Short queries, natural language and spoken documents retrieval: experiments at Glasgow University

This paper contains a description of the methodology and results of the three TREC submissions made by the Glasgow IR group (glair). In addition to submitting to the ad hoc task, submissions were also made to NLP track and to the SDR speech `pre-track'. Results from our submissions reveal that some of our approaches have performed poorly (i.e. ad hoc and NLP track), but we have also had success particularly in the speech track through use of transcript merging. We also highlight and discuss a seemingly unusual result where retrieval based on the very short versions of the TREC ad hoc queries produced better retrieval effectiveness than retrieval based on more `normal' length queries

Structured document retrieval using Dempster-Shafer's Theory of Evidence: Implementation and evaluation

Documents are often structured, for example into chapters, each with sections, and so on. The representation of structured documents should provide for a focussed retrieval of those components, individual or aggregated, of the documents that are most relevant to an information need. In previous work, we developed a model for the representation and the retrieval of structured documents. This model is based on Dempster-Shafer's theory of evidence. In this paper, we propose an implementation of our model to evaluate its effectiveness. We are particularly interested in studying whether the representation of aggregated components within the Dempster-Shafer theory allows for focussed retrieval of structured documents. We accomplish a basic implementation so that we can concentrate solely on evaluating the appropriateness of the representation. We carried out a number of experiments which indicate that the use of the DempsterShafer theory in modelling the representation of aggrega..

Country survey military expenditure in Cyprus

Cyprus, a small island state, gained independence from British colonial rule in 1960. For more that half its history as an independent state Cyprus has been under occupation following the 1974 Turkish invasion. Despite the fact that it has faced war, invasion and occupation, Cyprus has allocated a comparatively small proportion of its national income to defence. The average defence burden—military expenditure as a share of GDP—during 1964-98 was around 2.5%. However, as a result of a substantial shift in defence policy during the past decade or so, the defence burden during the 1990s has increased, averaging about 4% of GDP as Cyprus decided to implement an extensive military modernization program aiming to present a more credible military deterrence vis-a-vis Turkey. Empirical estimations of a demand function for Cypriot military expenditure suggest that it is positively affected by alliance spillins and external military threat.Military expenditure, Cyprus,