From wf at world-foundation.org Sat Mar 1 12:28:20 2008 From: wf at world-foundation.org (Manufacturing News) Date: Sat, 1 Mar 2008 18:28:20 +0100 Subject: Small Business and Entrepreneurship Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/pipermail/ir-series/attachments/20080301/8c6e0b9a/attachment.html From jelsas+ at cs.cmu.edu Fri Mar 28 22:24:01 2008 From: jelsas+ at cs.cmu.edu (Jonathan Elsas) Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:24:01 -0400 Subject: IR Series - Nico Schlaefer - Friday, April 4, 12:00pm, NSH 3002 Message-ID: <8919351D-39FC-4D18-832D-DE21EC52923D@cs.cmu.edu> Greetings, Please join us for an upcoming talk from Nico Schlaefer. Lunch will be provided! Title: The Ephyra Question Answering System: Recent Results and Current Directions Who: Nico Schlaefer When: Friday, April 4, 12:00pm Where: NSH 3002 Abstract: This talk gives an overview of recent work on English question answering (QA) at CMU and our participation in last year?s TREC evaluation. QA is the task of retrieving accurate answers to natural language questions from a knowledge source such as the Web. The presentation includes a brief introduction to QA and the TREC competition, thus prior knowledge on QA is not required though helpful. The talk focuses on the challenges that an end-to-end QA system needs to address, and the architectural and algorithmic solutions implemented in Ephyra, our English QA system. Ephyra is a modular and extensible framework that facilitates the integration of different QA techniques. The system is organized as a pipeline of reusable standard components for question analysis, query generation, search, answer extraction, and answer selection. The most recent setup combines a syntactic pattern learning and matching approach with answer-type based extraction techniques and a semantic answer extractor that is based on semantic role labeling. Recently we have placed the Ephyra QA system into open source, making most of our code available to the research community. I will discuss why we took this step, and how you may benefit from our open source system - OpenEphyra* - for your own research. * http://www.ephyra.info/