Evolutionary algorithms : concepts and applications

Evolutionary algorithms are a family of stochastic problem-solving techniques, within the broader category of what we might call \u201cnatural-metaphor models\u201d, together with neural networks, ant systems, etc. They find their inspiration in biology and, in particular, they are based on mimicking the mechanisms of what we know as \u201cnatural evolution\u201d. During the last twenty-five years these techniques have been applied to a large number of problems of great practical and economic importance with excellent results. This paper presents a survey of these techniques and a few sample applications

Testing Carlo Cipolla's Laws of Human Stupidity with Agent-Based Modeling

International audienceWe set up an agent-based simulation to test Carlo M. Cipolla's theory of human stupidity. In particular, we investigate under which hypotheses his theory is compatible with a well-corroborated theory like natural evolution, which we build into the model. We discover that there exist parameter settings which determine the emergence of stylized facts in line with Cipolla's theory. The assumptions corresponding to those parameter settings are intuitive and justified by common sense

Hybrid Possibilistic Conditioning for Revision under Weighted Inputs

International audienceWe propose and investigate new operators in the possi-bilistic belief revision setting, obtained as different combinations of the conditioning operators on models and countermodels, as well as of how weighted inputs are interpreted. We obtain a family of eight operators that essentially obey the basic postulates of revision, with a few slight differences. These operators show an interesting variety of behaviors, making them suitable to representing changes in the beliefs of an agent in different contexts

A Conceptual Representation of Documents and Queries for Information Retrieval Systems by Using Light Ontologies

International audienceThis article presents a vector space model approach to representing documents and queries, based on concepts instead of terms and using WordNet as a light ontology. Such representation reduces information overlap with respect to classic semantic expansion techniques. Experiments carried out on the MuchMore benchmark and on the TREC-7 and TREC-8 Ad-hoc collections demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach

Uncertain Logical Gates in Possibilistic Networks. An Application to Human Geography

International audiencePossibilistic networks offer a qualitative approach for modeling epistemic uncertainty. Their practical implementation requires the specification of conditional possibility tables, as in the case of Bayesian networks for probabilities. This paper presents the possibilistic counterparts of the noisy probabilistic connectives (and, or, max, min, . . . ). Their interest is illustrated on an example taken from a human geography modeling problem. The difference of behaviors in some cases of some possibilistic connectives, with respect to their probabilistic analogs, is discussed in details

Learning Class Disjointness Axioms Using Grammatical Evolution

International audienceoday, with the development of the Semantic Web, LinkedOpen Data (LOD), expressed using the Resource Description Frame-work (RDF), has reached the status of “big data” and can be consideredas a giant data resource from which knowledge can be discovered. Theprocess of learning knowledge defined in terms of OWL 2 axioms fromthe RDF datasets can be viewed as a special case of knowledge discov-ery from data or “data mining”, which can be called “RDF mining”.The approaches to automated generation of the axioms from recordedRDF facts on the Web may be regarded as a case of inductive reasoningand ontology learning. The instances, represented by RDF triples, playthe role of specific observations, from which axioms can be extracted bygeneralization. Based on the insight that discovering new knowledge isessentially an evolutionary process, whereby hypotheses are generatedby some heuristic mechanism and then tested against the available evi-dence, so that only the best hypotheses survive, we propose the use ofGrammatical Evolution, one type of evolutionary algorithm, for miningdisjointness OWL 2 axioms from an RDF data repository such as DBpe-dia. For the evaluation of candidate axioms against the DBpedia dataset,we adopt an approach based on possibility theory

Syntactic Computation of Hybrid Possibilistic Conditioning under Uncertain Inputs

International audienceWe extend hybrid possibilistic conditioning to deal with inputs consisting of a set of triplets composed of propositional formulas, the level at which the formulas should be accepted, and the way in which their models should be revised. We characterize such conditioning using elementary operations on possibility distributions. We then solve a difficult issue that concerns the syntactic computation of the revision of possibilistic knowledge bases, made of weighted formulas, using hybrid conditioning. An important result is that there is no extra computational cost in using hybrid possibilistic conditioning and in particular the size of the revised possibilistic base is polynomial with respect to the size of the initial base and the input

Révision des qualificatifs de l'imparfait pour l'information géographique

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A Neuro-Evolutionary Corpus-Based Method for Word Sense Disambiguation

International audienceWe propose a supervised approach to Word Sense Disambiguation based on Neural Networks combined with Evolutionary Algorithms. An established method to automatically design the structure and learn the connection weights of Neural Networks by means of an Evolutionary Algorithm is used to evolve a neural-network disambiguator for each polysemous word, against a dataset extracted from an annotated corpus. Two distributed encoding schemes, based on the orthography of words and characterized by different degrees of information compression, have been used to represent the context in which a word occurs. The performance of such encoding schemes has been compared. The viability of the approach has been demonstrated through experiments carried out on a representative set of polysemous words. Comparison with the best entry of the Semeval-2007 competition has shown that the proposed approach is almost competitive with state-of-the-art WSD approaches