11,498 research outputs found

    Statistical analysis of grouped text documents

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    L'argomento di questa tesi sono i modelli statistici per l'analisi dei dati testuali, con particolare attenzione ai contesti in cui i campioni di testo sono raggruppati. Quando si ha a che fare con dati testuali, il primo problema è quello di elaborarli, per renderli compatibili dal punto di vista computazionale e metodologico con i metodi matematici e statistici prodotti e continuamente sviluppati dalla comunità scientifica. Per questo motivo, la tesi passa in rassegna i metodi esistenti per la rappresentazione analitica e l'elaborazione di campioni di dati testuali, compresi i "Vector Space Models", le "rappresentazioni distribuite" di parole e documenti e i "contextualized embeddings". Questa rassegna comporta la standardizzazione di una notazione che, anche all'interno dello stesso approccio di rappresentazione, appare molto eterogenea in letteratura. Vengono poi esplorati due domini di applicazione: i social media e il turismo culturale. Per quanto riguarda il primo, viene proposto uno studio sull'autodescrizione di gruppi diversi di individui sulla piattaforma StockTwits, dove i mercati finanziari sono gli argomenti dominanti. La metodologia proposta ha integrato diversi tipi di dati, sia testuali che variabili categoriche. Questo studio ha agevolato la comprensione sul modo in cui le persone si presentano online e ha trovato stutture di comportamento ricorrenti all'interno di gruppi di utenti. Per quanto riguarda il turismo culturale, la tesi approfondisce uno studio condotto nell'ambito del progetto "Data Science for Brescia - Arts and Cultural Places", in cui è stato addestrato un modello linguistico per classificare le recensioni online scritte in italiano in quattro aree semantiche distinte relative alle attrazioni culturali della città di Brescia. Il modello proposto permette di identificare le attrazioni nei documenti di testo, anche quando non sono esplicitamente menzionate nei metadati del documento, aprendo così la possibilità di espandere il database relativo a queste attrazioni culturali con nuove fonti, come piattaforme di social media, forum e altri spazi online. Infine, la tesi presenta uno studio metodologico che esamina la specificità di gruppo delle parole, analizzando diversi stimatori di specificità di gruppo proposti in letteratura. Lo studio ha preso in considerazione documenti testuali raggruppati con variabile di "outcome" e variabile di gruppo. Il suo contributo consiste nella proposta di modellare il corpus di documenti come una distribuzione multivariata, consentendo la simulazione di corpora di documenti di testo con caratteristiche predefinite. La simulazione ha fornito preziose indicazioni sulla relazione tra gruppi di documenti e parole. Inoltre, tutti i risultati possono essere liberamente esplorati attraverso un'applicazione web, i cui componenti sono altresì descritti in questo manoscritto. In conclusione, questa tesi è stata concepita come una raccolta di studi, ognuno dei quali suggerisce percorsi di ricerca futuri per affrontare le sfide dell'analisi dei dati testuali raggruppati.The topic of this thesis is statistical models for the analysis of textual data, emphasizing contexts in which text samples are grouped. When dealing with text data, the first issue is to process it, making it computationally and methodologically compatible with the existing mathematical and statistical methods produced and continually developed by the scientific community. Therefore, the thesis firstly reviews existing methods for analytically representing and processing textual datasets, including Vector Space Models, distributed representations of words and documents, and contextualized embeddings. It realizes this review by standardizing a notation that, even within the same representation approach, appears highly heterogeneous in the literature. Then, two domains of application are explored: social media and cultural tourism. About the former, a study is proposed about self-presentation among diverse groups of individuals on the StockTwits platform, where finance and stock markets are the dominant topics. The methodology proposed integrated various types of data, including textual and categorical data. This study revealed insights into how people present themselves online and found recurring patterns within groups of users. About the latter, the thesis delves into a study conducted as part of the "Data Science for Brescia - Arts and Cultural Places" Project, where a language model was trained to classify Italian-written online reviews into four distinct semantic areas related to cultural attractions in the Italian city of Brescia. The model proposed allows for the identification of attractions in text documents, even when not explicitly mentioned in document metadata, thus opening possibilities for expanding the database related to these cultural attractions with new sources, such as social media platforms, forums, and other online spaces. Lastly, the thesis presents a methodological study examining the group-specificity of words, analyzing various group-specificity estimators proposed in the literature. The study considered grouped text documents with both outcome and group variables. Its contribution consists of the proposal of modeling the corpus of documents as a multivariate distribution, enabling the simulation of corpora of text documents with predefined characteristics. The simulation provided valuable insights into the relationship between groups of documents and words. Furthermore, all its results can be freely explored through a web application, whose components are also described in this manuscript. In conclusion, this thesis has been conceived as a collection of papers. It aimed to contribute to the field with both applications and methodological proposals, and each study presented here suggests paths for future research to address the challenges in the analysis of grouped textual data

    On the interplay between speech perception and production: insights from research and theories

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    The study of spoken communication has long been entrenched in a debate surrounding the interdependence of speech production and perception. This mini review summarizes findings from prior studies to elucidate the reciprocal relationships between speech production and perception. We also discuss key theoretical perspectives relevant to speech perception-production loop, including hyper-articulation and hypo-articulation (H&H) theory, speech motor theory, direct realism theory, articulatory phonology, the Directions into Velocities of Articulators (DIVA) and Gradient Order DIVA (GODIVA) models, and predictive coding. Building on prior findings, we propose a revised auditory-motor integration model of speech and provide insights for future research in speech perception and production, focusing on the effects of impaired peripheral auditory systems

    UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024

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    The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp

    Adaptations in physiological and neuronal function during diet-induced obesity

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    Obesity significantly increases the risk of developing chronic conditions including type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and some cancers. The rate of obesity has tripled globally since 1975, which is in part due to the sudden prevalence and overconsumption of palatable high-fat diets (HFDs). Obesity profoundly perturbs the neural control of energy balance, affecting diverse cell types within the hypothalamus. However, an incomplete understanding of how HFD impacts the regulation of energy balance hinders our ability to more effectively treat obesity. In this thesis, I describe the physiological and neuronal response to HFD feeding in rodents. We identified that HFD exposure elevates the body weight set point, which is initially driven by a transient hyperphagia. This hyperphagia coincides with increased excitatory transmission to lateral hypothalamic orexin (ORX) neurons, which regulate acute food intake. This suggests that ORX neurons may be involved in the initial hyperphagia, implicating them in the development of obesity. As HFD prolongs, body weight gain slows and reaches a new steady state regardless of age at the start, duration of feeding, or palatability of the diet. This sustained weight coincides with increased synaptic contacts to melanin-concentrating hormone (MCH) neurons, which promote weight gain and food intake, likely contributing to the maintenance of obesity. The molecular mechanism underlying the establishment of a new set point remains elusive. During HFD feeding, the presence of a chronic low-grade hypothalamic inflammation exacerbates weight gain, therefore we reasoned that inflammatory factors could modulate appetite-promoting neurons to maintain a new set point. We found that the inflammatory mediator prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) activate MCH neurons via its EP2 receptor (EP2R). Suppressing PGE2-EP2R on MCH neurons partially protects against excess weight gain and fat accumulation in the liver during HFD feeding. This mechanism could contribute to the maintenance of an elevated body weight set point in during diet-induced obesity. Without long-term treatment options in face of the increasing rates of obesity, we are in desperate need of novel interventions. In the future, we hope that targeting EP2R on MCH neurons can lower body weight set point and aid in combatting obesity

    Location Reference Recognition from Texts: A Survey and Comparison

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    A vast amount of location information exists in unstructured texts, such as social media posts, news stories, scientific articles, web pages, travel blogs, and historical archives. Geoparsing refers to recognizing location references from texts and identifying their geospatial representations. While geoparsing can benefit many domains, a summary of its specific applications is still missing. Further, there is a lack of a comprehensive review and comparison of existing approaches for location reference recognition, which is the first and core step of geoparsing. To fill these research gaps, this review first summarizes seven typical application domains of geoparsing: geographic information retrieval, disaster management, disease surveillance, traffic management, spatial humanities, tourism management, and crime management. We then review existing approaches for location reference recognition by categorizing these approaches into four groups based on their underlying functional principle: rule-based, gazetteer matching–based, statistical learning-–based, and hybrid approaches. Next, we thoroughly evaluate the correctness and computational efficiency of the 27 most widely used approaches for location reference recognition based on 26 public datasets with different types of texts (e.g., social media posts and news stories) containing 39,736 location references worldwide. Results from this thorough evaluation can help inform future methodological developments and can help guide the selection of proper approaches based on application needs

    Analysis and Design of Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) Techniques for Next Generation Wireless Communication Systems

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    The current surge in wireless connectivity, anticipated to amplify significantly in future wireless technologies, brings a new wave of users. Given the impracticality of an endlessly expanding bandwidth, there’s a pressing need for communication techniques that efficiently serve this burgeoning user base with limited resources. Multiple Access (MA) techniques, notably Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA), have long addressed bandwidth constraints. However, with escalating user numbers, OMA’s orthogonality becomes limiting for emerging wireless technologies. Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA), employing superposition coding, serves more users within the same bandwidth as OMA by allocating different power levels to users whose signals can then be detected using the gap between them, thus offering superior spectral efficiency and massive connectivity. This thesis examines the integration of NOMA techniques with cooperative relaying, EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) chart analysis, and deep learning for enhancing 6G and beyond communication systems. The adopted methodology aims to optimize the systems’ performance, spanning from bit-error rate (BER) versus signal to noise ratio (SNR) to overall system efficiency and data rates. The primary focus of this thesis is the investigation of the integration of NOMA with cooperative relaying, EXIT chart analysis, and deep learning techniques. In the cooperative relaying context, NOMA notably improved diversity gains, thereby proving the superiority of combining NOMA with cooperative relaying over just NOMA. With EXIT chart analysis, NOMA achieved low BER at mid-range SNR as well as achieved optimal user fairness in the power allocation stage. Additionally, employing a trained neural network enhanced signal detection for NOMA in the deep learning scenario, thereby producing a simpler signal detection for NOMA which addresses NOMAs’ complex receiver problem

    Optimizing digital archiving: An artificial intelligence approach for OCR error correction

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    Project Work presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced Analytics, specialization in Business AnalyticsThis thesis research scopes the knowledge gap for effective ways to address OCR errors and the importance to have training datasets adequated size and quality, to promote digital documents OCR recognition efficiency. The main goal is to examine the effects regarding the following dimensions of sourcing data: input size vs performance vs time efficiency, and to propose a new design that includes a machine translation model, to automate the errors correction caused by OCR scan. The study implemented various LSTM, with different thresholds, to recover errors generated by OCR systems. However, the results did not overcomed the performance of existing OCR systems, due to dataset size limitations, a step further was achieved. A relationship between performance and input size was established, providing meaningful insights for future digital archiving systems optimisation. This dissertation creates a new approach, to deal with OCR problems and implementation considerations, that can be further followed, to optimise digital archive systems efficiency and results

    A VOS analysis of LSTM Learners Classification for Recommendation System

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    In response to the growing popularity of social web apps, much research has gone into analyzing and developing an AI-based responsive suggestion system. Machine learning and neural networks come in many forms that help online students choose the best texts for their studies. However, when training recommendation models to deal with massive amounts of data, traditional machine learning approaches require additional training models. As a result, they are deemed inappropriate for the personalized recommender generation of learning systems. In this paper, we examine LSTM-based strategies in order to make useful recommendations for future research

    Backpropagation Beyond the Gradient

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    Automatic differentiation is a key enabler of deep learning: previously, practitioners were limited to models for which they could manually compute derivatives. Now, they can create sophisticated models with almost no restrictions and train them using first-order, i. e. gradient, information. Popular libraries like PyTorch and TensorFlow compute this gradient efficiently, automatically, and conveniently with a single line of code. Under the hood, reverse-mode automatic differentiation, or gradient backpropagation, powers the gradient computation in these libraries. Their entire design centers around gradient backpropagation. These frameworks are specialized around one specific task—computing the average gradient in a mini-batch. This specialization often complicates the extraction of other information like higher-order statistical moments of the gradient, or higher-order derivatives like the Hessian. It limits practitioners and researchers to methods that rely on the gradient. Arguably, this hampers the field from exploring the potential of higher-order information and there is evidence that focusing solely on the gradient has not lead to significant recent advances in deep learning optimization. To advance algorithmic research and inspire novel ideas, information beyond the batch-averaged gradient must be made available at the same level of computational efficiency, automation, and convenience. This thesis presents approaches to simplify experimentation with rich information beyond the gradient by making it more readily accessible. We present an implementation of these ideas as an extension to the backpropagation procedure in PyTorch. Using this newly accessible information, we demonstrate possible use cases by (i) showing how it can inform our understanding of neural network training by building a diagnostic tool, and (ii) enabling novel methods to efficiently compute and approximate curvature information. First, we extend gradient backpropagation for sequential feedforward models to Hessian backpropagation which enables computing approximate per-layer curvature. This perspective unifies recently proposed block- diagonal curvature approximations. Like gradient backpropagation, the computation of these second-order derivatives is modular, and therefore simple to automate and extend to new operations. Based on the insight that rich information beyond the gradient can be computed efficiently and at the same time, we extend the backpropagation in PyTorch with the BackPACK library. It provides efficient and convenient access to statistical moments of the gradient and approximate curvature information, often at a small overhead compared to computing just the gradient. Next, we showcase the utility of such information to better understand neural network training. We build the Cockpit library that visualizes what is happening inside the model during training through various instruments that rely on BackPACK’s statistics. We show how Cockpit provides a meaningful statistical summary report to the deep learning engineer to identify bugs in their machine learning pipeline, guide hyperparameter tuning, and study deep learning phenomena. Finally, we use BackPACK’s extended automatic differentiation functionality to develop ViViT, an approach to efficiently compute curvature information, in particular curvature noise. It uses the low-rank structure of the generalized Gauss-Newton approximation to the Hessian and addresses shortcomings in existing curvature approximations. Through monitoring curvature noise, we demonstrate how ViViT’s information helps in understanding challenges to make second-order optimization methods work in practice. This work develops new tools to experiment more easily with higher-order information in complex deep learning models. These tools have impacted works on Bayesian applications with Laplace approximations, out-of-distribution generalization, differential privacy, and the design of automatic differentia- tion systems. They constitute one important step towards developing and establishing more efficient deep learning algorithms

    State-wise Constrained Policy Optimization

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    Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have shown tremendous success in simulation environments, but their application to real-world problems faces significant challenges, with safety being a major concern. In particular, enforcing state-wise constraints is essential for many challenging tasks such as autonomous driving and robot manipulation. However, existing safe RL algorithms under the framework of Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) do not consider state-wise constraints. To address this gap, we propose State-wise Constrained Policy Optimization (SCPO), the first general-purpose policy search algorithm for state-wise constrained reinforcement learning. SCPO provides guarantees for state-wise constraint satisfaction in expectation. In particular, we introduce the framework of Maximum Markov Decision Process, and prove that the worst-case safety violation is bounded under SCPO. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on training neural network policies for extensive robot locomotion tasks, where the agent must satisfy a variety of state-wise safety constraints. Our results show that SCPO significantly outperforms existing methods and can handle state-wise constraints in high-dimensional robotics tasks.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2305.1368
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