16103350
State Complexity of Regular Languages
State complexity is a descriptive complexity measure for regular languages. We investigate the problems related to the state complexity of regular languages and their operations. In particular, we compare the state complexity results on regular languages with those on nite languages.
206058077
Synchronization Expressions with Extended Join Operation
Synchronization expressions are high level constructs used for specifying minimal synchronization constraints of parallel processes. Their semantics is defined by the corresponding synchronization language. The original definition of synchronization expressions [12, 13] forces the languages to be closed under rewriting rules that, for instance, do not preserve regularity. Here we propose an extension of the syntactic definition of synchronization expressions, and an appropriate modification of their semantics. The extended definition has the advantage that it allows us to eliminate the less well motivated transformations (rewriting rules) describing properties of synchronization languages. We show that the modified rewriting rules preserve regularity of the languages. Also, we obtain a characterization of finite synchronization languages as the family consisting of languages satisfying the start-termination property and closed under three types of simple rewriting rules.
7865019
Follow automata
We give two new algorithms for constructing small nondeterministic finite automata (NFA) from regular expressions. The first constructs NFAs with e-transitions (eNFA) which are smaller than all the other eNFAs obtained by similar constructions. Their size is at most 3/2 |α| + 5/2, where α is the regular expression. This is very close to optimal since we prove also the lower bound 4/3; |α| + 5/2. The second constructs NFAs. It uses e-elimination in the eNFAs we just introduced and builds a quotient of the well-known position automaton w.r.t. the equivalence given by the follow relation; therefore giving the name of follow automaton. The new automaton uses optimally the information from the positions of a regular expression. We compare the follow automaton with the best constructions to date and show that it has important advantages over those.
27445105
Minimal cover-automata for finite languages
Abstract A cover-automaton A of a finite language L⊆Σ ∗ is a finite deterministic automaton (DFA) that accepts all words in L and possibly other words that are longer than any word in L . A minimal deterministic finite cover automaton (DFCA) of a finite language L usually has a smaller size than a minimal DFA that accept L . Thus, cover automata can be used to reduce the size of the representations of finite languages in practice. In this paper, we describe an efficient algorithm that, for a given DFA accepting a finite language, constructs a minimal deterministic finite cover-automaton of the language. We also give algorithms for the boolean operations on deterministic cover automata, i.e., on the finite languages they represent.
14075162
Synchronization Expressions: Characterization Results and Implementation
Synchronization expressions are defined as restricted regular expressions that specify synchronization constraints between parallel processes and their semantics is defined using the synchronization languages. In this paper we survey results on synchronization languages, in particular, various approaches to obtain a characterization of this language family using closure under a set of rewriting rules. Also, we discuss the use and implementation of synchronization expressions in a programming language designed for a parallel or distributed computing environment.
546963
Decision Problems for Patterns
We settle an open problem, the inclusion problem for pattern languages. This is the first known case where inclusion is undecidable for generative devices having a trivially decidable equivalence problem. The study of patterns goes back to the seminal work of Thue and is important also, for instance, in recent work concerning inductive inference and learning. Our results concern both erasing and nonerasing patterns.
7566163
Dirichlet enhanced relational learning
We apply nonparametric hierarchical Bayesian modelling to relational learning. In a hierarchical Bayesian approach, model parameters can be "personalized", i.e., owned by entities or relationships, and are coupled via a common prior distribution. Flexibility is added in a nonparametric hierarchical Bayesian approach, such that the learned knowledge can be truthfully represented. We apply our approach to a medical domain where we form a nonparametric hierarchical Bayesian model for relations involving hospitals, patients, procedures and diagnosis. The experiments show that the additional flexibility in a nonparametric hierarchical Bayes approach results in a more accurate model of the dependencies between procedures and diagnosis and gives significantly improved estimates of the probabilities of future procedures.
1394662
Dirichlet Enhanced Latent Semantic Analysis
This paper describes nonparametric Bayesian treatments for analyzing records containing occurrences of items. The introduced model retains the strength of previous approaches that explore the latent factors of each record (e.g. topics of documents), and further uncovers the clustering structure of records, which reflects the statistical dependencies of the latent factors. The nonparametric model induced by a Dirichlet process (DP) flexibly adapts model complexity to reveal the clustering structure of the data. To avoid the problems of dealing with infinite dimensions, we further replace the DP prior by a simpler alternative, namely Dirichlet-multinomial allocation (DMA), which maintains the main modelling properties of the DP. Instead of relying on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for inference, this paper applies efficient variational inference based on DMA. The proposed approach yields encouraging empirical results on both a toy problem and text data. The results show that the proposed algorithm uncovers not only the latent factors, but also the clustering structure.
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.
1058977
Block-based web search
Multiple-topic and varying-length of web pages are two negative factors significantly affecting the performance of web search. In this paper, we explore the use of page segmentation algorithms to partition web pages into blocks and investigate how to take advantage of block-level evidence to improve retrieval performance in the web context. Because of the special characteristics of web pages, different page segmentation method will have different impact on web search performance. We compare four types of methods, including fixed-length page segmentation, DOM-based page segmentation, vision-based page segmentation, and a combined method which integrates both semantic and fixed-length properties. Experiments on block-level query expansion and retrieval are performed. Among the four approaches, the combined method achieves the best performance for web search. Our experimental results also show that such a semantic partitioning of web pages effectively deals with the problem of multiple drifting topics and mixed lengths, and thus has great potential to boost up the performance of current web search engines.
11243052
Improving pseudo-relevance feedback in web information retrieval using web page segmentation
In contrast to traditional document retrieval, a web page as a whole is not a good information unit to search because it often contains multiple topics and a lot of irrelevant information from navigation, decoration, and interaction part of the page. In this paper, we propose a VIsion-based Page Segmentation (VIPS) algorithm to detect the semantic content structure in a web page. Compared with simple DOM based segmentation method, our page segmentation scheme utilizes useful visual cues to obtain a better partition of a page at the semantic level. By using our VIPS algorithm to assist the selection of query expansion terms in pseudo-relevance feedback in web information retrieval, we achieve 27% performance improvement on Web Track dataset.