Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems

TRECVid 2005 experiments at Dublin City University

In this paper we describe our experiments in the automatic and interactive search tasks and the BBC rushes pilot task of TRECVid 2005. Our approach this year is somewhat different than previous submissions in that we have implemented a multi-user search system using a DiamondTouch tabletop device from Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL).We developed two versions of oursystem one with emphasis on efficient completion of the search task (Físchlár-DT Efficiency) and the other with more emphasis on increasing awareness among searchers (Físchlár-DT Awareness). We supplemented these runs with a further two runs one for each of the two systems, in which we augmented the initial results with results from an automatic run. In addition to these interactive submissions we also submitted three fully automatic runs. We also took part in the BBC rushes pilot task where we indexed the video by semi-automatic segmentation of objects appearing in the video and our search/browsing system allows full keyframe and/or object-based searching. In the interactive search experiments we found that the awareness system outperformed the efficiency system. We also found that supplementing the interactive results with results of an automatic run improves both the Mean Average Precision and Recall values for both system variants. Our results suggest that providing awareness cues in a collaborative search setting improves retrieval performance. We also learned that multi-user searching is a viable alternative to the traditional single searcher paradigm, provided the system is designed to effectively support collaboration

ANNIS: a linguistic database for exploring information structure

In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of our first version of the database "ANNIS" (ANNotation of Information Structure). For research based on empirical data, ANNIS provides a uniform environment for storing this data together with its linguistic annotations. A central database promotes standardized annotation, which facilitates interpretation and comparison of the data. ANNIS is used through a standard web browser and offers tier-based visualization of data and annotations, as well as search facilities that allow for cross-level and cross-sentential queries. The paper motivates the design of the system, characterizes its user interface, and provides an initial technical evaluation of ANNIS with respect to data size and query processing

ELAN development, keeping pace with communities' needs

ELAN is a versatile multimedia annotation tool that is being developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. About a decade ago it emerged out of a number of corpus tools and utilities and it has been extended ever since. This paper focuses on the efforts made to ensure that the application keeps up with the growing needs of that era in linguistics and multimodality research; growing needs in terms of length and resolution of recordings, the number of recordings made and transcribed and the number of levels of annotation per transcription

Advanced content-based semantic scene analysis and information retrieval: the SCHEMA project

The aim of the SCHEMA Network of Excellence is to bring together a critical mass of universities, research centers, industrial partners and end users, in order to design a reference system for content-based semantic scene analysis, interpretation and understanding. Relevant research areas include: content-based multimedia analysis and automatic annotation of semantic multimedia content, combined textual and multimedia information retrieval, semantic -web, MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 standards, user interfaces and human factors. In this paper, recent advances in content-based analysis, indexing and retrieval of digital media within the SCHEMA Network are presented. These advances will be integrated in the SCHEMA module-based, expandable reference system