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

We study the problem of extracting cross-lingual topics from non-parallel multilingual text datasets with partially overlapping thematic content (e.g., aligned Wikipedia articles in two different languages). To this end, we develop a new bilingual probabilistic topic model called comparable bilingual latent Dirichlet allocation (C-BiLDA), which is able to deal with such comparable data, and, unlike the standard bilingual LDA model (BiLDA), does not assume the availability of document pairs with identical topic distributions. We present a full overview of C-BiLDA, and show its utility in the task of cross-lingual knowledge transfer for multi-class document classification on two benchmarking datasets for three language pairs. The proposed model outperforms the baseline LDA model, as well as the standard BiLDA model and two standard low-rank approximation methods (CL-LSI and CL-KCCA) used in previous work on this task.

C-BiLDA extracting cross-lingual topics from non-parallel texts by distinguishing shared from unshared content

We query the pictures of Yahoo! News for persons and objects by using the accompanying news captions as an indexing annotation. Our aim is to find these pictures on top of the answer list in which the sought persons or objects are most prominently present. We demonstrate that an appearance or content model based on syntactic, semantic and discourse analysis of the short news text is only useful for finding the best picture of a person of object if the database contains photos each picturing many entities. In other circumstances a simpler bag-of-nouns representation has a good performance. The appearance models are tested in a probabilistic ranking function.

Finding the best picture: cross-media retrieval of content

In many information retrieval and selection tasks it is valuable to score how much a text is about a certain entity and to compute how much the text discusses the entity with respect to a certain viewpoint. In this paper we are interested in giving an aboutness score to a text, when the input query is a person name and we want to measure the aboutness with respect to the biographical data of that person. We present a graph-based algorithm and compare its results with other approaches.

/pdf/measuring-aboutness-of-an-entity-in-a-text-418wat2g84.pdf

Measuring Aboutness of an Entity in a Text

Described is method, the Latent Words Language Model (LWLM), that automatically determines context-dependent word distributions (called hidden or latent words) for each word of a text. The probabilistic word distributions reflect the probability that another word of the vocabulary of a language would occur at that position in the text. Furthermore, a method is described to use these word distributions in statistical language processing applications, such as information extraction applications (for example, semantic role labeling, named entity recognition), automatic machine translation, textual entailment, paraphrasing, information retrieval, and speech recognition.

Method for the automatic determination of context-dependent hidden word distributions

This paper introduces speech-based visual question answering (VQA), the task of generating an answer given an image and a spoken question. Two methods are studied: an end-to-end, deep neural network that directly uses audio waveforms as input versus a pipelined approach that performs ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) on the question, followed by text-based visual question answering. Furthermore, we investigate the robustness of both methods by injecting various levels of noise into the spoken question and find both methods to be tolerate noise at similar levels.

Marie-Francine Moens

Papers

C-BiLDA extracting cross-lingual topics from non-parallel texts by distinguishing shared from unshared content

Finding the best picture: cross-media retrieval of content

Measuring Aboutness of an Entity in a Text

Method for the automatic determination of context-dependent hidden word distributions

Speech-Based Visual Question Answering.