We present an overview for a truly zero resource query-byexample search system designed for the 2012 MediaEval Spoken Web Search task. Our system is based on the recently proposed randomized acoustic indexing and logarithmictime search (RAILS) framework. The input is merely the raw acoustic observations for the query and search collection, requiring no trained models whatsoever, not even unsupe...

Article history: Received 26 September 2010 Available online 2 November 2011 Communicated by G. Borgefors

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SenseClusters is a freely available system that identifies similar contexts in text. It relies on lexical features to build first and second order representations of contexts, which are then clustered using unsupervised methods. It was originally developed to discriminate among contexts centered around a given target word, but can now be applied more generally. It also supports methods that cre...

The identification of the user’s intention or interest through queries that they submit to a search engine can be very useful to offer them more adequate results. In this work we present a framework for the identification of user’s interest in an automatic way, based on the analysis of query logs. This identification is made from two perspectives, the objectives or goals of a user and the categ...

We present an unsupervised approach to reconstructing ancient word forms. The present work addresses three limitations of previous work. First, previous work focused on faithfulness features, which model changes between successive languages. We add markedness features, which model well-formedness within each language. Second, we introduce universal features, which support generalizations across...