2304647
Evaluating Question-Answering Techniques in Chinese
An important first step in developing a cross-lingual question answering system is to understand whether techniques developed with English text will also work with other languages, such as Chinese. The Marsha Chinese question answering system described in this paper uses techniques similar to those used in the English systems developed for TREC. Marsha consists of three main components: the query processing module, the Hanquery search engine, and the answer extraction module. It also contains some specific techniques dealing with Chinese language characteristics, such as word segmentation and ordinals processing. Evaluation of the system is done using a method based on the TREC question-answering track. The results of the evaluation show that the performance of Marsha is comparable to some English question answering systems in TREC 8 track. An English language version of Marsha further indicates that the heuristics used are applicable to the English question answering task.
16393547
A new robust relevance model in the language model framework
In this paper, a new robust relevance model is proposed that can be applied to both pseudo and true relevance feedback in the language-modeling framework for document retrieval. There are at least three main differences between our new relevance model and other relevance models. The proposed model brings back the original query into the relevance model by treating it as a short, special document, in addition to a number of top-ranked documents returned from the first round retrieval for pseudo feedback, or a number of relevant documents for true relevance feedback. Second, instead of using a uniform prior as in the original relevance model proposed by Lavrenko and Croft, documents are assigned with different priors according to their lengths (in terms) and ranks in the first round retrieval. Third, the probability of a term in the relevance model is further adjusted by its probability in a background language model. In both pseudo and true relevance cases, we have compared the performance of our model to that of the two baselines: the original relevance model and a linear combination model. Our experimental results show that the proposed new model outperforms both of the two baselines in terms of mean average precision.
16964451
HISA: a query system bridging the semantic gap for large image databases
We propose a novel system called HISA for organizing very large image databases. HISA implements the first known data structure to capture both the ontological knowledge and visual features for effective and effcient retrieval of images by either keywords, image examples, or both. HISA employs automatic image annotation technique, ontology analysis and statistical analysis of domain knowledge to precompute the data structure. Using these techniques, HISA is able to bridge the gap between the image semantics and the visual features, therefore providing more user-friendly and high-performance queries. We demonstrate the novel data structure employed by HISA, the query algorithms, and the pre-computation process.
15133148
Modeling Image Data for Effective Indexing and Retrieval in Large General Image Databases
In this paper, we propose an image semantic model based on the knowledge and criteria in the field of linguistics and taxonomy. Our work bridges the "semantic gap" by seamlessly exploiting the synergy of both visual feature processing and semantic relevance computation in a new way, and provides improved query efficiency and effectiveness for large general image databases. Our main contributions are as follows: we design novel data structures, namely, a lexical hierarchy, an image-semantic hierarchy, and a number of atomic semantic domains, to capture the semantics and the features of the database, and to provide the indexing scheme. We present a novel image query algorithm based on the proposed structures. In addition, we propose a novel term expansion mechanism to improve the lexical processing. Our extensive experiments indicate that our proposed techniques are effective in achieving high runtime performance with improved retrieval accuracy. The experiments also show that the proposed method has good scalability.
16418153
The limits of localization using RSS
We characterize the fundamental limits of localization using signal strength in indoor environments. Signal strength approaches are attractive because they are widely applicable to wireless sensor networks and do not require additional localization hardware. We show that although a broad spectrum of algorithms can trade accuracy for precision, none has a significant advantage in localization performance. We found that using commodity 802.11 technology over a range of algorithms, approaches and environments, one can expect a median localization error of 10ft and 97th percentile of 30ft. We present strong evidence that these limitations are fundamental and that they are unlikely to be transcended without fundamentally more complex environmental models or additional localization infrastructure.
29798457
Adaptive Image Segmentation Using Modified Pulse Coupled Neural Network
This paper proposes a novel image segmentation algorithm based on Pulse Coupled Neural Network (PCNN).Unlike the traditional PCNN image segmentation methods, the presented algorithm can achieve the optimum parameters automatically. Experimental results show its good performance and robustness. The research fruits have great importance both on the theory research and practical application of PCNN.
25240485
An Image-Semantic Ontological Framework for Large Image Databases
In the past decade, the Internet has rapidly become a most prevalent platform for information sharing and data communications all over the world. This trend has been enhanced by the wide proliferation of home-used digital photos and videos. Although the Web has seen numerous applications for photo storage, sharing, and searching, few image retrieval systems provide satisfactory search service. The so-called semantic gap and curse of dimensionality are two major barriers that existing technologies cannot adequately address. In this paper, we propose a framework to achieve effective and efficient content-base retrieval on images by addressing the above two issues. That is, we need to narrow the semantic gap while mitigating the curse of dimensionality.