Our participation in the TREC 2006 QA task is the first step on the way of developing a new and improved DIOGENE system. The leading principles of this re-engineering activity are: i) to create a modular architecture, based on a pipeline of modules which share common I/O formats, open to the insertion/substitution of new components; ii) to allow for the capability of configuring the settings of...

We describe the University of Amsterdam’s participation in the INEX 2006 Adhoc Track. We participated in all four Adhoc Track tasks, and report initial findings based on a single set of measure for all four tasks. Our main findings are the following. First, a complete element index outperforms a restricted index based on section-structure, albeit the differences are small. Second, grouping elem...

In this paper, we describe the Centre for Interactive Systems Research’s participation in the INEX 2006 adhoc track. Rather than using a fieldweighted BM25 model in INEX 2005, we revert back to using the traditional BM25 weighting function. Our main research aims in this year are to investigate the effects of document filtering by result record cut-off, element filtering by length cut-off and t...

We report on the experiments undertaken by the NICTA I2D2 Group as part of GeoCLEF 2006, as well as post-GeoCLEF evaluations and improvements to the submitted system. In particular, we used techniques to assign probabilistic likelihoods to geographic candidates for each identified geo-term, and a probabilistic IR engine. A normalisation process that adjusts term weights, so as to prevent expand...

This article presents our contributions to expert search and discussion search of Enterprise Track in TREC 2006. In discussion search, we take advantage of the redundant patterns of emails, such as the subject, author, sent time, etc., which we incorporate in a field-based weighting method to mine discussion topics with more robustness. Some non-content features, such as time-line and mail thre...

This report describes the work done at The University of Melbourne for the TREC2006 Terabyte Track. For this track, we participated in all three main tasks. We continued our work with impact-based ranking and sought to reduce indexing as well as query time. However, to support the named-page task, more conventional retrieval mechanisms were also employed. The results show that, in general, the ...

This paper describes our participation in the WiQA 2006 pilot on question answering using Wikipedia. We present an analysis of the results of our system for both monolingual and bilingual runs. The system currently works for Dutch and English.

Background: For every pregnant woman, it is possible to have a child with chromosomal abnormalities. Although this possibility is not very high, by performing screening tests and considering the mother's background factors, we can largely realize the real extent of this possibility. Many comorbidities (like high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity) and high-risk exposures (like alcohol consu...