Renaud Petit

A dynamic user interface for document assembly

Document assembly has turned out to be a convenient approach to corporate publishing and reuse of large collections of documents. Automated assembly of a document reduces the amount of human effort when creating customized documents consisting of document fragments from a collection.However, most methods used require a number of parameters to be defined prior to the assembly process, and providing these parameters in the correct format is seen to be too demanding for an average user. We have designed and implemented a graphical user interface that provides the user with a simple way to specify the parameters of the assembly process. The interface, which is dynamically generated based on a given document configuration, lets the user create and customize documents such as technical manuals.In our example assembly case, the user can select the product, the manual type, the language of the manual as well as the optional components to be included in the manual.

Question Answering System for Incomplete and Noisy Data

We present a question answering system that can handle noisy and incomplete natural language data, and methods and measures for the evaluation of question answering systems. Our question answering system is based on the vector space model and linguistic analysis of the natural language data. In the evaluation procedure, we test eight different preprocessing schemes for the data, and come to the conclusion that lemmatization combined with breaking compound words into their constituents gives significantly better results than the baseline. The evaluation process is based on stratified random sampling and bootstrapping. To measure the correctness of an answer, we use partial credits as well as full credits.