This paper introduces L2F’s (INESC-ID) question/answering system and presents its results in the QA@CLEF07 evaluation task. QA@LF bases its performance on a high-quality deep linguistic analysis of the question, which is strongly based on named entity recognition. However, if a precise analysis is not possible or if no answer is found in previous processed data, the system is also capable of re...

We investigated using the LDC English/Chinese bilingual wordlists for English-Chinese cross language retrieval. It is shown that the Chinese-to-English wordlist can be considered as both a phrase and word dictionary, and is preferable to the English-to-Chinese version in terms of phrase translation and word translation selection. Additional techniques such as frequency-based term selection, tra...

The Layered Domain Class system (LDC) is an experimental natural language processor being developed at Duke University which reached the prototype stage in May of 1983. Its primary goals are (I) to provide English-language retrieval capabilities for structured but unnormaUzed data files created by the user, (2) to allow very complex semantics, in terms of the information directly available from...

Over-dependence of African countries on the West has been reflected in various socioeconomic dimensions. Such dependence has also been reflected in the telecommunications industry of Africa’s LDCs in a bid to solve its low teledensity (number of main telephone lines per one hundred inhabitants) problems. African LDCs are greatly behind other regions of the world in utilizing information and tel...

This paper deals with the semantics of the Evidential marker in Northern Ostyak. As far as I know, the semantics of grammaticalized Evidentials has not been studied in detail for the (eastern) Uralic languages, although in the modal system of some of them the Evidential category plays an important role. I will analyze the different meanings of the Ostyak Evidentials, and suggest that the appare...

The paper featuresMAVE, a knowledge-based system for answer validation through deep linguistic processing and logical inference. A relaxation loop is used to determine a robust indicator of logical entailment. The system not only validates answers directly, but also gathers evidence by proving the original question and comparing results with the answer candidate. This method boosts recall by up...

The ability to classify emotions from speech is beneficial in a number of domains, including the study of human relationships. However, manual classification of emotions from speech is time consuming. Current technology supports the automatic classification of emotions from speech, but these systems have some limitations. In particular, existing systems are trained with a given data set and can...

The Arabic Treebank team at the Linguistic Data Consortium has significantly revised and enhanced its annotation guidelines and procedure over the past year. Improvements were made to both the morphological and syntactic annotation guidelines, and annotators were trained in the new guidelines, focusing on areas of low inter-annotator agreement. The revised guidelines are now being applied in an...

We show that any q-query locally decodable code (LDC) gives a copy of `1 with small distortion in the Banach space of q-linear forms on `Np1×· · ·× ` N pq , provided 1/p1 + · · ·+1/pq ≤ 1 and where k, N , and the distortion are simple functions of the code parameters. We exhibit the copies of `1 by constructing a basis directly from “smooth” LDC decoders, thus bypassing a matching lemma often u...

This paper presents a theoretical model to describe the effects of default risk on international lending to LDC sovereign borrowers. The threat of defaults in international lending is shown to give rise to many characteristics of the syndicated loan market: (1) quantity rationing of loans; (2) LDC policies designed to enhance creditworthiness; (3) prevalence of short maturities on international...