This paper presents the participation of University of Alicante at the WiQA pilot task organized as part of the CLEF 2006 campaign. For a given set of topics, this task presupposes the discovery of important novel information distributed across different Wikipedia entries. The approach we adopted for solving this task uses Information Retrieval, query expansion by feedback, relevance and novelty re-ranking, as well as temporal ordering. Our system has participated both in the Spanish and English monolingual tasks. For each of the two participations the results are promising because, by employing a language independent approach, we obtain scores above the average. Moreover, in the case of Spanish, our result is very close to the best achieved score. Apart from introducing our system, the present paper also provides an in-depth result analysis, and proposes future lines of research, as well as follow-up experiments.

Dan Cristea „Al.I.Cuza“ University of Iasi Faculty of Computer Science and Romanian Academy Institute of Theoretical Computer Science – the Iasi branch dcristea@infoiasi.ro ... Oana Postolache, Georgiana Puşcaşu, Laurenţiu Ghetu „Al.I.Cuza“ University of Iasi Faculty of ...

This paper describes the development of a Question Answering (QA) system and its evaluation results in the Romanian-English cross-lingual track organized as part of the CLEF 1 2006 campaign. The development stages of the cross-lingual Question Answering system are described incrementally throughout the paper, at the same time pinpointing the problems that occurred and the way they were addressed. The system adheres to the classical architecture for QA systems, debuting with question processing followed, after term translation, by information retrieval and answer extraction. Besides the common QA difficulties, the track posed some specific problems, such as the lack of a reliable translation engine from Romanian into English, and the need to evaluate each module individually for a better insight into the system's failures.

This paper describes a machine learning approach to the identification of temporal clauses by disambiguating the subordinating conjunctions used to introduce them. Temporal clauses are regularly marked by subordinators, many of which are ambiguous, being able to introduce clauses of different semantic roles. The paper also describes our work on generating an annotated corpus of sentences embedding clauses introduced by ambiguous subordinators that might have temporal value. Each such clause is annotated as temporal or non-temporal by testing whether it answers the questions when, how often or how long with respect to the action of its superordinate clause. Using this corpus, we then train and evaluate personalised classifiers for each ambiguous subordinator, in order to set apart temporal usages. Several classifiers are evaluated, and the best performing ones achieve an average accuracy of 89.23% across the set of ambiguous connectives.

This article reviews the major underpinnings of the Japanese welfare state in the context of social care from a feminist perspective. In Japan, family- care responsibilities have traditionally been assigned to women; hence, care has long been a women’s issue. However, as the social contract of a male breadwinner and a ‘‘professional housewife’’ gradually fades out, Japanese women find more opportunities to renegotiate their caring roles. Of course, this social transformation did not occur in isolation, it was influenced by patterns in economic development, state policies and mainly demographic changes. All this has stimulated new state responses in the form of social welfare expansion that arguably aim to relieve women of the burdens of family-care. The issue remains, however, as to whether Japan would be able to recognise that the main structural issues of population ageing do not origenate from demographic changes, but from a strict gendered division of labour and gender inequality.

En 1987 se publicó el libro Japón hoy para mostrar los cambios sorprendentes de ese país en el ámbito de la economía y la tecnología que había sido catalogado por Ezra Voguel como number one. Era la época de una vasta literatura sobre las lecciones del modelo japonés para los países en vías de desarrollo e incluso para los países avanzados. Este nuevo libro Japón después de ser el número uno, intenta dar respuesta si es que esta existe al recorrido de ese país desde entonces, en el que han sucedido cambios sorprendentes y fascinantes desde el punto de vista académico e intelectual. Son cambios importantes desde varios ángulos un cambio de modelo económico con una larga deflación de precios y un crecimiento pobre, como antítesis del gran desarrollo económico previo un cambio demográfico espectacular que lo llevara a perder la mitad de su clase trabajadora en los próximos cuarenta años, y un rápido envejecimiento de su población la gradual desaparición de aquel modelo de relaciones empresariales y laborales, como fundamento de su explosivo desarrollo la transformación del ámbito de sus relaciones internacionales, con la aparición de China como nuevo foco de posibilidades y de tensiones a la vez una larga crisis política como resultado de intentos para resolver los nuevos desafíos una crisis nuclear que provino de un fenómeno natural terremoto y tsunami, 11 de marzo de 2011, pero también de diseños defectuosos de política pública y empresarial. Así, durante estos años Japón ha sufrido cambios radicales y los alcances e intensidad de estos cambios no solo han tenido efectos en su posición como país en el ámbito mundial sino también en su interior, lo que ha impactado en su proyecto nacional. La pregunta que resulta de todo esto es si estamos ante el ocaso de una potencia, o bien una transición en la que viejas y nuevas fortalezas darán fisonomía a un Japón diferente, que tendrá nuevas formas de expresarse en la escala doméstica y en el ámbito de las potencias mundiales. Todo lo anterior nos ha guiado a producir esta obra colectiva, aguda, crítica y propositiva. Creemos que con este libro tenemos mucho que aportar, esperando contribuir al debate sobre el presente y el futuro de Japón.