Description: This paper presents the architecture, operation and results obtained with the LASSO Question Answering system developed in the Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU. To find answers, the system relies on a combination of syntactic and semantic techniques. The search for the answer is based on a novel form of indexing called paragraph indexing. A score of 55.5% for short answers and 64.5% for long answers was achieved at the TREC-8 competition.

Description: This paper introduces the semantic wildcard. The IRSLO (Information Retrieval using Semantic and Lexical Operators) project aims at integrating semantic and lexical information into the retrieval process, in order to overcome some of the impediments currently encountered with today's information retrieval systems. This paper introduces the semantic wildcard, one of the most powerful operators implemented in IRSLO, which allows for searches along general-specific lines. The semantic wildcard, denoted with #, acts in a manner similar with the lexical wildcard, but at semantic levels, enabling the retrieval of subsumed concepts. For instance, a search for animal# will match any concept that is of type animal, including dog, goat, and so forth, thereby going beyond the explicit knowledge stated in texts. This operator, together with a lexical locality operator that enables the retrieval of paragraphs rather than entire documents, have been both implemented in the IRSLO system and tested on requests of information run against an index of 130,000 documents. Significant improvement was observed over classic keyword-based retrieval systems in terms of precision, recall and success rate.

Description: This paper presents a Word Sense Disambiguation method based on the idea of semantic density between words. The disambiguation is done in the context of WordNet. The Internet is used as a raw corpora to provide statistical information for word associations. A metric is introduced and used to measure the semantic density and to rank all possible combinations of the senses of two words. This method provides a precision of 58% in indicating the correct sense for both words at the same time. The precision increases as we consider more choices: 70% for top two ranked and 73% for top three ranked.

Description: This paper discusses a WordNet-based interface to Internet search engines. A vast amount of information is available on the Internet, and naturally, many information gathering tools have been developed. Several search engines with different characteristics, such as Alta Vista, Lycos, Infoseek, and others are available. However, the web information retrieval technology is still in its infancy, and there is need for considerable improvement. Some inherent difficulties are: (1) the web information is diverse and highly unstructured, (2) the size of information is large and it grows at an exponential rate, and (3) the current search engine technology is still rudimentary. While the first two issues are more profound and require long term solutions, it may be possible to develop software around the search engines to improve the quality of the information retrieved. In this paper the authors present a natural language interface system to a search engine and discuss some of the results obtained.

Description: This presentation discusses flexible allocation of capacity in multi-cell CDMA networks. The effect of reverse power levels on the capacity of a code-division multiple-access (CDMA) cellular network is evaluated. The inter-cell and intra-cell interferences of every cell on every other cell are first calculated for a given network topology. Based on this, the nominal power of users is increased by a factor the authors call the Power Compensation Factor (PCF) which enables small cells to overcome the excessive interference from adjacent large cells.