Public Perceptions of the Midwest’s Pavements - Wisconsin - Phase I (Focus Group)

This research is being conducted as part of a larger study of the public\u27s perceptions of state-maintained rural highway pavements in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. Later stages of this project will involve interview;ing residents of the three states by telephone to gather information about people\u27s concerns about the pavements in general and specific stretches of highways in particular. Information from this effort is expected to aid the states\u27 Departments of Transportation refine the standards used to set pavement reconstruction priorities to better meet the needs of residents

Japanese/English Cross-Language Information Retrieval: Exploration of Query Translation and Transliteration

Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), where queries and documents are in different languages, has of late become one of the major topics within the information retrieval community. This paper proposes a Japanese/English CLIR system, where we combine a query translation and retrieval modules. We currently target the retrieval of technical documents, and therefore the performance of our system is highly dependent on the quality of the translation of technical terms. However, the technical term translation is still problematic in that technical terms are often compound words, and thus new terms are progressively created by combining existing base words. In addition, Japanese often represents loanwords based on its special phonogram. Consequently, existing dictionaries find it difficult to achieve sufficient coverage. To counter the first problem, we produce a Japanese/English dictionary for base words, and translate compound words on a word-by-word basis. We also use a probabilistic method to resolve translation ambiguity. For the second problem, we use a transliteration method, which corresponds words unlisted in the base word dictionary to their phonetic equivalents in the target language. We evaluate our system using a test collection for CLIR, and show that both the compound word translation and transliteration methods improve the system performance

Public Perceptions of the Midwest’s Pavements - Minnesota - Phase III (Targeted Survey Report)

This research is being conducted as part of a larger study of the public’s perceptions of state-maintained rural highway pavements in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. Later stages of this project will involve interviewing residents of the three states by telephone to gather information about people’s concerns about the pavements in general and specific stretches of highways in particular. Information from this effort is expected to aid the states’ Departments of Transportation refine the standards used to set pavement reconstruction priorities to better meet the needs of residents

Decoherence, the measurement problem, and interpretations of quantum mechanics

Environment-induced decoherence and superselection have been a subject of intensive research over the past two decades, yet their implications for the foundational problems of quantum mechanics, most notably the quantum measurement problem, have remained a matter of great controversy. This paper is intended to clarify key features of the decoherence program, including its more recent results, and to investigate their application and consequences in the context of the main interpretive approaches of quantum mechanics.Comment: 41 pages. Final published versio