In this paper we present newly developed functions in Maplepackage SyNRAC, for solving real algebraic constraints derived from various engineering problems. The current version of SyNRAC provides quantifier elimination (QE) for the quadratic case and an environment dealing with first-order formulas over the reals (including new simplifiers of formulas) on Maple.

Increase of digital storage capacity enabled the creation of large-scale news video archives. To make full use of the archive, it is necessary to grasp the development and dependencies of news stories. Considering this problem, we investigate tracking and re-ranking methodologies of news stories. The archive used as a test-bed consists of more than 30,000 news stories. This paper proposes a nov...

This paper proposes an alternative automated mechanism design approach called parametric mechanism design via quantifier elimination (PMD-QE), which utilizes QE, a symbolic formula manipulation technique. In PMD-QE, we start from a skeleton of mechanisms, which is characterized by a set of parameters, e.g., critical values. The range of parameters where the given constraints are satisfied is au...

This paper describes our work in the subtask IR4QA. Our IR system designed for this task consists of two modules: (1) query processing; (2) indexing, retrieval and re-rank. We first study the method of question classification, and the strategies of weighting based on the result of question classification. Baidu and Wanfang resources are exploited to help query expansion. Through studying the sp...

In this paper we discuss how the inclusion of semantic functionalities in a Learning Objects Repository allows a better characterization of the learning materials enclosed and improves their retrieval through the adoption of some query expansion strategies. Thus, we started to regard the use of ontologies to automatically suggest additional concepts when users are filling some metadata fields a...

We describe our participation in the TREC 2006 Enterprise track. We provide a detailed account of the ideas underlying our language modeling approaches to both the discussion search and expert search tasks. For discussion search, our focus was on query expansion techniques, using additional information from the topic statement and from message threads; while the former was generally helpful, th...

This paper reports the participation of the XLDB Group from the University of Lisbon in the CLEF 2006 ad-hoc monolingual and bilingual subtasks for Portuguese. We present our IR system and detail both the query expansion strategy and the weighting scheme. In the end, we describe our runs and analyse our performance.

Abstr act. We present a report about our participation in the ImageCLEF photo task 2006 and a short description of our new framework for future use in further CLEF participations. We described and analysed our participation in the monolingual English task. Special Lucene­aligned query expansion and histogram comparisons are helping to improve the baseline results.

This paper describes our participation to the monolingual English GIRT task. The main objectives of our experiments were to evaluate the use of Mercure IRS (designed at IRIT/SIG) on domain specific corpus. Two other techniques of automatic query reformulation using WordNet are evaluated.