An overview of the Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems

This introduction provides an overview of the state-of-the-art technology in Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems. Specifically, we analyze the need for such technologies to successfully address the new challenges of modern information systems, in which the exploitation of the Web as a main data source on business systems becomes a key requirement. It will also discuss the reasons why Human Language Technologies themselves have shifted their focus onto new areas of interest very directly linked to the development of technology for the treatment and understanding of Web 2.0. These new technologies are expected to be future interfaces for the new information systems to come. Moreover, we will review current topics of interest to this research community, and will present the selection of manuscripts that have been chosen by the program committee of the NLDB 2011 conference as representative cornerstone research works, especially highlighting their contribution to the advancement of such technologies.

A general proposal to multilingual information access based on syntactic-semantic patterns

In the last few years, there has been a wide development in the research on textual information systems. The goal is to improve these systems in order to allow an easy localization, treatment and access to the information stored in digital format (Digital Databases, Documental Databases, and so on). There are lots of applications focused on information access (for example, Web-search systems like Google or Altavista). However, these applications have problems when they must access to cross-language information, or when they need to show information in a language different from the one of the query. This paper explores the use of syntactic-sematic patterns as a method to access to multilingual information, and revise, in the case of Information Retrieval, where it is possible and useful to employ patterns when it comes to the multilingual and interactive aspects. On the one hand, the multilingual aspects that are going to be studied are the ones related to the access to documents in different languages from the one of the query, as well as the automatic translation of the document, i.e. a machine translation system based on patterns. On the other hand, this paper is going to go deep into the interactive aspects related to the reformulation of a query based on the syntactic-semantic pattern of the request.

Educación bilingüe del alumnado sordo: pilares para un cambio estratégico

Pese a los progresos logrados en la protección de los derechos fundamentales de salud y educación de las personas sordas usuarias de las lenguas de signos, a menudo se sigue negando a niños sordos su derecho a aprender y usar las lenguas de signos en su educación y en entornos físicos y psicosociales accesibles de conformidad con la Convención de los Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad (CDPD) y con las recientes leyes 27/2007 y 17/2007. El objetivo principal de este estudio fue obtener información sobre los factores estratégicos que favorecen una escuela saludable e inclusiva, mediante programas de educación bilingüe sostenibles y de calidad para escolares sordos en España. La metodología utilizada consistió en un estudio descriptivo con componentes de investigación-acción participativa y un enfoque de análisis estratégico. Como resultados, cabe destacar que las principales macrotendencias que, en el ámbito internacional, han promovido el cambio hacia prácticas bilingües son dos: en primer lugar, los cambios sociales y políticos que tienden a una creciente aceptación de la diversidad y los temas relacionados con las personas sordas; y en segundo lugar, una tendencia a un activismo, una autoconciencia y un apoderamiento crecientes por parte de las personas sordas. Como contrapartida, las que lo han obstaculizado son, por un lado, la visión de la sordera como una condición médica, que puede solucionarse mediante la tecnología; y por otro lado, el fonocentrismo, unido a una cierta resistencia social a lo desconocido. Aunque en España algunas de las escuelas que han iniciado el cambio cumplen las recomendaciones de la CDPD, la mayoría están todavía en una fase preliminar de formulación o puesta en práctica de este nuevo modelo y distan mucho de encontrarse distribuidas de manera igualitaria en las diferentes comunidades autónomas. Como conclusión podemos decir que conseguir una educación más saludable e inclusiva para los escolares sordos implica poner en marcha una estrategia de actuación planificada en la que participen activamente todos los sectores y organismos relevantes implicados y, en particular, las comunidades sordas a través de las organizaciones que las representan. Sin un cambio radical de perspectiva, la salud y la educación no serán accesibles a todos y las desigualdades sociales se verán acentuadas.

Question answering and multi-search engines in geo-temporal information retrieval

In this paper we present a complete system for the treatment of both geographical and temporal dimensions in text and its application to information retrieval. This system has been evaluated in both the GeoTime task of the 8th and 9th NTCIR workshop in the years 2010 and 2011 respectively, making it possible to compare the system to contemporary approaches to the topic. In order to participate in this task we have added the temporal dimension to our GIR system. The system proposed here has a modular architecture in order to add or modify features. In the development of this system, we have followed a QA-based approach as well as multi-search engines to improve the system performance.

Noise-tolerance feasibility for restricted-domain Information Retrieval systems

Information Retrieval systems normally have to work with rather heterogeneous sources, such as Web sites or documents from Optical Character Recognition tools. The correct conversion of these sources into flat text files is not a trivial task since noise may easily be introduced as a result of spelling or typeset errors. Interestingly, this is not a great drawback when the size of the corpus is sufficiently large, since redundancy helps to overcome noise problems. However, noise becomes a serious problem in restricted-domain Information Retrieval specially when the corpus is small and has little or no redundancy. This paper devises an approach which adds noise-tolerance to Information Retrieval systems. A set of experiments carried out in the agricultural domain proves the effectiveness of the approach presented.