The Ephyra QA system has been developed as a flexible open-domain QA framework. This framework allows us to combine several techniques for question analysis and answer extraction and to incorporate multiple knowledge bases to best fit the requirements of the TREC QA track, in which we participated this year for the first time. The techniques used include pattern learning and matching, answer ty...

This paper describes the method we used for the Genomics Track of TREC 2006. BM25 model is implemented to retrieve relevant documents. We also tried to re-ranking documents based on the initial retrieval before passage retrieval. Passages are retrieved based on the concepts defining in topics and concept coverage. Results of submitted runs are listed and discussed.

This paper describes the participation of a combined approach in GeoCLEF-2006. We have participated in Monolingual English Task and we present joint work of the three groups or teams belonging to the project R2D2 4 with a new system, combining the three individual systems of these teams. We consider that research in the area of GIR is still in its very early stages, therefore, although a voting...

This paper details the participation of the XLDB group from the University of Lisbon at the GeoCLEF task of CLEF 2006. We tested text mining methods that make use of an ontology to extract geographic references from text, assigning documents to encompassing geographic scopes. These scopes are used in document retrieval through a ranking function that combines BM25 text weighting with a similari...

In this paper we proposed a simple but effective method for simultaneously detecting video shot transitions of various types by means of combining threshold and SVM based method. Our method first selects the suspicious transition candidates using a low threshold method and then judges the candidates by using the SVM base method. In selecting the low threshold, we use only two simply features: h...

In this paper, we present a system for information retrieval of biomedical texts at passage level. Our system used KL-divergence as the underlying retrieval model. We further added query expansion and performed post-processing on the results. We were able to obtain a Document MAP of 0.3563, Passage MAP of 0.0464 and Aspect MAP of 0.2255 on one of the three runs.

Our Genomics experiments mainly focus on addressing four problems in biomedical information retrieval. The four problems are: (1) how to deal with synonyms? (2) how to deal with the frequent use of acronyms? (3) how to deal with homonyms? (4) how to deal with the document-level retrieval, passagelevel retrieval and aspect-level retrieval? In particular, we use the automatic query expansion algo...

While the primary INEX test collection is based on a single DTD, it is realistic to assume that most XML collections consist of documents from different sources. This leads to a heterogeneity of syntax, semantics and document genre. In order to cope with the challenges posed by such a diverse environment, the heterogeneous track was offered at INEX 2006. Within this track, we set up a collectio...

Hummingbird participated in the WebCLEF mixed monolingual retrieval task of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2006. In this task, the system was given 1939 known-item queries, and the goal was to find the desired page in the 82GB EuroGOV collection (3.4 million pages crawled from government sites of 27 European domains). The 1939 queries included 124 new manually-created queries, 195 m...