5146657
Interpreting Loosely Encoded Questions
Knowledge-based question-answering systems have become quite competent and robust at answering a wide range of questions in different domains, however in order to ask questions correctly, one needs to have intimate knowledge of the structure of the knowledge base, and typical users lack this knowledge. We address this problem by developing a system that uses the content of the knowledge base to automatically align a user's encoding of a query to the structure of the knowledge base. Our preliminary evaluation shows the system detects and corrects most misalignments, and users are able to pose most questions quickly.
5975278
The Knowledge Required to Interpret Noun Compounds
This paper presents a novel approach to the estimation of user’s affective states in Human-Computer Interaction. Most of the present approaches divide emotions strictly between positive or negative. However, recent discoveries in the field of Emotional Intelligence show that emotions should be rather perceived as context-sensitive engagements with the world. This leads to a need to specify whether the emotions conveyed in a conversation are appropriate for a situation they are expressed in. In the proposed method we use a system for affect analysis on textual input to recognize users emotions and a Web mining technique to verify the contextual appropriateness of those emotions. On this basis a conversational agent can choose to either sympathize with the user or help them manage their emotions. Finally, the results of evaluation of the proposed method with two different conversational agents are discussed, and perspectives for further development of the method are proposed.
1153368
Indirect anaphora resolution as semantic path search
Anaphora occur commonly in natural language text, and resolving them is essential for capturing the knowledge encoded in text. Indirect anaphora are especially challenging to resolve because the referring expression and the antecedent are related by unstated background knowledge. Such anaphora need to be resolved properly in order to automatically capture the knowledge expressed in natural language. Resolving indirect anaphora has been treated as a unique problem that requires special-purpose methods, and these methods have had limited success in precision and recall. In this study, we used a generic tool for finding semantic paths between two concepts to resolve these anaphora, and it achieved approximately twice the recall of the best previous system without loss of precision. A series of ablation study showed that the biggest increase in recall came from an abductive stopping criterion of the search.
1692629
Representing roles and purpose
Ontology designers often distinguish Entities (things that are) from Events (things that happen). It is not obvious how this division admits Roles (things that are, but only in the context of things that happen). For example, Person might be considered an Entity, while Employee is a Role. A Person remains a Person independent of the Events in which he participates. Someone is an Employee only by virtue of participating in an Employment Event. The problem of how to represent Roles is not new, but there is little consensus on a solution. In this paper, we present an ontology that finds a place for Roles as well as a representation that allows Roles to be related to Entities and Events to express the teleological notion of purpose.
800122
Concept-oriented video skimming via semantic video classification
Effective video skimming requires a good understanding of the semantics of video contents. However, more existing systems for content-based video retrieval (CBVR) can only support low-level video analysis, but they have limited effectiveness on achieving semantic-sensitive video understanding. In this paper, we have developed a novel framework to achieve concept-oriented video skimming and it consists of three parts: (a) using salient objects for semantic-sensitive video content representation; (b) using finite mixture models for semantic video concept modeling and classification; (c) enabling concept-oriented video skimming via semantic video classification.
4017008
Gene symbol disambiguation using knowledge-based profiles
MOTIVATION
The ambiguity of biomedical entities, particularly of gene symbols, is a big challenge for text-mining systems in the biomedical domain. Existing knowledge sources, such as Entrez Gene and the MEDLINE database, contain information concerning the characteristics of a particular gene that could be used to disambiguate gene symbols.


RESULTS
For each gene, we create a profile with different types of information automatically extracted from related MEDLINE abstracts and readily available annotated knowledge sources. We apply the gene profiles to the disambiguation task via an information retrieval method, which ranks the similarity scores between the context where the ambiguous gene is mentioned, and candidate gene profiles. The gene profile with the highest similarity score is then chosen as the correct sense. We evaluated the method on three automatically generated testing sets of mouse, fly and yeast organisms, respectively. The method achieved the highest precision of 93.9% for the mouse, 77.8% for the fly and 89.5% for the yeast.


AVAILABILITY
The testing data sets and disambiguation programs are available at http://www.dbmi.columbia.edu/~hux7002/gsd2006
228217
Localized on-chip power delivery network optimization via sequence of linear programming
In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to reduce the voltage noises for on-chip power/ground (P/G) networks of VLSI. The new method is based on the sequence of linear programming (SLP) method as the optimization engine and a localized scheme via partitioning for dealing with large circuits. We show that by directly optimizing the decap area as the objective function and using the time-domain adjoint method, SLP can deliver much better quality than existing methods based on the merged time-domain adjoint method. The partitioning strategy further improves the scalability of the proposed algorithm and makes it efficient for large circuits. The resulting algorithm is general enough for any P/G network. Experimental results demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method over existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of solution quality at a mild computation cost increase
9912670
On the Quadratic Convergence of the Levenberg-Marquardt Method without Nonsingularity Assumption
Recently, Yamashita and Fukushima [11] established an interesting quadratic convergence result for the Levenberg-Marquardt method without the nonsingularity assumption. This paper extends the result of Yamashita and Fukushima by using μk=||F(xk)||δ, where δ∈[1,2], instead of μk=||F(xk)||2 as the Levenberg-Marquardt parameter. If ||F(x)|| provides a local error bound for the system of nonlinear equations F(x)=0, it is shown that the sequence {xk} generated by the new method converges to a solution quadratically, which is stronger than dist(xk,X*)→0 given by Yamashita and Fukushima. Numerical results show that the method performs well for singular problems.
10472812
Building concept ontology for medical video annotation
Most existing systems for content-based video retrieval (CBVR) are now amenable to support automatic low-level video content analysis and feature extraction, but they have limited effectiveness from a user's perspective. To support semantic video retrieval via keywords, we have proposed a novel framework by incorporating the concept ontology to enable more effective modeling and representation of semantic video concepts. Specifically, this novel framework includes: (a) Using the salient objects to achieve a middle-level understanding of the semantics of video contents; (b) Building a domain dependent concept ontology to enable multi-level modeling and representation of semantic video concepts; (c) Developing a multi-task boosting technique to achieve hierarchical video classifier training for automatic multi-level video annotation. The experimental results in a certain domain of medical education videos are also provided.