Today's Web-enabled deluge of electronic data calls for automated methods of data analysis. Machine learning provides these, developing methods that can automatically detect patterns in data and then use the uncovered patterns to predict future data. This textbook offers a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to the field of machine learning, based on a unified, probabilistic approach. The coverage combines breadth and depth, offering necessary background material on such topics as probability, optimization, and linear algebra as well as discussion of recent developments in the field, including conditional random fields, L1 regularization, and deep learning. The book is written in an informal, accessible style, complete with pseudo-code for the most important algorithms. All topics are copiously illustrated with color images and worked examples drawn from such application domains as biology, text processing, computer vision, and robotics. Rather than providing a cookbook of different heuristic methods, the book stresses a principled model-based approach, often using the language of graphical models to specify models in a concise and intuitive way. Almost all the models described have been implemented in a MATLAB software package--PMTK (probabilistic modeling toolkit)--that is freely available online. The book is suitable for upper-level undergraduates with an introductory-level college math background and beginning graduate students.

Machine Learning : A Probabilistic Perspective

We describe the design and use of the Stanford CoreNLP toolkit, an extensible pipeline that provides core natural language analysis. This toolkit is quite widely used, both in the research NLP community and also among commercial and government users of open source NLP technology. We suggest that this follows from a simple, approachable design, straightforward interfaces, the inclusion of robust and good quality analysis components, and not requiring use of a large amount of associated baggage.

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The Stanford CoreNLP Natural Language Processing Toolkit

Recent progress in natural language processing has been driven by advances in both model architecture and model pretraining. Transformer architectures have facilitated building higher-capacity models and pretraining has made it possible to effectively utilize this capacity for a wide variety of tasks. Transformers is an open-source library with the goal of opening up these advances to the wider machine learning community. The library consists of carefully engineered state-of-the art Transformer architectures under a unified API. Backing this library is a curated collection of pretrained models made by and available for the community. Transformers is designed to be extensible by researchers, simple for practitioners, and fast and robust in industrial deployments. The library is available at https://github.com/huggingface/transformers.

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Transformers: State-of-the-Art Natural Language Processing

We propose a hierarchical attention network for document classification. Our model has two distinctive characteristics: (i) it has a hierarchical structure that mirrors the hierarchical structure of documents; (ii) it has two levels of attention mechanisms applied at the wordand sentence-level, enabling it to attend differentially to more and less important content when constructing the document representation. Experiments conducted on six large scale text classification tasks demonstrate that the proposed architecture outperform previous methods by a substantial margin. Visualization of the attention layers illustrates that the model selects qualitatively informative words and sentences.

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Hierarchical Attention Networks for Document Classification

Despite progress in perceptual tasks such as image classification, computers still perform poorly on cognitive tasks such as image description and question answering. Cognition is core to tasks that involve not just recognizing, but reasoning about our visual world. However, models used to tackle the rich content in images for cognitive tasks are still being trained using the same datasets designed for perceptual tasks. To achieve success at cognitive tasks, models need to understand the interactions and relationships between objects in an image. When asked "What vehicle is the person riding?", computers will need to identify the objects in an image as well as the relationships riding(man, carriage) and pulling(horse, carriage) to answer correctly that "the person is riding a horse-drawn carriage." In this paper, we present the Visual Genome dataset to enable the modeling of such relationships. We collect dense annotations of objects, attributes, and relationships within each image to learn these models. Specifically, our dataset contains over 108K images where each image has an average of $$35$$35 objects, $$26$$26 attributes, and $$21$$21 pairwise relationships between objects. We canonicalize the objects, attributes, relationships, and noun phrases in region descriptions and questions answer pairs to WordNet synsets. Together, these annotations represent the densest and largest dataset of image descriptions, objects, attributes, relationships, and question answer pairs.

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Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations

Historically, unsupervised learning techniques have lacked a principled technique for selecting the number of unseen components. Research into non-parametric priors, such as the Dirichlet process, has enabled instead the use of infinite models, in which the number of hidden categories is not fixed, but can grow with the amount of training data. Here we develop the infinite tree, a new infinite model capable of representing recursive branching structure over an arbitrarily large set of hidden categories. Specifically, we develop three infinite tree models, each of which enforces different independence assumptions, and for each model we define a simple direct assignmentsampling inference procedure. We demonstrate the utility of our models by doing unsupervised learning of part-of-speech tags from treebank dependency skeleton structure, achieving an accuracy of 75.34%, and by doing unsupervised splitting of part-of-speech tags, which increases the accuracy of a generative dependency parser from 85.11% to 87.35%.

The Infinite Tree

We present a maximum entropy-based system for identifying named entities (NEs) in biomedical abstracts and present its performance in the only two biomedical named entity recognition (NER) comparative evaluations that have been held to date, namely BioCreative and Coling BioNLP. Our system obtained an exact match F-score of 83.2% in the BioCreative evaluation and 70.1% in the BioNLP evaluation. We discuss our system in detail, including its rich use of local features, attention to correct boundary identification, innovative use of external knowledge resources, including parsing and web searches, and rapid adaptation to new NE sets. We also discuss in depth problems with data annotation in the evaluations which caused the final performance to be lower than optimal.

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A System for Identifying Named Entities in Biomedical Text: how Results From two Evaluations Reflect on Both the System and the Evaluations

One of the main obstacles to producing high quality joint models is the lack of jointly annotated data. Joint modeling of multiple natural language processing tasks outperforms single-task models learned from the same data, but still under-performs compared to single-task models learned on the more abundant quantities of available single-task annotated data. In this paper we present a novel model which makes use of additional single-task annotated data to improve the performance of a joint model. Our model utilizes a hierarchical prior to link the feature weights for shared features in several single-task models and the joint model. Experiments on joint parsing and named entity recognition, using the OntoNotes corpus, show that our hierarchical joint model can produce substantial gains over a joint model trained on only the jointly annotated data.

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Hierarchical Joint Learning: Improving Joint Parsing and Named Entity Recognition with Non-Jointly Labeled Data

We present a machine learning approach to robust textual inference, in which parses of the text and the hypothesis sentences are used to measure their asymmetric “similarity”, and thereby to decide if the hypothesis can be inferred. This idea is realized in two different ways. In the first, each sentence is represented as a graph (extracted from a dependency parser) in which the nodes are words/phrases, and the links represent dependencies. A learned, asymmetric, graph-matching cost is then computed to measure the similarity between the text and the hypothesis. In the second approach, the text and the hypothesis are parsed into the logical formula-like representation used by (Harabagiu et al., 2000). An abductive theorem prover (using learned costs for making different types of assumptions in the proof) is then applied to try to infer the hypothesis from the text, and the total “cost” of proving the hypothesis is used to decide if the hypothesis is entailed.

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Robust Textual Inference using Diverse Knowledge Sources

We present a maximum entropy-based system for identifying named entities (NEs) in biomedical abstracts and present its performance in the only two biomedical named entity recognition (NER) comparative evaluations that have been held to date, namely BioCreative and Coling BioNLP. Our system obtained an exact match F-score of 83.2p in the BioCreative evaluation and 70.1p in the BioNLP evaluation. We discuss our system in detail, including its rich use of local features, attention to correct boundary identification, innovative use of external knowledge resources, including parsing and web searches, and rapid adaptation to new NE sets. We also discuss in depth problems with data annotation in the evaluations which caused the final performance to be lower than optimal. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A system for identifying named entities in biomedical text: how results from two evaluations reflect on both the system and the evaluations: Conference Papers

Jenny Rose Finkel

Papers

The Infinite Tree

A System for Identifying Named Entities in Biomedical Text: how Results From two Evaluations Reflect on Both the System and the Evaluations

Hierarchical Joint Learning: Improving Joint Parsing and Named Entity Recognition with Non-Jointly Labeled Data

Robust Textual Inference using Diverse Knowledge Sources

A system for identifying named entities in biomedical text: how results from two evaluations reflect on both the system and the evaluations: Conference Papers