Query: A Multitask Objective to Inject Lexical Contrast into Distributional Semantics

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Not All Neural Embeddings are Born Equal <=SEP=> Neural language models learn word representations that capture rich linguistic and conceptual information. Here we investigate the embeddings learned by neural machine translation models. We show that translation-based embeddings outperform those learned by cutting-edge monolingual models at single-language tasks requiring knowledge of conceptual similarity and/or syntactic role. The findings suggest that, while monolingual models learn information about how concepts are related, neural-translation models better capture their true ontological status. It is well known that word representations can be learned from the distributional patterns in corpora. Originally, such representations were constructed by counting word co-occurrences, so that the features in one word’s representation corresponded to other words [11, 17]. Neural language models, an alternative means to learn word representations, use language data to optimise (latent) features with respect to a language modelling objective. The objective can be to predict either the next word given the initial words of a sentence [4, 14, 8], or simply a nearby word given a single cue word [13, 15]. The representations learned by neural models (sometimes called embeddings) generally outperform those acquired by co-occurrence counting models when applied to NLP tasks [3]. Despite these clear results, it is not well understood how the architecture of neural models affects the information encoded in their embeddings. Here, we explore this question by considering the embeddings learned by architectures with a very different objective function to monolingual language models: neural machine translation models. We show that translation-based embeddings outperform monolingual embeddings on two types of task: those that require knowledge of conceptual similarity (rather than simply association or relatedness), and those that require knowledge of syntactic role. We discuss what the findings indicate about the information content of different embeddings, and suggest how this content might emerge as a consequence of the translation objective. 1 Learning embeddings from language data Both neural language models and translation models learn real-valued embeddings (of specified dimension) for words in some pre-specified vocabulary, V , covering many or all words in their training corpus. At each training step, a ‘score’ for the current training example (or batch) is computed based on the embeddings in their current state. This score is compared to the model’s objective function, and the error is backpropagated to update both the model weights (affecting how the score is computed from the embeddings) and the embedding features. At the end of this process, the embeddings should encode information that enables the model to optimally satisfy its objective. 1.1 Monolingual models In the original neural language model [4] and subsequent variants [8], each training example consists of n subsequent words, of which the model is trained to predict the n-th word given the first n − 1 ar X iv :1 41 0. 07 18 v2 [ cs .C L ] 1 3 N ov 2 01 4 1 words. The model first represents the input as an ordered sequence of embeddings, which it transforms into a single fixed length ‘hidden’ representation by, e.g., concatenation and non-linear projection. Based on this representation, a probability distribution is computed over the vocabulary, from which the model can sample a guess at the next word. The model weights and embeddings are updated to maximise the probability of correct guesses for all sentences in the training corpus. More recent work has shown that high quality word embeddings can be learned via models with no nonlinear hidden layer [13, 15]. Given a single word in the corpus, these models simply predict which other words will occur nearby. For each word w in V , a list of training cases (w, c) : c ∈ V is extracted from the training corpus. For instance, in the skipgram approach [13], for each ‘cue word’ w the ‘context words’ c are sampled from windows either side of tokens of w in the corpus (with c more likely to be sampled if it occurs closer to w).1 For each w in V , the model initialises both a cue-embedding, representing the w when it occurs as a cue-word, and a context-embedding, used when w occurs as a context-word. For a cue word w, the model can use the corresponding cueembedding and all context-embeddings to compute a probability distribution over V that reflects the probability of a word occurring in the context of w. When a training example (w, c) is observed, the model updates both the cue-word embedding of w and the context-word embeddings in order to increase the conditional probability of c. 1.2 Translation-based embeddings Neural translation models generate an appropriate sentence in their target language St given a sentence Ss in their source language [see, e.g., 16, 6]. In doing so, they learn distinct sets of embeddings for the vocabularies Vs and Vt in the source and target languages respectively. Observing a training case (Ss, St), such a model represents Ss as an ordered sequence of embeddings of words from Vs. The sequence for Ss is then encoded into a single representation RS .2 Finally, by referencing the embeddings in Vt, RS and a representation of what has been generated thus far, the model decodes a sentence in the target language word by word. If at any stage the decoded word does not match the corresponding word in the training target St, the error is recorded. The weights and embeddings in the model, which together parameterise the encoding and decoding process, are updated based on the accumulated error once the sentence decoding is complete. Although neural translation models can differ in low-level architecture [7, 2], the translation objective exerts similar pressure on the embeddings in all cases. The source language embeddings must be such that the model can combine them to form single representations for ordered sequences of multiple words (which in turn must enable the decoding process). The target language embeddings must facilitate the process of decoding these representations into correct target-language sentences. 2 Comparing Mono-lingual and Translation-based Embeddings To learn translation-based embeddings, we trained both the RNN encoder-decoder [RNNenc, 7] and the RNN Search architectures [2] on a 300m word corpus of English-French sentence pairs. We conducted all experiments with the resulting (English) source embeddings from these models. For comparison, we trained a monolingual skipgram model [13] and its Glove variant [15] for the same number of epochs on the English half of the bilingual corpus. We also extracted embeddings from a full-sentence language model [CW, 8] trained for several months on a larger 1bn word corpus. As in previous studies [1, 5, 3], we evaluate embeddings by calculating pairwise (cosine) distances and correlating these distances with (gold-standard) human judgements. Table 1 shows the correlations of different model embeddings with three such gold-standard resources, WordSim-353 [1], MEN [5] and SimLex-999 [10]. Interestingly, translation embeddings perform best on SimLex-999, while the two sets of monolingual embeddings perform better on modelling the MEN and WordSim353. To interpret these results, it should be noted that SimLex-999 evaluation quantifies conceptual similarity (dog wolf ), whereas MEN and WordSim-353 (despite its name) quantify more general relatedness (dog collar) [10]. The results seem to indicate that translation-based embeddings better capture similarity, while monolingual embeddings better capture relatedness. 1 Subsequent variants use different algorithms for selecting the (w, c) from the training corpus [9, 12] Alternatively, subsequences (phrases) of Ss may be encoded at this stage in place of the whole sentence [2].

Combining Language and Vision with a Multimodal Skip-gram Model <=SEP=> We extend the SKIP-GRAM model of Mikolov et al. (2013a) by taking visual information into account. Like SKIP-GRAM, our multimodal models (MMSKIP-GRAM) build vector-based word representations by learning to predict linguistic contexts in text corpora. However, for a restricted set of words, the models are also exposed to visual representations of the objects they denote (extracted from natural images), and must predict linguistic and visual features jointly. The MMSKIP-GRAM models achieve good performance on a variety of semantic benchmarks. Moreover, since they propagate visual information to all words, we use them to improve image labeling and retrieval in the zero-shot setup, where the test concepts are never seen during model training. Finally, the MMSKIP-GRAM models discover intriguing visual properties of abstract words, paving the way to realistic implementations of embodied theories of meaning.

WORDNET: A Lexical Database For English <=SEP=> 

Computing Lexical Contrast <=SEP=> Knowing the degree of semantic contrast between words has widespread application in natural language processing, including machine translation, information retrieval, and dialogue systems. Manually created lexicons focus on opposites, such as hot and cold. Opposites are of many kinds such as antipodals, complementaries, and gradable. Existing lexicons often do not classify opposites into the different kinds, however. They also do not explicitly list word pairs that are not opposites but yet have some degree of contrast in meaning, such as warm and cold or tropical and freezing. We propose an automatic method to identify contrasting word pairs that is based on the hypothesis that if a pair of words, A and B, are contrasting, then there is a pair of opposites, C and D, such that A and C are strongly related and B and D are strongly related. (For example, there exists the pair of opposites hot and cold such that tropical is related to hot, and freezing is related to cold.) We will call this the contrast hypothesis.We begin with a large crowdsourcing experiment to determine the amount of human agreement on the concept of oppositeness and its different kinds. In the process, we flesh out key features of different kinds of opposites. We then present an automatic and empirical measure of lexical contrast that relies on the contrast hypothesis, corpus statistics, and the structure of a Roget-like thesaurus. We show how, using four different data sets, we evaluated our approach on two different tasks, solving “most contrasting word” questions and distinguishing synonyms from opposites. The results are analyzed across four parts of speech and across five different kinds of opposites. We show that the proposed measure of lexical contrast obtains high precision and large coverage, outperforming existing methods.

Word Embedding-based Antonym Detection using Thesauri and Distributional Information <=SEP=> This paper proposes a novel approach to train word embeddings to capture antonyms. Word embeddings have shown to capture synonyms and analogies. Such word embeddings, however, cannot capture antonyms since they depend on the distributional hypothesis. Our approach utilizes supervised synonym and antonym information from thesauri, as well as distributional information from large-scale unlabelled text data. The evaluation results on the GRE antonym question task show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art systems and it can answer the antonym questions in the F-score of 89%.

Forensic Analysis of WhatsApp on Android Smartphones <=SEP=> ii Acknowledgements The research and writing of this thesis has been one of the most significant academic challenges I ever had to face. Without the support and guidance of the following people, this study would not have been completed. It is to them that I owe my deepest gratitude. I would sincerely like to thank my advisor, Dr. Golden G. Richard III for giving me an opportunity to conduct this thesis research under his excellent guidance. His exceptional knowledge, wisdom and understanding have inspired and motivated me. My professors, Dr. Shengru Tu and Dr. Adlai DePano for being on my thesis committee and mentoring me during my Master's degree in Computer Science at University of New Orleans. I am thankful to my friend Thomas Sires, for initiating my interest in Linux, making sure I keep it up and help me solve technical issues. I appreciate the help from Aisha Ali-Gombe, Joe Sylve and Andrew Case who are on our Information Assurance group, for their contributions in the Information Assurance field and answering my questions. Finally, I would like to thank my Parents and each member in my family and friends for their unconditional love and support. I specially want to thank my husband Mr. Naveen Singh, who has been my core source of strength through every phase of this effort and constantly encouraged me to do my best. His systematic approach and kind feedback towards my thesis has helped me improve. Words cannot express how grateful I am to you. My heartfelt gratitude to my precious daughter Navya Singh, who was born during my Master's program and has spent many days without my complete attention. With her never give up attitude she has taught me perseverance to work around a problem until I succeed. Thank you for all your love my little girl, it kept me going. Abstract Android forensics has evolved over time offering significant opportunities and exciting challenges. On one hand, being an open source platform Android is giving developers the freedom to contribute to the rapid growth of the Android market whereas on the other hand Android users may not be aware of the security and privacy implications of installing these applications on their phones. Users may assume that a password-locked device protects their personal information, but applications may retain private information on devices, in ways that users might not anticipate. In this thesis we will be …

Yet another DSL for cross-platforms mobile development <=SEP=> With the growing success of mobility, mobile platforms (iOS, Android, WindowsPhone, etc.) multiply, each requiring specific development skills. Given this situation, it becomes very difficult for software developers to duplicate their apps accordingly. Meanwhile, web-based applications have evolved to be "mobile-friendly" but it appears that this is not a silver bullet: the user experience and the overall quality is still better with native applications. Of course, cross-platform mobile development tools have emerged in recent years. This paper provides a survey of these tools and points out that a full-fledged language for mobile development is highly desirable. Consequently, we present a preliminary work on Xmob, a technology-neutral DSL intended to be cross-compiled to produce native code for a variety of platforms.

Intelligent stock data prediction using predictive data mining techniques <=SEP=> Cloud computing is the one of the admired paradigms of current era, which facilitates the users with on demand services and pay as you use services. It has tremendous applications in almost every sphere such as education, gaming, social networking, transportation, medical, business, stock market, pattern matching, etc. Stock market is such an industry where lots of data is generated and benefits are reaped on the basis of accurate prediction. So prediction is a vital part of stock market. Therefore, an attempt is being made to predict the stock market based on the given data set of stock market along with some features; using the techniques available for predictive data mining. Machine learning is one of the upcoming trends of data mining; hence few machine learning algorithms have been used such as Decision tree, Linear model, Random forest and further their results have been compared using the classification evaluation parameters such as H, AUC, ROC, TPR, FPR, etc. Random forest have been consider as the most effective model as it yield the highest accuracy of 54.12% whereas decision tree and linear model gives the accuracy of 51.87% and 52.83% respectively.

Molecular phylogenetic evidence for the reorganization of the Hyperiid amphipods, a diverse group of pelagic crustaceans. <=SEP=> Within the crustaceans, the Amphipoda rank as one of the most speciose extant orders. Amphipods have successfully invaded and become major constituents of a variety of ecosystems. The hyperiid amphipods are classically defined as an exclusively pelagic group broadly inhabiting oceanic midwater environments and often having close associations with gelatinous zooplankton. As with other amphipod groups they have largely been classified based on appendage structures, however evidence suggests that at least some of these characters are the product of convergent evolution. Here we present the first multi-locus molecular phylogenetic assessment of relationships among the hyperiid amphipods. We sampled 51 species belonging to 16 of the 23 recognized hyperiidian families for three nuclear loci (18S, 28S, and H3) and mitochondrial COI. We performed both Bayesian Inference and Maximum Likelihood analyses of concatenated sequences. In addition, we also explored the utility of species-tree methods for reconstructing deep evolutionary histories using the Minimize Deep Coalescence (MDC) approach. Our results are compared with previous molecular analyses and traditional systematic groupings. We discuss these results within the context of adaptations correlated with the pelagic life history of hyperiid amphipods. Within the infraorder Physocephalata (Bowman and Gruner, 1973) we inferred support for three reciprocally monophyletic clades; the Platysceloidea, Vibilioidea, and Phronimoidea. Our results also place the enigmatic Cystisomatidae and Paraphronimidae at the base of the infraorder Physosomata (Bowman and Gruner, 1973) suggesting that Physosomata as traditionally recognized is paraphyletic. Based on our multilocus phylogeny, major rearrangements to existing taxonomic groupings of hyperiid amphipods are warranted.

Classification of Battlefield Ground Vehicles Using Acoustic Features and Fuzzy Logic Rule-Based Classifiers <=SEP=> In this paper, we demonstrate, through the multicategory classification of battlefield ground vehicles using acoustic features, how it is straightforward to directly exploit the information inherent in a problem to determine the number of rules, and subsequently the architecture, of fuzzy logic rule-based classifiers (FLRBC). We propose three FLRBC architectures, one non-hierarchical and two hierarchical (HFLRBC), conduct experiments to evaluate the performances of these architectures, and compare them to a Bayesian classifier. Our experimental results show that: 1) for each classifier the performance in the adaptive mode that uses simple majority voting is much better than in the non-adaptive mode; 2) all FLRBCs perform substantially better than the Bayesian classifier; 3) interval type-2 (T2) FLRBCs perform better than their competing type-1 (T1) FLRBCs, although sometimes not by much; 4) the interval T2 nonhierarchical and HFLRBC-series architectures perform the best; and 5) all FLRBCs achieve higher than the acceptable 80% classification accuracy

Current sensor in PCB technology <=SEP=> A novel DC/AC current sensor works on the fluxgate principle. The core in the form of a 7/10-mm ring made of electrodeposited permalloy is sandwiched in the middle of a printed circuit board (PCB), whereas the sensor excitation winding is also integrated in the copper layers of the PCB. To lower the sensor power consumption, the excitation winding was tuned by a parallel capacitor. The peak-peak/rms ratio of 5.2 was achieved for the excitation frequency of 25 kHz. The open-loop sensor has 100-mV/A sensitivity; the characteristics have a linearity error of 10% and hysteresis below 0.1% in the 1-A range.

Kernel regression in mixed feature spaces for spatio-temporal saliency detection <=SEP=> Spatio-temporal saliency detection has attracted lots of research interests due to its competitive performance on wide multimedia applications. For spatio-temporal saliency detection, existing bottom-up algorithms often over-simplify the fusion strategy, which results in the inferior performance than the human vision system. In this paper, a novel bottom-up spatio-temporal saliency model is proposed to improve the accuracy of attentional region estimation in videos through fully exploiting the merit of fusion. In order to represent the space constructed by several types of features such as location, appearance and temporal cues extracted from video, kernel regression in mixed feature spaces (KR-MFS) including three approximation entity-models is proposed. Using KR-MFS, a hybrid fusion strategy which considers the combination of spatial and temporal saliency of each individual unit and incorporates the impacts from the neighboring units is presented and embedded into the spatio-temporal saliency model. The proposed model has been evaluated on the publicly available dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed spatio-temporal saliency model can achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art approaches. 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Obesity is associated with macrophage accumulation in adipose tissue. <=SEP=> Obesity alters adipose tissue metabolic and endocrine function and leads to an increased release of fatty acids, hormones, and proinflammatory molecules that contribute to obesity associated complications. To further characterize the changes that occur in adipose tissue with increasing adiposity, we profiled transcript expression in perigonadal adipose tissue from groups of mice in which adiposity varied due to sex, diet, and the obesity-related mutations agouti (Ay) and obese (Lepob). We found that the expression of 1,304 transcripts correlated significantly with body mass. Of the 100 most significantly correlated genes, 30% encoded proteins that are characteristic of macrophages and are positively correlated with body mass. Immunohistochemical analysis of perigonadal, perirenal, mesenteric, and subcutaneous adipose tissue revealed that the percentage of cells expressing the macrophage marker F4/80 (F4/80+) was significantly and positively correlated with both adipocyte size and body mass. Similar relationships were found in human subcutaneous adipose tissue stained for the macrophage antigen CD68. Bone marrow transplant studies and quantitation of macrophage number in adipose tissue from macrophage-deficient (Csf1op/op) mice suggest that these F4/80+ cells are CSF-1 dependent, bone marrow-derived adipose tissue macrophages. Expression analysis of macrophage and nonmacrophage cell populations isolated from adipose tissue demonstrates that adipose tissue macrophages are responsible for almost all adipose tissue TNF-alpha expression and significant amounts of iNOS and IL-6 expression. Adipose tissue macrophage numbers increase in obesity and participate in inflammatory pathways that are activated in adipose tissues of obese individuals.

Gamification of Clinical Routine: The Dr. Fill Approach <=SEP=> Gamification is used in clinical context in the health care education. Furthermore, it has shown great promises to improve the performance of the health care staff in their daily routine. In this work we focus on the medication sorting task, which is performed manually in hospitals. This task is very error prone and needs to be performed daily. Nevertheless, errors in the medication are crucial and lead to serious complications. In this work we present a real world gamification approach of the medication sorting task in a patient’s daily pill organizer. The player of the game needs to sort the correct medication into the correct dispenser slots and is rewarded or punished in real time. At the end of the game, a score is given and the user can register in a leaderboard.

A data-centric approach to synchronization <=SEP=> Concurrency-related errors, such as data races, are frustratingly difficult to track down and eliminate in large object-oriented programs. Traditional approaches to preventing data races rely on protecting instruction sequences with synchronization operations. Such control-centric approaches are inherently brittle, as the burden is on the programmer to ensure that all concurrently accessed memory locations are consistently protected. Data-centric synchronization is an alternative approach that offloads some of the work on the language implementation. Data-centric synchronization groups fields of objects into atomic sets to indicate that these fields must always be updated atomically. Each atomic set has associated units of work, that is, code fragments that preserve the consistency of that atomic set. Synchronization operations are added automatically by the compiler. We present an extension to the Java programming language that integrates annotations for data-centric concurrency control. The resulting language, called AJ, relies on a type system that enables separate compilation and supports atomic sets that span multiple objects and that also supports full encapsulation for more efficient code generation. We evaluate our proposal by refactoring classes from standard libraries, as well as a number of multithreaded benchmarks, to use atomic sets. Our results suggest that data-centric synchronization is easy to use and enjoys low annotation overhead, while successfully preventing data races. Moreover, experiments on the SPECjbb benchmark suggest that acceptable performance can be achieved with a modest amount of tuning.

Data Mining of Causal Relations from Text: Analysing Maritime Accident Investigation Reports <=SEP=> Text mining is a process of extracting information of interest from text. Such a method includes techniques from various areas such as Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Information Extraction (IE). In this study, text mining methods are applied to extract causal relations from maritime accident investigation reports collected from the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB). These causal relations provide information on various mechanisms behind accidents, including human and organizational factors relating to the accident. The objective of this study is to facilitate the analysis of the maritime accident investigation reports, by means of extracting contributory causes with more feasibility. A careful investigation of contributory causes from the reports provide opportunity to improve safety in future. Two methods have been employed in this study to extract the causal relations. They are 1) Pattern classification method and 2) Connectives method. The earlier one uses naı̈ve Bayes and Support Vector Machines (SVM) as classifiers. The latter simply searches for the words connecting cause and effect in sentences. The causal patterns extracted using these two methods are compared to the manual (human expert) extraction. The pattern classification method showed a fair and sensible performance with F-measure(average) = 65% when compared to connectives method with F-measure(average) = 58%. This study is an evidence, that text mining methods could be employed in extracting causal relations from marine accident investigation reports.

SemEval-2016 Task 7: Determining Sentiment Intensity of English and Arabic Phrases <=SEP=> We present a shared task on automatically determining sentiment intensity of a word or a phrase. The words and phrases are taken from three domains: general English, English Twitter, and Arabic Twitter. The phrases include those composed of negators, modals, and degree adverbs as well as phrases formed by words with opposing polarities. For each of the three domains, we assembled the datasets that include multi-word phrases and their constituent words, both manually annotated for real-valued sentiment intensity scores. The three datasets were presented as the test sets for three separate tasks (each focusing on a specific domain). Five teams submitted nine system outputs for the three tasks. All datasets created for this shared task are freely available to the research community.

Design of an Optical Character Recognition System for Camera-based Handheld Devices <=SEP=> This paper presents a complete Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system for camera captured image/graphics embedded textual documents for handheld devices. At first, text regions are extracted and skew corrected. Then, these regions are binarized and segmented into lines and characters. Characters are passed into the recognition module. Experimenting with a set of 100 business card images, captured by cell phone camera, we have achieved a maximum recognition accuracy of 92.74%. Compared to Tesseract, an open source desktop-based powerful OCR engine, present recognition accuracy is worth contributing. Moreover, the developed technique is computationally efficient and consumes low memory so as to be applicable on handheld devices.

Risk assessment method for cyber security of cyber physical systems <=SEP=> Cyber security is one of the most important risks for all types of cyber-physical systems (CPS). To evaluate the cyber security risk of CPS, a quantitative hierarchized assessment model consists of attack severity, attack success probability and attack consequence is proposed, which can assess the risk caused by an ongoing attack at host level and system level. Then the definitions and calculation methods of the three indexes are discussed in detail. Finally, this paper gives the risk assessment algorithm which describes the steps of implementation. Numerical example shows that the model can response to the attack timely and obtain the system security risk change curve. So that it can help users response to the risk timely. The risk change curve can also be used to predict the risk for the future time.

Monthly Rainfall Prediction Using Wavelet Neural Network Analysis <=SEP=> Rainfall is one of the most significant parameters in a hydrological model. Several models have been developed to analyze and predict the rainfall forecast. In recent years, wavelet techniques have been widely applied to various water resources research because of their timefrequency representation. In this paper an attempt has been made to find an alternative method for rainfall prediction by combining the wavelet technique with Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The wavelet and ANNmodels have been applied to monthly rainfall data of Darjeeling rain gauge station. The calibration and validation performance of the models is evaluated with appropriate statistical methods. The results of monthly rainfall series modeling indicate that the performances of wavelet neural network models are more effective than the ANN models.

RIC: Relaxed Inclusion Caches for mitigating LLC side-channel attacks <=SEP=> Recently, side-channel attacks on Last Level Caches (LLCs) were demonstrated. The attacks require the ability to evict critical data from the cache hierarchy, making future accesses visible. We propose Relaxed Inclusion Caches (RIC), a low-complexity cache design protecting against LLC side channel attacks. RIC relaxes inclusion when it is not needed, preventing the attacker from replacing the victim's data from the local core caches thus protecting critical data from leakage. RIC improves performance (by about 10%) and retains snoop filtering capabilities of inclusive cache hierarchies, while requiring only minimal changes to the cache.

On Dimensionality Reduction Techniques for Cross-Language Information Retrieval <=SEP=> With the advent of the Web, cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) becomes important not only to satisfy the information need across languages but to mine resources for multiple languages e.g. parallel or comparable documents. Broadly CLIR techniques are of two types, in the first case, either queries or documents are translated to the language of comparison while the other type tries to project the vector space representation of the text to a shared translingual space which represents the “semantics” of the documents. In this study, we review the state-of-the-art for CLIR by means of the latter approach and identify the scope for further research.

A memetic algorithm based extreme learning machine for classification <=SEP=> Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) is an elegant technique for training Single-hidden Layer Feedforward Networks (SLFNs) with extremely fast speed that attracts significant interest recently. One potential weakness of ELM is the random generation of the input weights and hidden biases, which may deteriorate the classification accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new Memetic Algorithm (MA) based Extreme Learning Machine (M-ELM) for classification problems. M-ELM uses Memetic Algorithm which is a combination of population-based global optimization technique and individual-based local heuristic search method to find optimal network parameters for ELM. The optimized network parameters will enhance the classification accuracy and generalization performance of ELM. Experiments and comparisons on 22 benchmark data sets demonstrate that M-ELM is able to provide highly competitive results compared with other state-of-the-art varieties of ELM algorithms.

Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning <=SEP=> In this paper, we present a simple and efficient method for training deep neural networks in a semi-supervised setting where only a small portion of training data is labeled. We introduce self-ensembling, where we form a consensus prediction of the unknown labels using the outputs of the network-in-training on different epochs, and most importantly, under different regularization and input augmentation conditions. This ensemble prediction can be expected to be a better predictor for the unknown labels than the output of the network at the most recent training epoch, and can thus be used as a target for training. Using our method, we set new records for two standard semi-supervised learning benchmarks, reducing the (non-augmented) classification error rate from 18.44% to 7.05% in SVHN with 500 labels and from 18.63% to 16.55% in CIFAR-10 with 4000 labels, and further to 5.12% and 12.16% by enabling the standard augmentations. We additionally obtain a clear improvement in CIFAR-100 classification accuracy by using random images from the Tiny Images dataset as unlabeled extra inputs during training. Finally, we demonstrate good tolerance to incorrect labels.

Best Keyword Cover Search <=SEP=> It is common that the objects in a spatial database (e.g., restaurants/hotels) are associated with keyword(s) to indicate their businesses/services/features. An interesting problem known as Closest Keywords search is to query objects, called keyword cover, which together cover a set of query keywords and have the minimum inter-objects distance. In recent years, we observe the increasing availability and importance of keyword rating in object evaluation for the better decision making. This motivates us to investigate a generic version of Closest Keywords search called Best Keyword Cover which considers inter-objects distance as well as the keyword rating of objects. The baseline algorithm is inspired by the methods of Closest Keywords search which is based on exhaustively combining objects from different query keywords to generate candidate keyword covers. When the number of query keywords increases, the performance of the baseline algorithm drops dramatically as a result of massive candidate keyword covers generated. To attack this drawback, this work proposes a much more scalable algorithm called keyword nearest neighbor expansion (keyword-NNE). Compared to the baseline algorithm, keyword-NNE algorithm significantly reduces the number of candidate keyword covers generated. The in-depth analysis and extensive experiments on real data sets have justified the superiority of our keyword-NNE algorithm.

Debugging the Internet of Things: The Case of Wireless Sensor Networks <=SEP=> The Internet of Things (IoT) has the strong potential to support a human society interacting more symbiotically with its physical environment. Indeed, the emergence of tiny devices that sense environmental cues and trigger actuators after consulting logic and human preferences promises a more environmentally aware and less wasteful society. However, the IoT inherently challenges software development processes, particularly techniques for ensuring software reliability. Researchers have developed debugging tools for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which can be viewed as the enablers of perception in the IoT. These tools gather run-time information on individual sensor node executions and node interactions and then compress that information.

Learning patterns of university student retention <=SEP=> Learning predictors for student retention is very difficult. After reviewing the literature, it is evident that there is considerable room for improvement in the current state of the art. As shown in this paper, improvements are possible if we (a) explore a wide range of learning methods; (b) take care when selecting attributes; (c) assess the efficacy of the learned theory not just by its median performance, but also by the variance in that performance; (d) study the delta of student factors between those who stay and those who are retained. Using these techniques, for the goal of predicting if students will remain for the first three years of an undergraduate degree, the following factors were found to be informative: family background and family’s social-economic status, high school GPA

MedLeaf: Mobile biodiversity informatics tool for mapping and identifying Indonesian medicinal Plants <=SEP=> We presents a mobile biodiversity informatics tools for identifying and mapping Indonesian medicinal plants. The system - called MedLeaf - has been developed as a prototype data resource for documenting, integrating, disseminating, and identifying of Indonesian medicinal plants. Identification of medicinal plant is done automatically based on digital image processing. Fuzzy Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and geometrical features are used to extract leaves features. Probabilistic Neural Network is used as classifier for discrimination. Data set consist of 85 species of Indonesian medicinal plants with 3,502 leaves digital images. Our results indicate that combination of leaves features outperform than using single features with accuracy 88.5%. The distribution of medicinal plants can be shown on mobile phone using GIS application. The application is essential to help people identify the medicinal plants and disseminate information of medicinal plants distribution in Indonesia.

Discriminative Word Alignment with Conditional Random Fields <=SEP=> In this paper we present a novel approach for inducing word alignments from sentence aligned data. We use a Conditional Random Field (CRF), a discriminative model, which is estimated on a small supervised training set. The CRF is conditioned on both the source and target texts, and thus allows for the use of arbitrary and overlapping features over these data. Moreover, the CRF has efficient training and decoding processes which both find globally optimal solutions. We apply this alignment model to both French-English and Romanian-English language pairs. We show how a large number of highly predictive features can be easily incorporated into the CRF, and demonstrate that even with only a few hundred word-aligned training sentences, our model improves over the current state-ofthe-art with alignment error rates of 5.29 and 25.8 for the two tasks respectively.

Fingerprint classification using convolutional neural networks and ridge orientation images <=SEP=> Deep learning is currently popular in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition. Deep learning models such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been shown to be extremely effective at solving computer vision problems with state-of-the-art results. This work uses the CNN model to achieve a high degree of accuracy on the problem of fingerprint image classification. It will also be shown that effective image preprocessing can greatly reduce the dimensionality of the problem, allowing fast training times without compromising classification accuracy, even in networks of moderate depth. The proposed approach has achieved 95.9% classification accuracy on the NIST-DB4 dataset with zero sample rejection.