We describe our approach to the ImageCLEF Photo and WikiMediaMM 2008 tasks. The novelty of our method consists of combining image segment based image retrieval with our text based approach. We rank text hits by our own Okapi BM25 based information retrieval system and image similarities by using a feature vector describing the visual content of image segments. Images were segmented by a home de...

This paper describes details of our participation in the NTCIR-6 Chinese-to-Chinese Question Answering task. We use the “retrieval plus extraction approach” to get answers for questions. We first split the documents into short passages, and then retrieve potentially relevant passages for a question, and finally extract named entity answers from the most relevant passages. For question type iden...

This paper describes the work for our participation in the NTCIR-5 Chinese to Chinese Question Answering task. Our strategy is based on the “Retrieval plus Extraction” approach. We first retrieve relevant documents, then retrieve short passages from the above documents, and finally extract named entity answers from the most relevant passages. For question type identification, we use simple heur...

This paper reports on the participation of ITC-irst in the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) of 2001. ITC-irst has taken part to two tracks: the monolingual retrieval task, and the bilingual retrieval task. In both cases, Italian was chosen as the query language, while English was chosen as the document language of the bilingual task. The employed retrieval engine combines scores computed ...

This paper explores the effectiveness of index terms more complex than single words in conventional information retrieval systems. Retrieval is performed in two phases. In the first phase, a conventional retrieval method (the Okapi system) is used and in the second phase, complex index terms such as syntactic relations and single words with part of speech information are introduced to rerank th...

This paper reports on the participation of ITC-irst in the Italian monolingual retrieval track and in the bilingual English-Italian track of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2002. A crosslanguage information retrieval systems is proposed which integrates retrieval and translation scores over the set of N-best translations of the source query. Translations are computed by a statistical...

In this paper, we present some ideas about possible directions of a new interpretation of the Okapi BM25 ranking formula. In particular, we have focused on a full bayesian approach for deriving a smoothed formula that takes into account a-priori knowledge on the probability of terms. In fact, most of the efforts in improving the BM25 were done in capturing the language model (frequencies, lengt...

York University participated in the TREC 2008 Blog track, by introducing two opinion finding features. By initially focusing solely on the sentiment terms found in a document, using two different methods, and not considering the topic relevance, we saw an overall negative impact in the final evaluations. Post-TREC improvements show the necessity of combining opinion weights with the topic relev...