20,996 research outputs found
User experiments with the Eurovision cross-language image retrieval system
In this paper we present Eurovision, a text-based system for cross-language (CL) image retrieval.
The system is evaluated by multilingual users for two search tasks with the system configured in
English and five other languages. To our knowledge this is the first published set of user
experiments for CL image retrieval. We show that: (1) it is possible to create a usable multilingual
search engine using little knowledge of any language other than English, (2) categorizing images
assists the user's search, and (3) there are differences in the way users search between the proposed
search tasks. Based on the two search tasks and user feedback, we describe important aspects of
any CL image retrieval system
Embedding Web-based Statistical Translation Models in Cross-Language Information Retrieval
Although more and more language pairs are covered by machine translation
services, there are still many pairs that lack translation resources.
Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is an application which needs
translation functionality of a relatively low level of sophistication since
current models for information retrieval (IR) are still based on a
bag-of-words. The Web provides a vast resource for the automatic construction
of parallel corpora which can be used to train statistical translation models
automatically. The resulting translation models can be embedded in several ways
in a retrieval model. In this paper, we will investigate the problem of
automatically mining parallel texts from the Web and different ways of
integrating the translation models within the retrieval process. Our
experiments on standard test collections for CLIR show that the Web-based
translation models can surpass commercial MT systems in CLIR tasks. These
results open the perspective of constructing a fully automatic query
translation device for CLIR at a very low cost.Comment: 37 page
Sub-word indexing and blind relevance feedback for English, Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi IR
The Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) provides document collections, topics, and relevance assessments for information retrieval (IR) experiments on Indian languages. Several research questions are explored in this paper: 1. how to create create a simple, languageindependent corpus-based stemmer, 2. how to identify sub-words and which types of sub-words are suitable as indexing units, and 3. how to apply blind relevance feedback on sub-words and how feedback term selection is affected by the type of the indexing unit. More than 140 IR experiments are conducted using the BM25 retrieval model on the topic titles and descriptions (TD) for the FIRE 2008 English, Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi document collections. The major findings are: The corpus-based stemming approach is effective as a knowledge-light
term conation step and useful in case of few language-specific resources. For English, the corpusbased
stemmer performs nearly as well as the Porter stemmer and significantly better than the baseline of indexing words when combined with query expansion. In combination with blind relevance feedback, it also performs significantly better than the baseline for Bengali and Marathi IR.
Sub-words such as consonant-vowel sequences and word prefixes can yield similar or better performance in comparison to word indexing. There is no best performing method for all languages. For English, indexing using the Porter stemmer performs best, for Bengali and Marathi, overlapping 3-grams obtain the best result, and for Hindi, 4-prefixes yield the highest MAP. However, in combination with blind relevance feedback using 10 documents and 20 terms, 6-prefixes for English and 4-prefixes for Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi IR yield the highest MAP. Sub-word identification is a general case of decompounding. It results in one or more index terms for a single word form and increases the number of index terms but decreases their average length. The corresponding retrieval experiments show that relevance feedback on sub-words benefits from
selecting a larger number of index terms in comparison with retrieval on word forms. Similarly, selecting the number of relevance feedback terms depending on the ratio of word vocabulary size to sub-word vocabulary size almost always slightly increases information retrieval effectiveness
compared to using a fixed number of terms for different languages
Statistical Augmentation of a Chinese Machine-Readable Dictionary
We describe a method of using statistically-collected Chinese character
groups from a corpus to augment a Chinese dictionary. The method is
particularly useful for extracting domain-specific and regional words not
readily available in machine-readable dictionaries. Output was evaluated both
using human evaluators and against a previously available dictionary. We also
evaluated performance improvement in automatic Chinese tokenization. Results
show that our method outputs legitimate words, acronymic constructions, idioms,
names and titles, as well as technical compounds, many of which were lacking
from the original dictionary.Comment: 17 pages, uuencoded compressed PostScrip
Connecting Dream Networks Across Cultures
Many species dream, yet there remain many open research questions in the
study of dreams. The symbolism of dreams and their interpretation is present in
cultures throughout history. Analysis of online data sources for dream
interpretation using network science leads to understanding symbolism in dreams
and their associated meaning. In this study, we introduce dream interpretation
networks for English, Chinese and Arabic that represent different cultures from
various parts of the world. We analyze communities in these networks, finding
that symbols within a community are semantically related. The central nodes in
communities give insight about cultures and symbols in dreams. The community
structure of different networks highlights cultural similarities and
differences. Interconnections between different networks are also identified by
translating symbols from different languages into English. Structural
correlations across networks point out relationships between cultures.
Similarities between network communities are also investigated by analysis of
sentiment in symbol interpretations. We find that interpretations within a
community tend to have similar sentiment. Furthermore, we cluster communities
based on their sentiment, yielding three main categories of positive, negative,
and neutral dream symbols.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure
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
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