The paper describes how to use inference networks to solve two problems in searching multiple collections: collection selection and result merging. The eeectiveness of the approaches is demonstrated with the INQUERY system and 3 gigabyte TREC collections.

BACKGROUND Real-Time quantitative PCR is an important tool in research and clinical settings. Here, we describe two new approaches that broaden the scope of real-time quantitative PCR; namely, run-internal mini standard curves (RIMS) and direct real-time relative quantitative PCR (drqPCR). RIMS are an efficient alternative to traditional standard curves and provide both run-specific and target-...

In the TREC 2005 Spam Evaluation Track, a number of popular spam filters – all owing their heritage to Graham’s A Plan for Spam – did quite well. Machine learning techniques reported elsewhere to perform well were hardly represented in the participating filters, and not represented at all in the better results. A non-traditional technique Prediction by Partial Matching (PPM) – performed excepti...

The concept of multipath invariance asserts that there exist properties and/or regions of the code correlation function that do not change as a function of the multipath amplitude, delay, phase and phase rate. These Multipath Invariant (MPI) points exist at the plateaus of the correlation function. Previous experiments have demonstrated that despite low correlation power, it is possible to impl...

Several groups in IBM’s Research Division have participated in TREC, with differing goals. This chapter summarizes some of their activities and the conclusions they reached. It should be emphasized that there was no central plan in these activities – individual groups decided to participate in the way that made sense to them at the time. In effect, participation in TREC was a tool they used to ...

This year, we participated for the rst time in TREC, and entered two runs for the main task of the TREC 2001 question answering track. Both runs use a simple baseline component implemented especially for TREC, and a high-level NLP component (called Shapaqa) that uses various NLP tools developed earlier by our group. Shapaqa imposes many linguistic constraints on potential answers strings which ...

I. INTRODUCTION For TREC 2003 the MultiText Project focused its efforts on the Genomics and Robust tracks. We also submitted passage-retrieval runs for the QA track. For the Genomics Track primary task, we used an amalgamation of retrieval and query expansion techniques, including tiering, term rewriting and pseudo-relevance feedback. For the Robust Track, we examined the impact of pseudo-relev...

Narrowband receivers are more robust to narrowband interference and to GPS signal faults, but they tend to have relatively poor multipath performance. Few current techniques are capable of mitigating multipath in these receivers. The Tracking Error Compensator (TrEC) however operates independent of the receiver’s precorrelation bandwidth (PCB) using the concept of Multipath Invariance (MPI). Th...

The Document Understanding Conference (DUC) uses TREC data as a test bed for algorithms for single and multiple document summarization. For the 2003 DUC task of choosing relevant and novel sentences, we tested a system based on a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). In this work, we use variations of this system on the tasks of the TREC Novelty Track for finding relevant and new sentences. Our complete i...

This paper presents a novel language-independent question/answering (Q/A) system based on natural language processing techniques, shallow query understanding, dynamic sliding window techniques, and statistical proximity distribution matching techniques. The performance of the proposed system using the latest Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-8) data was comparable to results reported by the top T...