13917172
iCLEF 2003 at Maryland: Translation Selection and Document Selection
Maryland performed two sets of experiments for the 2003 Cross-Language Evaluation Forum’s interactive track, one focused on interactive selection of appropriate translations for query terms, the second focused on interactive selection of relevant documents. Translation selection was supported using possible synonyms discovered through back translation and two techniques for generating KeyWord In Context (KWIC) examples of usage. The results indicate that searchers typically achieved a similar search effectiveness using fewer query iterations when interactive translation selection was available. For document selection, a complete extract of the first 40 words of each news story was compared to a compressed extract generated using an automated parse-and-trim approach that approximates one way in which people can produce headlines. The results indicate that compressed “headlines” result in faster assessment, but with a 20% relative reduction in the F α= 0.8 search effectiveness measure.
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.
14507980
Effects of term segmentation on Chinese/English cross-language information retrieval
The majority of recent Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) research has focused on European languages. CLIR problems that involve East Asian languages such as Chinese introduce additional challenges, because written Chinese texts lack boundaries between terms. The paper examines three Chinese segmentation techniques in combination with two variants of dictionary-based Chinese to English query translation. The results indicate that failure to segment terms, particularly technical terms and names, can have a cascading effect that reduces retrieval effectiveness. Task-tuned segmentation algorithms and alternative term weighting strategies are suggested as productive directions for future work.
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.
14753351
Making MIRACLEs: Interactive translingual search for Cebuano and Hindi
Searching is inherently a user-centered process; people pose the questions for which machines seek answers, and ultimately people judge the degree to which retrieved documents meet their needs. Rapid development of interactive systems that use queries expressed in one language to search documents written in another poses five key challenges: (1) interaction design, (2) query formulation, (3) cross-language search, (4) construction of translated summaries, and (5) machine translation. This article describes the design of MIRACLE, an easily extensible system based on English queries that has previously been used to search French, German, and Spanish documents, and explains how the capabilities of MIRACLE were rapidly extended to accommodate Cebuano and Hindi. Evaluation results for the cross-language search component are presented for both languages, along with results from a brief full-system interactive experiment with Hindi. The article concludes with some observations on directions for further research on interactive cross-language information retrieval.
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.
8535317
On cubic s-arc transitive Cayley graphs of finite simple groups
For a positive integer s, a graph Γ is called s-arc transitive if its full automorphism group AutΓ acts transitively on the set of s-arcs of Γ. Given a group G and a subset S of G with S = S-1 and 1 ∉ S, let Γ = Cay(G, S) be the Cayley graph of G with respect to S and GR the set of right translations of G on G. Then GR forms a regular subgroup of AutΓ. A Cayley graph Γ = Cay(G, S) is called normal if GR is normal in AutΓ. In this paper we investigate connected cubic s-arc transitive Cayley graphs Γ of finite non-Abelian simple groups. Based on Li's work (Ph.D. Thesis (1996)), we prove that either Γ is normal with s ≤ 2 or G = A47 with s = 5 and AutΓ ≃ A48. Further, a connected 5-arc transitive cubic Cayley graph of A47 is constructed.
8673951
An iterative optimization approach for unified image segmentation and matting
Separating a foreground object from the background in a static image involves determining both full and partial pixel coverages, also known as extracting a matte. Previous approaches require the input image to be presegmented into three regions: foreground, background and unknown, which are called a trimap. Partial opacity values are then computed only for pixels inside the unknown region. This presegmentation based approach fails for images with large portions of semitransparent foreground where the trimap is difficult to create even manually. In this paper, we combine the segmentation and matting problem together and propose a unified optimization approach based on belief propagation. We iteratively estimate the opacity value for every pixel in the image, based on a small sample of foreground and background pixels marked by the user. Experimental results show that compared with previous approaches, our method is more efficient to extract high quality mattes for foregrounds with significant semitransparent regions
6283537
A bandwidth management technique for hierarchical storage in large-scale multimedia servers
Using magnetic disks as a cache for tertiary storage has been shown to be an effective way to address the high storage coats of large-scale multimedia servers. The authors investigate a technique for managing the bandwidth of such a hierarchical storage design. In existing schemes, all data items are treated equally; and the same I/O rate is used to load data from tertiary storage when they are requested. In their approach, different loading rates are used for data items with different characteristics. For frequently used items, one keeps a large percentage of data in the disk buffer and needs to use only a small I/O rate to load the missing portions on demand. On the contrary, a larger portion of less frequently used items is kept in the tertiary storage. To minimize their access latencies, larger I/O rates are used to load the missing parts when these items are needed. They formally prove that this approach is better than using the same loading rate for all data items. They also show simulation results to quantitatively demonstrate the benefits of the technique. They confirm that the scheme is able to provide higher system throughput while ensuring very short latencies (i.e., several seconds) for essentially all accesses. Such good performance is achieved using surprisingly small disk space (i.e., about 5% or less of the database size).
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.
44970162
Toward Web mining of cross-language query translations in digital libraries
This paper proposes an effective query-translation approach that enables a cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) service to be more easily supported in digital library systems that only contain monolingual content. A query-translation engine called LiveTrans is used to process the translation requests of cross-lingual queries from connected digital library systems. To automatically extract translations not covered by standard dictionaries, the engine is developed based on a novel integration of dictionary resources and Web mining approaches, including anchor-text and search-result methods. The engine exploits a broad range of multilingual Web resources used as live bilingual corpora to alleviate translation difficulties. It is shown to be particularly effective for extracting multilingual translation equivalents of query terms containing proper names or new terminology. The obtained results show the feasibility of and great potential for creating English-Chinese CLIR services in existing digital libraries and new applications in cross-language Web searching, although difficulties still remain that need to be investigated further.