The ability to discriminate and distinguish among individual documents in the ever-increasing volume of information available through digital networks is becoming more and more difficult. With websites being added to the 100 million installed base by tens of thousands per month, information overload is inevitable (H. Berghel, 1997). There are two basic paradigms for dealing with this information overload: filtering (Information filtering, 1992) information before it reaches the end-user, and customizing the information after it arrives (Berleant & Berghel, 1994a, 1994b). Filtering remains primarily a server side activity since filtering at the client-side would necessitate unnecessary downloads. Information customization is a client-side activity designed to pick up where information filtering leaves off. In this article, we describe our vision of information customization and, along the way, chronicle the development of our proof-of-concept prototype, Cyberbrowser, for customizing information on the Web.

No abstract available.

We describe an improvement on Ukkonen's Enhanced Dynamic Programming (EHD) approximate string-matching algorithm for unit-penalty four-edit comparisons. The new algorithm has an asymptotic complexity similar to that of Ukkonen's but is significantly faster due to a decrease in the number of array cell calculations. A 42% speedup was achieved in an application involving name comparisons. Even greater improvements are possible when comparing longer and more dissimilar strings. Although the speed of the algorithm under consideration is comparable to other fast ASM algorithms, it has greater effectiveness in text-processing applications because it supports all four basic Damerau-type editing operations.

Recent interest in the automation of crossword compilation has lead to the development of a wide variety of different procedures in use on an even wider range of host systems. Due to the variegation between these procedures, comparisons between them in terms of efficiency is difficult. In this paper we provide a dataset and the output listing for a 5×5 puzzle which we suggest may be of use as a standardized method of comparison for such compilers in order to measure relative efficiency.

We describe a procedure, which we refer to as crossword compiler-compilation, which will create source code for a crossword compiler from the puzzle geometry alone. This procedure complements earlier results of ourselves and other which automate only the latter stages of compilation.

Because of the widespread interest in crossword puzzles, serious attention has been given in recent years toward the development of efficient algorithms for their generation and solution. In this paper we describe a new approach which is based upon an analysis of the problem expressed in first-order predicate logic. This analysis is then used to construct a crossword compiler in Prolog. The kernel of the program is then presented and described.