6108756
Whole-sentence exponential language models: a vehicle for linguistic-statistical integration
We introduce an exponential language model which models a whole sentence or utterance as a single unit. By avoiding the chain rule, the model treats each sentence as a “bag of features", where features are arbitrary computable properties of the sentence. The new model is computationally more efficient, and more naturally suited to modeling global sentential phenomena, than the conditional exponential (e.g. maximum entropy) models proposed to date. Using the model is straightforward. Training the model requires sampling from an exponential distribution. We describe the challenge of applying Monte Carlo Markov Chain and other sampling techniques to natural language, and discuss smoothing and step-size selection. We then present a novel procedure for feature selection, which exploits discrepancies between the existing model and the training corpus. We demonstrate our ideas by constructing and analysing competitive models in the Switchboard and Broadcast News domains, incorporating lexical and syntactic information.
7395446
Segmenting hands of arbitrary color
Hand segmentation is a prerequisite for many gesture recognition tasks. Color has been widely used for hand segmentation. However, many approaches rely on predefined skin color models. It is very difficult to predefine a color model in a mobile application where the light condition may change dramatically over time. We propose a novel statistical approach to hand segmentation based on Bayes decision theory. The proposed method requires no predefined skin color model. Instead it generates a hand color model and a background color model for a given image, and uses these models to classify each pixel in the image as either a hand pixel or a background pixel. Models are generated using a Gaussian mixture model with the restricted EM algorithm. Our method is capable of segmenting hands of arbitrary color in a complex scene. It performs well even when there is a significant overlap between hand and background colors, or when the user wears gloves. We show that the Bayes decision method is superior to a commonly used method by comparing their upper bound performance. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.
6174679
Correlation Clustering for Crosslingual Link Detection
The crosslingual link detection problem calls for identifying news articles in multiple languages that report on the same news event. This paper presents a novel approach based on constrained clustering. We discuss a general way for constrained clustering using a recent, graph-based clustering framework called correlation clustering. We introduce a correlation clustering implementation that features linear program chunking to allow processing larger datasets. We show how to apply the correlation clustering algorithm to the crosslingual link detection problem and present experimental results that show correlation clustering improves upon the hierarchical clustering approaches commonly used in link detection, and, hierarchical clustering approaches that take constraints into account.
14278266
Harmonic mixtures: combining mixture models and graph-based methods for inductive and scalable semi-supervised learning
Graph-based methods for semi-supervised learning have recently been shown to be promising for combining labeled and unlabeled data in classification problems. However, inference for graph-based methods often does not scale well to very large data sets, since it requires inversion of a large matrix or solution of a large linear program. Moreover, such approaches are inherently transductive, giving predictions for only those points in the unlabeled set, and not for an arbitrary test point. In this paper a new approach is presented that preserves the strengths of graph-based semi-supervised learning while overcoming the limitations of scalability and non-inductive inference, through a combination of generative mixture models and discriminative regularization using the graph Laplacian. Experimental results show that this approach preserves the accuracy of purely graph-based transductive methods when the data has "manifold structure," and at the same time achieves inductive learning with significantly reduced computational cost.
6597740
Semi-supervised classification with hybrid generative/discriminative methods
We compare two recently proposed frameworks for combining generative and discriminative probabilistic classifiers and apply them to semi-supervised classification. In both cases we explore the tradeoff between maximizing a discriminative likelihood of labeled data and a generative likelihood of labeled and unlabeled data. While prominent semi-supervised learning methods assume low density regions between classes or are subject to generative modeling assumptions, we conjecture that hybrid generative/discriminative methods allow semi-supervised learning in the presence of strongly overlapping classes and reduce the risk of modeling structure in the unlabeled data that is irrelevant for the specific classification task of interest. We apply both hybrid approaches within naively structured Markov random field models and provide a thorough empirical comparison with two well-known semi-supervised learning methods on six text classification tasks. A semi-supervised hybrid generative/discriminative method provides the best accuracy in 75% of the experiments, and the multi-conditional learning hybrid approach achieves the highest overall mean accuracy across all tasks.
2283419
Nonparametric Transforms of Graph Kernels for Semi-Supervised Learning
We present an algorithm based on convex optimization for constructing kernels for semi-supervised learning. The kernel matrices are derived from the spectral decomposition of graph Laplacians, and combine labeled and unlabeled data in a systematic fashion. Unlike previous work using diffusion kernels and Gaussian random field kernels, a nonparametric kernel approach is presented that incorporates order constraints during optimization. This results in flexible kernels and avoids the need to choose among different parametric forms. Our approach relies on a quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP), and is computationally feasible for large datasets. We evaluate the kernels on real datasets using support vector machines, with encouraging results.
3813357
Video data mining: semantic indexing and event detection from the association perspective
Advances in the media and entertainment industries, including streaming audio and digital TV, present new challenges for managing and accessing large audio-visual collections. Current content management systems support retrieval using low-level features, such as motion, color, and texture. However, low-level features often have little meaning for naive users, who much prefer to identify content using high-level semantics or concepts. This creates a gap between systems and their users that must be bridged for these systems to be used effectively. To this end, in this paper, we first present a knowledge-based video indexing and content management framework for domain specific videos (using basketball video as an example). We will provide a solution to explore video knowledge by mining associations from video data. The explicit definitions and evaluation measures (e.g., temporal support and confidence) for video associations are proposed by integrating the distinct feature of video data. Our approach uses video processing techniques to find visual and audio cues (e.g., court field, camera motion activities, and applause), introduces multilevel sequential association mining to explore associations among the audio and visual cues, classifies the associations by assigning each of them with a class label, and uses their appearances in the video to construct video indices. Our experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach.
5944615
Eliminating Class Noise in Large Datasets
This paper presents a new approach for identifying and eliminating mislabeled instances in large or distributed datasets. We first partition a dataset into subsets, each of which is small enough to be processed by an induction algorithm at one time. We construct good rules from each subset, and use the good rules to evaluate the whole dataset. For a given instance Ik, two error count variables are used to count the number of times it has been identified as noise by all subsets. The instance with higher error values will have a higher probability of being a mislabeled example. Two threshold schemes, majority and non-objection, are used to identify the noise. Experimental results and comparative studies from real-world datasets are reported to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.
52810083
A hierarchical modeling framework for on-chip communication architectures
The communication sub-system of complex IC systems is increasingly critical for achieving system performance. Given this, it is important that the on-chip communication architecture should be included in any quantitative evaluation of system design during design space exploration. While there are several mature methodologies for the modeling and evaluation of architectures of processing elements, there is relatively little work done in modeling of an extensive range of on-chip communication architectures, and integrating this into a single modeling and simulation environment combining processing element and on-chip communication architectures. This paper describes a modeling framework with accompanying simulation tools that attempts to fill this gap. Based on an analysis of a wide range of on-chip communication architectures, we describe how a specific hierarchical class library can be used to develop new on-chip communication architectures, or variants of existing ones with relatively little incremental effort. We demonstrate this through three case studies including two commercial on-chip bus systems and an on-chip packet switching network. Here we show that through careful analysis and construction it is possible for the modeling environment to support the common features of these architectures as part of the library and permit instantiation of the individual architectures as variants of the library design. As part of this methodology we also show how different levels of abstraction of the model can be supported and viewed as different variants that can be used in an accuracy versus simulation time trade-off.
12655450
The circular chromatic index of graphs of high girth
We show that for each @e>0 and each integer @D>=1, there exists a number g such that for any graph G of maximum degree @D and girth at least g, the circular chromatic index of G is at most @[email protected]
6927660
Scalable Representative Instance Selection and Ranking
Finding a small set of representative instances for large datasets can bring various benefits to data mining practitioners so they can (1) build a learner superior to the one constructed from the whole massive data; and (2) avoid working on the whole original dataset all the time. We propose in this paper a scalable representative instance selection and ranking (SRISTAR pronounced 3STAR) mechanism, which carries two unique features: (1) it provides a representative instance ranking list, so that users can always select instances from the top to the bottom, based on the number of examples they prefer; and (2) it investigates the behaviors of the underlying examples for instance selection, and the selection procedure tries to optimize the expected future error. Given a dataset, we first cluster instances into small data cells, each of which consists of instances with similar behaviors. Then we progressively evaluate data cells and their combinations, and order them into a list such that the learners built from the top cells are more accurate