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cs/9809028
Separating Dependency from Constituency in a Tree Rewriting System
cs.CL
In this paper we present a new tree-rewriting formalism called Link-Sharing Tree Adjoining Grammar (LSTAG) which is a variant of synchronous TAGs. Using LSTAG we define an approach towards coordination where linguistic dependency is distinguished from the notion of constituency. Such an approach towards coordination that explicitly distinguishes dependencies from constituency gives a better formal understanding of its representation when compared to previous approaches that use tree-rewriting systems which conflate the two issues.
cs/9809029
Incremental Parser Generation for Tree Adjoining Grammars
cs.CL
This paper describes the incremental generation of parse tables for the LR-type parsing of Tree Adjoining Languages (TALs). The algorithm presented handles modifications to the input grammar by updating the parser generated so far. In this paper, a lazy generation of LR-type parsers for TALs is defined in which parse tables are created by need while parsing. We then describe an incremental parser generator for TALs which responds to modification of the input grammar by updating parse tables built so far.
cs/9809032
Stable models and an alternative logic programming paradigm
cs.LO cs.AI
In this paper we reexamine the place and role of stable model semantics in logic programming and contrast it with a least Herbrand model approach to Horn programs. We demonstrate that inherent features of stable model semantics naturally lead to a logic programming system that offers an interesting alternative to more traditional logic programming styles of Horn logic programming, stratified logic programming and logic programming with well-founded semantics. The proposed approach is based on the interpretation of program clauses as constraints. In this setting programs do not describe a single intended model, but a family of stable models. These stable models encode solutions to the constraint satisfaction problem described by the program. Our approach imposes restrictions on the syntax of logic programs. In particular, function symbols are eliminated from the language. We argue that the resulting logic programming system is well-attuned to problems in the class NP, has a well-defined domain of applications, and an emerging methodology of programming. We point out that what makes the whole approach viable is recent progress in implementations of algorithms to compute stable models of propositional logic programs.
cs/9809033
Efficient Retrieval of Similar Time Sequences Using DFT
cs.DB
We propose an improvement of the known DFT-based indexing technique for fast retrieval of similar time sequences. We use the last few Fourier coefficients in the distance computation without storing them in the index since every coefficient at the end is the complex conjugate of a coefficient at the beginning and as strong as its counterpart. We show analytically that this observation can accelerate the search time of the index by more than a factor of two. This result was confirmed by our experiments, which were carried out on real stock prices and synthetic data.
cs/9809034
Semantics and Conversations for an Agent Communication Language
cs.MA cs.AI
We address the issues of semantics and conversations for agent communication languages and the Knowledge Query Manipulation Language (KQML) in particular. Based on ideas from speech act theory, we present a semantic description for KQML that associates ``cognitive'' states of the agent with the use of the language's primitives (performatives). We have used this approach to describe the semantics for the whole set of reserved KQML performatives. Building on the semantics, we devise the conversation policies, i.e., a formal description of how KQML performatives may be combined into KQML exchanges (conversations), using a Definite Clause Grammar. Our research offers methods for a speech act theory-based semantic description of a language of communication acts and for the specification of the protocols associated with these acts. Languages of communication acts address the issue of communication among software applications at a level of abstraction that is useful to the emerging software agents paradigm.
cs/9809036
Document Archiving, Replication and Migration Container for Mobile Web Users
cs.MA cs.MM
With the increasing use of mobile workstations for a wide variety of tasks and associated information needs, and with many variations of available networks, access to data becomes a prime consideration. This paper discusses issues of workstation mobility and proposes a solution wherein the data structures are accessed in an encapsulated form - through the Portable File System (PFS) wrapper. The paper discusses an implementation of the Portable File System, highlighting the architecture and commenting upon performance of an experimental system. Although investigations have been focused upon mobile access of WWW documents, this technique could be applied to any mobile data access situation.
cs/9809049
Aspects of Evolutionary Design by Computers
cs.NE
This paper examines the four main types of Evolutionary Design by computers: Evolutionary Design Optimisation, Evolutionary Art, Evolutionary Artificial Life Forms and Creative Evolutionary Design. Definitions for all four areas are provided. A review of current work in each of these areas is given, with examples of the types of applications that have been tackled. The different properties and requirements of each are examined. Descriptions of typical representations and evolutionary algorithms are provided and examples of designs evolved using these techniques are shown. The paper then discusses how the boundaries of these areas are beginning to merge, resulting in four new 'overlapping' types of Evolutionary Design: Integral Evolutionary Design, Artificial Life Based Evolutionary Design, Aesthetic Evolutionary AL and Aesthetic Evolutionary Design. Finally, the last part of the paper discusses some common problems faced by creators of Evolutionary Design systems, including: interdependent elements in designs, epistasis, and constraint handling.
cs/9809050
A Freely Available Morphological Analyzer, Disambiguator and Context Sensitive Lemmatizer for German
cs.CL
In this paper we present Morphy, an integrated tool for German morphology, part-of-speech tagging and context-sensitive lemmatization. Its large lexicon of more than 320,000 word forms plus its ability to process German compound nouns guarantee a wide morphological coverage. Syntactic ambiguities can be resolved with a standard statistical part-of-speech tagger. By using the output of the tagger, the lemmatizer can determine the correct root even for ambiguous word forms. The complete package is freely available and can be downloaded from the World Wide Web.
cs/9809051
Spoken Language Dialogue Systems and Components: Best practice in development and evaluation (DISC 24823) - Periodic Progress Report 1: Basic Details of the Action
cs.CL cs.SE
The DISC project aims to (a) build an in-depth understanding of the state-of-the-art in spoken language dialogue systems (SLDSs) and components development and evaluation with the purpose of (b) developing a first best practice methodology in the field. The methodology will be accompanied by (c) a series of development and evaluation support tools. To the limited extent possible within the duration of the project, the draft versions of the methodology and the tools will be (d) tested by SLDS developers from industry and research, and will be (e) packaged to best suit their needs. In the first year of DISC, (a) has been accomplished, and (b) and (c) have started. A proposal to complete the work proposed above by adding 12 months to the 18 months of the present project, has been submitted to Esprit Long-Term Research in March 1998.
cs/9809106
Processing Unknown Words in HPSG
cs.CL
The lexical acquisition system presented in this paper incrementally updates linguistic properties of unknown words inferred from their surrounding context by parsing sentences with an HPSG grammar for German. We employ a gradual, information-based concept of ``unknownness'' providing a uniform treatment for the range of completely known to maximally unknown lexical entries. ``Unknown'' information is viewed as revisable information, which is either generalizable or specializable. Updating takes place after parsing, which only requires a modified lexical lookup. Revisable pieces of information are identified by grammar-specified declarations which provide access paths into the parse feature structure. The updating mechanism revises the corresponding places in the lexical feature structures iff the context actually provides new information. For revising generalizable information, type union is required. A worked-out example demonstrates the inferential capacity of our implemented system.
cs/9809107
Computing Declarative Prosodic Morphology
cs.CL
This paper describes a computational, declarative approach to prosodic morphology that uses inviolable constraints to denote small finite candidate sets which are filtered by a restrictive incremental optimization mechanism. The new approach is illustrated with an implemented fragment of Modern Hebrew verbs couched in MicroCUF, an expressive constraint logic formalism. For generation and parsing of word forms, I propose a novel off-line technique to eliminate run-time optimization. It produces a finite-state oracle that efficiently restricts the constraint interpreter's search space. As a byproduct, unknown words can be analyzed without special mechanisms. Unlike pure finite-state transducer approaches, this hybrid setup allows for more expressivity in constraints to specify e.g. token identity for reduplication or arithmetic constraints for phonetics.
cs/9809108
Learning Nested Agent Models in an Information Economy
cs.MA cs.AI
We present our approach to the problem of how an agent, within an economic Multi-Agent System, can determine when it should behave strategically (i.e. learn and use models of other agents), and when it should act as a simple price-taker. We provide a framework for the incremental implementation of modeling capabilities in agents, and a description of the forms of knowledge required. The agents were implemented and different populations simulated in order to learn more about their behavior and the merits of using and learning agent models. Our results show, among other lessons, how savvy buyers can avoid being ``cheated'' by sellers, how price volatility can be used to quantitatively predict the benefits of deeper models, and how specific types of agent populations influence system behavior.
cs/9809110
Similarity-Based Models of Word Cooccurrence Probabilities
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
In many applications of natural language processing (NLP) it is necessary to determine the likelihood of a given word combination. For example, a speech recognizer may need to determine which of the two word combinations ``eat a peach'' and ``eat a beach'' is more likely. Statistical NLP methods determine the likelihood of a word combination from its frequency in a training corpus. However, the nature of language is such that many word combinations are infrequent and do not occur in any given corpus. In this work we propose a method for estimating the probability of such previously unseen word combinations using available information on ``most similar'' words. We describe probabilistic word association models based on distributional word similarity, and apply them to two tasks, language modeling and pseudo-word disambiguation. In the language modeling task, a similarity-based model is used to improve probability estimates for unseen bigrams in a back-off language model. The similarity-based method yields a 20% perplexity improvement in the prediction of unseen bigrams and statistically significant reductions in speech-recognition error. We also compare four similarity-based estimation methods against back-off and maximum-likelihood estimation methods on a pseudo-word sense disambiguation task in which we controlled for both unigram and bigram frequency to avoid giving too much weight to easy-to-disambiguate high-frequency configurations. The similarity-based methods perform up to 40% better on this particular task.
cs/9809111
Evolution of Neural Networks to Play the Game of Dots-and-Boxes
cs.NE cs.LG
Dots-and-Boxes is a child's game which remains analytically unsolved. We implement and evolve artificial neural networks to play this game, evaluating them against simple heuristic players. Our networks do not evaluate or predict the final outcome of the game, but rather recommend moves at each stage. Superior generalisation of play by co-evolved populations is found, and a comparison made with networks trained by back-propagation using simple heuristics as an oracle.
cs/9809112
On the Evaluation and Comparison of Taggers: The Effect of Noise in Testing Corpora
cs.CL
This paper addresses the issue of {\sc pos} tagger evaluation. Such evaluation is usually performed by comparing the tagger output with a reference test corpus, which is assumed to be error-free. Currently used corpora contain noise which causes the obtained performance to be a distortion of the real value. We analyze to what extent this distortion may invalidate the comparison between taggers or the measure of the improvement given by a new system. The main conclusion is that a more rigorous testing experimentation setting/designing is needed to reliably evaluate and compare tagger accuracies.
cs/9809113
Improving Tagging Performance by Using Voting Taggers
cs.CL
We present a bootstrapping method to develop an annotated corpus, which is specially useful for languages with few available resources. The method is being applied to develop a corpus of Spanish of over 5Mw. The method consists on taking advantage of the collaboration of two different POS taggers. The cases in which both taggers agree present a higher accuracy and are used to retrain the taggers.
cs/9809121
Using Local Optimality Criteria for Efficient Information Retrieval with Redundant Information Filters
cs.IR cs.AI
We consider information retrieval when the data, for instance multimedia, is coputationally expensive to fetch. Our approach uses "information filters" to considerably narrow the universe of possiblities before retrieval. We are especially interested in redundant information filters that save time over more general but more costly filters. Efficient retrieval requires that decision must be made about the necessity, order, and concurrent processing of proposed filters (an "execution plan"). We develop simple polynomial-time local criteria for optimal execution plans, and show that most forms of concurrency are suboptimal with information filters. Although the general problem of finding an optimal execution plan is likely exponential in the number of filters, we show experimentally that our local optimality criteria, used in a polynomial-time algorithm, nearly always find the global optimum with 15 filters or less, a sufficient number of filters for most applications. Our methods do not require special hardware and avoid the high processor idleness that is characteristic of massive parallelism solutions to this problem. We apply our ideas to an important application, information retrieval of cpationed data using natural-language understanding, a problem for which the natural-language processing can be the bottleneck if not implemented well.
cs/9809122
Practical algorithms for on-line sampling
cs.LG cs.DS
One of the core applications of machine learning to knowledge discovery consists on building a function (a hypothesis) from a given amount of data (for instance a decision tree or a neural network) such that we can use it afterwards to predict new instances of the data. In this paper, we focus on a particular situation where we assume that the hypothesis we want to use for prediction is very simple, and thus, the hypotheses class is of feasible size. We study the problem of how to determine which of the hypotheses in the class is almost the best one. We present two on-line sampling algorithms for selecting hypotheses, give theoretical bounds on the number of necessary examples, and analize them exprimentally. We compare them with the simple batch sampling approach commonly used and show that in most of the situations our algorithms use much fewer number of examples.
cs/9809123
A role of constraint in self-organization
cs.NE cs.CG
In this paper we introduce a neural network model of self-organization. This model uses a variation of Hebb rule for updating its synaptic weights, and surely converges to the equilibrium status. The key point of the convergence is the update rule that constrains the total synaptic weight and this seems to make the model stable. We investigate the role of the constraint and show that it is the constraint that makes the model stable. For analyzing this setting, we propose a simple probabilistic game that models the neural network and the self-organization process. Then, we investigate the characteristics of this game, namely, the probability that the game becomes stable and the number of the steps it takes.
cs/9810002
Pre-fetching tree-structured data in distributed memory
cs.DC cs.DB
A distributed heap storage manager has been implemented on the Fujitsu AP1000 multicomputer. The performance of various pre-fetching strategies is experimentally compared. Subjective programming benefits and objective performance benefits of up to 10% in pre-fetching are found for certain applications, but not for all. The performance benefits of pre-fetching depend on the specific data structure and access patterns. We suggest that control of pre-fetching strategy be dynamically under the control of the application.
cs/9810003
A Linear Shift Invariant Multiscale Transform
cs.CV
This paper presents a multiscale decomposition algorithm. Unlike standard wavelet transforms, the proposed operator is both linear and shift invariant. The central idea is to obtain shift invariance by averaging the aligned wavelet transform projections over all circular shifts of the signal. It is shown how the same transform can be obtained by a linear filter bank.
cs/9810005
Anytime Coalition Structure Generation with Worst Case Guarantees
cs.MA cs.AI
Coalition formation is a key topic in multiagent systems. One would prefer a coalition structure that maximizes the sum of the values of the coalitions, but often the number of coalition structures is too large to allow exhaustive search for the optimal one. But then, can the coalition structure found via a partial search be guaranteed to be within a bound from optimum? We show that none of the previous coalition structure generation algorithms can establish any bound because they search fewer nodes than a threshold that we show necessary for establishing a bound. We present an algorithm that establishes a tight bound within this minimal amount of search, and show that any other algorithm would have to search strictly more. The fraction of nodes needed to be searched approaches zero as the number of agents grows. If additional time remains, our anytime algorithm searches further, and establishes a progressively lower tight bound. Surprisingly, just searching one more node drops the bound in half. As desired, our algorithm lowers the bound rapidly early on, and exhibits diminishing returns to computation. It also drastically outperforms its obvious contenders. Finally, we show how to distribute the desired search across self-interested manipulative agents.
cs/9810012
Ultrametric Distance in Syntax
cs.CL q-bio.NC
Phrase structure trees have a hierarchical structure. In many subjects, most notably in Taxonomy such tree structures have been studied using ultrametrics. Here syntactical hierarchical phrase trees are subject to a similar analysis, which is much siompler as the branching structure is more readily discernible and switched. The occurence of hierarchical structure elsewhere in linguistics is mentioned. The phrase tree can be represented by a matrix and the elements of the matrix can be represented by triangles. The height at which branching occurs is not prescribed in previous syntatic models, but it is by using the ultrametric matrix. The ambiguity of which branching height to choose is resolved by postulating that branching occurs at the lowest height available. An ultrametric produces a measure of the complexity of sentences: presumably the complexity of sentence increases as a language is aquired so that this can be tested. A All ultrametric triangles are equilateral or isocles, here it is shown that X structur implies that there are no equilateral triangles. Restricting attention to simple syntax a minium ultrametric distance between lexical categories is calculatex. This ultrametric distance is shown to be different than the matrix obtasined from feaures. It is shown that the definition of c-commabnd can be replaced by an equivalent ultrametric definition. The new definition invokes a minimum distance between nodes and this is more aesthetically satisfing than previouv varieties of definitions. From the new definition of c-command follows a new definition of government.
cs/9810014
Resources for Evaluation of Summarization Techniques
cs.CL
We report on two corpora to be used in the evaluation of component systems for the tasks of (1) linear segmentation of text and (2) summary-directed sentence extraction. We present characteristics of the corpora, methods used in the collection of user judgments, and an overview of the application of the corpora to evaluating the component system. Finally, we discuss the problems and issues with construction of the test set which apply broadly to the construction of evaluation resources for language technologies.
cs/9810015
Restrictions on Tree Adjoining Languages
cs.CL
Several methods are known for parsing languages generated by Tree Adjoining Grammars (TAGs) in O(n^6) worst case running time. In this paper we investigate which restrictions on TAGs and TAG derivations are needed in order to lower this O(n^6) time complexity, without introducing large runtime constants, and without losing any of the generative power needed to capture the syntactic constructions in natural language that can be handled by unrestricted TAGs. In particular, we describe an algorithm for parsing a strict subclass of TAG in O(n^5), and attempt to show that this subclass retains enough generative power to make it useful in the general case.
cs/9810016
SYNERGY: A Linear Planner Based on Genetic Programming
cs.AI
In this paper we describe SYNERGY, which is a highly parallelizable, linear planning system that is based on the genetic programming paradigm. Rather than reasoning about the world it is planning for, SYNERGY uses artificial selection, recombination and fitness measure to generate linear plans that solve conjunctive goals. We ran SYNERGY on several domains (e.g., the briefcase problem and a few variants of the robot navigation problem), and the experimental results show that our planner is capable of handling problem instances that are one to two orders of magnitude larger than the ones solved by UCPOP. In order to facilitate the search reduction and to enhance the expressive power of SYNERGY, we also propose two major extensions to our planning system: a formalism for using hierarchical planning operators, and a framework for planning in dynamic environments.
cs/9810017
General Theory of Image Normalization
cs.CV
We give a systematic, abstract formulation of the image normalization method as applied to a general group of image transformations, and then illustrate the abstract analysis by applying it to the hierarchy of viewing transformations of a planar object.
cs/9810018
A Proof Theoretic View of Constraint Programming
cs.AI cs.PL
We provide here a proof theoretic account of constraint programming that attempts to capture the essential ingredients of this programming style. We exemplify it by presenting proof rules for linear constraints over interval domains, and illustrate their use by analyzing the constraint propagation process for the {\tt SEND + MORE = MONEY} puzzle. We also show how this approach allows one to build new constraint solvers.
cs/9810020
Computational Geometry Column 33
cs.CG cs.AI cs.GR
Several recent SIGGRAPH papers on surface simplification are described.
cs/9811003
A Winnow-Based Approach to Context-Sensitive Spelling Correction
cs.LG cs.CL
A large class of machine-learning problems in natural language require the characterization of linguistic context. Two characteristic properties of such problems are that their feature space is of very high dimensionality, and their target concepts refer to only a small subset of the features in the space. Under such conditions, multiplicative weight-update algorithms such as Winnow have been shown to have exceptionally good theoretical properties. We present an algorithm combining variants of Winnow and weighted-majority voting, and apply it to a problem in the aforementioned class: context-sensitive spelling correction. This is the task of fixing spelling errors that happen to result in valid words, such as substituting "to" for "too", "casual" for "causal", etc. We evaluate our algorithm, WinSpell, by comparing it against BaySpell, a statistics-based method representing the state of the art for this task. We find: (1) When run with a full (unpruned) set of features, WinSpell achieves accuracies significantly higher than BaySpell was able to achieve in either the pruned or unpruned condition; (2) When compared with other systems in the literature, WinSpell exhibits the highest performance; (3) The primary reason that WinSpell outperforms BaySpell is that WinSpell learns a better linear separator; (4) When run on a test set drawn from a different corpus than the training set was drawn from, WinSpell is better able than BaySpell to adapt, using a strategy we will present that combines supervised learning on the training set with unsupervised learning on the (noisy) test set.
cs/9811004
Does Meaning Evolve?
cs.CL q-bio.PE
A common method of making a theory more understandable, is by comparing it to another theory which has been better developed. Radical interpretation is a theory which attempts to explain how communication has meaning. Radical interpretation is treated as another time-dependent theory and compared to the time dependent theory of biological evolution. The main reason for doing this is to find the nature of the time dependence; producing analogs between the two theories is a necessary prerequisite to this and brings up many problems. Once the nature of the time dependence is better known it might allow the underlying mechanism to be uncovered. Several similarities and differences are uncovered, there appear to be more differences than similarities.
cs/9811006
Machine Learning of Generic and User-Focused Summarization
cs.CL cs.LG
A key problem in text summarization is finding a salience function which determines what information in the source should be included in the summary. This paper describes the use of machine learning on a training corpus of documents and their abstracts to discover salience functions which describe what combination of features is optimal for a given summarization task. The method addresses both "generic" and user-focused summaries.
cs/9811008
Translating near-synonyms: Possibilities and preferences in the interlingua
cs.CL
This paper argues that an interlingual representation must explicitly represent some parts of the meaning of a situation as possibilities (or preferences), not as necessary or definite components of meaning (or constraints). Possibilities enable the analysis and generation of nuance, something required for faithful translation. Furthermore, the representation of the meaning of words, especially of near-synonyms, is crucial, because it specifies which nuances words can convey in which contexts.
cs/9811009
Choosing the Word Most Typical in Context Using a Lexical Co-occurrence Network
cs.CL
This paper presents a partial solution to a component of the problem of lexical choice: choosing the synonym most typical, or expected, in context. We apply a new statistical approach to representing the context of a word through lexical co-occurrence networks. The implementation was trained and evaluated on a large corpus, and results show that the inclusion of second-order co-occurrence relations improves the performance of our implemented lexical choice program.
cs/9811010
Learning to Resolve Natural Language Ambiguities: A Unified Approach
cs.CL cs.LG
We analyze a few of the commonly used statistics based and machine learning algorithms for natural language disambiguation tasks and observe that they can be re-cast as learning linear separators in the feature space. Each of the methods makes a priori assumptions, which it employs, given the data, when searching for its hypothesis. Nevertheless, as we show, it searches a space that is as rich as the space of all linear separators. We use this to build an argument for a data driven approach which merely searches for a good linear separator in the feature space, without further assumptions on the domain or a specific problem. We present such an approach - a sparse network of linear separators, utilizing the Winnow learning algorithm - and show how to use it in a variety of ambiguity resolution problems. The learning approach presented is attribute-efficient and, therefore, appropriate for domains having very large number of attributes. In particular, we present an extensive experimental comparison of our approach with other methods on several well studied lexical disambiguation tasks such as context-sensitive spelling correction, prepositional phrase attachment and part of speech tagging. In all cases we show that our approach either outperforms other methods tried for these tasks or performs comparably to the best.
cs/9811013
The Asilomar Report on Database Research
cs.DB cs.DL
The database research community is rightly proud of success in basic research, and its remarkable record of technology transfer. Now the field needs to radically broaden its research focus to attack the issues of capturing, storing, analyzing, and presenting the vast array of online data. The database research community should embrace a broader research agenda -- broadening the definition of database management to embrace all the content of the Web and other online data stores, and rethinking our fundamental assumptions in light of technology shifts. To accelerate this transition, we recommend changing the way research results are evaluated and presented. In particular, we advocate encouraging more speculative and long-range work, moving conferences to a poster format, and publishing all research literature on the Web.
cs/9811016
Comparing a statistical and a rule-based tagger for German
cs.CL
In this paper we present the results of comparing a statistical tagger for German based on decision trees and a rule-based Brill-Tagger for German. We used the same training corpus (and therefore the same tag-set) to train both taggers. We then applied the taggers to the same test corpus and compared their respective behavior and in particular their error rates. Both taggers perform similarly with an error rate of around 5%. From the detailed error analysis it can be seen that the rule-based tagger has more problems with unknown words than the statistical tagger. But the results are opposite for tokens that are many-ways ambiguous. If the unknown words are fed into the taggers with the help of an external lexicon (such as the Gertwol system) the error rate of the rule-based tagger drops to 4.7%, and the respective rate of the statistical taggers drops to around 3.7%. Combining the taggers by using the output of one tagger to help the other did not lead to any further improvement.
cs/9811018
P-model Alternative to the T-model
cs.CL q-bio.NC
Standard linguistic analysis of syntax uses the T-model. This model requires the ordering: D-structure $>$ S-structure $>$ LF. Between each of these representations there is movement which alters the order of the constituent words; movement is achieved using the principles and parameters of syntactic theory. Psychological serial models do not accommodate the T-model immediately so that here a new model called the P-model is introduced. Here it is argued that the LF representation should be replaced by a variant of Frege's three qualities. In the F-representation the order of elements is not necessarily the same as that in LF and it is suggested that the correct ordering is: F-representation $>$ D-structure $>$ S-structure. Within this framework movement originates as the outcome of emphasis applied to the sentence.
cs/9811019
Locked and Unlocked Polygonal Chains in 3D
cs.CG cs.DS cs.RO
In this paper, we study movements of simple polygonal chains in 3D. We say that an open, simple polygonal chain can be straightened if it can be continuously reconfigured to a straight sequence of segments in such a manner that both the length of each link and the simplicity of the chain are maintained throughout the movement. The analogous concept for closed chains is convexification: reconfiguration to a planar convex polygon. Chains that cannot be straightened or convexified are called locked. While there are open chains in 3D that are locked, we show that if an open chain has a simple orthogonal projection onto some plane, it can be straightened. For closed chains, we show that there are unknotted but locked closed chains, and we provide an algorithm for convexifying a planar simple polygon in 3D with a polynomial number of moves.
cs/9811022
Expoiting Syntactic Structure for Language Modeling
cs.CL
The paper presents a language model that develops syntactic structure and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history, thus enabling the use of long distance dependencies. The model assigns probability to every joint sequence of words--binary-parse-structure with headword annotation and operates in a left-to-right manner --- therefore usable for automatic speech recognition. The model, its probabilistic parameterization, and a set of experiments meant to evaluate its predictive power are presented; an improvement over standard trigram modeling is achieved.
cs/9811024
The Essence of Constraint Propagation
cs.AI
We show that several constraint propagation algorithms (also called (local) consistency, consistency enforcing, Waltz, filtering or narrowing algorithms) are instances of algorithms that deal with chaotic iteration. To this end we propose a simple abstract framework that allows us to classify and compare these algorithms and to establish in a uniform way their basic properties.
cs/9811025
A Structured Language Model
cs.CL
The paper presents a language model that develops syntactic structure and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history, thus enabling the use of long distance dependencies. The model assigns probability to every joint sequence of words - binary-parse-structure with headword annotation. The model, its probabilistic parametrization, and a set of experiments meant to evaluate its predictive power are presented.
cs/9811029
A Human - machine interface for teleoperation of arm manipulators in a complex environment
cs.RO cs.AI
This paper discusses the feasibility of using configuration space (C-space) as a means of visualization and control in operator-guided real-time motion of a robot arm manipulator. The motivation is to improve performance of the human operator in tasks involving the manipulator motion in an environment with obstacles. Unlike some other motion planning tasks, operators are known to make expensive mistakes in such tasks, even in a simpler two-dimensional case. They have difficulty learning better procedures and their performance improves very little with practice. Using an example of a two-dimensional arm manipulator, we show that translating the problem into C-space improves the operator performance rather remarkably, on the order of magnitude compared to the usual work space control. An interface that makes the transfer possible is described, and an example of its use in a virtual environment is shown.
cs/9811030
Generating Segment Durations in a Text-To-Speech System: A Hybrid Rule-Based/Neural Network Approach
cs.NE cs.HC
A combination of a neural network with rule firing information from a rule-based system is used to generate segment durations for a text-to-speech system. The system shows a slight improvement in performance over a neural network system without the rule firing information. Synthesized speech using segment durations was accepted by listeners as having about the same quality as speech generated using segment durations extracted from natural speech.
cs/9811031
Speech Synthesis with Neural Networks
cs.NE cs.HC
Text-to-speech conversion has traditionally been performed either by concatenating short samples of speech or by using rule-based systems to convert a phonetic representation of speech into an acoustic representation, which is then converted into speech. This paper describes a system that uses a time-delay neural network (TDNN) to perform this phonetic-to-acoustic mapping, with another neural network to control the timing of the generated speech. The neural network system requires less memory than a concatenation system, and performed well in tests comparing it to commercial systems using other technologies.
cs/9811032
Text-To-Speech Conversion with Neural Networks: A Recurrent TDNN Approach
cs.NE cs.HC
This paper describes the design of a neural network that performs the phonetic-to-acoustic mapping in a speech synthesis system. The use of a time-domain neural network architecture limits discontinuities that occur at phone boundaries. Recurrent data input also helps smooth the output parameter tracks. Independent testing has demonstrated that the voice quality produced by this system compares favorably with speech from existing commercial text-to-speech systems.
cs/9812001
A Probabilistic Approach to Lexical Semantic Knowledge Acquisition and S tructural Disambiguation
cs.CL
In this thesis, I address the problem of automatically acquiring lexical semantic knowledge, especially that of case frame patterns, from large corpus data and using the acquired knowledge in structural disambiguation. The approach I adopt has the following characteristics: (1) dividing the problem into three subproblems: case slot generalization, case dependency learning, and word clustering (thesaurus construction). (2) viewing each subproblem as that of statistical estimation and defining probability models for each subproblem, (3) adopting the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle as learning strategy, (4) employing efficient learning algorithms, and (5) viewing the disambiguation problem as that of statistical prediction. Major contributions of this thesis include: (1) formalization of the lexical knowledge acquisition problem, (2) development of a number of learning methods for lexical knowledge acquisition, and (3) development of a high-performance disambiguation method.
cs/9812002
Training Reinforcement Neurocontrollers Using the Polytope Algorithm
cs.NE
A new training algorithm is presented for delayed reinforcement learning problems that does not assume the existence of a critic model and employs the polytope optimization algorithm to adjust the weights of the action network so that a simple direct measure of the training performance is maximized. Experimental results from the application of the method to the pole balancing problem indicate improved training performance compared with critic-based and genetic reinforcement approaches.
cs/9812003
Neural Network Methods for Boundary Value Problems Defined in Arbitrarily Shaped Domains
cs.NE cond-mat.dis-nn cs.NA math-ph math.MP math.NA physics.comp-ph
Partial differential equations (PDEs) with Dirichlet boundary conditions defined on boundaries with simple geometry have been succesfuly treated using sigmoidal multilayer perceptrons in previous works. This article deals with the case of complex boundary geometry, where the boundary is determined by a number of points that belong to it and are closely located, so as to offer a reasonable representation. Two networks are employed: a multilayer perceptron and a radial basis function network. The later is used to account for the satisfaction of the boundary conditions. The method has been successfuly tested on two-dimensional and three-dimensional PDEs and has yielded accurate solutions.
cs/9812004
Name Strategy: Its Existence and Implications
cs.CL cs.AI math.HO
It is argued that colour name strategy, object name strategy, and chunking strategy in memory are all aspects of the same general phenomena, called stereotyping. It is pointed out that the Berlin-Kay universal partial ordering of colours and the frequency of traffic accidents classified by colour are surprisingly similar. Some consequences of the existence of a name strategy for the philosophy of language and mathematics are discussed. It is argued that real valued quantities occur {\it ab initio}. The implication of real valued truth quantities is that the {\bf Continuum Hypothesis} of pure mathematics is side-stepped. The existence of name strategy shows that thought/sememes and talk/phonemes can be separate, and this vindicates the assumption of thought occurring before talk used in psycholinguistic speech production models.
cs/9812005
Optimal Multi-Paragraph Text Segmentation by Dynamic Programming
cs.CL
There exist several methods of calculating a similarity curve, or a sequence of similarity values, representing the lexical cohesion of successive text constituents, e.g., paragraphs. Methods for deciding the locations of fragment boundaries are, however, scarce. We propose a fragmentation method based on dynamic programming. The method is theoretically sound and guaranteed to provide an optimal splitting on the basis of a similarity curve, a preferred fragment length, and a cost function defined. The method is especially useful when control on fragment size is of importance.
cs/9812006
A High Quality Text-To-Speech System Composed of Multiple Neural Networks
cs.NE cs.HC
While neural networks have been employed to handle several different text-to-speech tasks, ours is the first system to use neural networks throughout, for both linguistic and acoustic processing. We divide the text-to-speech task into three subtasks, a linguistic module mapping from text to a linguistic representation, an acoustic module mapping from the linguistic representation to speech, and a video module mapping from the linguistic representation to animated images. The linguistic module employs a letter-to-sound neural network and a postlexical neural network. The acoustic module employs a duration neural network and a phonetic neural network. The visual neural network is employed in parallel to the acoustic module to drive a talking head. The use of neural networks that can be retrained on the characteristics of different voices and languages affords our system a degree of adaptability and naturalness heretofore unavailable.
cs/9812010
Towards a computational theory of human daydreaming
cs.AI
This paper examines the phenomenon of daydreaming: spontaneously recalling or imagining personal or vicarious experiences in the past or future. The following important roles of daydreaming in human cognition are postulated: plan preparation and rehearsal, learning from failures and successes, support for processes of creativity, emotion regulation, and motivation. A computational theory of daydreaming and its implementation as the program DAYDREAMER are presented. DAYDREAMER consists of 1) a scenario generator based on relaxed planning, 2) a dynamic episodic memory of experiences used by the scenario generator, 3) a collection of personal goals and control goals which guide the scenario generator, 4) an emotion component in which daydreams initiate, and are initiated by, emotional states arising from goal outcomes, and 5) domain knowledge of interpersonal relations and common everyday occurrences. The role of emotions and control goals in daydreaming is discussed. Four control goals commonly used in guiding daydreaming are presented: rationalization, failure/success reversal, revenge, and preparation. The role of episodic memory in daydreaming is considered, including how daydreamed information is incorporated into memory and later used. An initial version of DAYDREAMER which produces several daydreams (in English) is currently running.
cs/9812013
The Self-Organizing Symbiotic Agent
cs.NE cs.CC
In [N. A. Baas, Emergence, Hierarchies, and Hyper-structures, in C.G. Langton ed., Artificial Life III, Addison Wesley, 1994.] a general framework for the study of Emergence and hyper-structure was presented. This approach is mostly concerned with the description of such systems. In this paper we will try to bring forth a different aspect of this model we feel will be useful in the engineering of agent based solutions, namely the symbiotic approach. In this approach a self-organizing method of dividing the more complex "main-problem" to a hyper-structure of "sub-problems" with the aim of reducing complexity is desired. A description of the general problem will be given along with some instances of related work. This paper is intended to serve as an introductory challenge for general solutions to the described problem.
cs/9812014
An Adaptive Agent Oriented Software Architecture
cs.DC cs.MA
A new approach to software design based on an agent-oriented architecture is presented. Unlike current research, we consider software to be designed and implemented with this methodology in mind. In this approach agents are considered adaptively communicating concurrent modules which are divided into a white box module responsible for the communications and learning, and a black box which is the independent specialized processes of the agent. A distributed Learning policy is also introduced for adaptability.
cs/9812017
A reusable iterative optimization software library to solve combinatorial problems with approximate reasoning
cs.AI
Real world combinatorial optimization problems such as scheduling are typically too complex to solve with exact methods. Additionally, the problems often have to observe vaguely specified constraints of different importance, the available data may be uncertain, and compromises between antagonistic criteria may be necessary. We present a combination of approximate reasoning based constraints and iterative optimization based heuristics that help to model and solve such problems in a framework of C++ software libraries called StarFLIP++. While initially developed to schedule continuous caster units in steel plants, we present in this paper results from reusing the library components in a shift scheduling system for the workforce of an industrial production plant.
cs/9812018
A Flexible Shallow Approach to Text Generation
cs.CL
In order to support the efficient development of NL generation systems, two orthogonal methods are currently pursued with emphasis: (1) reusable, general, and linguistically motivated surface realization components, and (2) simple, task-oriented template-based techniques. In this paper we argue that, from an application-oriented perspective, the benefits of both are still limited. In order to improve this situation, we suggest and evaluate shallow generation methods associated with increased flexibility. We advise a close connection between domain-motivated and linguistic ontologies that supports the quick adaptation to new tasks and domains, rather than the reuse of general resources. Our method is especially designed for generating reports with limited linguistic variations.
cs/9812021
Forgetting Exceptions is Harmful in Language Learning
cs.CL cs.LG
We show that in language learning, contrary to received wisdom, keeping exceptional training instances in memory can be beneficial for generalization accuracy. We investigate this phenomenon empirically on a selection of benchmark natural language processing tasks: grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, part-of-speech tagging, prepositional-phrase attachment, and base noun phrase chunking. In a first series of experiments we combine memory-based learning with training set editing techniques, in which instances are edited based on their typicality and class prediction strength. Results show that editing exceptional instances (with low typicality or low class prediction strength) tends to harm generalization accuracy. In a second series of experiments we compare memory-based learning and decision-tree learning methods on the same selection of tasks, and find that decision-tree learning often performs worse than memory-based learning. Moreover, the decrease in performance can be linked to the degree of abstraction from exceptions (i.e., pruning or eagerness). We provide explanations for both results in terms of the properties of the natural language processing tasks and the learning algorithms.
cs/9812022
Hypertree Decompositions and Tractable Queries
cs.DB cs.AI
Several important decision problems on conjunctive queries (CQs) are NP-complete in general but become tractable, and actually highly parallelizable, if restricted to acyclic or nearly acyclic queries. Examples are the evaluation of Boolean CQs and query containment. These problems were shown tractable for conjunctive queries of bounded treewidth and of bounded degree of cyclicity. The so far most general concept of nearly acyclic queries was the notion of queries of bounded query-width introduced by Chekuri and Rajaraman (1997). While CQs of bounded query width are tractable, it remained unclear whether such queries are efficiently recognizable. Chekuri and Rajaraman stated as an open problem whether for each constant k it can be determined in polynomial time if a query has query width less than or equal to k. We give a negative answer by proving this problem NP-complete (specifically, for k=4). In order to circumvent this difficulty, we introduce the new concept of hypertree decomposition of a query and the corresponding notion of hypertree width. We prove: (a) for each k, the class of queries with query width bounded by k is properly contained in the class of queries whose hypertree width is bounded by k; (b) unlike query width, constant hypertree-width is efficiently recognizable; (c) Boolean queries of constant hypertree width can be efficiently evaluated.
cs/9901001
TDLeaf(lambda): Combining Temporal Difference Learning with Game-Tree Search
cs.LG cs.AI
In this paper we present TDLeaf(lambda), a variation on the TD(lambda) algorithm that enables it to be used in conjunction with minimax search. We present some experiments in both chess and backgammon which demonstrate its utility and provide comparisons with TD(lambda) and another less radical variant, TD-directed(lambda). In particular, our chess program, ``KnightCap,'' used TDLeaf(lambda) to learn its evaluation function while playing on the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS, fics.onenet.net). It improved from a 1650 rating to a 2100 rating in just 308 games. We discuss some of the reasons for this success and the relationship between our results and Tesauro's results in backgammon.
cs/9901002
KnightCap: A chess program that learns by combining TD(lambda) with game-tree search
cs.LG cs.AI
In this paper we present TDLeaf(lambda), a variation on the TD(lambda) algorithm that enables it to be used in conjunction with game-tree search. We present some experiments in which our chess program ``KnightCap'' used TDLeaf(lambda) to learn its evaluation function while playing on the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS, fics.onenet.net). The main success we report is that KnightCap improved from a 1650 rating to a 2150 rating in just 308 games and 3 days of play. As a reference, a rating of 1650 corresponds to about level B human play (on a scale from E (1000) to A (1800)), while 2150 is human master level. We discuss some of the reasons for this success, principle among them being the use of on-line, rather than self-play.
cs/9901003
Fixpoint 3-valued semantics for autoepistemic logic
cs.LO cs.AI
The paper presents a constructive fixpoint semantics for autoepistemic logic (AEL). This fixpoint characterizes a unique but possibly three-valued belief set of an autoepistemic theory. It may be three-valued in the sense that for a subclass of formulas F, the fixpoint may not specify whether F is believed or not. The paper presents a constructive 3-valued semantics for autoepistemic logic (AEL). We introduce a derivation operator and define the semantics as its least fixpoint. The semantics is 3-valued in the sense that, for some formulas, the least fixpoint does not specify whether they are believed or not. We show that complete fixpoints of the derivation operator correspond to Moore's stable expansions. In the case of modal representations of logic programs our least fixpoint semantics expresses well-founded semantics or 3-valued Fitting-Kunen semantics (depending on the embedding used). We show that, computationally, our semantics is simpler than the semantics proposed by Moore (assuming that the polynomial hierarchy does not collapse).
cs/9901004
On the geometry of similarity search: dimensionality curse and concentration of measure
cs.IR cs.CG cs.DB cs.DS
We suggest that the curse of dimensionality affecting the similarity-based search in large datasets is a manifestation of the phenomenon of concentration of measure on high-dimensional structures. We prove that, under certain geometric assumptions on the query domain $\Omega$ and the dataset $X$, if $\Omega$ satisfies the so-called concentration property, then for most query points $x^\ast$ the ball of radius $(1+\e)d_X(x^\ast)$ centred at $x^\ast$ contains either all points of $X$ or else at least $C_1\exp(-C_2\e^2n)$ of them. Here $d_X(x^\ast)$ is the distance from $x^\ast$ to the nearest neighbour in $X$ and $n$ is the dimension of $\Omega$.
cs/9901005
An Empirical Approach to Temporal Reference Resolution (journal version)
cs.CL
Scheduling dialogs, during which people negotiate the times of appointments, are common in everyday life. This paper reports the results of an in-depth empirical investigation of resolving explicit temporal references in scheduling dialogs. There are four phases of this work: data annotation and evaluation, model development, system implementation and evaluation, and model evaluation and analysis. The system and model were developed primarily on one set of data, and then applied later to a much more complex data set, to assess the generalizability of the model for the task being performed. Many different types of empirical methods are applied to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. Detailed annotation instructions were developed and an intercoder reliability study was performed, showing that naive annotators can reliably perform the targeted annotations. A fully automatic system has been developed and evaluated on unseen test data, with good results on both data sets. We adopt a pure realization of a recency-based focus model to identify precisely when it is and is not adequate for the task being addressed. In addition to system results, an in-depth evaluation of the model itself is presented, based on detailed manual annotations. The results are that few errors occur specifically due to the model of focus being used, and the set of anaphoric relations defined in the model are low in ambiguity for both data sets.
cs/9901008
Fast Computational Algorithms for the Discrete Wavelet Transform and Applications of Localized Orthonormal Bases in Signal Classification
cs.MS cs.CE
We construct an algorithm for implementing the discrete wavelet transform by means of matrices in SO_2(R) for orthonormal compactly supported wavelets and matrices in SL_m(R), m > = 2, for compactly supported biorthogonal wavelets. We show that in 1 dimension the total operation count using this algorithm can be reduced to about 50% of the conventional convolution and downsampling by 2-operation for both orthonormal and biorthogonal filters. In the special case of biorthogonal symmetric odd-odd filters, we show an implementation yielding a total operation count of about 38% of the conventional method. In 2 dimensions we show an implementation of this algorithm yielding a reduction in the total operation count of about 70% when the filters are orthonormal, a reduction of about 62% for general biorthogonal filters, and a reduction of about 70% if the filters are symmetric odd-odd length filters. We further extend these results to 3 dimensions. We also show how the SO_2(R)-method for implementing the discrete wavelet transform may be exploited to compute short FIR filters, and we construct edge mappings where we try to improve upon the degree of preservation of regularity in the conventional methods. We also consider a two-class waveform discrimination problem. A statistical space-frequency analysis is performed on a training data set using the LDB-algorithm of N.Saito and R.Coifman. The success of the algorithm on this particular problem is evaluated on a disjoint test data set.
cs/9901012
Extremal problems in logic programming and stable model computation
cs.LO cs.AI
We study the following problem: given a class of logic programs C, determine the maximum number of stable models of a program from C. We establish the maximum for the class of all logic programs with at most n clauses, and for the class of all logic programs of size at most n. We also characterize the programs for which the maxima are attained. We obtain similar results for the class of all disjunctive logic programs with at most n clauses, each of length at most m, and for the class of all disjunctive logic programs of size at most n. Our results on logic programs have direct implication for the design of algorithms to compute stable models. Several such algorithms, similar in spirit to the Davis-Putnam procedure, are described in the paper. Our results imply that there is an algorithm that finds all stable models of a program with n clauses after considering the search space of size O(3^{n/3}) in the worst case. Our results also provide some insights into the question of representability of families of sets as families of stable models of logic programs.
cs/9901014
Minimum Description Length Induction, Bayesianism, and Kolmogorov Complexity
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CC cs.IT cs.LO math.IT math.PR physics.data-an
The relationship between the Bayesian approach and the minimum description length approach is established. We sharpen and clarify the general modeling principles MDL and MML, abstracted as the ideal MDL principle and defined from Bayes's rule by means of Kolmogorov complexity. The basic condition under which the ideal principle should be applied is encapsulated as the Fundamental Inequality, which in broad terms states that the principle is valid when the data are random, relative to every contemplated hypothesis and also these hypotheses are random relative to the (universal) prior. Basically, the ideal principle states that the prior probability associated with the hypothesis should be given by the algorithmic universal probability, and the sum of the log universal probability of the model plus the log of the probability of the data given the model should be minimized. If we restrict the model class to the finite sets then application of the ideal principle turns into Kolmogorov's minimal sufficient statistic. In general we show that data compression is almost always the best strategy, both in hypothesis identification and prediction.
cs/9901016
Representation Theory for Default Logic
cs.LO cs.AI
Default logic can be regarded as a mechanism to represent families of belief sets of a reasoning agent. As such, it is inherently second-order. In this paper, we study the problem of representability of a family of theories as the set of extensions of a default theory. We give a complete solution to the representability by means of normal default theories. We obtain partial results on representability by arbitrary default theories. We construct examples of denumerable families of non-including theories that are not representable. We also study the concept of equivalence between default theories.
cs/9902001
Compacting the Penn Treebank Grammar
cs.CL
Treebanks, such as the Penn Treebank (PTB), offer a simple approach to obtaining a broad coverage grammar: one can simply read the grammar off the parse trees in the treebank. While such a grammar is easy to obtain, a square-root rate of growth of the rule set with corpus size suggests that the derived grammar is far from complete and that much more treebanked text would be required to obtain a complete grammar, if one exists at some limit. However, we offer an alternative explanation in terms of the underspecification of structures within the treebank. This hypothesis is explored by applying an algorithm to compact the derived grammar by eliminating redundant rules -- rules whose right hand sides can be parsed by other rules. The size of the resulting compacted grammar, which is significantly less than that of the full treebank grammar, is shown to approach a limit. However, such a compacted grammar does not yield very good performance figures. A version of the compaction algorithm taking rule probabilities into account is proposed, which is argued to be more linguistically motivated. Combined with simple thresholding, this method can be used to give a 58% reduction in grammar size without significant change in parsing performance, and can produce a 69% reduction with some gain in recall, but a loss in precision.
cs/9902002
Automatic Identification of Subjects for Textual Documents in Digital Libraries
cs.DL cs.CL
The amount of electronic documents in the Internet grows very quickly. How to effectively identify subjects for documents becomes an important issue. In past, the researches focus on the behavior of nouns in documents. Although subjects are composed of nouns, the constituents that determine which nouns are subjects are not only nouns. Based on the assumption that texts are well-organized and event-driven, nouns and verbs together contribute the process of subject identification. This paper considers four factors: 1) word importance, 2) word frequency, 3) word co-occurrence, and 4) word distance and proposes a model to identify subjects for textual documents. The preliminary experiments show that the performance of the proposed model is close to that of human beings.
cs/9902005
Mutual Search
cs.DS cs.CC cs.DB cs.DC cs.DM cs.IR
We introduce a search problem called ``mutual search'' where $k$ \agents, arbitrarily distributed over $n$ sites, are required to locate one another by posing queries of the form ``Anybody at site $i$?''. We ask for the least number of queries that is necessary and sufficient. For the case of two \agents using deterministic protocols we obtain the following worst-case results: In an oblivious setting (where all pre-planned queries are executed) there is no savings: $n-1$ queries are required and are sufficient. In a nonoblivious setting we can exploit the paradigm of ``no news is also news'' to obtain significant savings: in the synchronous case $0.586n$ queries suffice and $0.536n$ queries are required; in the asynchronous case $0.896n$ queries suffice and a fortiori 0.536 queries are required; for $o(\sqrt{n})$ \agents using a deterministic protocol less than $n$ queries suffice; there is a simple randomized protocol for two \agents with worst-case expected $0.5n$ queries and all randomized protocols require at least $0.125n$ worst-case expected queries. The graph-theoretic framework we formulate for expressing and analyzing algorithms for this problem may be of independent interest.
cs/9902006
A Discipline of Evolutionary Programming
cs.NE cs.AI cs.CC cs.DS cs.LG cs.MA
Genetic fitness optimization using small populations or small population updates across generations generally suffers from randomly diverging evolutions. We propose a notion of highly probable fitness optimization through feasible evolutionary computing runs on small size populations. Based on rapidly mixing Markov chains, the approach pertains to most types of evolutionary genetic algorithms, genetic programming and the like. We establish that for systems having associated rapidly mixing Markov chains and appropriate stationary distributions the new method finds optimal programs (individuals) with probability almost 1. To make the method useful would require a structured design methodology where the development of the program and the guarantee of the rapidly mixing property go hand in hand. We analyze a simple example to show that the method is implementable. More significant examples require theoretical advances, for example with respect to the Metropolis filter.
cs/9902015
Resource Discovery in Trilogy
cs.DL cs.AI cs.MA
Trilogy is a collaborative project whose key aim is the development of an integrated virtual laboratory to support research training within each institution and collaborative projects between the partners. In this paper, the architecture and underpinning platform of the system is described with particular emphasis being placed on the structure and the integration of the distributed database. A key element is the ontology that provides the multi-agent system with a conceptualisation specification of the domain; this ontology is explained, accompanied by a discussion how such a system is integrated and used within the virtual laboratory. Although in this paper, Telecommunications and in particular Broadband networks are used as exemplars, the underlying system principles are applicable to any domain where a combination of experimental and literature-based resources are required.
cs/9902017
Not Available
cs.DL cs.DB
withdrawn by author
cs/9902018
ZBroker: A Query Routing Broker for Z39.50 Databases
cs.DL cs.DB
A query routing broker is a software agent that determines from a large set of accessing information sources the ones most relevant to a user's information need. As the number of information sources on the Internet increases dramatically, future users will have to rely on query routing brokers to decide a small number of information sources to query without incurring too much query processing overheads. In this paper, we describe a query routing broker known as ZBroker developed for bibliographic database servers that support the Z39.50 protocol. ZBroker samples the content of each bibliographic database by using training queries and their results, and summarizes the bibliographic database content into a knowledge base. We present the design and implementation of ZBroker and describe its Web-based user interface.
cs/9902021
Visualization of Retrieved Documents using a Presentation Server
cs.DL cs.IR
In any search-based digital library (DL) systems dealing with a non-trivial number of documents, users are often required to go through a long list of short document descriptions in order to identify what they are looking for. To tackle the problem, a variety of document organization algorithms and/or visualization techniques have been used to guide users in selecting relevant documents. Since these techniques require heavy computations, however, we developed a presentation server designed to serve as an intermediary between retrieval servers and clients equipped with a visualization interface. In addition, we designed our own visual interface by which users can view a set of documents from different perspectives through layers of document maps. We finally ran experiments to show that the visual interface, in conjunction with the presentation server, indeed helps users in selecting relevant documents from the retrieval results.
cs/9902024
Algorithms of Two-Level Parallelization for DSMC of Unsteady Flows in Molecular Gasdynamics
cs.CE cs.PF
The general scheme of two-level parallelization (TLP) for direct simulation Monte Carlo of unsteady gas flows on shared memory multiprocessor computers has been described. The high efficient algorithm of parallel independent runs is used on the first level. The data parallelization is employed for the second one. Two versions of TLP algorithm are elaborated with static and dynamic load balancing. The method of dynamic processor reallocation is used for dynamic load balancing. Two gasdynamic unsteady problems were used to study speedup and efficiency of the algorithms. The conditions of efficient application field for the algorithms have been determined.
cs/9902025
An Efficient Mean Field Approach to the Set Covering Problem
cs.NE
A mean field feedback artificial neural network algorithm is developed and explored for the set covering problem. A convenient encoding of the inequality constraints is achieved by means of a multilinear penalty function. An approximate energy minimum is obtained by iterating a set of mean field equations, in combination with annealing. The approach is numerically tested against a set of publicly available test problems with sizes ranging up to 5x10^3 rows and 10^6 columns. When comparing the performance with exact results for sizes where these are available, the approach yields results within a few percent from the optimal solutions. Comparisons with other approximate methods also come out well, in particular given the very low CPU consumption required -- typically a few seconds. Arbitrary problems can be processed using the algorithm via a public domain server.
cs/9902026
Probabilistic Inductive Inference:a Survey
cs.LG cs.CC cs.LO math.LO
Inductive inference is a recursion-theoretic theory of learning, first developed by E. M. Gold (1967). This paper surveys developments in probabilistic inductive inference. We mainly focus on finite inference of recursive functions, since this simple paradigm has produced the most interesting (and most complex) results.
cs/9902027
Autocatalytic Theory of Meaning
cs.CL adap-org nlin.AO
Recently it has been argued that autocatalytic theory could be applied to the origin of culture. Here possible application to a theory of meaning in the philosophy of language, called radical interpretation, is commented upon and compared to previous applications.
cs/9902028
A Scrollbar-based Visualization for Document Navigation
cs.IR cs.HC
We are interested in questions of improving user control in best-match text-retrieval systems, specifically questions as to whether simple visualizations that nonetheless go beyond the minimal ones generally available can significantly help users. Recently, we have been investigating ways to help users decide-given a set of documents retrieved by a query-which documents and passages are worth closer examination. We built a document viewer incorporating a visualization centered around a novel content-displaying scrollbar and color term highlighting, and studied whether the visualization is helpful to non-expert searchers. Participants' reaction to the visualization was very positive, while the objective results were inconclusive.
cs/9902029
The "Fodor"-FODOR fallacy bites back
cs.CL
The paper argues that Fodor and Lepore are misguided in their attack on Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon, largely because their argument rests on a traditional, but implausible and discredited, view of the lexicon on which it is effectively empty of content, a view that stands in the long line of explaining word meaning (a) by ostension and then (b) explaining it by means of a vacuous symbol in a lexicon, often the word itself after typographic transmogrification. (a) and (b) both share the wrong belief that to a word must correspond a simple entity that is its meaning. I then turn to the semantic rules that Pustejovsky uses and argue first that, although they have novel features, they are in a well-established Artificial Intelligence tradition of explaining meaning by reference to structures that mention other structures assigned to words that may occur in close proximity to the first. It is argued that Fodor and Lepore's view that there cannot be such rules is without foundation, and indeed systems using such rules have proved their practical worth in computational systems. Their justification descends from line of argument, whose high points were probably Wittgenstein and Quine that meaning is not to be understood by simple links to the world, ostensive or otherwise, but by the relationship of whole cultural representational structures to each other and to the world as a whole.
cs/9902030
Is Word Sense Disambiguation just one more NLP task?
cs.CL
This paper compares the tasks of part-of-speech (POS) tagging and word-sense-tagging or disambiguation (WSD), and argues that the tasks are not related by fineness of grain or anything like that, but are quite different kinds of task, particularly becuase there is nothing in POS corresponding to sense novelty. The paper also argues for the reintegration of sub-tasks that are being separated for evaluation
cs/9903002
An Algebraic Programming Style for Numerical Software and its Optimization
cs.SE cs.AI cs.CE cs.MS
The abstract mathematical theory of partial differential equations (PDEs) is formulated in terms of manifolds, scalar fields, tensors, and the like, but these algebraic structures are hardly recognizable in actual PDE solvers. The general aim of the Sophus programming style is to bridge the gap between theory and practice in the domain of PDE solvers. Its main ingredients are a library of abstract datatypes corresponding to the algebraic structures used in the mathematical theory and an algebraic expression style similar to the expression style used in the mathematical theory. Because of its emphasis on abstract datatypes, Sophus is most naturally combined with object-oriented languages or other languages supporting abstract datatypes. The resulting source code patterns are beyond the scope of current compiler optimizations, but are sufficiently specific for a dedicated source-to-source optimizer. The limited, domain-specific, character of Sophus is the key to success here. This kind of optimization has been tested on computationally intensive Sophus style code with promising results. The general approach may be useful for other styles and in other application domains as well.
cs/9903003
A Formal Framework for Linguistic Annotation
cs.CL
`Linguistic annotation' covers any descriptive or analytic notations applied to raw language data. The basic data may be in the form of time functions -- audio, video and/or physiological recordings -- or it may be textual. The added notations may include transcriptions of all sorts (from phonetic features to discourse structures), part-of-speech and sense tagging, syntactic analysis, `named entity' identification, co-reference annotation, and so on. While there are several ongoing efforts to provide formats and tools for such annotations and to publish annotated linguistic databases, the lack of widely accepted standards is becoming a critical problem. Proposed standards, to the extent they exist, have focussed on file formats. This paper focuses instead on the logical structure of linguistic annotations. We survey a wide variety of existing annotation formats and demonstrate a common conceptual core, the annotation graph. This provides a formal framework for constructing, maintaining and searching linguistic annotations, while remaining consistent with many alternative data structures and file formats.
cs/9903007
Some Remarks on the Geometry of Grammar
cs.CL cs.LO
This paper, following (Dymetman:1998), presents an approach to grammar description and processing based on the geometry of cancellation diagrams, a concept which plays a central role in combinatorial group theory (Lyndon-Schuppe:1977). The focus here is on the geometric intuitions and on relating group-theoretical diagrams to the traditional charts associated with context-free grammars and type-0 rewriting systems. The paper is structured as follows. We begin in Section 1 by analyzing charts in terms of constructs called cells, which are a geometrical counterpart to rules. Then we move in Section 2 to a presentation of cancellation diagrams and show how they can be used computationally. In Section 3 we give a formal algebraic presentation of the concept of group computation structure, which is based on the standard notions of free group and conjugacy. We then relate in Section 4 the geometric and the algebraic views of computation by using the fundamental theorem of combinatorial group theory (Rotman:1994). In Section 5 we study in more detail the relationship between the two views on the basis of a simple grammar stated as a group computation structure. In section 6 we extend this grammar to handle non-local constructs such as relative pronouns and quantifiers. We conclude in Section 7 with some brief notes on the differences between normal submonoids and normal subgroups, group computation versus rewriting systems, and the use of group morphisms to study the computational complexity of parsing and generation.
cs/9903008
Empirically Evaluating an Adaptable Spoken Dialogue System
cs.CL
Recent technological advances have made it possible to build real-time, interactive spoken dialogue systems for a wide variety of applications. However, when users do not respect the limitations of such systems, performance typically degrades. Although users differ with respect to their knowledge of system limitations, and although different dialogue strategies make system limitations more apparent to users, most current systems do not try to improve performance by adapting dialogue behavior to individual users. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of TOOT, an adaptable spoken dialogue system for retrieving train schedules on the web. We conduct an experiment in which 20 users carry out 4 tasks with both adaptable and non-adaptable versions of TOOT, resulting in a corpus of 80 dialogues. The values for a wide range of evaluation measures are then extracted from this corpus. Our results show that adaptable TOOT generally outperforms non-adaptable TOOT, and that the utility of adaptation depends on TOOT's initial dialogue strategies.
cs/9903011
A complete anytime algorithm for balanced number partitioning
cs.DS cond-mat.dis-nn cs.AI
Given a set of numbers, the balanced partioning problem is to divide them into two subsets, so that the sum of the numbers in each subset are as nearly equal as possible, subject to the constraint that the cardinalities of the subsets be within one of each other. We combine the balanced largest differencing method (BLDM) and Korf's complete Karmarkar-Karp algorithm to get a new algorithm that optimally solves the balanced partitioning problem. For numbers with twelve significant digits or less, the algorithm can optimally solve balanced partioning problems of arbitrary size in practice. For numbers with greater precision, it first returns the BLDM solution, then continues to find better solutions as time allows.
cs/9903016
Modeling Belief in Dynamic Systems, Part II: Revision and Update
cs.AI
The study of belief change has been an active area in philosophy and AI. In recent years two special cases of belief change, belief revision and belief update, have been studied in detail. In a companion paper (Friedman & Halpern, 1997), we introduce a new framework to model belief change. This framework combines temporal and epistemic modalities with a notion of plausibility, allowing us to examine the change of beliefs over time. In this paper, we show how belief revision and belief update can be captured in our framework. This allows us to compare the assumptions made by each method, and to better understand the principles underlying them. In particular, it shows that Katsuno and Mendelzon's notion of belief update (Katsuno & Mendelzon, 1991a) depends on several strong assumptions that may limit its applicability in artificial intelligence. Finally, our analysis allow us to identify a notion of minimal change that underlies a broad range of belief change operations including revision and update.
cs/9903017
SIMMUNE, a tool for simulating and analyzing immune system behavior
cs.MA q-bio
We present a new approach to the simulation and analysis of immune system behavior. The simulations that can be done with our software package called SIMMUNE are based on immunological data that describe the behavior of immune system agents (cells, molecules) on a microscopial (i.e. agent-agent interaction) scale by defining cellular stimulus-response mechanisms. Since the behavior of the agents in SIMMUNE can be very flexibly configured, its application is not limited to immune system simulations. We outline the principles of SIMMUNE's multiscale analysis of emergent structure within the simulated immune system that allow the identification of immunological contexts using minimal a priori assumptions about the higher level organization of the immune system.
cs/9904001
A Proposal for the Establishment of Review Boards - a flexible approach to the selection of academic knowledge
cs.CY cs.DL cs.IR
Paper journals use a small number of trusted academics to select information on behalf of all their readers. This inflexibility in the selection was justified due to the expense of publishing. The advent of cheap distribution via the internet allows a new trade-off between time and expense and the flexibility of the selection process. This paper explores one such possible process one where the role of mark-up and archiving is separated from that of review. The idea is that authors publish their papers on their own web pages or in a public paper archive, a board of reviewers judge that paper on a number of different criteria. The detailed results of the reviews are stored in such a way as to enable readers to use these judgements to find the papers they want using search engines on the web. Thus instead of journals using generic selection criteria readers can set their own to suit their needs. The resulting system might be even cheaper than web-journals to implement.
cs/9904002
A geometric framework for modelling similarity search
cs.IR cs.DB cs.DS
The aim of this paper is to propose a geometric framework for modelling similarity search in large and multidimensional data spaces of general nature, which seems to be flexible enough to address such issues as analysis of complexity, indexability, and the `curse of dimensionality.' Such a framework is provided by the concept of the so-called similarity workload, which is a probability metric space $\Omega$ (query domain) with a distinguished finite subspace $X$ (dataset), together with an assembly of concepts, techniques, and results from metric geometry. They include such notions as metric transform, $\e$-entropy, and the phenomenon of concentration of measure on high-dimensional structures. In particular, we discuss the relevance of the latter to understanding the curse of dimensionality. As some of those concepts and techniques are being currently reinvented by the database community, it seems desirable to try and bridge the gap between database research and the relevant work already done in geometry and analysis.
cs/9904003
The Structure of Weighting Coefficient Matrices of Harmonic Differential Quadrature and Its Applications
cs.CE cs.NA math.NA
The structure of weighting coefficient matrices of Harmonic Differential Quadrature (HDQ) is found to be either centrosymmetric or skew centrosymmetric depending on the order of the corresponding derivatives. The properties of both matrices are briefly discussed in this paper. It is noted that the computational effort of the harmonic quadrature for some problems can be further reduced up to 75 per cent by using the properties of the above-mentioned matrices.
cs/9904004
Mixing Metaphors
cs.CL cs.AI
Mixed metaphors have been neglected in recent metaphor research. This paper suggests that such neglect is short-sighted. Though mixing is a more complex phenomenon than straight metaphors, the same kinds of reasoning and knowledge structures are required. This paper provides an analysis of both parallel and serial mixed metaphors within the framework of an AI system which is already capable of reasoning about straight metaphorical manifestations and argues that the processes underlying mixing are central to metaphorical meaning. Therefore, any theory of metaphors must be able to account for mixing.
cs/9904006
Jacobian matrix: a bridge between linear and nonlinear polynomial-only problems
cs.CE cs.NA math.NA
By using the Hadamard matrix product concept, this paper introduces two generalized matrix formulation forms of numerical analogue of nonlinear differential operators. The SJT matrix-vector product approach is found to be a simple, efficient and accurate technique in the calculation of the Jacobian matrix of the nonlinear discretization by finite difference, finite volume, collocation, dual reciprocity BEM or radial functions based numerical methods. We also present and prove simple underlying relationship (theorem (3.1)) between general nonlinear analogue polynomials and their corresponding Jacobian matrices, which forms the basis of this paper. By means of theorem 3.1, stability analysis of numerical solutions of nonlinear initial value problems can be easily handled based on the well-known results for linear problems. Theorem 3.1 also leads naturally to the straightforward extension of various linear iterative algorithms such as the SOR, Gauss-Seidel and Jacobi methods to nonlinear algebraic equations. Since an exact alternative of the quasi-Newton equation is established via theorem 3.1, we derive a modified BFGS quasi-Newton method. A simple formula is also given to examine the deviation between the approximate and exact Jacobian matrices. Furthermore, in order to avoid the evaluation of the Jacobian matrix and its inverse, the pseudo-Jacobian matrix is introduced with a general applicability of any nonlinear systems of equations. It should be pointed out that a large class of real-world nonlinear problems can be modeled or numerically discretized polynomial-only algebraic system of equations. The results presented here are in general applicable for all these problems. This paper can be considered as a starting point in the research of nonlinear computation and analysis from an innovative viewpoint.
cs/9904007
The Study on the Nonlinear Computations of the DQ and DC Methods
cs.CE cs.NA math.NA
This paper points out that the differential quadrature (DQ) and differential cubature (DC) methods due to their global domain property are more efficient for nonlinear problems than the traditional numerical techniques such as finite element and finite difference methods. By introducing the Hadamard product of matrices, we obtain an explicit matrix formulation for the DQ and DC solutions of nonlinear differential and integro-differential equations. Due to its simplicity and flexibility, the present Hadamard product approach makes the DQ and DC methods much easier to be used. Many studies on the Hadamard product can be fully exploited for the DQ and DC nonlinear computations. Furthermore, we first present SJT product of matrix and vector to compute accurately and efficiently the Frechet derivative matrix in the Newton-Raphson method for the solution of the nonlinear formulations. We also propose a simple approach to simplify the DQ or DC formulations for some nonlinear differential operators and thus the computational efficiency of these methods is improved significantly. We give the matrix multiplication formulas to compute efficiently the weighting coefficient matrices of the DC method. The spherical harmonics are suggested as the test functions in the DC method to handle the nonlinear differential equations occurring in global and hemispheric weather forecasting problems. Some examples are analyzed to demonstrate the simplicity and efficiency of the presented techniques. It is emphasized that innovations presented are applicable to the nonlinear computations of the other numerical methods as well.
cs/9904008
Transducers from Rewrite Rules with Backreferences
cs.CL
Context sensitive rewrite rules have been widely used in several areas of natural language processing, including syntax, morphology, phonology and speech processing. Kaplan and Kay, Karttunen, and Mohri & Sproat have given various algorithms to compile such rewrite rules into finite-state transducers. The present paper extends this work by allowing a limited form of backreferencing in such rules. The explicit use of backreferencing leads to more elegant and general solutions.
cs/9904009
An ascription-based approach to speech acts
cs.CL
The two principal areas of natural language processing research in pragmatics are belief modelling and speech act processing. Belief modelling is the development of techniques to represent the mental attitudes of a dialogue participant. The latter approach, speech act processing, based on speech act theory, involves viewing dialogue in planning terms. Utterances in a dialogue are modelled as steps in a plan where understanding an utterance involves deriving the complete plan a speaker is attempting to achieve. However, previous speech act based approaches have been limited by a reliance upon relatively simplistic belief modelling techniques and their relationship to planning and plan recognition. In particular, such techniques assume precomputed nested belief structures. In this paper, we will present an approach to speech act processing based on novel belief modelling techniques where nested beliefs are propagated on demand.
cs/9904018
A Computational Memory and Processing Model for Processing for Prosody
cs.CL
This paper links prosody to the information in a text and how it is processed by the speaker. It describes the operation and output of LOQ, a text-to-speech implementation that includes a model of limited attention and working memory. Attentional limitations are key. Varying the attentional parameter in the simulations varies in turn what counts as given and new in a text, and therefore, the intonational contours with which it is uttered. Currently, the system produces prosody in three different styles: child-like, adult expressive, and knowledgeable. This prosody also exhibits differences within each style -- no two simulations are alike. The limited resource approach captures some of the stylistic and individual variety found in natural prosody.
cs/9904021
Hadamard product nonlinear formulation of Galerkin and finite element methods
cs.CE cs.NA math.NA
A novel nonlinear formulation of the finite element and Galerkin methods is presented here, which leads to the Hadamard product expression of the resultant nonlinear algebraic analogue. The presented formulation attains the advantages of weak formulation in the standard finite element and Galerkin schemes and avoids the costly repeated numerical integration of the Jacobian matrix via the recently developed SJT product approach. This also provides possibility of the nonlinear decoupling computations.