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

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

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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

Grammatical Evolution to Mine OWL Disjointness Axioms Involving Complex Concept Expressions

International audienceDiscovering disjointness axioms is a very important task in ontology learning and knowledge base enrichment. To help overcome the knowledge-acquisition bottleneck, we propose a grammar-based genetic programming method for mining OWL class disjointness axioms from the Web of data. The effectiveness of the method is evaluated by sampling a large RDF dataset for training and testing the discovered axioms on the full dataset. First, we applied Grammatical Evolution to discover axioms based on a random sample of DBpedia, a large open knowledge graph consisting of billions of elementary assertions (RDF triples). Then, the discovered axioms are tested for accuracy on the whole DBpedia. We carried out experiments with different parameter settings and analyze output results as well as suggest extensions

A Multi-Objective Evolutionary Approach to Class Disjointness Axiom Discovery

International audienceThe huge wealth of linked data available on the Web (also known as the Web of data), organized according to the standards of the Semantic Web, can be exploited to automatically discover new knowledge, expressed in the form of axioms, one of the essential components of ontologies. In order to overcome the limitations of existing methods for axiom discovery, we propose a two-objective grammar-based genetic programming approach that casts axiom discovery as a genetic programming problem involving the two independent criteria of axiom credibility and generality. We demonstrate the power of the proposed approach by applying it to the task of discovering class disjointness axioms involving complex class expression, a type of axioms that plays an important role in improving the quality of ontologies. We carry out experiments to determine the most appropriate parameter settings and we perform an empirical comparison of the proposed method with state-of-the-art methods proposed in the literature

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