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: In natural speech, the speaker does not pause between words, yet a human listener somehow perceives this continuous stream of phonemes as a series of distinct words. The detection of boundaries between spoken words is an instance of a general capability of the human neocortex to remember and to recognize recurring sequences. This paper describes a computer algorithm that is designed to solve the problem of locating word boundaries in blocks of English text from which the spaces have been removed. This problem avoids the complexities of processing speech but requires similar capabilities for detecting recurring sequences. The algorithm that is described in this paper relies entirely on statistical relationships between letters in the input stream to infer the locations of word boundaries. The source code for a C++ version of this algorithm is presented in an appendix.

SOLUTION: A Statistical Learning Algorithm for Word Segmentation

PROBLEM: In natural-language discourse, related events tend to appear near each other to describe a larger scenario. Such structures can be formalized by the notion of a frame (a.k.a. template), which comprises a set of related events and prototypical participants and event transitions. Identifying frames is a prerequisite for information extraction and natural language generation, and is usually done manually. Methods for inducing frames have been proposed recently, but they typically use ad hoc procedures and are difficult to diagnose or extend. In this paper, we propose the first probabilistic approach to frame induction, which incorporates frames, events, participants as latent topics and learns those frame and event transitions that best explain the text. The number of frames is inferred by a novel application of a split-merge method from syntactic parsing. In end-to-end evaluations from text to induced frames and extracted facts, our method produced state-of-the-art results while substantially reducing engineering effort.

SOLUTION: Probabilistic Frame Induction

PROBLEM: Machine learning is increasingly used in security-critical applications, such as autonomous driving, face recognition and malware detection. Most learning methods, however, have not been designed with security in mind and thus are vulnerable to different types of attacks. This problem has motivated the research field of adversarial machine learning that is concerned with attacking and defending learning methods. Concurrently, a different line of research has tackled a very similar problem: In digital watermarking information are embedded in a signal in the presence of an adversary. As a consequence, this research field has also extensively studied techniques for attacking and defending watermarking methods. The two research communities have worked in parallel so far, unnoticeably developing similar attack and defense strategies. This paper is a first effort to bring these communities together. To this end, we present a unified notation of black-box attacks against machine learning and watermarking that reveals the similarity of both settings. To demonstrate the efficacy of this unified view, we apply concepts from watermarking to machine learning and vice versa. We show that countermeasures from watermarking can mitigate recent model-extraction attacks and, similarly, that techniques for hardening machine learning can fend off oracle attacks against watermarks. Our work provides a conceptual link between two research fields and thereby opens novel directions for improving the security of both, machine learning and digital watermarking.

SOLUTION:
Fraternal Twins: Unifying Attacks on Machine Learning and Digital Watermarking