An evaluation resource for geographic information retrieval

In this paper we present an evaluation resource for geographic information retrieval developed within the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The GeoCLEF track is dedicated to the evaluation of geographic information retrieval systems. The resource encompasses more than 600,000 documents, 75 topics so far, and more than 100,000 relevance judgments for these topics. Geographic information retrieval requires an evaluation resource which represents realistic information needs and which is geographically challenging. Some experimental results and analysis are reported

An evaluation resource for Geographical Information Retrieval

In this paper we present an evaluation resource for geographic information retrieval developed within the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The GeoCLEF track is dedicated to the evaluation of geographic information retrieval systems. The resource encompasses more than 600,000 documents, 75 topics so far, and more than 100,000 relevance judgments for these topics. Geographic information retrieval requires an evaluation resource which represents realistic information needs and which is geographically challenging. Some experimental results and analysis are reported

Using Language Models for Information Retrieval

Because of the world wide web, information retrieval systems are now used by millions of untrained users all over the world. The search engines that perform the information retrieval tasks, often retrieve thousands of potentially interesting documents to a query. The documents should be ranked in decreasing order of relevance in order to be useful to the user. This book describes a mathematical model of information retrieval based on the use of statistical language models. The approach uses simple document-based unigram models to compute for each document the probability that it generates the query. This probability is used to rank the documents. The study makes the following research contributions. * The development of a model that integrates term weighting, relevance feedback and structured queries. * The development of a model that supports multiple representations of a request or information need by integrating a statistical translation model. * The development of a model that supports multiple representations of a document, for instance by allowing proximity searches or searches for terms from a particular record field (e.g. a search for terms from the title). * A mathematical interpretation of stop word removal and stemming. * A mathematical interpretation of operators for mandatory terms, wildcards and synonyms. * A practical comparison of a language model-based retrieval system with similar systems that are based on well-established models and term weighting algorithms in a controlled experiment. * The application of the model to cross-language information retrieval and adaptive information filtering, and the evaluation of two prototype systems in a controlled experiment. Experimental results on three standard tasks show that the language model-based algorithms work as well as, or better than, today's top-performing retrieval algorithms. The standard tasks investigated are ad-hoc retrieval (when there are no previously retrieved documents to guide the search), retrospective relevance weighting (find the optimum model for a given set of relevant documents), and ad-hoc retrieval using manually formulated Boolean queries. The application to cross-language retrieval and adaptive filtering shows the practical use of respectively structured queries, and relevance feedback

A model for information retrieval driven by conceptual spaces

A retrieval model describes the transformation of a query into a set of documents. The question is: what drives this transformation? For semantic information retrieval type of models this transformation is driven by the content and structure of the semantic models. In this case, Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) are the semantic models that encode the meaning employed for monolingual and cross-language retrieval. The focus of this research is the relationship between these meanings’ representations and their role and potential in augmenting existing retrieval models effectiveness. The proposed approach is unique in explicitly interpreting a semantic reference as a pointer to a concept in the semantic model that activates all its linked neighboring concepts. It is in fact the formalization of the information retrieval model and the integration of knowledge resources from the Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud that is distinctive from other approaches. The preprocessing of the semantic model using Formal Concept Analysis enables the extraction of conceptual spaces (formal contexts)that are based on sub-graphs from the original structure of the semantic model. The types of conceptual spaces built in this case are limited by the KOSs structural relations relevant to retrieval: exact match, broader, narrower, and related. They capture the definitional and relational aspects of the concepts in the semantic model. Also, each formal context is assigned an operational role in the flow of processes of the retrieval system enabling a clear path towards the implementations of monolingual and cross-lingual systems. By following this model’s theoretical description in constructing a retrieval system, evaluation results have shown statistically significant results in both monolingual and bilingual settings when no methods for query expansion were used. The test suite was run on the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum Domain Specific 2004-2006 collection with additional extensions to match the specifics of this model

MSIR@FIRE: A Comprehensive Report from 2013 to 2016

[EN] India is a nation of geographical and cultural diversity where over 1600 dialects are spoken by the people. With the technological advancement, penetration of the internet and cheaper access to mobile data, India has recently seen a sudden growth of internet users. These Indian internet users generate contents either in English or in other vernacular Indian languages. To develop technological solutions for the contents generated by the Indian users using the Indian languages, the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) was established and held for the first time in 2008. Although Indian languages are written using indigenous scripts, often websites and user-generated content (such as tweets and blogs) in these Indian languages are written using Roman script due to various socio-cultural and technological reasons. A challenge that search engines face while processing transliterated queries and documents is that of extensive spelling variation. MSIR track was first introduced in 2013 at FIRE and the aim of MSIR was to systematically formalize several research problems that one must solve to tackle the code mixing in Web search for users of many languages around the world, develop related data sets, test benches and most importantly, build a research community focusing on this important problem that has received very little attention. This document is a comprehensive report on the 4 years of MSIR track evaluated at FIRE between 2013 and 2016.Somnath Banerjee and Sudip Kumar Naskar are supported by Media Lab Asia, MeitY, Government of India, under the Visvesvaraya PhD Scheme for Electronics & IT. The work of Paolo Rosso was partially supported by the MISMIS research project PGC2018-096212-B-C31 funded by the Spanish MICINN.Banerjee, S.; Choudhury, M.; Chakma, K.; Kumar Naskar, S.; Das, A.; Bandyopadhyay, S.; Rosso, P. (2020). MSIR@FIRE: A Comprehensive Report from 2013 to 2016. 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The first cross-script code-mixed question answering corpus. In: Proceedings of the workshop on modeling, learning and mining for cross/multilinguality (MultiLingMine 2016), co-located with the 38th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR). 2016.Banerjee S, Naskar SK, Rosso P, Bandyopadhyay S. Named entity recognition on code-mixed cross-script social media content. Comput Sistemas. 2017;21(4):681–92.Barman U, Das A, Wagner J, Foster J. Code mixing: a challenge for language identification in the language of social media. In: Proceedings of the first workshop on computational approaches to code switching. 2014. pp. 13–23.Bhardwaj P, Pakray P, Bajpeyee V, Taneja A. Information retrieval on code-mixed Hindi–English tweets. In: Working notes of FIRE 2016—forum for information retrieval evaluation, Kolkata, India, December 7–10, 2016, CEUR workshop proceedings. 2016.Bhargava R, Khandelwal S, Bhatia A, Sharmai Y. Modeling classifier for code mixed cross script questions. In: Working notes of FIRE 2016—forum for information retrieval evaluation, Kolkata, India, December 7–10, 2016, CEUR workshop proceedings. CEUR-WS.org. 2016.Bhattacharjee D, Bhattacharya, P. Ensemble classifier based approach for code-mixed cross-script question classification. In: Working notes of FIRE 2016—forum for information retrieval evaluation, Kolkata, India, December 7–10, 2016, CEUR workshop proceedings. CEUR-WS.org. 2016.Chakma K, Das A. CMIR: a corpus for evaluation of code mixed information retrieval of Hindi–English tweets. In: The 17th international conference on intelligent text processing and computational linguistics (CICLING). 2016.Choudhury M, Chittaranjan G, Gupta P, Das A. Overview of fire 2014 track on transliterated search. Proceedings of FIRE. 2014. pp. 68–89.Ganguly D, Pal S, Jones GJ. Dcu@fire-2014: fuzzy queries with rule-based normalization for mixed script information retrieval. 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Identifying effective translations for cross-lingual Arabic-to-English user-generated speech search

Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) systems are a valuable tool to enable speakers of one language to search for content of interest expressed in a different language. A group for whom this is of particular interest is bilingual Arabic speakers who wish to search for English language content using information needs expressed in Arabic queries. A key challenge in CLIR is crossing the language barrier between the query and the documents. The most common approach to bridging this gap is automated query translation, which can be unreliable for vague or short queries. In this work, we examine the potential for improving CLIR effectiveness by predicting the translation effectiveness using Query Performance Prediction (QPP) techniques. We propose a novel QPP method to estimate the quality of translation for an Arabic-Engish Cross-lingual User-generated Speech Search (CLUGS) task. We present an empirical evaluation that demonstrates the quality of our method on alternative translation outputs extracted from an Arabic-to-English Machine Translation system developed for this task. Finally, we show how this framework can be integrated in CLUGS to find relevant translations for improved retrieval performance

Domain-specific query translation for multilingual access to digital libraries

Accurate high-coverage translation is a vital component of reliable cross language information access (CLIR) systems. This is particularly true of access to archives such as Digital Libraries which are often specific to certain domains. While general machine translation (MT) has been shown to be effective for CLIR tasks in information retrieval evaluation workshops, it is not well suited to specialized tasks where domain specific translations are required. We demonstrate that effective query translation in the domain of cultural heritage (CH) can be achieved by augmenting a standard MT system with domain-specific phrase dictionaries automatically mined from the online Wikipedia. Experiments using our hybrid translation system with sample query logs from users of CH websites demonstrate a large improvement in the accuracy of domain specific phrase detection and translation

Cross-Language Plagiarism Detection

Cross-language plagiarism detection deals with the automatic identification and extraction of plagiarism in a multilingual setting. In this setting, a suspicious document is given, and the task is to retrieve all sections from the document that originate from a large, multilingual document collection. Our contributions in this field are as follows: (1) a comprehensive retrieval process for cross-language plagiarism detection is introduced, highlighting the differences to monolingual plagiarism detection, (2) state-of-the-art solutions for two important subtasks are reviewed, (3) retrieval models for the assessment of cross-language similarity are surveyed, and, (4) the three models CL-CNG, CL-ESA and CL-ASA are compared. Our evaluation is of realistic scale: it relies on 120,000 test documents which are selected from the corpora JRC-Acquis and Wikipedia, so that for each test document highly similar documents are available in all of the six languages English, German, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Polish. The models are employed in a series of ranking tasks, and more than 100 million similarities are computed with each model. The results of our evaluation indicate that CL-CNG, despite its simple approach, is the best choice to rank and compare texts across languages if they are syntactically related. CL-ESA almost matches the performance of CL-CNG, but on arbitrary pairs of languages. CL-ASA works best on "exact" translations but does not generalize well.This work was partially supported by the TEXT-ENTERPRISE 2.0 TIN2009-13391-C04-03 project and the CONACyT-Mexico 192021 grant.Potthast, M.; Barrón Cedeño, LA.; Stein, B.; Rosso, P. (2011). Cross-Language Plagiarism Detection. 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Becker, S. Thrun, & K. Obermayer (Eds.), NIPS-02: Advances in neural information processing systems (pp. 1473–1480). MIT Press.Yang, Y., Carbonell, J. G., Brown, R. D., & Frederking, R. E. (1998). Translingual information retrieval: Learning from bilingual corpora. Artificial Intelligence, 103(1–2), 323–345

Automatic web translators as part of a multilingual question-answering (QA) system: translation of questions

Artículo de la editorial: http://translationjournal.net/journal/51webtranslators.htmThe traditional model of information retrieval entails some implicit restrictions, including: a) the assumption that users search for documents, not answers; and that the documents per se will respond to and satisfy the query, and b) the assumption that the queries and the document that will satisfy the particular informational need are written in the same language. However, many times users will need specific data in response to the queries put forth. Cross-language question-answering systems (QA) can be the solution, as they pursue the search for a minimal fragment of text—not a complete document—that applies to the query, regardless of the language in which the question is formulated or the language in which the answer is found. Cross-language QA calls for some sort of underlying translating process. At present there are many types of software for natural language translation, several of them available online for free. In this paper we describe the main features of the multilingual Question-Answering (QA) systems, and then analyze the effectiveness of the translations obtained through three of the most popular online translating tools (Google Translator, Promt and Worldlingo). The methodology used for evaluation, on the basis of automatic and subjective measures, is specifically oriented here to obtain a translation that will serve as input in a QA system. The results obtained contribute to the realm of innovative search systems by enhancing our understanding of online translators and their potential in the context of multilingual information retrieval