Abstract: A method includes receiving, at a message processing system that includes a processor and a memory, a message from an originator. The message includes content related to a particular service of a plurality of services. The method includes selecting a set of potential responses to the message at the message processing system based on the particular service. The method also includes retrieving account information related to the originator of the message at the message processing system. The method further includes filtering the set of potential responses at the message processing system to provide a filtered set of responses. The set of potential responses is filtered based on the account information. When a first response has a confidence level that exceeds a threshold confidence level, the method includes sending the first response from the message processing system to the originator of the message without sending the filtered set of responses to an agent.

Abstract: Probabilistic retrospective event detection is described. In one aspect, event parameters are initialized to identify a number of events from a corpus of documents. Using a generative model, documents are determined to be associated with an event to detect representative events from the identified number of events.

Abstract: Interesting location identification embodiments are presented that generally involve identifying and providing the interesting locations found in a given geospatial region. This is accomplished by modeling the location histories of multiple individuals who traveled through the region of interest, and identifying interesting locations in the region based on the number of individuals visiting a location weighted in terms of the travel experience of those individuals. A prescribed number of the top most interesting locations in a specified region can be provided upon request. In addition, prescribed numbers of the top most popular travel sequences through the interesting locations and the top most experienced travelers in the specified region can be provided as well.

Abstract: Website design pattern modeling technique embodiments are presented that model a website's design patterns. This can be based on the website's layout elements, its URL tokens, or both. When based on both, the design patterns can be modeled separately using first the layout elements and then the URL tokens, or vice versa. Alternately, the modeling can be based on coupled layout and URL token patterns. In operation, the modeling involves first identifying layout elements and/or URL tokens found on at least some of the pages of the website. The website design patterns are then modeled based on the occurrences of the identified layout elements and/or URL tokens in pages of the website. In cases where a coupled modeling scheme is employed, a modeling technique that exploits the correlations between the layout elements and URL tokens is used.

Abstract: The web forum data extraction technique is designed for the structured data extraction of data on web forums using both page-level information and site-level knowledge. To do this, the technique finds the kinds of page objects a forum site has, which object a page belongs to, and how different page objects are connected with each other. This information can be obtained by re-constructing the sitemap of the target forum which is based on a Data Object Model of the target forum. The web forum data extraction technique collects three kinds of evidence for data extraction: 1) inner-page features which cover both semantic and layout information on an individual page; 2) inter-vertex features which describe linkage-related observations; and 3) inner-vertex features which characterize interrelationships among pages in one vertex. The technique employs Markov Logic Networks to combine the types of evidence statistically for inference and thereby can extract the desired structures.

Abstract: The described systems, methods and data structures are directed to ranking Web pages with hierarchical considerations. The hierarchical structures and the linking relationships of the World Wide Web are used to provide a page importance ranking for Web searches. The linking relationships are aggregated to a high level node at each of the hierarchical structures. A link graph analysis is performed on the aggregated linking relationships to determine the importance of each node. The importance of each node may be propagated to pages associated with that node. For each page, the importance of that page and the importance of the node associated with the page are used to calculate the page importance ranking.

Abstract: The incremental web forum crawling technique described herein is a web forum crawling technique that employs a thread-wise strategy that takes into account thread-level statistics, for example, the number of replies and the frequency of replies, to estimate the activity trend of each thread. To extract such statistical information, the technique employs a simple yet very robust approach to extract the timestamp of each post in a discussion thread. It also employs a regression model to predict the time of the next post for each thread.

Abstract: A blog-based city landmark discovery framework is described to discover and summarize popular scenes and their representative views from blog photos to provide online personalized tourist suggestions. First, a location extraction algorithm is implemented to infer geographical associations of blog photos from their contextual descriptors, thus providing the ability to harvest city scene photos from web blogs. Second, a visual-textual hierarchical clustering scheme is adopted to organize crawled photos into a scene-view structure, and present a PhotoRank algorithm to discover representative views within each scene by viewing the representative photo selection problem as a popularity ranking problem in a visual correlation environment. Third, author, context and content issues are evaluated in a unified Landmark-HITS model to discover representative scenes as well as build author correlations.

Abstract: A system for calculating the importance of web pages is provided. The web pages are organized hierarchically into collections. The system calculates the importance of each collection based on inter-collection links from a web page in one collection to a web page in another collection. The system then calculates the importance of web pages in the collections with a high calculated importance based on links between the web pages in those collections using, for example, a conventional page rank algorithm. The system may also calculate the importance of web pages in each collection with a low calculated importance separately based on the links between the web pages in the collection using, for example, a conventional page rank algorithm.

Abstract: In some implementations, a plurality of first questions and corresponding first answers are identified at a community question-answer (CQA) site as a plurality of first question-answer (q-a) pairs. A query thread comprised of a second question and a plurality of candidate second answers is selected for making a determination of answer quality. A set of the first questions that are similar to the second question are identified from the plurality of first questions. First linking features between the identified set of first questions and their corresponding first answers are used for determining an analogy with second linking features between the second question and candidate answers for ranking the candidate answers.

Abstract: Disclosed herein are one or more embodiments that arrange a plurality of location entities into a hierarchy of location descriptors. One or more of the disclosed embodiments may determine whether one of the location entities is a spatial outlier based at least in part on presence of one or more other location entities within a predetermined distance of the one location entity. Also, the other location entities and the one location entity may share a location descriptor.

Abstract: A system and method for processing e-mail is provided wherein an e-mail is received from an originator or a customer, a routing destination is determined and responses to the e-mail are retrieved from a library based on the selected routing destination. Customer data is then accessed and the responses are filtered based on customer information that is extrinsic to the e-mail. An agent can select a response from the list of filtered responses and the selected response can be sent to the originator.

Abstract: A method for advertising in response to an image search. One or more keywords may be received. The keywords may be for searching one or more images on the network. The images may be retrieved based on the keywords. One or more advertisements may be selected based on a first visual content of the images and a second visual content of the one or more advertisements. The one or more of the advertisements may be displayed.

Abstract: A system for augmenting click-through data with latent information present in the click-through data for use in generating search results that are better tailored to the information needs of a user submitting a query is provided. The augmentation system creates a three-dimensional matrix with the dimensions of users, queries, and documents. The augmentation system then performs a three-order singular value decomposition of the three-dimensional matrix to generate a three-dimensional core singular value matrix and a left singular matrix for each dimension. The augmentation system finally multiplies the three-dimensional core singular value matrix by the left singular matrices to generate an augmented three-dimensional matrix that explicitly contains the information that was latent in the un-augmented three-dimensional matrix.

Abstract: A method and system for high-order co-clustering of objects of heterogeneous types is provided. A clustering system co-clusters objects of heterogeneous types based on joint distributions for objects of non-central types and objects of a central type. The clustering system uses an iterative approach to co-clustering the objects of the various types. The clustering system divides the co-clustering into a sub-problem, for each non-central type (e.g., first type and second type), of co-clustering objects of that non-central type and objects of the central type based on the joint distribution for that non-central type. After the co-clustering is completed, the clustering system clusters objects of the central type based on the clusters of the objects of the non-central types identified during co-clustering. The clustering system repeats the iterations until the clusters of objects of the central type converge on a solution.

Abstract: Method for making a recommendation to a first user in a computing network, including calculating one or more similarity scores between the first user and one or more remaining users in the network, identifying a portion of the remaining users having a highest similarity scores, identifying one or more locations visited by the portion of the remaining users but not by the first user, determining an interest level of the first user in each location, ranking the locations based on the interest levels, and displaying the locations based on the ranking as a first recommendation.

Abstract: A method and system for generating clusters of images for a search result of an image query is provided. When an original image query is received, the search system identifies text associated with the original image query by submitting the original image query to a search engine. The search system identifies phrases from the text of the web page containing the search result. The search system uses each of the identified phrases as an image query and submits the image queries to an image search engine. The search system considers the image search result for each image query to represent a cluster of related images. The search system then presents the clusters of images as the images of the image search result of the original image query.

Abstract: A method and system for labeling object information of an information page is provided. A labeling system identifies an object record of an information page based on the labeling of object elements within an object record and labels object elements based on the identification of an object record that contains the object elements. To identify the records and label the elements, the labeling system generates a hierarchical representation of blocks of an information page. The labeling system identifies records and elements within the records by propagating probability-related information of record labels and element labels through the hierarchy of the blocks. The labeling system generates a feature vector for each block to represent the block and calculates a probability of a label for a block being correct based on a score derived from the feature vectors associated with related blocks. The labeling system searches for the labeling of records and elements that has the highest probability of being correct.

Abstract: Method for determining similarities between a first user and a second user in a network, including receiving one or more Global Positioning System (GPS) logs from each user in the network, constructing a first hierarchal graph for the first user's GPS log and a second hierarchical graph for the second user's GPS log, and calculating a similarity score between the first user and the second user based on the first hierarchal graph and the second hierarchical graph.

Abstract: A method and system for identifying sights associated with a location and for displaying images associated with those sights is provided. A tour system identifies sights associated with a location by submitting a search request formed using the location to an image search service. The tour system identifies salient phrases of metadata of the search results to be the candidate sight names. The tour system also provides a user interface for displaying the images associated with the locations. The user interface may present a slideshow of sights encountered when traveling on a trip.