Pieces of personal information, such as personal names and relationships, are crucial in text mining applications. Obituaries are good sources for this kind of information. This study proposes an effective method for extracting various facts about people from obituary Web pages. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves high performance in terms of recall and precision.

In this paper, we propose two weighting techniques to improve performances of query expansion in biomedical document retrieval, especially when a short biomedical term in a query is expanded with its synonymous multi-word terms. When a query contains synonymous terms of different lengths, a traditional IR model highly ranks a document containing a longer terminology because a longer terminology has more chance to be matched with a query. However, such preference is clearly inappropriate and it often yields an unsatisfactory result. To alleviate the bias weighting problem, we devise a method of normalizing the weights of query terms in a long multi-word biomedical term, and a method of discriminating terms by using inverse terminology frequency which is a novel statistics estimated in a query domain. The experiment results on MEDLINE corpus show that our two simple techniques improve the retrieval performance by adjusting the inadequate preference for long multi-word terminologies in an expanded query.

This study proposes an effective pseudo relevance feedback method for information retrieval in the context of question answering. The method separates two retrieval models to improve the precision of initial search and the recall of feedback search. The topic-preserving query expansion links the two models to prevent the topic shift.

We propose a definitional question answering system that extracts phrases using syntactic patterns which are easily constructed manually and can reduce the coverage problem. Experimental results show that our phrase extraction system outperforms a sentence extraction system, especially for selecting concise answers, in terms of recall and precision, and indicate that the proper text unit of answer candidates and the final answer has a significant effect on the system performance.

A suffix tree is widely adopted for indexing genome sequences. While supporting highly efficient search, the suffix tree has a few shortcomings such as very large size and very long construction time. In this paper, we propose a very fast parallel algorithm to construct a disk-based suffix tree for human genome sequences. Our algorithm constructs a suffix array for part of the suffixes in the human genome sequence and then converts it into a suffix tree very quickly. It outperformed the previous algorithms by Loh et al. and Barsky et al. by up to 2.09 and 3.04 times, respectively.

In this paper, we suggest a new probabilistic model of semantic role labeling, which uses the frameset of the predicate as explicit linguistic knowledge for providing global information on the predicate-argument structure that local classifier is unable to catch. The proposed model consists of three sub-models: role sequence generation model, frameset generation model, and matching model. The role sequence generation model generates the semantic role sequence candidates of a given predicate by using the local classification approach, which is a widely used approach in previous research. The frameset generation model estimates the probability of each frameset that the predicate can take. The matching model is designed to measure the degree of the matching between the generated role sequence and the frameset by using several features. These features are developed to represent the predicate-argument structure information described in the frameset. In the experiments, our model shows that the use of knowledge about the predicate-argument structure is effective for selecting a more appropriate semantic role sequence.