Statistical learning techniques for text categorization with sparse labeled data

Many applications involve learning a supervised classifier from very few explicitly labeled training examples, since the cost of manually labeling the training data is often prohibitively high. For instance, we expect a good classifier to learn our interests from a few example books or movies we like, and recommend similar ones in the future, or we expect a search engine to give more personalized search results based on whatever little it learned about our past queries and clicked documents. There is thus a need for classification techniques capable of learning from sparse labeled data, by exploiting additional information about the classification task at hand (e.g., background knowledge) or by employing more sophisticated features (e.g., n-gram sequences, trees, graphs). In this thesis, we focus on two approaches for overcoming the bottleneck of sparse labeled data. We first propose the Inductive/Transductive Latent Model (ILM/TLM), which is a new generative model for text documents. ILM/TLM has various building blocks designed to facilitate the integration of background knowledge (e.g., unlabeled documents, ontologies of concepts, encyclopedia) into the process of learning from small training data. Our method can be used for inductive and transductive learning and achieves significant gains over state-of-the-art methods for very small training sets. Second, we propose Structured Logistic Regression (SLR), which is a new coordinate-wise gradient ascent technique for learning logistic regression in the space of all (word or character) sequences in the training data. SLR exploits the inherent structure of the n-gram feature space in order to automatically provide a compact set of highly discriminative n-gram features. Our detailed experimental study shows that while SLR achieves similar classification results to those of the state-of-the-art methods (which use all n-gram features given explicitly), it is more than an order of magnitude faster than its opponents. The techniques presented in this thesis can be used to advance the technologies for automatically and efficiently building large training sets, therefore reducing the need for spending human computation on this task.Viele Anwendungen benutzen Klassifikatoren, die auf dünn gesäten Trainingsdaten lernen müssen, da es oft aufwändig ist, Trainingsdaten zur Verfügung zu stellen. Ein Beispiel für solche Anwendungen sind Empfehlungssysteme, die auf der Basis von sehr wenigen Büchern oder Filmen die Interessen des Benutzers erraten müssen, um ihm ähnliche Bücher oder Filme zu empfehlen. Ein anderes Beispiel sind Suchmaschinen, die sich auf den Benutzer einzustellen versuchen, auch wenn sie bisher nur sehr wenig Information über den Benutzer in Form von gestellten Anfragen oder geklickten Dokumenten besitzen. Wir benötigen also Klassifikationstechniken, die von dünn gesäten Trainingsdaten lernen können. Dies kann geschehen, indem zusätzliche Information über die Klassifikationsaufgabe ausgenutzt wird (z.B. mit Hintergrundwissen) oder indem raffiniertere Merkmale verwendet werden (z.B. n-Gram-Folgen, Bäume oder Graphen). In dieser Arbeit stellen wir zwei Ansätze vor, um das Problem der dünn gesäten Trainingsdaten anzugehen. Als erstes schlagen wir das Induktiv-Transduktive Latente Modell (ILM/TLM) vor, ein neues generatives Modell für Text-Dokumente. Das ILM/TLM verfügt über mehrere Komponenten, die es erlauben, Hintergrundwissen (wie z.B. nicht Klassifizierte Dokumente, Konzeptontologien oder Enzyklopädien) in den Lernprozess mit einzubeziehen. Diese Methode kann sowohl für induktives als auch für transduktives Lernen eingesetzt werden. Sie schlägt die modernsten Alternativmethoden signifikant bei dünn gesäten Trainingsdaten. Zweitens schlagen wir Strukturierte Logistische Regression (SLR) vor, ein neues Gradientenverfahren zum koordinatenweisen Lernen von logistischer Regression im Raum aller Wortfolgen oder Zeichenfolgen in den Trainingsdaten. SLR nutzt die inhärente Struktur des n-Gram-Raums aus, um automatisch hoch-diskriminative Merkmale zu finden. Unsere detaillierten Experimente zeigen, dass SLR ähnliche Ergebnisse erzielt wie die modernsten Konkurrenzmethoden, allerdings dabei um mehr als eine Größenordnung schneller ist. Die in dieser Arbeit vorgestellten Techniken verbessern das Maschinelle Lernen auf dünn gesäten Trainingsdaten und verringern den Bedarf an manueller Arbeit

Cross-Lingual Adaptation using Structural Correspondence Learning

Cross-lingual adaptation, a special case of domain adaptation, refers to the transfer of classification knowledge between two languages. In this article we describe an extension of Structural Correspondence Learning (SCL), a recently proposed algorithm for domain adaptation, for cross-lingual adaptation. The proposed method uses unlabeled documents from both languages, along with a word translation oracle, to induce cross-lingual feature correspondences. From these correspondences a cross-lingual representation is created that enables the transfer of classification knowledge from the source to the target language. The main advantages of this approach over other approaches are its resource efficiency and task specificity. We conduct experiments in the area of cross-language topic and sentiment classification involving English as source language and German, French, and Japanese as target languages. The results show a significant improvement of the proposed method over a machine translation baseline, reducing the relative error due to cross-lingual adaptation by an average of 30% (topic classification) and 59% (sentiment classification). We further report on empirical analyses that reveal insights into the use of unlabeled data, the sensitivity with respect to important hyperparameters, and the nature of the induced cross-lingual correspondences

Mistake-Driven Learning in Text Categorization

Learning problems in the text processing domain often map the text to a space whose dimensions are the measured features of the text, e.g., its words. Three characteristic properties of this domain are (a) very high dimensionality, (b) both the learned concepts and the instances reside very sparsely in the feature space, and (c) a high variation in the number of active features in an instance. In this work we study three mistake-driven learning algorithms for a typical task of this nature -- text categorization. We argue that these algorithms -- which categorize documents by learning a linear separator in the feature space -- have a few properties that make them ideal for this domain. We then show that a quantum leap in performance is achieved when we further modify the algorithms to better address some of the specific characteristics of the domain. In particular, we demonstrate (1) how variation in document length can be tolerated by either normalizing feature weights or by using negative weights, (2) the positive effect of applying a threshold range in training, (3) alternatives in considering feature frequency, and (4) the benefits of discarding features while training. Overall, we present an algorithm, a variation of Littlestone's Winnow, which performs significantly better than any other algorithm tested on this task using a similar feature set.Comment: 9 pages, uses aclap.st

Bounded Coordinate-Descent for Biological Sequence Classification in High Dimensional Predictor Space

We present a framework for discriminative sequence classification where the learner works directly in the high dimensional predictor space of all subsequences in the training set. This is possible by employing a new coordinate-descent algorithm coupled with bounding the magnitude of the gradient for selecting discriminative subsequences fast. We characterize the loss functions for which our generic learning algorithm can be applied and present concrete implementations for logistic regression (binomial log-likelihood loss) and support vector machines (squared hinge loss). Application of our algorithm to protein remote homology detection and remote fold recognition results in performance comparable to that of state-of-the-art methods (e.g., kernel support vector machines). Unlike state-of-the-art classifiers, the resulting classification models are simply lists of weighted discriminative subsequences and can thus be interpreted and related to the biological problem

Taming Wild High Dimensional Text Data with a Fuzzy Lash

The bag of words (BOW) represents a corpus in a matrix whose elements are the frequency of words. However, each row in the matrix is a very high-dimensional sparse vector. Dimension reduction (DR) is a popular method to address sparsity and high-dimensionality issues. Among different strategies to develop DR method, Unsupervised Feature Transformation (UFT) is a popular strategy to map all words on a new basis to represent BOW. The recent increase of text data and its challenges imply that DR area still needs new perspectives. Although a wide range of methods based on the UFT strategy has been developed, the fuzzy approach has not been considered for DR based on this strategy. This research investigates the application of fuzzy clustering as a DR method based on the UFT strategy to collapse BOW matrix to provide a lower-dimensional representation of documents instead of the words in a corpus. The quantitative evaluation shows that fuzzy clustering produces superior performance and features to Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), two popular DR methods based on the UFT strategy

Unsupervised Learning of Individuals and Categories from Images

Motivated by the existence of highly selective, sparsely firing cells observed in the human medial temporal lobe (MTL), we present an unsupervised method for learning and recognizing object categories from unlabeled images. In our model, a network of nonlinear neurons learns a sparse representation of its inputs through an unsupervised expectation-maximization process. We show that the application of this strategy to an invariant feature-based description of natural images leads to the development of units displaying sparse, invariant selectivity for particular individuals or image categories much like those observed in the MTL data