Identifying Experts in Question \& Answer Portals: A Case Study on Data Science Competencies in Reddit

The irreplaceable key to the triumph of Question & Answer (Q&A) platforms is their users providing high-quality answers to the challenging questions posted across various topics of interest. Recently, the expert finding problem attracted much attention in information retrieval research. In this work, we inspect the feasibility of supervised learning model to identify data science experts in Reddit. Our method is based on the manual coding results where two data science experts labelled expert, non-expert and out-of-scope comments. We present a semi-supervised approach using the activity behaviour of every user, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), crowdsourced and user feature sets. We conclude that the NLP and user feature sets contribute the most to the better identification of these three classes It means that this method can generalise well within the domain. Moreover, we present different types of users, which can be helpful to detect various types of users in the future

Learning from Limited Labeled Data for Visual Recognition

Recent advances in computer vision are in part due to the widespread use of deep neural networks. However, training deep networks require enormous amounts of labeled data which can be a bottleneck. In this thesis, we propose several approaches to mitigate this in the context of modern deep networks and computer vision tasks. While transfer learning is an effective strategy for natural image tasks where large labeled datasets such as ImageNet are available, it is less effective for distant domains such as medical images and 3D shapes. Chapter 2 focuses on transfer learning from natural image representations to other modalities. In many cases, cross-modal data can be generated using computer graphics techniques. By forcing the agreement of predictions across modalities, we show that the models are more robust to image degradation, such as lower resolution, grayscale, or line drawings instead of color images in high-resolution. Similarly, we show that 3D shape classifiers learned from multi-view images can be transferred to the models of voxel or point cloud representations. Another line of work has focused on techniques for few-shot learning. In particular, meta-learning approaches explicitly aim to generalize representations by emphasizing transferability to novel tasks. In Chapter 3, we analyze how to improve these techniques by exploiting unlabeled data from related tasks. We show that combining unsupervised objectives with meta-learning objectives can boost the performance of novel tasks. However, we find that small amounts of domain-specific data can be more beneficial than large amounts of generic data. While transfer learning, unsupervised learning, and few-shot learning have been studied in isolation, in practice, one often finds that transfer learning from large labeled datasets is more effective than others. This is partly due to a lack of evaluation on benchmarks that contains challenges such as class imbalance and domain mismatch. In Chapter 4, we explore the role of expert models in the context of semi-supervised learning on a realistic benchmark. Unlike existing semi-supervised benchmarks, our dataset is designed to expose some of the challenges encountered in a realistic setting, such as the fine-grained similarity between classes, significant class imbalance, and domain mismatch between the labeled and unlabeled data. We show that current semi-supervised methods are negatively affected by out-of-class data, and their performance pales compared to a transfer learning baseline. Last, we leverage the coarse labels from a large collection of images to improve semi-supervised learning. In Chapter 5, we show that incorporating hierarchical labels in the taxonomy improves state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods

Pseudo-label refinement using superpixels for semi-supervised brain tumour segmentation

Training neural networks using limited annotations is an important problem in the medical domain. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) typically require large, annotated datasets to achieve acceptable performance which, in the medical domain, are especially difficult to obtain as they require significant time from expert radiologists. Semi-supervised learning aims to overcome this problem by learning segmentations with very little annotated data, whilst exploiting large amounts of unlabelled data. However, the best-known technique, which utilises inferred pseudo-labels, is vulnerable to inaccurate pseudo-labels degrading the performance. We propose a framework based on superpixels - meaningful clusters of adjacent pixels - to improve the accuracy of the pseudo labels and address this issue. Our framework combines superpixels with semi-supervised learning, refining the pseudo-labels during training using the features and edges of the superpixel maps. This method is evaluated on a multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) dataset for the task of brain tumour region segmentation. Our method demonstrates improved performance over the standard semi-supervised pseudo-labelling baseline when there is a reduced annotator burden and only 5 annotated patients are available. We report DSC=0.824 and DSC=0.707 for the test set whole tumour and tumour core regions respectively

Pseudo-label refinement using superpixels for semi-supervised brain tumour segmentation

Training neural networks using limited annotations is an important problem in the medical domain. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) typically require large, annotated datasets to achieve acceptable performance which, in the medical domain, are especially difficult to obtain as they require significant time from expert radiologists. Semi-supervised learning aims to overcome this problem by learning segmentations with very little annotated data, whilst exploiting large amounts of unlabelled data. However, the best-known technique, which utilises inferred pseudo-labels, is vulnerable to inaccurate pseudo-labels degrading the performance. We propose a framework based on superpixels - meaningful clusters of adjacent pixels - to improve the accuracy of the pseudo labels and address this issue. Our framework combines superpixels with semi-supervised learning, refining the pseudo-labels during training using the features and edges of the superpixel maps. This method is evaluated on a multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) dataset for the task of brain tumour region segmentation. Our method demonstrates improved performance over the standard semi-supervised pseudo-labelling baseline when there is a reduced annotator burden and only 5 annotated patients are available. We report DSC=0.824 and DSC=0.707 for the test set whole tumour and tumour core regions respectively

Gaussian process domain experts for model adaptation in facial behavior analysis

We present a novel approach for supervised domain adaptation that is based upon the probabilistic framework of Gaussian processes (GPs). Specifically, we introduce domain-specific GPs as local experts for facial expression classification from face images. The adaptation of the classifier is facilitated in probabilistic fashion by conditioning the target expert on multiple source experts. Furthermore, in contrast to existing adaptation approaches, we also learn a target expert from available target data solely. Then, a single and confident classifier is obtained by combining the predictions from multiple experts based on their confidence. Learning of the model is efficient and requires no retraining/reweighting of the source classifiers. We evaluate the proposed approach on two publicly available datasets for multi-class (MultiPIE) and multi-label (DISFA) facial expression classification. To this end, we perform adaptation of two contextual factors: where (view) and who (subject). We show in our experiments that the proposed approach consistently outperforms both source and target classifiers, while using as few as 30 target examples. It also outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for supervised domain adaptation