Task analysis

About: Task analysis is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10432 publications have been published within this topic receiving 283481 citations.

The Ordinal Nature of Emotions: An Emerging Approach

Abstract: Computational representation of everyday emotional states is a challenging task and, arguably, one of the most fundamental for affective computing. Standard practice in emotion annotation is to ask people to assign a value of intensity or a class value to each emotional behavior they observe. Psychological theories and evidence from multiple disciplines including neuroscience, economics and artificial intelligence, however, suggest that the task of assigning reference-based values to subjective notions is better aligned with the underlying representations. This paper draws together the theoretical reasons to favor ordinal labels for representing and annotating emotion, reviewing the literature across several disciplines. We go on to discuss good and bad practices of treating ordinal and other forms of annotation data and make the case for preference learning methods as the appropriate approach for treating ordinal labels. We finally discuss the advantages of ordinal annotation with respect to both reliability and validity through a number of case studies in affective computing, and address common objections to the use of ordinal data. More broadly, the thesis that emotions are by nature ordinal is supported by both theoretical arguments and evidence, and opens new horizons for the way emotions are viewed, represented and analyzed computationally.

Weighing Stars: Aggregating Online Product Reviews for Intelligent E-commerce Applications

Abstract: A new task in text-sentiment analysis adds usefulness scoring to polarity/ opinion extraction to improve product- review ranking services, helping shoppers and vendors leverage information from multiple sources. Human language is a medium not only for exchanging information but also for conveying subjective opinions and emotion. Recently, interest in text-subjectivity and sentiment analysis has increased as part of the larger research effort in affective computing, which aims to make computers understand and generate human-like emotions through language and other expressive activities such as gesture.

Learning-Based URLLC-Aware Task Offloading for Internet of Health Things

Abstract: In the Internet of Health Things (IoHT)-based e-Health paradigm, a large number of computational-intensive tasks have to be offloaded from resource-limited IoHT devices to proximal powerful edge servers to reduce latency and improve energy efficiency. However, the lack of global state information (GSI), the adversarial competition among multiple IoHT devices, and the ultra reliable and low latency communication (URLLC) constraints have imposed new challenges for task offloading optimization. In this article, we formulate the task offloading problem as an adversarial multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem. In addition to the average-based performance metrics, bound violation probability, occurrence probability of extreme events, and statistical properties of excess values are employed to characterize URLLC constraints. Then, we propose a URLLC-aware Task Offloading scheme based on the exponential-weight algorithm for exploration and exploitation (EXP3) named UTO-EXP3. URLLC awareness is achieved by dynamically balancing the URLLC constraint deficits and energy consumption through online learning. We provide a rigorous theoretical analysis to show that guaranteed performance with a bounded deviation can be achieved by UTO-EXP3 based on only local information. Finally, the effectiveness and reliability of UTO-EXP3 are validated through simulation results.

Using task features for zero-shot knowledge transfer in lifelong learning

Abstract: Knowledge transfer between tasks can improve the performance of learned models, but requires an accurate estimate of the inter-task relationships to identify the relevant knowledge to transfer. These inter-task relationships are typically estimated based on training data for each task, which is inefficient in lifelong learning settings where the goal is to learn each consecutive task rapidly from as little data as possible. To reduce this burden, we develop a lifelong reinforcement learning method based on coupled dictionary learning that incorporates high-level task descriptors to model the intertask relationships. We show that using task descriptors improves the performance of the learned task policies, providing both theoretical justification for the benefit and empirical demonstration of the improvement across a variety of dynamical control problems. Given only the descriptor for a new task, the lifelong learner is also able to accurately predict the task policy through zero-shot learning using the coupled dictionary, eliminating the need to pause to gather training data before addressing the task.