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

The continued development and maturation of advanced HTML features such as Cascading style sheets (CSS), Javascript, and AJAX, as well as their widespread adoption by browsers, has enabled web pages to flourish with sophistication and interactivity. Unfortunately, this presents challenges to the web search community, as a web page's representation in the browser (i.e., what users see) can diverge dramatically from its raw HTML content (i.e., what search engines index and retrieve). For example, interactive pages may contain content in regions that are not visible before a user action, such as focusing a tab, but which are nonetheless still contained within the raw HTML. We study this divergence by comparing raw HTML to its fully rendered form across a number of metrics spanning presentation, geometry, and content, using a large, representative sample of popular web pages. We find that a large divergence currently exists, and we show via a historical analysis that this divergence has grown more pronounced over the last decade. The general finding of our study is that continuing to index the web via simple HTML parsing will diminish the effectiveness of retrieval on the modern web, and that the IR community should work toward more sophisticated web page processing in indexing technology.

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The downside of markup: examining the harmful effects of CSS and javascript on indexing today's web

This paper introduces the visually informed embedding of word (VIEW), a continuous vector representation for a word extracted from a deep neural model trained using the Microsoft COCO data set to forecast the spatial arrangements between visual objects, given a textual description. The model is composed of a deep multilayer perceptron (MLP) stacked on the top of a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network, the latter being preceded by an embedding layer. The VIEW is applied to transferring multimodal background knowledge to Spatial Role Labeling (SpRL) algorithms, which recognize spatial relations between objects mentioned in the text. This work also contributes with a new method to select complementary features and a fine-tuning method for MLP that improves the $F1$ measure in classifying the words into spatial roles. The VIEW is evaluated with the Task 3 of SemEval-2013 benchmark data set, SpaceEval.

Deep Embedding for Spatial Role Labeling.

Many top-performing image captioning models rely solely on object features computed with an object detection model to generate image descriptions. However, recent studies propose to directly use scene graphs to introduce information about object relations into captioning, hoping to better describe interactions between objects. In this work, we thoroughly investigate the use of scene graphs in image captioning. We empirically study whether using additional scene graph encoders can lead to better image descriptions and propose a conditional graph attention network (C-GAT), where the image captioning decoder state is used to condition the graph updates. Finally, we determine to what extent noise in the predicted scene graphs influence caption quality. Overall, we find no significant difference between models that use scene graph features and models that only use object detection features across different captioning metrics, which suggests that existing scene graph generation models are still too noisy to be useful in image captioning. Moreover, although the quality of predicted scene graphs is very low in general, when using high quality scene graphs we obtain gains of up to 3.3 CIDEr compared to a strong Bottom-Up Top-Down baseline. We open source code to reproduce all our experiments in this https URL.

Are scene graphs good enough to improve Image Captioning

User generated content in online social networking sites provides a potentially rich source of information for applications that rely on personalisation, such as on-line marketing. In this study we contribute to this effort by exploring the use of machine learning (ML) techniques to automatically infer users’ personality traits based on their Facebook status updates (i.e., text messages to communicate with friends).

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How well do your Facebook status updates express your personality

The TadPolemic system identifies whether web search queries (1) are controversial in nature and/or (2) pertain to children's topics. We are incorporating it into a children's web search engine to assist children's search during difficult topics, as well as to provide filtering or mitigation of bias in results when children search for contentious topics. We show through an evaluation that the system is effective at detecting kids' topics and controversies for a broad range of topics. Though designed to assist children, we believe these methods are generalizable beyond young audiences and can be usefully applied in other contexts.

Marie-Francine Moens

Papers

The downside of markup: examining the harmful effects of CSS and javascript on indexing today's web

Deep Embedding for Spatial Role Labeling.

Are scene graphs good enough to improve Image Captioning

How well do your Facebook status updates express your personality

Clash of the typings: finding controversies and children's topics within queries