9665104
What would they think?: a computational model of attitudes
A key to improving at any task is frequent feedback from people whose opinions we care about: our family, friends, mentors, and the experts. However, such input is not usually available from the right people at the time it is needed most, and attaining a deep understanding of someone else's perspective requires immense effort. This paper introduces a technological solution.We present a novel method for automatically modeling a person's attitudes and opinions, and a proactive interface called "What Would They Think?" which offers the just-in-time perspectives of people whose opinions we care about, based on whatever the user happens to be reading or writing. In the application, each person is represented by a "digital persona," generated from an automated analysis of personal texts (e.g. weblogs and papers written by the person being modeled) using natural language processing and commonsense-based textual-affect sensing.In user studies, participants using our application were able to grasp the personalities and opinions of a panel of strangers more quickly and deeply than with either of two baseline methods. We discuss the theoretical and pragmatic implications of this research to intelligent user interfaces.
6190656
Toward a Programmatic Semantics of Natural Language
Natural language is imbued with a rich semantics but unfortunately its complex elegance is often mistaken for mere imprecision. Because complete parsers of English are not yet achievable, people assume that it is not feasible to use English directly as a means of instructing computers. However, in this paper, we show that English descriptions of procedures often contain programmatic semantics-linguistic features that can be easily mapped into programming language constructs. Some linguistic features can even inspire new ways of thinking about specifying programs. Far from being hopelessly ambiguous, natural languages exhibit important principles of communication that could be used to make human-computer communication more natural
38681572
Programmatic semantics for natural language interfaces
An important way of making interfaces usable by non-expert users is to enable the use of natural language input, as in natural language query interfaces to databases, or MUDs and MOOs. When the subject matter is about procedures, however, we have discovered that interfaces can take advantage of what we call Programmatic Semantics, procedural relations that can be inferred from the linguistic structure. Roughly, nouns can be interpreted as data structures; verbs are functions; adjectives are properties. Some linguistic forms imply conditionals, loops, and recursive structures.We illustrate the principles of Programmatic Semantics with a description of Metafor, a "brainstorming" editor for programs, analogous to an outlining tool for prose writing. Metafor interactively converts English sentences to partially specified program code, to be used as "scaffolding" for a more detailed program. A user study showed that Metafor is capable of capturing enough Programmatic Semantics to facilitate non-programming users and beginners' conceptualization of programming problems.
7016782
Adaptive Linking between Text and Photos Using Common Sense Reasoning
In a hypermedia authoring task, an author often wants to set up meaningful connections between different media, such as text and photographs. To facilitate this task, it is helpful to have a software agent dynamically adapt the presentation of a media database to the user's authoring activities, and look for opportunities for annotation and retrieval. However, potential connections are often missed because of differences in vocabulary or semantic connections that are "obvious" to people but that might not be explicit.ARIA (Annotation and Retrieval Integration Agent) is a software agent that acts an assistant to a user writing e-mail or Web pages. As the user types a story, it does continuous retrieval and ranking on a photo database. It can use descriptions in the story to semi-automatically annotate pictures. To improve the associations beyond simple keyword matching, we use natural language parsing techniques to extract important roles played by text, such as "who, what, where, when". Since many of the photos depict common everyday situations such as weddings or recitals, we use a common sense knowledge base, Open Mind, to fill in semantic gaps that might otherwise prevent successful associations.
11465537
Visualizing the affective structure of a text document
This paper introduces an approach for graphically visualizing the affective structure of a text document. A document is first affectively analyzed using a unique textual affect sensing engine, which leverages commonsense knowledge to classify text more reliably and comprehensively than can be achieved with keyword spotting methods alone. Using this engine, sentences are annotated using six basic Ekman emotions. Colors used to represent each of these emotions are sequenced into a color bar, which represents the progression of affect through a text document. Smoothing techniques allow the user to vary the granularity of the affective structure being displayed on the color bar. The bar is hyperlinked in a way such that it can be used to easily navigate the document. A user evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method for visualizing and navigating a document's affective structure facilitates a user's within-document information foraging activity.
15034094
Rendering Aesthetic Impressions of Text in Color Space
What is an artwork and how could a machine become artist? This paper addresses the provocative question by theorizing a computational model of aesthetics and implementing the Aesthetiscope|a computer program that portrays aesthetic impressions of text and renders an abstract color grid artwork reminiscent of early twentieth century abstract expressionism. Following Dewey’s psychological interpretation of \aesthetic" and Jung’s ontology of fundamental psychological functions, we theorize that a viewer flnds an artwork moving and satisfying because it seduces her into rich evocations of thoughts, sensations, intuitions, and feelings. The Aesthetiscope embodies this theory and aims to generate color grids paired with inspiration texts (a word, a poem, or song lyrics), which can be received as aesthetic and artistic by a viewer. The paper describes flve Jungian aesthetic readers which are together capable of creative narrative understanding, and three color-logics that employ psycho-semantic principles to render the aesthetic readings in color space. Evaluations of the Aesthetiscope revealed that the program is best at portraying intuition and feeling, and that overall, the Aesthetiscope is capable of creating the aesthetic of art based on an inspiration text in a non-arbitrary way.
46834678
Efficient Search of Reliable Exceptions
Finding patterns from data sets is a fundamental task of data mining. If we categorize all patterns into strong, weak, and random, conventional data mining techniques are designed only to find strong patterns, which hold for numerous objects and are usually consistent with the expectations of experts. While such strong patterns are helpful in prediction, the unexpectedness and contradiction exhibited by weak patterns are also very useful although they represent a relatively small number of objects. In this paper, we address the problem of finding weak patterns (i.e., reliable exceptions) from databases. A simple and efficient approach is proposed which uses deviation analysis to identify interesting exceptions and explore reliable ones. Besides, it is flexible in handling both subjective and objective exceptions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through a set of real-life data sets, and present interesting findings.
23957657
Terminology model discovery using natural language processing and visualization techniques
Medical terminologies are important for unambiguous encoding and exchange of clinical information. The traditional manual method of developing terminology models is time-consuming and limited in the number of phrases that a human developer can examine. In this paper, we present an automated method for developing medical terminology models based on natural language processing (NLP) and information visualization techniques. Surgical pathology reports were selected as the testing corpus for developing a pathology procedure terminology model. The use of a general NLP processor for the medical domain, MedLEE, provides an automated method for acquiring semantic structures from a free text corpus and sheds light on a new high-throughput method of medical terminology model development. The use of an information visualization technique supports the summarization and visualization of the large quantity of semantic structures generated from medical documents. We believe that a general method based on NLP and information visualization will facilitate the modeling of medical terminologies.
2276859
Dynamically Generating a Protein Entity Dictionary Using Online Resources
With the overwhelming amount of biological knowledge stored in free text, natural language processing (NLP) has received much attention recently to make the task of managing information recorded in free text more feasible. One requirement for most NLP systems is the ability to accurately recognize biological entity terms in free text and the ability to map these terms to corresponding records in databases. Such task is called biological named entity tagging. In this paper, we present a system that automatically constructs a protein entity dictionary, which contains gene or protein names associated with UniProt identifiers using online resources. The system can run periodically to always keep up-to-date with these online resources. Using online resources that were available on Dec. 25, 2004, we obtained 4,046,733 terms for 1,640,082 entities. The dictionary can be accessed from the following website: http://biocreative.ifsm.umbc.edu/biothesaurus/.
7863387
Understanding Neural Networks via Rule Extraction
Although backpropagation neural networks generally predict better than decision trees do for pattern classification problems, they are often regarded as black boxes, i.e., their predictions are not as interpretable as those of decision trees. This paper argues that this is because there has been no proper technique that enables us to do so. With an algorithm that can extract rules, by drawing parallels with those of decision trees, we show that the predictions of a network can be explained via rules extracted from it, thereby, the network can be understood. Experiments demonstrate that rules extracted from neural networks are comparable with those of decision trees in terms of predictive accuracy, number of rules and average number of conditions for a rule; they preserve high predictive accuracy of original networks.
6076549
Executable JVM model for analytical reasoning: a study
To study the properties of the Java Virtual Machine(JVM) and Java programs, our research group has produced a series of JVM models written in a functional subset of Common Lisp. In this paper, we present our most complete JVM model from this series, namely, M6, which is derived from a careful study of the J2ME KVM [16] implementation.On the one hand, our JVM model is a conventional machine emulator. M6 models accurately almost all aspects of the KVM implementation, including the dynamic class loading, class initialization and synchronization via monitors. It executes most J2ME Java programs that do not use any I/O or floating point operations. Engineers may consider M6 an implementation of the JVM. It is implemented with around 10K lines in 20+ modules.On the other hand, M6 is a novel model that allows for analytical reasoning besides conventional testing. M6 is written in an applicative (side-effect free) subset of Common Lisp, for which we have given precise meaning in terms of axioms and inference rules. A property of M6 can be expressed as a formula. Rules of interference can be used analytically to derive properties of M6 and the Java programs that run on the model, using a mechanical theorem prover.We argue that our approach of building an executable model of the system with an axiomatically described functional language can bring benefits from both the testing and the formal reasoning worlds.