8448956
From Single to Multi-document Summarization
NeATS is a multi-document summarization system that attempts to extract relevant or interesting portions from a set of documents about some topic and present them in coherent order. NeATS is among the best performers in the large scale summarization evaluation DUC 2001.
43748451
The Use of External Knowledge of Factoid QA
This paper describes recent development in the Webclopedia QA (Question Answering) system, focusing on the use of knowledge resources such as WordNet and a QA typology to improve the basic operations of candidate answer retrieval, ranking, and answer matching.
172983
The Effectiveness of Dictionary and Web-Based Answer Reranking
We describe an in-depth study of using a dictionary (WordNet) and web search engines (Altavista, MSN, and Google) to boost the performance of an automated question answering system, Webclopedia, in answering definition questions. The results indicate applying dictionary and web-based answer reranking together increase the performance of Webclopedia on a set of 102 TREC-10 definition questions by 25% in mean reciprocal rank score and 14% in finding answers in the top 5.
322920
Introduction to the special issue on statistical language modeling
The goal of statistical language modeling (SLM) is to estimate the likelihood (or probability) of a word string. SLM is fundamental to many natural language applications like automatic speech recognition (ASR) [Jelinek 1990], statistical machine translation (SMT) [Brown et al. 1993], and Asian language text input [Gao et al. 2002a]. The research on SLM basically involves two main tasks: modeling and estimation. Modeling is to determine the structure of a statistical model; estimation is to determine the free parameters of the model using training data. SLM usually uses a parametric model with Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) and various smoothing methods to tackle data sparseness problems. Different statistical models have been proposed in the past, but n-gram models (in particular, bigram and trigram models) still dominate SLM research. SLM has recently been demonstrated as an effective framework for a few new applications, such as question answering [Berger 2001], text summarization, paraphrasing [Barzilay and Lee 2004], and information retrieval [Croft and Lafferty 2003]. However, these new applications come with new challenges. For example, in the SLM approaches to information retrieval, a language model has to be trained on a single document, an extremely small training set; while in ASR, a language model is typically trained on a million word corpus. The recent development of related techniques stimulates new modeling and estimation methods that are beyond the scope of the traditional approaches. Two representative examples of such techniques are statistical parsing and discriminative training. With the ever-increasing popularity of SLM, we think that it is the right time to assemble a special issue reflecting recent advances in both its theory and applications. It __________________________________________________________________________________________
2010014
Training a selection function for extraction
In this paper we compare performance of several heuristics in generating informative generic/query-oriented extracts for newspaper articles in order to learn how topic prominence affects the performance of each heuristic. We study how different query types can affect the performance of each heuristic and discuss the possibility of using machine learning algorithms to automatically learn good combination functions to combine several heuristics. We also briefly describe the design, implementation, and performance of a multilingual text summarization system SUMMARIST.
40804846
Question Answering in Webclopedia
SHAPE ADJECTIVE COLOR DISEASE TEXT NARRATIVE* GENERAL-INFO DEFINITION USE EXPRESSION-ORIGIN HISTORY WHY-FAMOUS BIO ANTECEDENT INFLUENCE CONSEQUENT CAUSE-EFFECT METHOD-MEANS CIRCUMSTANCE-MEANS REASON EVALUATION PRO-CON CONTRAST RATING COUNSEL-ADVICE To create the QA Typology, we analyzed 17,384 questions and their answers (downloaded from answers.com); see (Gerber, 2001). The Typology contains 94 nodes, of which 47 are leaf nodes; a section of it appears in Figure 2. Each Typology node has been annotated with examples and typical patterns of expression of both Question and Answer, as indicated in Figure 3 for Proper-Person. Question examples Question templates Who was Johnny Mathis' high school track coach? who be 's Who was Lincoln's Secretary of State? Who was President of Turkmenistan in 1994? who be of Who is the composer of Eugene Onegin? Who is the CEO of General Electric? Actual answers Answer templates Lou Vasquez, track coach of...and Johnny Mathis , of Signed Saparmurad Turkmenbachy [Niyazov], of president of Turkmenistan ...Turkmenistan’s President Saparmurad Niyazov... ’s ...in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin... 's Mr. Jack Welch, GE chairman... ... ...Chairman John Welch said ...GE's | of related role-verb Figure 3. Portion of QA Typology node annotations for Proper-Person.
2262504
Video personalization and summarization system
A video personalization and summarization system is designed and implemented to dynamically generate a personalized video summary. The personalization system adopts the three-tier server-middleware-client architecture in order to select, adapt, and deliver rich media content to the user. The server stores the content sources along with their corresponding MPEG-7 metadata descriptions. These semantic metadata are provided through the use of our VideoAnnEx MPEG-7 video annotation tool. When the user initiates a request for content, the client communicates the user request and usage environment descriptions to the middleware. The middleware is powered by the personalization engine and the content adaptation engine. Our personalization engine includes the VideoSue summarization on usage environment engine that selects the optimal set of desired contents according to user preferences. Afterwards, the adaptation engine performs the required transformations and compositions of the selected contents for the specific usage environment using our VideoEd editing and composition tool. Finally, a personalization and summarization system is demonstrated on the IBM Websphere Portal Server for PCs and pervasive devices.
7870525
Adaptive History-Based Memory Schedulers
As memory performance becomes increasingly important to overall system performance, the need to carefully schedule memory operations also increases. This paper presents a new approach to memory scheduling that considers the history of recently scheduled operations. This history-based approach provides two conceptual advantages: (1) it allows the scheduler to better reason about the delays associated with its scheduling decisions, and (2) it allows the scheduler to select operations so that they match the program's mixture of Reads and Writes, thereby avoiding certain bottlenecks within the memory controller. We evaluate our solution using a cycle-accurate simulator for the recently announced IBM Power5. When compared with an in-order scheduler, our solution achieves IPC improvements of 10.9% on the NAS benchmarks and 63% on the data-intensive Stream benchmarks. Using microbenchmarks, we illustrate the growing importance of memory scheduling in the context of CMP's, hardware controlled prefetching, and faster CPU speeds.
38422944
Neural-Network-Based Fuzzy Logic Control and Decision System
A general neural-network (connectionist) model for fuzzy logic control and decision systems is proposed. This connectionist model, in the form of feedforward multilayer net, combines the idea of fuzzy logic controller and neural-network structure and learning abilities into an integrated neural-network-based fuzzy logic control and decision system. A fuzzy logic control decision network is constructed automatically by learning the training examples itself. By combining both unsupervised (self-organized) and supervised learning schemes, the learning speed converges much faster than the original backpropagation learning algorithm. The connectionist structure avoids the rule-matching time of the inference engine in the traditional fuzzy logic system. Two examples are presented to illustrate the performance and applicability of the proposed model. >
16836522
Real-time gang schedulings with workload models for parallel computers
Gang scheduling has been shown to be an effective job scheduling policy for parallel computers that combines elements of space sharing and time sharing. We propose new policies to enable gang scheduling to adapt to environments with real-time constraints. Our work, to our best knowledge, is the first work to attempt to address the real-time aspects of gang scheduling. Our system guided by a metric, called "task utilization workload", can schedule both real-time and non-real-time tasks at the same time. We report simulation results with a family of scheduling algorithms based on our proposed metric. Our scheme is designed to be a practical scheme to be used for large scale industrial and commercial parallel systems. Preliminary simulation results also show that our proposed policy is an effective scheme to perform real-time scheduling, while scheduling non-real-time jobs with fairness and good throughput.
27000155
Towards a Machine-Independent Solution of Sparse Cholesky Factorization