Table extraction for answer retrieval

The ability to find tables and extract information from them is a necessary component of many information retrieval tasks. Documents often contain tables in order to communicate densely packed, multi-dimensional information. Tables do this by employing layout patterns to efficiently indicate fields and records in two-dimensional form. Their rich combination of formatting and content presents difficulties for traditional retrieval techniques. This paper describes techniques for extracting tables from text and retrieving answers from the extracted information. We compare machine learning (especially, Conditional Random Fields) and heuristic methods for table extraction. To retrieve answers, our approach creates a cell document, which contains the cell and its metadata (headers, titles) for each table cell, and the retrieval model ranks the cells of the extracted tables using a language-modeling approach. Performance is tested using government statistical Web sites and news articles, and errors are analyzed in order to improve the system.     

Political systems vs. management systems in collegiate organizations

The emergence of the information age is necessitating that political systems, which govern collegiate organizations with bureaucracy, be replaced with management systems that employ third wave principles to produce a zenith of pedagogical productivity.Bruce Gunn is a Professor of Marketing in the College of Business at Florida State University. He has produced over 60 refereed articles and program papers in a wide variety of periodicals includingManagement Science, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and theJournal of Marketing Education. His current research interests involve developing the theories, concepts and techniques for advancing the acceptance of the Steady State Economy, the Competruistic Ideology, National Economic Planning and the use of Systems Science methodology in raising organizational productivity.     

The effects of reticence on group interaction

Research regarding the effects of reticence on group interaction reveals that reticence does not necessarily impede the group process; however, reticent individuals are seen as less effective participators due to their limited vocal activity, and they are less likely to emerge as the group's leader.

Research on the effects of reticence on group interaction is reviewed and suggestions are made to instructors of the small groups course regarding helping reticent students participate in the small group.     

Query structuring and expansion with two-stage term dependence for Japanese web retrieval

In this paper, we propose a new term dependence model for information retrieval, which is based on a theoretical framework using Markov random fields. We assume two types of dependencies of terms given in a query: (i) long-range dependencies that may appear for instance within a passage or a sentence in a target document, and (ii) short-range dependencies that may appear for instance within a compound word in a target document. Based on this assumption, our two-stage term dependence model captures both long-range and short-range term dependencies differently, when more than one compound word appear in a query. We also investigate how query structuring with term dependence can improve the performance of query expansion using a relevance model. The relevance model is constructed using the retrieval results of the structured query with term dependence to expand the query. We show that our term dependence model works well, particularly when using query structuring with compound words, through experiments using a 100-gigabyte test collection of web documents mostly written in Japanese. We also show that the performance of the relevance model can be significantly improved by using the structured query with our term dependence model.

An information-pattern-based approach to novelty detection

In this paper, a new novelty detection approach based on the identification of sentence level information patterns is proposed. First, “novelty” is redefined based on the proposed information patterns, and several different types of information patterns are given corresponding to different types of users’ information needs. Second, a thorough analysis of sentence level information patterns is elaborated using data from the TREC novelty tracks, including sentence lengths, named entities (NEs), and sentence level opinion patterns. Finally, a unified information-pattern-based approach to novelty detection (ip-BAND) is presented for both specific NE topics and more general topics. Experiments on novelty detection on data from the TREC 2002, 2003 and 2004 novelty tracks show that the proposed approach significantly improves the performance of novelty detection in terms of precision at top ranks. Future research directions are suggested.     

Research on “fortuitous” communication: A review

Summary In these two articles we have proposed a schematic theoretical model for the study of communication, one which subsumes both face-to-face and mass communication but is intended as an orientation to a general theory of mass communication. In addition we have used the model as a framework for a review of a part of the literature of mass communication and have attempted a brief assessment of the present state of our knowledge of the field. This paper presents one application of the authors’ conceptual model of the communication process published in the last issue of AVCR. Here they are attempting to order the existing research findings on “fortuitous” communication in relationship to their model. Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr., and Bruce H. Westley are assistant professors of Journalism, The University of Wisconsin.     

The effect of altered pitch length on performance and technique in junior fast bowlers

The aim of this study was to assess the effect of pitch length (20.12 m [full length], 18 m and 16 m) on the fast bowling performance and technique of junior cricketers. Performance measures included ball release speed and accuracy, while technique variables evaluated were those shown to be related to the aetiology of lower back injury. Thirty-seven fast bowlers from the under-11 (n=14), under-13 (n=11) and under-15 (n=12) age groups were filmed bowling five deliveries at each of the above pitch lengths. Two synchronized NAC video cameras operating at 200 Hz permitted three-dimensional reconstruction of the hip and shoulder alignments, while a standard digital video camera operating at 50 Hz (positioned perpendicular to the bowling action) was used to measure front knee angle and ball release speed. Accuracy scores were taken from a zoned target at the batsman's stumps. A two-way analysis of variance with repeated measures (with age and pitch length as the between- and within-participant variables, respectively) was used to compare each age group at the 0.05 significance level. Results showed that accuracy improved in all age groups at shorter pitch lengths, although ball velocity remained constant throughout all trials. Shoulder counter-rotation increased significantly for the under-13 bowlers when bowling on the full-length pitch in comparison with the two shorter lengths. Counter-rotation also increased on the full-length pitch in the under-11 age group, although this increase was not significant. The under-15 bowlers' techniques did not change as pitch length increased. As under-11 and under-13 bowlers adopted a "safer" bowling action with superior accuracy on the 18?m compared with the full length pitch, it was concluded that these age groups should bowl on an 18?m pitch to reduce the likelihood of lower back injuries and improve accuracy.