Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

本文对国际科学计量学杂志《Ｓｃｉｅｎｔｏｍｅｔｒｉｃｓ》１９７９－１９９１年的研究论文内容、栏目、作者及国别和编委及国别作了计量分析，揭示出科学计量学研究的重点、活动的中心及发展趋势，说明了学科带头人在发展科学计量学这门新兴学科中的作用。

国际刊物《Scientometrics》文献计量研究

C4.5: Programs for Machine Learning (書評)

The major change in the second edition of this book is the addition of a new chapter on probabilistic retrieval. This chapter has been included because I think this is one of the most interesting and active areas of research in information retrieval. There are still many problems to be solved so I hope that this particular chapter will be of some help to those who want to advance the state of knowledge in this area. All the other chapters have been updated by including some of the more recent work on the topics covered. In preparing this new edition I have benefited from discussions with Bruce Croft, The material of this book is aimed at advanced undergraduate information (or computer) science students, postgraduate library science students, and research workers in the field of IR. Some of the chapters, particularly Chapter 6 * , make simple use of a little advanced mathematics. However, the necessary mathematical tools can be easily mastered from numerous mathematical texts that now exist and, in any case, references have been given where the mathematics occur. I had to face the problem of balancing clarity of exposition with density of references. I was tempted to give large numbers of references but was afraid they would have destroyed the continuity of the text. I have tried to steer a middle course and not compete with the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. Normally one is encouraged to cite only works that have been published in some readily accessible form, such as a book or periodical. Unfortunately, much of the interesting work in IR is contained in technical reports and Ph.D. theses. For example, most the work done on the SMART system at Cornell is available only in reports. Luckily many of these are now available through the National Technical Information Service (U.S.) and University Microfilms (U.K.). I have not avoided using these sources although if the same material is accessible more readily in some other form I have given it preference. I should like to acknowledge my considerable debt to many people and institutions that have helped me. Let me say first that they are responsible for many of the ideas in this book but that only I wish to be held responsible. My greatest debt is to Karen Sparck Jones who taught me to research information retrieval as an experimental science. Nick Jardine and Robin …

Information retrieval

We show how to consider similarity between features for calculation of similarity of objects in the Vector Space Model (VSM) for machine learning algorithms and other classes of methods that involve similarity between objects. Unlike LSA, we assume that similarity between features is known (say, from a synonym dictionary) and does not need to be learned from the data.We call the proposed similarity measure soft similarity. Similarity between features is common, for example, in natural language processing: words, n-grams, or syntactic n-grams can be somewhat different (which makes them different features) but still have much in common: for example, words “play” and “game” are different but related. When there is no similarity between features then our soft similarity measure is equal to the standard similarity. For this, we generalize the well-known cosine similarity measure in VSM by introducing what we call “soft cosine measure”. We propose various formulas for exact or approximate calculation of the soft cosine measure. For example, in one of them we consider for VSM a new feature space consisting of pairs of the original features weighted by their similarity. Again, for features that bear no similarity to each other, our formulas reduce to the standard cosine measure. Our experiments show that our soft cosine measure provides better performance in our case study: entrance exams question answering task at CLEF. In these experiments, we use syntactic n-grams as features and Levenshtein distance as the similarity between n-grams, measured either in characters or in elements of n-grams.

/pdf/soft-similarity-and-soft-cosine-measure-similarity-of-54wpnf4bto.pdf

Soft Similarity and Soft Cosine Measure: Similarity of Features in Vector Space Model

The automatic detection of plagiarism is a task that has acquired relevance in the Information Retrieval area and it becomes more complex when the plagiarism is made in a multilingual panorama, where the original and suspicious texts are written in different languages. From a cross-lingual perspective, a text fragment in one language is considered a plagiarism of a text in another language if their contents are considered semantically similar no matter they are written in different languages and the corresponding citation or credit is not included.

Our current experiments on cross-lingual plagiarism analysis are based on the exploitation of a statistical bilingual dictionary. This dictionary is created on the basis of a parallel corpus which contains original fragments written in one language and plagiarised versions of these fragments written in another language.

The process for the automatic cross-lingual plagiarism analysis based on the statistical bilingual dictionary has shown good results and we consider that it could be useful also for the cross-lingual nearduplicate detection task.

/pdf/on-cross-lingual-plagiarism-analysis-using-a-statistical-20p2rvbeb5.pdf

On cross-lingual plagiarism analysis using a statistical model

The existence of huge volumes of documents written in multiple languages on Internet leads to investigate novel algorithmic approaches to deal with information of this kind. However, most crosslingual natural language processing (NLP) tasks consider a decoupled approach in which monolingual NLP techniques are applied along with an independent translation process. This two-step approach is too sensitive to translation errors, and in general to the accumulative effect of errors. To solve this problem, we propose to use a direct probabilistic crosslingual NLP system which integrates both steps, translation and the specific NLP task, into a single one. In order to perform this integrated approach to crosslingual tasks, we propose to use the statistical IBM 1 word alignment model (M1). The M1 model may show a non-monotonic behaviour when aligning words from a sentence in a source language to words from another sentence in a different, target language. This is the case of languages with different word order. In English, for instance, adjectives appear before nouns, whereas in Spanish it is exactly the opposite. The successful experimental results reported in three different tasks - text classification, information retrieval and plagiarism analysis - highlight the benefits of the statistical integrated approach proposed in this work.

A statistical approach to crosslingual natural language tasks

Clustering short length texts is a difficult task itself, but adding the narrow domain characteristic poses an additional challenge for current clustering methods. We addressed this problem with the use of a new measure of distance between documents which is based on the symmetric Kullback-Leibler distance. Although this measure is commonly used to calculate a distance between two probability distributions, we have adapted it in order to obtain a distance value between two documents. We have carried out experiments over two different narrow-domain corpora and our findings indicates that it is possible to use this measure for the addressed problem obtaining comparable results than those which use the Jaccard similarity measure.

/pdf/clustering-narrow-domain-short-texts-by-using-the-kullback-2pbrydlhkw.pdf

David Pinto

Papers

Soft Similarity and Soft Cosine Measure: Similarity of Features in Vector Space Model

On cross-lingual plagiarism analysis using a statistical model

A statistical approach to crosslingual natural language tasks

Clustering Narrow-Domain Short Texts by Using the Kullback-Leibler Distance

A statistical approach to crosslingual natural language tasks