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

Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Data Mining - Concepts and Techniques.

Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is the field of study that analyzes people's opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions from written language. It is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing and is also widely studied in data mining, Web mining, and text mining. In fact, this research has spread outside of computer science to the management sciences and social sciences due to its importance to business and society as a whole. The growing importance of sentiment analysis coincides with the growth of social media such as reviews, forum discussions, blogs, micro-blogs, Twitter, and social networks. For the first time in human history, we now have a huge volume of opinionated data recorded in digital form for analysis. Sentiment analysis systems are being applied in almost every business and social domain because opinions are central to almost all human activities and are key influencers of our behaviors. Our beliefs and perceptions of reality, and the choices we make, are largely conditioned on how others see and evaluate the world. For this reason, when we need to make a decision we often seek out the opinions of others. This is true not only for individuals but also for organizations. This book is a comprehensive introductory and survey text. It covers all important topics and the latest developments in the field with over 400 references. It is suitable for students, researchers and practitioners who are interested in social media analysis in general and sentiment analysis in particular. Lecturers can readily use it in class for courses on natural language processing, social media analysis, text mining, and data mining. Lecture slides are also available online.

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Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining

“Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks”の学習報告

Human concept representations are often grounded with visual information, yet some aspects of meaning cannot be visually represented or are better described with language. Thus, vision and language provide complementary information that, properly combined, can potentially yield more complete concept representations. Recently, state-of-the-art distributional semantic models and convolutional neural networks have achieved great success in representing linguistic and visual knowledge respectively. In this paper, we compare both, visual and linguistic representations in their ability to capture different types of fine-grain semantic knowledge—or attributes—of concepts. Humans often describe objects using attributes, that is, properties such as shape, color or functionality, which often transcend the linguistic and visual modalities. In our setting, we evaluate how well attributes can be predicted by using the unimodal representations as inputs. We are interested in first, finding out whether attributes are generally better captured by either the vision or by the language modality; and second, if none of them is clearly superior (as we hypothesize), what type of attributes or semantic knowledge are better encoded from each modality. Ultimately, our study sheds light on the potential of combining visual and textual representations.

Is an image worth more than a thousand words? On the fine-grain semantic differences between visual and linguistic representations

This paper gives a short overview of the state-of-the-art and goals of argumentation mining and it provides ideas for further research. Its content is based on two invited lectures on argumentation mining respectively at the FIRE 2013 conference at the India International Center in New Delhi, India and a lecture given as SICSA distinguished visitor at the University of Dundee, UK in the summer of 2014.

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Argumentation Mining: Where are we now, where do we want to be and how do we get there?

The SALOMON project automatically summarizes Belgian criminal cases in order to improve access to the large number of existing and future court decisions. SALOMON extracts text units from the case text to form a case summary. Such a case summary facilitates the rapid determination of the relevance of the case or may be employed in text search. An important part of the research concerns the development of techniques for automatic recognition of representative text paragraphs (or sentences) in texts of unrestricted domains. These techniques are employed to eliminate redundant material in the case texts, and to identify informative text paragraphs which are relevant to include in the case An evaluation of a test set of 700 criminal cases demonstrates that the algorithms have an application potential for automatic indexing, abstracting, and text linking.

Abstracting of legal cases: the potential of clustering based on the selection of representative objects

Argumentation mining is an advanced form of human language understanding by the machine. This is a challenging task for a machine. When sufficient explicit discourse markers are present in the language utterances, the argumentation can be interpreted by the machine with an acceptable degree of accuracy. However, in many real settings, the mining task is difficult due to the lack or ambiguity of the discourse markers, and the fact that a substantial amount of knowledge needed for the correct recognition of the argumentation, its composing elements and their relationships is not explicitly present in the text, but makes up the background knowledge that humans possess when interpreting language. In this article1 we focus on how the machine can automatically acquire the needed common sense and world knowledge. As very few research has been done in this respect, many of the ideas proposed in this article are tentative, but start being researched. We give an overview of the latest methods for human language understanding that map language to a formal knowledge representation that facilitates other tasks (for instance, a representation that is used to visualize the argumentation or that is easily shared in a decision or argumentation support system). Most current systems are trained on texts that are manually annotated. Then we go deeper into the new field of representation learning that nowadays is very much studied in computational linguistics. This field investigates methods for representing language as statistical concepts or as vectors, allowing straightforward methods of compositionality. The methods often use deep learning and its underlying neural network technologies to learn concepts from large text collections in an unsupervised way (i.e., without the need for manual annotations). We show how these methods can help the argumentation mining process, but also demonstrate that these methods need further research to automatically acquire the necessary background knowledge and more specifically common sense and world knowledge. We propose a number of ways to improve the learning of common sense and world knowledge by exploiting textual and visual data, and touch upon how we can integrate the learned knowledge in the argumentation mining process.

Argumentation mining: How can a machine acquire common sense and world knowledge?

In the field of law there is an absolute need for summarizing the texts of court decisions in order to make the content of the cases easily accessible for legal professionals. During the SALOMON and MOSAIC projects we investigated the summarization and retrieval of legal cases. This article presents some of the main findings while integrating the research results of experiments on legal document summarization by other research groups. In addition, we propose novel avenues of research for automatic text summarization, which we currently exploit when summarizing court decisions in the ACILA project. Techniques for automated concept learning and argument recognition are here the most challenging.

Marie-Francine Moens

Papers

Is an image worth more than a thousand words? On the fine-grain semantic differences between visual and linguistic representations

Argumentation Mining: Where are we now, where do we want to be and how do we get there?

Abstracting of legal cases: the potential of clustering based on the selection of representative objects

Argumentation mining: How can a machine acquire common sense and world knowledge?

Summarizing court decisions