III: Small: RUI: Collaborative Research: Exploiting Information Graphics in a Digital Library

这个项目是特拉华大学和米勒斯维尔大学的合作项目。信息图形(非图形图形，如条形图和折线图)经常出现在报纸和杂志等流行媒体中。不仅这些图形所传达的知识经常不包括在文章的正文中，而且(与科学文献相比)文章的正文通常甚至没有明确地提到图形。信息检索的研究主要集中在文档的文本上，而对文档的信息图形化的研究很大程度上被忽视。然而，平面设计师认为图形的信息足够重要，足以证明设计一幅图形来传达它是合理的。这个项目的目标是一种从数字图书馆中检索相关信息图形以响应用户查询的新方法。流行媒体中的信息图形通常具有旨在传达的沟通目标或信息。此消息封装了图形中包含的高级知识。该项目的做法是一种语言模型，它将图形与查询的相关性视为三个组成部分的混合：图形的预期信息、图形的其他文本组成部分，如其标题和补充标题的附加文本描述，以及包含该图形的文档的文本。正在解决的挑战包括识别文章中与图形相关的部分、将查询词语与文档库中的图形的预期消息相关联、扩展图形的缩写说明和附加文字描述以更充分地捕捉它们的内容、以及适当地加权混合模型的各个组件的贡献。此外，某些类型的图形(如分组条形图)既有主要的预期消息，也有次要的消息。还讨论了当理想图形不可用时二次消息对检索的影响。对图形检索方法的评估包括人类主体对检索到的图形与用户查询的相关性进行评分的实验。本项目的目标是产生一个检索相关信息图形的系统，从而扩展数字图书馆的效用。与通过语音传达信息图形内容的视觉系统一起，该项目将扩大可供视力障碍个人使用的信息资源。该项目还将生成一个信息、图形及其XML表示的语料库，供其他研究人员使用。语料库和研究结果将在项目网站(http://www.cis.udel.edu/~carberry/Graph-Retrieval).上发布除了显著增加数字图书馆可获得的资源外，这项研究还将为扩大问答研究以考虑信息图形奠定基础。该项目将通过培养研究生，为以本科生为主的机构的本科生提供研究机会，并提高研究生在包括本科生在内的团队中工作时的指导技能，为未来科学家的发展做出贡献。

This project is a collaborative effort between the University of Delaware and Millersville University. Information graphics (non-pictorial graphics such as bar charts and line graphs) occur frequently in popular media such as newspapers and magazines. Not only is the knowledge conveyed by these graphics very often not included in the article's text, but (in contrast with scientific documents) the article's text most often does not even explicitly refer to the graphics. Information retrieval research has focused on the text of documents, and their information graphics have largely been ignored. Yet, the graphic designer considered the graphic's message important enough to warrant designing a graphic to convey it. This project's goal is a novel methodology for retrieving relevant information graphics from a digital library in response to user queries.Information graphics in popular media generally have a communicative goal or message that they are intended to convey. This message encapsulates the high-level knowledge contained in the graphic. The approach of the project is a language model that treats the relevance of a graphic to a query as a mixture of three components: a graphic's intended message, other textual components of the graphic such as its caption and additional textual description augmenting the caption, and the text of the document containing the graphic. Challenges that are being addressed include identifying the portion of the article that is relevant to the graphic, associating query terms with the intended messages of graphics in the document library, expanding the abbreviated captions and additional textual descriptions of graphics to more fully capture their content, and appropriately weighting the contribution of individual components of the mixture model. In addition, some kinds of graphics, such as grouped bar charts, have both a primary intended message and a secondary message. The impact of the secondary message on retrieval when an ideal graphic is unavailable is also being addressed. Evaluation of the graph retrieval methodology consists of experiments in which human subjects rate the relevance of retrieved graphics to user queries.The goal of this project is to produce a system for retrieving relevant information graphics, thereby expanding the utility of digital libraries. Together with the SIGHT system, which conveys the content of information graphics via speech, the project will extend the information resources available to individuals with sight-impairments. The project will also produce a corpus of information graphics and their XML representations that can be used by other researchers. Corpora and research results will be disseminated on the project web site (http://www.cis.udel.edu/~carberry/Graph-Retrieval). In addition to significantly increasing the resources accessible from a digital library, the research will lay the foundation for expanding research on question-answering to take into account information graphics. The project will contribute to the development of future scientists by educating graduate students, providing research opportunities for undergraduates at a predominantly undergraduate institution, and enhancing the mentoring skills of graduate students as they work on a team that includes undergraduates.