Exploring Mass Message Customization

The paper begins with the exploratory concept of ‘mass customization’ and then moves on to discuss the possibility of applying it in business communication. Further, it gives a brief framework within which to fit this concept. The author then argues the relevance of the concept in today’s workplace. However, this paper does not discuss the details of the ‘process of mass message customization.’ It just hints to possible areas for further research and exploration.

DESQ: Frequent Sequence Mining with Subsequence Constraints

Frequent sequence mining methods often make use of constraints to control which subsequences should be mined. A variety of such subsequence constraints has been studied in the literature, including length, gap, span, regular-expression, and hierarchy constraints. In this paper, we show that many subsequence constraints---including and beyond those considered in the literature---can be unified in a single framework. A unified treatment allows researchers to study jointly many types of subsequence constraints (instead of each one individually) and helps to improve usability of pattern mining systems for practitioners. In more detail, we propose a set of simple and intuitive "pattern expressions" to describe subsequence constraints and explore algorithms for efficiently mining frequent subsequences under such general constraints. Our algorithms translate pattern expressions to compressed finite state transducers, which we use as computational model, and simulate these transducers in a way suitable for frequent sequence mining. Our experimental study on real-world datasets indicates that our algorithms---although more general---are competitive to existing state-of-the-art algorithms.Comment: Long version of the paper accepted at the IEEE ICDM 2016 conferenc

ANN-based Innovative Segmentation Method for Handwritten text in Assamese

Artificial Neural Network (ANN) s has widely been used for recognition of optically scanned character, which partially emulates human thinking in the domain of the Artificial Intelligence. But prior to recognition, it is necessary to segment the character from the text to sentences, words etc. Segmentation of words into individual letters has been one of the major problems in handwriting recognition. Despite several successful works all over the work, development of such tools in specific languages is still an ongoing process especially in the Indian context. This work explores the application of ANN as an aid to segmentation of handwritten characters in Assamese- an important language in the North Eastern part of India. The work explores the performance difference obtained in applying an ANN-based dynamic segmentation algorithm compared to projection- based static segmentation. The algorithm involves, first training of an ANN with individual handwritten characters recorded from different individuals. Handwritten sentences are separated out from text using a static segmentation method. From the segmented line, individual characters are separated out by first over segmenting the entire line. Each of the segments thus obtained, next, is fed to the trained ANN. The point of segmentation at which the ANN recognizes a segment or a combination of several segments to be similar to a handwritten character, a segmentation boundary for the character is assumed to exist and segmentation performed. The segmented character is next compared to the best available match and the segmentation boundary confirmed

Syn-QG: Syntactic and Shallow Semantic Rules for Question Generation

Question Generation (QG) is fundamentally a simple syntactic transformation; however, many aspects of semantics influence what questions are good to form. We implement this observation by developing Syn-QG, a set of transparent syntactic rules leveraging universal dependencies, shallow semantic parsing, lexical resources, and custom rules which transform declarative sentences into question-answer pairs. We utilize PropBank argument descriptions and VerbNet state predicates to incorporate shallow semantic content, which helps generate questions of a descriptive nature and produce inferential and semantically richer questions than existing systems. In order to improve syntactic fluency and eliminate grammatically incorrect questions, we employ back-translation over the output of these syntactic rules. A set of crowd-sourced evaluations shows that our system can generate a larger number of highly grammatical and relevant questions than previous QG systems and that back-translation drastically improves grammaticality at a slight cost of generating irrelevant questions.Comment: Some of the results in the paper were incorrec

Using Energy Peaks to Measure New Particle Masses

We discussed in arXiv:1209.0772 that the laboratory frame distribution of the energy of a massless particle from a two-body decay at a hadron collider has a peak whose location is identical to the value of this daughter's (fixed) energy in the rest frame of the corresponding mother particle. For that result to hold we assumed that the mother is unpolarized and has a generic boost distribution in the laboratory frame. In this work we discuss how this observation can be applied for determination of masses of new particles, without requiring a full reconstruction of their decay chains or information about the rest of the event. We focus on a two-step cascade decay of a massive particle that has one invisible particle in the final state: C -> Bb -> Aab, where C, B and A are new particles of which A is invisible and a, b are visible particles. Combining the measurements of the peaks of energy distributions of a and b with that of the edge in their invariant mass distribution, we demonstrate that it is in principle possible to determine separately all three masses of the new particles, in particular, without using any measurement of missing transverse momentum. Furthermore, we show how the use of the peaks in an inclusive energy distribution is generically less affected by combinatorial issues as compared to other mass measurement strategies. For some simplified, yet interesting, scenarios we find that these combinatorial issues are absent altogether. As an example of this general strategy, we study SUSY models where gluino decays to an invisible lightest neutralino via an on-shell bottom squark. Taking into account the dominant backgrounds, we show how the mass of the bottom squark, the gluino and (for some class of spectra) that of the neutralino can be determined using this technique.Comment: 42 pages, 11 figure