Leveraging comparable corpora for cross-lingual information retrieval in resource-lean language pairs

Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) has so far been studied with the assumption that some rich linguistic resources such as bilingual dictionaries or parallel corpora are available. But creation of such high quality resources is labor-intensive and they are not always at hand. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of using only comparable corpora for CLIR, without relying on other linguistic resources. Comparable corpora are text documents in different languages that cover similar topics and are often naturally attainable (e.g., news articles published in different languages at the same time period). We adapt an existing cross-lingual word association mining method and incorporate it into a language modeling approach to cross-language retrieval. We investigate different strategies for estimating the target query language models. Our evaluation results on the TREC Arabic–English cross-lingual data show that the proposed method is effective for the CLIR task, demonstrating that it is feasible to perform cross-lingual information retrieval with just comparable corpora.     

编辑核对外文参考文献的效果

对5位主张核对参考文献的编辑所编发的文后外文参考文献的著录情况进行了调查.结果证明,编辑认真对待参考文献并核对之,可使外文参考文献著录的错误率降低约50百分点.     

外文期刊装订中的几个相关问题

外文期刊装订工作是期刊管理中的一个重要环节,下架期刊的装订质量直接影响到馆藏过刊的质量,同时也会影响到读者的检索与利用.文章结合工作实际,对期刊装订中的难点与需要注意的问题进行分析与研究,以使今后的期刊装订工作更加规范与科学.     

National library of China: The acquisition of foreign language materials

The purpose of this study is to examine the growth of the acquisition of foreign language materials in the National Library of China. An objective is to show how historical and contemporary events affected the National Library's development in terms of the procurement of foreign materials. The paper clearly demonstrates the preponderance of foreign materials in science and technology for China's modernization.     

如何提高外文资料的利用率

本文主要是结合广州图书馆外文资料利用的现状，论述如何提高外文资料的利用率。     

Communicating in a foreign language: Its effects on perceived motivation,knowledge, and communication ability

Attributional bias research suggests that those who find it difficult to communicate in a foreign language will explain their inability in ways that pose the least threat to a positive self image. The applicability of this reasoning to foreign language communication was tested in a two (writing in English or in a foreign language) by two (subject familiarity) factorial experiment. As expected, writing a message in a foreign language led to perceptions of reduced motivation. Participants who communicated in a foreign language about familiar others reported lower levels of perceived foreign language skill than those who communicated in a foreign language about an unfamiliar person. Participants who described unfamiliar persons in a foreign language reported greater familiarity with these persons than participants describing unfamiliar persons in English. Results support the claim that attributional biases may affect some foreign language communication tasks.     

Hospital library foreign language labs: the experiences of two hospital libraries

Increasingly, hospital-based physicians, residents, and medical students are welcoming into their care foreign-born patients, who do not speak English. Most hospitals today have an Interpretive Services Department, but many of the physicians, residents, and medical students want to become more proficient in the most frequently spoken foreign languages in their respective locales. To help recruit and retain a diverse workforce, some hospitals sponsor English programs for staff. The Treadwell Library at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Grady Branch Library at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, have developed a special collection and hospital library-based language laboratories in order to meet this need.     

利用汇文系统进行外文图书回溯建库

本文结合汇文系统编目模块，论述了如何做好外文图书回溯建库的工作：利用一个优良的图书馆自动化管理软件，选择合适的回溯建库方案，选择合适的光盘书目数据源和网络书目数据源，注重书目数据质量的控制是做好外文图书回溯建库的关键。     

The development of foreign language collections at Peking University Library: Problems and prospects

The purpose of this study is to examine the development of foreign language collections at Peking University Library. On-site visits and interviews with librarians in China were conducted, together with an examination of primary sources. After a brief review of the acquisition of foreign language materials in the 1950s and 1960s, the study's primary focus is upon developments during the 1980s. The paper discusses the approaches to and problems in selection, examines and analyzes the funding sources, and concludes with an assessment of the foreign language collection.     

Biomedical text summarization to support genetic database curation: using Semantic MEDLINE to create a secondary database of genetic information

Objective:

This paper examines the development and evaluation of an automatic summarization system in the domain of molecular genetics. The system is a potential component of an advanced biomedical information management application called Semantic MEDLINE and could assist librarians in developing secondary databases of genetic information extracted from the primary literature.

Methods:

An existing summarization system was modified for identifying biomedical text relevant to the genetic etiology of disease. The summarization system was evaluated on the task of identifying data describing genes associated with bladder cancer in MEDLINE citations. A gold standard was produced using records from Genetics Home Reference and Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man. Genes in text found by the system were compared to the gold standard. Recall, precision, and F-measure were calculated.

Results:

The system achieved recall of 46%, and precision of 88% (F-measure = 0.61) by taking Gene References into Function (GeneRIFs) into account.

Conclusion:

The new summarization schema for genetic etiology has potential as a component in Semantic MEDLINE to support the work of data curators.

Highlights

• Semantic MEDLINE streamlines information retrieval by succinctly expressing the meaning of sometimes complicated text and summarizing output according to a user''s needs.
• Semantic MEDLINE identifies genes noted in biomedical text as associated with a disease process.
• Semantic MEDLINE can potentially simplify secondary database curation.

Implications

• Library information retrieval services can potentially benefit from automated applications such as Semantic MEDLINE.
• Use of such automated applications can facilitate the library''s work in interdepartmental collaborative endeavors, thus reinforcing the library''s core value in its parent institution.

     

中文科技期刊中外文参考文献著者姓名著录问题的调查与分析

通过中文科技期刊中外文参考文献著者姓名著录问题的调查,从欧美著者和用汉语拼音字母书写的中国著者的著录形式入手,进行了5个单项的分析和比较,找到事实上占主流的著录形式,并与GB/T 7714-2005相比较,得出结论:就外文参考文献中著者姓名的著录规范问题,中文科技期刊执行国家标准还是比较好的.对没有较好地执行国家标准的期刊做了原因上的分析,并对国家标准相关条款的修订提出了建议.     

Re-ranking search results using language models of query-specific clusters

To obtain high precision at top ranks by a search performed in response to a query, researchers have proposed a cluster-based re-ranking paradigm: clustering an initial list of documents that are the most highly ranked by some initial search, and using information induced from these (often called) query-specific clusters for re-ranking the list. However, results concerning the effectiveness of various automatic cluster-based re-ranking methods have been inconclusive. We show that using query-specific clusters for automatic re-ranking of top-retrieved documents is effective with several methods in which clusters play different roles, among which is the smoothing of document language models. We do so by adapting previously-proposed cluster-based retrieval approaches, which are based on (static) query-independent clusters for ranking all documents in a corpus, to the re-ranking setting wherein clusters are query-specific. The best performing method that we develop outperforms both the initial document-based ranking and some previously proposed cluster-based re-ranking approaches; furthermore, this algorithm consistently outperforms a state-of-the-art pseudo-feedback-based approach. In further exploration we study the performance of cluster-based smoothing methods for re-ranking with various (soft and hard) clustering algorithms, and demonstrate the importance of clusters in providing context from the initial list through a comparison to using single documents to this end.

Applying systems of video conference communication based on a software endec in the training of state employees

This paper considers the properties the Situation Center in the Russian Academy of State Service attached to the President of the Russian Federation; software tools for technologies with an active dialog are suggested and evaluated.     

粤西高校外文数据库资源网络共享平台构建设想

文章在分析粤西四所高校图书馆外文数据库资源利用特点的基础上,提出通过与数据商达成商业协议、共同订购Elsevier数据库、构建区域环境下网络共享平台等方式缓解图书馆经费紧张、资源不足及利用率低下等矛盾。     

Focused web crawling in the acquisition of comparable corpora

Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) resources, such as dictionaries and parallel corpora, are scarce for special domains. Obtaining comparable corpora automatically for such domains could be an answer to this problem. The Web, with its vast volumes of data, offers a natural source for this. We experimented with focused crawling as a means to acquire comparable corpora in the genomics domain. The acquired corpora were used to statistically translate domain-specific words. The same words were also translated using a high-quality, but non-genomics-related parallel corpus, which fared considerably worse. We also evaluated our system with standard information retrieval (IR) experiments, combining statistical translation using the Web corpora with dictionary-based translation. The results showed improvement over pure dictionary-based translation. Therefore, mining the Web for comparable corpora seems promising.