2,276 research outputs found
Distributional Measures of Semantic Distance: A Survey
The ability to mimic human notions of semantic distance has widespread
applications. Some measures rely only on raw text (distributional measures) and
some rely on knowledge sources such as WordNet. Although extensive studies have
been performed to compare WordNet-based measures with human judgment, the use
of distributional measures as proxies to estimate semantic distance has
received little attention. Even though they have traditionally performed poorly
when compared to WordNet-based measures, they lay claim to certain uniquely
attractive features, such as their applicability in resource-poor languages and
their ability to mimic both semantic similarity and semantic relatedness.
Therefore, this paper presents a detailed study of distributional measures.
Particular attention is paid to flesh out the strengths and limitations of both
WordNet-based and distributional measures, and how distributional measures of
distance can be brought more in line with human notions of semantic distance.
We conclude with a brief discussion of recent work on hybrid measures
Topological Data Analysis with Bregman Divergences
Given a finite set in a metric space, the topological analysis generalizes
hierarchical clustering using a 1-parameter family of homology groups to
quantify connectivity in all dimensions. The connectivity is compactly
described by the persistence diagram. One limitation of the current framework
is the reliance on metric distances, whereas in many practical applications
objects are compared by non-metric dissimilarity measures. Examples are the
Kullback-Leibler divergence, which is commonly used for comparing text and
images, and the Itakura-Saito divergence, popular for speech and sound. These
are two members of the broad family of dissimilarities called Bregman
divergences.
We show that the framework of topological data analysis can be extended to
general Bregman divergences, widening the scope of possible applications. In
particular, we prove that appropriately generalized Cech and Delaunay (alpha)
complexes capture the correct homotopy type, namely that of the corresponding
union of Bregman balls. Consequently, their filtrations give the correct
persistence diagram, namely the one generated by the uniformly growing Bregman
balls. Moreover, we show that unlike the metric setting, the filtration of
Vietoris-Rips complexes may fail to approximate the persistence diagram. We
propose algorithms to compute the thus generalized Cech, Vietoris-Rips and
Delaunay complexes and experimentally test their efficiency. Lastly, we explain
their surprisingly good performance by making a connection with discrete Morse
theory
Memory vectors for similarity search in high-dimensional spaces
We study an indexing architecture to store and search in a database of
high-dimensional vectors from the perspective of statistical signal processing
and decision theory. This architecture is composed of several memory units,
each of which summarizes a fraction of the database by a single representative
vector. The potential similarity of the query to one of the vectors stored in
the memory unit is gauged by a simple correlation with the memory unit's
representative vector. This representative optimizes the test of the following
hypothesis: the query is independent from any vector in the memory unit vs. the
query is a simple perturbation of one of the stored vectors.
Compared to exhaustive search, our approach finds the most similar database
vectors significantly faster without a noticeable reduction in search quality.
Interestingly, the reduction of complexity is provably better in
high-dimensional spaces. We empirically demonstrate its practical interest in a
large-scale image search scenario with off-the-shelf state-of-the-art
descriptors.Comment: Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Big Dat
Topic Detection and Tracking in Personal Search History
This thesis describes a system for tracking and detecting topics in personal search history. In particular, we developed a time tracking tool that helps users in analyzing their time and discovering their activity patterns. The system allows a user to specify interesting topics to monitor with a keyword description. The system would then keep track of the log and the time spent on each document and produce a time graph to show how much time has been spent on each topic to be monitored. The system can also detect new topics and potentially recommend relevant information about them to the user. This work has been integrated with the UCAIR Toolbar, a client side agent. Considering limited resources on the client side, we designed an e????cient incremental algorithm for topic tracking and detection. Various unsupervised learning approaches have been considered to improve the accuracy in categorizing the user log into appropriate categories. Experiments show that our tool is effective in categorizing the documents into existing categories and detecting the new useful catgeories. Moreover, the quality of categorization improves over time as more and more log is available
A Large-Scale Community Questions Classification Accounting for Category Similarity: An Exploratory?
The paper reports on a large-scale topical categorization of questions from a Russian community question answering (CQA) service [email protected]. We used a data set containing all the questions (more than 11 millions) asked by [email protected] users in 2012. This is the first study on question categorization dealing with non-English data of this size. The study focuses on adjusting category structure in order to get more robust classification results. We investigate several approaches to measure similarity between categories: the share of identical questions, language models, and user activity. The results show that the proposed approach is promising.14-07-00589; RFBR; Russian Foundation for Basic Research
Artificial Sequences and Complexity Measures
In this paper we exploit concepts of information theory to address the
fundamental problem of identifying and defining the most suitable tools to
extract, in a automatic and agnostic way, information from a generic string of
characters. We introduce in particular a class of methods which use in a
crucial way data compression techniques in order to define a measure of
remoteness and distance between pairs of sequences of characters (e.g. texts)
based on their relative information content. We also discuss in detail how
specific features of data compression techniques could be used to introduce the
notion of dictionary of a given sequence and of Artificial Text and we show how
these new tools can be used for information extraction purposes. We point out
the versatility and generality of our method that applies to any kind of
corpora of character strings independently of the type of coding behind them.
We consider as a case study linguistic motivated problems and we present
results for automatic language recognition, authorship attribution and self
consistent-classification.Comment: Revised version, with major changes, of previous "Data Compression
approach to Information Extraction and Classification" by A. Baronchelli and
V. Loreto. 15 pages; 5 figure
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