1,645 research outputs found
Deep Big Simple Neural Nets Excel on Handwritten Digit Recognition
Good old on-line back-propagation for plain multi-layer perceptrons yields a
very low 0.35% error rate on the famous MNIST handwritten digits benchmark. All
we need to achieve this best result so far are many hidden layers, many neurons
per layer, numerous deformed training images, and graphics cards to greatly
speed up learning.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, 4 listing
The Wiltshire Wills Feasibility Study
The Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office has nearly ninety thousand wills in its care. These records are neither adequately catalogued nor secured against loss by facsimile microfilm copies. With support from the Heritage Lottery Fund the Record Office has begun to produce suitable finding aids for the material. Beginning with this feasibility study the Record Office is developing a strategy to ensure the that facsimiles to protect the collection against risk of loss or damage and to improve public access are created.<p></p>
This feasibility study explores the different methodologies that can be used to assist the preservation and conservation of the collection and improve public access to it. The study aims to produce a strategy that will enable the Record Office to create digital facsimiles of the Wills in its care for access purposes and to also create preservation quality microfilms. The strategy aims to seek the most cost effective and time efficient approach to the problem and identifies ways to optimise the processes by drawing on the experience of other similar projects. This report provides a set of guidelines and recommendations to ensure the best use of the resources available for to provide the most robust preservation strategy and to ensure that future access to the Wills as an information resource can be flexible, both local and remote, and sustainable
The effect of word similarity on N-gram language models in Northern and Southern Dutch
In this paper we examine several combinations of classical N-gram language models with more advanced and well known techniques based on word similarity such as cache models and Latent Semantic Analysis. We compare the efficiency of these combined models to a model that combines N-grams with the recently proposed, state-of-the-art neural network-based continuous skip-gram. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each of these models, based on their predictive power of the Dutch language and find that a linear interpolation of a 3-gram, a cache model and a continuous skip-gram is capable of reducing perplexity by up to 18.63%, compared to a 3-gram baseline. This is three times the reduction achieved with a 5-gram.
In addition, we investigate whether and in what way the effect of Southern Dutch training material on these combined models differs when evaluated on Northern and Southern Dutch material. Experiments on Dutch newspaper and magazine material suggest that N-grams are mostly influenced by the register and not so much by the language (variety) of the training material. Word similarity models on the other hand seem to perform best when they are trained on material in the same language (variety)
DeepScribe: Localization and Classification of Elamite Cuneiform Signs Via Deep Learning
Twenty-five hundred years ago, the paperwork of the Achaemenid Empire was
recorded on clay tablets. In 1933, archaeologists from the University of
Chicago's Oriental Institute (OI) found tens of thousands of these tablets and
fragments during the excavation of Persepolis. Many of these tablets have been
painstakingly photographed and annotated by expert cuneiformists, and now
provide a rich dataset consisting of over 5,000 annotated tablet images and
100,000 cuneiform sign bounding boxes. We leverage this dataset to develop
DeepScribe, a modular computer vision pipeline capable of localizing cuneiform
signs and providing suggestions for the identity of each sign. We investigate
the difficulty of learning subtasks relevant to cuneiform tablet transcription
on ground-truth data, finding that a RetinaNet object detector can achieve a
localization mAP of 0.78 and a ResNet classifier can achieve a top-5 sign
classification accuracy of 0.89. The end-to-end pipeline achieves a top-5
classification accuracy of 0.80. As part of the classification module,
DeepScribe groups cuneiform signs into morphological clusters. We consider how
this automatic clustering approach differs from the organization of standard,
printed sign lists and what we may learn from it. These components, trained
individually, are sufficient to produce a system that can analyze photos of
cuneiform tablets from the Achaemenid period and provide useful transliteration
suggestions to researchers. We evaluate the model's end-to-end performance on
locating and classifying signs, providing a roadmap to a linguistically-aware
transliteration system, then consider the model's potential utility when
applied to other periods of cuneiform writing.Comment: Currently under review in the ACM JOCC
Fast Algorithm and Implementation of Dissimilarity Self-Organizing Maps
In many real world applications, data cannot be accurately represented by
vectors. In those situations, one possible solution is to rely on dissimilarity
measures that enable sensible comparison between observations. Kohonen's
Self-Organizing Map (SOM) has been adapted to data described only through their
dissimilarity matrix. This algorithm provides both non linear projection and
clustering of non vector data. Unfortunately, the algorithm suffers from a high
cost that makes it quite difficult to use with voluminous data sets. In this
paper, we propose a new algorithm that provides an important reduction of the
theoretical cost of the dissimilarity SOM without changing its outcome (the
results are exactly the same as the ones obtained with the original algorithm).
Moreover, we introduce implementation methods that result in very short running
times. Improvements deduced from the theoretical cost model are validated on
simulated and real world data (a word list clustering problem). We also
demonstrate that the proposed implementation methods reduce by a factor up to 3
the running time of the fast algorithm over a standard implementation
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