The BLue Amazon Brain (BLAB): A Modular Architecture of Services about the Brazilian Maritime Territory

We describe the first steps in the development of an artificial agent focused on the Brazilian maritime territory, a large region within the South Atlantic also known as the Blue Amazon. The "BLue Amazon Brain" (BLAB) integrates a number of services aimed at disseminating information about this region and its importance, functioning as a tool for environmental awareness. The main service provided by BLAB is a conversational facility that deals with complex questions about the Blue Amazon, called BLAB-Chat; its central component is a controller that manages several task-oriented natural language processing modules (e.g., question answering and summarizer systems). These modules have access to an internal data lake as well as to third-party databases. A news reporter (BLAB-Reporter) and a purposely-developed wiki (BLAB-Wiki) are also part of the BLAB service architecture. In this paper, we describe our current version of BLAB's architecture (interface, backend, web services, NLP modules, and resources) and comment on the challenges we have faced so far, such as the lack of training data and the scattered state of domain information. Solving these issues presents a considerable challenge in the development of artificial intelligence for technical domains

Feature Extraction and Duplicate Detection for Text Mining: A Survey

Text mining, also known as Intelligent Text Analysis is an important research area. It is very difficult to focus on the most appropriate information due to the high dimensionality of data. Feature Extraction is one of the important techniques in data reduction to discover the most important features. Proce- ssing massive amount of data stored in a unstructured form is a challenging task. Several pre-processing methods and algo- rithms are needed to extract useful features from huge amount of data. The survey covers different text summarization, classi- fication, clustering methods to discover useful features and also discovering query facets which are multiple groups of words or phrases that explain and summarize the content covered by a query thereby reducing time taken by the user. Dealing with collection of text documents, it is also very important to filter out duplicate data. Once duplicates are deleted, it is recommended to replace the removed duplicates. Hence we also review the literature on duplicate detection and data fusion (remove and replace duplicates).The survey provides existing text mining techniques to extract relevant features, detect duplicates and to replace the duplicate data to get fine grained knowledge to the user

Crime Topic Modeling

The classification of crime into discrete categories entails a massive loss of information. Crimes emerge out of a complex mix of behaviors and situations, yet most of these details cannot be captured by singular crime type labels. This information loss impacts our ability to not only understand the causes of crime, but also how to develop optimal crime prevention strategies. We apply machine learning methods to short narrative text descriptions accompanying crime records with the goal of discovering ecologically more meaningful latent crime classes. We term these latent classes "crime topics" in reference to text-based topic modeling methods that produce them. We use topic distributions to measure clustering among formally recognized crime types. Crime topics replicate broad distinctions between violent and property crime, but also reveal nuances linked to target characteristics, situational conditions and the tools and methods of attack. Formal crime types are not discrete in topic space. Rather, crime types are distributed across a range of crime topics. Similarly, individual crime topics are distributed across a range of formal crime types. Key ecological groups include identity theft, shoplifting, burglary and theft, car crimes and vandalism, criminal threats and confidence crimes, and violent crimes. Though not a replacement for formal legal crime classifications, crime topics provide a unique window into the heterogeneous causal processes underlying crime.Comment: 47 pages, 4 tables, 7 figure

Textual data summarization using the Self-Organized Co-Clustering model

International audienceRecently, different studies have demonstrated the use of co-clustering, a data mining technique which simultaneously produces row-clusters of observations and column-clusters of features. The present work introduces a novel co-clustering model to easily summarize textual data in a document-term format. In addition to highlighting homogeneous co-clusters as other existing algorithms do we also distinguish noisy co-clusters from significant co-clusters, which is particularly useful for sparse document-term matrices. Furthermore, our model proposes a structure among the significant co-clusters, thus providing improved interpretability to users. The approach proposed contends with state-of-the-art methods for document and term clustering and offers user-friendly results. The model relies on the Poisson distribution and on a constrained version of the Latent Block Model, which is a probabilistic approach for co-clustering. A Stochastic Expectation-Maximization algorithm is proposed to run the model’s inference as well as a model selection criterion to choose the number of coclusters. Both simulated and real data sets illustrate the eciency of this model by its ability to easily identify relevant co-clusters

BROCCOLI: overlapping and outlier-robust biclustering through proximal stochastic gradient descent

Matrix tri-factorization subject to binary constraints is a versatile and powerful framework for the simultaneous clustering of observations and features, also known as biclustering. Applications for biclustering encompass the clustering of high-dimensional data and explorative data mining, where the selection of the most important features is relevant. Unfortunately, due to the lack of suitable methods for the optimization subject to binary constraints, the powerful framework of biclustering is typically constrained to clusterings which partition the set of observations or features. As a result, overlap between clusters cannot be modelled and every item, even outliers in the data, have to be assigned to exactly one cluster. In this paper we propose Broccoli, an optimization scheme for matrix factorization subject to binary constraints, which is based on the theoretically well-founded optimization scheme of proximal stochastic gradient descent. Thereby, we do not impose any restrictions on the obtained clusters. Our experimental evaluation, performed on both synthetic and real-world data, and against 6 competitor algorithms, show reliable and competitive performance, even in presence of a high amount of noise in the data. Moreover, a qualitative analysis of the identified clusters shows that Broccoli may provide meaningful and interpretable clustering structures

Feature extraction and duplicate detection for text mining: A survey

Text mining, also known as Intelligent Text Analysis is an important research area. It is very difficult to focus on the most appropriate information due to the high dimensionality of data. Feature Extraction is one of the important techniques in data reduction to discover the most important features. Proce- ssing massive amount of data stored in a unstructured form is a challenging task. Several pre-processing methods and algo- rithms are needed to extract useful features from huge amount of data. The survey covers different text summarization, classi- fication, clustering methods to discover useful features and also discovering query facets which are multiple groups of words or phrases that explain and summarize the content covered by a query thereby reducing time taken by the user