Paul D. Clough

Modelling vague places with knowledge from the Web

Place names are often used to describe and to enquire about geographical information. It is common for users to employ vernacular names that have vague spatial extent and which do not correspond to the official and administrative place name terminology recorded within typical gazetteers. There is a need therefore to enrich gazetteers with knowledge of such vague places and hence improve the quality of place name‐based information retrieval. Here we describe a method for modelling vague places using knowledge harvested from Web pages. It is found that vague place names are frequently accompanied in text by the names of more precise co‐located places that lie within the extent of the target vague place. Density surface modelling of the frequency of co‐occurrence of such names provides an effective method of representing the inherent uncertainty of the extent of the vague place while also enabling approximate crisp boundaries to be derived from contours if required. The method is evaluated using both precise and vague places. The use of the resulting approximate boundaries is demonstrated using an experimental geographical search engine.

Multilingual Information Access for Text, Speech and Images

What Happened in CLEF 2004?.- What Happened in CLEF 2004?.- I. Ad Hoc Text Retrieval Tracks.- CLEF 2004: Ad Hoc Track Overview and Results Analysis.- Selection and Merging Strategies for Multilingual Information Retrieval.- Using Surface-Syntactic Parser and Deviation from Randomness.- Cross-Language Retrieval Using HAIRCUT at CLEF 2004.- Experiments on Statistical Approaches to Compensate for Limited Linguistic Resources.- Application of Variable Length N-Gram Vectors to Monolingual and Bilingual Information Retrieval.- Integrating New Languages in a Multilingual Search System Based on a Deep Linguistic Analysis.- IR-n r2: Using Normalized Passages.- Using COTS Search Engines and Custom Query Strategies at CLEF.- Report on Thomson Legal and Regulatory Experiments at CLEF-2004.- Effective Translation, Tokenization and Combination for Cross-Lingual Retrieval.- Two-Stage Refinement of Transitive Query Translation with English Disambiguation for Cross-Language Information Retrieval: An Experiment at CLEF 2004.- Dictionary-Based Amharic - English Information Retrieval.- Dynamic Lexica for Query Translation.- SINAI at CLEF 2004: Using Machine Translation Resources with a Mixed 2-Step RSV Merging Algorithm.- Mono- and Crosslingual Retrieval Experiments at the University of Hildesheim.- University of Chicago at CLEF2004: Cross-Language Text and Spoken Document Retrieval.- UB at CLEF2004: Cross Language Information Retrieval Using Statistical Language Models.- MIRACLEs Hybrid Approach to Bilingual and Monolingual Information Retrieval.- Searching a Russian Document Collection Using English, Chinese and Japanese Queries.- Dublin City University at CLEF 2004: Experiments in Monolingual, Bilingual and Multilingual Retrieval.- Finnish, Portuguese and Russian Retrieval with Hummingbird SearchServerTM at CLEF 2004.- Data Fusion for Effective European Monolingual Information Retrieval.- The XLDB Group at CLEF 2004.- The University of Glasgow at CLEF 2004: French Monolingual Information Retrieval with Terrier.- II. Domain-Specific Document Retrieval.- The Domain-Specific Track in CLEF 2004: Overview of the Results and Remarks on the Assessment Process.- University of Hagen at CLEF 2004: Indexing and Translating Concepts for the GIRT Task.- IRIT at CLEF 2004: The English GIRT Task.- Ricoh at CLEF 2004.- GIRT and the Use of Subject Metadata for Retrieval.- III. Interactive Cross-Language Information Retrieval.- iCLEF 2004 Track Overview: Pilot Experiments in Interactive Cross-Language Question Answering.- Interactive Cross-Language Question Answering: Searching Passages Versus Searching Documents.- Improving Interaction with the User in Cross-Language Question Answering Through Relevant Domains and Syntactic Semantic Patterns.- Cooperation, Bookmarking, and Thesaurus in Interactive Bilingual Question Answering.- Summarization Design for Interactive Cross-Language Question Answering.- Interactive and Bilingual Question Answering Using Term Suggestion and Passage Retrieval.- IV. Multiple Language Question Answering.- Overview of the CLEF 2004 Multilingual Question Answering Track.- A Question Answering System for French.- Cross-Language French-English Question Answering Using the DLT System at CLEF 2004.- Experiments on Robust NL Question Interpretation and Multi-layered Document Annotation for a Cross-Language Question/Answering System.- Making Stone Soup: Evaluating a Recall-Oriented Multi-stream Question Answering System for Dutch.- The DIOGENE Question Answering System at CLEF-2004.- Cross-Lingual Question Answering Using Off-the-Shelf Machine Translation.- Bulgarian-English Question Answering: Adaptation of Language Resources.- Answering French Questions in English by Exploiting Results from Several Sources of Information.- Finnish as Source Language in Bilingual Question Answering.- miraQA: Experiments with Learning Answer Context Patterns from the Web.- Question Answering for Spanish Supported by Lexical Context Annotation.- Question Answering Using Sentence Parsing and Semantic Network Matching.- First Evaluation of Esfinge - A Question Answering System for Portuguese.- University of Evora in QA@CLEF-2004.- COLE Experiments at QA@CLEF 2004 Spanish Monolingual Track.- Does English Help Question Answering in Spanish?.- The TALP-QA System for Spanish at CLEF 2004: Structural and Hierarchical Relaxing of Semantic Constraints.- ILC-UniPI Italian QA.- Question Answering Pilot Task at CLEF 2004.- Evaluation of Complex Temporal Questions in CLEF-QA.- V. Cross-Language Retrieval in Image Collections.- The CLEF 2004 Cross-Language Image Retrieval Track.- Caption and Query Translation for Cross-Language Image Retrieval.- Pattern-Based Image Retrieval with Constraints and Preferences on ImageCLEF 2004.- How to Visually Retrieve Images from the St. Andrews Collection Using GIFT.- UNED at ImageCLEF 2004: Detecting Named Entities and Noun Phrases for Automatic Query Expansion and Structuring.- Dublin City University at CLEF 2004: Experiments with the ImageCLEF St. Andrews Collection.- From Text to Image: Generating Visual Query for Image Retrieval.- Toward Cross-Language and Cross-Media Image Retrieval.- FIRE - Flexible Image Retrieval Engine: ImageCLEF 2004 Evaluation.- MIRACLE Approach to ImageCLEF 2004: Merging Textual and Content-Based Image Retrieval.- Cross-Media Feedback Strategies: Merging Text and Image Information to Improve Image Retrieval.- ImageCLEF 2004: Combining Image and Multi-lingual Search for Medical Image Retrieval.- Multi-modal Information Retrieval Using FINT.- Medical Image Retrieval Using Texture, Locality and Colour.- SMIRE: Similar Medical Image Retrieval Engine.- A Probabilistic Approach to Medical Image Retrieval.- UB at CLEF2004 Cross Language Medical Image Retrieval.- Content-Based Queries on the CasImage Database Within the IRMA Framework.- Comparison and Combination of Textual and Visual Features for Interactive Cross-Language Image Retrieval.- MSU at ImageCLEF: Cross Language and Interactive Image Retrieval.- VI. Cross-Language Spoken Document Retrieval.- CLEF 2004 Cross-Language Spoken Document Retrieval Track.- VII. Issues in CLIR and in Evaluation.- The Key to the First CLEF with Portuguese: Topics, Questions and Answers in CHAVE.- How Do Named Entities Contribute to Retrieval Effectiveness?.

ENSM-SE at CLEF 2006 : Fuzzy Proximity Method with an Adhoc Influence Function in Evaluation of Multilingual and Multi-modal Information Retrieval 7th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2006, Alicante, Spain

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the 7th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2006, held in Alicante, Spain, September 2006. The revised papers presented together with an introduction were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on Multilingual Textual Document Retrieval, Domain-Specifig Information Retrieval, i-CLEF, QA@CLEF, ImageCLEF, CLSR, WebCLEF and GeoCLEF.We experiment a new influence function in our information retrieval method that uses the degree of fuzzy proximity of key terms in a document to compute the relevance of the document to the query. The model is based on the idea that the closer the query terms in a document are to each other the more relevant the document. Our model handles Boolean queries but, contrary to the traditional extensions of the basic Boolean information retrieval model, does not use a proximity operator explicitly. A single parameter makes it possible to control the proximity degree required. To improve our system we use a stemming algorithm before indexing, we take a specific influence function and we merge fuzzy proximity result lists built with different width of influence function. We explain how we construct the queries and report the results of our experiments in the ad-hoc monolingual French task of the CLEF 2006 evaluation campaign.

The CLEF 2004 cross-language image retrieval track

The purpose of this paper is to outline efforts from the 2004 CLEF cross–language image retrieval campaign (ImageCLEF). The aim of this CLEF track is to explore the use of both text and content–based retrieval methods for cross–language image retrieval. Three tasks were offered in the ImageCLEF track: a TREC–style ad-hoc retrieval task, retrieval from a medical collection, and a user–centered (interactive) evaluation task. Eighteen research groups from a variety of backgrounds and nationalities participated in ImageCLEF. In this paper we describe the ImageCLEF tasks, submissions from participating groups and summarise the main findings.

Measuring Text Reuse

In this paper we present results from the METER (MEasuring TExt Reuse) project whose aim is to explore issues pertaining to text reuse and derivation, especially in the context of newspapers using newswire sources. Although the reuse of text by journalists has been studied in linguistics, we are not aware of any investigation using existing computational methods for this particular task. We investigate the classification of newspaper articles according to their degree of dependence upon, or derivation from, a newswire source using a simple 3-level scheme designed by journalists. Three approaches to measuring text similarity are considered: n-gram overlap, Greedy String Tiling, and sentence alignment. Measured against a manually annotated corpus of source and derived news text, we show that a combined classifier with features automatically selected performs best overall for the ternary classification achieving an average F1-measure score of 0.664 across all three categories.

Overview of the ImageCLEFphoto 2008 photographic retrieval task

The general photographic ad-hoc retrieval task of the ImageCLEF 2007 evaluation campaign is described. This task provides both the resources and the framework necessary to perform comparative laboratory-style evaluation of visual information retrieval from generic photographic collections. In 2007, the evaluation objective concentrated on retrieval of lightly annotated images, a new challenge that attracted a large number of submissions: a total of 20 participating groups submitted 616 system runs. This paper summarises the components used in the benchmark, including the document collection and the search tasks, and presents an analysis of the submissions and the results.

The design and implementation of SPIRIT: a spatially aware search engine for information retrieval on the Internet

Much of the information stored on the web contains geographical context, but current search engines treat such context in the same way as all other content. In this paper we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of a spatially aware search engine which is capable of handling queries in the form of the triplet of ⟨theme⟩⟨spatial relationship⟩⟨location⟩. The process of identifying geographic references in documents and assigning appropriate footprints to documents, to be stored together with document terms in an appropriate indexing structure allowing real‐time search, is described. Methods allowing users to query and explore results which have been relevance‐ranked in terms of both thematic and spatial relevance have been implanted and a usability study indicates that users are happy with the range of spatial relationships available and intuitively understand how to use such a search engine. Normalised precision for 38 queries, containing four types of spatial relationships, is significantly higher (p<0.001) for searches exploiting spatial information than pure text search.

Easy on that trigger dad: a study of long term family photo retrieval

We examine the effects of new technologies for digital photography on people’s longer term storage and access to collections of personal photos. We report an empirical study of parents’ ability to retrieve photos related to salient family events from more than a year ago. Performance was relatively poor with people failing to find almost 40% of pictures. We analyze participants’ organizational and access strategies to identify reasons for this poor performance. Possible reasons for retrieval failure include: storing too many pictures, rudimentary organization, use of multiple storage systems, failure to maintain collections and participants’ false beliefs about their ability to access photos. We conclude by exploring the technical and theoretical implications of these findings.

Developing a corpus of plagiarised short answers

Plagiarism is widely acknowledged to be a significant and increasing problem for higher education institutions (McCabe 2005; Judge 2008). A wide range of solutions, including several commercial systems, have been proposed to assist the educator in the task of identifying plagiarised work, or even to detect them automatically. Direct comparison of these systems is made difficult by the problems in obtaining genuine examples of plagiarised student work. We describe our initial experiences with constructing a corpus consisting of answers to short questions in which plagiarism has been simulated. This corpus is designed to represent types of plagiarism that are not included in existing corpora and will be a useful addition to the set of resources available for the evaluation of plagiarism detection systems.

The CLEF Cross Language Image Retrieval Track (ImageCLEF) 2004

In this paper we describe ImageCLEF, the cross language image retrieval track of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). We instigated and ran a pilot experiment in 2003 where participants submitted entries for an ad hoc bilingual image retrieval task on a collection of historic photographs from St. Andrews University Library. This was designed to simulate the situation in which users would express their search request in natural language but require visual documents in return. For 2004 we have extended the tasks to include a medical image retrieval task and a user-centred evaluation.