Statistical Models for Monolingual and Bilingual Information Retrieval

This work reviews information retrieval systems developed at ITC-irst which were evaluated through several tracks of CLEF, during the last three years. The presentation tries to follow the progress made over time in developing new statistical models first for monolingual information retrieval, then for cross-language information retrieval. Besides describing the underlying theory, performance of monolingual and bilingual information retrieval models are reported, respectively, on Italian monolingual tracks and Italian-English bilingual tracks of CLEF. Monolingual systems by ITC-irst performed consistently well in all the official evaluations, while the bilingual system ranked in CLEF 2002 just behind competitors using commercial machine translation engines. However, by experimentally comparing our statistical topic translation model against a state-of-the-art commercial system, no statistically significant difference in retrieval performance could be measured on a larger set of queries.     

A theoretical framework for productive education

having held various posts specializing in educational administration in different private institutions in California. Author of several articles dealing with the issue of productive work combined with academic study.     

How knowledge brokers emerge and evolve: The role of actors’ behaviour

This article investigates how actors positioned in a network can evolve as knowledge brokers, as well as how they act to develop new brokerage roles. Our focus is on actor's behaviour while previous studies concentrate more on the structural and positional determinants of brokerage roles. This research combines brokerage roles with a broker's functions in an exploratory study of a small Italian comics publishing house. Over 20 years, the firm played different brokerage roles involving different actors at national and international levels. We find that if all brokerage roles involve transcoding functions, the ability to overcome transcoding obstacles, through the use of shared imprinting with receiving partners, could be useful for developing any brokerage role. Moreover, heterogeneity in the competences and industry experience of hired members of the management team could support the development of new brokerage roles, with differentiated effects on various brokers’ functions. If a brokerage role involves new actors with no previous allegiance, the status of the broker, signalled through network relations, can have significant impacts by indirectly communicating its superior knowledge. The proposed, emerging theoretical framework has direct implications for studies of knowledge brokers and innovation in social networks, as well as for entrepreneurship research.     

Young refugees’ and asylum seekers’ career choices: a qualitative investigation

International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance - A major challenge for refugees and asylum seekers is social and professional integration. Using constructivist and capability...