Explorations in Automatic Thesaurus Discovery presents an automated method for creating a first-draft thesaurus from raw text. It describes natural processing steps of tokenization, surface syntactic analysis, and syntactic attribute extraction. From these attributes, word and term similarity is calculated and a thesaurus is created showing important common terms and their relation to each other, common verb--noun pairings, common expressions, and word family members. The techniques are tested on twenty different corpora ranging from baseball newsgroups, assassination archives, medical X-ray reports, abstracts on AIDS, to encyclopedia articles on animals, even on the text of the book itself. The corpora range from 40,000 to 6 million characters of text, and results are presented for each in the Appendix. The methods described in the book have undergone extensive evaluation. Their time and space complexity are shown to be modest. The results are shown to converge to a stable state as the corpus grows. The similarities calculated are compared to those produced by psychological testing. A method of evaluation using Artificial Synonyms is tested. Gold Standards evaluation show that techniques significantly outperform non-linguistic-based techniques for the most important words in corpora. Explorations in Automatic Thesaurus Discovery includes applications to the fields of information retrieval using established testbeds, existing thesaural enrichment, semantic analysis. Also included are applications showing how to create, implement, and test a first-draft thesaurus.

Most of the papers in this volume were first presented at the Workshop on Cross-Linguistic Information Retrieval that was held August 22, 1996 dur ing the SIGIR'96 Conference. Alan Smeaton of Dublin University and Paraic Sheridan of the ETH, Zurich, were the two other members of the Scientific Committee for this workshop. SIGIR is the Association for Computing Ma chinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, and they have held conferences yearly since 1977. Three additional papers have been added: Chapter 4 Distributed Cross-Lingual Information retrieval describes the EMIR retrieval system, one of the first general cross-language systems to be implemented and evaluated; Chapter 6 Mapping Vocabularies Using Latent Semantic Indexing, which originally appeared as a technical report in the Lab oratory for Computational Linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University in 1991, is included here because it was one of the earliest, though hard-to-find, publi cations showing the application of Latent Semantic Indexing to the problem of cross-language retrieval; and Chapter 10 A Weighted Boolean Model for Cross Language Text Retrieval describes a recent approach to solving the translation term weighting problem, specific to Cross-Language Information Retrieval. Gregory Grefenstette CONTRIBUTORS Lisa Ballesteros David Hull W, Bruce Croft Gregory Grefenstette Center for Intelligent Xerox Research Centre Europe Information Retrieval Grenoble Laboratory Computer Science Department University of Massachusetts Thomas K. Landauer Department of Psychology Mark W. Davis and Institute of Cognitive Science Computing Research Lab University of Colorado, Boulder New Mexico State University Michael L. Littman Bonnie J."

Explorations in Automatic Thesaurus Discovery presents an automated method for creating a first-draft thesaurus from raw text. It describes natural processing steps of tokenization, surface syntactic analysis, and syntactic attribute extraction. From these attributes, word and term similarity is calculated and a thesaurus is created showing important common terms and their relation to each other, common verb--noun pairings, common expressions, and word family members. The techniques are tested on twenty different corpora ranging from baseball newsgroups, assassination archives, medical X-ray reports, abstracts on AIDS, to encyclopedia articles on animals, even on the text of the book itself. The corpora range from 40,000 to 6 million characters of text, and results are presented for each in the Appendix. The methods described in the book have undergone extensive evaluation. Their time and space complexity are shown to be modest. The results are shown to converge to a stable state as the corpus grows. The similarities calculated are compared to those produced by psychological testing. A method of evaluation using Artificial Synonyms is tested. Gold Standards evaluation show that techniques significantly outperform non-linguistic-based techniques for the most important words in corpora. Explorations in Automatic Thesaurus Discovery includes applications to the fields of information retrieval using established testbeds, existing thesaural enrichment, semantic analysis. Also included are applications showing how to create, implement, and test a first-draft thesaurus.

Most of the papers in this volume were first presented at the Workshop on Cross-Linguistic Information Retrieval that was held August 22, 1996 dur ing the SIGIR'96 Conference. Alan Smeaton of Dublin University and Paraic Sheridan of the ETH, Zurich, were the two other members of the Scientific Committee for this workshop. SIGIR is the Association for Computing Ma chinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, and they have held conferences yearly since 1977. Three additional papers have been added: Chapter 4 Distributed Cross-Lingual Information retrieval describes the EMIR retrieval system, one of the first general cross-language systems to be implemented and evaluated; Chapter 6 Mapping Vocabularies Using Latent Semantic Indexing, which originally appeared as a technical report in the Lab oratory for Computational Linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University in 1991, is included here because it was one of the earliest, though hard-to-find, publi cations showing the application of Latent Semantic Indexing to the problem of cross-language retrieval; and Chapter 10 A Weighted Boolean Model for Cross Language Text Retrieval describes a recent approach to solving the translation term weighting problem, specific to Cross-Language Information Retrieval. Gregory Grefenstette CONTRIBUTORS Lisa Ballesteros David Hull W, Bruce Croft Gregory Grefenstette Center for Intelligent Xerox Research Centre Europe Information Retrieval Grenoble Laboratory Computer Science Department University of Massachusetts Thomas K. Landauer Department of Psychology Mark W. Davis and Institute of Cognitive Science Computing Research Lab University of Colorado, Boulder New Mexico State University Michael L. Littman Bonnie J.

This book presents revised versions of the lectures given at the 8th ELSNET European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication held on the Island of Chios, Greece, in summer 2000. Besides an introductory survey, the book presents lectures on data analysis for multimedia libraries, pronunciation modeling for large vocabulary speech recognition, statistical language modeling, very large scale information retrieval, reduction of information variation in text, and a concluding chapter on open questions in research for linguistics in information access. The book gives newcomers to language and speech communication a clear overview of the main technologies and problems in the area. Researchers and professionals active in the area will appreciate the book as a concise review of the technologies used in text- and speech-triggered information access.