291 research outputs found
Robust semantic analysis for adaptive speech interfaces
The DUMAS project develops speech-based applications that are adaptable to different users and domains. The paper describes the project's robust semantic analysis strategy, used both in the generic framework for the development of multilingual speech-based dialogue systems which is the main project goal, and in the initial test application, a mobile phone-based e-mail interface
Monoidal computer III: A coalgebraic view of computability and complexity
Monoidal computer is a categorical model of intensional computation, where
many different programs correspond to the same input-output behavior. The
upshot of yet another model of computation is that a categorical formalism
should provide a much needed high level language for theory of computation,
flexible enough to allow abstracting away the low level implementation details
when they are irrelevant, or taking them into account when they are genuinely
needed. A salient feature of the approach through monoidal categories is the
formal graphical language of string diagrams, which supports visual reasoning
about programs and computations.
In the present paper, we provide a coalgebraic characterization of monoidal
computer. It turns out that the availability of interpreters and specializers,
that make a monoidal category into a monoidal computer, is equivalent with the
existence of a *universal state space*, that carries a weakly final state
machine for any pair of input and output types. Being able to program state
machines in monoidal computers allows us to represent Turing machines, to
capture their execution, count their steps, as well as, e.g., the memory cells
that they use. The coalgebraic view of monoidal computer thus provides a
convenient diagrammatic language for studying computability and complexity.Comment: 34 pages, 24 figures; in this version: added the Appendi
Towards Diverse and Natural Image Descriptions via a Conditional GAN
Despite the substantial progress in recent years, the image captioning
techniques are still far from being perfect.Sentences produced by existing
methods, e.g. those based on RNNs, are often overly rigid and lacking in
variability. This issue is related to a learning principle widely used in
practice, that is, to maximize the likelihood of training samples. This
principle encourages high resemblance to the "ground-truth" captions while
suppressing other reasonable descriptions. Conventional evaluation metrics,
e.g. BLEU and METEOR, also favor such restrictive methods. In this paper, we
explore an alternative approach, with the aim to improve the naturalness and
diversity -- two essential properties of human expression. Specifically, we
propose a new framework based on Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks
(CGAN), which jointly learns a generator to produce descriptions conditioned on
images and an evaluator to assess how well a description fits the visual
content. It is noteworthy that training a sequence generator is nontrivial. We
overcome the difficulty by Policy Gradient, a strategy stemming from
Reinforcement Learning, which allows the generator to receive early feedback
along the way. We tested our method on two large datasets, where it performed
competitively against real people in our user study and outperformed other
methods on various tasks.Comment: accepted in ICCV2017 as an Oral pape
The Last Man
I examine the basic logical character of âthe last man exampleâ, as well as the logical character of one of its more important variants. Although it has one striking antecedent in recent philosophy â of which more later â itâs fair to regard it as an example first presented to a contemporary audience by Richard Routley in his 1973 paper, âIs There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic?â. I want to determine exactly how the example goes and what it shows. I want to determine what it does not show. One reason for engaging in this exercise is the striking and engaging character of the last man example itself. Another is that a large number of environmental philosophers have since referred to the last man but have drawn different, sometimes contrary, lessons from it â though we wonât have time here to visit any but the earliest of these responses. It seems to me time to patiently revisit the example and time to attempt a conclusive understanding of its significance. A second, and broader, purpose I have is to describe the meta-ethical views it led Routley to adopt â or manufacture! â in an attempt to philosophically position his normative stance within a more fundamental, explanatory, framework
Structuring Wikipedia Articles with Section Recommendations
Sections are the building blocks of Wikipedia articles. They enhance
readability and can be used as a structured entry point for creating and
expanding articles. Structuring a new or already existing Wikipedia article
with sections is a hard task for humans, especially for newcomers or less
experienced editors, as it requires significant knowledge about how a
well-written article looks for each possible topic. Inspired by this need, the
present paper defines the problem of section recommendation for Wikipedia
articles and proposes several approaches for tackling it. Our systems can help
editors by recommending what sections to add to already existing or newly
created Wikipedia articles. Our basic paradigm is to generate recommendations
by sourcing sections from articles that are similar to the input article. We
explore several ways of defining similarity for this purpose (based on topic
modeling, collaborative filtering, and Wikipedia's category system). We use
both automatic and human evaluation approaches for assessing the performance of
our recommendation system, concluding that the category-based approach works
best, achieving precision@10 of about 80% in the human evaluation.Comment: SIGIR '18 camera-read
Managing Interacting Criteria: Application to Environmental Evaluation Practices
The need for organizations to evaluate their environmental practices has been recently increasing. This fact has led to the development of many approaches to appraise such practices. In this paper, a novel decision model to evaluate companyâs environmental practices is proposed to improve traditional evaluation process in different facets. Firstly, different reviewersâ collectives related to the companyâs activity are taken into account in the process to increase company internal efficiency and external legitimacy. Secondly, following the standard ISO 14031, two general categories of environmental performance indicators, management and operational, are considered. Thirdly, since the assumption of independence among environmental indicators is rarely verified in environmental context, an aggregation operator to bear in mind the relationship among such indicators in the evaluation results is proposed. Finally, this new model integrates quantitative and qualitative information with different scales using a multi-granular linguistic model that allows to adapt diverse evaluation scales according to appraisersâ knowledge
A systems approach to evaluate One Health initiatives
Challenges calling for integrated approaches to health, such as the One Health (OH) approach, typically arise from the intertwined spheres of humans, animals, and ecosystems constituting their environment. Initiatives addressing such wicked problems commonly consist of complex structures and dynamics. As a result of the EU COST Action (TD 1404) âNetwork for Evaluation of One Healthâ (NEOH), we propose an evaluation framework anchored in systems theory to address the intrinsic complexity of OH initiatives and regard them as subsystems of the context within which they operate. Typically, they intend to influence a system with a view to improve human, animal, and environmental health. The NEOH evaluation framework consists of four overarching elements, namely: (1) the definition of the initiative and its context, (2) the description of the theory of change with an assessment of expected and unexpected outcomes, (3) the process evaluation of operational and supporting infrastructures (the âOH-nessâ), and (4) an assessment of the association(s) between the process evaluation and the outcomes produced. It relies on a mixed methods approach by combining a descriptive and qualitative assessment with a semi-quantitative scoring for the evaluation of the degree and structural balance of âOH-nessâ (summarised in an OH-index and OH-ratio, respectively) and conventional metrics for different outcomes in a multi-criteria-decision-analysis. Here, we focus on the methodology for Elements (1) and (3) including ready-to-use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for the assessment of the âOH-nessâ. We also provide an overview of Element (2), and refer to the NEOH handbook for further details, also regarding Element (4) (http://neoh.onehealthglobal.net). The presented approach helps researchers, practitioners, and evaluators to conceptualise and conduct evaluations of integrated approaches to health and facilitates comparison and learning across different OH activities thereby facilitating decisions on resource allocation. The application of the framework has been described in eight case studies in the same Frontiers research topic and provides first data on OH-index and OH-ratio, which is an important step towards their validation and the creation of a dataset for future benchmarking, and to demonstrate under which circumstances OH initiatives provide added value compared to disciplinary or conventional health initiatives
Question Generation based on Lexico-Syntactic Patterns Learned from the Web
THE MENTOR automatically generates multiple-choice tests from a given text. This tool aims at supporting the dialogue system of the FalaComigo project, as one of FalaComigo's goals is the interaction with tourists through questions/answers and quizzes about their visit. In a minimally supervised learning process and by leveraging the redundancy and linguistic variability of the Web, THE MENTOR learns lexico-syntactic patterns using a set of question/answer seeds. Afterward, these patterns are used to match the sentences from which new questions (and answers) can be generated. Finally, several ĂŻÂŹlters are applied in order to discard low quality items. In this paper we detail the question generation task as performed by T- Mand evaluate its performance
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