J. Blustein's Publications

For a current list see <URL:http://www.cs.dal.ca/~jamie/pubs/>.

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  • Theses
  • Refereed
  • Non-Refereed
  • Webpages
  • Address

  • Short List

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    Theses and Dissertations

    Titles are links to details below.

  • Hypertext Versions of Journal Articles: Computer-aided linking and realistic human-based evaluation (PhD thesis, 1999)
  • An Evaluation of Tools for Converting Text to Hypertext (MSc thesis, Dec. 1993/Jan. 1994)
  • Refereed

    Titles are links to details below.

  • Automatically Generated Hypertext Versions of Scholarly Articles and Their Evaluation (2000)
  • Evaluating Automatically Generated Hypertext Versions of Scholarly Articles (1998)
  • Methods For Evaluating the Quality of Hypertext Links (1997)
  • A Design for the Construction and Evaluation of an Automatic Hypertext Generator (1997)
  • Using LSI to Evaluate the Quality of Hypertext Links (1995)
  • A Statistical Analysis of the TREC-3 Data (1994)
  • Non-Refereed

    Titles are links to details below.

  • Tracking Links in a Single HTML Document (in press)
  • Panel: Adaptive Hypermedia (conference trip report, 1999)
  • An Experiment in Evaluating Automatically Generated Hypertext. (1999)
  • Implementing Bit Vectors in C (1995)
  • IR-STAT-PAK (computer program, 1995)
  • Replication Strategies for X.500: Experiments with a Prototype X.500 Directory (1990)
  • LINKAGE Help Manual (1989)
  • Significant Electronic Publications

    Titles are links to the documents (at this site).

  • alt.hypertext frequently asked questions list
    HTML version of my periodic informational Usenet posting.
    Awards: won a Web Design Group award, Selected by PC Webopaedia, Selected by Yahoo!, Speech Friendly Ribbon Award
  • Dynamic bibliography of technical books
    A proof-of-concept using code from my DDJ article.
  • J. Blustein's C Programming Language Resources
    `Mixed with a good selection of site and book references, James Blustein's Scholarly Resources for CompSci Undergrads present short notes on K&R II, on debugging, and a longer example of how to encapsulate a data type in C.' -- Jutta Degener in the Other Sources section of the Lysator C Archive (21 April 1996).
  • CS 881 -- Topics in Computing and Biology: DNA Computing
    Homepage and list of resources for what we believe is the first ever course about DNA computers.
    Awards: Selected by BioMed, Speech Friendly Ribbon Award
  • Author's Address

  • E-mail: <jamie@csd.uwo.ca> or <jamie@acm.org>
  • Postal: below

  • Detailed List

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    This detailed list is in chronological order, from most recent to earliest.

    Automatically Generated Hypertext Versions of Scholarly Articles and Their Evaluation
    James Blustein
    In ACM Hypertext 2000 Conference
    May - June 2000
    The overall objective of this work is to develop and evaluate ways of automatically incorporating hypertext links into pre-existing scientific articles. Some readers like hypertext even when it is not as useful to them as the linear document from which it was generated. Hypertexts must therefore be evaluated for usefulness and acceptability. We describe rules for making links and an experiment using two methods of applying those rules, to show how such rules should be evaluated, and to see if they truly help people. In addition to measures of performance we also collected measures of preference. The effectiveness of these links was evaluated by testing with people. Performance was determined by measuring the accuracy and inclusiveness of answers to questions about the article, and written summaries. Readers judged the quality of links (and thereby the quality of the rules used to forge them) and the overall effectiveness of the hypertext. Most readers did not read the entire articles in the time allotted. Readers had no preference for articles with or without novel link types, but they did have a strong preference for definition and structural links over (novel) semantic links. Readers of documents with only structural links had comprehension scores that were inversely proportional to their satisfaction ratings. No performance difference was detected.
    Tracking Links in a Single HTML Document
    James Blustein
    The Perl Journal (in press).
    Panel: Adaptive Hypermedia
    James Blustein and Luis Fransisco-Revilla
    sigWEB Newsletter vol. 8, no. 2, June 1999
    An Experiment in Evaluating Automatically Generated Hypertext
    James Blustein
    In Proceedings of the CyberMountain Colloquium
    Deena Larsen, Peter J. Nürnberg (eds.)
    (Aalborg University Esbjerg Department of Computer Science Technical Report AUE-CS-99-05)
    28 June - 2 July 1999.
    Hypertext Versions of Journal Articles: Computer-aided linking and realistic human-based evaluation
    William James Blustein
    Doctoral thesis
    April 1999
    Department of Computer Science, University of Western Ontario
    London, Ontario, Canada
    A PostScript version (encoded by gzip) is available for FTP from ftp.csd.uwo.ca in the pub/thesis directory.

    My overall objective is to develop and evaluate ways of automatically incorporating hypertext links into pre-existing scholarly journal articles. I describe a rule-based approach for making three types of links (structural, definition, and semantic). Structural links are a way of making explicit some connections between parts of the text. Definition links connect the use of a term, defined elsewhere in the document, to that definition. Links that connect parts of text that discuss similar things are semantic links. I distinguish several types of semantic links.

    I use two information retrieval (IR) systems (Cornell's SMART system and Bellcore's Latent Semantic Indexing) to select links based on the content of the articles. I conducted an experiment to compare the performance of the links forged using these two systems.

    The effectiveness of the links (and the rules used to make them) is tested by people reading the hypertext versions for information under a time constraint. A within-subjects experimental design was used. Each of the nineteen experimental participants read one version of each of three scholarly articles in a different hypertext form (one had only simple links, the others had definition links and semantic links selected using one of the IR systems). Subjects' preferences were also measured.

    Although I used three survey articles from published sources for my evaluation experiment there was no difference in reader preference or performance on the basis of article. Subjects ratings of the utility of the various links shows a significant preference for structural links over semantic links. Definition links were preferred to structural links, although the result was not significant. No difference between the links created using the two IR systems was detected.

    However there were significant differences in the times that readers spent on documents created using the various treatments When they read in documents with only structural links readers were more likely to have read the whole article, and their satisfaction scores were inversely proportional to their comprehension score.

    The method of evaluating hypertext versions of journal articles for use by researchers may be applied to other hypertext versions.

    Evaluating Automatically Generated Hypertext Versions of Scholarly Articles
    James Blustein
    Hyped-Media to Hyper-Media: Toward Theoretical Foundations of Design, Use and Evaluation
    Workshop at CHI 98 conference
    Organized by N. Hari Narayanan
    19 - 20 April 1998
    ACM SIGCHI
    Los Angeles, California, USA
    Note: The talk was based on an early version of my PhD research. My PhD proposal in brief and completed PhD thesis are also available.

    In this paper I present an experimental approach to the evaluation of a type of hypermedia application. My overall objective is to develop and evaluate ways of automatically incorporating hypermedia links into pre-existing scholarly journal articles. The focus of this paper is the evaluation method. My method allows the results to be applied to other documents than just those tested.

    To properly convert ordinary documents into useful hypermedia two constraints must be satisfied: the links must be useful to the readers and the risk of disorientation introduced by the new structure imposed by the links must be minimized. I describe a rule-based approach for making links. In my experiment I use two methods to detect when the rules should be applied. The effectiveness of the links is tested by people performing realistic tasks. Readers judge the quality of links (and thereby the quality of the rules used to forge them) and the overall effectiveness of the hypermedia.

    A Design for the Construction and Evaluation of an Automatic Hypertext Generator
    James Blustein
    Communication and Information In Context: Society, Technology, and the Professions
    Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference/Travaux du 25e congrès annuel
    Canadian Association for Information Science (CAIS)/Association Canadienne des Sciences de L'information (ACSI)
    Edited by Bernd Frohmann
    8 - 10 June 1997
    Learned Societies Congress/Congrès des sociétés savantes
    Memorial University of Newfoundland
    St. John's, Newfoundland
    Note: The talk was based on my PhD proposal. The proposal in brief is also available.

    My overall objective is to develop and evaluate ways of automatically incorporating hypertext links into pre-existing scientific articles. Hypertext can support all of the ways we believe people use printed versions of articles and can add additional useful features. However many readers find hypertext confusing and not all texts are suitable for conversion to hypertext. Some readers like hypertext even when it is not as useful to them as the linear document from which it was generated. Hypertexts must therefore be evaluated for usefulness.

    To properly convert ordinary documents into useful hypertext two constraints must be satisfied: the links must be useful to the readers and the risk of disorientation introduced by the new structure imposed by the links must be minimized. I describe rules for making links and two methods to detect when the rules should be applied.

    I propose to provide links by applying rules based on the content of the articles using two methods: the Cornell's SMART system and Bellcore's Latent Semantic Indexing. I will evaluate the effectiveness of these links by testing with people. Readers will judge the quality of links (and thereby the quality of the rules used to forge them) and the overall effectiveness of the hypertext.

    Methods For Evaluating the Quality of Hypertext Links
    James Blustein, Robert E. Webber, and Jean Tague-Sutcliffe
    Information Processing & Management (March 1997, vol. 33, no. 2, pp.255 - 271)

    We present two methods for evaluating automatically generated hypertext links. The first method is based on correlations between shortest paths in the hypertext structure and a semantic similarity measure. Experimental results with the first method show the degree to which the hypertext conversion process approximates semantic similarity. The semantic measure is in turn only an approximation of a user's internal model of the corpus. Therefore we propose a second evaluation method based on measuring user's performance using hypertext. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of computer versus human evaluation, respectively.

    Implementing Bit Vectors in C
    James Blustein
    Dr. Dobb's Journal (August 1995, vol. 20, issue 8, #233)
    Note: An updated version is available at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~jamie/BitVectors. The code should be available online from the DDJ FTP site (see http://www.ddj.com).

    Bit vectors provide an extremely space- and time-efficent means of implementing arrays of Boolean values.

    IR-STAT-PAK
    James Blustein, Jean Tague-Sutcliffe
    Presented at SIGIR '95 Conference (July 1995)
    The C code is available from http://www.itl.nist.gov/iaui/894.02/ in the IR Tools section. (The site might ask you for a user name and password, but none are needed so select just `cancel' from your browser.) A brief (4 page) overview is available as a PostScript file, or in HTML 4.0 format.

    A program to compute descriptive and analytic statistics for the TREC IR trials.

    A Statistical Analysis of the TREC-3 Data
    Jean Tague-Sutcliffe, James Blustein
    in Text Retrieval Conference
    National Institute of Standards and Technology
    Gaithersburg, MD, U.S.A.
    November 1994

    A statistical analysis of the TREC-3 data shows that performance differences across queries is greater than performance differences across participant runs. Generally, groups of runs which do not differ significantly at large, sometimes accounting for over half the runs. Correlation among the various performance measures is high.

    Using LSI to Evaluate the Quality of Hypertext Links
    James Blustein and Robert E. Webber
    in IR and Automatic Construction of Hypermedia: a research workshop
    13 July 1995
    Maristella Agosti and James Allan, eds.
    ACM SIGIR
    A PostScript version (encoded by gzip) is available.

    Useful hypertext is constrained by the need for users to be able to find documents about similar topics without extensive navigation. We show how examining the properties of a graph built by a document's hypertext links can be used to evaluate the usefulness of the document. To formally measure the quality of hypertext linking in a corpus, we compare the semantic similarity of pairs of documents with the minimum number of links between their corresponding nodes in an analogous hypertext graph. We use the measure of document-to-document similarity computed using latent semantic indexing as our measure of semantic similarity. Our method has been applied to a corpus composed of Usenet messages.

    I have made some minor corrections to some of the tables since the presentation. A more extensive analysis appears in the IP&M paper.

    An Evaluation of Tools for Converting Text to Hypertext
    William James Blustein
    Masters thesis
    December 1993/January 1994
    Department of Computer Science, University of Western Ontario
    London, Ontario, Canada
  • A PostScript version (encoded by Unix compress) is available for FTP from ftp.csd.uwo.ca in the pub/thesis directory.
  • The document collection and term list are available from the /pub/papers/webber/HypertextEvaluation/BlusteinThesisData directory.
  • Methods for automatically converting semi-structured text (Usenet messages) into hypertext form using information retrieval methods were investigated. The methods were evaluated using statistical means to determine which will produce hypertext best suited to browsing and searching. Methods were evaluated by comparing a measure of semantic similarity of all document pairs with the shortest path in a graph formed by hypertext links between those documents.

    I have made some minor corrections since publication.

    Replication Strategies for X.500: Experiments with a Prototype X.500 Directory
    Michael A. Bauer, J. Michael Bennett, Scott T. Feeney, James Blustein, Richard McBride
    UWO Dept. of Computer Science Technical Report #279
    October 1990
    ISBN 0-7714-1243-6
    LINKAGE Help Manual
    Jamie Blustein
    Available in printed form only from:
    Dr. R. G. Korneluk and Dr. A. E. Mackenzie
    Molecular Genetics
    Childrens' Hospital of Eastern Ontario
    401 Smyth Road,
    Ottawa, Ontario K1H 8L1
    Canada.

    A manual for the Lathrop et al.'s LINKAGE programs for genetic linkage analysis (See `Construction of Human Linkage Maps: likelihood calculations for multilocus linkage analysis' Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 81:3443-3446, June 1984) It was written for versions 4.6 to 5.0 of the microcomputer version but can also be used with mainframe versions. The trouble shooting section (pages 18 - 27) is probably the most useful.
    The latest version is 2.01 August 28, 1989.

    See also
    significant electronic publications above

    Address

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    J. Blustein
    Faculty of Computer Science
    Dalhousie University
    6050 University Avenue
    Halifax, Nova Scotia
    B3H 1W5
    Canada

    E-mail: <jamie@csd.uwo.ca> or <jamie@acm.org>
    Fax: (+1 902)492-1517

    http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~jamie/publications.html

    For a current list see <URL:http://www.cs.dal.ca/~jamie/pubs/>.

    This document is copyright by its author, J. Blustein.