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.

/pdf/sentiment-analysis-and-opinion-mining-8314pykwrf.pdf

Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining

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

Time is deeply woven into how people perceive, and communicate about the world. Almost unconsciously, we provide our language utterances with temporal cues, like verb tenses, and we can hardly produce sentences without such cues. Extracting temporal cues from text, and constructing a global temporal view about the order of described events is a major challenge of automatic natural language understanding. Temporal reasoning, the process of combining different temporal cues into a coherent temporal view, plays a central role in temporal information extraction. This article presents a comprehensive survey of the research from the past decades on temporal reasoning for automatic temporal information extraction from text, providing a case study on how combining symbolic reasoning with machine learning-based information extraction systems can improve performance. It gives a clear overview of the used methodologies for temporal reasoning, and explains how temporal reasoning can be, and has been successfully integrated into temporal information extraction systems. Based on the distillation of existing work, this survey also suggests currently unexplored research areas. We argue that the level of temporal reasoning that current systems use is still incomplete for the full task of temporal information extraction, and that a deeper understanding of how the various types of temporal information can be integrated into temporal reasoning is required to drive future research in this area.

/pdf/a-survey-on-temporal-reasoning-for-temporal-information-4mqy9qs4c8.pdf

A Survey on Temporal Reasoning for Temporal Information Extraction from Text

We report the results of experiments which prove that the analysis of relations between sentences increase the accuracy in the automatic detection of arguments in legal cases. We treat the search of arguments as a classification problem. Our corpus is a human-annotated and automatically-extracted test set from a collection of legal cases of the European Court of Human Rights. We obtain an increment around 8% in the general accuracy compared to previous experiments due to the addition of new features that study the relations between the text sentences.

Study on Sentence Relations in the Automatic Detection of Argumentation in Legal Cases

Recent deep learning approaches have shown promising results for named entity recognition (NER). A reasonable assumption for training robust deep learning models is that a sufficient amount of high-quality annotated training data is available. However, in many real-world scenarios, labeled training data is scarcely present. In this paper we consider two use cases: generic entity extraction from financial and from biomedical documents. First, we have developed a character based model for NER in financial documents and a word and character based model with attention for NER in biomedical documents. Further, we have analyzed how transfer learning addresses the problem of limited training data in a target domain. We demonstrate through experiments that NER models trained on labeled data from a source domain can be used as base models and then be fine-tuned with few labeled data for recognition of different named entity classes in a target domain. We also witness an interest in language models to improve NER as a way of coping with limited labeled data. The current most successful language model is BERT. Because of its success in state-of-the-art models we integrate representations based on BERT in our biomedical NER model along with word and character information. The results are compared with a state-of-the-art model applied on a benchmarking biomedical corpus.

https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/10/8/248/pdf

Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition in Financial and Biomedical Documents

Legislative sources are currently accessible via portal web sites. Users demand precise and exhaustive answers to their information queries. When legislation is drafted, it contains text-rich information that is increasingly marked with XML tags. The statute structure as signaled by XML markup can be exploited to more precisely answer free information queries. In this paper we report on several XML retrieval models that we explicitly designed for the retrieval of legislation. We show that the models provide more advanced access to the content of statutes.

Combining structured and unstructured information in a retrieval model for accessing legislation

Similarity search is a fundamental problem in network analysis and can be applied in many applications, such as collaborator recommendation in coauthor networks, friend recommendation in social networks, and relation prediction in medical information networks. In this article, we propose a sampling-based method using random paths to estimate the similarities based on both common neighbors and structural contexts efficiently in very large homogeneous or heterogeneous information networks. We give a theoretical guarantee that the sampling size depends on the error-bound e, the confidence level (1-Δ), and the path length T of each random walk. We perform an extensive empirical study on a Tencent microblogging network of 1,000,000,000 edges. We show that our algorithm can return top-k similar vertices for any vertex in a network 300× faster than the state-of-the-art methods. We develop a prototype system of recommending similar authors to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Marie-Francine Moens

Papers

A Survey on Temporal Reasoning for Temporal Information Extraction from Text

Study on Sentence Relations in the Automatic Detection of Argumentation in Legal Cases

Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition in Financial and Biomedical Documents

Combining structured and unstructured information in a retrieval model for accessing legislation

Fast and Flexible Top-k Similarity Search on Large Networks