Australian experience with co-ordinating agencies for tertiary education

This article reviews Australian experience since the late 1950s with UGC-type co-ordinating agencies for tertiary education. It focuses particularly on factors which have influenced the development and adaptation of co-ordinating agencies, the establishment and transformation over time of the Australian Universities Commission, and recent developments in co-ordinating mechanisms at both Commonwealth and state levels. An attempt is made to evaluate the suitability of current arrangements and to consider likely changes.     

Swapping documents and terms

Experiments were conducted to explore the impact of combining various components of eight leading information retrieval systems. Each system demonstrated improved effectiveness through the use of blind feedback, also known as pseudo-relevance feedback, a form of query expansion. Blind feedback uses the results of a preliminary retrieval step to augment the efficacy of a secondary retrieval step. The hybrid combination of primary and secondary retrieval steps from different systems in a number of cases yielded better effectiveness than either of the constituent systems alone. This positive combining effect was observed when entire documents were passed between the two retrieval steps, but not when only the expansion terms were passed. Several combinations of primary and secondary retrieval steps were fused using the CombMNZ algorithm; all yielded significant effectiveness improvement over the individual systems, with the best yielding an improvement of 13% (p = 10⁻⁶) over the best individual system and an improvement of 4% (p = 10⁻⁵) over a simple fusion of the eight systems.     

Student selection and admission to higher education:Policies and practices in the Asian region

Student selection and admission for higher education in the Asian region are matters of concern at a time when there is rapid growth in enrolments and mounting pressure for changes, and when public funds are unable to match demands for expansion. This paper provides a broad review of policies and practices in developing and newly industrialised countries of the Asian region, paying particular attention to access, selection, the admission process, equity and links to the labour market. It attempts an evaluation and provides suggestions for policymakers.     

DUC in context

Recent years have seen increased interest in text summarization with emphasis on evaluation of prototype systems. Many factors can affect the design of such evaluations, requiring choices among competing alternatives. This paper examines several major themes running through three evaluations: SUMMAC, NTCIR, and DUC, with a concentration on DUC. The themes are extrinsic and intrinsic evaluation, evaluation procedures and methods, generic versus focused summaries, single- and multi-document summaries, length and compression issues, extracts versus abstracts, and issues with genre.