The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a severe blow to human capital. This report presents new evidence and analysis to provide a comprehensive diagnostic of the effects of the pandemic on human capital outcomes and identify promising policy responses for governments faced with the task of rebuilding human capital in the wake of the pandemic.

Have teachers mastered the subject matter they are teaching? Can doctors accurately diagnose and treat critical health conditions? Are schools and health facilities sufficiently stocked with needed equipment and supplies? Are they sufficiently supported and staffed to optimize learning and health care outcomes? For the past decade, the World Bank's Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) surveys have collected nationally representative data in countries across Sub-Saharan Africa to answer these ...

Have teachers mastered the subject matter they are teaching? Can doctors accurately diagnose and treat critical health conditions? Are schools and health facilities sufficiently stocked with needed equipment and supplies? Are they sufficiently supported and staffed to optimize learning and health care outcomes? For the past decade, the World Bank’s Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) surveys have collected nationally representative data in countries across Sub-Saharan Africa to answer these ...

In plain, uncomplicated language, and using detailed examples to explain the key concepts, models, and algorithms in vertical search ranking, Relevance Ranking for Vertical Search Engines teaches readers how to manipulate ranking algorithms to achieve better results in real-world applications. This reference book for professionals covers concepts and theories from the fundamental to the advanced, such as relevance, query intention, location-based relevance ranking, and cross-property ranki...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 28th China Conference on Information Retrieval, CCIR 2022, held in Chongqing, China, in September 2022. Information retrieval aims to meet the demand of human on the Internet to obtain information quickly and accurately.The 8 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers provide a wide range of research results in information retrieval area.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th Information Retrieval Societies Conference, AIRS 2016, held in Beijing, China, in November/December 2016.The 21 full papers presented together with 11 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions. The final programme of AIRS 2015 is divided in the following tracks: IR models and theories; machine learning and data mining for IR; IR applications and user modeling; personalization and recommendation; ...

This book provides an up-to-date account of the many processes shaping and transforming rural space in various parts of the world. The various case studies focus on the multi-functionality of the rural world and the driving forces behind it. The book demonstrates that rural areas are no longer simply characterized by an agricultural economy, and instead accommodate multiple complementary activities. It also touches upon two major changes that have taken place. The first is the process of r...

Class-tested and coherent, this textbook teaches classical and web information retrieval, including web search and the related areas of text classification and text clustering from basic concepts. It gives an up-to-date treatment of all aspects of the design and implementation of systems for gathering, indexing, and searching documents; methods for evaluating systems; and an introduction to the use of machine learning methods on text collections. All the important ideas are explained using...

In this age of information overload, people use a variety of strategies to make choices about what to buy, how to spend their leisure time, and even whom to date. Recommender systems automate some of these strategies with the goal of providing affordable, personal, and high-quality recommendations. This book offers an overview of approaches to developing state-of-the-art recommender systems. The authors present current algorithmic approaches for generating personalized buying proposals, su...

The issue of data quality is as old as data itself. However, the proliferation of diverse, large-scale and often publically available data on the Web has increased the risk of poor data quality and misleading data interpretations. On the other hand, data is now exposed at a much more strategic level e.g. through business intelligence systems, increasing manifold the stakes involved for individuals, corporations as well as government agencies. There, the lack of knowledge about data accurac...

DASFAA is an annual international database conference, located in the Asia-Pacific region,which show cases state-of-the-art R & D activities in databases-terms and their applications. It provides a forum for technical presentations and discussions among database researchers, developers and users from academia, business and industry. DASFAA 2015 the 20th in the series, was held during April 20-23, 2015 in Hanoi, Vietnam. In this year, we carefully selected two workshops, each focusing on sp...

This successful textbook on predictive text mining offers a unified perspective on a rapidly evolving field, integrating topics spanning the varied disciplines of data science, machine learning, databases, and computational linguistics. Serving also as a practical guide, this unique book provides helpful advice illustrated by examples and case studies. This highly anticipated second edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded with new material on deep learning, graph models, mining so...