Lightweight Adaptation of Classifiers to Users and Contexts: Trends of the Emerging Domain

Intelligent computer applications need to adapt their behaviour to contexts and users, but conventional classifier adaptation methods require long data collection and/or training times. Therefore classifier adaptation is often performed as follows: at design time application developers define typical usage contexts and provide reasoning models for each of these contexts, and then at runtime an appropriate model is selected from available ones. Typically, definition of usage contexts and reasoning models heavily relies on domain knowledge. However, in practice many applications are used in so diverse situations that no developer can predict them all and collect for each situation adequate training and test databases. Such applications have to adapt to a new user or unknown context at runtime just from interaction with the user, preferably in fairly lightweight ways, that is, requiring limited user effort to collect training data and limited time of performing the adaptation. This paper analyses adaptation trends in several emerging domains and outlines promising ideas, proposed for making multimodal classifiers user-specific and context-specific without significant user efforts, detailed domain knowledge, and/or complete retraining of the classifiers. Based on this analysis, this paper identifies important application characteristics and presents guidelines to consider these characteristics in adaptation design

Cascaded model adaptation for dialog act segmentation and tagging

There are many speech and language processing problems which require cascaded classification tasks. While model adaptation has been shown to be useful in isolated speech and language processing tasks, it is not clear what constitutes system adaptation for such complex systems. This paper studies the following questions: In cases where a sequence of classification tasks is employed, how important is to adapt the earlier or latter systems? Is the performance improvement obtained in the earlier stages via adaptation carried on to later stages in cases where the later stages perform adaptation using similar data and/or methods? In this study, as part of a larger scale multiparty meeting understanding system, we analyze various methods for adapting dialog act segmentation and tagging models trained on conversational telephone speech (CTS) to meeting style conversations. We investigate the effect of using adapted and unadapted models for dialog act segmentation with those of tagging, showing the effect of model adaptation for cascaded classification tasks. Our results indicate that we can achieve significantly better dialog act segmentation and tagging by adapting the out-of-domain models, especially when the amount of in-domain data is limited. Experimental results show that it is more effective to adapt the models in the latter classification tasks, in our case dialog act tagging, when dealing with a sequence of cascaded classification tasksThis material is based upon work supported by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) CALO (Contract No. FA8750-07-D-0185, Delivery Order 0004), the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) fundings at SRI, Isik University Research Fund (Contract No. 0513304), J. William Fulbright Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship, and the Swiss National Science Foundation through the research network, IM2 fundings at ICS1. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies. We thank Elizabeth Shriberg, Andreas Stoleke, Matthias Zimmerman, and Matthew Magimai Doss for many helpful discussionsPublisher's Versio