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.
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.
22535159
Interactive Cross-Language Document Selection
The problem of finding documents written in a language that the searcher cannot read is perhaps the most challenging application of cross-language information retrieval technology. In interactive applications, that task involves at least two steps: (1) the machine locates promising documents in a collection that is larger than the searcher could scan, and (2) the searcher recognizes documents relevant to their intended use from among those nominated by the machine. This article presents the results of experiments designed to explore three techniques for supporting interactive relevance assessment: (1) full machine translation, (2) rapid term-by-term translation, and (3) focused phrase translation. Machine translation was found to better support this task than term-by-term translation, and focused phrase translation further improved recall without an adverse effect on precision. The article concludes with an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the evaluation framework used in this study and some remarks on implications of these results for future evaluation campaigns.
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.
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.
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.
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.
15717973
Effective hidden Markov models for detecting splicing junction sites in DNA sequences
Abstract Identification or prediction of coding sequences from within genomic DNA has been a major rate-limiting step in the pursuit of genes. Programs currently available are far from being powerful enough to elucidate the gene structure completely. In this paper, we develop effective hidden Markov models (HMMs) to represent the consensus and degeneracy features of splicing junction sites in eukaryotic genes. Our HMM system based on the developed HMMs is fully trained using an expectation maximization (EM) algorithm and the system performance is evaluated using a 10-way cross-validation method. Experimental results show that the proposed HMM system can correctly detect 92% of the true donor sites and 91.5% of the true acceptor sites in the test data set containing real vertebrate gene sequences. These results suggest that our approach provide a useful tool in discovering the splicing junction sites in eukaryotic genes.
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.
11138955
Computing an Almost Minimum Set of Spanning Line Segments of a Polyhedron
A set of spanning line segments (SLS) is a subset of the edges of a finite polyhedron in E3 such that an arbitrary plane intersects the polyhedron if and only if the plane intersects at least one of the line segments of the SLS. In this paper an algorithm is presented for computing an almost minimum set of spanning line segments for an arbitrary polyhedron . When the number of extreme vertices of is odd, the computed SLS is minimum; when the number of extreme vertices of is even, the size of the computed SLS is at most the minimum size plus one. The algorithm has linear-time complexity for a convex polyhedron, hence is optimal in this case; its time complexity is Θ(m log m) for an arbitrary polyhedron, where m is the number of vertices of the polyhedron.
12667585
A novel self-configuration mechanism for heterogeneous P2P networks
We propose a simple and efficient mechanism to self-configure semi-structured overlay networks for heterogeneous peer-to-peer systems with no global knowledge. The overlay network is constructed as a hierarchical graph based on peer power which is an aggregate measure of available resources. We use index based, random walk JOIN and LEAVE protocols to build the overlay network in which node degree and workload correspond to its peer power. We also propose an index based query scheme for peers to search documents in the network. Performance studies demonstrate that the proposed self-configuration protocol and search scheme are efficient and viable. The self-configured P2P network has significantly lower query cost than traditional Gnutella-like P2P systems. We further propose a caching assisted query mechanism where query results are cached by intermediate nodes along the search path, thereby exploiting the surplus storage power of the peers and further improving query efficiency. Caching assisted query permits a quicker response to subsequent queries for popular data without incurring the excessive overhead of globally replicated directory information. Our experimental study reveals that the caching assisted query provides an additional reduction of up to 40% in messages needed per query.