Internet-Scale code retrieval deals with the representation, storage, and access of relevant source code from a large amount of source code available on the Internet. Internet-Scale code retrieval systems support common emerging practices among software developers related to finding and reusing source code. In this dissertation we focus on some…

This thesis investigates and develops a few acceleration techniques for the search engine algorithms used in PageRank and HITS computations. PageRank and HITS methods are two highly successful applications of modern Linear Algebra in computer science and engineering. They constitute the essential technologies accounted for the immense growth and…

An increasing number of Web sites expose their content via query interfaces, many of them offering the same type of products/services (e.g., flight tickets, car rental/purchasing). They constitute the so-called "Deep Web". Accessing the content on the Deep Web has been a long-standing challenge for the database community. For a user interested in…

Search engines have now become essential tools in all aspects of our life. Although a variety of information needs can be served very successfully, there are still a lot of queries that search engines can not answer very effectively and these queries always make users feel frustrated. Since it is quite often that users encounter such "difficult…

With the dramatic growth of text information, there is an increasing need for powerful text mining systems that can automatically discover useful knowledge from text. Text is generally associated with all kinds of contextual information. Those contexts can be explicit, such as the time and the location where a blog article is written, and the…

The amount of online information has grown exponentially over the past few decades, and users become more and more dependent on ranking and recommendation systems to address their information seeking needs. The advance in information technologies has enabled users to provide feedback on the utilities of the underlying ranking and recommendation…