The exponential growth of digital libraries and the proliferation of scholarly content in electronic formats have made data mining and information retrieval essential tools for effectively managing, organizing, and disseminating knowledge. This thesis provides a comprehensive analysis of the advancements and challenges in these fields, with a…

Social bookmarking systems allow people to create pointers to Web resources in a shared, Web-based environment. These services allow users to add free-text labels, or "tags", to their bookmarks as a way to organize resources for later recall. Ease-of-use, low cognitive barriers, and a lack of controlled vocabulary have allowed social…

The inverted index is the main data structure used by all the major search engines. Search engines build an inverted index on their collection to speed up query processing. As the size of the web grows, the length of the inverted list structures, which can easily grow to hundreds of MBs or even GBs for common terms (roughly linear in the size of…

The Web is large and expanding, making it challenging to attract new visitors to websites. Website operators often use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to boost the search engine rankings of their sites, thereby maximizing the inflow of visitors. Malicious operators take SEO to the extreme through many unsavory techniques that are often…

Online discussion forums have become popular in recent times. They provide a platform for people from different parts of the world sharing a common interest to come together and topics of mutual interest and seek solutions to their problems. There are hundreds of thousands of internet forums containing tens of millions of discussion threads and…

Increasing use of the Internet has led to a proliferation of online communication and information sharing media. These media, each with its own set of affordances and limitations, are thought to encourage new ways to communicate. Interlocutors refashion general English into abbreviated and often pictographic representations of existing concepts.…

Quickly accessing the contents of a video is challenging for users, particularly for unstructured video, which contains no intentional shot boundaries, no chapters, and no apparent edited format. We approach this problem in the domain of lecture videos though the use of machine learning, to gather semantic information about the videos; and through…

Use of Internet marketing techniques in higher education to attract prospective students is relatively new. While the research is recent, there are several studies that identify what is most valuable to students seeking information on college web sites. Higher education is now facing increasing competition from for-profit schools and reduced…