Information Retrieval List Digest 157 (April 7, 1993) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/irld/irld-157 IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 April 7, 1993 Volume X, Number 13 Issue 157 ********************************************************** I. NOTICES A. Meeting Announcements/Calls for Papers 1. Information Exchange: Telecommunications as Part of the National Information Infrastructure 2. Understanding Images 3. Human-Computer Interaction B. Publication Announcements 1. IJCAI-93 Information II. QUERIES B. Requests for Information 1. Query: Automated Aids to Controlled Vocabulary Indexing IV. PROJECT WORK C. Abstracts 1. IR-Related Dissertation Abstracts ********************************************************** I. NOTICES I.A.1. From: Layne Watson Re: Information Exchange: Telecommunications as Part of the National Information Infrastructure INFORMATION EXCHANGE TELECOMMUNICATIONS AS PART OF THE NATIONAL INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE You are cordially invited to attend the IEEE-USA Information Exchange on Telecommunications as Part of the National Informa- tion Infrastructure. The United States needs to develop a world-class national information infrastructure. Fundamental to achieving this goal is establishing a national telecommunications policy that fosters effective application of evolving technologies, incentives for investment, and responsiveness to users. Many groups and associations are initiating projects to represent the views of their members on such an infrastructure. Because IEEE's wide-ranging membership touches almost all entities addressing this issue, the IEEE Committee on Communications & Information Policy will convene an Information Exchange May 4-5, 1993 Rosslyn Westpark Hotel Arlington, Virginia The purpose of this exchange is to allow the groups and associa- tions developing a vision of U.S. information infrastructure to share views and better understand their respective issues. We envision a dialogue among those already active in this arena and other key individuals who are directly concerned with telecomunications. This will be a neutral ground where different interests can target particular issues important to them and this country. Panelists of national stature will cover the range from technology through policy. We expect many officials of the Executive and Legislative branches to participate as well. The ultimate goal of this effort is to bring together the elements for a national policy to guide the nature and continuing development of a superior infrastructure. This Information Exchange is a first step in the process. Attendance is limited. The conference fee of $150.00 and the completed registration form are due by April 15. A block of rooms has been reserved in the name of "IEEE" at a discounted rate of $87.00. Hotel reservations must be made directly with the hotel at [PHONE (703) 527-4814; FAX (703) 522-8864] or before April 3, 1993. For registration and housing information, and a copy of the advance program, please contact: Deborah Rudolph Manager, Technology Policy Council IEEE-USA 1828 L Street NW, Suite 1202 Washington, DC 20036 PHONE: (202) 785-0017 FAX: (202) 785-0835 ********** I.A.2. Fr: Dr. Francis T. Marchese Re: NYC/ACM SIGGRAPH & Pace University: Understanding Images NYCACM SIGGRAPH and Pace University, School of Computer Science and Information Systems UNDERSTANDING IMAGES May 21-22,1993 New York, NY 10038 Artists, designers, scientists, engineers and educators share the problem of moving information from one mind to another. Traditionally, they have used pictures, words, demonstrations, music and dance to communicate imagery. However, expressing complex notions such as God and infinity or a seemingly well-defined concept such as a flower can present challenges which far exceed their technical skills. The explosive use of computers as visualization and expression tools has compounded this problem. In hypermedia, multimedia and virtual reality systems, vast amounts of information confront the observer or participant. Wading through a multitude of simultaneous images and sounds in possibly unfamiliar representations, a confounded user asks: What does it all mean? Since image construction, transmission, reception, decipherment and ultimate understanding are complex tasks strongly influenced by physiology, education and culture; and since electronic media radically amplify each processing step, then we, as electronic communicators, must determine the fundamental paradigms for composing imagery for understanding. Therefore, the purpose of this conference is to bring together a breadth of disciplines, including, but not limited to, the physical, biological and computational sciences, technology, art, psychology, philosophy, and education, in order to define and discuss the issues essential to image understanding within the computer graphics context. FEATURED TOPICS * Psychology/Perception: * Image Analysis * Design * Text * Sound * Philosophy FOR COMPLETE INFORMATION, CONTACT: Dr. Francis T. Marchese Computer Science Department NYC/ACM SIGGRAPH Conference Pace University 1 Pace Plaza Room T-1704 New York, New York 10038 voice:(212)346-1803 fax:(212)346-1933 Email: MARCHES F@PACEVM.bitnet *********** I.A.3. Fr: Ben Shneiderman Re: 10th Annual Symposium - Human-Computer Interaction Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory Center for Automation Research University of Maryland, College Park, MD 10th Annual Symposium & Open House on Thursday, June 10, 1993 in Skinner 0200 8:30am - 5:00pm NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: In addition to our annual hour-long videotape of projects, recent technical reports, and copies of the morning lecture slides, attendees will receive our new book that contains 25 key papers from our ten years of work and unpublished stories and essays such as Ben Shneiderman's declaration in the Apple vs. Microsoft/Hewlett-Packard case: Sparks of Innovation in Human-Computer Interaction (published by Ablex, Norwood, NJ, 1993). COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT / INSTITUTE FOR SYSTEMS RESEARCH: During the past year our work has focused more sharply on information visualization methods that give users x-ray vision into their mountains of data. Our treemap representation of hierarchical and categorical information is now available for browsing Macintosh directories, searching sports or business information in Open Look, and for general use on MS-DOS. Dynamic queries with direct manipulation input and spatial presentation of results are being applied to an ever widening set of applications. Work continues on Programming in the User Interface, Layout Appropriateness, creation of new widgets, evaluation of User Interface Management Systems, and browsing large spatial databases. PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT: The Department of Psychology hosts the Laboratory for Automation Psychology, a part of the HCIL. Lab facilities are designed for empirical studies of the human-computer interface and for usability research. Research designs are used to focus on the effects of specific variables (e.g., menu structure and layout) while controlling for nuisance variables (e.g., materials and individual differences). User's performance is recorded online and with video equipment. Reactions are assessed using the QUIS, the Questionnaire for User Interaction Satisfaction, developed in our lab and currently licensed to several dozen usability labs. COLLEGE OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SERVICES: The College of Library and Information Services pursues research to understand and improve information seeking in electronic environments. As science, business, and government increase their dependence on computing to manage their information resources, our abilities to access, filter, and manipulate this information becomes increasingly important. CONFERENCE TOPICS TECHNOLOGY FOR LEARNING: AT&T TEACHING THEATER: A COLLABORATIVE CLASSROOM. NAVIGATION, HYPERCOURSEWARE, AND BEYOND. A STUDENT EVALUATION OF THE AT&T TEACHING THEATER. PERSEUS: EVALUATION OF AN HYPERMEDIA CORPUS ABOUT THE ANCIENT GREEK WORLD. INTERFACE DESIGN: SEARCH AND SELECTION IN VAST MENUS WITH STRUCTURE. GRATEFUL MED INTERFACE PROTOTYPE: IMPROVING ACCESS TO MEDICAL ABSTRACTS. LAYOUT APPROPRIATENESS: GUIDING INTERFACE DESIGN WITH SIMPLE TASK DESCRIPTIONS. EVALUATION OF PLATFORM INDEPENDENT USER INTERFACE BUILDERS. PROGRAMMING IN THE USER INTERFACE WITH TRIGGERS. INFORMATION BROWSING/VISUALIZATION: ACCESS METHODS OF NOVICE HYPERTEXT USERS FOR INFORMATION RETRIEVAL. BROWSING LARGE SPATIAL INFORMATION SPACES: DYNAMIC QUERIES, NEW ALGORITHMS. TWO DIMENSIONAL BROWSERS, SPECIFICATION METHODS. TREEMAPS FOR VISUALIZING HIERARCHICAL INFORMATION: CONCEPTS AND APPLICATIONS. FOR COMPLETE INFORMATION CONTACT: HCIL, c/o Lian Arrow AV Williams Building: University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742-3255 e-mail arrow@cs.umd.edu ********** I.B.1. From: Jean-Pierre Laurent Subject: IJCAI-93 Infos INFORMATION ABOUT IJCAI-93, USING THE EMAIL IJCAI SERVER The IJCAI server contains the Conference Brochure of IJCAI-93 and the list of accepted papers. To access to this information, you have to send mails to the IJCAI server, as follows: * First, to obtain the content of the IJCAI server, send a mail to ijcai-serv@imag.fr the subject can be empty (or anything you want), the content must be: index You will receive a reply with the list of all available files in the IJCAI server (name and brief description of the content). * Second, to receive the file NAME, send a new mail at the same address : ijcai-serv@imag.fr the subject is again empty or anything you want, the content must be : get NAME You will receive a reply with the content of the file NAME. JP Laurent ********************************************************** II. QUERIES II.B.1. Fr: David Lewis Re: Query: Automated Aids to Controlled Vocabulary Indexing In a recent discussion on PACS-L, several people expressed the belief that artificial intelligence software was more likely to be of use as an aid to human indexing than as a replacement. I know of a couple of systems of this sort that have been fielded by Carnegie Group. I would be interested in getting pointers to other such software that currently exists, or to published research in this area. I'm particularly interested in systems that suggest controlled vocabulary categories to be assigned, with the human indexer having the opportunity to confirm or override the machine's suggestion. If you reply to me I will post a summary of replies to this list, and will include your name along with your comment unless otherwise requested. Thanks, Dave ********************************************************** IV. PROJECT WORK IV.C.1. Fr: Susanne M. Humphrey Re: Selected IR-Related Dissertation Abstracts The following are citations selected by title and abstract as being related to Information Retrieval (IR), resulting from a computer search, using BRS Information Technologies, of the Dissertation Abstracts Online database produced by University Microfilms International (UMI). Included are UMI order number, title, author, degree, year, institution; number of pages, one or more Dissertation Abstracts International (DAI) subject descriptors chosen by the author, and abstract. Unless otherwise specified, paper or microform copies of dissertations may be ordered from University Microfilms International, Dissertation Copies, Post Office Box 1764, Ann Arbor, MI 48106; telephone for U.S. (except Michigan, Hawaii, Alaska): 1-800-521-3042, for Canada: 1-800-268-6090. Price lists and other ordering and shipping information are in the introduction to the published DAI. An alternate source for copies is sometimes provided. Dissertation titles and abstracts contained here are published with permission of University Microfilms International, publishers of Dissertation Abstracts International (copyright by University Microfilms International), and may not be reproduced without their prior permission. AN University Microfilms Order Number ADGD--96200. AU PAGE, STEPHEN DOWLAND. TI COMPUTER TOOLS FOR MUSIC INFORMATION RETRIEVAL. IN University of Oxford (United Kingdom) D.Phil. 1988, 272 pages. SO DAI V53(03), SecB, pp1470. DE Computer Science. Music. AB Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. The computer has the potential to become a tool of great value for the musicologist and music analyst. However, since the early enthusiasm of the 1960s, there has been little innovative work on computer applications in music research, despite dramatic advances in other branches of computing. This thesis surveys the field, identifies reasons for the poor acceptance of computers in music research, and applies techniques from computer science to solve some of the problems, as a step towards a generally applicable tool for the music researcher. It is suggested that information retrieval underlies most applications of computers in music research, and therefore a common database retrieval subsystem can be built. The past problems of incompatibility of encoding languages can be dispelled by abandoning the text-string approach, instead using data structures to decouple input systems from later processing. Organisational principles and traversal primitives for a retrieval subsystem are proposed. Many kinds of musical enquiry can be handled using an interactive, nonprocedural query system: the user's description of a musical object is interpreted by the query system and used to direct a database search. This allows more effective experimentation than the currently conventional approach, which is based on operational concepts and programs. A high-level architecture for such a query system, incorporating a database subsystem, is presented. A restricted query system, capable of retrieving melodic and rhythmic patterns, has been implemented in experimental form. A query language, based on regular expressions, is described: this language allows the user to specify flexible search criteria which match varying sequences of notes. A single-pass search algorithm, using finite automata to traverse the database, is developed. Observations on performance suggest that such a query system can be successfully implemented on a small computer. Future steps towards the construction of a music researcher's "toolkit" are proposed. A comprehensive bibliography of the field is included, since many important materials are little known and hard to trace. AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG92-22108. AU SRIHARI, ROHINI KESAVAN. TI EXTRACTING VISUAL INFORMATION FROM TEXT: USING CAPTIONS TO LABEL FACES IN NEWSPAPER PHOTOGRAPHS. IN State University of New York at Buffalo Ph.D. 1992, 315 pages. SO DAI V53(03), SecB, pp1475. DE Computer Science. Artificial Intelligence. AB There are many situations where linguistic and pictorial data are jointly presented to communicate information. In the general case, each of these two sources conveys orthogonal information. A computer model for integrating information from the two sources requires an initial interpretation of both the text and the picture followed by consolidation of information. The problem of performing general-purpose vision without apriori knowledge (needed in such a situation) is nearly impossible. However, in some situations, the text describes salient aspects of the picture. In such situations, it is possible to extract visual information from the text, resulting in a conceptualised graph describing the structure of the accompanying picture. This graph can then be used by a computer vision system in the top-down interpretation of the picture. In this dissertation, a computational model for understanding pictures based on information in accompanying captions is presented. The use of SNePS (Semantic Network Processing System) as the common intermediate representation for both linguistic and pictorial information is discussed. Specifically, we present the knowledge representations and interpretations that comprise the model. The focus of this dissertation is on the generation of a conceptualised graph, a SNePS network which reflects a cognitive agent's conceptualisation of a picture based on information contained in a descriptive caption. This representation includes information about objects appearing in the picture and spatial constraints between them, information used in the subsequent task of labelling objects in the picture. A substantial portion of the dissertation is devoted to techniques of extracting such visual information from text. The techniques are based on both syntactic and semantic considerations. We classify linguistic methods of identifying objects in pictures into several broad categories and, for each category, discuss the manner in which visual information can be extracted. The problem of dynamically generating model descriptions for objects (and for entire pictures) is illustrated. A theoretical solution to this problem is presented and illustrated through an example. As a test of the model, we present an implementation, PICTION, whereby information obtained from parsing a caption of a newspaper photograph is used to identify human faces in the photograph. A key component of the system is the utilisation of spatial constraints in order to reduce the number of possible labels that could be associated with a face. These constraints are generated by a natural-language processing system that examines the caption in detail. We report on the extensive testing of the system and discuss the results obtained. The method of evaluating the performance of PICTION can be used by any face-identification system. ********************************************************** IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, Division of Library Automation, 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, CA. 94612-3550. Send subscription requests to: LISTSERV@UCCVMA.BITNET Send submissions to IRLIST to: IR-L@UCCVMA.BITNET Editorial Staff: Clifford Lynch calur@uccmvsa.ucop.edu or calur@uccmvsa.bitnet Nancy Gusack ncgur@uccmvsa.bitnet or ncgur@uccmvsa.ucop.edu Mary Engle meeur@uccmvsa.bitnet The IRLIST Archives is now set up for anonymous FTP, as well as via the LISTSERV. Using anonymous FTP via the host dla.ucop.edu, the files will be found in the directory pub/irl, stored in subdirectories by year (e.g., /pub/irl/1993). Using LISTSERV, send the message INDEX IR-L to LISTSERV@UCCVMA.BITNET. To get a specific issue listed in the Index, send the message GET IR-L LOGYYMM, where YY is the year and MM is the numeric month in which the issue was mailed, to LISTSERV@UCCVMA (Bitnet) or LISTSERV@UCCVMA.UCOP.EDU. You will receive the issues for the entire month you have requested. These files are not to be sold or used for commercial purposes. Contact Nancy Gusack or Mary Engle for more information on IRLIST. THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN IRLIST DO NOT REPRESENT THOSE OF THE EDITORS OR THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. AUTHORS ASSUME FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONTENTS OF THEIR SUBMISSIONS TO IRLIST.