In this paper, we describe a voting mechanism for accurate named entity (NE) translation in English–Chinese question answering (QA). This mechanism involves translations from three different sources: machine translation, online encyclopaedia, and web documents. The translation with the highest number of votes is selected. We evaluated this approach using test collection, topics and assessment r...

The Evalita 2011 contest proposed two forced alignment tasks, word and phone segmentation, and two modalities, “open” and “closed”. A system for each combination of task and modality has been proposed and submitted for evaluation. Direct use of silence/activity detection in forced alignment has been tested. Positive effects were shown in the acoustic model training step, especially when dealing...

This article proposes a method improving Kong et al. algorithm called Locally Adaptive Soft-Voting (LASV) algorithm described in ”General road detection from a single image”. This algorithm aims to detect and segment road in structured and unstructured environments. Evaluation of our method over different images datasets shows that it is speeded up by up to 32 times and precision is improved by...

This paper presents a machine-learning approach for the recognition of textual entailment. For our approach we model lexical and semantic features. We study the effect of stacking and voting joint classifier combination techniques which boost the final performance of the system. In an exhaustive experimental evaluation, the performance of the developed approach is measured. The obtained results...

Countries that elect their policy-makers by means of Plurality Voting tend to have a two-party system. We conduct laboratory experiments to study whether alternative voting procedures yield a two-party system as well. Plurality Voting is compared with Approval Voting and Dual Voting, both of which allow voters to vote for multiple candidates, but differ in whether voters are required to cast al...

Electronic voting is a prime application of cryptographic tools. Many researches are addressing election or confidence voting in this area. We address a new type of voting scheme “Divisible Voting Scheme,” in which each voter has multiple ballots where the number of ballots can be different among the voters. This type of voting is popular, however there is no secure protocol which achieves this...