Thematic Annotation: extracting concepts out of documents

Contrarily to standard approaches to topic annotation, the technique used in this work does not centrally rely on some sort of -- possibly statistical -- keyword extraction. In fact, the proposed annotation algorithm uses a large scale semantic database -- the EDR Electronic Dictionary -- that provides a concept hierarchy based on hyponym and hypernym relations. This concept hierarchy is used to generate a synthetic representation of the document by aggregating the words present in topically homogeneous document segments into a set of concepts best preserving the document's content. This new extraction technique uses an unexplored approach to topic selection. Instead of using semantic similarity measures based on a semantic resource, the later is processed to extract the part of the conceptual hierarchy relevant to the document content. Then this conceptual hierarchy is searched to extract the most relevant set of concepts to represent the topics discussed in the document. Notice that this algorithm is able to extract generic concepts that are not directly present in the document.Comment: Technical report EPFL/LIA. 81 pages, 16 figure

Reinforced concrete frame structure of shopping centre

Předmětem diplomové práce bylo navrhnout vybrané prvky železobetonové montované skeletové konstrukce jednopodlažního nákupního centra. Vybral jsem si nejvíce zatěžovaný rám na zadané konstrukci, kde jsem předpokládal nejvíce namáhané prvky, které jsem následně navrhnul. Veškeré podklady a výpočty jsou doloženy v části B2 statický výpočet mé diplomové práce.The point of my diploma thesis was design elements of reinforced concrete frame structures mounted single – storey mall.I choose the most exposed to the specified longitudinal frame structure, where I assumed the most highly stressed elements, which I subsequently designed. All documents and calculations are illustrated in part B2 of my diploma thesis.

INTRODUCING RESET PATTERNS: AN EXTENSION TO A RAPID DIALOGUE PROTOTYPING METHODOLOGY

This paper exposes the Rapid Dialogue Prototyping Methodology [1, 2, 3], a methodology allowing the easy and automatic derivation of an ad hoc dialogue management system from a specific task description. The goal of the produced manager is to provide the user with a dialogue based interface to easily perform the target task. In addition, reset patterns, an extension of the prototyping methodology allowing a more flexible interaction with the user, are proposed in order to improve the efficiency of the dialogue. Reset patterns are justified and theoretically validated by the definition of an average gain function to optimize. Two approaches to such an optimization are presented, focusing on a different aspect of the gain function. Eventually, experimental results are presented and a conclusion is drawn on the usefulness of the new feature

Explicit Trade-off and Prospective Analysis in Electronic Catalogs

We consider example-critiquing systems that help people search for their most preferred item in a large electronic catalog. We analyze how such systems can help users in the framework of four existing example-critiquing approaches (RABBIT, FindMe, Incremental Critiquing, ATA and AptDecision). In a second part we consider the use of several types of explicit passive analysis to guide the users in their search, specially in either underconstrained or overconstrained situations. We suggest that such a user-centric search system together with the right explicit passive analysis makes the users feel more confident in their decision and reduces session time and cognitive effort. Finally we present the result of a pilot study

Web Text Retrieval with a P2P Query-Driven Index

In this paper, we present a query-driven indexing/retrieval strategy for efficient full text retrieval from large document collections distributed within a structured P2P network. Our indexing strategy is based on two important properties: (1) the generated distributed index stores posting lists for carefully chosen indexing term combinations, and (2) the posting lists containing too many document references are truncated to a bounded number of their top-ranked elements. These two properties guarantee acceptable storage and bandwidth requirements, essentially because the number of indexing term combinations remains scalable and the transmitted posting lists never exceed a constant size. However, as the number of generated term combinations can still become quite large, we also use term statistics extracted from available query logs to index only such combinations that are frequently present in user queries. Thus, by avoiding the generation of superfluous indexing term combinations, we achieve an additional substantial reduction in bandwidth and storage consumption. As a result, the generated distributed index corresponds to a constantly evolving query-driven indexing structure that efficiently follows current information needs of the users. More precisely, our theoretical analysis and experimental results indicate that, at the price of a marginal loss in retrieval quality for rare queries, the generated index size and network traffic remain manageable even for web-size document collections. Furthermore, our experiments show that at the same time the achieved retrieval quality is fully comparable to the one obtained with a state-of-the-art centralized query engine

Rapid Dialogue Prototyping Methodology

The objective of this document is to present a rapid dialogue prototyping methodology developed at the Artificial Intelligent Laboratory - Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Concretely, the rapid dialogue prototyping methodology is decomposed into 5 consecutive main steps: (1) producing the task model; (2) deriving the initial dialogue model; (3) using a Wizard-of-Oz experiment to instantiate the initial dialogue model; (4) using an internal field test to refine the dialogue model; and (5) using an external field test to evaluate the final dialogue model

Explicit Passive Analysis in Electronic Catalogs

We consider example-critiquing systems that help people search for their most preferred item in a large catalog. We compare 6 existing approaches in terms of user or system-centric, implicit or explicit use of preferences, assumptions used and their behavior in underconstrained and overconstrained situations. We consider several types of explicit passive analysis to guide the users in their search, that is, information offered to the user about his current search but without any action taken by the system. We suggest that such a user-centric system together with the right analysis makes the users feel more confident in their decision and reduces session time and cognitive effort. We have implemented a prototype to evaluate the impact of explicit passive analysis in (1) a query-building and (2) a preference-based approach

Tool for robust stochastic parsing using optimal maximum coverage

This report presents a robust syntactic parser that is able to return a "correct" derivation tree even if the grammar cannot generate the input sentence. The following two step solution is prop osed: the finest corresponding most probable optimal maximum coverage is generated first, then the trees from this coverage are glued into one resulting tree. We discuss the implementation of this method with the SLP toolkit and libkp library