User experiments with the Eurovision cross-language image retrieval system

In this paper we present Eurovision, a text-based system for cross-language (CL) image retrieval. The system is evaluated by multilingual users for two search tasks with the system configured in English and five other languages. To our knowledge this is the first published set of user experiments for CL image retrieval. We show that: (1) it is possible to create a usable multilingual search engine using little knowledge of any language other than English, (2) categorizing images assists the user's search, and (3) there are differences in the way users search between the proposed search tasks. Based on the two search tasks and user feedback, we describe important aspects of any CL image retrieval system

Conceptual search – ESI, litigation and the issue of language

Across the globe, legal, business and technical practitioners charged with managing information are continually challenged by rapid-fire evolution and growth in the legal and technology fields. In the United States, new compliance requirements, amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and corresponding case law, along with technical advances, have made litigation support one of the most exciting professions in the legal arena. In the UK, revisions to the Practice Direction to CPR Rule 31 require parties in civil litigation to consider the impacts associated with electronic documents. One emerging technology trends—both aiding and complicating the management of electronically stored information (ESI) in litigation in the US, EU and UK alike—is the notion of “conceptual search.” This paper focuses on the evolution of conceptual search technology, and predictions of where this science will take legal professionals and technical information managers in coming years and a look at the advantages conceptual search can provide in dealing with the issue of language. This paper will focus primarily and the latent semantic analysis approach to conceptual search and why this approach is advantageous when searching ESI regardless of the language used in the documents, even to the extent of allowing for cross language searching and accurate searching of documents that contain co-mingle foreign terms with the native language

The Language of Search

This paper is concerned with a class of algorithms that perform exhaustive search on propositional knowledge bases. We show that each of these algorithms defines and generates a propositional language. Specifically, we show that the trace of a search can be interpreted as a combinational circuit, and a search algorithm then defines a propositional language consisting of circuits that are generated across all possible executions of the algorithm. In particular, we show that several versions of exhaustive DPLL search correspond to such well-known languages as FBDD, OBDD, and a precisely-defined subset of d-DNNF. By thus mapping search algorithms to propositional languages, we provide a uniform and practical framework in which successful search techniques can be harnessed for compilation of knowledge into various languages of interest, and a new methodology whereby the power and limitations of search algorithms can be understood by looking up the tractability and succinctness of the corresponding propositional languages

Person Search with Natural Language Description

Searching persons in large-scale image databases with the query of natural language description has important applications in video surveillance. Existing methods mainly focused on searching persons with image-based or attribute-based queries, which have major limitations for a practical usage. In this paper, we study the problem of person search with natural language description. Given the textual description of a person, the algorithm of the person search is required to rank all the samples in the person database then retrieve the most relevant sample corresponding to the queried description. Since there is no person dataset or benchmark with textual description available, we collect a large-scale person description dataset with detailed natural language annotations and person samples from various sources, termed as CUHK Person Description Dataset (CUHK-PEDES). A wide range of possible models and baselines have been evaluated and compared on the person search benchmark. An Recurrent Neural Network with Gated Neural Attention mechanism (GNA-RNN) is proposed to establish the state-of-the art performance on person search

Semantic industrial categorisation based on search engine index

Analysis of specialist language is one of the most pressing problems when trying to build intelligent content analysis system. Identifying the scope of the language used and then understanding the relationships between the language entities is a key problem. A semantic relationship analysis of the search engine index was devised and evaluated. Using search engine index provides us with access to the widest database of knowledge in any particular field (if not now, then surely in the future). Social network analysis of keywords collection seems to generate a viable list of the specialist terms and relationships among them. This approach has been tested in the engineering and medical sectors

Multiplicative Bidding in Online Advertising

In this paper, we initiate the study of the multiplicative bidding language adopted by major Internet search companies. In multiplicative bidding, the effective bid on a particular search auction is the product of a base bid and bid adjustments that are dependent on features of the search (for example, the geographic location of the user, or the platform on which the search is conducted). We consider the task faced by the advertiser when setting these bid adjustments, and establish a foundational optimization problem that captures the core difficulty of bidding under this language. We give matching algorithmic and approximation hardness results for this problem; these results are against an information-theoretic bound, and thus have implications on the power of the multiplicative bidding language itself. Inspired by empirical studies of search engine price data, we then codify the relevant restrictions of the problem, and give further algorithmic and hardness results. Our main technical contribution is an $O(\log n)$-approximation for the case of multiplicative prices and monotone values. We also provide empirical validations of our problem restrictions, and test our algorithms on real data against natural benchmarks. Our experiments show that they perform favorably compared with the baseline.Comment: 25 pages; accepted to EC'1