Finding Answers from the Word of God: Domain Adaptation for Neural Networks in Biblical Question Answering

Question answering (QA) has significantly benefitted from deep learning techniques in recent years. However, domain-specific QA remains a challenge due to the significant amount of data required to train a neural network. This paper studies the answer sentence selection task in the Bible domain and answer questions by selecting relevant verses from the Bible. For this purpose, we create a new dataset BibleQA based on bible trivia questions and propose three neural network models for our task. We pre-train our models on a large-scale QA dataset, SQuAD, and investigate the effect of transferring weights on model accuracy. Furthermore, we also measure the model accuracies with different answer context lengths and different Bible translations. We affirm that transfer learning has a noticeable improvement in the model accuracy. We achieve relatively good results with shorter context lengths, whereas longer context lengths decreased model accuracy. We also find that using a more modern Bible translation in the dataset has a positive effect on the task.Comment: The paper has been accepted at IJCNN 201

Visual Re-ranking with Natural Language Understanding for Text Spotting

Many scene text recognition approaches are based on purely visual information and ignore the semantic relation between scene and text. In this paper, we tackle this problem from natural language processing perspective to fill the gap between language and vision. We propose a post-processing approach to improve scene text recognition accuracy by using occurrence probabilities of words (unigram language model), and the semantic correlation between scene and text. For this, we initially rely on an off-the-shelf deep neural network, already trained with a large amount of data, which provides a series of text hypotheses per input image. These hypotheses are then re-ranked using word frequencies and semantic relatedness with objects or scenes in the image. As a result of this combination, the performance of the original network is boosted with almost no additional cost. We validate our approach on ICDAR'17 dataset.Comment: Accepted by ACCV 2018. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1810.0977

Visual re-ranking with natural language understanding for text spotting

The final publication is available at link.springer.comMany scene text recognition approaches are based on purely visual information and ignore the semantic relation between scene and text. In this paper, we tackle this problem from natural language processing perspective to fill the gap between language and vision. We propose a post processing approach to improve scene text recognition accuracy by using occurrence probabilities of words (unigram language model), and the semantic correlation between scene and text. For this, we initially rely on an off-the-shelf deep neural network, already trained with large amount of data, which provides a series of text hypotheses per input image. These hypotheses are then re-ranked using word frequencies and semantic relatedness with objects or scenes in the image. As a result of this combination, the performance of the original network is boosted with almost no additional cost. We validate our approach on ICDAR'17 dataset.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Deep learning in remote sensing: a review

Standing at the paradigm shift towards data-intensive science, machine learning techniques are becoming increasingly important. In particular, as a major breakthrough in the field, deep learning has proven as an extremely powerful tool in many fields. Shall we embrace deep learning as the key to all? Or, should we resist a 'black-box' solution? There are controversial opinions in the remote sensing community. In this article, we analyze the challenges of using deep learning for remote sensing data analysis, review the recent advances, and provide resources to make deep learning in remote sensing ridiculously simple to start with. More importantly, we advocate remote sensing scientists to bring their expertise into deep learning, and use it as an implicit general model to tackle unprecedented large-scale influential challenges, such as climate change and urbanization.Comment: Accepted for publication IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazin