niryuu/sni-each-converted huggingface dataset:
We present an ensemble approach for categorizing search query entities in the recruitment domain. Understanding the types of entities expressed in a search query (Company, Skill, Job Title, etc.) enables more intelligent information retrieval based upon those entities compared to a traditional keyword-based search. Because search queries are typically very short, leveraging a traditional bag-of-words model to identify entity types would be inappropriate due to the lack of contextual information. Our approach instead combines clues from different sources of varying complexity in order to collect real-world knowledge about query entities. We employ distributional semantic representations of query entities through two models: 1) contextual vectors generated from encyclopedic corpora like Wikipedia, and 2) high dimensional word embedding vectors generated from millions of job postings using word2vec. Additionally, our approach utilizes both entity linguistic properties obtained from WordNet and ontological properties extracted from DBpedia. We evaluate our approach on a data set created at CareerBuilder; the largest job board in the US. The data set contains entities extracted from millions of job seekers/recruiters search queries, job postings, and resume documents. After constructing the distributional vectors of search entities, we use supervised machine learning to infer search entity types. Empirical results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art word2vec distributional semantics model trained on Wikipedia. Moreover, we achieve microaveraged F1 score of 97% using the proposed distributional representations ensemble.
Output: Entity Type Recognition using an Ensemble of Distributional Semantic Models to Enhance Query Understanding
Nowadays, huge efforts are made to modernize the air traffic management systems to cope with uncertainty, complexity and sub-optimality. An answer is to enhance the information sharing between the stakeholders. This paper introduces a framework that bridges the gap between air traffic management and air traffic control on the one hand, and bridges the gap between the ground, the approach and the en-route centers on the other hand. An original system is presented, that has three essential components: the trajectory models, the optimization process, and the monitoring process. The uncertainty of the trajectory is modeled with a Bayesian Network, where the nodes are associated to two types of random variables: the time of overflight on metering points of the airspace, and the traveling time of the routes linking these points. The resulting Bayesian Network covers the complete airspace, and MonteCarlo simulations are done to estimate the probabilities of sector congestion and delays. On top of this trajectory model, an optimization process minimizes these probabilities by tuning the parameters of the Bayesian trajectory model related to overflight times on metering points. The last component is the monitoring process, that continuously updates the situation of the airspace, modifying the trajectories uncertainties according to actual positions of aircraft. After each update, a new optimal set of overflight times is computed, and can be communicated to the controllers as clearances for the aircraft pilots. The paper presents a formal specification of this global optimization problem, whose underlying rationale was derived with the help of air traffic controllers at Thales Air Systems.
Output: Increasing Air Traffic: What is the Problem?
We present an end-to-end, multimodal, fully convolu-<lb>tional network for extracting semantic structures from doc-<lb>ument images. We consider document semantic structure<lb>extraction as a pixel-wise segmentation task, and propose a<lb>unified model that classifies pixels based not only on their<lb>visual appearance, as in the traditional page segmentation<lb>task, but also on the content of underlying text. Moreover,<lb>we propose an efficient synthetic document generation pro-<lb>cess that we use to generate pretraining data for our net-<lb>work. Once the network is trained on a large set of synthetic<lb>documents, we fine-tune the network on unlabeled real doc-<lb>uments using a semi-supervised approach. We systemati-<lb>cally study the optimum network architecture and show that<lb>both our multimodal approach and the synthetic data pre-<lb>training significantly boost the performance.
Output: Learning to Extract Semantic Structure from Documents Using Multimodal Fully Convolutional Neural Networks
Arabic language and writing are now facing a resurgence of international normative solutions that challenge most of their local or network based operating principles. Even if the multilingual digital coding solutions, especially those proposed by Unicode, have solved many difficulties of Arabic writing, the linguistic aspect is still in search of more adapted solutions. Terminology is one of the sectors in which the Arabic language requires a deep modernization of its classical productivity models. The normative approach, in particular that of the ISO TC37, is proposed as one of the solutions that would allow it to combine with international standards to better integrate the knowledge society under construction.
Output: Normalisation de la langue et de l’écriture arabe : enjeux culturels régionaux et mondiaux
In this work, we investigate a novel semantic approach for pattern discovery in trajectories that, relying on ontologies, enhances object movement information with event semantics. The approach can be applied to the detection of movement patterns and behaviors whenever the semantics of events occurring along the trajectory is, explicitly or implicitly, available. In particular, we tested it against an exacting case scenario in maritime surveillance, i.e., the discovery of suspicious container transportations. The methodology we have developed entails the formalization of the application domain through a domain ontology, extending the Moving Object Ontology (MOO) described in this paper. Afterwards, movement patterns have to be formalized, either as Description Logic (DL) axioms or queries, enabling the retrieval of the trajectories that follow the patterns. In our experimental evaluation, we have considered a real world dataset of 18 Million of container events describing the deed undertaken in a port to accomplish the shipping (e.g., loading on a vessel, export operation). Leveraging events, we have reconstructed almost 300 thousand container trajectories referring to 50 thousand containers travelling along three years. We have formalized the anomalous itinerary patterns as DL axioms, testing different ontology APIs and DL reasoners to retrieve the suspicious transportations. Our experiments demonstrate that the approach is feasible and efficient. In particular, the joint use of Pellet and SPARQL-DL enables to detect the trajectories following a given pattern in a reasonable time with big size datasets.
Output: Semantic-based Anomalous Pattern Discovery in Moving Object Trajectories
Review fraud is a pervasive problem in online commerce, in which fraudulent sellers write or purchase fake reviews to manipulate perception of their products and services. Fake reviews are often detected based on several signs, including 1) they occur in short bursts of time; 2) fraudulent user accounts have skewed rating distributions. However, these may both be true in any given dataset. Hence, in this paper, we propose an approach for detecting fraudulent reviews which combines these 2 approaches in a principled manner, allowing successful detection even when one of these signs is not present. To combine these 2 approaches, we formulate our Bayesian Inference for Rating Data (BIRD) model, a flexible Bayesian model of user rating behavior. Based on our model we formulate a likelihood-based suspiciousness metric, Normalized Expected Surprise Total (NEST). We propose a linear-time algorithm for performing Bayesian inference using our model and computing the metric. Experiments on real data show that BIRDNEST successfully spots review fraud in large, real-world graphs: the 50 most suspicious users of the Flipkart platform flagged by our algorithm were investigated and all identified as fraudulent by domain experts at Flipkart.
Output: BIRDNEST: Bayesian Inference for Ratings-Fraud Detection
Decision support systems help decision makers make better decisions in the face of complex decision problems (e.g. investment or policy decisions). Fisheries and Aquaculture is a domain where decision makers face such decisions since they involve factors from many different scientific fields. No systematic overview of literature describing decision support systems and their application in fisheries and aquaculture has been conducted. This paper summarizes scientific literature that describes decision support systems applied to the domain of Fisheries and Aquaculture. We use an established systematic mapping survey method to conduct our literature mapping. Our research questions are: What decision support systems for fisheries and aquaculture exists? What are the most investigated fishery and aquaculture decision support systems topics and how have these changed over time? Do any current DSS for fisheries provide realtime analytics? Do DSSes in Fisheries and Aquaculture build their models using machine learning done on captured and grounded data? The paper then detail how we employ the systematic mapping method in answering these questions. This results in 27 papers being identified as relevant and gives an exposition on the primary methods concluded in the study for designing a decision support system. We provide an analysis of the research done in the studies collected. We discovered that most literature does not consider multiple aspects for multiple stakeholders in their work. In addition we observed that little or no work has been done with real-time analysis in these decision support systems.
Output: Decision Support Systems in Fisheries and Aquaculture: A systematic review
We present Net2Vec, a flexible high-performance platform that allows the execution of deep learning algorithms in the communication network. Net2Vec is able to capture data from the network at more than 60Gbps, transform it into meaningful tuples and apply predictions over the tuples in real time. This platform can be used for different purposes ranging from traffic classification to network performance analysis. Finally, we showcase the use of Net2Vec by implementing and testing a solution able to profile network users at line rate using traces coming from a real network. We show that the use of deep learning for this case outperforms the baseline method both in terms of accuracy and performance.
Output: Net2Vec: Deep Learning for the Network
As an important and challenging problem in computer vision and graphics, keypoint-based object tracking is typically formulated in a spatio-temporal statistical learning framework. However, most existing keypoint trackers are incapable of effectively modeling and balancing the following three aspects in a simultaneous manner: temporal model coherence across frames, spatial model consistency within frames, and discriminative feature construction. To address this issue, we propose a robust keypoint tracker based on spatio-temporal multi-task structured output optimization driven by discriminative metric learning. Consequently, temporal model coherence is characterized by multi-task structured keypoint model learning over several adjacent frames, while spatial model consistency is modeled by solving a geometric verification based structured learning problem. Discriminative feature construction is enabled by metric learning to ensure the intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Finally, the above three modules are simultaneously optimized in a joint learning scheme. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our tracker.
Output: Metric Learning Driven Multi-Task Structured Output Optimization for Robust Keypoint Tracking
Machine learning is increasingly prevalent in stock market trading. Though neural networks have seen success in computer vision and natural language processing, they have not been as useful in stock market trading. To demonstrate the applicability of a neural network in stock trading, we made a single-layer neural network that recommends buying or selling shares of a stock by comparing the highest high of 10 consecutive days with that of the next 10 days, a process repeated for the stock’s year-long historical data. A χ analysis found that the neural network can accurately and appropriately decide whether to buy or sell shares for a given stock, showing that a neural network can make simple decisions about the stock market.
Output: Application of a Shallow Neural Network to Short-Term Stock Trading
In this paper, we present a novel approach for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) where, we control cursor movement using a real-time camera. Current methods involve changing mouse parts such as adding more buttons or changing the position of the tracking ball. Instead, our method is to use a camera and computer vision technology, such as image segmentation and gesture recognition, to control mouse tasks (left and right clicking, double-clicking, and scrolling) and we show how it can perform everything as current mouse devices can. The software will be developed in JAVA language. Recognition and pose estimation in this system are user independent and robust as we will be using colour tapes on our finger to perform actions. The software can be used as an intuitive input interface to applications that require multi-dimensional control e.g. computer games etc.
Output: Mouse Simulation Using Two Coloured Tapes
A main goal of data visualization is to find, from among all the available alternatives, mappings to the 2D/3D display which are relevant to the user. Assuming user interaction data, or other auxiliary data about the items or their relationships, the goal is to identify which aspects in the primary data support the user’s input and, equally importantly, which aspects of the user’s potentially noisy input have support in the primary data. For solving the problem, we introduce a multi-view embedding in which a latent factorization identifies which aspects in the two data views (primary data and user data) are related and which are specific to only one of them. The factorization is a generative model in which the display is parameterized as a part of the factorization and the other factors explain away the aspects not expressible in a two-dimensional display. Functioning of the model is demonstrated on several data sets.
Output: VISUALIZATIONS RELEVANT TO THE USER BY MULTI-VIEW LATENT VARIABLE FACTORIZATION
Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a recent construction process based on a 3D model, containing every component related to the building achievement. Architects, structure engineers, method engineers, and others participant to the building process work on this model through the design-to-construction cycle. The high complexity and the large amount of information included in these models raise several issues, delaying its wide adoption in the industrial world. One of the most important is the visualization: professionals have difficulties to find out the relevant information for their job. Actual solutions suffer from two limitations: the BIM models information are processed manually and insignificant information are simply hidden, leading to inconsistencies in the building model. This paper describes a system relying on an ontological representation of the building information to label automatically the building elements. Depending on the user’s department, the visualization is modified according to these labels by automatically adjusting the colors and image properties based on a saliency model. The proposed saliency model incorporates several adaptations to fit the specificities of architectural images.
Output: Adaptive Visualisation System for Construction Building Information Models Using Saliency
We present persona-based models for handling the issue of speaker consistency in neural response generation. A speaker model encodes personas in distributed embeddings that capture individual characteristics such as background information and speaking style. A dyadic speaker-addressee model captures properties of interactions between two interlocutors. Our models yield qualitative performance improvements in both perplexity and BLEU scores over baseline sequence-to-sequence models, with similar gain in speaker consistency as measured by human judges.
Output: A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Model
We propose novel model transfer-learning methods that refine a decision forest model M learned within a “source” domain using a training set sampled from a “target” domain, assumed to be a variation of the source. We present two random forest transfer algorithms. The first algorithm searches greedily for locally optimal modifications of each tree structure by trying to locally expand or reduce the tree around individual nodes. The second algorithm does not modify structure, but only the parameter (thresholds) associated with decision nodes. We also propose to combine both methods by considering an ensemble that contains the union of the two forests. The proposed methods exhibit impressive experimental results over a range of problems.
Output: LEARN ON SOURCE, REFINE ON TARGET: A MODEL TRANSFER LEARNING FRAMEWORK WITH RANDOM FORESTS 1 Learn on Source, Refine on Target: A Model Transfer Learning Framework with Random Forests
We consider the task of obtaining the maximum a posteriori estimate of discrete pairwise random fields with arbitrary unary potentials and semimetric pairwise potentials. For this problem, we propose an accurate hierarchical move making strategy where each move is computed efficiently by solving an st-MINCUT problem. Unlike previous move making approaches, e.g. the widely used α-expansion algorithm, our method obtains the guarantees of the standard linear programming (LP) relaxation for the important special case of metric labeling. Unlike the existing LP relaxation solvers, e.g. interior-point algorithms or tree-reweighted message passing, our method is significantly faster as it uses only the efficient st-MINCUT algorithm in its design. Using both synthetic and real data experiments, we show that our technique outperforms several commonly used algorithms.
Output: MAP Estimation of Semi-Metric MRFs via Hierarchical Graph Cuts
Résumé Elections unleash strong political views on Twitter, but what do people really think about politics ? Opinion and trend mining on micro blogs dealing with politics has recently attracted researchers in several fields including Information Retrieval and Machine Learning (ML). Since the performance of ML and Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches are limited by the amount and quality of data available, one promising alternative for some tasks is the automatic propagation of expert annotations. This paper intends to develop a so-called active learning process for automatically annotating French language tweets that deal with the image (i.e., representation, web reputation) of politicians. Our main focus is on the methodology followed to build an original annotated dataset expressing opinion from two French politicians over time. We therefore review state of the art NLP-based ML algorithms to automatically annotate tweets using a manual initiation step as bootstrap. This paper focuses on key issues about active learning while building a large annotated data set from noise. This will be introduced by human annotators, abundance of data and the label distribution across data and entities. In turn, we show that Twitter characteristics such as the author’s name or hashtags can be considered as the bearing point to not only improve automatic systems for Opinion Mining (OM) and Topic Classification but also to reduce noise in human annotations. However, a later thorough analysis shows that reducing noise might induce the loss of crucial information.
Output: Active learning in annotating micro-blogs dealing with e-reputation
Standard deep reinforcement learning methods such as Deep Q-Networks (DQN) for multiple tasks (domains) face scalability problems. We propose a method for multi-domain dialogue policy learning—termed NDQN, and apply it to an information-seeking spoken dialogue system in the domains of restaurants and hotels. Experimental results comparing DQN (baseline) versus NDQN (proposed) using simulations report that our proposed method exhibits better scalability and is promising for optimising the behaviour of multi-domain dialogue systems.
Output: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Domain Dialogue Systems
Automated Text Scoring (ATS) provides a cost-effective and consistent alternative to human marking. However, in order to achieve good performance, the predictive features of the system need to be manually engineered by human experts. We introduce a model that forms word representations by learning the extent to which specific words contribute to the text’s score. Using Long-Short Term Memory networks to represent the meaning of texts, we demonstrate that a fully automated framework is able to achieve excellent results over similar approaches. In an attempt to make our results more interpretable, and inspired by recent advances in visualizing neural networks, we introduce a novel method for identifying the regions of the text that the model has found more discriminative.
Output: Automatic Text Scoring Using Neural Networks
This work, inspired by the idea of “Computing with Words and Perceptions” proposed by Zadeh in [57, 59], focuses on how to transform measurements into perceptions [22] for the problem of map building by Autonomous Mobile Robots. We propose to model the perceptions obtained from sonar-sensors as two grid maps: one for obstacles and another for empty spaces. The rules used to build and integrate these maps are expressed by linguistic descriptions and modeled by fuzzy rules. The main difference of this approach from other studies reported in the literature is that the method presented here is based on the hypothesis that the concepts “occupied” and “empty” are antonyms rather than complementary (as it happens in probabilistic approaches), or independent (as it happens in the previous fuzzy models). Controlled experimentation with a real robot in three representative indoor environments has been performed and the results presented. We offer a qualitative and quantitative comparison of the estimated maps obtained by the probabilistic approach, the previous fuzzy method and the new antonyms-based fuzzy approach. It is shown that the maps obtained with the antonyms-based approach are better defined, capture better the shape of the walls and of the empty-spaces, and contain less errors due to rebounds and short-echoes. Furthermore, in spite of noise and low resolution inherent to the sonar-sensors used, the maps obtained are accurate and tolerant to imprecision. IThis work has been supported by the Spanish Department of Science and Innovation (MICINN) under program Juan de la Cierva JCI-2008-3531, and the European Social Fund. ∗Corresponding author Email addresses: sergio.guadarrama@softcomputing.es (Sergio Guadarrama), aruiz@fi.upm.es (Antonio Ruiz-Mayor) Preprint submitted to Elsevier July 1, 2010 ar X iv :1 00 6. 58 27 v1 [ cs .R O ] 3 0 Ju n 20 10
Output: Approximate Robotic Mapping from sonar data by modeling Perceptions with Antonyms
The paper summarizes the development of the LVCSR system built as a part of the Pashto speech-translation system at the SCALE (Summer Camp for Applied Language Exploration) 2015 workshop on “Speech-to-text-translation for low-resource languages”. The Pashto language was chosen as a good “proxy” low-resource language, exhibiting multiple phenomena which make the speech-recognition and and speech-to-text-translation systems development hard. Even when the amount of data is seemingly sufficient, given the fact that the data originates from multiple sources, the preliminary experiments reveal that there is little to no benefit in merging (concatenating) the corpora and more elaborate ways of making use of all of the data must be worked out. This paper concentrates only on the LVCSR part and presents a range of different techniques that were found to be useful in order to benefit from multiple different corpora
Output: USING OF HETEROGENEOUS CORPORA FOR TRAINING OF AN ASR SYSTEM
Active appearance models (AAMs) are a class of generative models that have seen tremendous success in face analysis. However, model learning depends on the availability of detailed annotation of canonical landmark points. As a result, when accurate AAM fitting is required on a different set of variations (expression, pose, identity), a new dataset is collected and annotated. To overcome the need for time consuming data collection and annotation, transfer learning approaches have received recent attention. The goal is to transfer knowledge from previously available datasets (source) to a new dataset (target). We propose a subspace transfer learning method, in which we select a subspace from the source that best describes the target space. We propose a metric to compute the directional similarity between the source eigenvectors and the target subspace. We show an equivalence between this metric and the variance of target data when projected onto source eigenvectors. Using this equivalence, we select a subset of source principal directions that capture the variance in target data. To define our model, we augment the selected source subspace with the target subspace learned from a handful of target examples. In experiments done on six publicly available datasets, we show that our approach outperforms the state of the art in terms of the RMS fitting error as well as the percentage of test examples for which AAM fitting converges to the ground truth.
Output: Subspace Selection to Suppress Confounding Source Domain Information in AAM Transfer Learning
We describe a graphical representation of probabilistic relationships-an alternative to the Bayesian network-called a dependency network. Like a Bayesian network, a depen­ dency network has a graph and a probabil­ ity component. The graph component is a (cyclic) directed graph such that a node's parents render that node independent of all other nodes in the network. The probabil­ ity component consists of the probability of a node given its parents for each node (as in a Bayesian network) . We identify several ba­ sic properties of this representation, and de­ scribe its use in collaborative filtering (the task of predicting preferences) and the visu­ alization of predictive relationships.
Output: Dependency Networks for Collaborative Filtering and Data Visualization
Many deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) make incorrect predictions on adversarial samples obtained by imperceptible perturbations of clean samples. We hypothesize that this is caused by a failure to suppress unusual signals within network layers. As remedy we propose the use of Symmetric Activation Functions (SAF) in non-linear signal transducer units. These units suppress signals of exceptional magnitude. We prove that SAF networks can perform classification tasks to arbitrary precision in a simplified situation. In practice, rather than use SAFs alone, we add them into CNNs to improve their robustness. The modified CNNs can be easily trained using popular strategies with the moderate training load. Our experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 show that the modified CNNs perform similarly to plain ones on clean samples, and are remarkably more robust against adversarial and nonsense samples.
Output: Suppressing the Unusual: towards Robust CNNs using Symmetric Activation Functions
Résumé. Le crowdsourcing, un enjeu économique majeur, est le fait d’externaliser une tâche interne d’une entreprise vers le grand-public, la foule. C’est ainsi une forme de sous-traitance digitale destinée à toute personne susceptible de pouvoir réaliser la tâche demandée généralement rapide et non automatisable. L’évaluation de la qualité du travail des participants est cependant un problème majeur en crowdsourcing. En effet, les contributions doivent être contrôlées pour assurer l’efficacité et la pertinence d’une campagne. Plusieurs méthodes ont été proposées pour évaluer le niveau d’expertise des participants. Ce travail a la particularité de proposer une méthode de calcul de degrés d’expertise en présence de données dont l’ordre de classement est connu. Les degrés d’expertise sont ensuite considérés sur des données sans ordre pré-établi. Cette méthode fondée sur la théorie des fonctions de croyance tient compte des incertitudes des réponses et est évaluée sur des données réelles d’une campagne réalisée en 2016.
Output: Une mesure d’expertise pour le crowdsourcing
This paper reports on a writing style analysis of hyperpartisan (i.e., extremely onesided) news in connection to fake news. It presents a large corpus of 1,627 articles that were manually fact-checked by professional journalists from BuzzFeed. The articles originated from 9 well-known political publishers, 3 each from the mainstream, the hyperpartisan left-wing, and the hyperpartisan right-wing. In sum, the corpus contains 299 fake news, 97% of which originated from hyperpartisan publishers. We propose and demonstrate a new way of assessing style similarity between text categories via Unmasking—a meta-learning approach originally devised for authorship verification—, revealing that the style of left-wing and right-wing news have a lot more in common than any of the two have with the mainstream. Furthermore, we show that hyperpartisan news can be discriminated well by its style from the mainstream (F1 = 0.78), as can be satire from both (F1 = 0.81). Unsurprisingly, stylebased fake news detection does not live up to scratch (F1 = 0.46). Nevertheless, the former results are important to implement pre-screening for fake news detectors.
Output: A Stylometric Inquiry into Hyperpartisan and Fake News
In distributed, or privacy-preserving learning, we are often given a set of probabilistic models estimated from different local repositories, and asked to combine them into a single model that gives efficient statistical estimation. A simple method is to linearly average the parameters of the local models, which, however, tends to be degenerate or not applicable on non-convex models, or models with different parameter dimensions. One more practical strategy is to generate bootstrap samples from the local models, and then learn a joint model based on the combined bootstrap set. Unfortunately, the bootstrap procedure introduces additional noise and can significantly deteriorate the performance. In this work, we propose two variance reduction methods to correct the bootstrap noise, including a weighted M-estimator that is both statistically efficient and practically powerful. Both theoretical and empirical analysis is provided to demonstrate our methods.
Output: Bootstrap Model Aggregation for Distributed Statistical Learning
The past few years have seen a tremendous growth in the popularity of smartphones. As newer features continue to be added to smartphones to increase their utility, their significance will only increase in future. Combining machine learning with mobile computing can enable smartphones to become ‘intelligent’ devices, a feature which is hitherto unseen in them. Also, the combination of machine learning and context aware computing can enable smartphones to gauge users’ requirements proactively, depending upon their environment and context. Accordingly, necessary services can be provided to users. In this paper, we have explored the methods and applications of integrating machine learning and context aware computing on the Android platform, to provide higher utility to the users. To achieve this, we define a Machine Learning (ML) module which is incorporated in the basic Android architecture. Firstly, we have outlined two major functionalities that the ML module should provide. Then, we have presented three architectures, each of which incorporates the ML module at a different level in the Android architecture. The advantages and shortcomings of each of these architectures have been evaluated. Lastly, we have explained a few applications in which our proposed system can be incorporated such that their functionality is improved. Keywords—machine learning; association rules; machine learning in embedded systems; android, ID3; Apriori; Max-Miner
Output: Association Rule Based Flexible Machine Learning Module for Embedded System Platforms like Android
We describe two new related resources that facilitate modelling of general knowledge reasoning in 4th grade science exams. The first is a collection of curated facts in the form of tables, and the second is a large set of crowd-sourced multiple-choice questions covering the facts in the tables. Through the setup of the crowd-sourced annotation task we obtain implicit alignment information between questions and tables. We envisage that the resources will be useful not only to researchers working on question answering, but also to people investigating a diverse range of other applications such as information extraction, question parsing, answer type identification, and lexical semantic modelling.
Output: TabMCQ: A Dataset of General Knowledge Tables and Multiple-choice Questions
In the context of natural language processing, representation learning has emerged as a newly active research subject because of its excellent performance in many applications. Learning representations of words is a pioneering study in this school of research. However, paragraph (or sentence and document) embedding learning is more suitable/reasonable for some tasks, such as sentiment classification and document summarization. Nevertheless, as far as we are aware, there is relatively less work focusing on the development of unsupervised paragraph embedding methods. Classic paragraph embedding methods infer the representation of a given paragraph by considering all of the words occurring in the paragraph. Consequently, those stop or function words that occur frequently may mislead the embedding learning process to produce a misty paragraph representation. Motivated by these observations, our major contributions in this paper are twofold. First, we propose a novel unsupervised paragraph embedding method, named the essence vector (EV) model, which aims at not only distilling the most representative information from a paragraph but also excluding the general background information to produce a more informative low-dimensional vector representation for the paragraph. We evaluate the proposed EV model on benchmark sentiment classification and multi-document summarization tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed embedding method. Second, in view of the increasing importance of spoken content processing, an extension of the EV model, named the denoising essence vector (D-EV) model, is proposed. The D-EV model not only inherits the advantages of the EV model but also can infer a more robust representation for a given spoken paragraph against imperfect speech recognition. The utility of the D-EV model is evaluated on a spoken document summarization task, confirming the practical merits of the proposed embedding method in relation to several wellpracticed and state-of-the-art summarization methods.
Output: Learning to Distill: The Essence Vector Modeling Framework
This paper describes a new method for classifying a dataset that partitions elements into different categories. It has relations with neural networks but works in a different way, requiring only a single pass through the classifier to generate the weight sets. A grid structure is required and a novel idea of converting a row of real values into a 2-D or grid-like structure of value bands. Each cell in the band can then store a cell weight value and also a set of weights that represent its own importance to each of the output categories. For any input that needs to be categorised, all of the output weight lists for each relevant input cell can be retrieved and summed to produce a probability for what the correct output category is. So the relative importance of each input point to the output is distributed to each cell. The construction process itself can simply be the reinforcement of the weight values, without requiring an iterative adjustment process, making it potentially much faster.
Output: A Single-Pass Classifier for Categorical Data
We show that relation extraction can be reduced to answering simple reading comprehension questions, by associating one or more natural-language questions with each relation slot. This reduction has several advantages: we can (1) learn high-quality relation-extraction models by extending recent neural reading-comprehension techniques, (2) build very large training sets for those models by combining relation-specific crowd-sourced questions with distant supervision, and even (3) do zero-shot learning by extracting new relations that are only specified at test-time, for which we have no labeled training examples. Experiments on a Wikipedia slot-filling task demonstrate that the approach can generalize to new questions for known relations with high accuracy, and that zero-shot generalization to unseen relations is possible, at lower accuracy levels, setting the bar for future work on this task.
Output: Zero-Shot Relation Extraction via Reading Comprehension
Kimmo Kettunen, Eetu Mäkelä, Teemu Ruokolainen, Juha Kuokkala and Laura Löfberg 1 National Library of Finland, Centre for Preservation and Digitization, Mikkeli, Finland kimmo.kettunen@helsinki.fi 2 Aalto University, Semantic Computing Research Group, Espoo, Finland eetu.makela@aalto.fi 3 National Library of Finland, Centre for Preservation and Digitization, Mikkeli, Finland teemu.ruokolainen@helsinki.fi 4 University of Helsinki, Department of Modern Languages, Helsinki, Finland juha.kuokkala@helsinki.fi 5 Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, UK l.lofberg@lancaster.ac.uk
Output: Old Content and Modern Tools – Searching Named Entities in a Finnish OCRed Historical Newspaper Collection 1771–1910
We study the problem of structured prediction under test-time budget constraints. We propose a novel approach applicable to a wide range of structured prediction problems in computer vision and natural language processing. Our approach seeks to adaptively generate computationally costly features during test-time in order to reduce the computational cost of prediction while maintaining prediction performance. We show that training the adaptive feature generation system can be reduced to a series of structured learning problems, resulting in efficient training using existing structured learning algorithms. This framework provides theoretical justification for several existing heuristic approaches found in literature. We evaluate our proposed adaptive system on two structured prediction tasks, optical character recognition (OCR) and dependency parsing and show strong performance in reduction of the feature costs without degrading accuracy.
Output: Resource Constrained Structured Prediction
In this work, we present a minimal neural model for constituency parsing based on independent scoring of labels and spans. We show that this model is not only compatible with classical dynamic programming techniques, but also admits a novel greedy top-down inference algorithm based on recursive partitioning of the input. We demonstrate empirically that both prediction schemes are competitive with recent work, and when combined with basic extensions to the scoring model are capable of achieving state-of-the-art single-model performance on the Penn Treebank (91.79 F1) and strong performance on the French Treebank (82.23 F1).
Output: A Minimal Span-Based Neural Constituency Parser
Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has become a ubiquitous tool for data analysis. An important variant is the sparse NMF problem which arises when we explicitly require the learnt features to be sparse. A natural measure of sparsity is the L0 norm, however its optimization is NP-hard. Mixed norms, such as L1/L2 measure, have been shown to model sparsity robustly, based on intuitive attributes that such measures need to satisfy. This is in contrast to computationally cheaper alternatives such as the plain L1 norm. However, present algorithms designed for optimizing the mixed norm L1/L2 are slow and other formulations for sparse NMF have been proposed such as those based on L1 and L0 norms. Our proposed algorithm allows us to solve the mixed norm sparsity constraints while not sacrificing computation time. We present experimental evidence on real-world datasets that shows our new algorithm performs an order of magnitude faster compared to the current state-of-the-art solvers optimizing the mixed norm and is suitable for large-scale datasets.
Output: Block Coordinate Descent for Sparse NMF
We demonstrate that a continuous relaxation of the argmax operation can be used to create a differentiable approximation to greedy decoding for sequence-tosequence (seq2seq) models. By incorporating this approximation into the scheduled sampling training procedure (Bengio et al., 2015)–a well-known technique for correcting exposure bias–we introduce a new training objective that is continuous and differentiable everywhere and that can provide informative gradients near points where previous decoding decisions change their value. In addition, by using a related approximation, we demonstrate a similar approach to sampled-based training. Finally, we show that our approach outperforms cross-entropy training and scheduled sampling procedures in two sequence prediction tasks: named entity recognition and machine translation.
Output: Differentiable Scheduled Sampling for Credit Assignment
Machine comprehension of text is an important problem in natural language processing. A recently released dataset, the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), offers a large number of real questions and their answers created by humans through crowdsourcing. SQuAD provides a challenging testbed for evaluating machine comprehension algorithms, partly because compared with previous datasets, in SQuAD the answers do not come from a small set of candidate answers and they have variable lengths. We propose an end-to-end neural architecture for the task. The architecture is based on match-LSTM, a model we proposed previously for textual entailment, and Pointer Net, a sequence-to-sequence model proposed by Vinyals et al. (2015) to constrain the output tokens to be from the input sequences. We propose two ways of using Pointer Net for our task. Our experiments show that both of our two models substantially outperform the best results obtained by Rajpurkar et al. (2016) using logistic regression and manually crafted features.
Output: MACHINE COMPREHENSION USING MATCH-LSTM
We study the segmental recurrent neural network for end-to-end acoustic modelling. This model connects the segmental conditional random field (CRF) with a recurrent neural network (RNN) used for feature extraction. Compared to most previous CRF-based acoustic models, it does not rely on an external system to provide features or segmentation boundaries. Instead, this model marginalises out all the possible segmentations, and features are extracted from the RNN trained together with the segmental CRF. In essence, this model is self-contained and can be trained end-to-end. In this paper, we discuss practical training and decoding issues as well as the method to speed up the training in the context of speech recognition. We performed experiments on the TIMIT dataset. We achieved 17.3% phone error rate (PER) from the first-pass decoding — the best reported result using CRFs, despite the fact that we only used a zeroth-order CRF and without using any language model.
Output: Segmental Recurrent Neural Networks for End-to-end Speech Recognition
The ability to simultaneously leverage multiple modes of sensor information is critical for perception of an automated vehicle’s physical surroundings. Spatio-temporal alignment of registration of the incoming information is often a prerequisite to analyzing the fused data. The persistence and reliability of multi-modal registration is therefore the key to the stability of decision support systems ingesting the fused information. LiDAR-video systems like on those many driverless cars are a common example of where keeping the LiDAR and video channels registered to common physical features is important. We develop a deep learning method that takes multiple channels of heterogeneous data, to detect the misalignment of the LiDARvideo inputs. A number of variations were tested on the Ford LiDAR-video driving test data set and will be discussed. To the best of our knowledge the use of multi-modal deep convolutional neural networks for dynamic real-time LiDAR-video registration has not been presented.
Output: Multi-modal Sensor Registration for Vehicle Perception via Deep Neural Networks
We provide tight upper and lower bounds on the complexity of minimizing the average of m convex functions using gradient and prox oracles of the component functions. We show a significant gap between the complexity of deterministic vs randomized optimization. For smooth functions, we show that accelerated gradient descent (AGD) and an accelerated variant of SVRG are optimal in the deterministic and randomized settings respectively, and that a gradient oracle is sufficient for the optimal rate. For non-smooth functions, having access to prox oracles reduces the complexity and we present optimal methods based on smoothing that improve over methods using just gradient accesses.
Output: Tight Complexity Bounds for Optimizing Composite Objectives
In order to perform complex actions in human environments, an autonomous robot needs the ability to understand the environment, that is, to gather and maintain spatial knowledge. Topological map is commonly used for representing large scale, global maps such as floor plans. Although much work has been done in topological map extraction, we have found little previous work on the problem of learning the topological map using a probabilistic model. Learning a topological map means learning the structure of the large-scale space and dependency between places, for example, how the evidence of a group of places influence the attributes of other places. This is an important step towards planning complex actions in the environment. In this thesis, we consider the problem of using probabilistic deep learning model to learn the topological map, which is essentially a sparse undirected graph where nodes represent places annotated with their semantic attributes (e.g. place category). We propose to use a novel probabilistic deep model, Sum-Product Networks (SPNs) [20], due to their unique properties. We present two methods for learning topological maps using SPNs: the place grid method and the template-based method. We contribute an algorithm that builds SPNs for graphs using template models. Our experiments evaluate the ability of our models to enable robots to infer semantic attributes and detect maps with novel semantic attribute arrangements. Our results demonstrate their understanding of the topological map structure and spatial relations between places.
Output: Learning Large-Scale Topological Maps Using Sum-Product Networks