Much progress has been made in the English question-answering task since it was initiated in TREC-8 and our last participation in TREC-2001. QA is a complex semantics-oriented task, and it is necessary that much linguistic processing, auxiliary resources, and learning steps are needed to come up with adequate performance to the task [1]. Chinese language factoid QA was first introduced during N...

For some multi-criteria decision aiding methods, the relative ranks of two actions may be inverted when the original set is altered. This phenomenon is known as rank reversal. In this contribution, we formalise rank reversal for the Promethee II method and derive the exact conditions for its occurrence when one ore more actions are added or removed from/to the original set. These conditions eve...

Distributions over rankings are used to model data in various settings such as preference analysis and political elections. The factorial size of the space of rankings, however, typically forces one to make structural assumptions, such as smoothness, sparsity, or probabilistic independence about these underlying distributions. We approach the modeling problem from the computational principle th...

Traditional mechanisms used to rank learning objects are not longer viable thanks to the current abundance of resources. This work proposes the construction of an improved relevance ranking function based on contextualized attention data extracted from the interaction between the users and the objects. A multidimensional approach to relevance is followed. Beside the Algorithmic relevance, curre...

The Leiden Ranking 2011/2012 is a ranking of universities based on bibliometric indicators of publication output, citation impact, and scientific collaboration. The ranking includes 500 major universities from 41 different countries. This paper provides an extensive discussion of the Leiden Ranking 2011/2012. The ranking is compared with other global university rankings, in particular the Acade...

Measuring the relative compositionality of Multi-word Expressions (MWEs) is crucial to Natural Language Processing. Various collocation based measures have been proposed to compute the relative compositionality of MWEs. In this paper, we define novel measures (both collocation based and context based measures) to measure the relative compositionality of MWEs of V-N type. We show that the correl...

This paper presents a quantitative solution to the problem of aggregating referee scores for manuscripts submitted to peer-reviewed conferences or scientific journals. The proposed approach is a particular application of the Dempster-Shafer theory to a restricted setting, from which an interesting algebraic framework results. The paper investigates the algebraic properties of this framework and...

In this paper we report our approach and result as a participant of the NTCIR-9 Intent task. INTENT task is a new NTCIR task which consists of two subtasks: (1) Subtopic Mining subtask: given a query, a system lists all possible subtopics that might cover users’ different intents. Our approach is mining the query log to find subtopics candidates and rank them according to the frequencies of eac...

This paper outlines a feasible approach to ranking Grid resources based on an easily obtainable application-specific performance model utilizing low-level performance metrics. First, Grid resources are characterized using lowlevel performance metrics; Then the performance of a given application is associated to the low-level performance measurements via a Ranking Function; Finally, the Ranking ...

People commonly need to purchase things in person, from large garden supplies to home decor. Although modern search systems are very effective at finding online products, little research attention has been paid to helping users find places that sell a specific product offline. For instance, users searching for an apron are not typically directed to a nearby kitchen store by a standard search en...