This paper provides some arguments for the claim that Catalan and Spanish n-words are not lexically ambiguous. I put forward the hypothesis that Catalan and Spanish nwords are negative expressions and numeral weak quantifiers. I suggest the relevance of a hierarchy of negative items (negative quantifiers, minimizers, nwords, and polarity items), determined by the position of these items within ...

By definition spoken dialogue CALL systems should be easy to use and understand. However, interaction in this context is often far from unhindered. In this paper we introduce a formative feedback mechanism in our CALL system, which can monitor interaction, report errors and provide advice and suggestions to users. The distinctive feature of this mechanism is the ability to combine information f...

TREC 2009 was the fourth year of the Legal Track, which focuses on evaluation of search technology for “discovery” (i.e., responsive review) of electronically stored information in litigation and regulatory settings. The track included two tasks: an Interactive task (in which real users could iteratively refine their queries and/or engage in multi-pass relevance feedback) and a Batch task (two-...

In this paper, we summarise our analysis of the large log of multilingual image searches in Flickr provided to iCLEF 2008 participants. We have studied (a) correlations between the language skills of searchers in the target language and other session parameters, such as success (was the image found?), number of query refinements, etc.; (b) learning effects over time; (c) usage of specific cross...

This paper describes the techniques we applied for the two TREC 2006 tracks, i.e., Genomics and Enterprise track. For the Genomics Track, we used a Rocchio relevance feedback method to expand the terms and then performed passage retrieval by building dual index and using half overlapped windows passages. Several approaches to merge the results and rerank the passages are presented. For the Ente...

Data generating project work in middle school is a successful component of statistics training at this level. CensusAtSchool, GAISE, CAUSE projects and Statistics New Zealand SURFs also provide data for investigation in middle school and beyond. To motivate students further, real data from current research should be used in the classroom to help take statistics training to the next level. Such ...

We present a new document retrieval approach combining relevance feedback, pseudo-relevance feedback, and Markov random field modeling of term interaction. Overall effectiveness of our combined model and the relative contribution from each component is evaluated on the GOV2 webpage collection. Given 0-5 feedback documents, we find each component contributes unique value to the overall ensemble,...