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

Question Answering on Knowledge Bases and Text using Universal Schema and Memory Networks

Existing question answering methods infer answers either from a knowledge base or from raw text. While knowledge base (KB) methods are good at answering compositional questions, their performance is often affected by the incompleteness of the KB. Au contraire, web text contains millions of facts that are absent in the KB, however in an unstructured form. {\it Universal schema} can support reasoning on the union of both structured KBs and unstructured text by aligning them in a common embedded space. In this paper we extend universal schema to natural language question answering, employing \emph{memory networks} to attend to the large body of facts in the combination of text and KB. Our models can be trained in an end-to-end fashion on question-answer pairs. Evaluation results on \spades fill-in-the-blank question answering dataset show that exploiting universal schema for question answering is better than using either a KB or text alone. This model also outperforms the current state-of-the-art by 8.5 $F_1$ points.\footnote{Code and data available in \url{https://rajarshd.github.io/TextKBQA}}Comment: ACL 2017 (short

TRECVID 2008 - goals, tasks, data, evaluation mechanisms and metrics

The TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation (TRECVID) 2008 is a TREC-style video analysis and retrieval evaluation, the goal of which remains to promote progress in content-based exploitation of digital video via open, metrics-based evaluation. Over the last 7 years this effort has yielded a better understanding of how systems can effectively accomplish such processing and how one can reliably benchmark their performance. In 2008, 77 teams (see Table 1) from various research organizations --- 24 from Asia, 39 from Europe, 13 from North America, and 1 from Australia --- participated in one or more of five tasks: high-level feature extraction, search (fully automatic, manually assisted, or interactive), pre-production video (rushes) summarization, copy detection, or surveillance event detection. The copy detection and surveillance event detection tasks are being run for the first time in TRECVID. This paper presents an overview of TRECVid in 2008

Regulate or Be Regulated: Why Professional Landmen Should Be Proactive in Protecting the Integrity of Their Occupation

In most states, the landman profession is unregulated and free to define itself. Work performed by landmen often flirts with the practice of law, but under Texas law much of the work that landmen perform is excepted from the unlicensed practice of law. Historically, the American Association of Professional Landmen (“AAPL”) has been influential in guaranteeing that this exception stays available to landmen all over the United States and that landmen are not subject to licensing requirements in the states they work in. In light of the recent, unsuccessful attempt by the Texas legislature to regulate landmen, this Article will analyze whether or not regulation would be beneficial for landmen, the energy industry, and the general public. This Article will first discuss the historical roots and qualities of landmen. It will then address the duties and job functions of landmen. Section III will analyze why both the general public and the energy industry itself may distrust landmen and the job functions they perform. Section IV provides a contrast between landmen and the practice of law, in addition to identifying how the landman profession is relatable to the real estate profession. These comparisons help highlight the anomaly of the lack of regulation of landmen, even though there are similarities among these professions. Section V addresses the lack of regulation over landmen, including licensing theories, the regulation of comparable professions, and the licensure requirements proposed in Texas in 2009. Finally, Section VI presents examples of what other states have done to promote regulation, summarizes other regulatory recommendations, and ends by proposing regulations that Texas could enact to regulate landmen

A comparative approach to Question Answering Systems

In this paper I will analyze three different algorithms and approaches to implement Question Answering Systems (QA-Systems). I will analyze the efficiency, strengths, and weaknesses of multiple algorithms by explaining them in detail and comparing them with each other. The overarching aim of this thesis is to explore ideas that can be used to create a truly open context QA-System. Open context QA-Systems remain an open problem. The various algorithms and approaches presented in this work will be focused on complex questions. Complex questions are usually verbose and the context of the question is equally important to answer the query as is the question itself. Such questions represent an interesting problem in the field because they can be answered and written in a number of distinct ways. Also, the answer structure is not always the same and the QA-System needs to compensate for this. The analysis of complex questions differ between contexts. Contexts are the topic to which a complex question belongs, e.g. Biology, literature, etc… The analysis of the answer also differs according to the corpus used. Corpus is a set of documents, belonging to a specific context, where we can find the answer to a specified question. I will start by explaining various algorithms and approaches. I will then analyze its different parts. Finally, I will present some ideas on how to implement QA-Systems

More on the Ethics of E-Discovery: Predictive Coding and Other Forms of Computer-Assisted Review

This paper was circulated at a TAR conference hosted by the Bolch Judicial Institute (then the Center for Judicial Studies) in 2015. With the author\u27s permission, the paper has been archived in the scholarship repository. This document does not represent the views of Duke Law School, Duke University, their faculties, or any other organization