In this paper, we provide an overview of the NTCIR IMine task, which is a core task of NTCIR-11 and also a succeeding work of INTENT@NTCIR-9 and INTENT2@NTCIR-10 tasks. IMine is composed of a subtopic mining (SM) task, a document ranking (DR) task and a TaskMine (TM) pilot task. 21 groups from Canada, China, Germany, France, Japan, Korea, Spain, UK and United States registered to the task, whic...

This paper describes our contribution to the English Entrance Exams task of CLEF 2015, which requires participating systems to automatically solve multiple choice reading comprehension tasks. We use a combination of text segmentation and different similarity measures with the aim of exploiting two observed aspects of tests: 1) the often linear relationship between reading text and test question...

This is an overview of the NTCIR-9 INTENT task, which comprises the Subtopic Mining and the Document Ranking subtasks. The INTENT task attracted participating teams from seven different countries/regions – 16 teams for Subtopic Mining and 8 teams for Document Ranking. The Subtopic Mining subtask received 42 Chinese runs and 14 Japanese runs; the Document Ranking subtask received 24 Chinese runs...

In this paper, we address the problem of ranking clinical documents using centrality based approach. We model the documents to be ranked as nodes in a graph and place edges between documents based on their similarity. Given a query, we compute similarity of the query with respect to every document in the graph. Based on these similarity values, documents are ranked for a given query. Initially,...

Due to the opportunities provided by the Internet, people are taking advantage of e-learning courses and during the last few years enormous research efforts have been dedicated to the development of e-learning systems. So far, many e-learning systems are proposed and used practically. However, in these systems the e-learning completion rate is low. One of the reasons is the low study desire and...

Clostridium difficile spores play a pivotal role in the transmission of infectious diarrhoea, but in order to cause disease spores must complete germination and return to vegetative cell growth. While the mechanisms of spore germination are well understood in Bacillus, knowledge of C. difficile germination remains limited. Previous studies have shown that bile salts and amino acids play an impo...

The effect of high NaCl concentrations on nutrient and nonnutrient germination of Bacillus subtilis spores was systematically investigated. Under all conditions, increasing NaCl concentrations caused increasing, albeit reversible, inhibition of germination. High salinity delayed and increased the heterogeneity of germination initiation, slowed the germination kinetics of individual spores and t...

• Seed dormancy can affect life history through its effects on germination time. Here, we investigate its influence on life history beyond the timing of germination. • We used the response of Arabidopsis thaliana to chilling at the germination and flowering stages to test the following: how seed dormancy affects germination responses to the environment; whether variation in dormancy affects adu...

Seeds of high-mountain species are thought to germinate rapidly, synchronously and at high percentages after a cold period, with limited dependence on the external environment; yet, empirical evidence only partially supports this behaviour. We performed a comparative study of the germination response of two closely related taxa along an altitude gradient in northern Spain. Seeds from several ma...