This work evaluates the applicability of currently available research tools to the problem of cross lingual QA. We establish a task baseline by combining a cross lingual IR system with a monolingual QA system in a very short amount of time. A higher precision strategy involves applying the monolingual QA system to an automatically translated question, assumed to be correct. A higher coverage st...

This paper describes our participation in the TREC 2013 Microblog real-time search task. We utilized a query expansion approach and submitted three runs: one without using any form of external evidence and the remaining two runs utilize extended abstracts of Wikipedia articles.

These working notes describe the system developed by the WISTUD team for the Microblog track. We evaluated the suitability of semantic technologies for the search task, in particular, query expansion with named entities that are deduced by means of a topic-based profiling process. The results indicate the feasibility of the approach: for half of the topics, at P@30, our top performing automatic...

In this paper, we reported some experiments conducted by our members in the SIG team at the IRIT laboratory in the University of Toulouse within the context of the medical information retrieval (IR) task. As in our previous participation in ImageCLEF, in 2011, our research focuses on the case-based retrieval task. We compared the performance of different state-of-the-art term weighting models f...

We report our experiments in TREC 2009 Million Query track and Adhoc task of Web track. Our goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of axiomatic retrieval models on the large data collection. Axiomatic approaches to information retrieval have been recently proposed and studied. The basic idea is to search for retrieval functions that can satisfy all the reasonable retrieval constraints. Previous ...

This paper explores the use of texts that are related to an image collection, also known as collateral texts, for building thesauri in specialist domains to aid in image retrieval. Corpus linguistic and information extraction methods are used for identifying key terms and semantic relationships in specialist texts that may be used for query expansion purposes. The specialist domain context impo...

This paper describes and evaluates vector-space, probabilistic and language IR models used to retrieve news articles from a corpus written in the French language. Based on three CLEF test-collections and 151 topics, we analyze the retrieval effectiveness of these approaches and analyze the poor retrieval results of hard topics. An appropriate robust evaluation is not easy because both the mean ...

We present an adaptive translation quality estimation (QE) method to predict the human-targeted translation error rate (HTER) for a document-specific machine translation model. We first introduce features derived internal to the translation decoding process as well as externally from the source sentence analysis. We show the effectiveness of such features in both classification and regression o...

Hummingbird participated in the named page finding task of the TREC 2002 Web Track (find the named page in 18GB from the .GOV domain) and the monolingual Arabic topic relevance task of the TREC 2002 Cross-Language Track (find all relevant documents in 869MB of Arabic news data). In the named page finding task, SearchServer returned the named page in the first 10 rows for more than 80% of the 15...

This article investigates how consistent different newspapers are in their choice of words when writing about the same news events. News articles on the same news events were taken from three Finnish newspapers and compared in regard to their central concepts and words representing the concepts in the news texts. Consistency figures were calculated for each set of three articles (the total numb...