Declarative Machine Learning - A Classification of Basic Properties and Types

Declarative machine learning (ML) aims at the high-level specification of ML tasks or algorithms, and automatic generation of optimized execution plans from these specifications. The fundamental goal is to simplify the usage and/or development of ML algorithms, which is especially important in the context of large-scale computations. However, ML systems at different abstraction levels have emerged over time and accordingly there has been a controversy about the meaning of this general definition of declarative ML. Specification alternatives range from ML algorithms expressed in domain-specific languages (DSLs) with optimization for performance, to ML task (learning problem) specifications with optimization for performance and accuracy. We argue that these different types of declarative ML complement each other as they address different users (data scientists and end users). This paper makes an attempt to create a taxonomy for declarative ML, including a definition of essential basic properties and types of declarative ML. Along the way, we provide insights into implications of these properties. We also use this taxonomy to classify existing systems. Finally, we draw conclusions on defining appropriate benchmarks and specification languages for declarative ML

Declarative Data Analytics: a Survey

The area of declarative data analytics explores the application of the declarative paradigm on data science and machine learning. It proposes declarative languages for expressing data analysis tasks and develops systems which optimize programs written in those languages. The execution engine can be either centralized or distributed, as the declarative paradigm advocates independence from particular physical implementations. The survey explores a wide range of declarative data analysis frameworks by examining both the programming model and the optimization techniques used, in order to provide conclusions on the current state of the art in the area and identify open challenges.Comment: 36 pages, 2 figure

Big Data Systems Meet Machine Learning Challenges: Towards Big Data Science as a Service

Recently, we have been witnessing huge advancements in the scale of data we routinely generate and collect in pretty much everything we do, as well as our ability to exploit modern technologies to process, analyze and understand this data. The intersection of these trends is what is called, nowadays, as Big Data Science. Cloud computing represents a practical and cost-effective solution for supporting Big Data storage, processing and for sophisticated analytics applications. We analyze in details the building blocks of the software stack for supporting big data science as a commodity service for data scientists. We provide various insights about the latest ongoing developments and open challenges in this domain

Building a Large-scale Multimodal Knowledge Base System for Answering Visual Queries

The complexity of the visual world creates significant challenges for comprehensive visual understanding. In spite of recent successes in visual recognition, today's vision systems would still struggle to deal with visual queries that require a deeper reasoning. We propose a knowledge base (KB) framework to handle an assortment of visual queries, without the need to train new classifiers for new tasks. Building such a large-scale multimodal KB presents a major challenge of scalability. We cast a large-scale MRF into a KB representation, incorporating visual, textual and structured data, as well as their diverse relations. We introduce a scalable knowledge base construction system that is capable of building a KB with half billion variables and millions of parameters in a few hours. Our system achieves competitive results compared to purpose-built models on standard recognition and retrieval tasks, while exhibiting greater flexibility in answering richer visual queries

Can Prosody Aid the Automatic Classification of Dialog Acts in Conversational Speech?

Identifying whether an utterance is a statement, question, greeting, and so forth is integral to effective automatic understanding of natural dialog. Little is known, however, about how such dialog acts (DAs) can be automatically classified in truly natural conversation. This study asks whether current approaches, which use mainly word information, could be improved by adding prosodic information. The study is based on more than 1000 conversations from the Switchboard corpus. DAs were hand-annotated, and prosodic features (duration, pause, F0, energy, and speaking rate) were automatically extracted for each DA. In training, decision trees based on these features were inferred; trees were then applied to unseen test data to evaluate performance. Performance was evaluated for prosody models alone, and after combining the prosody models with word information -- either from true words or from the output of an automatic speech recognizer. For an overall classification task, as well as three subtasks, prosody made significant contributions to classification. Feature-specific analyses further revealed that although canonical features (such as F0 for questions) were important, less obvious features could compensate if canonical features were removed. Finally, in each task, integrating the prosodic model with a DA-specific statistical language model improved performance over that of the language model alone, especially for the case of recognized words. Results suggest that DAs are redundantly marked in natural conversation, and that a variety of automatically extractable prosodic features could aid dialog processing in speech applications.Comment: 55 pages, 10 figure

MLBench: How Good Are Machine Learning Clouds for Binary Classification Tasks on Structured Data?

We conduct an empirical study of machine learning functionalities provided by major cloud service providers, which we call machine learning clouds. Machine learning clouds hold the promise of hiding all the sophistication of running large-scale machine learning: Instead of specifying how to run a machine learning task, users only specify what machine learning task to run and the cloud figures out the rest. Raising the level of abstraction, however, rarely comes free - a performance penalty is possible. How good, then, are current machine learning clouds on real-world machine learning workloads? We study this question with a focus on binary classication problems. We present mlbench, a novel benchmark constructed by harvesting datasets from Kaggle competitions. We then compare the performance of the top winning code available from Kaggle with that of running machine learning clouds from both Azure and Amazon on mlbench. Our comparative study reveals the strength and weakness of existing machine learning clouds and points out potential future directions for improvement

Harnessing Deep Neural Networks with Logic Rules

Combining deep neural networks with structured logic rules is desirable to harness flexibility and reduce uninterpretability of the neural models. We propose a general framework capable of enhancing various types of neural networks (e.g., CNNs and RNNs) with declarative first-order logic rules. Specifically, we develop an iterative distillation method that transfers the structured information of logic rules into the weights of neural networks. We deploy the framework on a CNN for sentiment analysis, and an RNN for named entity recognition. With a few highly intuitive rules, we obtain substantial improvements and achieve state-of-the-art or comparable results to previous best-performing systems.Comment: Fix typos in appendix. ACL 201

Helix: Holistic Optimization for Accelerating Iterative Machine Learning

Machine learning workflow development is a process of trial-and-error: developers iterate on workflows by testing out small modifications until the desired accuracy is achieved. Unfortunately, existing machine learning systems focus narrowly on model training---a small fraction of the overall development time---and neglect to address iterative development. We propose Helix, a machine learning system that optimizes the execution across iterations---intelligently caching and reusing, or recomputing intermediates as appropriate. Helix captures a wide variety of application needs within its Scala DSL, with succinct syntax defining unified processes for data preprocessing, model specification, and learning. We demonstrate that the reuse problem can be cast as a Max-Flow problem, while the caching problem is NP-Hard. We develop effective lightweight heuristics for the latter. Empirical evaluation shows that Helix is not only able to handle a wide variety of use cases in one unified workflow but also much faster, providing run time reductions of up to 19x over state-of-the-art systems, such as DeepDive or KeystoneML, on four real-world applications in natural language processing, computer vision, social and natural sciences

Machine Learning with World Knowledge: The Position and Survey

Machine learning has become pervasive in multiple domains, impacting a wide variety of applications, such as knowledge discovery and data mining, natural language processing, information retrieval, computer vision, social and health informatics, ubiquitous computing, etc. Two essential problems of machine learning are how to generate features and how to acquire labels for machines to learn. Particularly, labeling large amount of data for each domain-specific problem can be very time consuming and costly. It has become a key obstacle in making learning protocols realistic in applications. In this paper, we will discuss how to use the existing general-purpose world knowledge to enhance machine learning processes, by enriching the features or reducing the labeling work. We start from the comparison of world knowledge with domain-specific knowledge, and then introduce three key problems in using world knowledge in learning processes, i.e., explicit and implicit feature representation, inference for knowledge linking and disambiguation, and learning with direct or indirect supervision. Finally we discuss the future directions of this research topic

Mapping to Declarative Knowledge for Word Problem Solving

Math word problems form a natural abstraction to a range of quantitative reasoning problems, such as understanding financial news, sports results, and casualties of war. Solving such problems requires the understanding of several mathematical concepts such as dimensional analysis, subset relationships, etc. In this paper, we develop declarative rules which govern the translation of natural language description of these concepts to math expressions. We then present a framework for incorporating such declarative knowledge into word problem solving. Our method learns to map arithmetic word problem text to math expressions, by learning to select the relevant declarative knowledge for each operation of the solution expression. This provides a way to handle multiple concepts in the same problem while, at the same time, support interpretability of the answer expression. Our method models the mapping to declarative knowledge as a latent variable, thus removing the need for expensive annotations. Experimental evaluation suggests that our domain knowledge based solver outperforms all other systems, and that it generalizes better in the realistic case where the training data it is exposed to is biased in a different way than the test data.Comment: Accepted at TACL 201