Information Retrieval List Digest 203 (March 7, 1994) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/irld/irld-203 IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 March 7, 1994 Volume XI, Number 10 Issue 203 ********************************************************** I. NOTICES A. Meeting Announcements/Calls for Papers 1. BCS IR Conference 2. Digital Libraries '94 3. ETS Conference: Natural Language Processing Techniques & Technology in Assessment & Education 4. ASSETS '94 B. Publications 1. UVa Internet Access to SGML Textual Analyses Resources 2. Announcing Winhlp-L II. QUERIES A. Questions/Answers 1. Managing Gigabytes: Response to II.B.1. in Issue 202 2. Conquest Text Retrieval B. Requests for Information 1. IR Test Collections Request ********************************************************** I. NOTICES I.A.1. Fr: Ruben Leon Re: BCS IR BCS IR CONFERENCE PROGRAMME 22, 23 March 1994 Drymen, by Loch Lomond, Scotland The conference will take place in the Buchanan Highland Hotel,Drymen, a small atmospheric village located some 15 miles north of Glasgow and 30 minutes walk from Loch Lomond. Is is hosted by the Department of Information Science, University of Strathclyde. CONFERENCE PROGRAMME TUESDAY, March 22: Partitioned Signature Files and Beyond". F. Kelledy, Dublin City University. * "IR by imaging". Fabio Crestani, Padova University. * "A Linguistic approach to IR". Ruari O'Donnell, Dublin City University. * "The Roiters Collection" Mark Sanderson. WEDNESDAY 23 March (Parallel Sessions A and B): "Potential for Incorporating Document Ranking into the MenUSE Front-End Search Intermediary System", Martin Smith, Huddersfield University. * "A Natural Language Understanding system for reference resolution in information dialogues", F. C. Johnson, Manchester Metropolitan University. * "Discovery of optimal weights in a concept selection system", P.V.G Bradbeer, Napier University. * "Design of Graphical User Interface for a Highly Interactive IR System", Margaret Fieldhouse, City University (London). * "Codon Signatures: A document retrieval method", Jaber Al-Merri,Strathclyde University. * "Supporting Query by Navigation", F.C. Berger, Nijmegen University. * "Using Worldnet for Conceptual Distance Measurement", R. Richardson, Dublin City University. * "Situations, a General Framework for Studying IR", T.W.C Huibers, Utrecht University. * "Mrs. Thatcher Handbag Modem", John Lindsay, Kingston University. FOR COMPLETE INFORMATION, CONTACT: secretary@dis.strath.ac.uk, fax 44 41 553 1393, or telephone 44 41 552 4400 ext 3700. ********** I.A.2. Fr: Gary Marchionini Re: Digital Libraries '94 Digital Libraries '94 Symposium on the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries An unprecedented opportunity exists for forming a community of scholars to study the theory and practice of digital libraries. The catalyst has been the National Science Foundation's Digital Library Initiative. In preparing responses to the call for proposals, hundreds of researchers have spent uncounted thousands of hours evaluating and re-evaluating the characteristics of the digital library. Innovative, exciting alliances have been formed, bringing together distributed teams drawn from independent research laboratories, client organizations, and industrial entities. In the past few months we have seen what is certainly the greatest collective application of thought to date on issues of the digital library. Because of their competitive nature, proposals are often developed in private, and the insights that are gained are shared only within the small group of participants. Now that the deadline has passed, we propose that it is time to turn our attention towards dissemination of these insights. By doing so, we can significantly increase the level of sophistication of our collective understanding of the problem area, and begin to take the steps towards building a wide-ranging, open, research community that reflects the diversity of knowledge needed to address the problems of the digital library. CALL FOR PAPERS: We welcome your participation in Digital Libraries '94, which we expect will inaugurate a new conference series. Because attendance may be limited by the size of our facilities, prospective attendees are asked to submit either a full paper or a short position statement. Full papers, 10 pages or less, will be considered for presentation at the symposium. Papers accepted for presentation will be printed in a proceedings that will be distributed at the symposium. Essentially all topics relating to the design, implementation, and use of a digital library are welcome as the subject of full papers. Short position statements should be one or two pages in length. Position statements accepted for participation in the symposium will be available at the symposium for attendees' perusal. Full papers and position statements may be submitted by a team, but we ask that in this case you let us know how many team members wish to attend the symposium to aid in our space budgeting decisions. Prospective attendees are asked to contact us now to be added to our mailing list for symposium announcements. KEY DATES AND CONTACT INFORMATION: April 1, 1994 Full papers and position statements due April 20, 1994 Acceptance notification May 15, 1994 Final version of papers and statements due June 19-21, 1994 Symposium (College Station, TX) Full papers and position statements should be sent in electronic form in PostScript (preferred) or ASCII format. We prefer incoming FTP; please contact us for additional instructions. Digital Libraries '94 Hypermedia Research Laboratory Department of Computer Science Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843-3112 Electronic mail: DL94@bush.cs.tamu.edu Telephone: (409)-845-0298 FAX: (409)-847-8578 ********** I.A.3. Fr: Jill C Burstein Re: ETS Conference on Natural Language Processing The Educational Testing Service Conference on Natural Language Processing Techniques and Technology in Assessment and Education May 18th - 19th, 1994 Chauncey Conference Center Educational Testing Service Rosedale Road Princeton, New Jersey 08541 CONFERENCE PURPOSE: ETS is sponsoring this conference to stimulate discussion about the use of various technologies in education and assessment. The particular focus of this meeting will be on the uses of Natural Language Processing Techniques and Applied Technology in education and assessment. ETS has been exploring the use of technologies, such as Natural Language Processing, to facilitate the implementation of new and innovative items for assessment. This conference will help to establish a continuing discourse among the Natural Language Processing, technology, education, and assessment communities. MAY 18, 1994: Henry Braun, Vice President for Research Management- Educational Testing Service, "Opening Remarks and Welcome" * Ernest J. Anastasio, Executive Vice President-Educational Testing Service, TBA * Randy Kaplan, Educational Testing Service, "Conference Overview" SESSION I: APPLIED TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION AND ASSESSMENT: Keynote Speaker: Linda Roberts, Special Advisor on Technology, (U.S. Department of Education) "Technology and Education Reform" * Laura D'Amico (Northwestern University), Louis Gomez (Northwestern University), Steven McGee (Northwestern University), "A Case Study of Student and Teacher Use of Projects in a Technology-Supported Distributed Learning SESSION II: NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING TECHNIQUES FOR EDUCATION AND ASSESSMENT: Jacquelynn M. Kud (General Electric-Corporate Research and Development), George R. Krupka (General Electric-Corporate Research and Development), Lisa F. Rau (General Electric-Corporate Research and Development), "Methods for Clustering Short-Answer Responses" * Karen Kukich (Bellcore) "Automatic Word Correction: Can computers do it write?" * Linda Suri (Educational Testing Service) "Developing Computer Tools for the Assessment and Instruction of Deaf Writers" * Roundtable Discussion: "Setting an Agenda for Creating Educational Technology" Panelists: Randy Kaplan (ETS), Jill Burstein (ETS), Lisa Rau (GE), Thomas Landauer (Bellcore and The University of Colorado), Louis Gomez (Northwestern University), Karen Kukich (Bellcore) MAY 19, 1994 SESSION I: APPLIED TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION AND ASSESSMENT: Mike Eleey (University of Pennsylvania) "The Smart Textbook" * Steve Clyman (National Board of Medical Examiners), Anna Bersky (National Council on the State Boards of Nursing), "Processing Examinee Free-Text Entries and Authoring Tools for Patient-Care Simulations" * Randy Kaplan (Educational Testing Service) "A Vision of the Future of Assessment" SESSION II: APPLIED TECHNOLOGY AND NLP IN EDUCATION AND ASSESSMENT: Melissa Holland (Army Research Institute) "Intelligent Tutors for foreign languages: What parsers and lexical semantics do to help learners and assess learning" * George Miller (Princeton University) "Word-Sense Resolution and Reading Comprehension" * Thomas Landauer (Bellcore and The University of Colorado) "Latent structure analyses of word knowledge as models, measures and methods for patient care simulations" FOR COMPLETE INFORMATION CONTACT ANY OF THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE: Corrine Cohen Mailstop 16-R Educational Testing Service Rosedale Road Princeton, NJ 08541 phone: (609) 734-1108 Eleanore DeYoung Mailstop 17-R Educational Testing Service Rosedale Rd. Princeton, NJ 08541 e-mail: edeyoung@rosedale.org phone: (609) 734-5834 Jill Burstein Mailstop 11-R Educational Testing Service Rosedale Rd. Princeton, NJ 08541 e-mail: jburstein@rosedale.org phone: (609) 734-5823 ********** I.A.4. Fr: Ephraim P. Glinert Re: ASSETS '94 ASSETS '94 The First Annual International ACM/SIGCAPH Conference on Assistive Technologies October 31-November 1, 1994, Marina del Rey, California Sponsored by the ACM's Special Interest Group on Computers and the Physically Handicapped, ASSETS'94 is the first of a new annual series of conferences whose goal is to provide a forum where researchers and developers, from academia and industry, can meet to exchange ideas and report on new developments relating to computer-based systems to help people. The conference scope spans impairments and disabilities of all kinds, including but not limited to: sensory (hearing, vision, touch); motor (orthopedic); cognitive (learning, speech, mental); and emotional. Technical papers (up to 8 pgs in length) should be of the high quality expected at the best ACM conferences, and should either (a) present significant, original research results of a theoretical nature, or (b) report the results of relevant and rigorous empirical studies, or (c) describe the "look and feel" and discuss the internal workings of an implemented system. Where possible and appropriate, papers should be accompanied by a video to clarify and reinforce the concepts discussed. Panel proposals (up to 3 pgs in length) on timely and controversial topics are also welcome! All submissions will be refereed, and no more will be accepted than can be comfortably presented in a single track (no parallel sessions). Send 7 copies of full papers and 4 copies of panel proposals, all formatted in accordance with standard ACM two-column conference style, to the Program Chair: Ephraim P. Glinert Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, FR-35 University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 ALL SUBMISSIONS MUST BE RECEIVED NO LATER THAN APRIL 30, 1994. Questions should be directed to glinert@cs.washington.edu. NOTE: ASSETS'94 will immediately precede UIST'94, which will take place at the same site on November 2-4. See you in Marina del Rey! ********** I.B.1. Fr: John Price-Wilkin Re: UVa Internet access to SGML Textual Analysis Resources UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA LIBRARY presents INTERNET ACCESS TO SGML TEXTUAL ANALYSIS RESOURCES The University of Virginia Library is pleased to announce the Internet-accessibility of several of its text collections indexed with Open Text's PAT search engine. With the generous permission of Open Text Corporation and depositors of the texts included in this effort, we are now able to provide client/server access to several collections, including a growing body of Middle English texts, the King James and Revised Standard Versions of the Bible, and the Michigan Early Modern English Materials. Although no remote login to the University of Virginia system will be supported, access is possible through several client software packages, including Open Text's PatMotif and a freely- available vt100 client developed by the University of Virginia. A full description of the client software and the textual resources offered is available via anonymous ftp from etext.virginia.edu (128.143.22.16), as /pub/announce (URL: file://etext.virginia.edu/pub/announce). ********** I.B.2. Fr: George Byrnes Re: Announcing Winhlp-L Winhlp-L is a listserv for people creating hypertext files for the Windows environment using winhelp (.hlp). This list will enable authors to share ideas and provide each other with answers to technical questions concerning the Microsoft compiler (available ftp from 129.79.26.27) and WinWord formatting. To subscribe, send an unsigned (no signature file appended) email message to Via Internet ~~~~~~~~~~~~ listserv@Admin.HumberC.ON.CA Via Bitnet ~~~~~~~~~~ listserv.Humber.Bitnet The body of your message should contain only the following: SUB WINHLP-L George Byrnes, Human Studies/Lakeshore, Humber College 3199 Lakeshore Blvd. W., Toronto, ON. Canada M8V 1K8 BITNET: BYRNES@HUMBER.BITNET INTERNET: BYRNES@ADMIN.HUMBERC.ON.CA PHONE: (416) 675-6622 X3324 FAX: (416) 252-8842 ********************************************************** II. QUERIES II.A.1. Fr: Bill Teahan Re: Managing Gigabytes In response to II.B.1. in IR-L Digest XI-9-202 (February 28, 1994): >I am trying to track down a text that is supposedly due out soon: >March 94. The text is called "Managing Gigabytes" and is a >comparative discussion of inversion and compression (among other >topics). I would like to find the name of the author and the >publisher, if possible. One of the authors is my D.Phil. supervisor, Ian Witten. Here's the details : Witten, I.H., Moffat, A. and Bell, T.C. (1994) "Managing gigabytes: compressing and indexing documents and images." Van Nostrand Reinhold New York. Bill Teahan Computer Services Department University of Waikato Hamilton, New Zealand ********** II.A.2. Fr: fried@zeus.datasrv.co.il (IRIS Software) Re: Conquest Text Retrieval Does anybody know about the Conquest text retrieval program and its relative benefits and advantages, as well as the down side? ********** II.B.1. Fr: Jaber Al Merri Re: Information Retreival Test Collections Request Hi everybody, I have developed a new document retrieval algorithm. This method uses a machine learning techniques to improve the precision/recall of the system. I have tested the algorithm using a test collections (ADINUL, CACM, LISA). The queries with these test collections have been divided into two sets, one as training set, and the other as testing set. However, the ratio of the test queries to the training queries is very small (less than 10%). This makes the result not reliable. I am looking for benchmark test collections with a large number of queries. The test collection should have two different sets of queries. One set is to be used as training queries and the other as test queries. Please, let me know if there is any ftp site from which I can get these collections. I will appreciate any help. Thanks in advance, Jaber Almerri | E-mail: jaber@cs.strath.ac.uk Department of Computer Science | Voice : +44-41-552-4400/ext. 4310, 4300 University of Strathclyde | 26 Richmond Street | Glasgow, G1 1XH Scotland, U.K. ********************************************************** 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.ucop.edu or nancy.gusack@ucop.edu Mary Engle meeur@uccmvsa.ucop.edu or mary.engle@ucop.edu 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). 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