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

Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

How to Do Things With Words

Recommender systems have developed in parallel with the web. They were initially based on demographic, content-based and collaborative filtering. Currently, these systems are incorporating social information. In the future, they will use implicit, local and personal information from the Internet of things. This article provides an overview of recommender systems as well as collaborative filtering methods and algorithms; it also explains their evolution, provides an original classification for these systems, identifies areas of future implementation and develops certain areas selected for past, present or future importance.

http://romisatriawahono.net/lecture/rm/survey/information%20retrieval/Bobadilla%20-%20Recommender%20Systems%20-%202013.pdf

Recommender systems survey

5分で分かる!? 有名論文ナナメ読み：Jacob Devlin et al. : BERT : Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding

Basic content personalization consists in matching up the attributes of a user profile, in which preferences and interests are stored, with the attributes of a content object. The Web 2.0 (r)evolution and the advent of user generated content have changed the game for personalization, since the role of people has evolved from passive consumers of information to that of active contributors. One of the forms of user generated content that has drawn more attention from the research community is folksonomy, a taxonomy generated by users who collaboratively annotate and categorize resources of interests with freely chosen keywords called tags.In this paper, we investigate whether folksonomies might be a valuable source of information about user interests. The main contribution is a strategy that enables a content-based recommender to infer user interests by applying machine learning techniques both on the "official" item descriptions provided by a publisher, and on tags which users adopt to freely annotate relevant items. Static content and tags are preventively analyzed by advanced linguistic techniques in order to capture the semantics of the user interests often hidden behind keywords. The proposed approach has been evaluated in the context of cultural heritage personalization. Preliminary experiments involving 30 real users show an improvement in the predictive accuracy of the tag-augmented recommender compared to the pure content-based one.

Integrating tags in a semantic content-based recommender

English. Recent scientific studies on natural language processing (NLP) report the outstanding effectiveness observed in the use of context-dependent and task-free language understanding models such as ELMo, GPT, and BERT. Specifically, they have proved to achieve state of the art performance in numerous complex NLP tasks such as question answering and sentiment analysis in the English language. Following the great popularity and effectiveness that these models are gaining in the scientific community, we trained a BERT language understanding model for the Italian language (AlBERTo). In particular, AlBERTo is focused on the language used in social networks, specifically on Twitter. To demonstrate its robustness, we evaluated AlBERTo on the EVALITA 2016 task SENTIPOLC (SENTIment POLarity Classification) obtaining state of the art results in subjectivity, polarity and irony detection on Italian tweets. The pre-trained AlBERTo model will be publicly distributed through the GitHub platform at the following web address: https://github.com/ marcopoli/AlBERTo-it in order to facilitate future research.

/pdf/alberto-italian-bert-language-understanding-model-for-nlp-2plhjm1pt4.pdf

AlBERTo: Italian BERT Language Understanding Model for NLP Challenging Tasks Based on Tweets.

This paper describes a new Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) algorithm which extends two well-known variations of the Lesk WSD method. Given a word and its context, Lesk algorithm exploits the idea of maximum number of shared words (maximum overlaps) between the context of a word and each definition of its senses (gloss) in order to select the proper meaning. The main contribution of our approach relies on the use of a word similarity function defined on a distributional semantic space to compute the gloss-context overlap. As sense inventory we adopt BabelNet, a large multilingual semantic network built exploiting both WordNet and Wikipedia. Besides linguistic knowledge, BabelNet also represents encyclopedic concepts coming from Wikipedia. The evaluation performed on SemEval-2013 Multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation shows that our algorithm goes beyond the most frequent sense baseline and the simplified version of the Lesk algorithm. Moreover, when compared with the other participants in SemEval-2013 task, our approach is able to outperform the best system for English.

An Enhanced Lesk Word Sense Disambiguation Algorithm through a Distributional Semantic Model

The textual similarity is a crucial aspect for many extractive text summarization methods. A bag-of-words representation does not allow to grasp the semantic relationships between concepts when comparing strongly related sentences with no words in common. To overcome this issue, in this paper we propose a centroid-based method for text summarization that exploits the compositional capabilities of word embeddings. The evaluations on multi-document and multilingual datasets prove the effectiveness of the continuous vector representation of words compared to the bag-of-words model. Despite its simplicity, our method achieves good performance even in comparison to more complex deep learning models. Our method is unsupervised and it can be adopted in other summarization tasks.

/pdf/centroid-based-text-summarization-through-compositionality-18wotmqht1.pdf

Centroid-based Text Summarization through Compositionality of Word Embeddings

Content-based recommender systems try to recommend items similar to those a given user has liked in the past. The basic process consists of matching up the attributes of a user profile, in which preferences and interests are stored, with the attributes of a content object (item).Common-sense and domain-specific knowledge may be useful to give some meaning to the content of items, thus helping to generate more informative features than "plain" attributes.The process of learning user profiles could also benefit from the infusion of exogenous knowledge or open source knowledge, with respect to the classical use of endogenous knowledge (extracted from the items themselves).The main contribution of this paper is a proposal for knowledge infusion into content-based recommender systems, which suggests a novel view of this type of systems, mostly oriented to content interpretation by way of the infused knowledge.The idea is to provide the system with the "linguistic" and "cultural" background knowledge that hopefully allows a more accurate content analysis than classic approaches based on words. A set of knowledge sources is modeled to create a memory of linguistic competencies and of more specific world "facts", that can be exploited to reason about content as well as to support the user profiling and recommendation processes.The modeled knowledge sources include a dictionary, Wikipedia, and content generated by users (i.e. tags provided on items), while the core of the reasoning component is a spreading activation algorithm.

Pierpaolo Basile

Papers

Integrating tags in a semantic content-based recommender

AlBERTo: Italian BERT Language Understanding Model for NLP Challenging Tasks Based on Tweets.

An Enhanced Lesk Word Sense Disambiguation Algorithm through a Distributional Semantic Model

Centroid-based Text Summarization through Compositionality of Word Embeddings

Knowledge infusion into content-based recommender systems