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.
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.
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 __________________________________________________________________________________________
16307564
Architecture of Trustworthy Networks
Existing isolated and add-on secure systems are rarely robust under attack, misoperation and internal faults. Secure communication only offers little protection if one ore more components are compromised, and are not sufficient for holistic and systemic security. This paper proposes the concept of trustworthy networks, which makes advances along these traditional researches on network security in combination. We outline the key challenges in constructing trustworthy networks, and define three properties, namely security, survivability and controllability. Consulting human interactions, the abstract architecture for trustworthy networks is proposed, depicting protocols layers, topology structure, entities and components, and protocol steps
268525
Optimizing the Use of High Performance Software Libraries
This paper describes how the use of software libraries, which is prevalent in high performance computing, can benefit from compiler optimizations in much the same way that conventional programming languages do. We explain how the compilation of these informal languages differs from the compilation of more conventional languages. In particular, such compilation requires precise pointer analysis, domain-specific information about the library's semantics, and a configurable compilation scheme. We describe a solution that combines dataflow analysis and pattern matching to perform configurable optimizations.
7645082
An annotation language for optimizing software libraries
This paper introduces an annotation language and a compiler that together can customize a library implementation for specific application needs. Our approach is distinguished by its ability to exploit high level, domain-specific information in the customization process. In particular, the annotations provide semantic information that enables our compiler to analyze and optimize library operations as if they were primitives of a domain-specific language. Thus, our approach yields many of the performance benefits of domain-specific languages, without the effort of developing a new compiler for each domain.
This paper presents the annotation language, describes its role in optimization, and illustrates the benefits of the overall approach. Using a partially implemented compiler, we show how our system can significantly improve the performance of two applications written using the PLAPACK parallel linear algebra library.
43707062
A Dependable Task Scheduling Strategy for a Fault Tolerant Grid Model
Grid provides an integrated computer platform composed of differentiated and distributed systems. In this paper, aiming at the heterogeneity and dynamism of a grid system, a novel fault-tolerant grid-scheduling model is presented based on Stochastic Petri Net. On the other hand, a new grid-scheduling strategy, the united strategy for the availability factor and expected accomplishing time (USAT), is put forward, In the end, the performance of the scheduling strategy based on the fault-tolerant grid-scheduling model is analyzed by SPNP software package. The numerical results show that USAT strategy can reduce these bad effects of dynamic and autonomic resources to some extent so as to guarantee quality of service (QoS).
33646984
Isomorphic Antidirected Path Decompositions of Complete Symmetric Graphs