45470054
A Type Driven Hardware Engine For Prolog Clause Retrieval Over A Large Knowledge Base
Whereas existing Prolog systerns are very effective at handling small knowledge bases, they are not very efficient at and often incapable of handling large sets of clauses. Large knowledge bases which may comprise millions of clauses and are shared by a number of users, may need to reside in secondary memory. In such cases exhaustive search is inordinately slow. Various approaches have been put forward for handling the problem, most of whichinvolve coupled systems (loosely or tightly coupled). A Prolog data/knowledge based system which provides an integrated solution to the problem is being developa An essential element in this system is the CLAuse Retrieval Engine, CLARE, which is a special purpose hardware engine designed to perform selective retrieval of data from disk in order to identify all potential clauses which will be required for full unification during a query. 'Me engine consists of two separate hardware components, which together form a two-stage filtering configuration. This paper concentrates on the second stage filter which is concerned with partial test unification.
16840924
Improving Transliteration with Precise Alignment of Phoneme Chunks and Using Contextual Features
Automatic transliteration of foreign names is basically regarded as a diminutive clone of the machine translation (MT) problem. It thus follows IBM's conventional MT models under the source-channel framework. Nonetheless, some parameters of this model dealing with zero-fertility words in the target sequences, can negatively impact transliteration effectiveness because of the inevitable inverted conditional probability estimation. Instead of source-channel, this paper presents a direct probabilistic transliteration model using contextual features of phonemes with a tailored alignment scheme for phoneme chunks. Experiments demonstrate superior performance over the source-channel for the task of English-Chinese transliteration.
690242
Improving Quality of Email Categorization with Tournament Methods
The tournament text classification methods are proposed in this article to perform the task of email categorization, in which the essence is to break down the multi-class categorization process into a set of binary classification tasks. We implement the methods of elimination and Round Robin tournament to classify emails within 15 folders. Substantial experiments are conducted to compare the effectiveness and robustness of the tournament methods against the n-way classification method and the voting method. The experimental results show that the tournament methods outperform the n-way method by 11.7% and the voting method by 4.1% regarding precision, and the Round Robin performs slightly better than the Elimination tournament on average.
37472111
Extending the superimposed codeword indexing scheme to handle incomplete information
In order to use Prolog as a basis for database applications, techniques are required for rapid retrieval of clauses from large data sets. Various researchers have contributed to the development of indexing strategies for this purpose. One such strategy is known as superimposed codeword+mask bits (SCW+MB). One extension of Prolog which is useful in the development of deductive databases is the ability to handle incomplete information. A form of incomplete information based on sets has been introduced and used in a deductive database system. In order to provide efficient access to clauses containing incomplete information, existing strategies need to be adapted accordingly. This paper presents an extension to the SCW+MB algorithm to cover incomplete information, and describes how this can be realized in hardware.
12876616
A Design of Temporal Event Extraction from Chinese Financial News
This paper presents an information system for Chinese Information Extraction from Financial news (CHIEF). The ultimate target of the system is to extract information concerning the occurrence time and places of the financial activities in the different companies from a local Hong Kong newspaper, namely (Tao Kung Pao). To facilitate event extraction purpose, two groups of templates were defined, i.e. the company related and company restructuring templates. They are used to select the desired information for each type of financial activities, such as (bankruptcy) or (merge). Each specific event is then represented using a frame-based knowledge structure. Two types of slots are embedded in each frame: they are the activity- and time-related slots. Based on these slots, multiple activities are interconnected according to their entity relations, temporal relations or the deduced relations. Effectively, CHIEF is a question-answering system designed for handling the company related queries, event based queries, temporal queries and complex queries in a finance domain.
45209699
A Workflow Model for Chinese Business Processes
This paper proposes a new workflow model (MAWM) targeted at Chinese business processing. The cultural dependent characteristics of Chinese business processes are identified and taken into account in the MAWM model. MAWM adopts a decentralized modeling style based on the conventional business perspective on labor division and cooperation. This idea is reflected in the concept of agent-workflow. Activity-based and communication-based modeling methods are integrated in the process model. They are used to model different types of business activities. In addition, the model is formalized using Process Algebra and a simplified algorithm is proposed for safety verification of workflow processes.
3091024
On integrating visualization techniques for effective software exploration
This paper describes the SHriMP visualization technique for seamlessly exploring software structure and browsing source code, with a focus on effectively assisting hybrid program comprehension strategies. The technique integrates both pan+zoom and fisheye-view visualization approaches for exploring a nested graph view of software structure. The fisheye-view approach handles multiple focal points, which are necessary when examining several subsystems and their mutual interconnections. Source code is presented by embedding code fragments within the nodes of the nested graph. Finer connections among these fragments are represented by a network that is navigated using a hypertext link-following metaphor. SHriMP combines this hypertext metaphor with animated panning and zooming motions over the nested graph to provide continuous orientation and contextual cues for the user. The SHriMP tool is being evaluated in several user studies. Observations of users performing program understanding tasks with the tool are discussed.
6918962
Head Model Acquisition from Silhouettes
This paper describes a practical system developed for generating 3D models of human heads from silhouettes alone. The input to the system is an image sequence acquired from circular motion. Both the camera motion and the 3D structure of the head are estimated using silhouettes which are tracked throughout the sequence. Special properties of the camera motion and their relationships with the intrinsic parameters of the camera are exploited to provide a simple parameterization of the fundamental matrix relating any pair of views in the sequence. Such a parameterization greatly reduces the dimension of the search space for the optimization problem. In contrast to previous methods, this work can cope with incomplete circular motion and more widely spaced images. Experiments on real image sequences are carried out, showing accurate recovery of 3D shapes.
12936831
On designing an experiment to evaluate a reverse engineering tool
The Rigi reverse engineering system is designed to analyze and summarize the structure of large software systems. Two contrasting approaches are available for visualizing software structures in the Rigi graph editor. The first approach displays the structures through multiple, individual windows. The second approach, simple hierarchical multi-perspective (SHriMP) views, employs fisheye views of nested graphs. The paper describes the design of an experiment to evaluate these alternative user interfaces. Various results from a preliminary pilot study to test the experiment design are reported.
991816
Wrapping coarse-grained objects using standard infrastructure technology
There are two basic approaches to migrating a particular subsystem: reengineering and wrapping. The author considers coarse-grained object wrapping. In wrapping, the original subsystem is essentially integrated into the new setting using infrastructure technologies. Legacy systems that have evolved over many years are notoriously difficult to decompose. Wrapping is most effective if the legacy system can be decomposed into a few large chunks where the number of communication paths among subsystems is minimized. The author discusses the use of infrastructure technology such as CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture)
16497195
Computable Economic Analysis
This paper discusses an economic equilibrium theory with computabil-ity constraints on both the magnitudes (prices, quantities, etc.) and the operations (to perceive, evaluate, choose, communicate, etc) that agents can use. Prices and quantities are computable numbers (Turing (1936)), and preference relations, utility functions, demand functions are computable (in the sense of Moschovakis (1964)). We present sharper versions of several traditional assertions on utility representation , existence of consumer demand functions, the fundamental welfare theorems, characterizations of market excess demands. We also give a \computable coun-terexample" to the existence of a competitive equilibrium. These results can be interpreted as possibility and impossibility results in computability-bounded ratio-nality, and in computational economics.