arXiv subjects

Boualem Benatallah

Publications and source records attributed to Boualem Benatallah.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Agentic Metaverse Services: A New As-a-Service Paradigm

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is reconstructing the digital virtual world, upgrading agents through enhancing their abilities in autonomous learning, multi-modal interaction, content generation, and collaborative decision-making. In particular, the shift from conversational chatbots to agentic AI, the most recent significant technical breakthrough of GenAI, has brought a new form of services, agentic services and Agent-as-a-Service (AaaS), in which the agent's abilities are encapsulated, such as perception, decision-making, execution, collaboration, and content generation, to provide the customized agent services to users. The metaverse is a virtual ecosystem for human life, work, creation, and entertainment, supported by the new generation of digital technologies. Through combining agentic services and the metaverse, an Agentic Metaverse Service, denoted as AMServ, is produced for metaverse business processing, as a new form of metaverse service. The AaaS in the metaverse environment, denoted as Meta-AaaS, as an approach to realize AMServ, has become a new paradigm of agentic services and service computing. This paper overviews the evolution and new features of agents and services empowered by GenAI, reveals the roles and principles of agentic services in the metaverse environment, presents the forms, characteristics, and principles of the AMServ and the Meta-AaaS, discusses the typical application examples of the AMServ and the Meta-AaaS, and finally points out the new tendencies and research directions of the AMServ and the Meta-AaaS. The AMServ and the Meta-AaaS will bring great opportunities to human society and services in the AI era, and promote the rapid development of emerging service industries in the future.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Agentic Service-Oriented Computing: A Manifesto for the Next Frontier of Service-Oriented Computing

The rapid emergence of LLM-powered autonomous and semi-autonomous agents is reshaping software systems from static, request-response components into goal-directed, adaptive, and tool-using computational actors. As these agents move from isolated cognitive prototypes into complex distributed workflows, they confront challenges that the Service-Oriented Computing community has studied for more than two decades: composition, interoperability, quality of service, lifecycle management, governance, security, and trust. Yet much of today's agentic AI ecosystem is developing these foundations ad hoc, without the engineering rigour required for dependable enterprise and societal deployment. This paper introduces Agentic Service-Oriented Computing (ASOC) as a new research and practice area concerned with engineering agents as services, orchestrating services through autonomous and semi-autonomous agents, and governing ecosystems of agents and services under constraints of trust, cybersecurity, compliance, performance, and accountability. We articulate six foundational principles of ASOC (harness-ability, composability, lifecycle engineering, trustworthiness by design, goal-driven orchestration, and observability/accountability) and organise a five-dimensional research agenda spanning: (i) agentic services foundations and lifecycle engineering; (ii) composition, orchestration, and interoperability; (iii) governance, observability, and accountability; (iv) security, trust, and risk management; and (v) evaluation, certification, and Agentic QoS. We argue that the Services Computing community is especially well positioned to provide the conceptual and engineering spine for this emerging field, transforming agentic AI from fragmented demonstrations into dependable, service-based systems worthy of human and organisational trust.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

BTC-SAM: Leveraging LLMs for Generation of Bias Test Cases for Sentiment Analysis Models

Sentiment Analysis (SA) models harbor inherent social biases that can be harmful in real-world applications. These biases are identified by examining the output of SA models for sentences that only vary in the identity groups of the subjects. Constructing natural, linguistically rich, relevant, and diverse sets of sentences that provide sufficient coverage over the domain is expensive, especially when addressing a wide range of biases: it requires domain experts and/or crowd-sourcing. In this paper, we present a novel bias testing framework, BTC-SAM, which generates high-quality test cases for bias testing in SA models with minimal specification using Large Language Models (LLMs) for the controllable generation of test sentences. Our experiments show that relying on LLMs can provide high linguistic variation and diversity in the test sentences, thereby offering better test coverage compared to base prompting methods even for previously unseen biases.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

A Blockchain-Based Quality Control Model for Online Collaboration Systems

Collaborative content generation (CCG) enables collective creation of artifacts like scientific articles. Quality is a paramount concern in CCG, and a multitude of methods have been proposed to evaluate the quality of artifacts. Nevertheless, the majority of these methods are reliant on centralized architectures, which present challenges pertaining to security, privacy, and availability. Blockchain technology proffers a potential resolution to these challenges, by furnishing a decentralized and immutable ledger of quality scores. In this manuscript, we introduce a blockchain-based quality control model for CCG that uses a semi-iterative algorithm to interdependently compute quality scores of artifacts and reputation of nodes. Our model addresses critical challenges in academic informetrics, such as citation manipulation, transparency in collaborative scholarship, and decentralized trust in metric computation. Our model also exhibits sensitivity to processing latency, rendering it more agile in the presence of delays. Our model's quality scores, evaluated against PageRank and HITS baselines, show comparable performance, with additional assessments of throughput, latency, and robustness against malicious nodes confirming its reliability. A theoretical comparison with recent studies validates its feasibility for real world informetric application.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2023

ProcessGPT: Transforming Business Process Management with Generative Artificial Intelligence

Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) is a state-of-the-art machine learning model capable of generating human-like text through natural language processing (NLP). GPT is trained on massive amounts of text data and uses deep learning techniques to learn patterns and relationships within the data, enabling it to generate coherent and contextually appropriate text. This position paper proposes using GPT technology to generate new process models when/if needed. We introduce ProcessGPT as a new technology that has the potential to enhance decision-making in data-centric and knowledge-intensive processes. ProcessGPT can be designed by training a generative pre-trained transformer model on a large dataset of business process data. This model can then be fine-tuned on specific process domains and trained to generate process flows and make decisions based on context and user input. The model can be integrated with NLP and machine learning techniques to provide insights and recommendations for process improvement. Furthermore, the model can automate repetitive tasks and improve process efficiency while enabling knowledge workers to communicate analysis findings, supporting evidence, and make decisions. ProcessGPT can revolutionize business process management (BPM) by offering a powerful tool for process augmentation, automation and improvement. Finally, we demonstrate how ProcessGPT can be a powerful tool for augmenting data engineers in maintaining data ecosystem processes within large bank organizations. Our scenario highlights the potential of this approach to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance the quality of business operations through the automation of data-centric and knowledge-intensive processes. These results underscore the promise of ProcessGPT as a transformative technology for organizations looking to improve their process workflows.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2021

Crowdsourcing Diverse Paraphrases for Training Task-oriented Bots

A prominent approach to build datasets for training task-oriented bots is crowd-based paraphrasing. Current approaches, however, assume the crowd would naturally provide diverse paraphrases or focus only on lexical diversity. In this WiP we addressed an overlooked aspect of diversity, introducing an approach for guiding the crowdsourcing process towards paraphrases that are syntactically diverse.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

On the state of reporting in crowdsourcing experiments and a checklist to aid current practices

Crowdsourcing is being increasingly adopted as a platform to run studies with human subjects. Running a crowdsourcing experiment involves several choices and strategies to successfully port an experimental design into an otherwise uncontrolled research environment, e.g., sampling crowd workers, mapping experimental conditions to micro-tasks, or ensure quality contributions. While several guidelines inform researchers in these choices, guidance of how and what to report from crowdsourcing experiments has been largely overlooked. If under-reported, implementation choices constitute variability sources that can affect the experiment's reproducibility and prevent a fair assessment of research outcomes. In this paper, we examine the current state of reporting of crowdsourcing experiments and offer guidance to address associated reporting issues. We start by identifying sensible implementation choices, relying on existing literature and interviews with experts, to then extensively analyze the reporting of 171 crowdsourcing experiments. Informed by this process, we propose a checklist for reporting crowdsourcing experiments.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

A Query Language for Summarizing and Analyzing Business Process Data

In modern enterprises, Business Processes (BPs) are realized over a mix of workflows, IT systems, Web services and direct collaborations of people. Accordingly, process data (i.e., BP execution data such as logs containing events, interaction messages and other process artifacts) is scattered across several systems and data sources, and increasingly show all typical properties of the Big Data. Understanding the execution of process data is challenging as key business insights remain hidden in the interactions among process entities: most objects are interconnected, forming complex, heterogeneous but often semi-structured networks. In the context of business processes, we consider the Big Data problem as a massive number of interconnected data islands from personal, shared and business data. We present a framework to model process data as graphs, i.e., Process Graph, and present abstractions to summarize the process graph and to discover concept hierarchies for entities based on both data objects and their interactions in process graphs. We present a language, namely BP-SPARQL, for the explorative querying and understanding of process graphs from various user perspectives. We have implemented a scalable architecture for querying, exploration and analysis of process graphs. We report on experiments performed on both synthetic and real-world datasets that show the viability and efficiency of the approach.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2021

An Internet of Things Service Roadmap

We propose a roadmap for leveraging the tremendous opportunities the Internet of Things (IoT) has to offer. We argue that the combination of the recent advances in service computing and IoT technology provide a unique framework for innovations not yet envisaged, as well as the emergence of yet-to-be-developed IoT applications. This roadmap covers: emerging novel IoT services, articulation of major research directions, and suggestion of a roadmap to guide the IoT and service computing community to address key IoT service challenges.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

On the impact of predicate complexity in crowdsourced classification tasks

This paper explores and offers guidance on a specific and relevant problem in task design for crowdsourcing: how to formulate a complex question used to classify a set of items. In micro-task markets, classification is still among the most popular tasks. We situate our work in the context of information retrieval and multi-predicate classification, i.e., classifying a set of items based on a set of conditions. Our experiments cover a wide range of tasks and domains, and also consider crowd workers alone and in tandem with machine learning classifiers. We provide empirical evidence into how the resulting classification performance is affected by different predicate formulation strategies, emphasizing the importance of predicate formulation as a task design dimension in crowdsourcing.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Challenges and strategies for running controlled crowdsourcing experiments

This paper reports on the challenges and lessons we learned while running controlled experiments in crowdsourcing platforms. Crowdsourcing is becoming an attractive technique to engage a diverse and large pool of subjects in experimental research, allowing researchers to achieve levels of scale and completion times that would otherwise not be feasible in lab settings. However, the scale and flexibility comes at the cost of multiple and sometimes unknown sources of bias and confounding factors that arise from technical limitations of crowdsourcing platforms and from the challenges of running controlled experiments in the "wild". In this paper, we take our experience in running systematic evaluations of task design as a motivating example to explore, describe, and quantify the potential impact of running uncontrolled crowdsourcing experiments and derive possible coping strategies. Among the challenges identified, we can mention sampling bias, controlling the assignment of subjects to experimental conditions, learning effects, and reliability of crowdsourcing results. According to our empirical studies, the impact of potential biases and confounding factors can amount to a 38\% loss in the utility of the data collected in uncontrolled settings; and it can significantly change the outcome of experiments. These issues ultimately inspired us to implement CrowdHub, a system that sits on top of major crowdsourcing platforms and allows researchers and practitioners to run controlled crowdsourcing projects.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Automatic Generation of Chatbots for Conversational Web Browsing

In this paper, we describe the foundations for generating a chatbot out of a website equipped with simple, bot-specific HTML annotations. The approach is part of what we call conversational web browsing, i.e., a dialog-based, natural language interaction with websites. The goal is to enable users to use content and functionality accessible through rendered UIs by "talking to websites" instead of by operating the graphical UI using keyboard and mouse. The chatbot mediates between the user and the website, operates its graphical UI on behalf of the user, and informs the user about the state of interaction. We describe the conceptual vocabulary and annotation format, the supporting conversational middleware and techniques, and the implementation of a demo able to deliver conversational web browsing experiences through Amazon Alexa.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

Chatbot integration in few patterns

Chatbots are software agents that are able to interact with humans in natural language. Their intuitive interaction paradigm is expected to significantly reshape the software landscape of tomorrow, while already today chatbots are invading a multitude of scenarios and contexts. This article takes a developer's perspective, identifies a set of architectural patterns that capture different chatbot integration scenarios, and reviews state-of-the-art development aids.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2019

CrowdHub: Extending crowdsourcing platforms for the controlled evaluation of tasks designs

We present CrowdHub, a tool for running systematic evaluations of task designs on top of crowdsourcing platforms. The goal is to support the evaluation process, avoiding potential experimental biases that, according to our empirical studies, can amount to 38% loss in the utility of the collected dataset in uncontrolled settings. Using CrowdHub, researchers can map their experimental design and automate the complex process of managing task execution over time while controlling for returning workers and crowd demographics, thus reducing bias, increasing utility of collected data, and making more efficient use of a limited pool of subjects.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2019

Understanding the Impact of Text Highlighting in Crowdsourcing Tasks

Text classification is one of the most common goals of machine learning (ML) projects, and also one of the most frequent human intelligence tasks in crowdsourcing platforms. ML has mixed success in such tasks depending on the nature of the problem, while crowd-based classification has proven to be surprisingly effective, but can be expensive. Recently, hybrid text classification algorithms, combining human computation and machine learning, have been proposed to improve accuracy and reduce costs. One way to do so is to have ML highlight or emphasize portions of text that it believes to be more relevant to the decision. Humans can then rely only on this text or read the entire text if the highlighted information is insufficient. In this paper, we investigate if and under what conditions highlighting selected parts of the text can (or cannot) improve classification cost and/or accuracy, and in general how it affects the process and outcome of the human intelligence tasks. We study this through a series of crowdsourcing experiments running over different datasets and with task designs imposing different cognitive demands. Our findings suggest that highlighting is effective in reducing classification effort but does not improve accuracy - and in fact, low-quality highlighting can decrease it.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2019

DARec: Deep Domain Adaptation for Cross-Domain Recommendation via Transferring Rating Patterns

Cross-domain recommendation has long been one of the major topics in recommender systems. Recently, various deep models have been proposed to transfer the learned knowledge across domains, but most of them focus on extracting abstract transferable features from auxilliary contents, e.g., images and review texts, and the patterns in the rating matrix itself is rarely touched. In this work, inspired by the concept of domain adaptation, we proposed a deep domain adaptation model (DARec) that is capable of extracting and transferring patterns from rating matrices {\em only} without relying on any auxillary information. We empirically demonstrate on public datasets that our method achieves the best performance among several state-of-the-art alternative cross-domain recommendation models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Combining Crowd and Machines for Multi-predicate Item Screening

This paper discusses how crowd and machine classifiers can be efficiently combined to screen items that satisfy a set of predicates. We show that this is a recurring problem in many domains, present machine-human (hybrid) algorithms that screen items efficiently and estimate the gain over human-only or machine-only screening in terms of performance and cost. We further show how, given a new classification problem and a set of classifiers of unknown accuracy for the problem at hand, we can identify how to manage the cost-accuracy trade off by progressively determining if we should spend budget to obtain test data (to assess the accuracy of the given classifiers), or to train an ensemble of classifiers, or whether we should leverage the existing machine classifiers with the crowd, and in this case how to efficiently combine them based on their estimated characteristics to obtain the classification. We demonstrate that the techniques we propose obtain significant cost/accuracy improvements with respect to the leading classification algorithms.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2018

Software Expert Discovery via Knowledge Domain Embeddings in a Collaborative Network

Community Question Answering (CQA) websites can be claimed as the most major venues for knowledge sharing, and the most effective way of exchanging knowledge at present. Considering that massive amount of users are participating online and generating huge amount data, management of knowledge here systematically can be challenging. Expert recommendation is one of the major challenges, as it highlights users in CQA with potential expertise, which may help match unresolved questions with existing high quality answers while at the same time may help external services like human resource systems as another reference to evaluate their candidates. In this paper, we in this work we propose to exploring experts in CQA websites. We take advantage of recent distributed word representation technology to help summarize text chunks, and in a semantic view exploiting the relationships between natural language phrases to extract latent knowledge domains. By domains, the users' expertise is determined on their historical performance, and a rank can be compute to given recommendation accordingly. In particular, Stack Overflow is chosen as our dataset to test and evaluate our work, where inclusive experiment shows our competence.

cs.IR↗