The task of TREC 2006 Genomics Track is to retrieve passages (from part to paragraph) from full-text HTML biomedical journal papers to answer the structured questions from real biologists. A system for such task needs to be able to parse the HTML free-texts (convert the HTML free-texts into plain texts) and pinpoint the most relevant passage(s) within documents for the specified question. This ...

Retrieval practice is a powerful memory enhancer. However, in educational settings, test taking is often experienced as a stressful event. While it is known that stress can impair retrieval processes, little is known about the delayed consequences of testing memory for educationally relevant material under stressful conditions, which is the focus of the present study. Participants (38 women, 37...

In this paper, we document our efforts at INEX 2007 where we participated in the Ad Hoc Track, the Link the Wiki Track, and the Interactive Track that continued from INEX 2006. Our main aims at INEX 2007 were the following. For the Ad Hoc Track, we investigated the effectiveness of incorporating link evidence into the model, and of a CAS filtering method exploiting the structural hints in the I...

The University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University worked together in the 2004 High Accuracy Retrieval from Documents (HARD) track to explore design options for interactive passage retrieval systems. HARD assessors responded to clarification forms by (1) selecting additional search terms from an automatically constructed list of potentially discriminating terms, (2) selected relevant passa...

In this paper we investigate the use of linguistic knowledge in passage retrieval as part of an open-domain question answering system. We use annotation produced by a deep syntactic dependency parser for Dutch, Alpino, to extract various kinds of linguistic features and syntactic units to be included in a multi-layer index. Similar annotation is produced for natural language questions to be ans...

Question answering systems can support biologists and physicians when searching for answers in the scientific literature or the Web. Further, multilingual question answering systems provide more possibilities and flexibility to users, by allowing them to write questions and get answers in their native language, and the exploration of resources in other languages by means of machine translation....

This report describes the joint work by Kyoto University and the University of Melbourne for the TREC Genomics Track in 2007. As with 2006, the task for this year was the retrieval of passages from a biomedical document collection. The overall framework of our system from 2006 remains unchanged and is comprised of two parts: a paragraph-level retrieval system and a passage extraction system. Th...

The NTCIR-9 GeoTime task is to retrieve documents to answer such questions as when and where certain events happened. In this paper we propose a Passage-Based Learning to Rank (PGLR) method to address this task. The proposed method recognizes texts both strongly related to the target topics and containing geographic and temporal expressions. The implemented system provides more accurate search ...

In this paper we present FuzzyPR, a novel fuzzy logic based passage retrieval system for Question Answering Systems (QAS). FuzzyPR employs a fuzzy logic based similarity measure that includes the best performing models to implement the question reformulation intuition. Our experiments show that FuzzyPR achieves consistently better performance in terms of coverage than JIRS on the TREC corpora a...

This paper gives an overview of the INEX 2008 Ad Hoc Track. The main goals of the Ad Hoc Track were two-fold. The first goal was to investigate the value of the internal document structure (as provided by the XML mark-up) for retrieving relevant information. This is a continuation of INEX 2007 and, for this reason, the retrieval results are liberalized to arbitrary passages and measures were ch...