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

In the field of machine learning, semi-supervised learning (SSL) occupies the middle ground, between supervised learning (in which all training examples are labeled) and unsupervised learning (in which no label data are given). Interest in SSL has increased in recent years, particularly because of application domains in which unlabeled data are plentiful, such as images, text, and bioinformatics. This first comprehensive overview of SSL presents state-of-the-art algorithms, a taxonomy of the field, selected applications, benchmark experiments, and perspectives on ongoing and future research. Semi-Supervised Learning first presents the key assumptions and ideas underlying the field: smoothness, cluster or low-density separation, manifold structure, and transduction. The core of the book is the presentation of SSL methods, organized according to algorithmic strategies. After an examination of generative models, the book describes algorithms that implement the low-density separation assumption, graph-based methods, and algorithms that perform two-step learning. The book then discusses SSL applications and offers guidelines for SSL practitioners by analyzing the results of extensive benchmark experiments. Finally, the book looks at interesting directions for SSL research. The book closes with a discussion of the relationship between semi-supervised learning and transduction. Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series

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Semi-Supervised Learning

An intelligent automated assistant system engages with the user in an integrated, conversational manner using natural language dialog, and invokes external services when appropriate to obtain information or perform various actions. The system can be implemented using any of a number of different platforms, such as the web, email, smartphone, and the like, or any combination thereof. In one embodiment, the system is based on sets of interrelated domains and tasks, and employs additional functionally powered by external services with which the system can interact.

Intelligent Automated Assistant

We describe the CoNLL-2000 shared task: dividing text into syntactically related non-overlapping groups of words, so-called text chunking. We give background information on the data sets, present a general overview of the systems that have taken part in the shared task and briefly discuss their performance.

Introduction to the CoNLL-2000 shared task: chunking

We apply Support Vector Machines (SVMs) to identify English base phrases (chunks). SVMs are known to achieve high generalization performance even with input data of high dimensional feature spaces. Furthermore, by the Kernel principle, SVMs can carry out training with smaller computational overhead independent of their dimensionality. We apply weighted voting of 8 SVMs-based systems trained with distinct chunk representations. Experimental results show that our approach achieves higher accuracy than previous approaches.

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Chunking with support vector machines

We present a geometric view on bilingual lexicon extraction from comparable corpora, which allows to re-interpret the methods proposed so far and identify unresolved problems. This motivates three new methods that aim at solving these problems. Empirical evaluation shows the strengths and weaknesses of these methods, as well as a significant gain in the accuracy of extracted lexicons.

A Geometric View on Bilingual Lexicon Extraction from Comparable Corpora

The cTDaR competition aims at benchmarking state-of-the-art table detection (TRACK A) and table recognition (TRACK B) methods. In particular, we wish to investigate and compare general methods that can reliably and robustly identify the table regions within a document image on the one hand, and the table structure on the other hand. Due to the presence of hand-drawn tables and handwritten text, the methods must be robust against various noise conditions, interfering annotations, and variations of the tables. Two new challenging datasets were created to test the behaviour of state-of-the-art table detection and recognition systems on real world data. One dataset consists of modern documents, while the other consists of archival documents with presence of hand-drawn tables and handwritten text. The evaluation scheme is adapted from the ICDAR 2013 Table competition. We received results of Track A from 11 teams and results of Track B from 2 teams. Results for Track A are very good for the top participants. The winner and his runner-up are very close while using very different approaches. Track B was more challenging and only one participant was able to produce good results.

ICDAR 2019 Competition on Table Detection and Recognition (cTDaR)

This paper focuses on exploiting different models and methods in bilingual lexicon extraction, either from parallel or comparable corpora, in specialized domains. First, a special attention is given to the use of multilingual thesauri, and different search strategies based on such thesauri are investigated. Then, a method to combine the different models for bilingual lexicon extraction is presented. Our results show that the combination of the models significantly improves results, and that the use of the hierarchical information contained in our thesaurus, UMLS/MeSH, is of primary importance. Lastly, methods for bilingual terminology extraction and thesaurus enrichment are discussed.

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An approach based on multilingual thesauri and model combination for bilingual lexicon extraction

String replacement is performed in text using linguistic processing. The linguistic processing identifies the existence of direct or indirect links between the string to be replaced and other strings in the text. Morphological, syntactic, anaphoric, or semantic inconsistencies, which are introduced in strings with the identified direct or indirect links to the string that is to be replaced are detected and corrected.

Smart string replacement

We describe the CoNLL-2001 shared task: dividing text into clauses. We give background information on the data sets, present a general overview of the systems that have taken part in the shared task and briefly discuss their performance.

Hervé Déjean

Papers

A Geometric View on Bilingual Lexicon Extraction from Comparable Corpora

ICDAR 2019 Competition on Table Detection and Recognition (cTDaR)

An approach based on multilingual thesauri and model combination for bilingual lexicon extraction

Smart string replacement

Introduction to the CoNLL-2001 Shared Task: Clause Identification