years and sixth months. The I.Qs. ranged from 50 to 110 with a median I.Q. of 70. There were 90 children with a mental age between eight and nine years and 110 children with a mental age between nine and ten years. The actual responses given by the children were taken down in shorthand by the examiner. An alphabetical tabulation was then prepared, making it possible to ascertain how many times ...

We compare different query formulation strategies and expansion based on lexical affinities in the context of passage retrieval. Our method to expand the queries using lexical affinities replaces only the missing terms from the original query in candidate passages while scoring them. The replacement term’s affinity with the missing term is used to weight the substitution, and the degree of affi...

This paper reports about an effort to build a large-scale call router able to reliably distinguish among 250 call reasons. Because training data from the specific application (Target) domain was not available, the statistical classifier was built using more than 300,000 transcribed and annotated utterances from related, but different, domains. Several tuning cycles including three re-annotation...

This is a report of the Multimedia Understanding Group participation in TRECVID-2010, where we submitted full runs for the Semantic Indexing (SIN) task. Our submission aims at experimentally evaluating three research items, that are important for work that is currently in progress. First, we examine the use of bag-of-words audio features for video concept detection, with noisy and/or low-qualit...

This paper tackles the problem of recognizing characters in images of natural scenes. In particular, we focus on recognizing characters in situations that would traditionally not be handled well by OCR techniques. We present an annotated database of images containing English and Kannada characters. The database comprises of images of street scenes taken in Bangalore, India using a standard came...

Given a target word wi to be disambiguated, we define a class of local contexts for wi such that the sense of wi is univocally determined. We call such local contexts sense discriminative and represent them with sense discriminative (SD) patterns of lexico-syntactic features. We describe an algorithm for the automatic acquisition of minimal SD patterns based on training data in SemCor. We have ...

Statistical ranking methods based on centroid vector (profile) extracted from external knowledge have become widely adopted in the top definitional QA systems in TREC 2003 and 2004. In these approaches, terms in the centroid vector are treated as a bag of words based on the independent assumption. To relax this assumption, this paper proposes a novel language model-based answer reranking method...

This work examines a novel method of developing features to use for machine learning of sentiment analysis and related tasks. This task is frequently approached using a “Bag of Words” representation – one feature for each word encountered in the training data – which can easily involve thousands of features. This paper describes a set of compact features developed by learning scores for words, ...