A wide variety of media can be used in learning, including distance learning, such as print, lectures, conference sections, tutors, pictures, video, sound, and computers. Any one instance of distance learning will make choices among these media, perhaps using several.

Multimedia in Learning

MUCKE aims to mine a large volume of images, to structure them conceptually and to use this conceptual structuring in order to improve large-scale image retrieval. The last decade witnessed important progress concerning low-level image representations. However, there are a number problems which need to be solved in order to unleash the full potential of image mining in applications. The central problem with low-level representations is the mismatch between them and the human interpretation of image content. This problem can be instantiated, for instance, by the incapability of existing descriptors to capture spatial relationships between the concepts represented or by their incapability to convey an explanation of why two images are similar in a content-based image retrieval framework. We start by assessing existing local descriptors for image classification and by proposing to use co-occurrence matrices to better capture spatial relationships in images. The main focus in MUCKE is on cleaning large scale Web image corpora and on proposing image representations which are closer to the human interpretation of images. Consequently, we introduce methods which tackle these two problems and compare results to state of the art methods. Note: some aspects of this deliverable are withheld at this time as they are pending review. Please contact the authors for a preview.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel2/4524/12820/00592460.pdf

Image Processing

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

What Happened in CLEF 2004?.- What Happened in CLEF 2004?.- I. Ad Hoc Text Retrieval Tracks.- CLEF 2004: Ad Hoc Track Overview and Results Analysis.- Selection and Merging Strategies for Multilingual Information Retrieval.- Using Surface-Syntactic Parser and Deviation from Randomness.- Cross-Language Retrieval Using HAIRCUT at CLEF 2004.- Experiments on Statistical Approaches to Compensate for Limited Linguistic Resources.- Application of Variable Length N-Gram Vectors to Monolingual and Bilingual Information Retrieval.- Integrating New Languages in a Multilingual Search System Based on a Deep Linguistic Analysis.- IR-n r2: Using Normalized Passages.- Using COTS Search Engines and Custom Query Strategies at CLEF.- Report on Thomson Legal and Regulatory Experiments at CLEF-2004.- Effective Translation, Tokenization and Combination for Cross-Lingual Retrieval.- Two-Stage Refinement of Transitive Query Translation with English Disambiguation for Cross-Language Information Retrieval: An Experiment at CLEF 2004.- Dictionary-Based Amharic - English Information Retrieval.- Dynamic Lexica for Query Translation.- SINAI at CLEF 2004: Using Machine Translation Resources with a Mixed 2-Step RSV Merging Algorithm.- Mono- and Crosslingual Retrieval Experiments at the University of Hildesheim.- University of Chicago at CLEF2004: Cross-Language Text and Spoken Document Retrieval.- UB at CLEF2004: Cross Language Information Retrieval Using Statistical Language Models.- MIRACLE's Hybrid Approach to Bilingual and Monolingual Information Retrieval.- Searching a Russian Document Collection Using English, Chinese and Japanese Queries.- Dublin City University at CLEF 2004: Experiments in Monolingual, Bilingual and Multilingual Retrieval.- Finnish, Portuguese and Russian Retrieval with Hummingbird SearchServerTM at CLEF 2004.- Data Fusion for Effective European Monolingual Information Retrieval.- The XLDB Group at CLEF 2004.- The University of Glasgow at CLEF 2004: French Monolingual Information Retrieval with Terrier.- II. Domain-Specific Document Retrieval.- The Domain-Specific Track in CLEF 2004: Overview of the Results and Remarks on the Assessment Process.- University of Hagen at CLEF 2004: Indexing and Translating Concepts for the GIRT Task.- IRIT at CLEF 2004: The English GIRT Task.- Ricoh at CLEF 2004.- GIRT and the Use of Subject Metadata for Retrieval.- III. Interactive Cross-Language Information Retrieval.- iCLEF 2004 Track Overview: Pilot Experiments in Interactive Cross-Language Question Answering.- Interactive Cross-Language Question Answering: Searching Passages Versus Searching Documents.- Improving Interaction with the User in Cross-Language Question Answering Through Relevant Domains and Syntactic Semantic Patterns.- Cooperation, Bookmarking, and Thesaurus in Interactive Bilingual Question Answering.- Summarization Design for Interactive Cross-Language Question Answering.- Interactive and Bilingual Question Answering Using Term Suggestion and Passage Retrieval.- IV. Multiple Language Question Answering.- Overview of the CLEF 2004 Multilingual Question Answering Track.- A Question Answering System for French.- Cross-Language French-English Question Answering Using the DLT System at CLEF 2004.- Experiments on Robust NL Question Interpretation and Multi-layered Document Annotation for a Cross-Language Question/Answering System.- Making Stone Soup: Evaluating a Recall-Oriented Multi-stream Question Answering System for Dutch.- The DIOGENE Question Answering System at CLEF-2004.- Cross-Lingual Question Answering Using Off-the-Shelf Machine Translation.- Bulgarian-English Question Answering: Adaptation of Language Resources.- Answering French Questions in English by Exploiting Results from Several Sources of Information.- Finnish as Source Language in Bilingual Question Answering.- miraQA: Experiments with Learning Answer Context Patterns from the Web.- Question Answering for Spanish Supported by Lexical Context Annotation.- Question Answering Using Sentence Parsing and Semantic Network Matching.- First Evaluation of Esfinge - A Question Answering System for Portuguese.- University of Evora in QA@CLEF-2004.- COLE Experiments at QA@CLEF 2004 Spanish Monolingual Track.- Does English Help Question Answering in Spanish?.- The TALP-QA System for Spanish at CLEF 2004: Structural and Hierarchical Relaxing of Semantic Constraints.- ILC-UniPI Italian QA.- Question Answering Pilot Task at CLEF 2004.- Evaluation of Complex Temporal Questions in CLEF-QA.- V. Cross-Language Retrieval in Image Collections.- The CLEF 2004 Cross-Language Image Retrieval Track.- Caption and Query Translation for Cross-Language Image Retrieval.- Pattern-Based Image Retrieval with Constraints and Preferences on ImageCLEF 2004.- How to Visually Retrieve Images from the St. Andrews Collection Using GIFT.- UNED at ImageCLEF 2004: Detecting Named Entities and Noun Phrases for Automatic Query Expansion and Structuring.- Dublin City University at CLEF 2004: Experiments with the ImageCLEF St. Andrew's Collection.- From Text to Image: Generating Visual Query for Image Retrieval.- Toward Cross-Language and Cross-Media Image Retrieval.- FIRE - Flexible Image Retrieval Engine: ImageCLEF 2004 Evaluation.- MIRACLE Approach to ImageCLEF 2004: Merging Textual and Content-Based Image Retrieval.- Cross-Media Feedback Strategies: Merging Text and Image Information to Improve Image Retrieval.- ImageCLEF 2004: Combining Image and Multi-lingual Search for Medical Image Retrieval.- Multi-modal Information Retrieval Using FINT.- Medical Image Retrieval Using Texture, Locality and Colour.- SMIRE: Similar Medical Image Retrieval Engine.- A Probabilistic Approach to Medical Image Retrieval.- UB at CLEF2004 Cross Language Medical Image Retrieval.- Content-Based Queries on the CasImage Database Within the IRMA Framework.- Comparison and Combination of Textual and Visual Features for Interactive Cross-Language Image Retrieval.- MSU at ImageCLEF: Cross Language and Interactive Image Retrieval.- VI. Cross-Language Spoken Document Retrieval.- CLEF 2004 Cross-Language Spoken Document Retrieval Track.- VII. Issues in CLIR and in Evaluation.- The Key to the First CLEF with Portuguese: Topics, Questions and Answers in CHAVE.- How Do Named Entities Contribute to Retrieval Effectiveness?.

Multilingual information access for text, speech and images : 5th workshop of the cross-language evaluation forum, CLEF 2004, Bath, UK, September 15-17, 2004, revised selected papers

When instructors prepare learning materials for students, they frequently develop accompanying questions to guide learning. Natural language processing technology can be used to automatically generate such questions but techniques used have not fully leveraged semantic information contained in the learning materials or the full context in which the question generation task occurs. We introduce a sophisticated template-based approach that incorporates semantic role labels into a system that automatically generates natural language questions to support online learning. While we have not yet incorporated the full learning context into our approach, our preliminary evaluation and evaluation methodology indicate our approach is a promising one for supporting learning.

/pdf/generating-natural-language-questions-to-support-learning-on-2l7tl9slzy.pdf

Generating Natural Language Questions to Support Learning On-Line

This paper presents an original low-level system for color image segmentation considering the Hue-Saturation-Value (HSV) color space. Many difficulties of color image segmentation may be resolved using the correct color space in order to increase the effectiveness of color components to discriminate color data. The technique proposed in the article uses new data structures that lead to simpler and more efficient segmentation algorithms. We introduce a flexible hexagonal network structure on the pixels image and we extract for each segmented region the syntactic features that can be used in the shape recognition process. Our technique has a time complexity lower than the methods studied from specialized literature and the experimental results on Berkeley Segmentation Dataset color image database show that the performance of method is robust.

A New Method for Segmentation of Images Represented in a HSV Color Space

The paper presents a framework that implements our original algorithm of automatic mapping a MySQL relational database to a MongoDB NoSQL database. The algorithm uses the metadata stored in the MySQL system tables. It takes into consideration the concepts from Entity-Relationship (ER) model: entity type represented by a relation in the Relational Model (RM), 1∶1 and 1∶M relationship type represented with Foreign Keys (FK) in the RM and N∶M relationship type represented in RM with a join table that contains the Primary Keys (PK) from the original tables, each representing a FK and two 1∶M relationships between the original tables and the join table. The initial results of our algorithm that was tested on small size databases (10–15 tables with many relationships and 100 records/ table) are presented in this paper.

/pdf/automatic-mapping-of-mysql-databases-to-nosql-mongodb-1h3hjr81uc.pdf

Automatic mapping of MySQL databases to NoSQL MongoDB

Automatic image annotation and semantic based image retrieval for medical domain

In the last decade the electronic learning became a very useful tool in the studentspsilas education from different activity domains. The accomplished studies indicated that the students substantially appreciate the e-learning method, due to the facilities: the facile information access, a better storage of the didactic material, the curricula harmonization between universities, personalized instruction. The paper presents a software tool that can be used in the e-learning process in order to automatically generate questions from course materials, based on a series of tags defined by the professor. The test creator tool permits generation of questions based on electronic materials that students have. The solution implies teachers to have a series of tags and templates that they manage. These tags are used to generate question automatically.

Question generation for learning evaluation

Creating new medical ontologies for image annotation , Creating new medical ontologies for image annotation , کتابخانه مرکزی دانشگاه علوم پزشکی تهران

Liana Stanescu

Papers

A New Method for Segmentation of Images Represented in a HSV Color Space

Automatic mapping of MySQL databases to NoSQL MongoDB

Automatic image annotation and semantic based image retrieval for medical domain

Question generation for learning evaluation

Creating new medical ontologies for image annotation