Microsoft Research Blog

Artificial intelligence

  1. iNeATS: Interactive Multi-Document Summarization 

    July 7, 2003 | Anton Leuski, Chin-Yew Lin, and Eduard Hovy

    We describe iNeATS – an interactive multi-document summarization system that integrates a state-of-the-art summarization engine with an advanced user interface. Three main goals of the system are: (1) provide a user with control over the summarization process, (2) support exploration of the document set with…

  2. Object removal by exemplar-based inpainting 

    June 18, 2003 | Antonio Criminisi, Patrick Perez, and Kentaro Toyama

    A new algorithm is proposed for removing large objects from digital images. The challenge is to fill in the hole that is left behind in a visually plausible way. In the past, this problem has been addressed by two classes of algorithms: (i) "texture synthesis"…

  3. Automatic Evaluation of Summaries Using N-gram Co-occurrence Statistics 

    May 27, 2003 | Chin-Yew Lin and E.H. Hovy

    Following the recent adoption by the machine translation community of automatic evaluation using the BLEU/NIST scoring process, we conduct an in-depth study of a similar idea for evaluating summaries. The results show that automatic evaluation using unigram cooccurrences between summary pairs correlates surprising well with…

  4. Estimating uncertainty in dense stereo disparity maps 

    March 1, 2003 | Andrew Blake, Philip H.S. Torr, Ingemar Cox, and Antonio Criminisi

    Dense stereo is a well studied problem in computer vision. Generally dense stereo algorithms provide only a single estimate of disparity, ignoring uncertainty in the disparity map. Here however, we present a new, linear-time, exact method for recovering entire distributions for disparity at all pixels.…

  5. The Effectiveness of Dictionary and Web-Based Answer Reranking 

    August 24, 2002 | Chin-Yew Lin

    We describe an in-depth study of using a dictionary (WordNet) and web search engines (Altavista, MSN, and Google) to boost the performance of an automated question answering system, Webclopedia, in answering definition questions. The results indicate applying dictionary and web-based answer reranking together increase the…

  6. Person identification using automatic height and stride estimation 

    July 31, 2002 | Chiraz BenAbdelkader, Ross Cutler, and Larry S. Davis

    We present a parametric method to automatically identify people in monocular low-resolution video by estimating the height and stride parameters of their gait. Stride parameters (stride length and cadence) are functions of body height, weight, and gender Previous work has demonstrated an effective use of…

  7. Knowledge-Based Question Answering 

    July 14, 2002 | Ulf Hermjakob, Eduard H. Hovy, and Chin-Yew Lin

    This paper describes the Webclopedia Question Answering system, in which methods to automatically learn patterns and parameterizations are combined with hand-crafted rules and concept ontologies. The source for answers is a collection of 1 million newspaper texts, distributed by NIST. In general, two kinds of…

  8. Manual and Automatic Evaluations of Summaries 

    July 11, 2002 | Chin-Yew Lin and E.H. Hovy

    In this paper we discuss manual and automatic evaluations of summaries using data from the Document Understanding Conference 2001 (DUC-2001). We first show the instability of the manual evaluation. Specifically, the low interhuman agreement indicates that more reference summaries are needed. To investigate the feasibility…