16221853
UMass at TREC 2004: Novelty and HARD
For the TREC 2004 Novelty track, UMass participated in all four tasks. Although finding relevant sentences was harder this year than last, we continue to show marked improvements over the baseline of calling all sentences relevant, with a variant of tfidf being the most successful approach. We achieve 5‐9% improvements over the baseline in locating novel sentences, primarily by looking at the similarity of a sentence to earlier sentences and focusing on named entities. For the High Accuracy Retrieval from Documents (HARD) track, we investigated the use of clarification forms, fixed- and variable-length passage retrieval, and the use of metadata. Clarification form results indicate that passage level feedback can provide improvements comparable to user supplied related-text for document evaluation and outperforms related-text for passage evaluation. Document retrieval methods without a query expansion component show the most gains from related-text. We also found that displaying the top passages for feedback outperformed displaying centroid passages. Named entity feedback resulted in mixed performance. Our primary findings for passage retrieval are that document retrieval methods performed better than passage retrieval methods on the passage evaluation metric of binary preference at 12,000 characters, and that clarification forms improved passage retrieval for every retrieval method explored. We found no benefit to using variable-length passages over fixed-length passages for this corpus. Our use of geography and genre metadata resulted in no significant changes in retrieval performance.
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.
13418116
An information-pattern-based approach to novelty detection
In this paper, a new novelty detection approach based on the identification of sentence level information patterns is proposed. First, ''novelty'' is redefined based on the proposed information patterns, and several different types of information patterns are given corresponding to different types of users' information needs. Second, a thorough analysis of sentence level information patterns is elaborated using data from the TREC novelty tracks, including sentence lengths, named entities (NEs), and sentence level opinion patterns. Finally, a unified information-pattern-based approach to novelty detection (ip-BAND) is presented for both specific NE topics and more general topics. Experiments on novelty detection on data from the TREC 2002, 2003 and 2004 novelty tracks show that the proposed approach significantly improves the performance of novelty detection in terms of precision at top ranks. Future research directions are suggested.
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.
42670703
A Latent Image Semantic Indexing Scheme for Image Retrieval on the Web
In this paper, we present a novel latent image semantic indexing scheme for efficient retrieval of WWW images. We present a hierarchical image semantic structure called HIST, which captures image semantics in an ontology tree and visual features in a set of specific semantic domains. The query algorithm works in two phases. First, the ontology is used for quickly locating the relevant semantic domains. Second, within each semantic domain, the visual features are extracted, and similarity techniques are exploited to break the “dimensionality curse”. The target images can then be efficiently retrieved with high precision. The experimental results show that HIST achieves good query performance. Therefore, our method is promising in diverse Web image retrieval.
45957444
An Adaptive Image Segmentation Method Based on a Modified Pulse Coupled Neural Network
Pulse-coupled neural network (PCNN) based on Eckhorn's model of the cat visual cortex has great significant advantage in image segmentation. However, the segmented performance depends on the suitable PCNN parameters, which are tuned by trial so far. Focusing on the famous difficult problem of PCNN, this paper establishes a modified PCNN, and proposes adaptive PCNN parameters determination algorithm based on water region area. Experimental results on image segmentation demonstrate its validity and robustness.
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.
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.
35636017
A Novel Pixel-Level and Feature-Level Combined Multisensor Image Fusion Scheme
This paper proposes a novel image fusion scheme, which combines the merits of pixel-level and feature-level fusion algorithms. It avoids some of the well-known problems in pixel-level fusion such as blurring effects and high sensitivity to noise and misregistration. The algorithm first segments images into several regions, then extract features from each segmented region to get the fused image. Two typical image segmentation methods, region growing and edge detection based are both presented in this paper. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method has extensive application scope and it outperforms the multiscale decompositions (MSD) based fusion approaches, both in visual effect and objective evaluation criteria.