Search

The need for academic researchers to retrieve patents and research papers is increasing, because applying for patents is now considered an important research activity. However, retrieving patents using keywords is a laborious task for researchers, because the terms used in patents for the purpose of enlarging the scope of the claims are generally more abstract than those used in research papers. Therefore, we have constructed a framework that facilitates patent retrieval for researchers, and have integrated research papers and patents by analysing the citation relationships between them. We obtained cited research papers in patents using two steps: (1) detection of sentences containing bibliographic information, and (2) extraction of bibliographic information from those sentences. To investigate the effectiveness of our method, we conducted two experiments. In the experiment involving Step 1, we prepared 42,073 sentences, among which a human subject manually identified 1,476 sentences containing citations of papers. For Step 2, we prepared 3,000 sentences, in which the titles, authors, and other bibliographic information were manually identified. We obtained a precision of 91.6%, and a recall of 86.9% in Step 1, and a precision of 86.2% and a recall of 85.1% in Step 2. Finally, we constructed an information retrieval system that provided two methods of retrieving research papers and patents. One method was retrieval by query, and another was from the citation relationships between research papers and patents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents ARCA, a software system that enables semantic search and exploration over a book catalog. The main purpose of this work is twofold: to propose a general paradigm for a semantic enrichment workflow and to evaluate a visual approach to information retrieval based on extracted information and existing knowledge graphs. ARCA has been designed and implemented following a user-centered design approach. Two different releases of the system have incrementally and iteratively developed and evaluated. The first release has evaluated the quality and usefulness of the extracted data. The second release, whose design was a refinement based on the previous evaluation results, was assessed by several users. Moreover, a comparative test with other information retrieval systems was conducted in order to study the potential added-value of the system. ARCA is employed in a real editorial scenario to visually search and explore the books of a publishing house. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of video classification can be viewed as discovering the signature patterns in the elemental features of a video class. In order to solve this problem, a large and diverse set of video features is proposed in this paper. The contributions of the paper further lie in dealing with high-dimensionality induced by the feature space and in presenting an algorithm based on two-phase grid searching for automatic parameter selection for support vector machine (SVM). The framework thus is directed to bridge the gap between low-level features and semantic video classes. The experimental results and comparison with state-of-the-art learning tools on more than 5000 video segments show the effectiveness of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ever-growing volumes of textual information from various sources have fostered the development of digital libraries, making digital content readily accessible but also easy for malicious users to plagiarize, thus giving rise tosecurityproblems. In this paper, we introduce aduplicate detectionscheme that is able to determine, with a particularly high accuracy, the degree to which one document is similar to another. Our pairwise document comparison scheme detects the resemblance between the content of documents by considering document chunks, representing contexts of words selected from the text. The resulting duplicate detection technique presents a good level of security in the protection of intellectual property while improving the availability of the data stored in the digital library and the correctness of the search results. Finally, the paper addresses efficiency and scalability issues by introducing new data reduction techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an introduction of a series of articles on the intersection of information visualization and retrieval. The articles originated from a workshop held at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Houston, Texas on May 31, 2003. Taken together, the articles cover both theoretical and experimental research on the development, usage, and evaluation of effective interfaces to digital libraries. They review, compare, and propose novel approaches to visualization in support of improved browsing, retrieval, analysis and understanding of data stored in digital libraries.

Content-oriented XML retrieval systems support access to XML repositories by retrieving, in response to user queries, XML document components (XML elements) instead of whole documents. The retrieved XML elements should not only contain information relevant to the query, but also provide the right level of granularity. In INEX, the INitiative for the Evaluation of XML retrieval, a relevant element is defined to be at the right level of granularity if it is exhaustive and specific to the query. Specificity was specifically introduced to capture how focused an element is on the query (i.e., discusses no other irrelevant topics). To score XML elements according to how exhaustive and specific they are given a query, the content and logical structure of XML documents have been widely used. One source of evidence that has led to promising results with respect to retrieval effectiveness is element length. This work aims at examining a new source of evidence deriving from the semantic decomposition of XML documents. We consider that XML documents can be semantically decomposed through the application of a topic segmentation algorithm. Using the semantic decomposition and the logical structure of XML documents, we propose a new source of evidence, the number of topic shifts in an element, to reflect its relevance and more particularly its specificity. This paper has three research objectives. Firstly, we investigate the characteristics of XML elements reflected by their number of topic shifts. Secondly, we compare topic shifts to element length, by incorporating each of them as a feature in a retrieval setting and examining their effects in estimating the relevance of XML elements given a query. Finally, we use the number of topic shifts as evidence for capturing specificity to provide a focused access to XML repositories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methods for content-based similarity search are fundamental for managing large multimedia repositories, as they make it possible to conduct queries for similar content, and to organize the repositories into classes of similar objects. 3D objects are an important type of multimedia data with many promising application possibilities. Defining the aspects that constitute the similarity among 3D objects, and designing algorithms that implement such similarity definitions is a difficult problem. Over the last few years, a strong interest in 3D similarity search has arisen, and a growing number of competing algorithms for the retrieval of 3D objects have been proposed. The contributions of this paper are to survey a body of recently proposed methods for 3D similarity search, to organize them along a descriptor extraction process model, and to present an extensive experimental effectiveness and efficiency evaluation of these methods, using several 3D databases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Searching a digital library is typically a tedious task. A system can improve information access by building on knowledge about a user acquired in a user profile in order to customize information access both in terms of the information returned in response to a query (query personalization) as well as in terms of the presentation of the results (presentation personalization). In this paper, we focus on query personalization in digital libraries; in particular, we address structured queries involving metadata stored in relational databases. We describe the specification of user preferences at the level of a user profile and the process of query personalization with the use of query-rewriting rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text retrieval systems require an index to allow efficient retrieval of documents at the cost of some storage overhead. This paper proposes a novel full-text indexing model for Chinese text retrieval based on the concept of adjacency matrix of directed graph. Using this indexing model, on one hand, retrieval systems need to keep only the indexing data, instead of the indexing data and the original text data as the traditional retrieval systems always do. On the other hand, occurrences of index term are identified by labels of the so-calleds-stringswhere the index term appears, rather than by its positions as in traditional indexing models. Consequently, system space cost as a whole can be reduced drastically while retrieval efficiency is maintained satisfactory. Experiments over several real-world Chinese text collections are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of this model. In addition to Chinese, The proposed indexing model is also effective and efficient for text retrieval of other Oriental languages, such as Japanese and Korean. It is especially useful for digital library application areas where storage resource is very limited (e.g., e-books and CD-based text retrieval systems). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on how clinicians search shows that they pose queries according to three common clinical tasks: searching for diagnoses, searching for treatments and searching for tests. We hypothesise, therefore, that structuring an information retrieval system around these three tasks would be beneficial when searching for evidence-based medicine (EBM) resources in medical digital libraries. Task-oriented (diagnosis, test and treatment) information was extracted from free-text medical articles using a natural language processing pipeline. This information was integrated into a retrieval and visualisation system for EBM search that allowed searchers to interact with the system via task-oriented filters. The effectiveness of the system was empirically evaluated using TREC CDS—a gold standard of medical articles and queries designed for EBM search. Task-oriented information was successfully extracted from 733,138 articles taken from a medical digital library. Task-oriented search led to improvements in the quality of search results and savings in searcher workload. An analysis of how different tasks affected retrieval showed that searching for treatments was the most challenging and that the task-oriented approach improved search for treatments. The most savings in terms of workload were observed when searching for treatments and tests. Overall, taking into account different clinical tasks can improve search according to these tasks. Each task displayed different results, making systems that are more adaptive to the clinical task type desirable. A future user study would help quantify the actual cost-saving estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary reflects on the issues presented in this volume from the perspective of a large eScience project, GEON, whose aim is to promote data integration in the geosciences within the US and abroad. Technical, social, and regulatory challenges accompanying the collection, curation, and sharing of eScience data are discussed. Opportunities and barriers to engaging in international eScience collaborations are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Easy access to large information collections is of great importance in many aspects of everyday life. However, limitations in information and communication technologies have so far prevented the average person from taking much advantage of existing resources. Historical documentaries held by national archives constitute some of the most precious yet least accessible cultural information. The ECHO project has facilitated accessibility to this type of precious information by developing a digital library (DL) service for historical films belonging to large national audiovisual archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]