%M J.RRIOC.2.1.1
%T Language Resources for a Question-Answering System for Romanian
%A Mititelu, Verginica Barbu
%A Ceausu, Alexandru
%A Ion, Radu
%A Irimia, Elena
%A Stefanescu, Dan
%A Tufis, Dan
%J Romanian Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
%D 2009
%V 2
%N 1
%P 1-17
%K question-answering system, language resources, thesaurus, lexical ontology,
corpus
%* (c) Copyright 2009 SIGCHI Romania
%X We describe here several language resources (a lexicon, a paradigmatic
morphology, two linguistic thesauri -- the Romanian wordnet and Eurovoc -- and
a parallel multilingual corpus) from the perspective of their utility
especially in question-answering tasks. We present the stages of the automatic
finding of an answer to a question written by a user in a natural language.
Wherever necessary, we show the way in which the linguistic resources
contribute to various problems solving. The lexicon is a sort of spellchecker
for the user's question. The paradigmatic morphology is used for lemmatizing
the question and the corpus. The Romanian wordnet is useful for query
expansion, for identifying the lexical chains between words senses and for
answers retrieval in a mono- and a multilingual system. The Eurovoc thesaurus
is used for segmentation and lemmatization of the user's question and of the
parallel multilingual corpus from which the answer is retrieved. The
architecture of the question-answering system described here is language
independent; the language resources, however, are, inherently, language
dependent (e.g. the lexicon, the paradigmatic morphology); exceptions make
those whose organization or structure allows for a multilingual perspective
(e.g. the thesauri and the corpus); in our case, they are aligned.

%M J.RRIOC.2.1.18
%T WebVOX -- a Solution for Web Page Accessibility Improvement for Persons with
Reading Deficiency
%A Fogarassy-Neszly, Paul
%J Romanian Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
%D 2009
%V 2
%N 1
%P 18-30
%K accessibly, Web page, reading deficiency, visual impairment
%* (c) Copyright 2009 SIGCHI Romania
%X This paper presents the WebVOX system, for Web page accessibility
improvement for persons with reading deficiency. The presented solution
addresses peoples with dyslexia, low literacy and reading skills, learning
difficulties, visual impaired and color-blind persons and blind persons.
Different reading deficiencies were analyzed, concluding the fact that reading
problems go beyond anatomic eye functionality. In the context of described
solution, different software assistive technologies were presented, both for
blind and visual impaired peoples. Were described the functionalities of screen
readers, speech synthesis and screen magnifiers; much of these functionalities
are implemented in WebVOX. Should be emphasized the fact that proposed solution
can improve the Webpage accessibility, but the way these pages are designed and
realized should obey the W3C recommendations in order to obtain the full
accessibility. At the end several existing solution were presented, both with
their advantage and disadvantages.

%M J.RRIOC.2.1.31
%T A task-based design approach to the design of a software assistant for
usability evaluation
%A Pribeanu, Costin
%J Romanian Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
%D 2009
%V 2
%N 1
%P 31-44
%K usability, formative evaluation, usability problems, computer-aided
evaluation, task-based design, usability evaluation assistant, software tools
%* (c) Copyright 2009 SIGCHI Romania
%X The quality of interactive systems is an important concern that brings in
front the ergonomic quality of the user interface. Formative usability
evaluation aims at identification and analysis of usability problems as early
in the develompment process. For this purpose, a detailed description is needed
as well as a classification according to different criteria: impact, context,
explanation and suggestion for improvement. An accurate description which is
agreed by the evaluation team and communicated to designers improves the
product quality and motivates the process of fixing usability problems. In this
paper we present a task-based approach to the design of a software tool to
assist evaluators during the tasks of collecting, organization and retrieval of
usability problems. In the case of heuristic evaluation and / or
guidelines-based evaluation the software tools should satisfy two kinds of
requirements: providing with appropriate heuristics / guidelines and recording
of usability problems. These requirements are resulting from a task analysis
and lead to develop a flexible software tool that could be used either as a
stand-alone tool or integrated with an existing tool for working with
guidelines.

%M J.RRIOC.2.1.45
%T Non-conventional User-Interaction. General Considerations and Case Studies
%A Buraga, Sabin-Corneliu
%A Ceriu, Stefan
%A Luca, Anca-Paula
%A Moraru, Eduard
%A Negru, Stefan
%A Prutianu, Stefan
%J Romanian Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
%D 2009
%V 2
%N 1
%P 45-72
%K non-conventional interaction, types of interfaces, experiments
%* (c) Copyright 2009 SIGCHI Romania
%X The paper presents several aspects of interest regarding the current
non-conventional user-interaction methods. The conducted experiments were
focused on using specific hardware devices -- e.g., sensor gloves, mobile
terminals, etc. --, and on "atypical" interactive manners to have access to
information or knowledge available on the Web.

%M J.RRIOC.2.1.73
%T An Ontology-centered Approach for Designing an Interactive Competence
Management System for IT Companies
%A Niculescu, Cristina
%A Trausan-Matu, Stefan
%J Romanian Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
%D 2009
%V 2
%N 1
%P 73-88
%K competencies, interface, ontology, competence management system, information
technology
%* (c) Copyright 2009 SIGCHI Romania
%X The paper presents an ontology-centered approach for designing an
interactive competence management system for IT companies. This type of
approach helps to shift the focus from a function-oriented, tool-centric view,
towards a semantic-oriented view. In the paper are covered subjects as:
ontologies definitions, generic architecture of the competence management
system (CMS), structure of CMS ontology, building and working the ontology
(integrity and inference of the ontology, knowledge acquisition,
conceptualization phase, querying types of concepts). The advantage of using an
ontology-based system is the possibility of the identification of new relations
among concepts based on inferences starting from the existing knowledge. The
user can choose to query instances of one type of concept, based on the
relations that are displayed for him/her in a dropping menu. In addition to
choosing relations modeled in the ontology, the user may also query inferred
relations that are not explicitly stored in the knowledge base. Other search
type is browsing the ontology. The skeleton of the ontology is seen as a tree
with nodes and hyperlinks that point to other concepts or instances. Starting
from base-concepts, the user can get specific information about any instance or
concept. The paper also presents some use-cases, conclusions and further
developments.

%M J.RRIOC.2.2.89
%T Cognitive task analysis: theoretical and methodological aspects
%A Marhan, Ana Maria
%J Romanian Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
%D 2009
%V 2
%N 2
%P 89-104
%K cognitive task analysis, expert, interview, knowledge elicitation
%* (c) Copyright 2009 SIGCHI Romania
%X This paper discusses some of the theoretical and methodological challenges
faced by nowadays users of cognitive tasks analysis (CTA) techniques. Despite
the fact that CTA is recognised as an important prerequisite for the HCI design
process, offering important benefits for quality of a final product, more than
often the designers will rather ignore the presentations of CTA techniques
provided by sophisticated research reports and papers. A communication effort
would be therefore necessary in order to identify and present relevant
information for practical applications in a more user-friendly manner, easier
to be comprehended, and transferred into practice, with clearer usability
bench-marks and more precise directions regarding its integration in subsequent
designing stages. It is suggested that a further challenge would be to test
various CTA techniques in real design contexts, and asses their effectiveness
and efficiency against specific tasks and situations, special design problems
and particular organizational structures.

%M J.RRIOC.2.2.105
%T Practical Approaches for Interdisciplinary Interaction Design
%A Guran, Adriana-Mihaela
%A Andrei, Daniela-Maria
%J Romanian Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
%D 2009
%V 2
%N 2
%P 105-118
%K human-computer interaction, usability, design methods
%* (c) Copyright 2009 SIGCHI Romania
%X In this paper the evolution of software design methods is discussed with
insights from the usability perspective. Usability is considered an essential
factor in the success or failure of an interactive system, determining its
acceptance or rejection. Although the software design methods are continuously
evolving, as the user are considered essential stakeholders in the design
process, there still can be notice shortages in the process of communicating
between the users and the developers of the software solution. The paper
presents the chronological evolution of design methods in parallel with the
evolution of the usability concept, emphasizing the support provided by the
design method for developing usable solutions. The article tries to correlate
the software design approaches with the solutions provided by Human-Computer
Interaction in order to improve the software design process. As the user
centered design focuses on an interdisciplinary approach, the paper presents
some practical methods of mixing the approaches from software engineering with
methods provided by social sciences.

%M J.RRIOC.2.2.119
%T Using Synchronization of Interaction Techniques for Implementing a
Hypervideo System
%A Dardala, Marian
%A Reveiu, Adriana
%A Furtuna, Titus Felix
%J Romanian Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
%D 2009
%V 2
%N 2
%P 119-130
%K hypertext, hypermedia, hypervideo, frame segment tree, video stream,
interaction synchronization
%* (c) Copyright 2009 SIGCHI Romania
%X Multimedia applications use special techniques to browse their own content
such as hypertext and hypermedia. These two concepts provide for the users
semantic alternative in accessing a multimedia document. A particular way of
achieving the concept of hypermedia is hypervideo. The main difficulty for
realize such a system is given the fact that video data has spatial feature as
well as a temporal dimension that means it lasts in time. To implement a
hypervideo system has to define many modules having specialized functions and
that are going to communicate each other. Thus, the article presents a data
structure adapted to manage the synchronization of user interaction events,
according to the timeline of the video sequence and the objects in view, which
received the event. Besides the particular data structure are also presented
usual operations for its maintaining as well as to explore it in the hypervideo
system context.

%M J.RRIOC.2.2.131
%T Ch.A.M.P. -- Modeling and Assessment System for Chat Evaluation
%A Dascalu, Mihai
%A Trausan-Matu, Stefan
%J Romanian Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
%D 2009
%V 2
%N 2
%P 131-146
%K Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, chat, evaluation, annotation,
social network, web semantic, Latent Semantic Analysis
%* (c) Copyright 2009 SIGCHI Romania
%X The paper presents a system developed to assess the skills and evolution of
participants in a collaborative environment. To obtain an overall approach, two
scenarios have been considered: quantitative approach based on social networks
and number of interchanged utterances between participants and the second,
qualitative, based on the semantic content analysis of each utterance. Thus,
metrics specific for social networks have been applied on the graph obtained
after evaluating each utterance under contextual relevance using methods for
text mining, natural language processing and latent semantic analysis. An
important component of the system is the visualization module which makes
possible the modeling and evolution of social networks. A specific view can be
generated in order to analyze the whole chat, a discussion thread, the
prospective growth/evolution of each participant, and can highlight the
contribution of each participant through the statistics generated by the
various metrics applied. Other modules have been developed to evaluate and
annotate each chat in order to obtain the "golden sample", to compare notes
with the results obtained from automatic analysis and to learn from the corpus
using WordNet and LSA.

%M J.RRIOC.2.2.147
%T Theories and models for technology acceptance
%A Balog, Alexandru
%A Cristescu, Irina
%J Romanian Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
%D 2009
%V 2
%N 2
%P 147-160
%K models for technology acceptance, TRA, TPB, TAM, TAM2, UTAUT
%* (c) Copyright 2009 SIGCHI Romania
%X The user acceptance of new technologies and systems is a topic of interest
for many researchers working in various areas. In this paper we present the
main theories employed in assessing the technology acceptance (theory of
reasoned action, theory of planned behavior) as well as the technology
acceptance models that have been developed on the basis of these theories. The
focus is on the model constructs and, implicitly, on the hypotheses that have
to be tested in order to validate the technology acceptance models in different
contexts of use.