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.
24553
Mandarin-English Information (MEI): investigating translingual speech retrieval
Abstract This paper describes the Mandarin–English Information (MEI) project, where we investigated the problem of cross-language spoken document retrieval (CL-SDR), and developed one of the first English–Chinese CL-SDR systems. Our system accepts an entire English news story (text) as query, and retrieves relevant Chinese broadcast news stories (audio) from the document collection. Hence, this is a cross-language and cross-media retrieval task. We applied a multi-scale approach to our problem, which unifies the use of phrases, words and subwords in retrieval. The English queries are translated into Chinese by means of a dictionary-based approach, where we have integrated phrase-based translation with word-by-word translation. Untranslatable named entities are transliterated by a novel subword translation technique. The multi-scale approach can be divided into three subtasks – multi-scale query formulation, multi-scale audio indexing (by speech recognition) and multi-scale retrieval. Experimental results demonstrate that the use of phrase-based translation and subword translation gave performance gains, and multi-scale retrieval outperforms word-based retrieval.
5646579
Comparing User-assisted and Automatic Query Translation
For the 2002 Cross-Language Evaluation Forum Interactive Track, the University of Maryland team focused on query formulation and reformulation. Twelve people performed a total of forty eight searches in the German document collection using English queries. Half of the searches were with user-assisted query translation, and half with fully automatic query translation. For the user-assisted query translation condition, participants were provided two types of cues about the meaning of each translation: a list of other terms with the same translation (potential synonyms), and a sentence in which the word was used in a translation-appropriate context. Four searchers performed the official iCLEF task, the other eight searched a smaller collection. Searchers performing the official task were able to make more accurate relevance judgments with user-assisted query translation for three of the four topics. We observed that the number of query iterations seems to vary systematically with topic, system, and collection, and we are analyzing query content and ranked retrieval measures to obtain further insight into these variations in search behavior.
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.
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.
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.
6919037
A systems engineering approach for constructing certifiable real-time distributed systems
In this paper, we present a systems engineering methodology for constructing certifiable realtime distributed systems. In the proposed approach, an architectural and algorithmic solution to an application problem is designed by considering the "weakest" models including the weakest asynchronous computational model and multimodal arrival model. Furthermore, timeliness properties are described using Jensen's benefit accrual predicates. Once a system solution is designed, timeliness properties are established by constructing necessary feasibility conditions that are expressed as non-valued predicates. The predicates are quantified and verified to produce the specification of a certified solution. We illustrate the approach by considering a packet transmission problem that desire soft timeliness. We present a certifiable solution to this problem that consists of switched Ethernet, a soft real-time packet scheduling algorithm (that was previously developed), and feasibility conditions.
13018290
Towards Web Mining of Query Translations for Cross-Language Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries
This paper proposes an efficient client-server-based query translation approach to allowing more feasible implementation of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) services in digital library (DL) systems. A centralized query translation server is constructed to process the translation requests of cross-lingual queries from connected DL systems. To extract translations not covered by standard dictionaries, the server is developed based on a novel integration of dictionary resources and Web mining methods, including anchor-text and search-result methods, which exploit huge amounts of multilingual and wide-scoped Web resources as live bilingual corpora to alleviate translation difficulties, and have been proven particularly effective for extracting multilingual translation equivalents of query terms containing proper names or new terminologies. The proposed approach was implemented in a query translation engine called LiveTrans, which has been shown its feasibility in providing efficient English-Chinese CLIR services for DL.
34164276
Absolute results concerning one-way functions and their applications
A new approach to one-way functions is considered. A one-way function is defined to be a function which is easy to compute but hard to invert in the sense that its inverse is not inDTIME(nk) for fixed largek. While this is weaker than the usual definition of one-way functions it requires no complexity-theoretic assumptions. Some of these functions are proved to exist, while the existence of other, stronger functions is shown to bear upon open problems in complexity theory. An application to public-key cryptosystems is given.
32133517
Information Extraction from the Structured Part of Office Documents
The contents of office documents can be divided into structured and unstructured parts. In this paper, we present a sample-based approach to analyzing a document to form its layout and conceptual structures, and then extracting information from the structured part of the office documents. We represent a document's layout structure as an ordered labeled tree structure using nested segmentation, and its conceptual structure as a set of attribute type pairs. The layout similarities between the document to be processed and samples are identified by employing an approximate tree matching method. The conceptual similarities are identified by analyzing document and sample contents, and by measuring the degree of conceptual closeness. Finally, the information is extracted by instantiating the attributes specified in the conceptual structure based on the result of document structure analysis.
16538539
Optimal jumper insertion for antenna avoidance under ratio upper-bound
Antenna effect may damage gate oxides during plasma-based fabrication process. The antenna ratio of total exposed antenna area to total gate oxide area is directly related to the amount of damage. Jumper insertion is a common technique applied at routing and post-layout stages to avoid and to fix the problems caused by the antenna effect. This paper presents an optimal algorithm for jumper insertion under the ratio upper-bound. It handles Steiner trees with obstacles. The algorithm us based on dynamic programming while works on free trees. The time complexity is O(alpha|V|2 ) and the space complexity is O(|V|2), where |V| is the number of nodes in the routing tree and a is a factor depending on how to find a non-blocked position on a wire for a jumper