this paper is: Independent of any given IR model, and examined within an information -based, abstract framework, what are commonsense properties of aboutness (and its dual, non-aboutness)? We propose a set of properties characterizing aboutness and non-aboutness from a commonsense perspective. Special attention is paid to the rules prescribing conservative behaviour of aboutness with respect to information composition. The interaction between aboutness and non-aboutness is modeled via normative rules. The completeness, soundness and consistency of the aboutness proof systems are analyzed and discussed. A case study based on monotonicity shows that many current IR systems are either monotonic or non-monotonic. An interesting class of IR models, namely those that are conservatively monotonic, is identified. 1 . Introduction You are sitting in a bus and two people in front of you are talking. The first says to the second, "I went to see so-andso film last night", to which

We describe our work on the development of Language and Evaluation Resources for the evaluation of summaries in English and Chinese. The language resources include a parallel corpus of English and Chinese texts which are translations of each other, a set of queries in both languages, clusters of documents relevants to each query, sentence relevance measures for each sentence in the document clusters, and manual multi-document summaries at different compression rates. The evaluation resources consist of metrics for measuring the content of automatic summaries against reference summaries. The framework can be used in the evaluation of extractive, non-extractive, single and multi-document summarization. We focus on the resources developed that are made available for the research community. 1.

this article, we propose to use inductive evaluation for functional benchmarking of IR models as a complement of the traditional experiment-based performance benchmarking. We define a functional benchmark suite in two stages: the evaluation criteria based on the notion of "aboutness," and the formal evaluation methodology using the criteria. The proposed benchmark has been successfully applied to evaluate various well-known classical and logic-based IR models. The functional benchmarking results allow us to compare and analyze the functionality of the different IR models

Information retrieval (IR) can be viewed as a process to determine the “aboutness”, or sometimes “relevance”, relationship between information carriers (e.g. document and query). Thus, the concept of aboutness lies at the heart of IR. A better understanding of aboutness would lead to more effective IR systems. In this paper, we give a review of the status of current research on aboutness. It is shown that important outcomes have been obtained. However, there are still several problems to be further worked out, including soundness of aboutness properties, ordering of aboutness inferences and conservative monotonicity of aboutness relation. We discuss these problems in detail and propose a strategy for further investigation of aboutness, i.e. the fundamental and sound properties of aboutness from commonsense perspective. The goal of our work is to define a generic commonsense aboutness theory for IR modeling. The applications of aboutness theory are also highlighted.

this report, we give a brief description of the symbolic aboutness theory, and introduce an implementation of the proposed symbolic aboutness theory -- "Penguin" Aboutness Inference System. The experimental results show that the proposed aboutness rules are reasonable, and at the same time, provide us a deeper understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of symbolic approach. Moving down to a vector based conceptual level, which is underneath the symbolic level, would provide a solution to the major disadvantages of symbolic approaches- computational complexity and the frame problem

This Digital lmage Archive (DIA) project Involves the production of a digital archive of a collection of Nineteenth Century photographic images and equipment. The DIA was designed to operate as a public access catalogue, to aid curators with information retrieval and to reduce the need to handle some original material. Much of the William Henry Fox Talbot collection at the Royal Photographic Society can no longer be exhibited due to damage caused by handllng and light. Access to the collection is restricted because of preservation concerns over a growing percentage of the collection and insufficient resources for reproductions and supervision. These problems led to investigations into the possible advantages that digital technology might offer. Cross-referencing, administrative cataloguing and recording of preservation techniques are ideally suited to digital technology. The short life span of digital storage media and concerns over system compatibility requires the development of a complex long-term digital stratem that must be standardized if the archival material is to survive. Construction of the DTA involved investigations into software and hardware configurations concentrating on the abilitv to customize factors such as indexing from recognized standards and practices. mi; paper concentrates on the results of a &wey into Candards within digital indexing systems, which indicates that although there is growing awareness of standardization within digital cataloguing and multimedia, many organizations continue to devise independent systems.

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Investigators frequently need to quickly learn new research domains in order to advance their research. This thesis presents five contributions to understanding how software helps researchers explore scientific literature networks. (1) A taxonomy which summarizes capabilities in existing bibliography tools, revealing patterns of capabilities by system type. (2) Six participants in two user studies evaluate Action Science Explorer (ASE), which is designed to create surveys of scientific literature and integrates visualizations and statistics. Users found document-level statistics and attribute rankings to be convenient when beginning literature exploration. (3) User studies also identify users ’ questions when exploring academic literature, which include examining the evolution of a field, identifying author relationships, and searching for review papers. (4) The evaluations suggest shortcomings of ASE, and this thesis outlines improvements to ASE and lists user requirements for bibliographic exploration. (5) I recommend strategies for evaluating bibliographic exploration tools based on experiences evaluating ASE. UNDERSTANDING SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE NETWORKS:

and other research outputs Application of aboutness to functional benchmarking in information retrieval