57,035 research outputs found
Active classification with comparison queries
We study an extension of active learning in which the learning algorithm may
ask the annotator to compare the distances of two examples from the boundary of
their label-class. For example, in a recommendation system application (say for
restaurants), the annotator may be asked whether she liked or disliked a
specific restaurant (a label query); or which one of two restaurants did she
like more (a comparison query).
We focus on the class of half spaces, and show that under natural
assumptions, such as large margin or bounded bit-description of the input
examples, it is possible to reveal all the labels of a sample of size using
approximately queries. This implies an exponential improvement over
classical active learning, where only label queries are allowed. We complement
these results by showing that if any of these assumptions is removed then, in
the worst case, queries are required.
Our results follow from a new general framework of active learning with
additional queries. We identify a combinatorial dimension, called the
\emph{inference dimension}, that captures the query complexity when each
additional query is determined by examples (such as comparison queries,
each of which is determined by the two compared examples). Our results for half
spaces follow by bounding the inference dimension in the cases discussed above.Comment: 23 pages (not including references), 1 figure. The new version
contains a minor fix in the proof of Lemma 4.
Combination Strategies for Semantic Role Labeling
This paper introduces and analyzes a battery of inference models for the
problem of semantic role labeling: one based on constraint satisfaction, and
several strategies that model the inference as a meta-learning problem using
discriminative classifiers. These classifiers are developed with a rich set of
novel features that encode proposition and sentence-level information. To our
knowledge, this is the first work that: (a) performs a thorough analysis of
learning-based inference models for semantic role labeling, and (b) compares
several inference strategies in this context. We evaluate the proposed
inference strategies in the framework of the CoNLL-2005 shared task using only
automatically-generated syntactic information. The extensive experimental
evaluation and analysis indicates that all the proposed inference strategies
are successful -they all outperform the current best results reported in the
CoNLL-2005 evaluation exercise- but each of the proposed approaches has its
advantages and disadvantages. Several important traits of a state-of-the-art
SRL combination strategy emerge from this analysis: (i) individual models
should be combined at the granularity of candidate arguments rather than at the
granularity of complete solutions; (ii) the best combination strategy uses an
inference model based in learning; and (iii) the learning-based inference
benefits from max-margin classifiers and global feedback
Multi-utility Learning: Structured-output Learning with Multiple Annotation-specific Loss Functions
Structured-output learning is a challenging problem; particularly so because
of the difficulty in obtaining large datasets of fully labelled instances for
training. In this paper we try to overcome this difficulty by presenting a
multi-utility learning framework for structured prediction that can learn from
training instances with different forms of supervision. We propose a unified
technique for inferring the loss functions most suitable for quantifying the
consistency of solutions with the given weak annotation. We demonstrate the
effectiveness of our framework on the challenging semantic image segmentation
problem for which a wide variety of annotations can be used. For instance, the
popular training datasets for semantic segmentation are composed of images with
hard-to-generate full pixel labellings, as well as images with easy-to-obtain
weak annotations, such as bounding boxes around objects, or image-level labels
that specify which object categories are present in an image. Experimental
evaluation shows that the use of annotation-specific loss functions
dramatically improves segmentation accuracy compared to the baseline system
where only one type of weak annotation is used
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