2,499 research outputs found
The Google Similarity Distance
Words and phrases acquire meaning from the way they are used in society, from
their relative semantics to other words and phrases. For computers the
equivalent of `society' is `database,' and the equivalent of `use' is `way to
search the database.' We present a new theory of similarity between words and
phrases based on information distance and Kolmogorov complexity. To fix
thoughts we use the world-wide-web as database, and Google as search engine.
The method is also applicable to other search engines and databases. This
theory is then applied to construct a method to automatically extract
similarity, the Google similarity distance, of words and phrases from the
world-wide-web using Google page counts. The world-wide-web is the largest
database on earth, and the context information entered by millions of
independent users averages out to provide automatic semantics of useful
quality. We give applications in hierarchical clustering, classification, and
language translation. We give examples to distinguish between colors and
numbers, cluster names of paintings by 17th century Dutch masters and names of
books by English novelists, the ability to understand emergencies, and primes,
and we demonstrate the ability to do a simple automatic English-Spanish
translation. Finally, we use the WordNet database as an objective baseline
against which to judge the performance of our method. We conduct a massive
randomized trial in binary classification using support vector machines to
learn categories based on our Google distance, resulting in an a mean agreement
of 87% with the expert crafted WordNet categories.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures; changed some text/figures/notation/part of
theorem. Incorporated referees comments. This is the final published version
up to some minor changes in the galley proof
Handling Massive N-Gram Datasets Efficiently
This paper deals with the two fundamental problems concerning the handling of
large n-gram language models: indexing, that is compressing the n-gram strings
and associated satellite data without compromising their retrieval speed; and
estimation, that is computing the probability distribution of the strings from
a large textual source. Regarding the problem of indexing, we describe
compressed, exact and lossless data structures that achieve, at the same time,
high space reductions and no time degradation with respect to state-of-the-art
solutions and related software packages. In particular, we present a compressed
trie data structure in which each word following a context of fixed length k,
i.e., its preceding k words, is encoded as an integer whose value is
proportional to the number of words that follow such context. Since the number
of words following a given context is typically very small in natural
languages, we lower the space of representation to compression levels that were
never achieved before. Despite the significant savings in space, our technique
introduces a negligible penalty at query time. Regarding the problem of
estimation, we present a novel algorithm for estimating modified Kneser-Ney
language models, that have emerged as the de-facto choice for language modeling
in both academia and industry, thanks to their relatively low perplexity
performance. Estimating such models from large textual sources poses the
challenge of devising algorithms that make a parsimonious use of the disk. The
state-of-the-art algorithm uses three sorting steps in external memory: we show
an improved construction that requires only one sorting step thanks to
exploiting the properties of the extracted n-gram strings. With an extensive
experimental analysis performed on billions of n-grams, we show an average
improvement of 4.5X on the total running time of the state-of-the-art approach.Comment: Published in ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), February
2019, Article No: 2
Using a low-bit rate speech enhancement variable post-filter as a speech recognition system pre-filter to improve robustness to GSM speech
Includes bibliographical references.Performance of speech recognition systems degrades when they are used to recognize speech that has been transmitted through GS1 (Global System for Mobile Communications) voice communication channels (GSM speech). This degradation is mainly due to GSM speech coding and GSM channel noise on speech signals transmitted through the network. This poor recognition of GSM channel speech limits the use of speech recognition applications over GSM networks. If speech recognition technology is to be used unlimitedly over GSM networks recognition accuracy of GSM channel speech has to be improved. Different channel normalization techniques have been developed in an attempt to improve recognition accuracy of voice channel modified speech in general (not specifically for GSM channel speech). These techniques can be classified into three broad categories, namely, model modification, signal pre-processing and feature processing techniques. In this work, as a contribution toward improving the robustness of speech recognition systems to GSM speech, the use of a low-bit speech enhancement post-filter as a speech recognition system pre-filter is proposed. This filter is to be used in recognition systems in combination with channel normalization techniques
Sparse representation based hyperspectral image compression and classification
Abstract
This thesis presents a research work on applying sparse representation to lossy hyperspectral image
compression and hyperspectral image classification. The proposed lossy hyperspectral image
compression framework introduces two types of dictionaries distinguished by the terms sparse
representation spectral dictionary (SRSD) and multi-scale spectral dictionary (MSSD), respectively.
The former is learnt in the spectral domain to exploit the spectral correlations, and the
latter in wavelet multi-scale spectral domain to exploit both spatial and spectral correlations in
hyperspectral images. To alleviate the computational demand of dictionary learning, either a
base dictionary trained offline or an update of the base dictionary is employed in the compression
framework. The proposed compression method is evaluated in terms of different objective
metrics, and compared to selected state-of-the-art hyperspectral image compression schemes, including
JPEG 2000. The numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of
both SRSD and MSSD approaches.
For the proposed hyperspectral image classification method, we utilize the sparse coefficients
for training support vector machine (SVM) and k-nearest neighbour (kNN) classifiers. In particular,
the discriminative character of the sparse coefficients is enhanced by incorporating contextual
information using local mean filters. The classification performance is evaluated and compared
to a number of similar or representative methods. The results show that our approach could outperform
other approaches based on SVM or sparse representation.
This thesis makes the following contributions. It provides a relatively thorough investigation
of applying sparse representation to lossy hyperspectral image compression. Specifically,
it reveals the effectiveness of sparse representation for the exploitation of spectral correlations
in hyperspectral images. In addition, we have shown that the discriminative character of sparse
coefficients can lead to superior performance in hyperspectral image classification.EM201
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