Data mining techniques for complex application domains

The emergence of advanced communication techniques has increased availability of large collection of data in electronic form in a number of application domains including healthcare, e- business, and e-learning. Everyday a large amount of records are stored electronically. However, finding useful information from such a large data collection is a challenging issue. Data mining technology aims automatically extracting hidden knowledge from large data repositories exploiting sophisticated algorithms. The hidden knowledge in the electronic data may be potentially utilized to facilitate the procedures, productivity, and reliability of several application domains. The PhD activity has been focused on novel and effective data mining approaches to tackle the complex data coming from two main application domains: Healthcare data analysis and Textual data analysis. The research activity, in the context of healthcare data, addressed the application of different data mining techniques to discover valuable knowledge from real exam-log data of patients. In particular, efforts have been devoted to the extraction of medical pathways, which can be exploited to analyze the actual treatments followed by patients. The derived knowledge not only provides useful information to deal with the treatment procedures but may also play an important role in future predictions of potential patient risks associated with medical treatments. The research effort in textual data analysis is twofold. On the one hand, a novel approach to discovery of succinct summaries of large document collections has been proposed. On the other hand, the suitability of an established descriptive data mining to support domain experts in making decisions has been investigated. Both research activities are focused on adopting widely exploratory data mining techniques to textual data analysis, which require overcoming intrinsic limitations for traditional algorithms for handling textual documents efficiently and effectively

Towards Personalized and Human-in-the-Loop Document Summarization

The ubiquitous availability of computing devices and the widespread use of the internet have generated a large amount of data continuously. Therefore, the amount of available information on any given topic is far beyond humans' processing capacity to properly process, causing what is known as information overload. To efficiently cope with large amounts of information and generate content with significant value to users, we require identifying, merging and summarising information. Data summaries can help gather related information and collect it into a shorter format that enables answering complicated questions, gaining new insight and discovering conceptual boundaries. This thesis focuses on three main challenges to alleviate information overload using novel summarisation techniques. It further intends to facilitate the analysis of documents to support personalised information extraction. This thesis separates the research issues into four areas, covering (i) feature engineering in document summarisation, (ii) traditional static and inflexible summaries, (iii) traditional generic summarisation approaches, and (iv) the need for reference summaries. We propose novel approaches to tackle these challenges, by: i)enabling automatic intelligent feature engineering, ii) enabling flexible and interactive summarisation, iii) utilising intelligent and personalised summarisation approaches. The experimental results prove the efficiency of the proposed approaches compared to other state-of-the-art models. We further propose solutions to the information overload problem in different domains through summarisation, covering network traffic data, health data and business process data.Comment: PhD thesi

Towards Robust Long-form Text Generation Systems

Text generation is an important emerging AI technology that has seen significant research advances in recent years. Due to its closeness to how humans communicate, mastering text generation technology can unlock several important applications such as intelligent chat-bots, creative writing assistance, or newer applications like task-agnostic few-shot learning. Most recently, the rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs) has resulted in systems like ChatGPT, capable of generating fluent, coherent and human-like text. However, despite their remarkable capabilities, LLMs still suffer from several limitations, particularly when generating long-form text. In particular, (1) long-form generated text is filled with factual inconsistencies to world knowledge and the input prompt; (2) it is difficult to accurately evaluate the quality of long-form generated text; (3) it is difficult to identify whether a piece of long-form text was AI-generated, a task necessary to prevent widespread misinformation and plagiarism. In this thesis I design algorithms aimed at making progress towards these three issues in current LLMs. I will first describe a retrieval-augmented system we built for long-form question answering, to improve factual correctness of long-form generated text. However, a careful empirical analysis reveals issues related to input/output consistency of generated text, and an inherent difficulty in evaluation. I will then describe our model RankGen, which uses large-scale contrastive learning on documents to significantly outperform competing long-form text generation methods to generate text more faithful to the input. Next, I will describe our efforts to improve human evaluation of long-form generation (issue #2) by proposing the LongEval guidelines. LongEval is a set of three simple empirically-motivated ideas to make human evaluation of long-form generation more consistent, less expensive, and cognitively easier for evaluators. Finally, I describe my work on AI-generated text detection (issue #3), and showcase the brittleness of existing methods to paraphrasing attacks I designed. I will describe a simple new AI-generated text detection algorithm using information retrieval, which is significantly more robust to paraphrasing attacks. Finally, I conclude this thesis with some future research directions that I am excited about, including plan-based long-form text generation, and a deeper dive into understanding large language model training dynamics

JURI SAYS:An Automatic Judgement Prediction System for the European Court of Human Rights

In this paper we present the web platform JURI SAYS that automatically predicts decisions of the European Court of Human Rights based on communicated cases, which are published by the court early in the proceedings and are often available many years before the final decision is made. Our system therefore predicts future judgements of the court. The platform is available at jurisays.com and shows the predictions compared to the actual decisions of the court. It is automatically updated every month by including the prediction for the new cases. Additionally, the system highlights the sentences and paragraphs that are most important for the prediction (i.e. violation vs. no violation of human rights)

Geographic information extraction from texts

A large volume of unstructured texts, containing valuable geographic information, is available online. This information – provided implicitly or explicitly – is useful not only for scientific studies (e.g., spatial humanities) but also for many practical applications (e.g., geographic information retrieval). Although large progress has been achieved in geographic information extraction from texts, there are still unsolved challenges and issues, ranging from methods, systems, and data, to applications and privacy. Therefore, this workshop will provide a timely opportunity to discuss the recent advances, new ideas, and concepts but also identify research gaps in geographic information extraction

WiFi-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Attention-Based BiLSTM

Recently, significant efforts have been made to explore human activity recognition (HAR) techniques that use information gathered by existing indoor wireless infrastructures through WiFi signals without demanding the monitored subject to carry a dedicated device. The key intuition is that different activities introduce different multi-paths in WiFi signals and generate different patterns in the time series of channel state information (CSI). In this paper, we propose and evaluate a full pipeline for a CSI-based human activity recognition framework for 12 activities in three different spatial environments using two deep learning models: ABiLSTM and CNN-ABiLSTM. Evaluation experiments have demonstrated that the proposed models outperform state-of-the-art models. Also, the experiments show that the proposed models can be applied to other environments with different configurations, albeit with some caveats. The proposed ABiLSTM model achieves an overall accuracy of 94.03%, 91.96%, and 92.59% across the 3 target environments. While the proposed CNN-ABiLSTM model reaches an accuracy of 98.54%, 94.25% and 95.09% across those same environments

Tune your brown clustering, please

Brown clustering, an unsupervised hierarchical clustering technique based on ngram mutual information, has proven useful in many NLP applications. However, most uses of Brown clustering employ the same default configuration; the appropriateness of this configuration has gone predominantly unexplored. Accordingly, we present information for practitioners on the behaviour of Brown clustering in order to assist hyper-parametre tuning, in the form of a theoretical model of Brown clustering utility. This model is then evaluated empirically in two sequence labelling tasks over two text types. We explore the dynamic between the input corpus size, chosen number of classes, and quality of the resulting clusters, which has an impact for any approach using Brown clustering. In every scenario that we examine, our results reveal that the values most commonly used for the clustering are sub-optimal