14844222
Summarization Design for Interactive Cross-Language Question Answering
This paper describes an experimental investigation of interactive techniques for cross-language information access. The task was to answer factual questions from a large collection of documents written in a language in which the user has little proficiency. An interactive cross-language retrieval system that included optional user-assisted query translation, display of translated summaries for individual document ranked in order of decreasing degree of match to the user's query, and optional full-text examination of individual documents was provided. Two alternative types of extractive summaries were tried using a systematically varied presentation order, one drawn from a single segment of the translated document and the other drawn from three (usually) shorter segments of the translated document. On average, users were able to correctly answer just 62% of the sixteen assigned questions in an average of 176 seconds per question. Little difference was found between the two summary types for this task in an experiment using eight human subjects. Time on task and the number of query iterations were found to exhibit a positive correlation with question difficulty.
414995
Combining bidirectional translation and synonymy for cross-language information retrieval
This paper introduces a general framework for the use of translation probabilities in cross-language information retrieval based on the notion that information retrieval fundamentally requires matching what the searcher means with what the author of a document meant. That perspective yields a computational formulation that provides a natural way of combining what have been known as query and document translation. Two well-recognized techniques are shown to be a special case of this model under restrictive assumptions. Cross-language search results are reported that are statistically indistinguishable from strong monolingual baselines for both French and Chinese documents.
34826531
User-assisted query translation for interactive CLIR
We view interactive Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) as an iterative process in which the searcher and the retrieval system collaborate to find documents that satisfy the searcher’s needs, regardless of the language in which those documents are written. Our motivation is that humans and machines can bring complementary strengths to this process. Machines are excellent at repetitive tasks that are well specified; humans bring creativity and exceptional pattern recognition capabilities. Properly coupling these capabilities can result in a synergy that greatly exceeds the ability of either human or machine alone. Designers of CLIR systems can select from a variety of fully automatic techniques to overcome problems with unknown terms and translation ambiguity, but automatic processing of this sort risks reducing the searcher’s understanding of system operation. This, in turn, tends to work against the synergy that we seek to accomplish. We are therefore exploring more transparent approaches to support interactive CLIR.
12859800
Building an information retrieval test collection for spontaneous conversational speech
Test collections model use cases in ways that facilitate evaluation of information retrieval systems. This paper describes the use of search-guided relevance assessment to create a test collection for retrieval of spontaneous conversational speech. Approximately 10,000 thematically coherent segments were manually identified in 625 hours of oral history interviews with 246 individuals. Automatic speech recognition results, manually prepared summaries, controlled vocabulary indexing, and name authority control are available for every segment. Those features were leveraged by a team of four relevance assessors to identify topically relevant segments for 28 topics developed from actual user requests. Search-guided assessment yielded sufficient inter-annotator agreement to support formative evaluation during system development. Baseline results for ranked retrieval are presented to illustrate use of the collection.
2271365
Minimal period retiming under process variations
With aggressive scaling down of feature sizes in VLSI fabrication, process variations have become a critical issue in designs. With process variations, timing optimization should consider the randomness introduced in delays. This paper considers how to retime a circuit under process variations. A statistical retiming problem is defined on the concept of a disutility function. Based on a new minimal period retiming algorithm, two algorithms are presented for the statistical retiming problem. Both theoretical and experimental results are given.
94229
Translating unknown queries with web corpora for cross-language information retrieval
It is crucial for cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) systems to deal with the translation of unknown queries due to that real queries might be short. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of exploiting the Web as the corpus source to translate unknown queries for CLIR. We propose an online translation approach to determine effective translations for unknown query terms via mining of bilingual search-result pages obtained from Web search engines. This approach can alleviate the problem of the lack of large bilingual corpora, translate many unknown query terms, provide flexible query specifications, and extract semantically-close translations to benefit CLIR tasks -- especially for cross-language Web search.
40574141
Finding similar consensus between trees: an algorithm and a distance hierarchy
Abstract The problem of finding this similar consensus (also known as the largest approximately common substructures) of two trees arises in many pattern recognition applications. This paper presents a dynamic programming algorithm to solve the problem based on the distance measure originated from Tanaka and Tanaka. The algorithm runs as fast as the best-known algorithm for comparing two trees using Tanaka's distance measure when the allowed distance between the common substructures is a constant independent of the input trees. In addition, we establish a hierarchy among Tanaka's distance measure and three other edit-based distance measures published in the literature.
6516220
Resource-Constrained Workflow Modeling
Business processes are often constrained by resource availability. This is particularly true in an emergency response system where large quantity of resources, including emergency responders, ambulances, fire trucks, medications, food, clothing, etc., are required. In our previous work, we introduced WIFA model to meet the needs of incident command systems workflow modeling and analysis. In this paper, we extend WIFA to take resources into account when modeling and enacting workflows. A formal resource-constrained workflow model is defined and the state transitions rules are established to support workflow analysis. An example is given to illustrate the use of the model.
14843520
Deriving knowledge from figures for digital libraries
Figures in digital documents contain important information. Current digital libraries do not summarize and index information available within figures for document retrieval. We present our system on automatic categorization of figures and extraction of data from 2-D plots. A machine-learning based method is used to categorize figures into a set of predefined types based on image features. An automated algorithm is designed to extract data values from solid line curves in 2-D plots. The semantic type of figures and extracted data values from 2-D plots can be integrated with textual information within documents to provide more effective document retrieval services for digital library users. Experimental evaluation has demonstrated that our system can produce results suitable for real-world use.