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: The success of semi-supervised learning crucially relies on the scalability to a huge amount of unlabelled data that are needed to capture the underlying manifold structure for better classification. Since computing the pairwise similarity between the training data is prohibitively expensive in most kinds of input data, currently, there is no general readyto-use semi-supervised learning method/tool available for learning with tens of millions or more data points. In this paper, we adopted the idea of two low-rank label propagation algorithms, GLNP (Global Linear Neighborhood Propagation) and Kernel Nyström Approximation, and implemented the parallelized version of the two algorithms accelerated with Nesterov’s accelerated projected gradient descent for Big-data Label Propagation (BigLP). The parallel algorithms are tested on five real datasets ranging from 7000 to 10,000,000 in size and a simulation dataset of 100,000,000 samples. In the experiments, the implementation can scale up to datasets with 100,000,000 samples and hundreds of features and the algorithms also significantly improved the prediction accuracy when only a very small percentage of the data is labeled. The results demonstrate that the BigLP implementation is highly scalable to big data and effective in utilizing the unlabeled data for semi-supervised learning.

SOLUTION: Low-rank Label Propagation for Semi-supervised Learning with 100 Millions Samples

PROBLEM: A Verbal Autopsy is the record of an interview about the circumstances of an uncertified death. In developing countries, if a death occurs away from health facilities, a field-worker interviews a relative of the deceased about the circumstances of the death; this Verbal Autopsy can be reviewed offsite. We report on a comparative study of the processes involved in Text Classification applied to classifying Cause of Death: feature value representation; machine learning classification algorithms; and feature reduction strategies in order to identify the suitable approaches applicable to the classification of Verbal Autopsy text. We demonstrate that normalised term frequency and the standard TFiDF achieve comparable performance across a number of classifiers. The results also show Support Vector Machine is superior to other classification algorithms employed in this research. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of employing a ’locally-semisupervised’ feature reduction strategy in order to increase performance accuracy.

SOLUTION: A Comparative Study of Machine Learning Methods for Verbal Autopsy Text Classification

PROBLEM: We introduce a new approach for disfluency detection using a Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory neural network (BLSTM). In addition to the word sequence, the model takes as input pattern match features that were developed to reduce sensitivity to vocabuary size in training, which lead to improved performance over the word sequence alone. The BLSTM takes advantage of explicit repair states in addition to the standard reparandum states. The final output leverages integer linear programming to incorporate constraints of disluency structure. In experiments on the Switchboard corpus, the model achieves state-of-the-art performance for both the standard disfluency detection task and the correction detection task. Analysis shows that the model has better detection of non-repetition disfluencies, which tend to be much harder to detect.

SOLUTION:
Disfluency Detection using a Bidirectional LSTM