Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Interacting Conceptual Spaces I: Grammatical Composition of Concepts

The categorical compositional approach to meaning has been successfully applied in natural language processing, outperforming other models in mainstream empirical language processing tasks. We show how this approach can be generalized to conceptual space models of cognition. In order to do this, first we introduce the category of convex relations as a new setting for categorical compositional semantics, emphasizing the convex structure important to conceptual space applications. We then show how to construct conceptual spaces for various types such as nouns, adjectives and verbs. Finally we show by means of examples how concepts can be systematically combined to establish the meanings of composite phrases from the meanings of their constituent parts. This provides the mathematical underpinnings of a new compositional approach to cognition.
Combining Gameplay Data with Monte Carlo Tree Search to Emulate Human Play

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has become a popular solution for controlling non-player characters. Its use has repeatedly been shown to be capable of creating strong game playing opponents. However, the emergent playstyle of agents using MCTS is not necessarily human-like, believable or enjoyable. AI Factory Spades, currently the top rated Spades game in the Google Play store, uses a variant of MCTS to control non-player characters. In collaboration with the developers, we collected gameplay data from 27,592 games and showed in a previous study that the playstyle of human players significantly differed from that of the non-player characters. This paper presents a method of biasing MCTS using human gameplay data to create Spades playing agents that emulate human play whilst maintaining a strong, competitive performance. The methods of player modelling and biasing MCTS presented in this study are generally applicable to digital games with discrete actions.
A Logical Key Hierarchy Based Approach to Preserve Content Privacy in Decentralized Online Social Networks

Distributed Online Social Networks (DOSNs) have been proposed to shift the control over user data from a unique entity, the online social network provider, to the users of the DOSN themselves. In this paper we focus on the problem of preserving the privacy of the contents shared to large groups of users. In general, content privacy is enforced by encrypting the content, having only authorized parties being able to decrypt it. When efficiency has to be taken into account, new solutions have to be devised that: i) minimize the re-encryption of the contents published in a group when the composition of the group changes; and, ii) enable a fast distribution of the cryptographic keys to all the members (n) of a group, each time a set of users is removed from or added to the group by the group owner. Current solutions fall short in meeting the above criteria, while our approach requires only O(d . logd(n)) encryption operations when a user is removed from a group (where d is an input parameter of the system), and O(2 . log <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">d</sub> (n)) when a user joins the group. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated through simulations based on a real online social network.
Single Image Depth Estimation With Normal Guided Scale Invariant Deep Convolutional Fields

Estimating scene depth from a single image can be widely applied to understand 3D environments due to the easy access of the images captured by consumer-level cameras. Previous works exploit conditional random fields (CRFs) to estimate image depth, where neighboring pixels (superpixels) with similar appearances are constrained to share the same depth. However, the depth may vary significantly in the slanted surface, thus leading to severe estimation errors. In order to eliminate those errors, we propose a superpixel-based normal guided scale invariant deep convolutional field by encouraging the neighboring superpixels with similar appearance to lie on the same 3D plane of the scene. In doing so, a depth-normal multitask CNN is introduced to produce the superpixel-wise depth and surface normal predictions simultaneously. To correct the errors of the roughly estimated superpiexl-wise depth, we develop a normal guided scale invariant CRF (NGSI-CRF). NGSI-CRF consists of a scale invariant unary potential that is able to measure the relative depth between superpixels as well as the absolute depth of superpixels, and a normal guided pairwise potential that constrains spatial relationships between superpixels in accordance with the 3D layout of the scene. In other words, the normal guided pairwise potential is designed to smooth the depth prediction without deteriorating the 3D structure of the depth prediction. The superpixel-wise depth maps estimated by NGSI-CRF will be fed into a pixel-wise refinement module to produce a smooth fine-grained depth prediction. Furthermore, we derive a closed-form solution for the maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference of NGSI-CRF. Thus, our proposed network can be efficiently trained in an end-to-end manner. We conduct our experiments on various datasets, such as NYU-D2, KITTI, and Make 3D. As demonstrated in the experimental results, our method achieves superior performance in both indoor and outdoor scenes.
Analyzing big datasets of genomic sequences: fast and scalable collection of k-mer statistics

Distributed approaches based on the MapReduce programming paradigm have started to be proposed in the Bioinformatics domain, due to the large amount of data produced by the next-generation sequencing techniques. However, the use of MapReduce and related Big Data technologies and frameworks (e.g., Apache Hadoop and Spark) does not necessarily produce satisfactory results, in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. We discuss how the development of distributed and Big Data management technologies has affected the analysis of large datasets of biological sequences. Moreover, we show how the choice of different parameter configurations and the careful engineering of the software with respect to the specific framework under consideration may be crucial in order to achieve good performance, especially on very large amounts of data. We choose k-mers counting as a case study for our analysis, and Spark as the framework to implement FastKmer, a novel approach for the extraction of k-mer statistics from large collection of biological sequences, with arbitrary values of k. One of the most relevant contributions of FastKmer is the introduction of a module for balancing the statistics aggregation workload over the nodes of a computing cluster, in order to overcome data skew while allowing for a full exploitation of the underlying distributed architecture. We also present the results of a comparative experimental analysis showing that our approach is currently the fastest among the ones based on Big Data technologies, while exhibiting a very good scalability. We provide evidence that the usage of technologies such as Hadoop or Spark for the analysis of big datasets of biological sequences is productive only if the architectural details and the peculiar aspects of the considered framework are carefully taken into account for the algorithm design and implementation.
Integrating Image and Textual Information in Human–Robot Interactions for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Talking and literary reading are important activities for children, especially for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We try to integrate the activities with NAO robots to excite their communication willingness. In this paper, a novel multimodal picture book recommendation framework that combines textual information and image information to calculate the similarity between the picture books and the conversation topics is proposed and evaluated using a testing dataset. In the proposed framework, an image neighbor discovery method to get more relative terms and an near-duplicated keyframes (NDK) friend detection method to get more relative NDKs are proposed. Finally, the booklist generated from the experiment is evaluated by six performance indicators and the experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves satisfactory and promising performance. With the help of the proposed recommendation framework, an autistic child can talk to the NAO robot in a relaxed and enjoyable environment. Please note that the proposed framework is not evaluated for its performance with the ASD children but for its performance at recommending books based on visual and textual features. Therefore, no tests were performed with either professionals nor diagnosed individuals.
Shared Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model for Incomplete Multiview Clustering

These days, many multiview learning methods have been proposed by integrating the complementary information of multiple views and can significantly improve the performance of machine learning tasks comparing with single-view learning methods. However, most of these methods fail to learn better models when the multiview data are unpaired (or partially paired) or incomplete (or partially complete). Although some previous attempts have been made to address these problems, these methods often lead to poor results when dealing with incomplete multiview data that contain a relatively large number of missing instances. In fact, this incomplete problem is more challenging than the unpaired problem since less shared information can be caught by the model in the former case. In this paper, we propose a shared Gaussian process (GP) latent variable model for incomplete multiview clustering to gain the merits of two worlds (i.e., GP and multiview learning). Specifically, it learns a set of intentionally aligned representative auxiliary points in individual views jointly to not only compensate for missing instances but also implement the group-level constraint. Thus, the shared information among these views can be explicitly built into the model. All of the hyper-parameters and auxiliary points are simultaneously learned by variational inference. Compared with the existing methods, our method naturally inherits the advantages of GP. Furthermore, it is also straightforwardly extended to cases with more than two views without adding any complexity in formulation. In the experiments, we compare it with the state-of-the-art methods for incomplete multiview data clustering to demonstrate its superiorities.