17095458
Application and Difficulty of Natural Language Processing in Chinese Temporal Information Extraction
The conventional information system cannot cater for temporal information effectively. It may not be able to handle users’ queries concerning how an action relates to another in time. It is useful to capture and maintain the temporal knowledge associated to each action in an information system. In this paper, we proposed a general frame structure for maintaining the extracted temporal concepts and proposed a system for extracting time-dependent information from Hong Kong financial news, known as TICS. In the system, temporal knowledge is represented in the forms of types of temporal concepts and temporal relations. When analyzing a sentence, TICS first determines the situation related to the predicate verb. This in turn will identify the type of temporal concept. Based on that, the relevant temporal information is extracted and temporal relations are derived. These relations link relevant concept frames together in chronological order, and provide the knowledge to fulfill users' queries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
12666551
Fused data-centric visualizations for software evolution environments
During software evolution, several different facets of the system need to be related to one another at multiple levels of abstraction. Current software evolution tools have limited capabilities for effectively visualizing and evolving multiple system facets in an integrated manner. Many tools provide methods for tracking and relating different levels of abstraction within a single facet. However, it is less well understood how to represent and understand relationships between and among different abstraction hierarchies, i.e. for inter-hierarchy relations. Often, these are represented and explored independently, making them difficult to relate to one another. As a result, engineers are likely to have difficulty understanding how the various facets of a system relate and interact. We describe preliminary results of a collaborative research project between industry and academia to enhance the inter-hierarchy visualization capabilities of an existing software evolution environment called "KLOCwork Suite". Specifically, we describe our efforts to add a "fused" visualization based on story board diagrams. This visualization integrates - or "fuses" - facets of architecture, behavior and data. We describe how these diagrams bridge currently isolated visualizations of system information, and argue how they can help drive architecture excavation tasks.
13225873
Model reconstruction and pose acquisition using extended Lowe's method
Finding the pose and structure of an unknown object from an image sequence has many applications in graphics, virtual reality, and multimedia processing. In this paper, we address this problem by using a two-stage iterative method. Starting from an initial guess of the structure, the first stage estimates the pose of the object. The second stage uses the estimated pose information to refine the structure. This process is repeated until the difference between the observed data and data re-projected from the estimated model is minimized. This method is a variation of the classical bundle adjustment method, but is faster in execution and is simpler to implement. We used the Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi feature tracker for obtaining the image features. Synthetic and real data have been tested with good results.
62300434
How do program understanding tools affect how programmers understand programs?
Abstract In this paper, we explore the question of whether program understanding tools enhance or change the way that programmers understand programs. The strategies that programmers use to comprehend programs vary widely. Program understanding tools should enhance or ease the programmer's preferred strategies, rather than impose a fixed strategy that may not always be suitable. We present observations from a user study that compares three tools for browsing program source code and exploring software structures. In this study, 30 participants used these tools to solve several high-level program understanding tasks. These tasks required a broad range of comprehension strategies. We describe how these tools supported or hindered the diverse comprehension strategies used.
33091738
SHAPES: A Novel Approach for Learning Search Heuristics in Under-Constrained Optimization Problems
Although much research in machine learning has been carried out on acquiring knowledge for problem-solving in many problem domains, little effort has been focused on learning search-control knowledge for solving optimization problems. This paper reports on the development of SHAPES, a system that learns heuristic search guidance for solving optimization problems in intractable, under-constrained domains based on the Explanation-Based Learning (EBL) framework. The system embodies two new and novel approaches to machine learning. First, it makes use of explanations of varying levels of approximation as a mean for verifying heuristic-based decisions, allowing heuristic estimates to be revised and corrected during problem-solving. The provision of such a revision mechanism is particularly important when working in intractable and under-constrained domains, where heuristics tend to be highly over-generalized, and hence at times will give rise to incorrect results. Second, it employs a new linear and quadratic programming-based weight-assignment algorithm formulated to direct search toward optimal solutions under best-first search. The algorithm offers a direct method for assigning rule strengths and, in so doing, avoids the need to address the credit-assignment problem faced by other iterative weight-adjustment methods.
6619418
The Software Bookshelf
Legacy software systems are typically complex, geriatric, and difficult to change, having evolved over decades and having passed through many developers. Nevertheless, these systems are mature, heavily used, and constitute massive corporate assets. Migrating such systems to modern platforms is a significant challenge due to the loss of information over time. As a result, we embarked on a research project to design and implement an environment to support software migration. In particular, we focused on migrating legacy PL/I source code to C++, with an initial phase of looking at redocumentation strategies. Recent technologies such as reverse engineering tools and World Wide Web standards now make it possible to build tools that greatly simplify the process of redocumenting a legacy software system. In this paper we introduce the concept of a software bookshelf as a means to capture, organize, and manage information about a legacy software system. We distinguish three roles directly involved in the construction, population, and use of such a bookshelf: the builder, the librarian, and the patron. From these perspectives, we describe requirements for the bookshelf, as well as a generic architecture and a prototype implementation. We also discuss various parsing and analysis tools that were developed and integrated to assist in the recovery of useful information about a legacy system. In addition, we illustrate how a software bookshelf is populated with the information of a given software project and how the bookshelf can be used in a program-understanding scenario. Reported results are based on a pilot project that developed a prototype bookshelf for a software system consisting of approximately 300K lines of code written in a PL/I dialect.