Users and Assessors in the Context of INEX: Are Relevance Dimensions Relevant?

The main aspects of XML retrieval are identified by analysing and comparing the following two behaviours: the behaviour of the assessor when judging the relevance of returned document components; and the behaviour of users when interacting with components of XML documents. We argue that the two INEX relevance dimensions, Exhaustivity and Specificity, are not orthogonal dimensions; indeed, an empirical analysis of each dimension reveals that the grades of the two dimensions are correlated to each other. By analysing the level of agreement between the assessor and the users, we aim at identifying the best units of retrieval. The results of our analysis show that the highest level of agreement is on highly relevant and on non-relevant document components, suggesting that only the end points of the INEX 10-point relevance scale are perceived in the same way by both the assessor and the users. We propose a new definition of relevance for XML retrieval and argue that its corresponding relevance scale would be a better choice for INEX

Local search: A guide for the information retrieval practitioner

There are a number of combinatorial optimisation problems in information retrieval in which the use of local search methods are worthwhile. The purpose of this paper is to show how local search can be used to solve some well known tasks in information retrieval (IR), how previous research in the field is piecemeal, bereft of a structure and methodologically flawed, and to suggest more rigorous ways of applying local search methods to solve IR problems. We provide a query based taxonomy for analysing the use of local search in IR tasks and an overview of issues such as fitness functions, statistical significance and test collections when conducting experiments on combinatorial optimisation problems. The paper gives a guide on the pitfalls and problems for IR practitioners who wish to use local search to solve their research issues, and gives practical advice on the use of such methods. The query based taxonomy is a novel structure which can be used by the IR practitioner in order to examine the use of local search in IR

Constructing Web subject gateways using Dublin Core, RDF and Topic Maps

Specialised subject gateways have become an essential tool for locating and accessing digital information resources, with the added value of organisation and previous evaluation catering for the needs of the varying communities using these. Within the framework of a research project on the subject, a software tool has been developed that enables subject gateways to be developed and managed. General guidelines for the work were established which set out the main principles for the technical aspects of the application, on one hand, and on aspects of the treatment and management of information, on the other. All this has been integrated into a prototype model for developing software tools. The needs analysis established the conditions to be fulfilled by the application. A detailed study of the available options for the treatment of information on metadata proved that the best option was to use the Dublin Core, and that the metadata set should be included, in turn, in RDF tags, or in tags based on XML

Constructing Web subject gateways using Dublin Core, RDF and Topic Maps

Specialised subject gateways have become an essential tool for locating and accessing digital information resources, with the added value of organisation and previous evaluation catering for the needs of the varying communities using these. Within the framework of a research project on the subject, a software tool has been developed that enables subject gateways to be developed and managed. General guidelines for the work were established which set out the main principles for the technical aspects of the application, on one hand, and on aspects of the treatment and management of information, on the other. All this has been integrated into a prototype model for developing software tools. The needs analysis established the conditions to be fulfilled by the application. A detailed study of the available options for the treatment of information on metadata proved that the best option was to use the Dublin Core, and that the metadata set should be included, in turn, in RDF tags, or in tags based on XML

A hybrid architecture for robust parsing of german

This paper provides an overview of current research on a hybrid and robust parsing architecture for the morphological, syntactic and semantic annotation of German text corpora. The novel contribution of this research lies not in the individual parsing modules, each of which relies on state-of-the-art algorithms and techniques. Rather what is new about the present approach is the combination of these modules into a single architecture. This combination provides a means to significantly optimize the performance of each component, resulting in an increased accuracy of annotation

Integration and coordination in a cognitive vision system

In this paper, we present a case study that exemplifies general ideas of system integration and coordination. The application field of assistant technology provides an ideal test bed for complex computer vision systems including real-time components, human-computer interaction, dynamic 3-d environments, and information retrieval aspects. In our scenario the user is wearing an augmented reality device that supports her/him in everyday tasks by presenting information that is triggered by perceptual and contextual cues. The system integrates a wide variety of visual functions like localization, object tracking and recognition, action recognition, interactive object learning, etc. We show how different kinds of system behavior are realized using the Active Memory Infrastructure that provides the technical basis for distributed computation and a data- and eventdriven integration approach