Improve and Implement an Open Source Question Answering System

A question answer system takes queries from the user in natural language and returns a short concise answer which best fits the response to the question. This report discusses the integration and implementation of question answer systems for English and Hindi as part of the open source search engine Yioop. We have implemented a question answer system for English and Hindi, keeping in mind users who use these languages as their primary language. The user should be able to query a set of documents and should get the answers in the same language. English and Hindi are very different when it comes to language structure, characters etc. We have implemented the Question Answer System so that it supports localization and improved Part of Speech tagging performance by storing the lexicon in the database instead of a file based lexicon. We have implemented a brill tagger variant for Part of Speech tagging of Hindi phrases and grammar rules for triplet extraction. We also improve Yioop’s lexical data handling support by allowing the user to add named entities. Our improvements to Yioop were then evaluated by comparing the retrieved answers against a dataset of answers known to be true. The test data for the question answering system included creating 2 indexes, 1 each for English and Hindi. These were created by configuring Yioop to crawl 200,000 wikipedia pages for each crawl. The crawls were configured to be domain specific so that English index consists of pages restricted to English text and Hindi index is restricted to pages with Hindi text. We then used a set of 50 questions on the English and Hindi systems. We recored, Hindi system to have an accuracy of about 55% for simple factoid questions and English question answer system to have an accuracy of 63%

Models in the Cloud: Exploring Next Generation Environmental Software Systems

There is growing interest in the application of the latest trends in computing and data science methods to improve environmental science. However we found the penetration of best practice from computing domains such as software engineering and cloud computing into supporting every day environmental science to be poor. We take from this work a real need to re-evaluate the complexity of software tools and bring these to the right level of abstraction for environmental scientists to be able to leverage the latest developments in computing. In the Models in the Cloud project, we look at the role of model driven engineering, software frameworks and cloud computing in achieving this abstraction. As a case study we deployed a complex weather model to the cloud and developed a collaborative notebook interface for orchestrating the deployment and analysis of results. We navigate relatively poor support for complex high performance computing in the cloud to develop abstractions from complexity in cloud deployment and model configuration. We found great potential in cloud computing to transform science by enabling models to leverage elastic, flexible computing infrastructure and support new ways to deliver collaborative and open science

Combining Expression and Content in Domains for Dialog Managers

We present work in progress on abstracting dialog managers from their domain in order to implement a dialog manager development tool which takes (among other data) a domain description as input and delivers a new dialog manager for the described domain as output. Thereby we will focus on two topics; firstly, the construction of domain descriptions with description logics and secondly, the interpretation of utterances in a given domain.Comment: 5 pages, uses conference.st

Meme Maps: A Tool for Configuring Memes in Time and Space

This paper presents an elegant method for visually representing the life and times of a meme, an element of cultural transmission. The elements of a Meme Map are described, and the steps for constructing a generic Meme Map are listed. A worked example of a Meme Map (using the "organic" meme) is provided. A Meme Map is a powerful and flexible tool for capturing, displaying and sharing memetic information - illustrating the time and space propinquity of Meme Events - yet it is easy to learn and simple to apply. Meme Maps can readily be drawn on “the back on an envelope”, or they can be professionally produced using any standard drawing package on a computer

The Semantic Grid: A future e-Science infrastructure

e-Science offers a promising vision of how computer and communication technology can support and enhance the scientific process. It does this by enabling scientists to generate, analyse, share and discuss their insights, experiments and results in an effective manner. The underlying computer infrastructure that provides these facilities is commonly referred to as the Grid. At this time, there are a number of grid applications being developed and there is a whole raft of computer technologies that provide fragments of the necessary functionality. However there is currently a major gap between these endeavours and the vision of e-Science in which there is a high degree of easy-to-use and seamless automation and in which there are flexible collaborations and computations on a global scale. To bridge this practice–aspiration divide, this paper presents a research agenda whose aim is to move from the current state of the art in e-Science infrastructure, to the future infrastructure that is needed to support the full richness of the e-Science vision. Here the future e-Science research infrastructure is termed the Semantic Grid (Semantic Grid to Grid is meant to connote a similar relationship to the one that exists between the Semantic Web and the Web). In particular, we present a conceptual architecture for the Semantic Grid. This architecture adopts a service-oriented perspective in which distinct stakeholders in the scientific process, represented as software agents, provide services to one another, under various service level agreements, in various forms of marketplace. We then focus predominantly on the issues concerned with the way that knowledge is acquired and used in such environments since we believe this is the key differentiator between current grid endeavours and those envisioned for the Semantic Grid

Intelligent Management and Efficient Operation of Big Data

This chapter details how Big Data can be used and implemented in networking and computing infrastructures. Specifically, it addresses three main aspects: the timely extraction of relevant knowledge from heterogeneous, and very often unstructured large data sources, the enhancement on the performance of processing and networking (cloud) infrastructures that are the most important foundational pillars of Big Data applications or services, and novel ways to efficiently manage network infrastructures with high-level composed policies for supporting the transmission of large amounts of data with distinct requisites (video vs. non-video). A case study involving an intelligent management solution to route data traffic with diverse requirements in a wide area Internet Exchange Point is presented, discussed in the context of Big Data, and evaluated.Comment: In book Handbook of Research on Trends and Future Directions in Big Data and Web Intelligence, IGI Global, 201