATIONS RESEARCH

Abstract
The resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) is one of the most studied problems in the project scheduling literature, and aims at constructing a project schedule with a minimum makespan that satisfies both the precedence relations of the network and the limited availability of the renewable resources. The problem has attracted attention due to its NP hardness status, and different algorithms have been proposed that solve a wide variety of RCPSP instances to optimality or near-optimality. In this paper, we analyse the hardness of this problem from an experimental point-of-view by testing different algorithms on a huge set of existing instances and detect which ones are difficult to solve. To that purpose, we propose a three-phased approach that makes use of five elementary blocks, well-performing algorithms and a huge amount of computational power to transform easy RCPSP instances into very hard ones. The purpose of this study is to create insight and understanding into what makes an RCPSP instance hard, and propose a new dataset that consists of a small set of instances that are impossible to solve with the algorithms currently existing in the literature. These instances should be as small as possible in terms of number of activities and resources, and should be as diverse as possible in terms of network structure and resource strictness. Such a dataset should enable researchers to focus their attention on the development of radically new algorithms to solve the RCPSP rather than gradually improving current algorithms that can solve the existing RCPSP instances only slightly better.

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