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成果。信息图形（非图形图形，如条形图和线形图）经常出现在报纸和杂志等大众媒体上。不仅这些图表所传达的知识通常不包含在文章的文本中，而且（与科学文献相反）文章的文本通常甚至没有明确提及图表。信息检索的研究主要集中在文献的文本上，而文献的信息图形在很大程度上被忽视了。然而，图形设计师认为图形的信息足够重要，因此可以设计一个图形来传达它。该项目的目标是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。大众媒体中的信息图形通常有一个它们想要传达的交际目标或信息。此消息封装了图形中包含的高级知识。该项目的方法是一种语言模型，它将图形与查询的相关性视为三个组件的混合：图形的预期消息、图形的其他文本组件（如其标题和扩展标题的附加文本描述）以及包含图形的文档的文本。正在解决的挑战包括识别文章中与图形相关的部分，将查询术语与文档库中图形的预期消息关联起来，扩展图形的缩略标题和附加文本描述以更全面地捕获其内容，以及适当地加权混合模型中各个组件的贡献。此外，某些类型的图形，如分组条形图，既有主要的预期信息，也有次要的信息。当理想图形不可用时，次要消息对检索的影响也正在解决中。图检索方法的评估包括实验，在实验中，人类受试者对检索到的图形与用户查询的相关性进行评分。该项目的目标是建立一个检索相关信息图形的系统，从而扩大数字图书馆的效用。该项目将与通过语音传递信息图形内容的SIGHT系统一起，为视力障碍人士提供更多的信息资源。该项目还将生成信息图形及其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。除了显著增加可从数字图书馆获得的资源外，该研究还将为扩大考虑信息图形的问答研究奠定基础。该项目将通过教育研究生，为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.