Mark T. Maybury - Böcker

Major trends in the development of an important new method of information access that combines elements of natural language processing, information retrieval, and human computer interaction.Question answering systems, which provide natural language responses to natural language queries, are the subject of rapidly advancing research encompassing both academic study and commercial applications, the most well-known of which is the search engine Ask Jeeves. Question answering draws on different fields and technologies, including natural language processing, information retrieval, explanation generation, and human computer interaction. Question answering creates an important new method of information access and can be seen as the natural step beyond such standard Web search methods as keyword query and document retrieval. This collection charts significant new directions in the field, including temporal, spatial, definitional, biographical, multimedia, and multilingual question answering. After an introduction that defines essential terminology and provides a roadmap to future trends, the book covers key areas of research and development. These include current methods, architecture requirements, and the history of question answering on the Web; the development of systems to address new types of questions; interactivity, which is often required for clarification of questions or answers; reuse of answers; advanced methods; and knowledge representation and reasoning used to support question answering. Each section contains an introduction that summarizes the chapters included and places them in context, relating them to the other chapters in the book as well as to the existing literature in the field and assessing the problems and challenges that remain.

This work provides a theoretical and practical explanation of the advancements in information retrieval and their application to existing systems. It takes a system approach, discussing all aspects of an Information Retrieval System. The major difference between this book and the first edition is the addition to this text of descriptions of the automated indexing of multimedia documents, as items in information retrieval are now considered to be a combination of text along with graphics, audio, image and video data types. The growth of the Internet and the availability of enormous volumes of data in digital form have necessitated intense interest in techniques to assist the user in locating data. The importance of the Internet and its associated hypertext linked structure are put into perspective as a new type of information retrieval data structure. The total system approach also includes discussion of the human interface and the importance of information visualization for identification of relevant information. With the availability of large quantities of multi-media on the Internet (audio, video, images), Information Retrieval Systems need to address multi-modal retrieval.The primary use of this book is as a college text on Information Retrieval Systems. But in addition to the theoretical aspects, the book maintains a theme of practicality that puts into perspective the importance and utilization of the theory in systems that are being used by anyone on the Internet. The student will gain an understanding of what is achievable using existing technologies and deficient areas that warrant additional research. The text provides coverage of all of the major aspects of information retrieval and has sufficient detail to allow students to implement a simple Information Retrieval System.

The advent of increasingly large consumer collections of audio (e.g., iTunes), imagery (e.g., Flickr), and video (e.g., YouTube) is driving a need not only for multimedia retrieval but also information extraction from and across media. Furthermore, industrial and government collections fuel requirements for stock media access, media preservation, broadcast news retrieval, identity management, and video surveillance.  While significant advances have been made in language processing for information extraction from unstructured multilingual text and extraction of objects from imagery and video, these advances have been explored in largely independent research communities who have addressed extracting information from single media (e.g., text, imagery, audio).  And yet users need to search for concepts across individual media, author multimedia artifacts, and perform multimedia analysis in many domains. This collection is intended to serve several purposes, including reporting the current state of the art, stimulating novel research, and encouraging cross-fertilization of distinct research disciplines. The collection and integration of a common base of intellectual material will provide an invaluable service from which to teach a future generation of cross disciplinary media scientists and engineers.

TV viewers today are exposed to overwhelming amounts of information, and challenged by the plethora of interactive functionality provided by current set-top boxes. To ensure broad adoption of this technology by consumers, future Digital Television will have to take usability issues thoroughly into account. In particular serious attention must be paid to facilitate the selection of content on an individual basis, and to provide easy-to-use interfaces that satisfy viewers' interaction requirements. This volume collects selected research reports on the development of personalized services for Interactive TV. Drawing upon contributions from academia and industry in the US, Europe and Asia, this book represents a comprehensive picture of leading edge research in personalized television.

Chapter 1 places into perspective a total Information Storage and Retrieval System. This perspective introduces new challenges to the problems that need to be theoretically addressed and commercially implemented. Ten years ago commercial implementation of the algorithms being developed was not realistic, allowing theoreticians to limit their focus to very specific areas. Bounding a problem is still essential in deriving theoretical results. But the commercialization and insertion of this technology into systems like the Internet that are widely being used changes the way problems are bounded. From a theoretical perspective, efficient scalability of algorithms to systems with gigabytes and terabytes of data, operating with minimal user search statement information, and making maximum use of all functional aspects of an information system need to be considered. The dissemination systems using persistent indexes or mail files to modify ranking algorithms and combining the search of structured information fields and free text into a consolidated weighted output are examples of potential new areas of investigation. The best way for the theoretician or the commercial developer to understand the importance of problems to be solved is to place them in the context of a total vision of a complete system. Understanding the differences between Digital Libraries and Information Retrieval Systems will add an additional dimension to the potential future development of systems. The collaborative aspects of digital libraries can be viewed as a new source of information that dynamically could interact with information retrieval techniques.