Text segmentation on multilabel documents: A distant-supervised approach

Segmenting text into semantically coherent segments is an important task with applications in information retrieval and text summarization. Developing accurate topical segmentation requires the availability of training data with ground truth information at the segment level. However, generating such labeled datasets, especially for applications in which the meaning of the labels is user-defined, is expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we develop an approach that instead of using segment-level ground truth information, it instead uses the set of labels that are associated with a document and are easier to obtain as the training data essentially corresponds to a multilabel dataset. Our method, which can be thought of as an instance of distant supervision, improves upon the previous approaches by exploiting the fact that consecutive sentences in a document tend to talk about the same topic, and hence, probably belong to the same class. Experiments on the text segmentation task on a variety of datasets show that the segmentation produced by our method beats the competing approaches on four out of five datasets and performs at par on the fifth dataset. On the multilabel text classification task, our method performs at par with the competing approaches, while requiring significantly less time to estimate than the competing approaches.Comment: Accepted in 2018 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM

Multilabel Classification with R Package mlr

We implemented several multilabel classification algorithms in the machine learning package mlr. The implemented methods are binary relevance, classifier chains, nested stacking, dependent binary relevance and stacking, which can be used with any base learner that is accessible in mlr. Moreover, there is access to the multilabel classification versions of randomForestSRC and rFerns. All these methods can be easily compared by different implemented multilabel performance measures and resampling methods in the standardized mlr framework. In a benchmark experiment with several multilabel datasets, the performance of the different methods is evaluated.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, to be published in R Journal; reference correcte

A Contextual Bandit Bake-off

Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving many real-world interactive machine learning problems. Despite multiple recent successes on statistically and computationally efficient methods, the practical behavior of these algorithms is still poorly understood. We leverage the availability of large numbers of supervised learning datasets to empirically evaluate contextual bandit algorithms, focusing on practical methods that learn by relying on optimization oracles from supervised learning. We find that a recent method (Foster et al., 2018) using optimism under uncertainty works the best overall. A surprisingly close second is a simple greedy baseline that only explores implicitly through the diversity of contexts, followed by a variant of Online Cover (Agarwal et al., 2014) which tends to be more conservative but robust to problem specification by design. Along the way, we also evaluate various components of contextual bandit algorithm design such as loss estimators. Overall, this is a thorough study and review of contextual bandit methodology