Semantics and statistics for automated image annotation

Automated image annotation consists of a number of techniques that aim to find the correlation between words and image features such as colour, shape, and texture to provide correct annotation words to images. In particular, approaches based on Bayesian theory use machine-learning techniques to learn statistical models from a training set of pre-annotated images and apply them to generate annotations for unseen images. The focus of this thesis lies in demonstrating that an approach, which goes beyond learning the statistical correlation between words and visual features and also exploits information about the actual semantics of the words used in the annotation process, is able to improve the performance of probabilistic annotation systems. Specifically, I present three experiments. Firstly, I introduce a novel approach that automatically refines the annotation words generated by a non-parametric density estimation model using semantic relatedness measures. Initially, I consider semantic measures based on co-occurrence of words in the training set. However, this approach can exhibit limitations, as its performance depends on the quality and coverage provided by the training data. For this reason, I devise an alternative solution that combines semantic measures based on knowledge sources, such as WordNet and Wikipedia, with word co-occurrence in the training set and on the web, to achieve statistically significant results over the baseline. Secondly, I investigate the effect of using semantic measures inside an evaluation measure that computes the performance of an automated image annotation system, whose annotation words adopt the hierarchical structure of an ontology. This is the case of the ImageCLEF2009 collection. Finally, I propose a Markov Random Field that exploits the semantic context dependencies of the image. The best result obtains a mean average precision of 0.32, which is consistent with the state-of-the-art in automated image annotation for the Corel 5k dataset. </br

Using Neural Networks for Relation Extraction from Biomedical Literature

Using different sources of information to support automated extracting of relations between biomedical concepts contributes to the development of our understanding of biological systems. The primary comprehensive source of these relations is biomedical literature. Several relation extraction approaches have been proposed to identify relations between concepts in biomedical literature, namely, using neural networks algorithms. The use of multichannel architectures composed of multiple data representations, as in deep neural networks, is leading to state-of-the-art results. The right combination of data representations can eventually lead us to even higher evaluation scores in relation extraction tasks. Thus, biomedical ontologies play a fundamental role by providing semantic and ancestry information about an entity. The incorporation of biomedical ontologies has already been proved to enhance previous state-of-the-art results.Comment: Artificial Neural Networks book (Springer) - Chapter 1

Kernel Methods for Minimally Supervised WSD

We present a semi-supervised technique for word sense disambiguation that exploits external knowledge acquired in an unsupervised manner. In particular, we use a combination of basic kernel functions to independently estimate syntagmatic and domain similarity, building a set of word-expert classifiers that share a common domain model acquired from a large corpus of unla- beled data. The results show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of lexical sample tasks and on the English all-words task of Senseval-3, although it uses a considerably smaller number of training examples than other methods

Word sense discrimination in information retrieval: a spectral clustering-based approach

International audienceWord sense ambiguity has been identified as a cause of poor precision in information retrieval (IR) systems. Word sense disambiguation and discrimination methods have been defined to help systems choose which documents should be retrieved in relation to an ambiguous query. However, the only approaches that show a genuine benefit for word sense discrimination or disambiguation in IR are generally supervised ones. In this paper we propose a new unsupervised method that uses word sense discrimination in IR. The method we develop is based on spectral clustering and reorders an initially retrieved document list by boosting documents that are semantically similar to the target query. For several TREC ad hoc collections we show that our method is useful in the case of queries which contain ambiguous terms. We are interested in improving the level of precision after 5, 10 and 30 retrieved documents (P@5, P@10, P@30) respectively. We show that precision can be improved by 8% above current state-of-the-art baselines. We also focus on poor performing queries

Discourse Structure in Machine Translation Evaluation

In this article, we explore the potential of using sentence-level discourse structure for machine translation evaluation. We first design discourse-aware similarity measures, which use all-subtree kernels to compare discourse parse trees in accordance with the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Then, we show that a simple linear combination with these measures can help improve various existing machine translation evaluation metrics regarding correlation with human judgments both at the segment- and at the system-level. This suggests that discourse information is complementary to the information used by many of the existing evaluation metrics, and thus it could be taken into account when developing richer evaluation metrics, such as the WMT-14 winning combined metric DiscoTKparty. We also provide a detailed analysis of the relevance of various discourse elements and relations from the RST parse trees for machine translation evaluation. In particular we show that: (i) all aspects of the RST tree are relevant, (ii) nuclearity is more useful than relation type, and (iii) the similarity of the translation RST tree to the reference tree is positively correlated with translation quality.Comment: machine translation, machine translation evaluation, discourse analysis. Computational Linguistics, 201

Knowledge-enhanced document embeddings for text classification

Accurate semantic representation models are essential in text mining applications. For a successful application of the text mining process, the text representation adopted must keep the interesting patterns to be discovered. Although competitive results for automatic text classification may be achieved with traditional bag of words, such representation model cannot provide satisfactory classification performances on hard settings where richer text representations are required. In this paper, we present an approach to represent document collections based on embedded representations of words and word senses. We bring together the power of word sense disambiguation and the semantic richness of word- and word-sense embedded vectors to construct embedded representations of document collections. Our approach results in semantically enhanced and low-dimensional representations. We overcome the lack of interpretability of embedded vectors, which is a drawback of this kind of representation, with the use of word sense embedded vectors. Moreover, the experimental evaluation indicates that the use of the proposed representations provides stable classifiers with strong quantitative results, especially in semantically-complex classification scenarios