15832417
KPS: a Web Information Mining Algorithm
Abstract The Web mostly contains semi-structured information. It is, however, not easy to search and extract structural data hidden in a Web page. Current practices address this problem by (1) syntax analysis (i.e. HTML tags); or (2) wrappers or user-defined declarative languages. The former is only suitable for highly structured Web sites and the latter is time-consuming and offers low scalability. Wrappers could handle tens, but certainly not thousands, of information sources. In this paper, we present a novel information mining algorithm, namely KPS, over semi-structured information on the Web. KPS employs keywords, patterns and/or samples to mine the desired information. Experimental results show that KPS is more efficient than existing Web extracting methods.
37472111
Extending the superimposed codeword indexing scheme to handle incomplete information
In order to use Prolog as a basis for database applications, techniques are required for rapid retrieval of clauses from large data sets. Various researchers have contributed to the development of indexing strategies for this purpose. One such strategy is known as superimposed codeword+mask bits (SCW+MB). One extension of Prolog which is useful in the development of deductive databases is the ability to handle incomplete information. A form of incomplete information based on sets has been introduced and used in a deductive database system. In order to provide efficient access to clauses containing incomplete information, existing strategies need to be adapted accordingly. This paper presents an extension to the SCW+MB algorithm to cover incomplete information, and describes how this can be realized in hardware.
45209699
A Workflow Model for Chinese Business Processes
This paper proposes a new workflow model (MAWM) targeted at Chinese business processing. The cultural dependent characteristics of Chinese business processes are identified and taken into account in the MAWM model. MAWM adopts a decentralized modeling style based on the conventional business perspective on labor division and cooperation. This idea is reflected in the concept of agent-workflow. Activity-based and communication-based modeling methods are integrated in the process model. They are used to model different types of business activities. In addition, the model is formalized using Process Algebra and a simplified algorithm is proposed for safety verification of workflow processes.
16840924
Improving Transliteration with Precise Alignment of Phoneme Chunks and Using Contextual Features
Automatic transliteration of foreign names is basically regarded as a diminutive clone of the machine translation (MT) problem. It thus follows IBM's conventional MT models under the source-channel framework. Nonetheless, some parameters of this model dealing with zero-fertility words in the target sequences, can negatively impact transliteration effectiveness because of the inevitable inverted conditional probability estimation. Instead of source-channel, this paper presents a direct probabilistic transliteration model using contextual features of phonemes with a tailored alignment scheme for phoneme chunks. Experiments demonstrate superior performance over the source-channel for the task of English-Chinese transliteration.
12876616
A Design of Temporal Event Extraction from Chinese Financial News
This paper presents an information system for Chinese Information Extraction from Financial news (CHIEF). The ultimate target of the system is to extract information concerning the occurrence time and places of the financial activities in the different companies from a local Hong Kong newspaper, namely (Tao Kung Pao). To facilitate event extraction purpose, two groups of templates were defined, i.e. the company related and company restructuring templates. They are used to select the desired information for each type of financial activities, such as (bankruptcy) or (merge). Each specific event is then represented using a frame-based knowledge structure. Two types of slots are embedded in each frame: they are the activity- and time-related slots. Based on these slots, multiple activities are interconnected according to their entity relations, temporal relations or the deduced relations. Effectively, CHIEF is a question-answering system designed for handling the company related queries, event based queries, temporal queries and complex queries in a finance domain.
690242
Improving Quality of Email Categorization with Tournament Methods
The tournament text classification methods are proposed in this article to perform the task of email categorization, in which the essence is to break down the multi-class categorization process into a set of binary classification tasks. We implement the methods of elimination and Round Robin tournament to classify emails within 15 folders. Substantial experiments are conducted to compare the effectiveness and robustness of the tournament methods against the n-way classification method and the voting method. The experimental results show that the tournament methods outperform the n-way method by 11.7% and the voting method by 4.1% regarding precision, and the Round Robin performs slightly better than the Elimination tournament on average.
42199214
A Technique for Improving the Convergence Characteristic of Genetic Algorithms and Its Application to a Genetic-Based Load Flow Algorithm
This paper is devoted to the development of a technique for the enhancement of the convergence of genetic algorithms. Based on the concept of solution acceleration, a technique is proposed and applied to a constrained-genetic-algorithm load-flow algorithm CGALF recently developed for solving the problem of evaluating the voltage profile and power flow in electric power networks. The enhanced CGALF algorithm is applied to a practical power system to illustrate the effectiveness of the developed method.
15199591
Structure and motion from silhouettes
This paper addresses the problem of recovering structure and motion from silhouettes. Silhouettes are projections of contour generators which are viewpoint dependent, and hence do not readily provide point correspondences for exploitation in motion estimation. Previous works have exploited correspondences induced by epipolar tangencies, and a successful solution has been developed in the special case of circular motion (turnable sequences). However, the main drawbacks are (1) new views cannot be added easily at a later time, and (2) part of the structure will always remain invisible under circular motion. In this paper we overcome the above problems by incorporating arbitrary general views and estimating the camera poses using silhouettes alone. We present a complete and practical system which produces high quality 3D models from 2D uncalibrated silhouettes. The 3D models thus obtained can be refined incrementally by adding new arbitrary views and estimating their poses. Experimental results on various objects are presented, demonstrating the quality of the reconstructions.
62300434
How do program understanding tools affect how programmers understand programs?
Abstract In this paper, we explore the question of whether program understanding tools enhance or change the way that programmers understand programs. The strategies that programmers use to comprehend programs vary widely. Program understanding tools should enhance or ease the programmer's preferred strategies, rather than impose a fixed strategy that may not always be suitable. We present observations from a user study that compares three tools for browsing program source code and exploring software structures. In this study, 30 participants used these tools to solve several high-level program understanding tasks. These tasks required a broad range of comprehension strategies. We describe how these tools supported or hindered the diverse comprehension strategies used.
10330894
Reconstruction of sculpture from uncalibrated image profiles
Profiles of a sculpture provide rich information about its geometry, and can be used for model reconstruction under known camera motion. By exploiting correspondences induced by epipolar tangents on the profiles, a successful solution to motion estimation has been developed for the case of circular motion. Arbitrary general views can then be incorporated to refine the model built from circular motion.
33091738
SHAPES: A Novel Approach for Learning Search Heuristics in Under-Constrained Optimization Problems
Although much research in machine learning has been carried out on acquiring knowledge for problem-solving in many problem domains, little effort has been focused on learning search-control knowledge for solving optimization problems. This paper reports on the development of SHAPES, a system that learns heuristic search guidance for solving optimization problems in intractable, under-constrained domains based on the Explanation-Based Learning (EBL) framework. The system embodies two new and novel approaches to machine learning. First, it makes use of explanations of varying levels of approximation as a mean for verifying heuristic-based decisions, allowing heuristic estimates to be revised and corrected during problem-solving. The provision of such a revision mechanism is particularly important when working in intractable and under-constrained domains, where heuristics tend to be highly over-generalized, and hence at times will give rise to incorrect results. Second, it employs a new linear and quadratic programming-based weight-assignment algorithm formulated to direct search toward optimal solutions under best-first search. The algorithm offers a direct method for assigning rule strengths and, in so doing, avoids the need to address the credit-assignment problem faced by other iterative weight-adjustment methods.