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: This paper tests the hypothesis that distinctive feature classifiers anchored at phonetic landmarks can be transferred crosslingually without loss of accuracy. Three consonant voicing classifiers were developed: (1) manually selected acoustic features anchored at a phonetic landmark, (2) MFCCs (either averaged across the segment or anchored at the landmark), and (3) acoustic features computed using a convolutional neural network (CNN). All detectors are trained on English data (TIMIT), and tested on English, Turkish, and Spanish (performance measured using F1 and accuracy). Experiments demonstrate that manual features outperform all MFCC classifiers, while CNN features outperform both. MFCC-based classifiers suffer an overall error rate increase of up to 96.1% when generalized from English to other languages. Manual features suffer only an up to 35.2% relative error rate increase, and CNN features actually perform the best on Turkish and Spanish, demonstrating that features capable of representing long-term spectral dynamics (CNN and landmark-based features) are able to generalize cross-lingually with little or no loss of accuracy.

SOLUTION: LANDMARK-BASED CONSONANT VOICING DETECTION ON MULTILINGUAL CORPORA

PROBLEM: Recently there has been significant activity in developing algorithms with provable guarantees for topic modeling. In standard topic models, a topic (such as sports, business, or politics) is viewed as a probability distribution ai over words, and a document is generated by first selecting a mixture w over topics, and then generating words i.i.d. from the associated mixture Aw. Given a large collection of such documents, the goal is to recover the topic vectors and then to correctly classify new documents according to their topic mixture. In this work we consider a broad generalization of this framework in which words are no longer assumed to be drawn i.i.d. and instead a topic is a complex distribution over sequences of paragraphs. Since one could not hope to even represent such a distribution in general (even if paragraphs are given using some natural feature representation), we aim instead to directly learn a document classifier. That is, we aim to learn a predictor that given a new document, accurately predicts its topic mixture, without learning the distributions explicitly. We present several natural conditions under which one can do this efficiently and discuss issues such as noise tolerance and sample complexity in this model. More generally, our model can be viewed as a generalization of the multi-view or co-training setting in machine learning. ∗Supported in part by National Science Foundation grants CCF-1525971 and CCF-1535967. †Supported in part by National Science Foundation grant CCF-1525971 and by a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship and an IBM Ph.D Fellowship. ar X iv :1 61 1. 01 25 9v 1 [ cs .L G ] 4 N ov 2 01 6

SOLUTION: Generalized Topic Modeling

PROBLEM: We propose an algorithm to uncover the intrinsic low-rank component of a high-dimensional, graph-smooth and grossly-corrupted dataset, under the situations that the underlying graph is unknown. Based on a model with a low-rank component plus a sparse perturbation, and an initial graph estimation, our proposed algorithm simultaneously learns the low-rank component and refines the graph. The refined graph improves the effectiveness of the graph smoothness constraint and increases the accuracy of the low-rank estimation. We derive the learning steps using ADMM. Our evaluations using synthetic and real brain imaging data in a supervised classification task demonstrate encouraging performance.

SOLUTION:
SIMULTANEOUS LOW-RANK COMPONENT AND GRAPH ESTIMATION FOR HIGH-DIMENSIONAL GRAPH SIGNALS: APPLICATION TO BRAIN IMAGING