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cs/0103007
Two-parameter Model of Word Length "Language - Genre"
cs.CL
A two-parameter model of word length measured by the number of syllables comprising it is proposed. The first parameter is dependent on language type, the second one - on text genre and reflects the degree of completion of synergetic processes of language optimization.
cs/0103010
Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two: Syntactic Structure Recognition in Japanese and English Sentences
cs.CL
George A. Miller said that human beings have only seven chunks in short-term memory, plus or minus two. We counted the number of bunsetsus (phrases) whose modifiees are undetermined in each step of an analysis of the dependency structure of Japanese sentences, and which therefore must be stored in short-term memory. The number was roughly less than nine, the upper bound of seven plus or minus two. We also obtained similar results with English sentences under the assumption that human beings recognize a series of words, such as a noun phrase (NP), as a unit. This indicates that if we assume that the human cognitive units in Japanese and English are bunsetsu and NP respectively, analysis will support Miller's $7 \pm 2$ theory.
cs/0103011
A Machine-Learning Approach to Estimating the Referential Properties of Japanese Noun Phrases
cs.CL
The referential properties of noun phrases in the Japanese language, which has no articles, are useful for article generation in Japanese-English machine translation and for anaphora resolution in Japanese noun phrases. They are generally classified as generic noun phrases, definite noun phrases, and indefinite noun phrases. In the previous work, referential properties were estimated by developing rules that used clue words. If two or more rules were in conflict with each other, the category having the maximum total score given by the rules was selected as the desired category. The score given by each rule was established by hand, so the manpower cost was high. In this work, we automatically adjusted these scores by using a machine-learning method and succeeded in reducing the amount of manpower needed to adjust these scores.
cs/0103012
Meaning Sort - Three examples: dictionary construction, tagged corpus construction, and information presentation system
cs.CL
It is often useful to sort words into an order that reflects relations among their meanings as obtained by using a thesaurus. In this paper, we introduce a method of arranging words semantically by using several types of `{\sf is-a}' thesauri and a multi-dimensional thesaurus. We also describe three major applications where a meaning sort is useful and show the effectiveness of a meaning sort. Since there is no doubt that a word list in meaning-order is easier to use than a word list in some random order, a meaning sort, which can easily produce a word list in meaning-order, must be useful and effective.
cs/0103013
CRL at Ntcir2
cs.CL
We have developed systems of two types for NTCIR2. One is an enhenced version of the system we developed for NTCIR1 and IREX. It submitted retrieval results for JJ and CC tasks. A variety of parameters were tried with the system. It used such characteristics of newspapers as locational information in the CC tasks. The system got good results for both of the tasks. The other system is a portable system which avoids free parameters as much as possible. The system submitted retrieval results for JJ, JE, EE, EJ, and CC tasks. The system automatically determined the number of top documents and the weight of the original query used in automatic-feedback retrieval. It also determined relevant terms quite robustly. For EJ and JE tasks, it used document expansion to augment the initial queries. It achieved good results, except on the CC tasks.
cs/0103015
Fitness Uniform Selection to Preserve Genetic Diversity
cs.AI cs.DC cs.LG q-bio
In evolutionary algorithms, the fitness of a population increases with time by mutating and recombining individuals and by a biased selection of more fit individuals. The right selection pressure is critical in ensuring sufficient optimization progress on the one hand and in preserving genetic diversity to be able to escape from local optima on the other. We propose a new selection scheme, which is uniform in the fitness values. It generates selection pressure towards sparsely populated fitness regions, not necessarily towards higher fitness, as is the case for all other selection schemes. We show that the new selection scheme can be much more effective than standard selection schemes.
cs/0103020
Belief Revision: A Critique
cs.AI cs.LO
We examine carefully the rationale underlying the approaches to belief change taken in the literature, and highlight what we view as methodological problems. We argue that to study belief change carefully, we must be quite explicit about the ``ontology'' or scenario underlying the belief change process. This is something that has been missing in previous work, with its focus on postulates. Our analysis shows that we must pay particular attention to two issues that have often been taken for granted: The first is how we model the agent's epistemic state. (Do we use a set of beliefs, or a richer structure, such as an ordering on worlds? And if we use a set of beliefs, in what language are these beliefs are expressed?) We show that even postulates that have been called ``beyond controversy'' are unreasonable when the agent's beliefs include beliefs about her own epistemic state as well as the external world. The second is the status of observations. (Are observations known to be true, or just believed? In the latter case, how firm is the belief?) Issues regarding the status of observations arise particularly when we consider iterated belief revision, and we must confront the possibility of revising by p and then by not-p.
cs/0103022
Secure, Efficient Data Transport and Replica Management for High-Performance Data-Intensive Computing
cs.DC cs.DB
An emerging class of data-intensive applications involve the geographically dispersed extraction of complex scientific information from very large collections of measured or computed data. Such applications arise, for example, in experimental physics, where the data in question is generated by accelerators, and in simulation science, where the data is generated by supercomputers. So-called Data Grids provide essential infrastructure for such applications, much as the Internet provides essential services for applications such as e-mail and the Web. We describe here two services that we believe are fundamental to any Data Grid: reliable, high-speed transporet and replica management. Our high-speed transport service, GridFTP, extends the popular FTP protocol with new features required for Data Grid applciations, such as striping and partial file access. Our replica management service integrates a replica catalog with GridFTP transfers to provide for the creation, registration, location, and management of dataset replicas. We present the design of both services and also preliminary performance results. Our implementations exploit security and other services provided by the Globus Toolkit.
cs/0103026
A Decision Tree of Bigrams is an Accurate Predictor of Word Sense
cs.CL
This paper presents a corpus-based approach to word sense disambiguation where a decision tree assigns a sense to an ambiguous word based on the bigrams that occur nearby. This approach is evaluated using the sense-tagged corpora from the 1998 SENSEVAL word sense disambiguation exercise. It is more accurate than the average results reported for 30 of 36 words, and is more accurate than the best results for 19 of 36 words.
cs/0104005
Bootstrapping Structure using Similarity
cs.LG cs.CL
In this paper a new similarity-based learning algorithm, inspired by string edit-distance (Wagner and Fischer, 1974), is applied to the problem of bootstrapping structure from scratch. The algorithm takes a corpus of unannotated sentences as input and returns a corpus of bracketed sentences. The method works on pairs of unstructured sentences or sentences partially bracketed by the algorithm that have one or more words in common. It finds parts of sentences that are interchangeable (i.e. the parts of the sentences that are different in both sentences). These parts are taken as possible constituents of the same type. While this corresponds to the basic bootstrapping step of the algorithm, further structure may be learned from comparison with other (similar) sentences. We used this method for bootstrapping structure from the flat sentences of the Penn Treebank ATIS corpus, and compared the resulting structured sentences to the structured sentences in the ATIS corpus. Similarly, the algorithm was tested on the OVIS corpus. We obtained 86.04 % non-crossing brackets precision on the ATIS corpus and 89.39 % non-crossing brackets precision on the OVIS corpus.
cs/0104006
ABL: Alignment-Based Learning
cs.LG cs.CL
This paper introduces a new type of grammar learning algorithm, inspired by string edit distance (Wagner and Fischer, 1974). The algorithm takes a corpus of flat sentences as input and returns a corpus of labelled, bracketed sentences. The method works on pairs of unstructured sentences that have one or more words in common. When two sentences are divided into parts that are the same in both sentences and parts that are different, this information is used to find parts that are interchangeable. These parts are taken as possible constituents of the same type. After this alignment learning step, the selection learning step selects the most probable constituents from all possible constituents. This method was used to bootstrap structure on the ATIS corpus (Marcus et al., 1993) and on the OVIS (Openbaar Vervoer Informatie Systeem (OVIS) stands for Public Transport Information System.) corpus (Bonnema et al., 1997). While the results are encouraging (we obtained up to 89.25 % non-crossing brackets precision), this paper will point out some of the shortcomings of our approach and will suggest possible solutions.
cs/0104007
Bootstrapping Syntax and Recursion using Alignment-Based Learning
cs.LG cs.CL
This paper introduces a new type of unsupervised learning algorithm, based on the alignment of sentences and Harris's (1951) notion of interchangeability. The algorithm is applied to an untagged, unstructured corpus of natural language sentences, resulting in a labelled, bracketed version of the corpus. Firstly, the algorithm aligns all sentences in the corpus in pairs, resulting in a partition of the sentences consisting of parts of the sentences that are similar in both sentences and parts that are dissimilar. This information is used to find (possibly overlapping) constituents. Next, the algorithm selects (non-overlapping) constituents. Several instances of the algorithm are applied to the ATIS corpus (Marcus et al., 1993) and the OVIS (Openbaar Vervoer Informatie Systeem (OVIS) stands for Public Transport Information System.) corpus (Bonnema et al., 1997). Apart from the promising numerical results, the most striking result is that even the simplest algorithm based on alignment learns recursion.
cs/0104008
Event Indexing Systems for Efficient Selection and Analysis of HERA Data
cs.DB cs.IR
The design and implementation of two software systems introduced to improve the efficiency of offline analysis of event data taken with the ZEUS Detector at the HERA electron-proton collider at DESY are presented. Two different approaches were made, one using a set of event directories and the other using a tag database based on a commercial object-oriented database management system. These are described and compared. Both systems provide quick direct access to individual collision events in a sequential data store of several terabytes, and they both considerably improve the event analysis efficiency. In particular the tag database provides a very flexible selection mechanism and can dramatically reduce the computing time needed to extract small subsamples from the total event sample. Gains as large as a factor 20 have been obtained.
cs/0104009
Evaluating Recommendation Algorithms by Graph Analysis
cs.IR cs.DM cs.DS
We present a novel framework for evaluating recommendation algorithms in terms of the `jumps' that they make to connect people to artifacts. This approach emphasizes reachability via an algorithm within the implicit graph structure underlying a recommender dataset, and serves as a complement to evaluation in terms of predictive accuracy. The framework allows us to consider questions relating algorithmic parameters to properties of the datasets. For instance, given a particular algorithm `jump,' what is the average path length from a person to an artifact? Or, what choices of minimum ratings and jumps maintain a connected graph? We illustrate the approach with a common jump called the `hammock' using movie recommender datasets.
cs/0104010
Type Arithmetics: Computation based on the theory of types
cs.CL
The present paper shows meta-programming turn programming, which is rich enough to express arbitrary arithmetic computations. We demonstrate a type system that implements Peano arithmetics, slightly generalized to negative numbers. Certain types in this system denote numerals. Arithmetic operations on such types-numerals - addition, subtraction, and even division - are expressed as type reduction rules executed by a compiler. A remarkable trait is that division by zero becomes a type error - and reported as such by a compiler.
cs/0104011
Potholes on the Royal Road
cs.NE nlin.AO
It is still unclear how an evolutionary algorithm (EA) searches a fitness landscape, and on what fitness landscapes a particular EA will do well. The validity of the building-block hypothesis, a major tenet of traditional genetic algorithm theory, remains controversial despite its continued use to justify claims about EAs. This paper outlines a research program to begin to answer some of these open questions, by extending the work done in the royal road project. The short-term goal is to find a simple class of functions which the simple genetic algorithm optimizes better than other optimization methods, such as hillclimbers. A dialectical heuristic for searching for such a class is introduced. As an example of using the heuristic, the simple genetic algorithm is compared with a set of hillclimbers on a simple subset of the hyperplane-defined functions, the pothole functions.
cs/0104013
Shooting Over or Under the Mark: Towards a Reliable and Flexible Anticipation in the Economy
cs.CE
The real monetary economy is grounded upon monetary flow equilibration or the activity of actualizing monetary flow continuity at each economic agent except for the central bank. Every update of monetary flow continuity at each agent constantly causes monetary flow equilibration at the neighborhood agents. Every monetary flow equilibration as the activity of shooting the mark identified as monetary flow continuity turns out to be off the mark, and constantly generate the similar activities in sequence. Monetary flow equilibration ceaselessly reverberating in the economy performs two functions. One is to seek an organization on its own, and the other is to perturb the ongoing organization. Monetary flow equilibration as the agency of seeking and perturbing its organization also serves as a means of predicting its behavior. The likely organizational behavior could be the one that remains most robust against monetary flow equilibration as an agency of applying perturbations.
cs/0104014
Tracing a Faint Fingerprint of the Invisible Hand?
cs.CE
Any economic agent constituting the monetary economy maintains the activity of monetary flow equilibration for fulfilling the condition of monetary flow continuity in the record, except at the central bank. At the same time, monetary flow equilibration at one economic agent constantly induces at other agents in the economy further flow disequilibrium to be eliminated subsequently. We propose the rate of monetary flow disequilibration as a figure measuring the progressive movement of the economy. The rate of disequilibration was read out of both the Japanese and the United States monetary economy recorded over the last fifty years.
cs/0104017
Local Search Techniques for Constrained Portfolio Selection Problems
cs.CE cs.AI
We consider the problem of selecting a portfolio of assets that provides the investor a suitable balance of expected return and risk. With respect to the seminal mean-variance model of Markowitz, we consider additional constraints on the cardinality of the portfolio and on the quantity of individual shares. Such constraints better capture the real-world trading system, but make the problem more difficult to be solved with exact methods. We explore the use of local search techniques, mainly tabu search, for the portfolio selection problem. We compare and combine previous work on portfolio selection that makes use of the local search approach and we propose new algorithms that combine different neighborhood relations. In addition, we show how the use of randomization and of a simple form of adaptiveness simplifies the setting of a large number of critical parameters. Finally, we show how our techniques perform on public benchmarks.
cs/0104018
Several new domain-type and boundary-type numerical discretization schemes with radial basis function
cs.NA cs.CE
This paper is concerned with a few novel RBF-based numerical schemes discretizing partial differential equations. For boundary-type methods, we derive the indirect and direct symmetric boundary knot methods (BKM). The resulting interpolation matrix of both is always symmetric irrespective of boundary geometry and conditions. In particular, the direct BKM applies the practical physical variables rather than expansion coefficients and becomes very competitive to the boundary element method. On the other hand, based on the multiple reciprocity principle, we invent the RBF-based boundary particle method (BPM) for general inhomogeneous problems without a need using inner nodes. The direct and symmetric BPM schemes are also developed. For domain-type RBF discretization schemes, by using the Green integral we develop a new Hermite RBF scheme called as the modified Kansa method (MKM), which differs from the symmetric Hermite RBF scheme in that the MKM discretizes both governing equation and boundary conditions on the same boundary nodes. The local spline version of the MKM is named as the finite knot method (FKM). Both MKM and FKM significantly reduce calculation errors at nodes adjacent to boundary. In addition, the nonsingular high-order fundamental or general solution is strongly recommended as the RBF in the domain-type methods and dual reciprocity method approximation of particular solution relating to the BKM. It is stressed that all the above discretization methods of boundary-type and domain-type are symmetric, meshless, and integration-free. The spline-based schemes will produce desirable symmetric sparse banded interpolation matrix. In appendix, we present a Hermite scheme to eliminate edge effect on the RBF geometric modeling and imaging.
cs/0104019
Dynamic Nonlocal Language Modeling via Hierarchical Topic-Based Adaptation
cs.CL
This paper presents a novel method of generating and applying hierarchical, dynamic topic-based language models. It proposes and evaluates new cluster generation, hierarchical smoothing and adaptive topic-probability estimation techniques. These combined models help capture long-distance lexical dependencies. Experiments on the Broadcast News corpus show significant improvement in perplexity (10.5% overall and 33.5% on target vocabulary).
cs/0104020
Coaxing Confidences from an Old Friend: Probabilistic Classifications from Transformation Rule Lists
cs.CL cs.AI
Transformation-based learning has been successfully employed to solve many natural language processing problems. It has many positive features, but one drawback is that it does not provide estimates of class membership probabilities. In this paper, we present a novel method for obtaining class membership probabilities from a transformation-based rule list classifier. Three experiments are presented which measure the modeling accuracy and cross-entropy of the probabilistic classifier on unseen data and the degree to which the output probabilities from the classifier can be used to estimate confidences in its classification decisions. The results of these experiments show that, for the task of text chunking, the estimates produced by this technique are more informative than those generated by a state-of-the-art decision tree.
cs/0104022
Microplanning with Communicative Intentions: The SPUD System
cs.CL
The process of microplanning encompasses a range of problems in Natural Language Generation (NLG), such as referring expression generation, lexical choice, and aggregation, problems in which a generator must bridge underlying domain-specific representations and general linguistic representations. In this paper, we describe a uniform approach to microplanning based on declarative representations of a generator's communicative intent. These representations describe the results of NLG: communicative intent associates the concrete linguistic structure planned by the generator with inferences that show how the meaning of that structure communicates needed information about some application domain in the current discourse context. Our approach, implemented in the SPUD (sentence planning using description) microplanner, uses the lexicalized tree-adjoining grammar formalism (LTAG) to connect structure to meaning and uses modal logic programming to connect meaning to context. At the same time, communicative intent representations provide a resource for the process of NLG. Using representations of communicative intent, a generator can augment the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of an incomplete sentence simultaneously, and can assess its progress on the various problems of microplanning incrementally. The declarative formulation of communicative intent translates into a well-defined methodology for designing grammatical and conceptual resources which the generator can use to achieve desired microplanning behavior in a specified domain.
cs/0105001
Correction of Errors in a Modality Corpus Used for Machine Translation by Using Machine-learning Method
cs.CL
We performed corpus correction on a modality corpus for machine translation by using such machine-learning methods as the maximum-entropy method. We thus constructed a high-quality modality corpus based on corpus correction. We compared several kinds of methods for corpus correction in our experiments and developed a good method for corpus correction.
cs/0105002
Man [and Woman] vs. Machine: A Case Study in Base Noun Phrase Learning
cs.CL
A great deal of work has been done demonstrating the ability of machine learning algorithms to automatically extract linguistic knowledge from annotated corpora. Very little work has gone into quantifying the difference in ability at this task between a person and a machine. This paper is a first step in that direction.
cs/0105003
Rule Writing or Annotation: Cost-efficient Resource Usage for Base Noun Phrase Chunking
cs.CL cs.AI
This paper presents a comprehensive empirical comparison between two approaches for developing a base noun phrase chunker: human rule writing and active learning using interactive real-time human annotation. Several novel variations on active learning are investigated, and underlying cost models for cross-modal machine learning comparison are presented and explored. Results show that it is more efficient and more successful by several measures to train a system using active learning annotation rather than hand-crafted rule writing at a comparable level of human labor investment.
cs/0105004
Parallel implementation of the TRANSIMS micro-simulation
cs.CE
This paper describes the parallel implementation of the TRANSIMS traffic micro-simulation. The parallelization method is domain decomposition, which means that each CPU of the parallel computer is responsible for a different geographical area of the simulated region. We describe how information between domains is exchanged, and how the transportation network graph is partitioned. An adaptive scheme is used to optimize load balancing. We then demonstrate how computing speeds of our parallel micro-simulations can be systematically predicted once the scenario and the computer architecture are known. This makes it possible, for example, to decide if a certain study is feasible with a certain computing budget, and how to invest that budget. The main ingredients of the prediction are knowledge about the parallel implementation of the micro-simulation, knowledge about the characteristics of the partitioning of the transportation network graph, and knowledge about the interaction of these quantities with the computer system. In particular, we investigate the differences between switched and non-switched topologies, and the effects of 10 Mbit, 100 Mbit, and Gbit Ethernet. keywords: Traffic simulation, parallel computing, transportation planning, TRANSIMS
cs/0105005
A Complete WordNet1.5 to WordNet1.6 Mapping
cs.CL
We describe a robust approach for linking already existing lexical/semantic hierarchies. We use a constraint satisfaction algorithm (relaxation labelling) to select --among a set of candidates-- the node in a target taxonomy that bests matches each node in a source taxonomy. In this paper we present the complete mapping of the nominal, verbal, adjectival and adverbial parts of WordNet 1.5 onto WordNet 1.6.
cs/0105012
Joint and conditional estimation of tagging and parsing models
cs.CL
This paper compares two different ways of estimating statistical language models. Many statistical NLP tagging and parsing models are estimated by maximizing the (joint) likelihood of the fully-observed training data. However, since these applications only require the conditional probability distributions, these distributions can in principle be learnt by maximizing the conditional likelihood of the training data. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, models estimated by maximizing the joint were superior to models estimated by maximizing the conditional, even though some of the latter models intuitively had access to ``more information''.
cs/0105014
Errata and supplements to: Orthonormal RBF Wavelet and Ridgelet-like Series and Transforms for High-Dimensional Problems
cs.NA cs.CE
In recent years some attempts have been done to relate the RBF with wavelets in handling high dimensional multiscale problems. To the author's knowledge, however, the orthonormal and bi-orthogonal RBF wavelets are still missing in the literature. By using the nonsingular general solution and singular fundamental solution of differential operator, recently the present author, refer. 3, made some substantial headway to derive the orthonormal RBF wavelets series and transforms. The methodology can be generalized to create the RBF wavelets by means of the orthogonal convolution kernel function of various integral operators. In particular, it is stressed that the presented RBF wavelets does not apply the tensor product to handle multivariate problems at all. This note is to correct some errata in reference 3 and also to supply a few latest advances in the study of orthornormal RBF wavelet transforms.
cs/0105015
The alldifferent Constraint: A Survey
cs.PL cs.AI
The constraint of difference is known to the constraint programming community since Lauriere introduced Alice in 1978. Since then, several solving strategies have been designed for this constraint. In this paper we give both a practical overview and an abstract comparison of these different strategies.
cs/0105016
Probabilistic top-down parsing and language modeling
cs.CL
This paper describes the functioning of a broad-coverage probabilistic top-down parser, and its application to the problem of language modeling for speech recognition. The paper first introduces key notions in language modeling and probabilistic parsing, and briefly reviews some previous approaches to using syntactic structure for language modeling. A lexicalized probabilistic top-down parser is then presented, which performs very well, in terms of both the accuracy of returned parses and the efficiency with which they are found, relative to the best broad-coverage statistical parsers. A new language model which utilizes probabilistic top-down parsing is then outlined, and empirical results show that it improves upon previous work in test corpus perplexity. Interpolation with a trigram model yields an exceptional improvement relative to the improvement observed by other models, demonstrating the degree to which the information captured by our parsing model is orthogonal to that captured by a trigram model. A small recognition experiment also demonstrates the utility of the model.
cs/0105017
Optimization Over Zonotopes and Training Support Vector Machines
cs.CG cs.AI
We make a connection between classical polytopes called zonotopes and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers. We combine this connection with the ellipsoid method to give some new theoretical results on training SVMs. We also describe some special properties of soft margin C-SVMs as parameter C goes to infinity.
cs/0105019
Robust Probabilistic Predictive Syntactic Processing
cs.CL
This thesis presents a broad-coverage probabilistic top-down parser, and its application to the problem of language modeling for speech recognition. The parser builds fully connected derivations incrementally, in a single pass from left-to-right across the string. We argue that the parsing approach that we have adopted is well-motivated from a psycholinguistic perspective, as a model that captures probabilistic dependencies between lexical items, as part of the process of building connected syntactic structures. The basic parser and conditional probability models are presented, and empirical results are provided for its parsing accuracy on both newspaper text and spontaneous telephone conversations. Modifications to the probability model are presented that lead to improved performance. A new language model which uses the output of the parser is then defined. Perplexity and word error rate reduction are demonstrated over trigram models, even when the trigram is trained on significantly more data. Interpolation on a word-by-word basis with a trigram model yields additional improvements.
cs/0105021
Solving Composed First-Order Constraints from Discrete-Time Robust Control
cs.LO cs.AI cs.CE
This paper deals with a problem from discrete-time robust control which requires the solution of constraints over the reals that contain both universal and existential quantifiers. For solving this problem we formulate it as a program in a (fictitious) constraint logic programming language with explicit quantifier notation. This allows us to clarify the special structure of the problem, and to extend an algorithm for computing approximate solution sets of first-order constraints over the reals to exploit this structure. As a result we can deal with inputs that are clearly out of reach for current symbolic solvers.
cs/0105022
Multi-Channel Parallel Adaptation Theory for Rule Discovery
cs.AI
In this paper, we introduce a new machine learning theory based on multi-channel parallel adaptation for rule discovery. This theory is distinguished from the familiar parallel-distributed adaptation theory of neural networks in terms of channel-based convergence to the target rules. We show how to realize this theory in a learning system named CFRule. CFRule is a parallel weight-based model, but it departs from traditional neural computing in that its internal knowledge is comprehensible. Furthermore, when the model converges upon training, each channel converges to a target rule. The model adaptation rule is derived by multi-level parallel weight optimization based on gradient descent. Since, however, gradient descent only guarantees local optimization, a multi-channel regression-based optimization strategy is developed to effectively deal with this problem. Formally, we prove that the CFRule model can explicitly and precisely encode any given rule set. Also, we prove a property related to asynchronous parallel convergence, which is a critical element of the multi-channel parallel adaptation theory for rule learning. Thanks to the quantizability nature of the CFRule model, rules can be extracted completely and soundly via a threshold-based mechanism. Finally, the practical application of the theory is demonstrated in DNA promoter recognition and hepatitis prognosis prediction.
cs/0105023
Generating a 3D Simulation of a Car Accident from a Written Description in Natural Language: the CarSim System
cs.CL
This paper describes a prototype system to visualize and animate 3D scenes from car accident reports, written in French. The problem of generating such a 3D simulation can be divided into two subtasks: the linguistic analysis and the virtual scene generation. As a means of communication between these two modules, we first designed a template formalism to represent a written accident report. The CarSim system first processes written reports, gathers relevant information, and converts it into a formal description. Then, it creates the corresponding 3D scene and animates the vehicles.
cs/0105025
Market-Based Reinforcement Learning in Partially Observable Worlds
cs.AI cs.LG cs.MA cs.NE
Unlike traditional reinforcement learning (RL), market-based RL is in principle applicable to worlds described by partially observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), where an agent needs to learn short-term memories of relevant previous events in order to execute optimal actions. Most previous work, however, has focused on reactive settings (MDPs) instead of POMDPs. Here we reimplement a recent approach to market-based RL and for the first time evaluate it in a toy POMDP setting.
cs/0105026
Toward Natural Gesture/Speech Control of a Large Display
cs.CV cs.HC
In recent years because of the advances in computer vision research, free hand gestures have been explored as means of human-computer interaction (HCI). Together with improved speech processing technology it is an important step toward natural multimodal HCI. However, inclusion of non-predefined continuous gestures into a multimodal framework is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a structured approach for studying patterns of multimodal language in the context of a 2D-display control. We consider systematic analysis of gestures from observable kinematical primitives to their semantics as pertinent to a linguistic structure. Proposed semantic classification of co-verbal gestures distinguishes six categories based on their spatio-temporal deixis. We discuss evolution of a computational framework for gesture and speech integration which was used to develop an interactive testbed (iMAP). The testbed enabled elicitation of adequate, non-sequential, multimodal patterns in a narrative mode of HCI. Conducted user studies illustrate significance of accounting for the temporal alignment of gesture and speech parts in semantic mapping. Furthermore, co-occurrence analysis of gesture/speech production suggests syntactic organization of gestures at the lexical level.
cs/0105027
Bounds on sample size for policy evaluation in Markov environments
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CC
Reinforcement learning means finding the optimal course of action in Markovian environments without knowledge of the environment's dynamics. Stochastic optimization algorithms used in the field rely on estimates of the value of a policy. Typically, the value of a policy is estimated from results of simulating that very policy in the environment. This approach requires a large amount of simulation as different points in the policy space are considered. In this paper, we develop value estimators that utilize data gathered when using one policy to estimate the value of using another policy, resulting in much more data-efficient algorithms. We consider the question of accumulating a sufficient experience and give PAC-style bounds.
cs/0105030
The OLAC Metadata Set and Controlled Vocabularies
cs.CL cs.DL
As language data and associated technologies proliferate and as the language resources community rapidly expands, it has become difficult to locate and reuse existing resources. Are there any lexical resources for such-and-such a language? What tool can work with transcripts in this particular format? What is a good format to use for linguistic data of this type? Questions like these dominate many mailing lists, since web search engines are an unreliable way to find language resources. This paper describes a new digital infrastructure for language resource discovery, based on the Open Archives Initiative, and called OLAC -- the Open Language Archives Community. The OLAC Metadata Set and the associated controlled vocabularies facilitate consistent description and focussed searching. We report progress on the metadata set and controlled vocabularies, describing current issues and soliciting input from the language resources community.
cs/0105032
Learning to Cooperate via Policy Search
cs.LG cs.MA
Cooperative games are those in which both agents share the same payoff structure. Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms, such as variants of Q-learning, have been applied to learning cooperative games, but they only apply when the game state is completely observable to both agents. Policy search methods are a reasonable alternative to value-based methods for partially observable environments. In this paper, we provide a gradient-based distributed policy-search method for cooperative games and compare the notion of local optimum to that of Nash equilibrium. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method experimentally in a small, partially observable simulated soccer domain.
cs/0105035
Historical Dynamics of Lexical System as Random Walk Process
cs.CL
It is offered to consider word meanings changes in diachrony as semicontinuous random walk with reflecting and swallowing screens. The basic characteristics of word life cycle are defined. Verification of the model has been realized on the data of Russian words distribution on various age periods.
cs/0105036
Disjunctive Logic Programs with Inheritance
cs.LO cs.AI
The paper proposes a new knowledge representation language, called DLP<, which extends disjunctive logic programming (with strong negation) by inheritance. The addition of inheritance enhances the knowledge modeling features of the language providing a natural representation of default reasoning with exceptions. A declarative model-theoretic semantics of DLP< is provided, which is shown to generalize the Answer Set Semantics of disjunctive logic programs. The knowledge modeling features of the language are illustrated by encoding classical nonmonotonic problems in DLP<. The complexity of DLP< is analyzed, proving that inheritance does not cause any computational overhead, as reasoning in DLP< has exactly the same complexity as reasoning in disjunctive logic programming. This is confirmed by the existence of an efficient translation from DLP< to plain disjunctive logic programming. Using this translation, an advanced KR system supporting the DLP< language has been implemented on top of the DLV system and has subsequently been integrated into DLV.
cs/0105037
Integrating Prosodic and Lexical Cues for Automatic Topic Segmentation
cs.CL
We present a probabilistic model that uses both prosodic and lexical cues for the automatic segmentation of speech into topically coherent units. We propose two methods for combining lexical and prosodic information using hidden Markov models and decision trees. Lexical information is obtained from a speech recognizer, and prosodic features are extracted automatically from speech waveforms. We evaluate our approach on the Broadcast News corpus, using the DARPA-TDT evaluation metrics. Results show that the prosodic model alone is competitive with word-based segmentation methods. Furthermore, we achieve a significant reduction in error by combining the prosodic and word-based knowledge sources.
cs/0106003
A note on radial basis function computing
cs.CE cs.CG
This note carries three purposes involving our latest advances on the radial basis function (RBF) approach. First, we will introduce a new scheme employing the boundary knot method (BKM) to nonlinear convection-diffusion problem. It is stressed that the new scheme directly results in a linear BKM formulation of nonlinear problems by using response point-dependent RBFs, which can be solved by any linear solver. Then we only need to solve a single nonlinear algebraic equation for desirable unknown at some inner node of interest. The numerical results demonstrate high accuracy and efficiency of this nonlinear BKM strategy. Second, we extend the concepts of distance function, which include time-space and variable transformation distance functions. Finally, we demonstrate that if the nodes are symmetrically placed, the RBF coefficient matrices have either centrosymmetric or skew centrosymmetric structures. The factorization features of such matrices lead to a considerable reduction in the RBF computing effort. A simple approach is also presented to reduce the ill-conditioning of RBF interpolation matrices in general cases.
cs/0106004
Soft Scheduling
cs.AI cs.PL
Classical notions of disjunctive and cumulative scheduling are studied from the point of view of soft constraint satisfaction. Soft disjunctive scheduling is introduced as an instance of soft CSP and preferences included in this problem are applied to generate a lower bound based on existing discrete capacity resource. Timetabling problems at Purdue University and Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University considering individual course requirements of students demonstrate practical problems which are solved via proposed methods. Implementation of general preference constraint solver is discussed and first computational results for timetabling problem are presented.
cs/0106005
The Representation of Legal Contracts
cs.AI cs.CY
The paper outlines ongoing research on logic-based tools for the analysis and representation of legal contracts of the kind frequently encountered in large-scale engineering projects and complex, long-term trading agreements. We consider both contract formation and contract performance, in each case identifying the representational issues and the prospects for providing automated support tools.
cs/0106006
A Constraint-Driven System for Contract Assembly
cs.AI
We present an approach for modelling the structure and coarse content of legal documents with a view to providing automated support for the drafting of contracts and contract database retrieval. The approach is designed to be applicable where contract drafting is based on model-form contracts or on existing examples of a similar type. The main features of the approach are: (1) the representation addresses the structure and the interrelationships between the constituent parts of contracts, but not the text of the document itself; (2) the representation of documents is separated from the mechanisms that manipulate it; and (3) the drafting process is subject to a collection of explicitly stated constraints that govern the structure of the documents. We describe the representation of document instances and of 'generic documents', which are data structures used to drive the creation of new document instances, and we show extracts from a sample session to illustrate the features of a prototype system implemented in MacProlog.
cs/0106007
Modelling Contractual Arguments
cs.AI
One influential approach to assessing the "goodness" of arguments is offered by the Pragma-Dialectical school (p-d) (Eemeren & Grootendorst 1992). This can be compared with Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Mann & Thompson 1988), an approach that originates in discourse analysis. In p-d terms an argument is good if it avoids committing a fallacy, whereas in RST terms an argument is good if it is coherent. RST has been criticised (Snoeck Henkemans 1997) for providing only a partially functional account of argument, and similar criticisms have been raised in the Natural Language Generation (NLG) community-particularly by Moore & Pollack (1992)- with regards to its account of intentionality in text in general. Mann and Thompson themselves note that although RST can be successfully applied to a wide range of texts from diverse domains, it fails to characterise some types of text, most notably legal contracts. There is ongoing research in the Artificial Intelligence and Law community exploring the potential for providing electronic support to contract negotiators, focusing on long-term, complex engineering agreements (see for example Daskalopulu & Sergot 1997). This paper provides a brief introduction to RST and illustrates its shortcomings with respect to contractual text. An alternative approach for modelling argument structure is presented which not only caters for contractual text, but also overcomes the aforementioned limitations of RST.
cs/0106008
Computing Functional and Relational Box Consistency by Structured Propagation in Atomic Constraint Systems
cs.PL cs.AI
Box consistency has been observed to yield exponentially better performance than chaotic constraint propagation in the interval constraint system obtained by decomposing the original expression into primitive constraints. The claim was made that the improvement is due to avoiding decomposition. In this paper we argue that the improvement is due to replacing chaotic iteration by a more structured alternative. To this end we distinguish the existing notion of box consistency from relational box consistency. We show that from a computational point of view it is important to maintain the functional structure in constraint systems that are associated with a system of equations. So far, it has only been considered computationally important that constraint propagation be fair. With the additional structure of functional constraint systems, one can define and implement computationally effective, structured, truncated constraint propagations. The existing algorithm for box consistency is one such. Our results suggest that there are others worth investigating.
cs/0106010
Modelling Legal Contracts as Processes
cs.AI cs.LO
This paper concentrates on the representation of the legal relations that obtain between parties once they have entered a contractual agreement and their evolution as the agreement progresses through time. Contracts are regarded as process and they are analysed in terms of the obligations that are active at various points during their life span. An informal notation is introduced that summarizes conveniently the states of an agreement as it evolves over time. Such a representation enables us to determine what the status of an agreement is, given an event or a sequence of events that concern the performance of actions by the agents involved. This is useful both in the context of contract drafting (where parties might wish to preview how their agreement might evolve) and in the context of contract performance monitoring (where parties might with to establish what their legal positions are once their agreement is in force). The discussion is based on an example that illustrates some typical patterns of contractual obligations.
cs/0106011
Computational properties of environment-based disambiguation
cs.CL cs.HC
The standard pipeline approach to semantic processing, in which sentences are morphologically and syntactically resolved to a single tree before they are interpreted, is a poor fit for applications such as natural language interfaces. This is because the environment information, in the form of the objects and events in the application's run-time environment, cannot be used to inform parsing decisions unless the input sentence is semantically analyzed, but this does not occur until after parsing in the single-tree semantic architecture. This paper describes the computational properties of an alternative architecture, in which semantic analysis is performed on all possible interpretations during parsing, in polynomial time.
cs/0106012
Computational Properties of Metaquerying Problems
cs.DB cs.CC
Metaquerying is a datamining technology by which hidden dependencies among several database relations can be discovered. This tool has already been successfully applied to several real-world applications. Recent papers provide only preliminary results about the complexity of metaquerying. In this paper we define several variants of metaquerying that encompass, as far as we know, all variants defined in the literature. We study both the combined complexity and the data complexity of these variants. We show that, under the combined complexity measure, metaquerying is generally intractable (unless P=NP), lying sometimes quite high in the complexity hierarchies (as high as NP^PP), depending on the characteristics of the plausibility index. However, we are able to single out some tractable and interesting metaquerying cases (whose combined complexity is LOGCFL-complete). As for the data complexity of metaquerying, we prove that, in general, this is in TC0, but lies within AC0 in some simpler cases. Finally, we discuss implementation of metaqueries, by providing algorithms to answer them.
cs/0106014
L.T.Kuzin: Research Program
cs.DM cs.AI cs.SE
Lev T. Kuzin (1928--1997) is one of the founders of modern cybernetics and information science in Russia. He was awarded and honored the USSR State Prize for inspiring vision into the future of technical cybernetics and his invention and innovation of key technologies. The last years he interested in the computational models of geometrical and algebraic nature and their applications in various branches of computer science and information technologies. In the recent years the interest in computation models based on object notion has grown tremendously stimulating an interest to Kuzin's ideas. This year of 50th Anniversary of Cybernetics and on the occasion of his 70th birthday on September 12, 1998 seems especially appropriate for discussing Kuzin's Research Program.
cs/0106015
Organizing Encyclopedic Knowledge based on the Web and its Application to Question Answering
cs.CL
We propose a method to generate large-scale encyclopedic knowledge, which is valuable for much NLP research, based on the Web. We first search the Web for pages containing a term in question. Then we use linguistic patterns and HTML structures to extract text fragments describing the term. Finally, we organize extracted term descriptions based on word senses and domains. In addition, we apply an automatically generated encyclopedia to a question answering system targeting the Japanese Information-Technology Engineers Examination.
cs/0106016
File mapping Rule-based DBMS and Natural Language Processing
cs.CL cs.AI cs.DB cs.IR cs.LG cs.PL
This paper describes the system of storage, extract and processing of information structured similarly to the natural language. For recursive inference the system uses the rules having the same representation, as the data. The environment of storage of information is provided with the File Mapping (SHM) mechanism of operating system. In the paper the main principles of construction of dynamic data structure and language for record of the inference rules are stated; the features of available implementation are considered and the description of the application realizing semantic information retrieval on the natural language is given.
cs/0106021
Object-oriented solutions
cs.LO cs.DB cs.PL
In this paper are briefly outlined the motivations, mathematical ideas in use, pre-formalization and assumptions, object-as-functor construction, `soft' types and concept constructions, case study for concepts based on variable domains, extracting a computational background, and examples of evaluations.
cs/0106023
Object-oriented tools for advanced applications
cs.LO cs.DB cs.PL
This paper contains a brief discussion of the Application Development Environment (ADE) that is used to build database applications involving the graphical user interface (GUI). ADE computing separates the database access and the user interface. The variety of applications may be generated that communicate with different and distinct desktop databases. The advanced techniques allows to involve remote or stored procedures retrieval and call.
cs/0106024
Objects and their computational framework
cs.LO cs.DB cs.PL
Most of the object notions are embedded into a logical domain, especially when dealing with a database theory. Thus, their properties within a computational domain are not yet studied properly. The main topic of this paper is to analyze different concepts of the distinct computational primitive frames to extract the useful object properties and their possible advantages. Some important metaoperators are used to unify the approaches and to establish their possible correspondences.
cs/0106025
Information Integration and Computational Logic
cs.AI
Information Integration is a young and exciting field with enormous research and commercial significance in the new world of the Information Society. It stands at the crossroad of Databases and Artificial Intelligence requiring novel techniques that bring together different methods from these fields. Information from disparate heterogeneous sources often with no a-priori common schema needs to be synthesized in a flexible, transparent and intelligent way in order to respond to the demands of a query thus enabling a more informed decision by the user or application program. The field although relatively young has already found many practical applications particularly for integrating information over the World Wide Web. This paper gives a brief introduction of the field highlighting some of the main current and future research issues and application areas. It attempts to evaluate the current and potential role of Computational Logic in this and suggests some of the problems where logic-based techniques could be used.
cs/0106026
Event Driven Computations for Relational Query Language
cs.LO cs.DB cs.PL
This paper deals with an extended model of computations which uses the parameterized families of entities for data objects and reflects a preliminary outline of this problem. Some topics are selected out, briefly analyzed and arranged to cover a general problem. The authors intended more to discuss the particular topics, their interconnection and computational meaning as a panel proposal, so that this paper is not yet to be evaluated as a closed journal paper. To save space all the technical and implementation features are left for the future paper. Data object is a schematic entity and modelled by the partial function. A notion of type is extended by the variable domains which depend on events and types. A variable domain is built from the potential and schematic individuals and generates the valid families of types depending on a sequence of events. Each valid type consists of the actual individuals which are actual relatively the event or script. In case when a type depends on the script then corresponding view for data objects is attached, otherwise a snapshot is generated. The type thus determined gives an upper range for typed variables so that the local ranges are event driven resulting is the families of actual individuals. An expressive power of the query language is extended using the extensional and intentional relations.
cs/0106027
Event Driven Objects
cs.LO cs.DB cs.SE
A formal consideration in this paper is given for the essential notations to characterize the object that is distinguished in a problem domain. The distinct object is represented by another idealized object, which is a schematic element. When the existence of an element is significant, then a class of these partial elements is dropped down into actual, potential and virtual objects. The potential objects are gathered into the variable domains which are the extended ranges for unbound variables. The families of actual objects are shown to be parameterized with the types and events. The transitions between events are shown to be driven by the scripts. A computational framework arises which is described by the commutative diagrams.
cs/0106028
Pricing Virtual Paths with Quality-of-Service Guarantees as Bundle Derivatives
cs.NI cs.CE
We describe a model of a communication network that allows us to price complex network services as financial derivative contracts based on the spot price of the capacity in individual routers. We prove a theorem of a Girsanov transform that is useful for pricing linear derivatives on underlying assets, which can be used to price many complex network services, and it is used to price an option that gives access to one of several virtual channels between two network nodes, during a specified future time interval. We give the continuous time hedging strategy, for which the option price is independent of the service providers attitude towards risk. The option price contains the density function of a sum of lognormal variables, which has to be evaluated numerically.
cs/0106029
Building Views with Description Logics in ADE: Application Development Environment
cs.LO cs.DB cs.DS
Any of views is formally defined within description logics that were established as a family of logics for modeling complex hereditary structures and have a suitable expressive power. This paper considers the Application Development Environment (ADE) over generalized variable concepts that are used to build database applications involving the supporting views. The front-end user interacts the database via separate ADE access mechanism intermediated by view support. The variety of applications may be generated that communicate with different and distinct desktop databases in a data warehouse. The advanced techniques allows to involve remote or stored procedures retrieval and call.
cs/0106030
Logic, Individuals and Concepts
cs.LO cs.DB cs.DM cs.SE
This extended abstract gives a brief outline of the connections between the descriptions and variable concepts. Thus, the notion of a concept is extended to include both the syntax and semantics features. The evaluation map in use is parameterized by a kind of computational environment, the index, giving rise to indexed concepts. The concepts are inhabited into language by the descriptions from the higher order logic. In general the idea of object-as-functor should assist the designer to outline a programming tool in conceptual shell style.
cs/0106031
Complexity Results and Practical Algorithms for Logics in Knowledge Representation
cs.LO cs.AI
Description Logics (DLs) are used in knowledge-based systems to represent and reason about terminological knowledge of the application domain in a semantically well-defined manner. In this thesis, we establish a number of novel complexity results and give practical algorithms for expressive DLs that provide different forms of counting quantifiers. We show that, in many cases, adding local counting in the form of qualifying number restrictions to DLs does not increase the complexity of the inference problems, even if binary coding of numbers in the input is assumed. On the other hand, we show that adding different forms of global counting restrictions to a logic may increase the complexity of the inference problems dramatically. We provide exact complexity results and a practical, tableau based algorithm for the DL SHIQ, which forms the basis of the highly optimized DL system iFaCT. Finally, we describe a tableau algorithm for the clique guarded fragment (CGF), which we hope will serve as the basis for an efficient implementation of a CGF reasoner.
cs/0106033
location.location.location: Internet Addresses as Evolving Property
cs.CY cs.HC cs.IR
I describe recent developments in the rules governing registration and ownership of Internet and World Wide Web addresses or "domain names." I consider the idea that "virtual" properties like domain names are more similar to real estate than to trademarks. Therefore, it would be economically efficient to grant domain name owners stronger rights than those of trademarks and copyright holders.
cs/0106034
Solving equations in the relational algebra
cs.LO cs.DB
Enumerating all solutions of a relational algebra equation is a natural and powerful operation which, when added as a query language primitive to the nested relational algebra, yields a query language for nested relational databases, equivalent to the well-known powerset algebra. We study \emph{sparse} equations, which are equations with at most polynomially many solutions. We look at their complexity, and compare their expressive power with that of similar notions in the powerset algebra.
cs/0106035
Polymorphic type inference for the relational algebra
cs.LO cs.DB
We give a polymorphic account of the relational algebra. We introduce a formalism of ``type formulas'' specifically tuned for relational algebra expressions, and present an algorithm that computes the ``principal'' type for a given expression. The principal type of an expression is a formula that specifies, in a clear and concise manner, all assignments of types (sets of attributes) to relation names, under which a given relational algebra expression is well-typed, as well as the output type that expression will have under each of these assignments. Topics discussed include complexity and polymorphic expressive power.
cs/0106036
Convergence and Error Bounds for Universal Prediction of Nonbinary Sequences
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CC math.PR
Solomonoff's uncomputable universal prediction scheme $\xi$ allows to predict the next symbol $x_k$ of a sequence $x_1...x_{k-1}$ for any Turing computable, but otherwise unknown, probabilistic environment $\mu$. This scheme will be generalized to arbitrary environmental classes, which, among others, allows the construction of computable universal prediction schemes $\xi$. Convergence of $\xi$ to $\mu$ in a conditional mean squared sense and with $\mu$ probability 1 is proven. It is shown that the average number of prediction errors made by the universal $\xi$ scheme rapidly converges to those made by the best possible informed $\mu$ scheme. The schemes, theorems and proofs are given for general finite alphabet, which results in additional complications as compared to the binary case. Several extensions of the presented theory and results are outlined. They include general loss functions and bounds, games of chance, infinite alphabet, partial and delayed prediction, classification, and more active systems.
cs/0106039
Iterative Residual Rescaling: An Analysis and Generalization of LSI
cs.CL cs.IR
We consider the problem of creating document representations in which inter-document similarity measurements correspond to semantic similarity. We first present a novel subspace-based framework for formalizing this task. Using this framework, we derive a new analysis of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), showing a precise relationship between its performance and the uniformity of the underlying distribution of documents over topics. This analysis helps explain the improvements gained by Ando's (2000) Iterative Residual Rescaling (IRR) algorithm: IRR can compensate for distributional non-uniformity. A further benefit of our framework is that it provides a well-motivated, effective method for automatically determining the rescaling factor IRR depends on, leading to further improvements. A series of experiments over various settings and with several evaluation metrics validates our claims.
cs/0106040
Stacking classifiers for anti-spam filtering of e-mail
cs.CL cs.AI
We evaluate empirically a scheme for combining classifiers, known as stacked generalization, in the context of anti-spam filtering, a novel cost-sensitive application of text categorization. Unsolicited commercial e-mail, or "spam", floods mailboxes, causing frustration, wasting bandwidth, and exposing minors to unsuitable content. Using a public corpus, we show that stacking can improve the efficiency of automatically induced anti-spam filters, and that such filters can be used in real-life applications.
cs/0106043
Using the Distribution of Performance for Studying Statistical NLP Systems and Corpora
cs.CL
Statistical NLP systems are frequently evaluated and compared on the basis of their performances on a single split of training and test data. Results obtained using a single split are, however, subject to sampling noise. In this paper we argue in favour of reporting a distribution of performance figures, obtained by resampling the training data, rather than a single number. The additional information from distributions can be used to make statistically quantified statements about differences across parameter settings, systems, and corpora.
cs/0106044
A Sequential Model for Multi-Class Classification
cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG
Many classification problems require decisions among a large number of competing classes. These tasks, however, are not handled well by general purpose learning methods and are usually addressed in an ad-hoc fashion. We suggest a general approach -- a sequential learning model that utilizes classifiers to sequentially restrict the number of competing classes while maintaining, with high probability, the presence of the true outcome in the candidates set. Some theoretical and computational properties of the model are discussed and we argue that these are important in NLP-like domains. The advantages of the model are illustrated in an experiment in part-of-speech tagging.
cs/0106046
Expressing the cone radius in the relational calculus with real polynomial constraints
cs.DB cs.LO
We show that there is a query expressible in first-order logic over the reals that returns, on any given semi-algebraic set A, for every point a radius around which A is conical. We obtain this result by combining famous results from calculus and real algebraic geometry, notably Sard's theorem and Thom's first isotopy lemma, with recent algorithmic results by Rannou.
cs/0106047
Modeling informational novelty in a conversational system with a hybrid statistical and grammar-based approach to natural language generation
cs.CL
We present a hybrid statistical and grammar-based system for surface natural language generation (NLG) that uses grammar rules, conditions on using those grammar rules, and corpus statistics to determine the word order. We also describe how this surface NLG module is implemented in a prototype conversational system, and how it attempts to model informational novelty by varying the word order. Using a combination of rules and statistical information, the conversational system expresses the novel information differently than the given information, based on the run-time dialog state. We also discuss our plans for evaluating the generation strategy.
cs/0106054
Software Toolkit for Building Embedded and Distributed Knowledge-based Systems
cs.AI cs.DC cs.MA
The paper discusses the basic principles and the architecture of the software toolkit for constructing knowledge-based systems which can be used cooperatively over computer networks and also embedded into larger software systems in different ways. Presented architecture is based on frame knowledge representation and production rules, which also allows to interface high-level programming languages and relational databases by exposing corresponding classes or database tables as frames. Frames located on the remote computers can also be transparently accessed and used in inference, and the dynamic knowledge for specific frames can also be transferred over the network. The issues of implementation of such a system are addressed, which use Java programming language, CORBA and XML for external knowledge representation. Finally, some applications of the toolkit are considered, including e-business approach to knowledge sharing, intelligent web behaviours, etc.
cs/0106055
A Seamless Integration of Association Rule Mining with Database Systems
cs.DB
The need for Knowledge and Data Discovery Management Systems (KDDMS) that support ad hoc data mining queries has been long recognized. A significant amount of research has gone into building tightly coupled systems that integrate association rule mining with database systems. In this paper, we describe a seamless integration scheme for database queries and association rule discovery using a common query optimizer for both. Query trees of expressions in an extended algebra are used for internal representation in the optimizer. The algebraic representation is flexible enough to deal with constrained association rule queries and other variations of association rule specifications. We propose modularization to simplify the query tree for complex tasks in data mining. It paves the way for making use of existing algorithms for constructing query plans in the optimization process. How the integration scheme we present will facilitate greater user control over the data mining process is also discussed. The work described in this paper forms part of a larger project for fully integrating data mining with database management.
cs/0106059
CHR as grammar formalism. A first report
cs.PL cs.CL
Grammars written as Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) can be executed as efficient and robust bottom-up parsers that provide a straightforward, non-backtracking treatment of ambiguity. Abduction with integrity constraints as well as other dynamic hypothesis generation techniques fit naturally into such grammars and are exemplified for anaphora resolution, coordination and text interpretation.
cs/0107002
Enhancing Constraint Propagation with Composition Operators
cs.AI
Constraint propagation is a general algorithmic approach for pruning the search space of a CSP. In a uniform way, K. R. Apt has defined a computation as an iteration of reduction functions over a domain. He has also demonstrated the need for integrating static properties of reduction functions (commutativity and semi-commutativity) to design specialized algorithms such as AC3 and DAC. We introduce here a set of operators for modeling compositions of reduction functions. Two of the major goals are to tackle parallel computations, and dynamic behaviours (such as slow convergence).
cs/0107005
The Role of Conceptual Relations in Word Sense Disambiguation
cs.CL
We explore many ways of using conceptual distance measures in Word Sense Disambiguation, starting with the Agirre-Rigau conceptual density measure. We use a generalized form of this measure, introducing many (parameterized) refinements and performing an exhaustive evaluation of all meaningful combinations. We finally obtain a 42% improvement over the original algorithm, and show that measures of conceptual distance are not worse indicators for sense disambiguation than measures based on word-coocurrence (exemplified by the Lesk algorithm). Our results, however, reinforce the idea that only a combination of different sources of knowledge might eventually lead to accurate word sense disambiguation.
cs/0107006
Looking Under the Hood : Tools for Diagnosing your Question Answering Engine
cs.CL
In this paper we analyze two question answering tasks : the TREC-8 question answering task and a set of reading comprehension exams. First, we show that Q/A systems perform better when there are multiple answer opportunities per question. Next, we analyze common approaches to two subproblems: term overlap for answer sentence identification, and answer typing for short answer extraction. We present general tools for analyzing the strengths and limitations of techniques for these subproblems. Our results quantify the limitations of both term overlap and answer typing to distinguish between competing answer candidates.
cs/0107007
The Risk Profile Problem for Stock Portfolio Optimization
cs.CE cs.DM cs.DS
This work initiates research into the problem of determining an optimal investment strategy for investors with different attitudes towards the trade-offs of risk and profit. The probability distribution of the return values of the stocks that are considered by the investor are assumed to be known, while the joint distribution is unknown. The problem is to find the best investment strategy in order to minimize the probability of losing a certain percentage of the invested capital based on different attitudes of the investors towards future outcomes of the stock market. For portfolios made up of two stocks, this work shows how to exactly and quickly solve the problem of finding an optimal portfolio for aggressive or risk-averse investors, using an algorithm based on a fast greedy solution to a maximum flow problem. However, an investor looking for an average-case guarantee (so is neither aggressive or risk-averse) must deal with a more difficult problem. In particular, it is #P-complete to compute the distribution function associated with the average-case bound. On the positive side, approximate answers can be computed by using random sampling techniques similar to those for high-dimensional volume estimation. When k>2 stocks are considered, it is proved that a simple solution based on the same flow concepts as the 2-stock algorithm would imply that P = NP, so is highly unlikely. This work gives approximation algorithms for this case as well as exact algorithms for some important special cases.
cs/0107012
Three-Stage Quantitative Neural Network Model of the Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon
cs.CL cs.AI q-bio.NC q-bio.QM
A new three-stage computer artificial neural network model of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is shortly described, and its stochastic nature was demonstrated. A way to calculate strength and appearance probability of tip-of-the-tongue states, neural network mechanism of feeling-of-knowing phenomenon are proposed. The model synthesizes memory, psycholinguistic, and metamemory approaches, bridges speech errors and naming chronometry research traditions. A model analysis of a tip-of-the-tongue case from Anton Chekhov's short story 'A Horsey Name' is performed. A new 'throw-up-one's-arms effect' is defined.
cs/0107013
The Logic Programming Paradigm and Prolog
cs.PL cs.AI
This is a tutorial on logic programming and Prolog appropriate for a course on programming languages for students familiar with imperative programming.
cs/0107014
Transformations of CCP programs
cs.PL cs.AI cs.LO
We introduce a transformation system for concurrent constraint programming (CCP). We define suitable applicability conditions for the transformations which guarantee that the input/output CCP semantics is preserved also when distinguishing deadlocked computations from successful ones and when considering intermediate results of (possibly) non-terminating computations. The system allows us to optimize CCP programs while preserving their intended meaning: In addition to the usual benefits that one has for sequential declarative languages, the transformation of concurrent programs can also lead to the elimination of communication channels and of synchronization points, to the transformation of non-deterministic computations into deterministic ones, and to the crucial saving of computational space. Furthermore, since the transformation system preserves the deadlock behavior of programs, it can be used for proving deadlock freeness of a given program wrt a class of queries. To this aim it is sometimes sufficient to apply our transformations and to specialize the resulting program wrt the given queries in such a way that the obtained program is trivially deadlock free.
cs/0107016
Introduction to the CoNLL-2001 Shared Task: Clause Identification
cs.CL
We describe the CoNLL-2001 shared task: dividing text into clauses. We give background information on the data sets, present a general overview of the systems that have taken part in the shared task and briefly discuss their performance.
cs/0107017
Learning Computational Grammars
cs.CL
This paper reports on the "Learning Computational Grammars" (LCG) project, a postdoc network devoted to studying the application of machine learning techniques to grammars suitable for computational use. We were interested in a more systematic survey to understand the relevance of many factors to the success of learning, esp. the availability of annotated data, the kind of dependencies in the data, and the availability of knowledge bases (grammars). We focused on syntax, esp. noun phrase (NP) syntax.
cs/0107018
Combining a self-organising map with memory-based learning
cs.CL
Memory-based learning (MBL) has enjoyed considerable success in corpus-based natural language processing (NLP) tasks and is thus a reliable method of getting a high-level of performance when building corpus-based NLP systems. However there is a bottleneck in MBL whereby any novel testing item has to be compared against all the training items in memory base. For this reason there has been some interest in various forms of memory editing whereby some method of selecting a subset of the memory base is employed to reduce the number of comparisons. This paper investigates the use of a modified self-organising map (SOM) to select a subset of the memory items for comparison. This method involves reducing the number of comparisons to a value proportional to the square root of the number of training items. The method is tested on the identification of base noun-phrases in the Wall Street Journal corpus, using sections 15 to 18 for training and section 20 for testing.
cs/0107019
Applying Natural Language Generation to Indicative Summarization
cs.CL
The task of creating indicative summaries that help a searcher decide whether to read a particular document is a difficult task. This paper examines the indicative summarization task from a generation perspective, by first analyzing its required content via published guidelines and corpus analysis. We show how these summaries can be factored into a set of document features, and how an implemented content planner uses the topicality document feature to create indicative multidocument query-based summaries.
cs/0107020
Transformation-Based Learning in the Fast Lane
cs.CL
Transformation-based learning has been successfully employed to solve many natural language processing problems. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on many natural language processing tasks and does not overtrain easily. However, it does have a serious drawback: the training time is often intorelably long, especially on the large corpora which are often used in NLP. In this paper, we present a novel and realistic method for speeding up the training time of a transformation-based learner without sacrificing performance. The paper compares and contrasts the training time needed and performance achieved by our modified learner with two other systems: a standard transformation-based learner, and the ICA system \cite{hepple00:tbl}. The results of these experiments show that our system is able to achieve a significant improvement in training time while still achieving the same performance as a standard transformation-based learner. This is a valuable contribution to systems and algorithms which utilize transformation-based learning at any part of the execution.
cs/0107021
Multidimensional Transformation-Based Learning
cs.CL
This paper presents a novel method that allows a machine learning algorithm following the transformation-based learning paradigm \cite{brill95:tagging} to be applied to multiple classification tasks by training jointly and simultaneously on all fields. The motivation for constructing such a system stems from the observation that many tasks in natural language processing are naturally composed of multiple subtasks which need to be resolved simultaneously; also tasks usually learned in isolation can possibly benefit from being learned in a joint framework, as the signals for the extra tasks usually constitute inductive bias. The proposed algorithm is evaluated in two experiments: in one, the system is used to jointly predict the part-of-speech and text chunks/baseNP chunks of an English corpus; and in the second it is used to learn the joint prediction of word segment boundaries and part-of-speech tagging for Chinese. The results show that the simultaneous learning of multiple tasks does achieve an improvement in each task upon training the same tasks sequentially. The part-of-speech tagging result of 96.63% is state-of-the-art for individual systems on the particular train/test split.
cs/0107026
Annotated revision programs
cs.AI cs.LO
Revision programming is a formalism to describe and enforce updates of belief sets and databases. That formalism was extended by Fitting who assigned annotations to revision atoms. Annotations provide a way to quantify the confidence (probability) that a revision atom holds. The main goal of our paper is to reexamine the work of Fitting, argue that his semantics does not always provide results consistent with intuition, and to propose an alternative treatment of annotated revision programs. Our approach differs from that proposed by Fitting in two key aspects: we change the notion of a model of a program and we change the notion of a justified revision. We show that under this new approach fundamental properties of justified revisions of standard revision programs extend to the annotated case.
cs/0107027
Fixed-parameter complexity of semantics for logic programs
cs.LO cs.AI
A decision problem is called parameterized if its input is a pair of strings. One of these strings is referred to as a parameter. The problem: given a propositional logic program P and a non-negative integer k, decide whether P has a stable model of size no more than k, is an example of a parameterized decision problem with k serving as a parameter. Parameterized problems that are NP-complete often become solvable in polynomial time if the parameter is fixed. The problem to decide whether a program P has a stable model of size no more than k, where k is fixed and not a part of input, can be solved in time O(mn^k), where m is the size of P and n is the number of atoms in P. Thus, this problem is in the class P. However, algorithms with the running time given by a polynomial of order k are not satisfactory even for relatively small values of k. The key question then is whether significantly better algorithms (with the degree of the polynomial not dependent on k) exist. To tackle it, we use the framework of fixed-parameter complexity. We establish the fixed-parameter complexity for several parameterized decision problems involving models, supported models and stable models of logic programs. We also establish the fixed-parameter complexity for variants of these problems resulting from restricting attention to Horn programs and to purely negative programs. Most of the problems considered in the paper have high fixed-parameter complexity. Thus, it is unlikely that fixing bounds on models (supported models, stable models) will lead to fast algorithms to decide the existence of such models.
cs/0107028
Propositional satisfiability in answer-set programming
cs.AI cs.LO
We show that propositional logic and its extensions can support answer-set programming in the same way stable logic programming and disjunctive logic programming do. To this end, we introduce a logic based on the logic of propositional schemata and on a version of the Closed World Assumption. We call it the extended logic of propositional schemata with CWA (PS+, in symbols). An important feature of this logic is that it supports explicit modeling of constraints on cardinalities of sets. In the paper, we characterize the class of problems that can be solved by finite PS+ theories. We implement a programming system based on the logic PS+ and design and implement a solver for processing theories in PS+. We present encouraging performance results for our approach --- we show it to be competitive with smodels, a state-of-the-art answer-set programming system based on stable logic programming.
cs/0107029
aspps --- an implementation of answer-set programming with propositional schemata
cs.AI cs.LO
We present an implementation of an answer-set programming paradigm, called aspps (short for answer-set programming with propositional schemata). The system aspps is designed to process PS+ theories. It consists of two basic modules. The first module, psgrnd, grounds an PS+ theory. The second module, referred to as aspps, is a solver. It computes models of ground PS+ theories.
cs/0107032
Coupled Clustering: a Method for Detecting Structural Correspondence
cs.LG cs.CL cs.IR
This paper proposes a new paradigm and computational framework for identification of correspondences between sub-structures of distinct composite systems. For this, we define and investigate a variant of traditional data clustering, termed coupled clustering, which simultaneously identifies corresponding clusters within two data sets. The presented method is demonstrated and evaluated for detecting topical correspondences in textual corpora.
cs/0107033
Yet another zeta function and learning
cs.LG cs.DM math.PR
We study the convergence speed of the batch learning algorithm, and compare its speed to that of the memoryless learning algorithm and of learning with memory (as analyzed in joint work with N. Komarova). We obtain precise results and show in particular that the batch learning algorithm is never worse than the memoryless learning algorithm (at least asymptotically). Its performance vis-a-vis learning with full memory is less clearcut, and depends on certainprobabilistic assumptions. These results necessitate theintroduction of the moment zeta function of a probability distribution and the study of some of its properties.
cs/0108003
The Partial Evaluation Approach to Information Personalization
cs.IR cs.PL
Information personalization refers to the automatic adjustment of information content, structure, and presentation tailored to an individual user. By reducing information overload and customizing information access, personalization systems have emerged as an important segment of the Internet economy. This paper presents a systematic modeling methodology - PIPE (`Personalization is Partial Evaluation') - for personalization. Personalization systems are designed and implemented in PIPE by modeling an information-seeking interaction in a programmatic representation. The representation supports the description of information-seeking activities as partial information and their subsequent realization by partial evaluation, a technique for specializing programs. We describe the modeling methodology at a conceptual level and outline representational choices. We present two application case studies that use PIPE for personalizing web sites and describe how PIPE suggests a novel evaluation criterion for information system designs. Finally, we mention several fundamental implications of adopting the PIPE model for personalization and when it is (and is not) applicable.