Textual Entailment (TE) is the task of recognizing entailment, paraphrase, and contradiction relations between a given text pair. The goal of textual entailment research is to develop a core inference component that can be applied to various domains such as QA or IR. We observed several rank correl ations on the test data and system results in the NTCIR-10 RITE-2 task, trying to find out correlations between datasets and evaluation metrics. We also constructed RITE4QA datasets in the RITE-2 task under the scenario of QA in order to see the applicability of RITE techniques in QA systems. Although we find that datasets created from different sources and different ways can hardly predict each other, we also find that ranking by RITE metrics has moderate correlation with the ranking by QA metrics if testing on artificial pairs. Both RITE metrics and QA metrics are stable in terms of their own subtasks.

High-speed rail systems are becoming increasingly popular among long-distance travelers. With the explosive growth in the number of mobile devices, the provision of high-quality telecommunication and Internet access services on high-speed trains is now a pressing problem. Network mobility (NEMO) has been proposed to enable a large number of mobile devices on a vehicle to access the Internet; however, several issues must be solved before it can be put into practice, e.g., frequent handovers, long handover latency, and poor quality of service. To resolve these problems, we propose an LTE femtocell-based network mobility scheme that uses multiple egress network interfaces to support seamless handover for high-speed rail systems called MEN-NEMO. The results of simulations show that the proposed MEN-NEMO scheme reduces the handover latency and transmission overhead of handover signaling substantially.

Network mobility introduces a new communication paradigm that provides sets of mobile hosts (MH) moved collectively as a unit with high-mobility. Efficient network mobility handover design is essential to meet QoS requirements for real-time VoIP-like applications. IETF MIPv6-NEMO design has some problems and introduces extra overheads on packet header and tunnel processing, and added transmission delays due to additional routing legs. Inflexible execution sequence between tasks in MIPv6-NEMO causes negative effect on handover latency performance. In this work, we combine the designs of routing and resource allocation with network mobility management, and introduce the notion of foreign mobility agent in a hierarchical backhaul packet forwarding architecture, referred to as HiMIP-NEMO, to facilitate QoS-handovers and reduce latency and packet loss during handover. Under the architecture, a QoS-incorporated registration protocol and handover protocol with several new layers 2 and 3 message types are also proposed. Both the analytical and simulation results are presented. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed integrated designs in the support of QoS-handover and significant improvements in latency and packet loss performances.

Question Answering (QA) research has been conducted in many languages. Nearly all the top performing systems use heavy methods that require sophisticated techniques, such as parsers or logic provers. However, such techniques are usually unavailable or unaffordable for under-resourced languages or in resource-limited situations. In this article, we describe how a top-performing Chinese QA system can be designed by using lightweight methods effectively. We propose two lightweight methods, namely the Sum of Co-occurrences of Question and Answer Terms (SCO-QAT) and Alignment-based Surface Patterns (ABSPs). SCO-QAT is a co-occurrence-based answer-ranking method that does not need extra knowledge, word-ignoring heuristic rules, or tools. It calculates co-occurrence scores based on the passage retrieval results. ABSPs are syntactic patterns trained from question-answer pairs with a multiple alignment algorithm. They are used to capture the relations between terms and then use the relations to filter answers. We attribute the success of the ABSPs and SCO-QAT methods to the effective use of local syntactic information and global co-occurrence information. By using SCO-QAT and ABSPs, we improved the RU-Accuracy of our testbed QA system, ASQA, from 0.445 to 0.535 on the NTCIR-5 dataset. It also achieved the top 0.5 RU-Accuracy on the NTCIR-6 dataset. The result shows that lightweight methods are not only cheaper to implement, but also have the potential to achieve state-of-the-art performances.

Although there are various wireless access network technologies with different characteristics and performance level have been developed, no single network that can satisfy the anytime, anywhere, and any service wireless access needs of mobile users. A truly seamless mobile environment can only be realized by considering vertical and horizontal handoffs together. With the advantages of Mobile IPv6, a more comprehensive and integrated framework of heterogeneous networks can be developed. In this paper, we discuss the issues related to handoffs including horizontal and vertical handoffs. We present a scheme for integrating wireless local area network and wide area access networks, and propose a micromobility management method called HiMIPv6+. We also propose a QoS-based (quality-of-service-based) vertical handoff scheme and algorithm that consider wireless network transport capacity and user service requirement. Our prototype evaluations and the simulations show that our framework performs as expected.