A Menagerie of Tracks at Maryland: HARD, Enterprise, QA, and Genomics, Oh My!

Abstract

This year, the University of Maryland participated in four separate tracks: HARD, enterprise, question answering, and genomics. Our HARD experiments involved a trained intermediary who searched for documents on behalf of the user, created clarification forms manually, and exploited user responses accordingly. The aim was to better understand the nature of single-iteration clarification dialogs and to develop an "ontology of clarifications" that can be leveraged to guide system development. For the enterprise track, we submitted official runs to the Known Item Search and the Discussion Search tasks. Document transformation to normalize dates and version numbers was found to be helpful, but suppression of text quoted from earlier messages and expansion of the indexed terms for a message based on subject line threading proved to not be. For the QA track, we submitted a manual run of "other" questions in an effort to quantify human performance on the task. Our genomics track participation was in collaboration with the National Library of Medicine, and is primarily reported in NLM's overview paper.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2006
Accession Number
ADA456308

Entities

People

  • Dina Demner-fushman
  • Douglas W. Oard
  • Eileen Abels
  • Jimmy Lin
  • Philip Wu
  • Yejun Wu

Organizations

  • University of Maryland

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Cancer
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Science
  • Electronic Mail
  • Genomics
  • Human-Machine Interaction
  • Information Retrieval
  • Information Science
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Machine Translation
  • Maryland
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Ontologies
  • Standards
  • Statistics

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Defense Technology Research and Development.
  • Information Retrieval