The problem of automatically answering natural language questions by pinpointing exact answers in a large text (web) corpus has been studied since the mid 1990s. Most research has been directed at answering factoid questions: questions that expect a ...

Collaboration is often required or encouraged for activities that are too complex or difficult to deal with for an individual. Many situations involving information seeking also call for people working together. Despite its natural appeal and ...

The size of theWeb as well as user bases of search systems continue to grow exponentially. Consequently, providing subsecond query response times and high query throughput become quite challenging for large-scale information retrieval systems. ...

The Crowdsourcing for Search Evaluation Workshop (CSE 2010) was held on July 23, 2010 in Geneva, Switzerland, in conjunction with the 33rd Annual ACM SIGIR Conference. The workshop addressed the latest advances in theory and empirical methods in ...

In the context of creating large scale test collections, the present paper discusses methods of constructing a patent test collection for evaluation of prior art search. In particular, it addresses criteria for topic selection and identification of ...

A single search interface to all a person's digital resources, such as email archives, corporate databases, websites, and subscription services, is appealing but a central index of all private, corporate, subscription and web data is impractical. A ...

The Workshop on Large-Scale Distributed Systems for Information Retrieval was a venue for seminal ideas on the design of systems for search. The workshop focused mainly on mechanisms for P2P IR, which is currently a highly popular research area, but it ...

A new signature file organization is proposed as a combination of two orthogonal partitioning strategies, the key-based and the bit-sliced, respectively. The design results from theoretical analysis of these elementary approaches in which performance is ...

InQuisiX is an interactive system supporting the development and use of an electronic catalog. Features are provided for organizing the catalog, classifying and describing items, and searching and browsing catalog descriptions. Items described in the ...

In a research environment for text and document retreival, the experimental functionality is and must be paramount. However, for long-term durability of a software product, the user-interface is seen as a critical component to successful development. In ...

The two basic requirements for achieving software reuse are: (1) to provide a sufficient number of components over a spectrum of domains that can be reused as is (black-box reuse) or easily adapted (white-box reuse), and (2) to organize components such ...

Many methods for representing software components for reuse have been proposed. These include traditional library and information science methods, knowledge based methods, and hypertext. There has been no empirical evaluation of these methods, and ...