This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second and Third Workshops of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation, FIRE 2010 and 2011, on Multi-lingual Information Access in South Asian Languages held in Gandhinagar, India, in February 2010 and in Bombay, India, in December 2011. The volume brings together revised and expanded versions of a total of 29 papers. The papers are organized in topical sections on various aspects of multi-lingual information access.
Spanning scholarly contributions from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, this edited volume seeks to capture and elucidate the distinct challenges, approaches and possible solutions associated with interpreting, adapting and applying language-in-education policies in a range of linguistically complex teaching and learning environments across South Asia. Centring on-the-ground perspectives of scholars, practitioners, pupils, parents and the larger community, the volume offers new insights into one of the most complex, populous, and diverse multilingual educational contexts in the world. Language-in-education policies and practices within this setting represent particularly high stakes issues, playing a pivotal role in determining access to literacy, thereby forming a critical pivot in the reproduction of educational inequality. The broad aim of the collection is thus to highlight the pedagogical, practical, ideological and identity-related implications arising from current language-in-education policies in this region, with the aim of illustrating how systemic inequality is intertwined with such policies and their associated interpretations. Aimed at both academics and practitioners - whether researchers and students in the fields of education, linguistics, sociology, anthropology or South Asian studies, on the one hand, or language policy advisors, curriculum developers, teacher educators, teachers, and members of funding bodies, aid providers or NGOs, on the other - it is anticipated that the accounts in this volume will offer their readership opportunities to consider their wider implications and applications across other rich multilingual settings – be these local, regional, national or global.
This book describes recent advances in text summarization, identifies remaining gaps and challenges, and proposes ways to overcome them. It begins with one of the most frequently discussed topics in text summarization – ‘sentence extraction’ –, examines the effectiveness of current techniques in domain-specific text summarization, and proposes several improvements. In turn, the book describes the application of summarization in the legal and scientific domains, describing two new corpora that consist of more than 100 thousand court judgments and more than 20 thousand scientific articles, with the corresponding manually written summaries. The availability of these large-scale corpora opens up the possibility of using the now popular data-driven approaches based on deep learning. The book then highlights the effectiveness of neural sentence extraction approaches, which perform just as well as rule-based approaches, but without the need for any manual annotation. As a next step, multiple techniques for creating ensembles of sentence extractors – which deliver better and more robust summaries – are proposed. In closing, the book presents a neural network-based model for sentence compression. Overall the book takes readers on a journey that begins with simple sentence extraction and ends in abstractive summarization, while also covering key topics like ensemble techniques and domain-specific summarization, which have not been explored in detail prior to this.
We are living in a multilingual world and the diversity in languages which are used to interact with information access systems has generated a wide variety of challenges to be addressed by computer and information scientists. The growing amount of non-English information accessible globally and the increased worldwide exposure of enterprises also necessitates the adaptation of Information Retrieval (IR) methods to new, multilingual settings. Peters, Braschler and Clough present a comprehensive description of the technologies involved in designing and developing systems for Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR). They provide readers with broad coverage of the various issues involved in creating systems to make accessible digitally stored materials regardless of the language(s) they are written in. Details on Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) are also covered that help readers to understand how to develop retrieval systems that cross language boundaries. Their work is divided into six chapters and accompanies the reader step-by-step through the various stages involved in building, using and evaluating MLIR systems. The book concludes with some examples of recent applications that utilise MLIR technologies. Some of the techniques described have recently started to appear in commercial search systems, while others have the potential to be part of future incarnations. The book is intended for graduate students, scholars, and practitioners with a basic understanding of classical text retrieval methods. It offers guidelines and information on all aspects that need to be taken into consideration when building MLIR systems, while avoiding too many ‘hands-on details’ that could rapidly become obsolete. Thus it bridges the gap between the material covered by most of the classical IR textbooks and the novel requirements related to the acquisition and dissemination of information in whatever language it is stored.
The ninth campaign of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) for European languages was held from January to September 2008. There were seven main eval- tion tracks in CLEF 2008 plus two pilot tasks. The aim, as usual, was to test the p- formance of a wide range of multilingual information access (MLIA) systems or s- tem components. This year, 100 groups, mainly but not only from academia, parti- pated in the campaign. Most of the groups were from Europe but there was also a good contingent from North America and Asia plus a few participants from South America and Africa. Full details regarding the design of the tracks, the methodologies used for evaluation, and the results obtained by the participants can be found in the different sections of these proceedings. The results of the CLEF 2008 campaign were presented at a two-and-a-half day workshop held in Aarhus, Denmark, September 17–19, and attended by 150 resear- ers and system developers. The annual workshop, held in conjunction with the European Conference on Digital Libraries, plays an important role by providing the opportunity for all the groups that have participated in the evaluation campaign to get together comparing approaches and exchanging ideas. The schedule of the workshop was divided between plenary track overviews, and parallel, poster and breakout sessions presenting this year’s experiments and discu- ing ideas for the future. There were several invited talks.
The increasing globalization and centralization in the world is threatening the existence of a large number of smaller languages. In South Asia some locally dominant languages (e.g., Hindi, Urdu, Nepali) are gaining ground beside English at the expense of the lesser-known languages. Despite a long history of stable multilingualism, language death is not uncommon in the South Asian context. We do not know how the language situation in South Asia will be affected by modern information and communication technologies: Will cultural and linguistic diversity be strengthened or weakened as they become increasingly prevalent in all walks of life? This volume brings together areas of research that so far do not interact to any significant extent: traditional South Asian descriptive linguistics and sociolinguistics, documentary linguistics, issues of intellectual and cultural property and fieldwork ethics, and language technology. Researchers working in the areas of documentary linguistics and language technology have become aware of each other in the last few years, and of how work in the other area could be potentially useful in furthering their own aims. Similarly, the insights of documentary linguistics are making their way into descriptive linguistics and sociolinguistics. However, the potential for synergy among these areas of research is almost limitless. This volume provides the reader, not so much with a do-it-yourself recipe for applying modern technology to the problem of language shift in South Asia today, but rather with some basic knowledge about the problems involved and some directions from which solutions could be forthcoming, a toolbox rather than a blueprint, for helping to shape the linguistic future of South Asia.
While most discoverability evaluation studies in the Library and Information Science field discuss the intersection of discovery layers and library systems, this book looks specifically at digital repositories, examining discoverability from the lenses of system structure, user searches, and external discovery avenues. Discoverability, the ease with which information can be found by a user, is the cornerstone of all successful digital information platforms. Yet, most digital repository practitioners and researchers lack a holistic and comprehensive understanding of how and where discoverability happens. This book brings together current understandings of user needs and behaviors and poses them alongside a deeper examination of digital repositories around the theme of discoverability. It examines discoverability in digital repositories from both user and system perspectives by exploring how users access content (including their search patterns and habits, need for digital content, effects of outreach, or integration with Wikipedia and other web-based tools) and how systems support or prevent discoverability through the structure or quality of metadata, system interfaces, exposure to search engines or lack thereof, and integration with library discovery tools. Discoverability in Digital Repositories will be particularly useful to digital repository managers, practitioners, and researchers, metadata librarians, systems librarians, and user studies, usability and user experience librarians. Additionally, and perhaps most prominently, this book is composed with the emerging practitioner in mind. Instructors and students in Library and Information Science and Information Management programs will benefit from this book that specifically addresses discoverability in digital repository systems and services.
This is the first comprehensive text on Optical Character Recognition for Indic scripts. It covers many topics and describes OCR systems for eight different scripts—Bangla, Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarti, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Urdu.
With nearly a quarter of the world’s population, members of at least five major language families plus several putative language isolates, South Asia is a fascinating arena for linguistic investigations, whether comparative-historical linguistics, studies of language contact and multilingualism, or general linguistic theory. This volume provides a state-of-the-art survey of linguistic research on the languages of South Asia, with contributions by well-known experts. Focus is both on what has been accomplished so far and on what remains unresolved or controversial and hence offers challenges for future research. In addition to covering the languages, their histories, and their genetic classification, as well as phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, and sociolinguistics, the volume provides special coverage of contact and convergence, indigenous South Asian grammatical traditions, applications of modern technology to South Asian languages, and South Asian writing systems. An appendix offers a classified listing of major sources and resources, both digital/online and printed.
"This book provides pertinent and vital information that researchers, postgraduate, doctoral students, and practitioners are seeking for learning about the latest discoveries and advances in NLP methodologies and applications of NLP"--Provided by publisher.
