8944311
Recent shortcuts: using recent interactions to support shared activities
We present an empirical study of teams that revealed the amount of extraneous individual work needed to enable collaboration: finding references to other people, finding files to attach to email, managing incoming email attachments, managing the variety of files used in shared activities, and tracking what work is owed to others. Much of this work involves finding recently accessed objects that are needed again in the user's current task focus. These observations led to the design of Recent Shortcuts, a tool to help support coordination by making recently used objects easily accessible. Recent Shortcuts enables quick access to people (including groups of people), received attachments, files, and file folders that the user interacted with recently for re-use in the user's current context. Recent Shortcuts makes it easy to use these objects across applications with no additional user input and minimal changes to the user's applications or work practice. Early user experiences with a working prototype led to an extension that integrates recently accessed objects across multiple devices.
6272838
A visual language for sketching large and complex interactive designs
Informal, sketch-based design tools closely match the work practices of user interface designers. Current tools, however, are limited in the size and complexity of interaction that can be specified. We have created an advanced sketch-based visual language that allows for easy prototyping of large, complex interactive designs. In its current embodiment in the denim web design tool, the visual language allows designers to sketch reusable components for recurring page elements, such as navigation bars, as well as conditionals to illustrate and test transitions that depend on a user's input. Designers can also specify sites that accept richer user input than simple clicking. Our informal evaluation shows that these features allow designers with little programming experience to quickly create prototypes of large, complex web sites while still working inside an informal, sketch-based environment
22235434
The role of context in question answering systems
Despite recent advances in natural language question an-swering technology, the problem of designing effective user interfaces has been largely unexplored. We conducted a user study to investigate the problem and discovered that overall, users prefer a paragraph-sized chunk of text over just an exact phrase as the answer to their questions. Fur-thermore, users generally prefer answers embedded in con-text, regardless of the perceived reliability of the source documents. When users research a topic, increasing the amount of text returned to users significantly decreases the number of queries that they pose to the system, suggesting that users utilize supporting text to answer related ques-tions. We believe that these results can serve to guide future developments in question answering user interfaces.
9391992
Web question answering: is more always better?
This paper describes a question answering system that is designed to capitalize on the tremendous amount of data that is now available online. Most question answering systems use a wide variety of linguistic resources. We focus instead on the redundancy available in large corpora as an important resource. We use this redundancy to simplify the query rewrites that we need to use, and to support answer mining from returned snippets. Our system performs quite well given the simplicity of the techniques being utilized. Experimental results show that question answering accuracy can be greatly improved by analyzing more and more matching passages. Simple passage ranking and n-gram extraction techniques work well in our system making it efficient to use with many backend retrieval engines.
47470200
Multipurpose virtual-reality-based motion simulator
Public security has become an important issue everywhere. In particular, the safe manipulation and control of various machines and vehicles has gained special attention such that the authorities keep emphasizing the strict training and censoring of human operators. Currently, such training and censoring processes usually rely on the actual machines, equipment, or vehicles in the real sites. This not only has high demands in space, time and cost, but also causes another phase of public security problem. In connection with this, the world-wide trend is to tackle the above dilemma by using virtual reality (VR). However, the current VR research or products are more mature in the software display part of VR. How to combine a 3D VR display with a motion platform to achieve the aforementioned training and censoring purposes is an important research issue. The paper focuses on this research issue, and the goal is to develop a multipurpose virtual-reality-based motion simulation system to meet the requirements of public security in training and censoring of human operators.
56722618
Building a reusable test collection for question answering
In contrast to traditional information retrieval systems, which return ranked lists of documents that users must manually browse through, a question answering system attempts to directly answer natural language questions posed by the user. Although such systems possess language-processing capabilities, they still rely on traditional document retrieval techniques to generate an initial candidate set of documents. In this article, the authors argue that document retrieval for question answering represents a task different from retrieving documents in response to more general retrospective information needs. Thus, to guide future system development, specialized question answering test collections must be constructed. They show that the current evaluation resources have major shortcomings; to remedy the situation, they have manually created a small, reusable question answering test collection for research purposes. In this article they describe their methodology for building this test collection and discuss issues they encountered regarding the notion of “answer correctness.” © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
132630
Answering Definition Questions Using Multiple Knowledge Sources
Definition questions represent a largely unexplored area of question answering—they are different from factoid questions in that the goal is to return as many relevant “nuggets” of information about a concept as possible. We describe a multi-strategy approach to answering such questions using a database constructed offline with surface patterns, a Webbased dictionary, and an off-the-shelf document retriever. Results are presented from component-level evaluation and from an endto-end evaluation of our implemented system at the TREC 2003 Question Answering Track.