This paper provides an overview of the xDD/LAPPS Grid framework and provides results of evaluating the AskMe retrievalengine using the BEIR benchmark datasets. Our primary goal is to determine a solid baseline of performance to guide furtherdevelopment of our retrieval capabilities. Beyond this, we aim to dig deeper to determine when and why certain approachesperform well (or badly) on both in-domain and out-of-domain data, an issue that has to date received relatively little attention.

The Computational Linguistics Applications for Multimedia Services (CLAMS) platform provides access to computational content analysis tools for multimedia material. The version we present here is a robust update of an initial prototype implementation from 2019. The platform now sports a variety of image, video, audio and text processing tools that interact via a common multi-modal representation language named MMIF (Multi-Media Interchange Format). We describe the overall architecture, the MMIF format, some of the tools included in the platform, the process to set up and run a workflow, visualizations included in CLAMS, and evaluate aspects of the platform on data from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, showing how CLAMS can add metadata to mass-digitized multimedia collections, metadata that are typically only available implicitly in now largely unsearchable digitized media in archives and libraries.

Promoting interoperrable computational linguistics (CL) and natural language processing (NLP) application platforms and interchange-able data formats have contributed improving discoverabilty and accessbility of the openly available NLP software. In this paper, wediscuss the enhanced data visualization capabilities that are also enabled by inter-operating NLP pipelines and interchange formats. For adding openly available visualization tools and graphical annotation tools to the Language Applications Grid (LAPPS Grid) andComputational Linguistics Applications for Multimedia Services (CLAMS) toolboxes, we have developed interchange formats that cancarry annotations and metadata for text and audiovisual source data. We descibe those data formats and present case studies where wesuccessfully adopt open-source visualization tools and combine them with CL tools.

This paper investigates a machine learning approach for temporally ordering and anchoring events in natural language texts. To address data sparseness, we used temporal reasoning as an over-sampling method to dramatically expand the amount of training data, resulting in predictive accuracy on link labeling as high as 93% using a Maximum Entropy classifier on human annotated data. This method compared favorably against a series of increasingly sophisticated baselines involving expansion of rules derived from human intuitions.