Applying contextual memory cues for retrieval from personal information archives

Advances in digital technologies for information capture combined with massive increases in the capacity of digital storage media mean that it is now possible to capture and store one’s entire life experiences in a Human Digital Memory (HDM). Information can be captured from a myriad of personal information devices including desktop computers, PDAs, digital cameras, video and audio recorders, and various sensors, including GPS, Bluetooth, and biometric devices. These diverse collections of personal information are potentially very valuable, but will only be so if significant information can be reliably retrieved from them. HDMs differ from traditional document collections for which existing search technologies have been developed since users may have poor recollection of contents or even the existence of stored items. Additionally HDM data is highly heterogeneous and unstructured, making it difficult to form search queries. We believe that a Personal Information Management (PIM) system which exploits the context of information capture, and potentially of earlier refinding, can be valuable in effective retrieval from an HDM. We report an investigation into how individuals perform searches of their personal information, and use the outcome of this study to develop an information retrieval (IR) framework for HDM search incorporating the context of document capture. We then describe the creation of a pilot HDM test collection, and initial experiments in retrieval from this collection. Results from these experiments indicate that use of context data can be significantly beneficial to increasing the efficient retrieval of partially recalled items from an HDM

A study of remembered context for information access from personal digital archives

Retrieval from personal archives (or Human Digital Memories (HDMs)) is set to become a significant challenge in information retrieval (IR) research. These archives are unique in that the items in them are personal to the owner and as such the owner may have personal memories associated with the items. It is recognized that the harnessing of an individual’s memories about HDM items can be used as context data (such as user location at the time of item access) to aid retrieval. We present a pilot study, using one subject’s HDM, of remembered context data and its utility in retrieval. Our results explore the types of context data best remembered for different item types and categories over time and show that context appears to become a more important factor in effective HDM IR over time as the subject’s recall of contents declines

Domain-specific query translation for multilingual access to digital libraries

Accurate high-coverage translation is a vital component of reliable cross language information access (CLIR) systems. This is particularly true of access to archives such as Digital Libraries which are often specific to certain domains. While general machine translation (MT) has been shown to be effective for CLIR tasks in information retrieval evaluation workshops, it is not well suited to specialized tasks where domain specific translations are required. We demonstrate that effective query translation in the domain of cultural heritage (CH) can be achieved by augmenting a standard MT system with domain-specific phrase dictionaries automatically mined from the online Wikipedia. Experiments using our hybrid translation system with sample query logs from users of CH websites demonstrate a large improvement in the accuracy of domain specific phrase detection and translation

Using term clouds to represent segment-level semantic content of podcasts

Spoken audio, like any time-continuous medium, is notoriously difficult to browse or skim without support of an interface providing semantically annotated jump points to signal the user where to listen in. Creation of time-aligned metadata by human annotators is prohibitively expensive, motivating the investigation of representations of segment-level semantic content based on transcripts generated by automatic speech recognition (ASR). This paper examines the feasibility of using term clouds to provide users with a structured representation of the semantic content of podcast episodes. Podcast episodes are visualized as a series of sub-episode segments, each represented by a term cloud derived from a transcript generated by automatic speech recognition (ASR). Quality of segment-level term clouds is measured quantitatively and their utility is investigated using a small-scale user study based on human labeled segment boundaries. Since the segment-level clouds generated from ASR-transcripts prove useful, we examine an adaptation of text tiling techniques to speech in order to be able to generate segments as part of a completely automated indexing and structuring system for browsing of spoken audio. Results demonstrate that the segments generated are comparable with human selected segment boundaries

Theology, News and Notes - Vol. 20, No. 02

Theology News & Notes was a theological journal published by Fuller Theological Seminary from 1954 through 2014.https://digitalcommons.fuller.edu/tnn/1046/thumbnail.jp

Theology, News and Notes - Vol. 40, No. 01

Theology News & Notes was a theological journal published by Fuller Theological Seminary from 1954 through 2014.https://digitalcommons.fuller.edu/tnn/1201/thumbnail.jp

G.J.F.: Applying contextual memory cues for retrieval from personal information archives

Advances in digital technologies for information capture combined with massive increases in the capacity of digital storage media mean that it is now possible to capture and store one’s entire life experiences in a Human Digital Memory (HDM). Information can be captured from a myriad of personal information devices including desktop computers, PDAs, digital cameras, video and audio recorders, and various sensors, including GPS, Bluetooth, and biometric devices. These diverse collections of personal information are potentially very valuable, but will only be so if significant information can be reliably retrieved from them. HDMs differ from traditional document collections for which existing search technologies have been developed since users may have poor recollection of contents or even the existence of stored items. Additionally HDM data is highly heterogeneous and unstructured, making it difficult to form search queries. We believe that a Personal Information Management (PIM) system which exploits the context of information capture, and potentially of earlier refinding, can be valuable in effective retrieval from an HDM. We report an investigation into how individuals perform searches of their personal information, and use the outcome of this study to develop an information retrieval (IR) framework for HDM search incorporating the context of document capture. We then describe the creation of a pilot HDM test collection, and initial experiments in retrieval from this collection. Results from these experiments indicate that use of context data can be significantly beneficial to increasing the efficient retrieval of partially recalled items from an HDM

Plantes et Sociétés

Le titre du cliché de la couverture aux Archives nationales d’Aix-en-Provence est « Tananarive. Marché du “Zoma” ; l’herboristerie en plein air. 1940 ». Il s’agit d’un cliché – consultable en ligne sur la base Ulysse – de G. Ramiandrisoa qui s’inscrit dans une série d’une quarantaine de photographies données au Ministère de la France d’Outre-Mer en 1946. Pourquoi les auteurs de ce numéro se sont-ils arrêtés à ce tableau si tananarivien ? N’auraient-ils pas pu s’accommoder d’autres clichés plus anciens ? Celui-ci a en effet quelque chose de contemporain, voire d’actuel, quand on sait la fascination qu’exercent médecine traditionnelle ou phytopraticiens. Cette « herboristerie » est à la croisée de deux mondes, ceux que P. Boiteau évoque en 1942, lors d’une exposition consacrée aux plantes médicinales, à Tsimbazaza. C’est tout l’art de Ramiandrisoa que de le montrer d’un bloc. Ramiandrisoa fixe les attitudes de quelques inconnus en ce haut lieu, où, il n’y a pas si longtemps, avant l’explosion du Zoma en de multiples marchés excentrés, se vendaient encore les simples (rues Andrianampoinimerina, Escande, Ranavalona Ire)