Description: Abstract: This paper presents the architecture of the Question-Answering server (QAS) developed at the Language Computer Corporation (LCC) and used in the TREC-10 evaluations. LCC's QAS™ extracts answers for (a) factual questions of variable degree of difficulty; (b) questions that expect lists of answers; and (c) questions posed in the context of previous questions and answers. One of the major novelties is the implementation of bridging inference mechanisms that guide the search for answers to complex questions. Additionally, LCC's QAS™ encodes an efficient way of modeling context via reference resolution. In TREC-10, this system generated an RAR of 0.58 on the main task and 0.78 on the context task.

Description: This article discusses document indexing using named entities. Abstract: Current text indexing and retrieval techniques have their roots in the field of Information Retrieval where the task is to extract documents that best match a query. With an ever increasing number of documents available due to the easy access through the Internet, the challenge is to provide users with concise and relevant information. The authors are proposing here a novel, yet simple approach, which indexes the named entities in the documents, such as to improve the relevance of documents retrieved. Experiments performed in finding information related to a set of 75 input questions, from a large collection of 125,000 documents, show that this new technique reduces the number of retrieved documents by a factor of 2, while still retrieving the relevant documents.

Description: Traditional design rules for cellular networks are not directly applicable to code division multiple access (CDMA) networks where intercell interference is not mitigated by cell placement and careful frequency planning. For transmission quality requirements, a minimum signal-to-interface ratio (SIR) must be achieved. The base-station location, its pilot-signal power (which determines the size of the cell), and the transmission power of the mobiles all affect the received SIR. In addition, because of the need for power control in CDMA networks, large cells can cause a lot of interference to adjacent small cells, posing another constraint to design. In order to maximize the network capacity associated with a design, the authors develop a methodology to calculate the sensitivity of capacity to base-station location, pilot-signal power, and transmission power of each mobile. To alleviate the problem caused by difference cell sizes, the authors introduce the power compensation factor, by which the nominal power of the mobiles in every cell is adjusted. The authors then use the calculated sensitivities in an iterative algorithm to determine the optimal locations of the base stations, pilot-signal powers, and power compensation factors in order to maximize capacity. The authors show examples of how networks using these design techniques ...