Across the bridge: CLEF 2001 - Non-English monolingual retrieval. The French task.

This paper presents work on document retrieval based on first time participation in the CLEF 2001 monolingual retrieval task using French. The experiment findings indicated that Okapi, the text retrieval system in use, can successfully be used for non-English text retrieval. A lot of internal pre-processing is required in the basic search system for conversion into Okapi access formats. Various shell scripts were written to achieve the conversion in a UNIX environment, failure of which would significantly have impeded the overall performance. Based on the experiment findings using Okapi - originally designed for English - it was clear that, although most European languages share conventional word boundaries and variant word morphemes formed by the additon of suffixes, there is significant difference between French and English retrieval depending on the adaptation of indexing and search strategies in use. No sophisticated method for higher recall and precision such as stemming techniques, phrase translation or de-compounding was employed for the experiment and our results were suggestively poor. Future participation would include more refined query translation tools.

Pre-emptive scheduling problems with controllable processing times

We consider a range of single machine and identical parallel machine pre-emptive scheduling models with controllable processing times. For each model we study a single criterion problem to minimize the compression cost of the processing times subject to the constraint that all due dates should be met. We demonstrate that each single criterion problem can be formulated in terms of minimizing a linear function over a polymatroid, and this justifies the greedy approach to its solution. A unified technique allows us to develop fast algorithms for solving both single criterion problems and bicriteria counterparts.

Concise introduction to image processing using C++

A Concise Intro to Image Processing using C++ presents state-of-the-art image processing methodology, including current industrial practices for image compression, image de-noising methods based on partial differential equations, and new image compression methods such as fractal image compression and wavelet compression. It includes elementary concepts of image processing and related fundamental tools with coding examples as well as exercises. With a particular emphasis on illustrating fractal and wavelet compression algorithms, the text covers image segmentation, object recognition, and morphology. An accompanying CD-ROM contains code for all algorithms.