INEX Tweet Contextualization Task: Evaluation, Results and Lesson Learned

Microblogging platforms such as Twitter are increasingly used for on-line client and market analysis. This motivated the proposal of a new track at CLEF INEX lab of Tweet Contextualization. The objective of this task was to help a user to understand a tweet by providing him with a short explanatory summary (500 words). This summary should be built automatically using resources like Wikipedia and generated by extracting relevant passages and aggregating them into a coherent summary. Running for four years, results show that the best systems combine NLP techniques with more traditional methods. More precisely the best performing systems combine passage retrieval, sentence segmentation and scoring, named entity recognition, text part-of-speech (POS) analysis, anaphora detection, diversity content measure as well as sentence reordering. This paper provides a full summary report on the four-year long task. While yearly overviews focused on system results, in this paper we provide a detailed report on the approaches proposed by the participants and which can be considered as the state of the art for this task. As an important result from the 4 years competition, we also describe the open access resources that have been built and collected. The evaluation measures for automatic summarization designed in DUC or MUC were not appropriate to evaluate tweet contextualization, we explain why and depict in detailed the LogSim measure used to evaluate informativeness of produced contexts or summaries. Finally, we also mention the lessons we learned and that it is worth considering when designing a task

Vers une représentation du contexte thématique en Recherche d'Information

Quand des humains cherchent des informations au sein de bases de connaissancesou de collections de documents, ils utilisent un système de recherche d information(SRI) faisant office d interface. Les utilisateurs doivent alors transmettre au SRI unereprésentation de leur besoin d information afin que celui-ci puisse chercher des documentscontenant des informations pertinentes. De nos jours, la représentation du besoind information est constituée d un petit ensemble de mots-clés plus souvent connu sousla dénomination de requête . Or, quelques mots peuvent ne pas être suffisants pourreprésenter précisément et efficacement l état cognitif complet d un humain par rapportà son besoin d information initial. Sans une certaine forme de contexte thématiquecomplémentaire, le SRI peut ne pas renvoyer certains documents pertinents exprimantdes concepts n étant pas explicitement évoqués dans la requête.Dans cette thèse, nous explorons et proposons différentes méthodes statistiques, automatiqueset non supervisées pour la représentation du contexte thématique de larequête. Plus spécifiquement, nous cherchons à identifier les différents concepts implicitesd une requête formulée par un utilisateur sans qu aucune action de sa part nesoit nécessaire. Nous expérimentons pour cela l utilisation et la combinaison de différentessources d information générales représentant les grands types d informationauxquels nous sommes confrontés quotidiennement sur internet. Nous tirons égalementparti d algorithmes de modélisation thématique probabiliste (tels que l allocationde Dirichlet latente) dans le cadre d un retour de pertinence simulé. Nous proposonspar ailleurs une méthode permettant d estimer conjointement le nombre de conceptsimplicites d une requête ainsi que l ensemble de documents pseudo-pertinent le plusapproprié afin de modéliser ces concepts. Nous évaluons nos approches en utilisantquatre collections de test TREC de grande taille. En annexes, nous proposons égalementune approche de contextualisation de messages courts exploitant des méthodesde recherche d information et de résumé automatiqueWhen searching for information within knowledge bases or document collections,humans use an information retrieval system (IRS). So that it can retrieve documentscontaining relevant information, users have to provide the IRS with a representationof their information need. Nowadays, this representation of the information need iscomposed of a small set of keywords often referred to as the query . A few wordsmay however not be sufficient to accurately and effectively represent the complete cognitivestate of a human with respect to her initial information need. A query may notcontain sufficient information if the user is searching for some topic in which she is notconfident at all. Hence, without some kind of context, the IRS could simply miss somenuances or details that the user did not or could not provide in query.In this thesis, we explore and propose various statistic, automatic and unsupervisedmethods for representing the topical context of the query. More specifically, we aim toidentify the latent concepts of a query without involving the user in the process norrequiring explicit feedback. We experiment using and combining several general informationsources representing the main types of information we deal with on a dailybasis while browsing theWeb.We also leverage probabilistic topic models (such as LatentDirichlet Allocation) in a pseudo-relevance feedback setting. Besides, we proposea method allowing to jointly estimate the number of latent concepts of a query andthe set of pseudo-relevant feedback documents which is the most suitable to modelthese concepts. We evaluate our approaches using four main large TREC test collections.In the appendix of this thesis, we also propose an approach for contextualizingshort messages which leverages both information retrieval and automatic summarizationtechniquesAVIGNON-Bib. numérique (840079901) / SudocSudocFranceF

Geographic information extraction from texts

A large volume of unstructured texts, containing valuable geographic information, is available online. This information – provided implicitly or explicitly – is useful not only for scientific studies (e.g., spatial humanities) but also for many practical applications (e.g., geographic information retrieval). Although large progress has been achieved in geographic information extraction from texts, there are still unsolved challenges and issues, ranging from methods, systems, and data, to applications and privacy. Therefore, this workshop will provide a timely opportunity to discuss the recent advances, new ideas, and concepts but also identify research gaps in geographic information extraction