Linguistic redundancy in Twitter

In the last few years, the interest of the research community in micro-blogs and social media services, such as Twitter, is growing exponentially. Yet, so far not much attention has been paid on a key characteristic of micro-blogs: the high level of information redundancy. The aim of this paper is to systematically approach this problem by providing an operational definition of redundancy. We cast redundancy in the framework of Textual En-tailment Recognition. We also provide quantitative evidence on the pervasiveness of redundancy in Twitter, and describe a dataset of redundancy-annotated tweets. Finally, we present a general purpose system for identifying redundant tweets. An extensive quantitative evaluation shows that our system successfully solves the redundancy detection task, improving over baseline systems with statistical significance

Active Learning for Text Classification

Text classification approaches are used extensively to solve real-world challenges. The success or failure of text classification systems hangs on the datasets used to train them, without a good dataset it is impossible to build a quality system. This thesis examines the applicability of active learning in text classification for the rapid and economical creation of labelled training data. Four main contributions are made in this thesis. First, we present two novel selection strategies to choose the most informative examples for manually labelling. One is an approach using an advanced aggregated confidence measurement instead of the direct output of classifiers to measure the confidence of the prediction and choose the examples with least confidence for querying. The other is a simple but effective exploration guided active learning selection strategy which uses only the notions of density and diversity, based on similarity, in its selection strategy. Second, we propose new methods of using deterministic clustering algorithms to help bootstrap the active learning process. We first illustrate the problems of using non-deterministic clustering for selecting initial training sets, showing how non-deterministic clustering methods can result in inconsistent behaviour in the active learning process. We then compare various deterministic clustering techniques and commonly used non-deterministic ones, and show that deterministic clustering algorithms are as good as non-deterministic clustering algorithms at selecting initial training examples for the active learning process. More importantly, we show that the use of deterministic approaches stabilises the active learning process. Our third direction is in the area of visualising the active learning process. We demonstrate the use of an existing visualisation technique in understanding active learning selection strategies to show that a better understanding of selection strategies can be achieved with the help of visualisation techniques. Finally, to evaluate the practicality and usefulness of active learning as a general dataset labelling methodology, it is desirable that actively labelled dataset can be reused more widely instead of being only limited to some particular classifier. We compare the reusability of popular active learning methods for text classification and identify the best classifiers to use in active learning for text classification. This thesis is concerned using active learning methods to label large unlabelled textual datasets. Our domain of interest is text classification, but most of the methods proposed are quite general and so are applicable to other domains having large collections of data with high dimensionality

VENCE : un modèle performant d'extraction de résumés basé sur une approche d'apprentissage automatique renforcée par de la connaissance ontologique

De nombreuses méthodes et techniques d’intelligence artificielle pour l’extraction d'information, la reconnaissance des formes et l’exploration de données sont utilisées pour extraire des résumés automatiquement. En particulier, de nouveaux modèles d'apprentissage automatique semi supervisé avec ajout de connaissance ontologique permettent de choisir des phrases d’un corpus en fonction de leur contenu d'information. Le corpus est considéré comme un ensemble de phrases sur lequel des méthodes d'optimisation sont appliquées pour identifier les attributs les plus importants. Ceux-ci formeront l’ensemble d’entrainement, à partir duquel un algorithme d’apprentissage pourra abduire une fonction de classification capable de discriminer les phrases de nouveaux corpus en fonction de leur contenu d’information. Actuellement, même si les résultats sont intéressants, l’efficacité des modèles basés sur cette approche est encore faible notamment en ce qui concerne le pouvoir discriminant des fonctions de classification. Dans cette thèse, un nouveau modèle basé sur l’apprentissage automatique est proposé et dont l’efficacité est améliorée par un ajout de connaissance ontologique à l’ensemble d’entrainement. L’originalité de ce modèle est décrite à travers trois articles de revues. Le premier article a pour but de montrer comment des techniques linéaires peuvent être appliquées de manière originale pour optimiser un espace de travail dans le contexte du résumé extractif. Le deuxième article explique comment insérer de la connaissance ontologique pour améliorer considérablement la performance des fonctions de classification. Cette insertion se fait par l’ajout, à l'ensemble d’entraînement, de chaines lexicales extraites de bases de connaissances ontologiques. Le troisième article décrit VENCE , le nouveau modèle d’apprentissage automatique permettant d’extraire les phrases les plus porteuses d’information en vue de produire des résumés. Une évaluation des performances de VENCE a été réalisée en comparant les résultats obtenus avec ceux produits par des logiciels actuels commerciaux et publics, ainsi que ceux publiés dans des articles scientifiques très récents. L’utilisation des métriques habituelles de rappel, précision et F_measure ainsi que l’outil ROUGE a permis de constater la supériorité de VENCE. Ce modèle pourrait être profitable pour d’autres contextes d’extraction d’information comme pour définir des modèles d’analyse de sentiments.Several methods and techniques of artificial intelligence for information extraction, pattern recognition and data mining are used for extraction of summaries. More particularly, new machine learning models with the introduction of ontological knowledge allow the extraction of the sentences containing the greatest amount of information from a corpus. This corpus is considered as a set of sentences on which different optimization methods are applied to identify the most important attributes. They will provide a training set from which a machine learning algorithm will can abduce a classification function able to discriminate the sentences of new corpus according their information content. Currently, even though the results are interesting, the effectiveness of models based on this approach is still low, especially in the discriminating power of classification functions. In this thesis, a new model based on this approach is proposed and its effectiveness is improved by inserting ontological knowledge to the training set. The originality of this model is described through three papers. The first paper aims to show how linear techniques could be applied in an original way to optimize workspace in the context of extractive summary. The second article explains how to insert ontological knowledge to significantly improve the performance of classification functions. This introduction is performed by inserting lexical chains of ontological knowledge based in the training set. The third article describes VENCE , the new machine learning model to extract sentences with the most information content in order to produce summaries. An assessment of the VENCE performance is achieved comparing the results with those produced by current commercial and public software as well as those published in very recent scientific articles. The use of usual metrics recall, precision and F_measure and the ROUGE toolkit showed the superiority of VENCE. This model could benefit other contexts of information extraction as for instance to define models for sentiment analysis

Compactly supported basis functions as support vector kernels: Capturing feature interdependence in the embedding space

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Exploiting general-purpose background knowledge for automated schema matching

The schema matching task is an integral part of the data integration process. It is usually the first step in integrating data. Schema matching is typically very complex and time-consuming. It is, therefore, to the largest part, carried out by humans. One reason for the low amount of automation is the fact that schemas are often defined with deep background knowledge that is not itself present within the schemas. Overcoming the problem of missing background knowledge is a core challenge in automating the data integration process. In this dissertation, the task of matching semantic models, so-called ontologies, with the help of external background knowledge is investigated in-depth in Part I. Throughout this thesis, the focus lies on large, general-purpose resources since domain-specific resources are rarely available for most domains. Besides new knowledge resources, this thesis also explores new strategies to exploit such resources. A technical base for the development and comparison of matching systems is presented in Part II. The framework introduced here allows for simple and modularized matcher development (with background knowledge sources) and for extensive evaluations of matching systems. One of the largest structured sources for general-purpose background knowledge are knowledge graphs which have grown significantly in size in recent years. However, exploiting such graphs is not trivial. In Part III, knowledge graph em- beddings are explored, analyzed, and compared. Multiple improvements to existing approaches are presented. In Part IV, numerous concrete matching systems which exploit general-purpose background knowledge are presented. Furthermore, exploitation strategies and resources are analyzed and compared. This dissertation closes with a perspective on real-world applications

Semantic Similarity of Spatial Scenes

The formalization of similarity in spatial information systems can unleash their functionality and contribute technology not only useful, but also desirable by broad groups of users. As a paradigm for information retrieval, similarity supersedes tedious querying techniques and unveils novel ways for user-system interaction by naturally supporting modalities such as speech and sketching. As a tool within the scope of a broader objective, it can facilitate such diverse tasks as data integration, landmark determination, and prediction making. This potential motivated the development of several similarity models within the geospatial and computer science communities. Despite the merit of these studies, their cognitive plausibility can be limited due to neglect of well-established psychological principles about properties and behaviors of similarity. Moreover, such approaches are typically guided by experience, intuition, and observation, thereby often relying on more narrow perspectives or restrictive assumptions that produce inflexible and incompatible measures. This thesis consolidates such fragmentary efforts and integrates them along with novel formalisms into a scalable, comprehensive, and cognitively-sensitive framework for similarity queries in spatial information systems. Three conceptually different similarity queries at the levels of attributes, objects, and scenes are distinguished. An analysis of the relationship between similarity and change provides a unifying basis for the approach and a theoretical foundation for measures satisfying important similarity properties such as asymmetry and context dependence. The classification of attributes into categories with common structural and cognitive characteristics drives the implementation of a small core of generic functions, able to perform any type of attribute value assessment. Appropriate techniques combine such atomic assessments to compute similarities at the object level and to handle more complex inquiries with multiple constraints. These techniques, along with a solid graph-theoretical methodology adapted to the particularities of the geospatial domain, provide the foundation for reasoning about scene similarity queries. Provisions are made so that all methods comply with major psychological findings about people’s perceptions of similarity. An experimental evaluation supplies the main result of this thesis, which separates psychological findings with a major impact on the results from those that can be safely incorporated into the framework through computationally simpler alternatives