A Wikipedia Literature Review

This paper was originally designed as a literature review for a doctoral dissertation focusing on Wikipedia. This exposition gives the structure of Wikipedia and the latest trends in Wikipedia research

mARC: Memory by Association and Reinforcement of Contexts

This paper introduces the memory by Association and Reinforcement of Contexts (mARC). mARC is a novel data modeling technology rooted in the second quantization formulation of quantum mechanics. It is an all-purpose incremental and unsupervised data storage and retrieval system which can be applied to all types of signal or data, structured or unstructured, textual or not. mARC can be applied to a wide range of information clas-sification and retrieval problems like e-Discovery or contextual navigation. It can also for-mulated in the artificial life framework a.k.a Conway "Game Of Life" Theory. In contrast to Conway approach, the objects evolve in a massively multidimensional space. In order to start evaluating the potential of mARC we have built a mARC-based Internet search en-gine demonstrator with contextual functionality. We compare the behavior of the mARC demonstrator with Google search both in terms of performance and relevance. In the study we find that the mARC search engine demonstrator outperforms Google search by an order of magnitude in response time while providing more relevant results for some classes of queries

Can Who-Edits-What Predict Edit Survival?

As the number of contributors to online peer-production systems grows, it becomes increasingly important to predict whether the edits that users make will eventually be beneficial to the project. Existing solutions either rely on a user reputation system or consist of a highly specialized predictor that is tailored to a specific peer-production system. In this work, we explore a different point in the solution space that goes beyond user reputation but does not involve any content-based feature of the edits. We view each edit as a game between the editor and the component of the project. We posit that the probability that an edit is accepted is a function of the editor's skill, of the difficulty of editing the component and of a user-component interaction term. Our model is broadly applicable, as it only requires observing data about who makes an edit, what the edit affects and whether the edit survives or not. We apply our model on Wikipedia and the Linux kernel, two examples of large-scale peer-production systems, and we seek to understand whether it can effectively predict edit survival: in both cases, we provide a positive answer. Our approach significantly outperforms those based solely on user reputation and bridges the gap with specialized predictors that use content-based features. It is simple to implement, computationally inexpensive, and in addition it enables us to discover interesting structure in the data.Comment: Accepted at KDD 201

Combining Visual and Textual Features for Semantic Segmentation of Historical Newspapers

The massive amounts of digitized historical documents acquired over the last decades naturally lend themselves to automatic processing and exploration. Research work seeking to automatically process facsimiles and extract information thereby are multiplying with, as a first essential step, document layout analysis. If the identification and categorization of segments of interest in document images have seen significant progress over the last years thanks to deep learning techniques, many challenges remain with, among others, the use of finer-grained segmentation typologies and the consideration of complex, heterogeneous documents such as historical newspapers. Besides, most approaches consider visual features only, ignoring textual signal. In this context, we introduce a multimodal approach for the semantic segmentation of historical newspapers that combines visual and textual features. Based on a series of experiments on diachronic Swiss and Luxembourgish newspapers, we investigate, among others, the predictive power of visual and textual features and their capacity to generalize across time and sources. Results show consistent improvement of multimodal models in comparison to a strong visual baseline, as well as better robustness to high material variance

M-health review: joining up healthcare in a wireless world

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to deliver health and social care. This trend is bound to continue as providers (whether public or private) strive to deliver better care to more people under conditions of severe budgetary constraint

Natural Language Processing for Technology Foresight Summarization and Simplification: the case of patents

Technology foresight aims to anticipate possible developments, understand trends, and identify technologies of high impact. To this end, monitoring emerging technologies is crucial. Patents -- the legal documents that protect novel inventions -- can be a valuable source for technology monitoring. Millions of patent applications are filed yearly, with 3.4 million applications in 2021 only. Patent documents are primarily textual documents and disclose innovative and potentially valuable inventions. However, their processing is currently underresearched. This is due to several reasons, including the high document complexity: patents are very lengthy and are written in an extremely hard-to-read language, which is a mix of technical and legal jargon. This thesis explores how Natural Language Processing -- the discipline that enables machines to process human language automatically -- can aid patent processing. Specifically, we focus on two tasks: patent summarization (i.e., we try to reduce the document length while preserving its core content) and patent simplification (i.e., we try to reduce the document's linguistic complexity while preserving its original core meaning). We found that older patent summarization approaches were not compared on shared benchmarks (making thus it hard to draw conclusions), and even the most recent abstractive dataset presents important issues that might make comparisons meaningless. We try to fill both gaps: we first document the issues related to the BigPatent dataset and then benchmark extractive, abstraction, and hybrid approaches in the patent domain. We also explore transferring summarization methods from the scientific paper domain with limited success. For the automatic text simplification task, we noticed a lack of simplified text and parallel corpora. We fill this gap by defining a method to generate a silver standard for patent simplification automatically. Lay human judges evaluated the simplified sentences in the corpus as grammatical, adequate, and simpler, and we show that it can be used to train a state-of-the-art simplification model. This thesis describes the first steps toward Natural Language Processing-aided patent summarization and simplification. We hope it will encourage more research on the topic, opening doors for a productive dialog between NLP researchers and domain experts.Technology foresight aims to anticipate possible developments, understand trends, and identify technologies of high impact. To this end, monitoring emerging technologies is crucial. Patents -- the legal documents that protect novel inventions -- can be a valuable source for technology monitoring. Millions of patent applications are filed yearly, with 3.4 million applications in 2021 only. Patent documents are primarily textual documents and disclose innovative and potentially valuable inventions. However, their processing is currently underresearched. This is due to several reasons, including the high document complexity: patents are very lengthy and are written in an extremely hard-to-read language, which is a mix of technical and legal jargon. This thesis explores how Natural Language Processing -- the discipline that enables machines to process human language automatically -- can aid patent processing. Specifically, we focus on two tasks: patent summarization (i.e., we try to reduce the document length while preserving its core content) and patent simplification (i.e., we try to reduce the document's linguistic complexity while preserving its original core meaning). We found that older patent summarization approaches were not compared on shared benchmarks (making thus it hard to draw conclusions), and even the most recent abstractive dataset presents important issues that might make comparisons meaningless. We try to fill both gaps: we first document the issues related to the BigPatent dataset and then benchmark extractive, abstraction, and hybrid approaches in the patent domain. We also explore transferring summarization methods from the scientific paper domain with limited success. For the automatic text simplification task, we noticed a lack of simplified text and parallel corpora. We fill this gap by defining a method to generate a silver standard for patent simplification automatically. Lay human judges evaluated the simplified sentences in the corpus as grammatical, adequate, and simpler, and we show that it can be used to train a state-of-the-art simplification model. This thesis describes the first steps toward Natural Language Processing-aided patent summarization and simplification. We hope it will encourage more research on the topic, opening doors for a productive dialog between NLP researchers and domain experts