The Simplest Evaluation Measures for XML Information Retrieval that Could Possibly Work

This paper reviews several evaluation measures developed for evaluating XML information retrieval (IR) systems. We argue that these measures, some of which are currently in use by the INitiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX), are complicated, hard to understand, and hard to explain to users of XML IR systems. To show the value of keeping things simple, we report alternative evaluation results of official evaluation runs submitted to INEX 2004 using simple metrics, and show its value for INEX

Node discovery in a networked organization

In this paper, I present a method to solve a node discovery problem in a networked organization. Covert nodes refer to the nodes which are not observable directly. They affect social interactions, but do not appear in the surveillance logs which record the participants of the social interactions. Discovering the covert nodes is defined as identifying the suspicious logs where the covert nodes would appear if the covert nodes became overt. A mathematical model is developed for the maximal likelihood estimation of the network behind the social interactions and for the identification of the suspicious logs. Precision, recall, and F measure characteristics are demonstrated with the dataset generated from a real organization and the computationally synthesized datasets. The performance is close to the theoretical limit for any covert nodes in the networks of any topologies and sizes if the ratio of the number of observation to the number of possible communication patterns is large

Exploring cognitive issues in visual information retrieval

A study was conducted that compared user performance across a range of search tasks supported by both a textual and a visual information retrieval interface (VIRI). Test scores representing seven distinct cognitive abilities were examined in relation to user performance. Results indicate that, when using VIRIs, visual-perceptual abilities account for significant amounts of within-subjects variance, particularly when the relevance criteria were highly specific. Visualisation ability also seemed to be a critical factor when users were required to change topical perspective within the visualisation. Suggestions are made for navigational cues that may help to reduce the effects of these individual differences

Overview of the ImageCLEFphoto 2008 photographic retrieval task

ImageCLEFphoto 2008 is an ad-hoc photo retrieval task and part of the ImageCLEF evaluation campaign. This task provides both the resources and the framework necessary to perform comparative laboratory-style evaluation of visual information retrieval systems. In 2008, the evaluation task concentrated on promoting diversity within the top 20 results from a multilingual image collection. This new challenge attracted a record number of submissions: a total of 24 participating groups submitting 1,042 system runs. Some of the findings include that the choice of annotation language is almost negligible and the best runs are by combining concept and content-based retrieval methods

Automating Requirements Traceability: Two Decades of Learning from KDD

This paper summarizes our experience with using Knowledge Discovery in Data (KDD) methodology for automated requirements tracing, and discusses our insights.Comment: The work of the second author has been supported in part by NSF grants CCF-1511117 and CICI 1642134; 4 pages; in Proceedings of IEEE Requirements Engineering 201

Coreference-Based Summarization and Question Answering: a Case for High Precision Anaphor Resolution

Approaches to Text Summarization and Question Answering are known to benefit from the availability of coreference information. Based on an analysis of its contributions, a more detailed look at coreference processing for these applications will be proposed: it should be considered as a task of anaphor resolution rather than coreference resolution. It will be further argued that high precision approaches to anaphor resolution optimally match the specific requirements. Three such approaches will be described and empirically evaluated, and the implications for Text Summarization and Question Answering will be discussed