On Measures of Behavioral Distance between Business Processes

The desire to compute similarities or distances between business processes arises in numerous situations such as when comparing business processes with reference models or when integrating business processes. The objective of this paper is to develop an approach for measuring the distance between Business Processes Models (BPM) based on the behavior of the business process only while abstracting from any structural aspects of the actual model. Furthermore, the measure allows for assigning more weight to parts of a process which are executed more frequently and can thus be considered as more important. This is achieved by defining a probability distribution on the behavior allowing the computation of distance metrics from the field of statistics

Evolutionary distances in the twilight zone -- a rational kernel approach

Phylogenetic tree reconstruction is traditionally based on multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) and heavily depends on the validity of this information bottleneck. With increasing sequence divergence, the quality of MSAs decays quickly. Alignment-free methods, on the other hand, are based on abstract string comparisons and avoid potential alignment problems. However, in general they are not biologically motivated and ignore our knowledge about the evolution of sequences. Thus, it is still a major open question how to define an evolutionary distance metric between divergent sequences that makes use of indel information and known substitution models without the need for a multiple alignment. Here we propose a new evolutionary distance metric to close this gap. It uses finite-state transducers to create a biologically motivated similarity score which models substitutions and indels, and does not depend on a multiple sequence alignment. The sequence similarity score is defined in analogy to pairwise alignments and additionally has the positive semi-definite property. We describe its derivation and show in simulation studies and real-world examples that it is more accurate in reconstructing phylogenies than competing methods. The result is a new and accurate way of determining evolutionary distances in and beyond the twilight zone of sequence alignments that is suitable for large datasets.Comment: to appear in PLoS ON

Piloting an Empirical Study on Measures for Workflow Similarity

Service discovery of state dependent services has to take workflow aspects into account. To increase the usability of a service discovery, the result list of services should be ordered with regard to the relevance of the services. Means of ordering a list of workflows due to their similarity with regard to a query are missing. This paper presents a pilot of an empirical study on the influence of different measures on workflow similarity. It turns out that, although preliminary, relations between different measures are indicated and that a similarity definition depends on the application scenario in which the service discovery is applied

Annotating large lattices with the exact word error

The acoustic model in modern speech recognisers is trained discriminatively, for example with the minimum Bayes risk. This criterion is hard to compute exactly, so that it is normally approximated by a criterion that uses fixed alignments of lattice arcs. This approximation becomes particularly problematic with new types of acoustic models that require flexible alignments. It would be best to annotate lattices with the risk measure of interest, the exact word error. However, the algorithm for this uses finite-state automaton determinisation, which has exponential complexity and runs out of memory for large lattices. This paper introduces a novel method for determinising and minimising finite-state automata incrementally. Since it uses less memory, it can be applied to larger lattices.This work was supported by EPSRC Project EP/I006583/1 (Generative Kernels and Score Spaces for Classification of Speech) within the Global Uncertainties Programme and by a Google Research Award.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ISCA via http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/interspeech_2015/i15_2625.htm

Arabic spellchecking: a depth-filtered composition metric to achieve fully automatic correction

Digital environments for human learning have evolved a lot in recent years thanks to incredible advances in information technologies. Computer assistance for text creation and editing tools represent a future market in which natural language processing (NLP) concepts will be used. This is particularly the case of the automatic correction of spelling mistakes used daily by data operators. Unfortunately, these spellcheckers are considered writing aids tools, they are unable to perform this task automatically without user’s assistance. In this paper, we suggest a filtered composition metric based on the weighting of two lexical similarity distances in order to reach the auto-correction. The approach developed in this article requires the use of two phases: the first phase of correction involves combining two well-known distances: the edit distance weighted by relative weights of the proximity of the Arabic keyboard and the calligraphical similarity between Arabic alphabet, and combine this measure with the JaroWinkler distance to better weight, filter solutions having the same metric. The second phase is considered as a booster of the first phase, this use the probabilistic bigram language model after the recognition of the solutions of error, which may have the same lexical similarity measure in the first correction phase. The evaluation of the experimental results obtained from the test performed by our filtered composition measure on a dataset of errors allowed us to achieve a 96% of auto-correction rate