Overview of the CLEF-2007 cross-language speech retrieval track

The CLEF-2007 Cross-Language Speech Retrieval (CL-SR) track included two tasks: to identify topically coherent segments of English interviews in a known-boundary condition, and to identify time stamps marking the beginning of topically relevant passages in Czech interviews in an unknown-boundary condition. Six teams participated in the English evaluation, performing both monolingual and cross-language searches of ASR transcripts, automatically generated metadata, and manually generated metadata. Four teams participated in the Czech evaluation, performing monolingual searches of automatic speech recognition transcripts

MIA 2022 Shared Task Submission: Leveraging Entity Representations, Dense-Sparse Hybrids, and Fusion-in-Decoder for Cross-Lingual Question Answering

We describe our two-stage system for the Multilingual Information Access (MIA) 2022 Shared Task on Cross-Lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering. The first stage consists of multilingual passage retrieval with a hybrid dense and sparse retrieval strategy. The second stage consists of a reader which outputs the answer from the top passages returned by the first stage. We show the efficacy of using a multilingual language model with entity representations in pretraining, sparse retrieval signals to help dense retrieval, and Fusion-in-Decoder. On the development set, we obtain 43.46 F1 on XOR-TyDi QA and 21.99 F1 on MKQA, for an average F1 score of 32.73. On the test set, we obtain 40.93 F1 on XOR-TyDi QA and 22.29 F1 on MKQA, for an average F1 score of 31.61. We improve over the official baseline by over 4 F1 points on both the development and test sets.Comment: System description for the Multilingual Information Access 2022 Shared Tas

Cross-lingual Question Answering with QED

We present improvements and modifications of the QED open-domain question answering system developed for TREC-2003 to make it cross-lingual for participation in the CrossLinguistic Evaluation Forum (CLEF) Question Answering Track 2004 for the source languages French and German and the target language English. We use rule-based question translation extended with surface pattern-oriented pre- and post-processing rules for question reformulation to create and English query from its French or German original. Our system uses deep processing for the question and answers, which requires efficient and radical prior search space pruning. For answering factoid questions, we report an accuracy of 16% (German to English) and 20% (French to English), respectively

On the use of word embedding for cross language plagiarism detection

[EN] Cross language plagiarism is the unacknowledged reuse of text across language pairs. It occurs if a passage of text is translated from source language to target language and no proper citation is provided. Although various methods have been developed for detection of cross language plagiarism, less attention has been paid to measure and compare their performance, especially when tackling with different types of paraphrasing through translation. In this paper, we investigate various approaches to cross language plagiarism detection. Moreover, we present a novel approach to cross language plagiarism detection using word embedding methods and explore its performance against other state-of-the-art plagiarism detection algorithms. In order to evaluate the methods, we have constructed an English-Persian bilingual plagiarism detection corpus (referred to as HAMTA-CL) comprised of seven types of obfuscation. The results show that the word embedding approach outperforms the other approaches with respect to recall when encountering heavily paraphrased passages. On the other hand, translation based approach performs well when the precision is the main consideration of the cross language plagiarism detection system.Asghari, H.; Fatemi, O.; Mohtaj, S.; Faili, H.; Rosso, P. (2019). On the use of word embedding for cross language plagiarism detection. Intelligent Data Analysis. 23(3):661-680. https://doi.org/10.3233/IDA-183985S661680233H. Asghari, K. Khoshnava, O. Fatemi and H. Faili, Developing bilingual plagiarism detection corpus using sentence aligned parallel corpus: Notebook for {PAN} at {CLEF} 2015, In L. Cappellato, N. Ferro, G.J.F. Jones and E. SanJuan, editors, Working Notes of {CLEF} 2015 – Conference and Labs of the Evaluation forum, Toulouse, France, September 8–11, 2015, volume 1391 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2015.A. Barrón-Cede no, M. Potthast, P. Rosso and B. Stein, Corpus and evaluation measures for automatic plagiarism detection, In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odijk, S. Piperidis, M. Rosner and D. Tapias, editors, Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, {LREC} 2010, 17–23 May 2010, Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association, 2010.A. Barrón-Cede no, P. Rosso, D. Pinto and A. Juan, On cross-lingual plagiarism analysis using a statistical model, In B. Stein, E. Stamatatos and M. Koppel, editors, Proceedings of the ECAI’08 Workshop on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship and Social Software Misuse, Patras, Greece, July 22, 2008, volume 377 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org, 2008.Farghaly, A., & Shaalan, K. (2009). Arabic Natural Language Processing. ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing, 8(4), 1-22. doi:10.1145/1644879.1644881J. Ferrero, F. Agnès, L. Besacier and D. Schwab, A multilingual, multi-style and multi-granularity dataset for cross-language textual similarity detection, In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, S. Goggi, M. Grobelnik, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, H. Mazo, A. Moreno, J. Odijk and S. Piperidis, editors, Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation {LREC} 2016, Portorož, Slovenia, May 23–28, 2016, European Language Resources Association {(ELRA)}, 2016.Franco-Salvador, M., Gupta, P., Rosso, P., & Banchs, R. E. (2016). Cross-language plagiarism detection over continuous-space- and knowledge graph-based representations of language. Knowledge-Based Systems, 111, 87-99. doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2016.08.004Franco-Salvador, M., Rosso, P., & Montes-y-Gómez, M. (2016). A systematic study of knowledge graph analysis for cross-language plagiarism detection. Information Processing & Management, 52(4), 550-570. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2015.12.004C.K. Kent and N. Salim, Web based cross language plagiarism detection, CoRR, abs/0912.3, 2009.McNamee, P., & Mayfield, J. (2004). Character N-Gram Tokenization for European Language Text Retrieval. Information Retrieval, 7(1/2), 73-97. doi:10.1023/b:inrt.0000009441.78971.beT. Mikolov, K. Chen, G. Corrado and J. Dean, Efficient estimation of word representations in vector space, CoRR, abs/1301.3, 2013.S. Mohtaj, B. Roshanfekr, A. Zafarian and H. Asghari, Parsivar: A language processing toolkit for persian, In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, C. Cieri, T. Declerck, S. Goggi, K. Hasida, H. Isahara, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, H. Mazo, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, S. Piperidis and T. Tokunaga, editors, Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2018, Miyazaki, Japan, May 7–12, 2018, European Language Resources Association ELRA, 2018.R.M.A. Nawab, M. Stevenson and P.D. Clough, University of Sheffield – Lab Report for {PAN} at {CLEF} 2010, In M. Braschler, D. Harman and E. Pianta, editors, {CLEF} 2010 LABs and Workshops, Notebook Papers, 22–23 September 2010, Padua, Italy, volume 1176 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2010.G. Oberreuter, G. L’Huillier, S.A. Rios and J.D. Velásquez, Approaches for intrinsic and external plagiarism detection – Notebook for {PAN} at {CLEF} 2011, In V. Petras, P. Forner and P.D. Clough, editors, {CLEF} 2011 Labs and Workshop, Notebook Papers, 19–22 September 2011, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, volume 1177 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2011.Pinto, D., Civera, J., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Juan, A., & Rosso, P. (2009). A statistical approach to crosslingual natural language tasks. Journal of Algorithms, 64(1), 51-60. doi:10.1016/j.jalgor.2009.02.005M. Potthast, A. Barrón-Cede no, A. Eiselt, B. Stein and P. Rosso, Overview of the 2nd international competition on plagiarism detection, In M. Braschler, D. Harman and E. Pianta, editors, {CLEF} 2010 LABs and Workshops, Notebook Papers, 22–23 September 2010, Padua, Italy, volume 1176 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2010.Potthast, M., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., & Rosso, P. (2010). Cross-language plagiarism detection. Language Resources and Evaluation, 45(1), 45-62. doi:10.1007/s10579-009-9114-zM. Potthast, A. Eiselt, A. Barrón-Cede no, B. Stein and P. Rosso, Overview of the 3rd international competition on plagiarism detection, In V. Petras, P. Forner and P.D. Clough, editors, {CLEF} 2011 Labs and Workshop, Notebook Papers, 19–22 September 2011, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, volume 1177 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org, 2011.M. Potthast, S. Goering, P. Rosso and B. Stein, Towards data submissions for shared tasks: First experiences for the task of text alignment, In L. Cappellato, N. Ferro, G.J.F. Jones and E. SanJuan, editors, Working Notes of {CLEF} 2015 – Conference and Labs of the Evaluation forum, Toulouse, France, September 8–11, 2015, volume 1391 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2015.Potthast, M., Stein, B., & Anderka, M. (s. f.). A Wikipedia-Based Multilingual Retrieval Model. Advances in Information Retrieval, 522-530. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-78646-7_51B. Pouliquen, R. Steinberger and C. Ignat, Automatic identification of document translations in large multilingual document collections, CoRR, abs/cs/060, 2006.B. Stein, E. Stamatatos and M. Koppel, Proceedings of the ECAI’08 Workshop on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship and Social Software Misuse, Patras, Greece, July 22, 2008, volume 377 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2008.J. Wieting, M. Bansal, K. Gimpel and K. Livescu, Towards universal paraphrastic sentence embeddings, CoRR, abs/1511.0, 2015.V. Zarrabi, J. Rafiei, K. Khoshnava, H. Asghari and S. Mohtaj, Evaluation of text reuse corpora for text alignment task of plagiarism detection, In L. Cappellato, N. Ferro, G.J.F. Jones and E. SanJuan, editors, Working Notes of {CLEF} 2015 – Conference and Labs of the Evaluation forum, Toulouse, France, September 8–11, 2015, volume 1391 of {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2015.Barrón-Cedeño, A., Gupta, P., & Rosso, P. (2013). Methods for cross-language plagiarism detection. Knowledge-Based Systems, 50, 211-217. doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2013.06.01

Finding answers to questions, in text collections or web, in open domain or specialty domains

International audienceThis chapter is dedicated to factual question answering, i.e. extracting precise and exact answers to question given in natural language from texts. A question in natural language gives more information than a bag of word query (i.e. a query made of a list of words), and provides clues for finding precise answers. We will first focus on the presentation of the underlying problems mainly due to the existence of linguistic variations between questions and their answerable pieces of texts for selecting relevant passages and extracting reliable answers. We will first present how to answer factual question in open domain. We will also present answering questions in specialty domain as it requires dealing with semi-structured knowledge and specialized terminologies, and can lead to different applications, as information management in corporations for example. Searching answers on the Web constitutes another application frame and introduces specificities linked to Web redundancy or collaborative usage. Besides, the Web is also multilingual, and a challenging problem consists in searching answers in target language documents other than the source language of the question. For all these topics, we present main approaches and the remaining problems

Enhancing knowledge acquisition systems with user generated and crowdsourced resources

This thesis is on leveraging knowledge acquisition systems with collaborative data and crowdsourcing work from internet. We propose two strategies and apply them for building effective entity linking and question answering (QA) systems. The first strategy is on integrating an information extraction system with online collaborative knowledge bases, such as Wikipedia and Freebase. We construct a Cross-Lingual Entity Linking (CLEL) system to connect Chinese entities, such as people and locations, with corresponding English pages in Wikipedia. The main focus is to break the language barrier between Chinese entities and the English KB, and to resolve the synonymy and polysemy of Chinese entities. To address those problems, we create a cross-lingual taxonomy and a Chinese knowledge base (KB). We investigate two methods of connecting the query representation with the KB representation. Based on our CLEL system participating in TAC KBP 2011 evaluation, we finally propose a simple and effective generative model, which achieved much better performance. The second strategy is on creating annotation for QA systems with the help of crowd- sourcing. Crowdsourcing is to distribute a task via internet and recruit a lot of people to complete it simultaneously. Various annotated data are required to train the data-driven statistical machine learning algorithms for underlying components in our QA system. This thesis demonstrates how to convert the annotation task into crowdsourcing micro-tasks, investigate different statistical methods for enhancing the quality of crowdsourced anno- tation, and finally use enhanced annotation to train learning to rank models for passage ranking algorithms for QA.Gegenstand dieser Arbeit ist das Nutzbarmachen sowohl von Systemen zur Wissener- fassung als auch von kollaborativ erstellten Daten und Arbeit aus dem Internet. Es werden zwei Strategien vorgeschlagen, welche für die Erstellung effektiver Entity Linking (Disambiguierung von Entitätennamen) und Frage-Antwort Systeme eingesetzt werden. Die erste Strategie ist, ein Informationsextraktions-System mit kollaborativ erstellten Online- Datenbanken zu integrieren. Wir entwickeln ein Cross-Linguales Entity Linking-System (CLEL), um chinesische Entitäten, wie etwa Personen und Orte, mit den entsprechenden Wikipediaseiten zu verknüpfen. Das Hauptaugenmerk ist es, die Sprachbarriere zwischen chinesischen Entitäten und englischer Datenbank zu durchbrechen, und Synonymie und Polysemie der chinesis- chen Entitäten aufzulösen. Um diese Probleme anzugehen, erstellen wir eine cross linguale Taxonomie und eine chinesische Datenbank. Wir untersuchen zwei Methoden, die Repräsentation der Anfrage und die Repräsentation der Datenbank zu verbinden. Schließlich stellen wir ein einfaches und effektives generatives Modell vor, das auf unserem System für die Teilnahme an der TAC KBP 2011 Evaluation basiert und eine erheblich bessere Performanz erreichte. Die zweite Strategie ist, Annotationen für Frage-Antwort-Systeme mit Hilfe von "Crowd- sourcing" zu erstellen. "Crowdsourcing" bedeutet, eine Aufgabe via Internet an eine große Menge an angeworbene Menschen zu verteilen, die diese simultan erledigen. Verschiedene annotierte Daten sind notwendig, um die datengetriebenen statistischen Lernalgorithmen zu trainieren, die unserem Frage-Antwort System zugrunde liegen. Wir zeigen, wie die Annotationsaufgabe in Mikro-Aufgaben für das Crowdsourcing umgewan- delt werden kann, wir untersuchen verschiedene statistische Methoden, um die Qualität der Annotation aus dem Crowdsourcing zu erweitern, und schließlich nutzen wir die erwei- erte Annotation, um Modelle zum Lernen von Ranglisten von Textabschnitten zu trainieren

Information Retrieval: Recent Advances and Beyond

In this paper, we provide a detailed overview of the models used for information retrieval in the first and second stages of the typical processing chain. We discuss the current state-of-the-art models, including methods based on terms, semantic retrieval, and neural. Additionally, we delve into the key topics related to the learning process of these models. This way, this survey offers a comprehensive understanding of the field and is of interest for for researchers and practitioners entering/working in the information retrieval domain