2852882
Hierarchy-regularized latent semantic indexing
Organizing textual documents into a hierarchical taxonomy is a common practice in knowledge management. Beside textual features, the hierarchical structure of directories reflect additional and important knowledge annotated by experts. It is generally desired to incorporate this information into text mining processes. In this paper, we propose hierarchy-regularized latent semantic indexing, which encodes the hierarchy into a similarity graph of documents and then formulates an optimization problem mapping each document into a low dimensional vector space. The new feature space preserves the intrinsic structure of the original taxonomy and thus provides a meaningful basis for various learning tasks like visualization and classification. Our approach employs the information about class proximity and class specificity, and can naturally cope with multi-labeled documents. Our empirical studies show very encouraging results on two real-world data sets, the new Reuters (RCVI) benchmark and the Swissprot protein database.
946526
A Probabilistic Clustering-Projection Model for Discrete Data
For discrete co-occurrence data like documents and words, calculating optimal projections and clustering are two different but related tasks. The goal of projection is to find a low-dimensional latent space for words, and clustering aims at grouping documents based on their feature representations. In general projection and clustering are studied independently, but they both represent the intrinsic structure of data and should reinforce each other. In this paper we introduce a probabilistic clustering-projection (PCP) model for discrete data, where they are both represented in a unified framework. Clustering is seen to be performed in the projected space, and projection explicitly considers clustering structure. Iterating the two operations turns out to be exactly the variational EM algorithm under Bayesian model inference, and thus is guaranteed to improve the data likelihood. The model is evaluated on two text data sets, both showing very encouraging results.
10350219
Multi-label informed latent semantic indexing
Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a well-known unsupervised approach for dimensionality reduction in information retrieval. However if the output information (i.e. category labels) is available, it is often beneficial to derive the indexing not only based on the inputs but also on the target values in the training data set. This is of particular importance in applications with multiple labels, in which each document can belong to several categories simultaneously. In this paper we introduce the multi-label informed latent semantic indexing (MLSI) algorithm which preserves the information of inputs and meanwhile captures the correlations between the multiple outputs. The recovered "latent semantics" thus incorporate the human-annotated category information and can be used to greatly improve the prediction accuracy. Empirical study based on two data sets, Reuters-21578 and RCV1, demonstrates very encouraging results.
268086
Collaborative ordinal regression
Ordinal regression has become an effective way of learning user preferences, but most research focuses on single regression problems. In this paper we introduce collaborative ordinal regression, where multiple ordinal regression tasks are handled simultaneously. Rather than modeling each task individually, we explore the dependency between ranking functions through a hierarchical Bayesian model and assign a common Gaussian Process (GP) prior to all individual functions. Empirical studies show that our collaborative model outperforms the individual counterpart in preference learning applications.
13007604
Extracting Content Structure for Web Pages Based on Visual Representation
A new web content structure based on visual representation is proposed in this paper. Many web applications such as information retrieval, information extraction and automatic page adaptation can benefit from this structure. This paper presents an automatic top-down, tag-tree independent approach to detect web content structure. It simulates how a user understands web layout structure based on his visual perception. Comparing to other existing techniques, our approach is independent to underlying documentation representation such as HTML and works well even when the HTML structure is far different from layout structure. Experiments show satisfactory results.
2476670
Soft Clustering on Graphs
We propose a simple clustering framework on graphs encoding pairwise data similarities. Unlike usual similarity-based methods, the approach softly assigns data to clusters in a probabilistic way. More importantly, a hierarchical clustering is naturally derived in this framework to gradually merge lower-level clusters into higher-level ones. A random walk analysis indicates that the algorithm exposes clustering structures in various resolutions, i.e., a higher level statistically models a longer-term diffusion on graphs and thus discovers a more global clustering structure. Finally we provide very encouraging experimental results.
14182899
DNA computing, sticker systems, and universality
Abstract. We introduce the sticker systems, a computability model, which is an abstraction of the computations using the Watson-Crick complementarity as in Adleman's DNA computing experiment, [1]. Several types of sticker systems are shown to characterize (modulo a weak coding) the regular languages, hence the power of finite automata. One variant is proven to be equivalent to Turing machines. Another one is found to have a strictly intermediate power.

14253919
Object-Specific Figure-Ground Segregation
We consider the problem of segmenting an image into foreground and background, with foreground containing solely objects of interest known a priori. We propose an integration model that incorporates both edge detection and object part detection results. It consists of two parallel processes: low-level pixel grouping and high-level patch grouping. We seek a solution that optimizes a joint grouping criterion in a reduced space enforced by grouping correspondence between pixels and patches. Using spectral graph partitioning, we show that a near global optimum can be found by solving a constrained eigenvalue problem. We report promising experimental results on a dataset of 15 objects under clutter and occlusion.
13332239
A Hierarchical Markov Random Field Model for Figure-Ground Segregation
To segregate overlapping objects into depth layers requires the integration of local occlusion cues distributed over the entire image into a global percept. We propose to model this process using hierarchical Markov random field (HMRF), and suggest a broader view that clique potentials in MRF models can be used to encode any local decision rules. A topology-dependent multiscale hierarchy is used to introduce long range interaction. The operations within each level are identical across the hierarchy. The clique parameters that encode the relative importance of these decision rules are estimated using an optimization technique called learning from rehearsals based on 2-object training samples. We find that this model generalizes successfully to 5-object test images, and that depth segregation can be completed within two traversals across the hierarchy. This computational framework therefore provides an interesting platform for us to investigate the interaction of local decision rules and global representations, as well as to reason about the rationales underlying some of recent psychological and neurophysiological findings related to figure-ground segregation.
329765
Unsupervised segmentation of color images
A novel technique for unsupervised learning in feature space is presented. The feature space is considered as composed of two distinct sources, "mode" and "valley", in the point of view of information theory. An entropy-based thresholding is taken to distinguish the discretized cells in the feature space. The cells labeled as "mode" are then chained to form mode areas. Thereafter a modified Akaike's information criterion is proposed to solve the cluster validity problem. After all the parameters are estimated, a labeling algorithm is developed based on the majority game theory. The method is applied to color image segmentation. The segmentation process is completely autonomous.
2791772
Segmentation induced by scale invariance
Perceptual organization is scale-invariant. In turn, a segmentation that separates features consistently at all scales is the desired one that reveals the underlying structural organization of an image. Addressing cross-scale correspondence with interior pixels, we develop this intuition into a general segmenter that handles texture and illusory contours through edges entirely without any explicit characterization of texture or curvilinearity. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only performs on par with either texture segmentation or boundary completion methods on their specialized examples, but also works well on a variety of real images.