An analysis of machine translation errors on the effectiveness of an Arabic-English QA system

The aim of this paper is to investigate how much the effectiveness of a Question Answering (QA) system was affected by the performance of Machine Translation (MT) based question translation. Nearly 200 questions were selected from TREC QA tracks and ran through a question answering system. It was able to answer 42.6% of the questions correctly in a monolingual run. These questions were then translated manually from English into Arabic and back into English using an MT system, and then re-applied to the QA system. The system was able to answer 10.2% of the translated questions. An analysis of what sort of translation error affected which questions was conducted, concluding that factoid type questions are less prone to translation error than others

The effects of topic familiarity on user search behavior in question answering systems

This paper reports on experiments that attempt to characterize the relationship between users and their knowledge of the search topic in a Question Answering (QA) system. It also investigates user search behavior with respect to the length of answers presented by a QA system. Two lengths of answers were compared; snippets (one to two sentences of text) and exact answers. A user test was conducted, 92 factoid questions were judged by 44 participants, to explore the participants’ preferences, feelings and opinions about QA system tasks. The conclusions drawn from the results were that participants preferred and obtained higher accuracy in finding answers from the snippets set. However, accuracy varied according to users’ topic familiarity; users were only substantially helped by the wider context of a snippet if they were already familiar with the topic of the question, without such familiarity, users were about as accurate at locating answers from the snippets as they were in exact set

Relevance Judgments between TREC and Non-TREC Assessors

This paper investigates the agreement of relevance assessments between official TREC judgments and those generated from an interactive IR experiment. Results show that 63% of documents judged relevant by our users matched official TREC judgments. Several factors contributed to differences in the agreements: the number of retrieved relevant documents; the number of relevant documents judged; system effectiveness per topic and the ranking of relevant documents

The Relationship between IR Effectiveness Measures and User Satisfaction

This paper presents an experimental study of users assessing the quality of Google web search results. In particular we look at how users' satisfaction correlates with the effectiveness of Google as quantified by IR measures such as precision and the suite of Cumulative Gain measures (CG, DCG, NDCG). Results indicate strong correlation between users' satisfaction, CG and precision, moderate correlation with DCG, with perhaps surprisingly negligible correlation with NDCG. The reasons for the low correlation with NDCG are examined

Users' effectiveness and satisfaction for image retrieval

This paper presents results from an initial user study exploring the relationship between system effectiveness as quantified by traditional measures such as precision and recall, and users’ effectiveness and satisfaction of the results. The tasks involve finding images for recall-based tasks. It was concluded that no direct relationship between system effectiveness and users’ performance could be proven (as shown by previous research). People learn to adapt to a system regardless of its effectiveness. This study recommends that a combination of attributes (e.g. system effectiveness, user performance and satisfaction) is a more effective way to evaluate interactive retrieval systems. Results of this study also reveal that users are more concerned with accuracy than coverage of the search results

Arabic users' satisfaction with the online information as obtained from Google

This paper reports an experimental study that evaluates the retrieval effectiveness of Google in response to 104 Arabic queries. The study investigates Arabic users’ satisfaction with the accuracy and coverage of search results. Analysis of results indicates that Arabic users are not highly satisfied with the results of Google

Device Closure of Superior Sinus Venosus Atrial Septal Defects: A single centre experience

Sinus venosus atrial septal defects present a wide variety of anatomical features and are frequently associated with partial anomalous pulmonary venous drainage of one or more right pulmonary veins. Surgical correction used to be the standard treatment. In recent times, transcatheter correction of superior sinus venosus atrial septal defects has come into vogue. The transcatheter closure of these defects with covered stents at a tertiary care centre in Oman between 2018 and 2023 is reported. Keywords: Heart Septal Defects, Atrial; Vena Cava, Superior; Endovascular Procedures; Stents; Cardiac Catheterization; Echocardiography, Transesophageal; Oman

Targeted disruption of the Kcnj5 gene in the female mouse lowers aldosterone levels.

Aldosterone is released from adrenal zona glomerulosa (ZG) cells and plays an important role in Na and K homoeostasis. Mutations in the human inwardly rectifying K channel CNJ type (KCNJ) 5 (KCNJ5) gene encoding the G-coupled inwardly rectifying K channel 4 (GIRK4) cause abnormal aldosterone secretion and hypertension. To better understand the role of wild-type (WT) GIRK4 in regulating aldosterone release, we have looked at aldosterone secretion in a Kcnj5 knockout (KO) mouse. We found that female but not male KO mice have reduced aldosterone levels compared with WT female controls, but higher levels of aldosterone after angiotensin II (Ang-II) stimulation. These differences could not be explained by sex differences in aldosterone synthase (Cyp11B2) gene expression in the mouse adrenal. Using RNAseq analysis to compare WT and KO adrenals, we showed that females also have a much larger set of differentially expressed adrenal genes than males (395 compared with 7). Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA) of this gene set suggested that peroxisome proliferator activated receptor (PPAR) nuclear receptors regulated aldosterone production and altered signalling in the female KO mouse, which could explain the reduced aldosterone secretion. We tested this hypothesis in H295R adrenal cells and showed that the selective PPARα agonist fenofibrate can stimulate aldosterone production and induce Cyp11b2. Dosing mice in vivo produced similar results. Together our data show that Kcnj5 is important for baseline aldosterone secretion, but its importance is sex-limited at least in the mouse. It also highlights a novel regulatory pathway for aldosterone secretion through PPARα that may have translational potential in human hyperaldosteronism

The Sinus Venosus Veno-Venous Bridge: Not a septal defect

This review provides an update on the morphology of the sinus venosus defect. It was earlier believed that a 'common wall' separated the right pulmonary veins from the superior caval vein. In the sinus venosus defects, this wall was absent. Current evidence shows that the superior rim of the oval fossa, rather than forming a second septum or representing a common wall, is an infolding between the walls of the caval veins and the right pulmonary veins. The sinus venosus defect is caused by the anomalous connection of one or more pulmonary veins to a systemic vein. However, the pulmonary vein(s) retain their left atrial connections, leading to a veno-venous bridge that allows interatrial shunting outside the oval fossa. True atrial septal defects are located within the oval fossa or in the anteo-inferior buttress, while sinus venosus defects, ostium defects and coronary sinus defects are morphologically distinct from them. Keywords: Heart Septal Defects, Atrial; Diagnostic Imaging; Sinoatrial Node; Vena Cava, Superior