Learning has transcended into a life-long endeavor in the information age. It is no longer restricted to confines of formal classrooms. Consequently, a student is not restricted to traditional learning resources like teachers, textbooks or printed content. Digital resources available on the Internet form a very significant component of…

This paper discusses a model for structuring resources for automatic assessment in scientific education by means of textual descriptions. This study aims to support instructors in extending teaching strategies and expanding formative assessment in virtual communities of practice. The strategy to achieve these goals involves the implementation of a…

Identifying topics of a textual document is useful for many purposes. We can organize the documents by topics in digital libraries. Then, we could browse and search for the documents with specific topics. By examining the topics of a document, we can quickly understand what the document is about. To augment the traditional manual way of topic…

Quickly accessing the contents of a video is challenging for users, particularly for unstructured video, which contains no intentional shot boundaries, no chapters, and no apparent edited format. We approach this problem in the domain of lecture videos though the use of machine learning, to gather semantic information about the videos; and through…

Researchers that investigate the media's coverage of health have historically relied on keyword searches to retrieve relevant health news coverage, and manual content analysis methods to categorize and score health news text. These methods are problematic. Manual content analysis methods are labor intensive, time consuming, and inherently…

As part of the research carried out at the University of California, Santa Barbara's Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS), the Paper Authentication and Integrity Research (PAIR) project was launched. We began by investigating how one recent technology affected student learning outcomes. One aspect of this research was to study the…

Proposes a structure for natural language descriptions of the semantic content of visual materials that requires descriptions to be (modified) keywords, phrases, or simple sentences, with components that are grammatical relations common to many languages. This structure makes it easy to implement a collection's descriptions as a relational…

Presents three different statistical techniques for identifying content-bearing phrases within a natural language database. Describes results on the effectiveness of the scoring methods when applied to MEDLINE phrases, and how the three methods can be combined to improve performance. Processing results for an example document are provided.…

Explores the interrelation between Web publishing and information retrieval technologies and lists new approaches to Web indexing and searching. Highlights include Web directories; search engines; portalisation; Internet service providers; browser providers; meta search engines; popularity based analysis; natural language searching; links-based…

Rosetta, an indexing and retrieval system indexes papers in a collection based on the way they have been described when referenced by other papers in the collection. Using Rosetta, simple natural language queries retrieve high-precision results in which descriptions based on citations clearly summarize retrieved papers, allowing users to quickly…

Presents criteria for an effective syntagmatic relator system and describes how conceptual syntagmatic relationships are expressed in natural language, commenting on the adequacy of such expressions for document retrieval systems. Only one type of expression, a gestalt structure, represented as a frame, conforms to the criteria. (Author/JKP)

Explains some major problems related to the subject indexing process and proposes semiotics as a framework for understanding the interpretive nature of the process. Explores the approach to studies of indexing and library and information science suggested by Fairthorne, Blair, Benediktsson, and others. Offers an explanation of what occurs in the…

Examines the vocabulary and communication constructs that are used by novices and domain experts to describe objects in an object identification task. Results suggest that indexing and retrieval systems should provide semantic level similarity mechanisms to allow for whole-object as well as part-wise visual analogy. The systems should also provide…

Explores the indirect method of locating for indexing the likely explicit and implicit captions of photographs, using multimodal clues including the specific words used, syntax, surrounding layout of the Web page, and general appearance of the associated image. The MARIE-3 system thus avoids full image processing and full natural-language…

The accelerating rate of data generation and resulting publications are taxing the ability of scientific investigators to stay current with the emerging literature. This problem, acute in science, is not uncommon in other areas. New approaches to managing this explosion of information are needed. While it is only possible to read one paper or…