TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
PROBLEM: We develop a probabilistic latent-variable model to discover semantic frames—types of events and their participants—from corpora. We present a Dirichlet-multinomial model in which frames are latent categories that explain the linking of verb-subject-object triples, given document-level sparsity. We analyze what the model learns, and compare it to FrameNet, noting it learns some novel and interesting frames. This document also contains a discussion of inference issues, including concentration parameter learning; and a small-scale error analysis of syntactic parsing accuracy. Note: this work was originally posted online October 2012 as part of CMU MLD’s Data Analysis Project requirement. This version has no new experiments or results, but has added some discussion of new related work.

SOLUTION: Learning Frames from Text with an Unsupervised Latent Variable Model

PROBLEM: Probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) is a popular normalization approach for the i-vector model, and has delivered state-of-the-art performance in speaker recognition. A potential problem of the PLDA model, however, is that it essentially assumes Gaussian distributions over speaker vectors, which is not always true in practice. Additionally, the objective function is not directly related to the goal of the task, e.g., discriminating true speakers and imposters. In this paper, we propose a max-margin metric learning approach to solve the problems. It learns a linear transform with a criterion that the margin between target and imposter trials are maximized. Experiments conducted on the SRE08 core test show that compared to PLDA, the new approach can obtain comparable or even better performance, though the scoring is simply a cosine computation.

SOLUTION: Max-Margin Metric Learning for Speaker Recognition

PROBLEM: In this paper, we present a conversational model that incorporates both context and participant role for two-party conversations. Different architectures are explored for integrating participant role and context information into a Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) language model. The conversational model can function as a language model or a language generation model. Experiments on the Ubuntu Dialog Corpus show that our model can capture multiple turn interaction between participants. The proposed method outperforms a traditional LSTM model as measured by language model perplexity and response ranking. Generated responses show characteristic differences between the two participant roles.

SOLUTION:
LSTM based Conversation Models