Using Recognizing Textual Entailment as a Core Engine for Answer Validation
This paper is about our approach to answer validation, which centered by a Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) core engine. We first combined the question and the answer into Hypothesis (H) and view the document as Text (T); then, we used our RTE system to check whether the entailment relation holds between them. Our system was evaluated on the Answer Validation Exercise (AVE) task and achieved f-measures of 0.46 and 0.55 for two submission runs, which both outperformed others' results for the English language.

title: Inference Rules and their Application to Recognizing Textual Entailment
abstract: In this paper, we explore ways of improving an inference rule collection and its application to the task of recognizing textual entailment. For this purpose, we start with an automatically acquired collection and we propose methods to refine it and obtain more rules using a hand-crafted lexical resource. Following this, we derive a dependency-based structure representation from texts, which aims to provide a proper base for the inference rule application. The evaluation of our approach on the recognizing textual entailment data shows promising results on precision and the error analysis suggests possible improvements.

title: Ontology-based Query Construction for GeoCLEF
abstract: This paper describes experiments with geographical information retrieval (GIR). Being different from the traditional information IR, we focus more on the query expansion instead of document ranking. We parse each topic into the event part and the geographic part and use different ontologies to expand both parts respectively. The results show promising results of our strategy for this task.

title: DFKI-LT at QAST 2007: Adapting QA Components to Mine Answers in Speech Transcripts
abstract: The paper describes QAst-v1 a robust question answering system for answering factoid questions in manual and automatic transcriptions of speech. The system is an adaptation of our text---based crosslingual open---domain QA system that we used for the CLEF main tasks.

title: Recognizing Textual Relatedness with Predicate-Argument Structures
abstract: In this paper, we first compare several strategies to handle the newly proposed three-way Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) task. Then we define a new measurement for a pair of texts, called Textual Relatedness, which is a weaker concept than semantic similarity or paraphrase. We show that an alignment model based on the predicate-argument structures using this measurement can help an RTE system to recognize the Unknown cases at the first stage, and contribute to the improvement of the overall performance in the RTE task. In addition, several heterogeneous lexical resources are tested, and different contributions from them are observed.

title: SketchML a representation language for novel sketch recognition approach
abstract: Multimodal interfaces can be profitably used to support increasingly complex services in assistive environments. In particular, sketch-based interfaces offer users an effortless and powerful communication way to represent concepts and commands on different devices. Unlike other modalities, sketch-based interaction can be easily fitted according to heterogeneous services. Moreover it can be quickly personalized according to the user needs.
 Developing a sketch-based interface for a specific service is a time-consuming operation that requires the re-engineering and/or the re-designing of the whole recognizer framework. This paper describes a definitive framework by which the user, simply by using freehand drawing, can define every kind of sketch-based interface. The definition of the interface and its recognition process are performed by using our developed Sketch Modeling Language (SketchML).

title: Outdoor Face Recognition Using Enhanced Near Infrared Imaging
abstract: In this paper, we present a robust and accurate system for outdoor (as well as indoor) face recognition, based on a recently developed enhanced near-infrared (ENIR) imaging device. Using a narrow band NIR laser generator instead of LED lights for active frontal illumination, the ENIR device can provide face images of good quality even under sunlight. Experiments show that the ENIR system performs similarly to the existing NIR system when used indoors, but outperforms it significantly outdoors especially under sunlight.

title: A Market-Based Adaptation for Resolving Competing Needs for Scarce Resources
abstract: The dynamic nature of many real-world domains (e.g., military, emergency first response and hurricane relief, etc) requires adaptive resource allocation to respond to changes in the environment that trigger additional resource requirements. Since the total resources are limited, there are often conflicts among various tasks regarding their resource needs. Thus, resources must be reallocated in order to maximize global utility for the current situation. This problem is further complicated when scarce resources are owned by distributed teams, each of which needs to allocate resources among tasks assigned to them, because each team has limited information about the other teams' resources and states. In this paper, we propose a market-based approach that uses an agent-based auction mechanism to enable teams to communicate and coordinate their utility information about possibly competing resource needs. As a result, the teams can collaboratively assess trade-offs among competing needs to allocate resources efficiently.

title: Experimental Investigation of Co-Presence Factors in a Mixed Reality-Mediated Collaborative Design System
abstract: This paper argues how a Mixed Reality-Mediated collaborative design system should be featured after considering co-presence factors. This paper also presents an experiment to examine some of the co-presence factors, with a focus on the image size and viewing distance. The experimental results show that larger images and appropriate viewing distance could bring better sense of being in the Mixed Reality space and participants feel more involved in the design tasks. Therefore, by considering the co-presence factors, higher level of copresence and better effects in the Mixed Reality-mediated collaborative design system could be achieved.

title: Proactive information gathering for homeland security teams
abstract: Supporting counterterrorism analysts with software agents that dynamically anticipate their information requirements.

title: All-frequency relighting of glossy objects
abstract: We present a technique for interactive rendering of glossy objects in complex and dynamic lighting environments that captures interreflections and all-frequency shadows. Our system is based on precomputed radiance transfer and separable BRDF approximation. We factor glossy BRDFs using a separable decomposition and keep only a few low-order approximation terms, each consisting of a purely view-dependent and a purely light-dependent component. In the precomputation step, for every vertex, we sample its visibility and compute a direct illumination transport vector corresponding to each BRDF term. We use modern graphics hardware to accelerate this step and further compress the data using a nonlinear wavelet approximation. The direct illumination pass is followed by one or more interreflection passes, each of which gathers compressed transport vectors from the previous pass to produce global illumination transport vectors. To render at run time, we dynamically sample the lighting to produce a light vector, also represented in a wavelet basis. We compute the inner product of the light vector with the precomputed transport vectors, and the results are further combined with the BRDF view-dependent components to produce vertex colors. We describe acceleration of the rendering algorithm using programmable graphics hardware and discuss the limitations and trade-offs imposed by the hardware.