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: Chinese word segmentation is a fundamental task for Chinese language processing. The granularity mismatch problem is the main cause of the errors. This paper showed that the binary tree representation can store outputs with different granularity. A binary tree based framework is also designed to overcome the granularity mismatch problem. There are two steps in this framework, namely tree building and tree pruning. The tree pruning step is specially designed to focus on the granularity problem. Previous work for Chinese word segmentation such as the sequence tagging can be easily employed in this framework. This framework can also provide quantitative error analysis methods. The experiments showed that after using a more sophisticated tree pruning function for a state-of-the-art conditional random field based baseline, the error reduction can be up to 20%.

SOLUTION: Binary Tree based Chinese Word Segmentation

PROBLEM: We consider a general framework of online learning with expert advice where the regret is defined with respect to a competitor class defined by a weighted automaton over sequences of experts. Our framework covers several problems previously studied, in particular that of competing against k-shifting experts. We give a series of algorithms for this problem, including an automata-based algorithm extending weightedmajority and more efficient algorithms based on the notion of failure transitions. We further present efficient algorithms based on a compact approximation of the competitor automaton, in particular efficient n-gram models obtained by minimizing the Rényi divergence, and present an extensive study of the approximation properties of such models. We also extend our algorithms and results to the framework of sleeping experts. Finally, we describe the extension of our approximation methods to online convex optimization and a general mirror descent setting.

SOLUTION: Online Learning against Expert Automata

PROBLEM: Most contemporary multi-task learning methods assume linear models. This setting is considered shallow in the era of deep learning. In this paper, we present a new deep multi-task representation learning framework that learns cross-task sharing structure at every layer in a deep network. Our approach is based on generalising the matrix factorisation techniques explicitly or implicitly used by many conventional MTL algorithms to tensor factorisation, to realise automatic learning of end-to-end knowledge sharing in deep networks. This is in contrast to existing deep learning approaches that need a user-defined multi-task sharing strategy. Our approach applies to both homogeneous and heterogeneous MTL. Experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our deep multi-task representation learning in terms of both higher accuracy and fewer design choices.

SOLUTION:
DEEP MULTI-TASK REPRESENTATION LEARNING: A TENSOR FACTORISATION APPROACH