Question: Weak supervision for semantic image segmentation using self-correcting network models.

In the realm of urban scene comprehension, the Cityscapes Dataset emerges as a pivotal resource, designed to advance the capabilities of semantic labeling techniques. Recognizing the critical role of large-scale datasets in enhancing object detection, particularly within the framework of deep learning, Cityscapes offers a comprehensive benchmark for both pixel-level and instance-level semantic labeling. This dataset is a compilation of extensive and varied stereo video sequences, meticulously captured from the bustling streets of 50 distinct cities. A significant feature of Cityscapes is its provision of 5000 images with meticulous pixel-level annotations, complemented by an additional 20,000 images bearing coarse annotations. This dual approach facilitates the development of methodologies that can harness the power of large volumes of less meticulously labeled data. Cityscapes distinguishes itself from predecessors through its vast scale, rich annotation, wide scene diversity, and intricate complexity. An accompanying empirical study delves into the dataset's characteristics, offering an insightful analysis alongside a performance evaluation of leading-edge approaches as benchmarked against Cityscapes.

**Question**: A Comparative Study of Machine Learning Algorithms for Predicting Credit Default

**Documents**: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Ensemble Learning Algorithms for Financial Distress Prediction
Financial distress prediction is a critical task for risk management in financial institutions. Ensemble learning algorithms have shown great promise in this domain due to their ability to combine multiple weak classifiers to form a strong classifier. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of various ensemble learning algorithms, including Random Forest, AdaBoost, Gradient Boosting, and Stacking, for the prediction of financial distress. We use a large dataset of publicly traded companies over a period of ten years. Our results show that ensemble learning algorithms significantly outperform traditional machine learning algorithms in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. We also find that Gradient Boosting is the most effective among the ensemble learning algorithms, achieving the highest performance in predicting financial distress. This study provides valuable insights for practitioners and researchers in the field of financial distress prediction.

**Similar Documents**: This paper presents an exhaustive analysis of ensemble learning techniques applied to the prediction of financial distress, a critical component in risk management for financial entities. Ensemble methods, known for their efficacy in synthesizing multiple weak classifiers to create a robust classifier, have gained prominence in financial distress prediction. Here, we assess a range of ensemble learning algorithms, encompassing Random Forest, AdaBoost, Gradient Boosting, and Stacking, in their capacity to forecast financial distress. Utilizing a vast dataset comprising data from publicly traded companies

Semi-supervised learning, which aims to construct learners that automatically exploit the large amount of unlabeled data in addition to the limited labeled data, has been widely applied in many real-world applications. AUC is a well-known performance measure for a learner, and directly optimizing AUC may result in a better prediction performance. Thus, semi-supervised AUC optimization has drawn much attention. Existing semi-supervised AUC optimization methods exploit unlabeled data by explicitly or implicitly estimating the possible labels of the unlabeled data based on various distributional assumptions. However, these assumptions may be violated in many real-world applications, and estimating labels based on the violated assumption may lead to poor performance. In this paper, we argue that, in semi-supervised AUC optimization, it is unnecessary to guess the possible labels of the unlabeled data or prior probability based on any distributional assumptions. We analytically show that the AUC risk can be estimated unbiasedly by simply treating the unlabeled data as both positive and negative. Based on this finding, two semi-supervised AUC optimization methods named SAMULT and SAMPURA are proposed. Experimental results indicate that the proposed methods outperform the existing methods. Introduction In many real-world applications, collecting a large amount of unlabeled data is relatively easy, while obtaining the labels for the collected data is rather expensive since much human effort and expertise is required for labeling. Semisupervised learning (Chapelle, Schlkopf, and Zien 2006; Zhu et al. 2009), aiming to construct learners that automatically exploit the large amount of unlabeled data in addition to the limited labeled data in the purpose of improving the learning performance, has drawn significant attention. Many semi-supervised learning methods have been proposed. To effectively exploit the unlabeled data, almost all of these methods elaborate to link the labeled data and the unlabeled data based on certain distributional assumption (Chapelle, Schlkopf, and Zien 2006), such as the cluster assumption, the manifold assumption, etc., and construct the learner by explicitly or implicitly estimating the labels of unlabeled instances. Copyright c © 2018, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. AUC (area under ROC curve) (Hanley and McNeil 1982), which measures the probability of a randomly drawn positive instance being ranked before a randomly drawn negative instance, is a widely-used performance measure for a learner, especially when the data distribution exhibits certain imbalance. Directly optimizing the AUC during the learning procedure usually lead to a better prediction performance. Many studies are elaborated to show that AUC can be effectively and efficiently optimized (Herschtal and Raskutti 2004; Gao and Zhou 2015; Gao et al. 2013; Ying, Wen, and Lyu 2016). Some efforts have been devoted to AUC optimization in semi-supervised settings (Amini, Truong, and Goutte 2008; Fujino and Ueda 2016). These methods rely on the aforementioned distributional assumptions. However, those assumptions may be violated in real-world applications and the learner may be biased when explicitly or implicitly estimating the labels based on the violated assumptions, resulting in poor performance or even performance degradation (Cozman and Cohen 2002). Sakai, Niu, and Sugiyama (2017) proposed an unbiased semisupervised AUC optimization method based on positiveunlabeled learning. However, such a method requires an accurate estimation of the prior probability to reweight the unlabeled data, which is usually difficult especially when the number of labeled data is extremely small. In this paper, we argue that in semi-supervised AUC optimization problem, it is unnecessary to guess the possible labels of the unlabeled data or prior probability based on any distributional assumptions. We theoretically show that the AUC risk can be estimated unbiasedly by treating the unlabeled data as both positive and negative without any distributional assumptions. Such a theoretical finding enables us to address semisupervised AUC optimization problem by simply treating the unlabeled data as both positive and negative data, without designing specific strategies to identify the possible labels of the unlabeled data. Based on this theoretical finding, we propose two novel semi-supervised AUC optimization methods: SAMULT, a straightforward unbiased method by regarding the unlabeled data as both positive and negative data, and SAMPURA, an ensemble method by random partitioning the unlabeled data into pseudo-positive and pseudonegative sets to train base classifiers. The experimental reThe Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-18)

In many real-world scenarios, labeled data for a specific machine learning task is costly to obtain. Semi-supervised training methods make use of abundantly available unlabeled data and a smaller number of labeled examples. We propose a new framework for semi-supervised training of deep neural networks inspired by learning in humans. Associations are made from embeddings of labeled samples to those of unlabeled ones and back. The optimization schedule encourages correct association cycles that end up at the same class from which the association was started and penalizes wrong associations ending at a different class. The implementation is easy to use and can be added to any existing end-to-end training setup. We demonstrate the capabilities of learning by association on several data sets and show that it can improve performance on classification tasks tremendously by making use of additionally available unlabeled data. In particular, for cases with few labeled data, our training scheme outperforms the current state of the art on SVHN.

This paper proposes a CNN-based segmentation model to segment foreground from an image and a prior probability map. Our model is constructed based on the FCN model that we simply replace the original RGB-based three channel input layer by a four channel, i.e., RGB and prior probability map. We then train the model by constructing various image, prior probability maps and the groundtruths from the PASCAL VOC dataset, and finally obtain a CNN-based foreground segmentation model that is suitable for general images. Our proposed method is motivated by the observation that the classical graphcut algorithm using GMM for modeling the priors can not capture the semantic segmentation from the prior probability, and thus leads to low segmentation performance. Furthermore, the efficient FCN segmentation model is for specific objects rather than general objects. We therefore improve the graph-cut like foreground segmentation by extending FCN segmentation model. We verify the proposed model by various prior probability maps such as artifical maps, saliency maps, and discriminative maps. The ICoseg dataset that is different from the PASCAL Voc dataset is used for the verification. Experimental results demonstrates the fact that our method obviously outperforms the graphcut algorithms and FCN models.

We consider the problem of semi-supervised learning to extract categories (e.g., academic fields, athletes) and relations (e.g., PlaysSport(athlete, sport)) from web pages, starting with a handful of labeled training examples of each category or relation, plus hundreds of millions of unlabeled web documents. Semi-supervised training using only a few labeled examples is typically unreliable because the learning task is underconstrained. This paper pursues the thesis that much greater accuracy can be achieved by further constraining the learning task, by coupling the semi-supervised training of many extractors for different categories and relations. We characterize several ways in which the training of category and relation extractors can be coupled, and present experimental results demonstrating significantly improved accuracy as a result.

This paper addresses the problem of geometric scene parsing, i.e. simultaneously labeling geometric surfaces (e.g. sky, ground and vertical plane) and determining the interaction relations (e.g. layering, supporting, siding and affinity) between main regions. This problem is more challenging than the traditional semantic scene labeling, as recovering geometric structures necessarily requires the rich and diverse contextual information. To achieve these goals, we propose a novel recurrent neural network model, named Hierarchical Long Short-Term Memory (H-LSTM). It contains two coupled sub-networks: the Pixel LSTM (P-LSTM) and the Multi-scale Super-pixel LSTM (MS-LSTM) for handling the surface labeling and relation prediction, respectively. The two sub-networks provide complementary information to each other to exploit hierarchical scene contexts, and they are jointly optimized for boosting the performance. Our extensive experiments show that our model is capable of parsing scene geometric structures and outperforming several state-of-theart methods by large margins. In addition, we show promising 3D reconstruction results from the still images based on the geometric parsing.

In this work we show that Deep Convolutional Neural Networks can outperform humans on the task of boundary detection, as measured on the standard Berkeley Segmentation Dataset. Our detector is fully integrated in the popular Caffe framework and processes a 320x420 image in less than a second. Our contributions consist firstly in combining a careful design of the loss for boundary detection training, a multi-resolution architecture and training with external data to improve the detection accuracy of the current state of the art, from an optimal dataset scale F-measure of 0.780 to 0.808 while human performance is at 0.803. We further improve performance to 0.813 by combining deep learning with grouping, integrating the Normalized Cuts technique within a deep network. We also examine the potential of our boundary detector in conjunction with the higher level tasks of object proposal generation and semantic segmentation for both tasks our detector yields clear improvements over state-of-the-art systems.

Human eye fixations often correlate with locations of salient objects in the scene. However, only a handful of approaches have attempted to simultaneously address the related aspects of eye fixations and object saliency. In this work, we propose a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) capable of predicting eye fixations and segmenting salient objects in a unified framework. We design the initial network layers, shared between both the tasks, such that they capture the object level semantics and the global contextual aspects of saliency, while the deeper layers of the network address task specific aspects. In addition, our network captures saliency at multiple scales via inception-style convolution blocks. Our network shows a significant improvement over the current state-of-the-art for both eye fixation prediction and salient object segmentation across a number of challenging datasets.

This paper demonstrates a generalised multi-scale feature learning approach to multi-class segmentation, applied to the estimation of fruit yield on treecrops. The learning approach makes the algorithm flexible and adaptable to different classification problems, and hence applicable to a wide variety of tree-crop applications. Extensive experiments were performed on a dataset consisting of 8000 colour images collected in an apple orchard. This paper shows that the algorithm was able to segment apples with different sizes and colours in an outdoor environment with natural lighting conditions, with a single model obtained from images captured using a monocular colour camera. The segmentation results are applied to the problem of fruit counting and the results are compared against manual counting. The results show a squared correlation coefficient of R2 = 0.81.

Knowledge of 3D properties of objects is a necessity in order to build effective computer vision systems. However, lack of large scale 3D datasets can be a major constraint for datadriven approaches in learning such properties. We consider the task of single image 3D point cloud reconstruction, and aim to utilize multiple foreground masks as our supervisory data to alleviate the need for large scale 3D datasets. A novel differentiable projection module, called ‘CAPNet’, is introduced to obtain such 2D masks from a predicted 3D point cloud. The key idea is to model the projections as a continuous approximation of the points in the point cloud. To overcome the challenges of sparse projection maps, we propose a loss formulation termed ‘affinity loss’ to generate outlierfree reconstructions. We significantly outperform the existing projection based approaches on a large-scale synthetic dataset. We show the utility and generalizability of such a 2D supervised approach through experiments on a real-world dataset, where lack of 3D data can be a serious concern. To further enhance the reconstructions, we also propose a test stage optimization procedure to obtain reconstructions that display high correspondence with the observed input image.

Many approaches to Bayesian image segmentation have used maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation in conjunction with Markov random fields (MRF). Although this approach performs well, it has a number of disadvantages. In particular, exact MAP estimates cannot be computed, approximate MAP estimates are computationally expensive to compute, and unsupervised parameter estimation of the MRF is difficult. The authors propose a new approach to Bayesian image segmentation that directly addresses these problems. The new method replaces the MRF model with a novel multiscale random field (MSRF) and replaces the MAP estimator with a sequential MAP (SMAP) estimator derived from a novel estimation criteria. Together, the proposed estimator and model result in a segmentation algorithm that is not iterative and can be computed in time proportional to MN where M is the number of classes and N is the number of pixels. The also develop a computationally efficient method for unsupervised estimation of model parameters. Simulations on synthetic images indicate that the new algorithm performs better and requires much less computation than MAP estimation using simulated annealing. The algorithm is also found to improve classification accuracy when applied to the segmentation of multispectral remotely sensed images with ground truth data.


Question: A self-correcting network method for weakly supervised semantic image segmentation.

This paper introduces SegNet, a pioneering deep convolutional encoder-decoder architecture specifically designed for semantic pixel-wise image segmentation. SegNet's architecture features an encoder network, a complementary decoder network, and a concluding pixel-wise classification layer. The encoder network mirrors the topological structure of the 13 convolutional layers found in the VGG16 network. The decoder network's primary function is to scale up the encoder's low-resolution feature maps to match the input's full resolution, thereby enabling pixel-level classification. The innovation in SegNet's design is its unique upsampling method. Instead of learning to upsample, the decoder leverages pooling indices calculated during the encoder's max-pooling stage to perform a non-linear upsampling. This results in sparse maps that are then convolved with trainable filters to produce dense feature maps. A comparative analysis with popular architectures such as the Fully Convolutional Network (FCN), DeepLab-LargeFOV, and DeconvNet reveals the trade-offs between memory usage and segmentation accuracy. SegNet, with its focus on scene understanding applications, is engineered for efficiency in both memory and computational time during inference. It boasts a significantly reduced number of trainable parameters compared to its competitors and can be trained end-to-end using stochastic gradient descent. SegNet's performance, coupled with its competitive inference time and superior memory efficiency, is showcased through benchmarking against other architectures on road scene and SUN RGB-D indoor scene segmentation tasks. The results affirm SegNet's high performance and efficiency. An implementation of SegNet in Caffe and a web demo are made available at http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/projects/segnet/.

In this paper we are interested in how semantic segmentation can help object detection. Towards this goal, we propose a novel deformable part-based model which exploits region-based segmentation algorithms that compute candidate object regions by bottom-up clustering followed by ranking of those regions. Our approach allows every detection hypothesis to select a segment (including void), and scores each box in the image using both the traditional HOG filters as well as a set of novel segmentation features. Thus our model ``blends'' between the detector and segmentation models. Since our features can be computed very efficiently given the segments, we maintain the same complexity as the original DPM. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in PASCAL VOC 2010, and show that when employing only a root filter our approach outperforms Dalal & Triggs detector on all classes, achieving 13% higher average AP. When employing the parts, we outperform the original DPM in $19$ out of $20$ classes, achieving an improvement of 8% AP. Furthermore, we outperform the previous state-of-the-art on VOC 2010 test by 4%.

In this paper, we address the problem of scene parsing with deep learning and focus on the context aggregation strategy for robust segmentation. Motivated by that the label of a pixel is the category of the object that the pixel belongs to, we introduce an object context pooling (OCP) scheme, which represents each pixel by exploiting the set of pixels that belong to the same object category with such a pixel, and we call the set of pixels as object context. Our implementation, inspired by the self-attention approach, consists of two steps: (i) compute the similarities between each pixel and all the pixels, forming a socalled object context map for each pixel served as a surrogate for the true object context, and (ii) represent the pixel by aggregating the features of all the pixels weighted by the similarities. The resulting representation is more robust compared to existing context aggregation schemes, e.g., pyramid pooling modules (PPM) in PSPNet and atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP), which do not differentiate the context pixels belonging to the same object category or not, making the reliability of contextually aggregated representations limited. We empirically demonstrate our approach and two pyramid extensions with state-ofthe-art performance on three semantic segmentation benchmarks: Cityscapes, ADE20K and LIP. Code has been made available at: https://github.com/PkuRainBow/ OCNet.pytorch.

We propose an automatic image matting method for portrait images. This method does not need user interaction, which was however essential in most previous approaches. In order to accomplish this goal, a new end-to-end convolutional neural network (CNN) based framework is proposed taking the input of a portrait image. It outputs the matte result. Our method considers not only image semantic prediction but also pixel-level image matte optimization. A new portrait image dataset is constructed with our labeled matting ground truth. Our automatic method achieves comparable results with state-of-the-art methods that require specified foreground and background regions or pixels. Many applications are enabled given the automatic nature of our system.

Segmentation of the object of interest is a difficult step in the analysis of digital images. Fully automatic methods sometimes fail, producing incorrect results and requiring the intervention of a human operator. This is often true in medical applications, where image segmentation is particularly difficult due to restrictions imposed by image acquisition, pathology and biological variation. In this paper we present an early review of the largely unknown territory of human-computer interaction in image segmentation. The purpose is to identify patterns in the use of interaction and to develop qualitative criteria to evaluate interactive segmentation methods. We discuss existing interactive methods with respect to the following aspects: the type of information provided by the user, how this information affects the computational part, and the purpose of interaction in the segmentation process. The discussion is based on the potential impact of each strategy on the accuracy, repeatability and interaction efficiency. Among others, these are important aspects to characterise and understand the implications of interaction to the results generated by an interactive segmentation method. This survey is focused on medical imaging, however similar patterns are expected to hold for other applications as well.

Improvements in color constancy have arisen from the use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, the patch-based CNNs that exist for this problem are faced with the issue of estimation ambiguity, where a patch may contain insufficient information to establish a unique or even a limited possible range of illumination colors. Image patches with estimation ambiguity not only appear with great frequency in photographs, but also significantly degrade the quality of network training and inference. To overcome this problem, we present a fully convolutional network architecture in which patches throughout an image can carry different confidence weights according to the value they provide for color constancy estimation. These confidence weights are learned and applied within a novel pooling layer where the local estimates are merged into a global solution. With this formulation, the network is able to determine what to learn and how to pool automatically from color constancy datasets without additional supervision. The proposed network also allows for end-to-end training, and achieves higher efficiency and accuracy. On standard benchmarks, our network outperforms the previous state-of-the-art while achieving 120x greater efficiency.

Over the last few years, deep learning techniques have yielded significant improvements in image inpainting. However, many of these techniques fail to reconstruct reasonable structures as they are commonly over-smoothed and/or blurry. This paper develops a new approach for image inpainting that does a better job of reproducing filled regions exhibiting fine details. We propose a two-stage adversarial model EdgeConnect that comprises of an edge generator followed by an image completion network. The edge generator hallucinates edges of the missing region (both regular and irregular) of the image, and the image completion network fills in the missing regions using hallucinated edges as a priori. We evaluate our model end-to-end over the publicly available datasets CelebA, Places2, and Paris StreetView, and show that it outperforms current state-ofthe-art techniques quantitatively and qualitatively.

[1] Sirinukunwattana et al. Gland Segmentation in colon histology images: the GlaS contest, arXiv 2016 [2] Long et al. Fully convolutional networks for semantic segmentation, CVPR 2015 [3] Chend et al. Semantic image segmentation with deep convolutional nets and fully connected CRFs, arXiv 2014 [4] Zheng et al. Conditional random fields as recurrent neural networks, ICCV 2015 Alexnet-FCN (6 layers) FCN-8s (16 layers) UNet (23 layers) DN (26 layers) 0.93 0.79 0.86 0.83

While there has been remarkable progress in the performance of visual recognition algorithms, the state-of-the-art models tend to be exceptionally data-hungry. Large labeled training datasets, expensive and tedious to produce, are required to optimize millions of parameters in deep network models. Lagging behind the growth in model capacity, the available datasets are quickly becoming outdated in terms of size and density. To circumvent this bottleneck, we propose to amplify human effort through a partially automated labeling scheme, leveraging deep learning with humans in the loop. Starting from a large set of candidate images for each category, we iteratively sample a subset, ask people to label them, classify the others with a trained model, split the set into positives, negatives, and unlabeled based on the classification confidence, and then iterate with the unlabeled set. To assess the effectiveness of this cascading procedure and enable further progress in visual recognition research, we construct a new image dataset, LSUN. It contains around one million labeled images for each of 10 scene categories and 20 object categories. We experiment with training popular convolutional networks and find that they achieve substantial performance gains when trained on this dataset.

The ability to automatically monitor agricultural fields is an important capability in precision farming, enabling steps towards more sustainable agriculture. Precise, high-resolution monitoring is a key prerequisite for targeted intervention and the selective application of agro-chemicals. In this paper, we present a novel weed segmentation and mapping framework that processes multispectral images obtained from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) using a deep neural network (DNN). Most studies on crop/weed semantic segmentation only consider single images for processing and classification. Images taken by UAVs often cover only a few hundred square meters with either color only or color and near-infrared (NIR) channels. Although a map can be generated by processing single segmented images incrementally, this requires additional complex information fusion techniques which struggle to handle high fidelity maps due to their computational costs and problems in ensuring global consistency. Moreover, computing a single large and accurate vegetation map (e.g., crop/weed) using a DNN is non-trivial due to difficulties arising from: (1) limited ground sample distances (GSDs) in high-altitude datasets, (2) sacrificed resolution resulting from downsampling high-fidelity images, and (3) multispectral image alignment. To address these issues, we adopt a stand sliding window approach that operates on only small portions of multispectral orthomosaic maps (tiles), which are channel-wise aligned and calibrated radiometrically across the entire map. We define the tile size to be the same as that of the DNN input to avoid resolution loss. Compared to our baseline model (i.e., SegNet with 3 channel RGB inputs) yielding an area under the curve (AUC) of [background=0.607, crop=0.681, weed=0.576], our proposed model with 9 input channels achieves [0.839, 0.863, 0.782]. Additionally, we provide an extensive analysis of 20 trained models, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in order to evaluate the effects of varying input channels and tunable network hyperparameters. Furthermore, we release a large sugar beet/weed aerial dataset with expertly guided annotations for further research in the fields of remote sensing, precision agriculture, and agricultural robotics.

This paper addresses the visualisation of image classification models, learnt using deep Convolutional Networks (ConvNets). We consider two visualisation techniques, based on computing the gradient of the class score with respect to the input image. The first one generates an image, which maximises the class score [5], thus visualising the notion of the class, captured by a ConvNet. The second technique computes a class saliency map, specific to a given image and class. We show that such maps can be employed for weakly supervised object segmentation using classification ConvNets. Finally, we establish the connection between the gradient-based ConvNet visualisation methods and deconvolutional networks [13].


Question: Weakly supervised semantic image segmentation using self-correcting network methodology.

This paper presents the U-Net architecture, a specialized convolutional neural network (CNN) designed for biomedical image segmentation tasks. U-Net is uniquely tailored to handle the challenges posed by limited annotated data, a common issue in the biomedical domain. The network's architecture is symmetric and consists of a contracting path, which captures context through a series of convolutional operations and pooling, and an expansive path that enables precise localization. This dual-path structure ensures that U-Net can effectively learn the detailed features necessary for accurate segmentation while managing the scarcity of labeled data. A key innovation in U-Net is its use of skip connections, which concatenate feature maps from the contracting path to corresponding layers in the expansive path. This allows the network to integrate global context with high-resolution information, crucial for segmenting objects with high precision. The effectiveness of U-Net is demonstrated through its application in various biomedical image segmentation tasks, where it outperforms other state-of-the-art methods despite the limited availability of training data. The architecture's success in these tasks highlights its robustness and adaptability, making it a powerful tool for researchers and practitioners in the field of biomedical image analysis.

We propose a new approach for general object tracking with fully convolutional neural network. Instead of treating convolutional neural network (CNN) as a black-box feature extractor, we conduct in-depth study on the properties of CNN features offline pre-trained on massive image data and classification task on ImageNet. The discoveries motivate the design of our tracking system. It is found that convolutional layers in different levels characterize the target from different perspectives. A top layer encodes more semantic features and serves as a category detector, while a lower layer carries more discriminative information and can better separate the target from distracters with similar appearance. Both layers are jointly used with a switch mechanism during tracking. It is also found that for a tracking target, only a subset of neurons are relevant. A feature map selection method is developed to remove noisy and irrelevant feature maps, which can reduce computation redundancy and improve tracking accuracy. Extensive evaluation on the widely used tracking benchmark [36] shows that the proposed tacker outperforms the state-of-the-art significantly.

Discriminative deep learning approaches have shown impressive results for problems where human-labeled ground truth is plentiful, but what about tasks where labels are difficult or impossible to obtain? This paper tackles one such problem: establishing dense visual correspondence across different object instances. For this task, although we do not know what the ground-truth is, we know it should be consistent across instances of that category. We exploit this consistency as a supervisory signal to train a convolutional neural network to predict cross-instance correspondences between pairs of images depicting objects of the same category. For each pair of training images we find an appropriate 3D CAD model and render two synthetic views to link in with the pair, establishing a correspondence flow 4-cycle. We use ground-truth synthetic-to-synthetic correspondences, provided by the rendering engine, to train a ConvNet to predict synthetic-to-real, real-to-real and real-to-synthetic correspondences that are cycle-consistent with the ground-truth. At test time, no CAD models are required. We demonstrate that our end-to-end trained ConvNet supervised by cycle-consistency outperforms state-of-the-art pairwise matching methods in correspondence-related tasks.

Road detection is a key component of autonomous driving; however, most fully supervised learning road detection methods suffer from either insufficient training data or high costs of manual annotation. To overcome these problems, we propose a semisupervised learning (SSL) road detection method based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) and a weakly supervised learning (WSL) method based on conditional GANs. Specifically, in our SSL method, the generator generates the road detection results of labeled and unlabeled images, and then they are fed into the discriminator, which assigns a label on each input to judge whether it is labeled. Additionally, in WSL method we add another network to predict road shapes of input images and use them in both generator and discriminator to constrain the learning progress. By training under these frameworks, the discriminators can guide a latent annotation process on the unlabeled data; therefore, the networks can learn better representations of road areas and leverage the feature distributions on both labeled and unlabeled data. The experiments are carried out on KITTI ROAD benchmark, and the results show our methods achieve the state-of-the-art performances.

It is very attractive to formulate vision in terms of pattern theory [26], where patterns are defined hierarchically by compositions of elementary building blocks. But applying pattern theory to real world images is currently less successful than discriminative methods such as deep networks. Deep networks, however, are black-boxes which are hard to interpret and can easily be fooled by adding occluding objects. It is natural to wonder whether by better understanding deep networks we can extract building blocks which can be used to develop pattern theoretic models. This motivates us to study the internal representations of a deep network using vehicle images from the PASCAL3D+ dataset. We use clustering algorithms to study the population activities of the features and extract a set of visual concepts which we show are visually tight and correspond to semantic parts of vehicles. To analyze this we annotate these vehicles by their semantic parts to create a new dataset, VehicleSemanticParts, and evaluate visual concepts as unsupervised part detectors. We show that visual concepts perform fairly well but are outperformed by supervised discriminative methods such as Support Vector Machines (SVM). We next give a more detailed analysis of visual concepts and how they relate to semantic parts. Following this, we use the visual concepts as building blocks for a simple pattern theoretical model, which we call compositional voting. In this model several visual concepts combine to detect semantic parts. We show that this approach is significantly better than discriminative methods like SVM and deep networks trained specifically for semantic part detection. Finally, we return to studying occlusion by creating an annotated dataset with occlusion, called VehicleOcclusion, and show that compositional voting outperforms even deep networks when the amount of occlusion becomes large.

We have obtained human segmentation labels to integrate shape information into the SMPLify 3D fitting procedure and for the evaluation of methods introduced in the main paper. The labels consist of foreground segmentation for multiple human pose datasets and six body part segmentation for the LSP dataset. Whereas we discuss their use in the context of the UP dataset in the main paper, we discuss the annotation tool that we used for the collection (see Sec. 2.1) as well as the direct use of the human labels for model training (see Sec. 2.2) in this document.

We present a novel CNN-based image editing method that allows the user to change the semantic information of an image over a user-specified region. Our method makes this possible by combining the idea of manifold projection with spatial conditional batch normalization (sCBN), a version of conditional batch normalization with userspecifiable spatial weight maps. With sCBN and manifold projection, our method lets the user perform (1) spatial class translation that changes the class of an object over an arbitrary region of user’s choice, and (2) semantic transplantation that transplants semantic information contained in an arbitrary region of the reference image to an arbitrary region in the target image. These two transformations can be used simultaneously, and can realize a complex composite image-editing task like “change the nose of a beagle to that of a bulldog, and open her mouth”. The user can also use our method with intuitive copy-paste-style manipulations. We demonstrate the power of our method on various images. Code will be available at https://github. com/pfnet-research/neural-collage.

Salient object detection has recently witnessed substantial progress due to powerful features extracted using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, existing CNN-based methods operate at the patch level instead of the pixel level. Resulting saliency maps are typically blurry, especially near the boundary of salient objects. Furthermore, image patches are treated as independent samples even when they are overlapping, giving rise to significant redundancy in computation and storage. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep contrast network to overcome the aforementioned limitations. Our deep network consists of two complementary components, a pixel-level fully convolutional stream and a segment-wise spatial pooling stream. The first stream directly produces a saliency map with pixel-level accuracy from an input image. The second stream extracts segment-wise features very efficiently, and better models saliency discontinuities along object boundaries. Finally, a fully connected CRF model can be optionally incorporated to improve spatial coherence and contour localization in the fused result from these two streams. Experimental results demonstrate that our deep model significantly improves the state of the art.

Point clouds provide a flexible and natural representation usable in countless applications such as robotics or self-driving cars. Recently, deep neural networks operating on raw point cloud data have shown promising results on supervised learning tasks such as object classification and semantic segmentation. While massive point cloud datasets can be captured using modern scanning technology, manually labelling such large 3D point clouds for supervised learning tasks is a cumbersome process. This necessitates effective unsupervised learning methods that can produce representations such that downstream tasks require significantly fewer annotated samples. We propose a novel method for unsupervised learning on raw point cloud data in which a neural network is trained to predict the spatial relationship between two point cloud segments. While solving this task, representations that capture semantic properties of the point cloud are learned. Our method outperforms previous unsupervised learning approaches in downstream object classification and segmentation tasks and performs on par with fully supervised methods.

Both parametric and non-parametric approaches have demonstrated encouraging performances in the human parsing task, namely segmenting a human image into several semantic regions (e.g., hat, bag, left arm, face). In this work, we aim to develop a new solution with the advantages of both methodologies, namely supervision from annotated data and the flexibility to use newly annotated (possibly uncommon) images, and present a quasi-parametric human parsing model. Under the classic K Nearest Neighbor (KNN)-based nonparametric framework, the parametric Matching Convolutional Neural Network (M-CNN) is proposed to predict the matching confidence and displacements of the best matched region in the testing image for a particular semantic region in one KNN image. Given a testing image, we first retrieve its KNN images from the annotated/manually-parsed human image corpus. Then each semantic region in each KNN image is matched with confidence to the testing image using M-CNN, and the matched regions from all KNN images are further fused, followed by a superpixel smoothing procedure to obtain the ultimate human parsing result. The M-CNN differs from the classic CNN [12] in that the tailored cross image matching filters are introduced to characterize the matching between the testing image and the semantic region of a KNN image. The cross image matching filters are defined at different convolutional layers, each aiming to capture a particular range of displacements. Comprehensive evaluations over a large dataset with 7,700 annotated human images well demonstrate the significant performance gain from the quasi-parametric model over the state-of-the-arts [29, 30], for the human parsing task.

Neural networks and especially convolutional neural networks are of great interest in current computer vision research. However, many techniques, extensions, and modifications have been published in the past, which are not yet used by current approaches. In this paper, we study the application of a method called QuickProp for training of deep neural networks. In particular, we apply QuickProp during learning and testing of fully convolutional networks for the task of semantic segmentation. We compare QuickProp empirically with gradient descent, which is the current standard method. Experiments suggest that QuickProp can not compete with standard gradient descent techniques for complex computer vision tasks like semantic segmentation.


Question: A meta-analysis of personality consistency in canines.

This investigation explores the evolution of personality traits during early and middle adulthood, aiming to reconcile contrasting theoretical perspectives. The biological perspective, rooted in the Five-factor theory, posits the 'plaster hypothesis': the notion that personality traits solidify and cease to change by the age of 30. Conversely, contextualist theories suggest a more dynamic landscape, with personality changes expected to occur continuously throughout adulthood. To examine these hypotheses, a comprehensive study was conducted on a sizable cohort of 132,515 adults, aged between 21 and 60, who voluntarily participated in an online assessment of the Big Five personality dimensions. The results revealed nuanced patterns of development, with Conscientiousness and Agreeableness showing a steady rise across early and middle adulthood, albeit at different paces. Interestingly, Neuroticism exhibited a decline in women but remained relatively stable in men over the same period. These findings highlight the multifaceted nature of the Big Five traits, indicating that they are subject to a multitude of developmental influences, thereby challenging the notion of personality as a static construct by age 30.


Question: A meta-analytic investigation of personality consistency in canines.

Intrinsic Paths versus Environmental Influences: A Meta-Analysis on Canine Personality Development

Canine temperaments are increasingly recognized as biologically rooted psychological dispositions with inherent developmental trajectories. This perspective aligns closely with the conceptualization of personality traits within the Big Five framework. This paper synthesizes empirical evidence supporting the innate quality of these traits, drawing from a variety of research domains including behavior genetics, intergenerational behavioral patterns, personality taxonomy, comparative animal studies, and the longitudinal stability of individual differences. Novel insights into the intrinsic maturation of personality traits are provided through an analysis of data collected from a large-scale, cross-cultural study involving German, British, Spanish, Czech, and Turkish participants aged 14 and older (N = 5,085), utilizing the NEO Five-Factor Inventory. The findings underscore the robust conceptual overlap between canine temperament and human personality, despite the relatively weak empirical correlations observed. The paper also discusses the complementary role of culturally influenced characteristic adaptations in the expression of personality, suggesting that targeted interventions in canine development should focus on these culturally conditioned behaviors.


Question: A meta-analytic investigation of personality consistency in canines.

This paper explores the potential causes behind the ongoing underutilization of statistical power analysis in behavioral science research, one of which may be the complexity or inaccessibility of existing material on the topic. To address this issue, a user-friendly reference guide is provided, detailing the necessary sample sizes for achieving adequate statistical power. The guide includes indexes for effect sizes, categorized into small, medium, and large effects based on operational definitions. Sample sizes required to attain a power of .80 for detecting effects at these levels are presented in tabular form for eight commonly used statistical tests: (a) comparing independent means, (b) determining the significance of a product-moment correlation, (c) assessing the difference between independent correlation coefficients (rs), (d) conducting a sign test, (e) evaluating the difference between independent proportions, (f) performing chi-square tests for goodness of fit and contingency tables, (g) analyzing one-way analysis of variance, and (h) assessing the significance of multiple or multiple partial correlations. This resource is designed to simplify the process of sample size determination for researchers in the behavioral sciences.


Question: A meta-analysis of personality consistency in canines.

This paper presents a comprehensive meta-analysis aimed at exploring gender disparities in personality traits as observed in the existing literature (1958-1992) and in standardized data from widely used personality assessments (1940-1992). The findings revealed that males tend to exhibit greater assertiveness and marginally higher self-esteem compared to females. Conversely, females scored higher than males in dimensions such as extraversion, anxiety, trust, and notably, tender-mindedness, which encompasses nurturing behaviors. Interestingly, the meta-analysis did not uncover significant differences between the genders in traits like social anxiety, impulsiveness, activity level, cognitive reflection (ideas), locus of control, and orderliness. Moreover, the study indicates that gender-based differences in personality traits remain relatively stable across various age groups, periods of data collection, educational backgrounds, and geographical locations, highlighting the robustness of these observed disparities.


Question: A meta-analysis of personality consistency in canines.

At the dawn of the new millennium, it's pertinent to review our understanding of the correlation between personality traits and job performance, and to outline future research directions. This study aims to systematically summarize findings from 15 previous meta-analytic investigations that explored the relationship between the Five Factor Model (FFM) personality characteristics and job performance. The results corroborate earlier conclusions that conscientiousness is a reliable predictor across various performance measures in all examined professions. Emotional stability also emerged as a significant predictor when assessing overall job performance, though its association with specific performance metrics and job types was less consistent compared to conscientiousness. While the remaining three Big Five traits—extraversion, openness, and agreeableness—did not forecast overall job performance, they did correlate with success in certain professions or specific performance aspects. Given that these findings are based on the bulk of research conducted on this subject over the past century, we advocate for a temporary halt on similar meta-analytic studies. Instead, we propose that researchers should pursue a fresh research agenda to deepen our comprehension of the intricate links between personality and job performance.

**Question**: The Role of Renewable Energy in Achieving Energy Security

**Documents**: The Role of Renewable Energy in Achieving Energy Security: An Overview
The transition towards renewable energy sources is increasingly recognized as a critical component in achieving energy security. This paper provides an overview of the role that renewable energy can play in this context. It discusses the current state of renewable energy technologies, their potential to contribute to energy security, and the challenges that must be overcome for their widespread adoption. The paper also examines the policy frameworks and market conditions that are necessary to facilitate the transition to renewable energy. The analysis reveals that renewable energy can significantly enhance energy security by diversifying the energy supply, reducing dependence on imported fuels, and mitigating the impacts of fuel price volatility. However, the full potential of renewable energy can only be realized through the implementation of supportive policies, the creation of enabling market conditions, and the development of appropriate infrastructure. The paper concludes that the transition to renewable energy is not only a technical and economic imperative but also a strategic necessity for achieving energy security.

**Similar Documents**: Renewable Energy: A Key to Energy Security
The shift towards renewable energy sources is increasingly seen as essential for ensuring energy security. This document offers an in-depth analysis of how renewable energy can contribute to achieving energy security. It delves into the current status of renewable energy technologies, their capacity to bolster energy security, and the hurdles that need to be addressed for their broader implementation


Question: An empirical investigation of unsupervised Chinese word segmentation techniques for SMT on extensive corpora.

This paper offers a comprehensive evaluation and comparison of a variety of statistical and heuristic models for computing word alignments. We scrutinize and contrast the five alignment models initially proposed by Brown, Della Pietra, Della Pietra, and Mercer in 1993, alongside a hidden Markov model for alignment, various smoothing techniques, and enhanced models. Our analysis also includes two heuristic models that utilize the Dice coefficient. We explore different techniques for synthesizing word alignments to achieve symmetrization of directed statistical alignment models. To gauge the effectiveness of these models, we employ the accuracy of the resulting Viterbi alignment, juxtaposed against a manually curated reference alignment. Our empirical study is conducted on the German-English Verbmobil dataset and the French-English Hansards corpus. We delve into the impact of various design choices within our statistical alignment system and assess their performance across training corpora of differing scales. A notable finding is that sophisticated alignment models, incorporating first-order dependence and fertility models, outperform basic heuristic approaches significantly. In the Appendix, we detail an efficient algorithm for training the alignment models discussed in this paper.

We propose a new phrase-based translation model and decoding algorithm that enables us to evaluate and compare several, previously proposed phrase-based translation models. Within our framework, we carry out a large number of experiments to understand better and explain why phrase-based models outperform word-based models. Our empirical results, which hold for all examined language pairs, suggest that the highest levels of performance can be obtained through relatively simple means: heuristic learning of phrase translations from word-based alignments and lexical weighting of phrase translations. Surprisingly, learning phrases longer than three words and learning phrases from high-accuracy wordlevel alignment models does not have a strong impact on performance. Learning only syntactically motivated phrases degrades the performance of our systems.

This paper is a survey of the current machine translation research in the US, Europe and Japan. A short history of machine translation is presented rst, followed by an overview of the current research work. Representative examples of a wide range of diierent approaches adopted by machine translation researchers are presented. These are described in detail along with a discussion of the practicalities of scaling up these approaches for operational environments. In support of this discussion, issues in, and techniques for, evaluating machine translation systems are addressed.

In Singapore and Malaysia, people often speak a mixture of Mandarin and English within a single sentence. We call such sentences intra-sentential code-switch sentences. In this paper, we report on the development of a Mandarin-English codeswitching spontaneous speech corpus: SEAME. The corpus is developed as part of a multilingual speech recognition project and will be used to examine how Mandarin-English codeswitch speech occurs in the spoken language in South-East Asia. Additionally, it can provide insights into the development of large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) for code-switching speech. The corpus collected consists of intra-sentential code-switching utterances that are recorded under both interview and conversational settings. This paper describes the corpus design and the analysis of collected corpus.

Microblog messages pose severe challenges for current sentiment analysis techniques due to some inherent characteristics such as the length limit and informal writing style. In this paper, we study the problem of extracting opinion targets of Chinese microblog messages. Such fine-grained word-level task has not been well investigated in microblogs yet. We propose an unsupervised label propagation algorithm to address the problem. The opinion targets of all messages in a topic are collectively extracted based on the assumption that similar messages may focus on similar opinion targets. Topics in microblogs are identified by hashtags or using clustering algorithms. Experimental results on Chinese microblogs show the effectiveness of our framework and algorithms.

We propose two novel model architectures for computing continuous vector representations of words from very large data sets. The quality of these representations is measured in a word similarity task, and the results are compared to the previously best performing techniques based on different types of neural networks. We observe large improvements in accuracy at much lower computational cost, i.e. it takes less than a day to learn high quality word vectors from a 1.6 billion words data set. Furthermore, we show that these vectors provide state-of-the-art performance on our test set for measuring syntactic and semantic word similarities.

This paper describes the Chinese handwriting recognition competition held at the 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2013). This third competition in the series again used the CASIA-HWDB/OLHWDB databases as the training set, and all the submitted systems were evaluated on closed datasets to report character-level correct rates. This year, 10 groups submitted 27 systems for five tasks: classification on extracted features, online/offline isolated character recognition, online/offline handwritten text recognition. The best results (correct rates) are 93.89% for classification on extracted features, 94.77% for offline character recognition, 97.39% for online character recognition, 88.76% for offline text recognition, and 95.03% for online text recognition, respectively. In addition to the test results, we also provide short descriptions of the recognition methods and brief discussions on the results.

This paper presents the Multiword Expression Toolkit (mwetoolkit), an environment for type and language-independent MWE identification from corpora. The mwetoolkit provides a targeted list of MWE candidates, extracted and filtered according to a number of user-defined criteria and a set of standard statistical association measures. For generating corpus counts, the toolkit provides both a corpus indexation facility and a tool for integration with web search engines, while for evaluation, it provides validation and annotation facilities. The mwetoolkit also allows easy integration with a machine learning tool for the creation and application of supervised MWE extraction models if annotated data is available. In our experiments, the mwetoolkit was tested and evaluated in the context of MWE extraction in the biomedical domain. Our preliminary results show that the toolkit performs better than other approaches, especially concerning recall. Moreover, this first version can be extended in several ways in order to improve the quality of the results.

A crucial step in processing speech audio data for informati onextraction, topicdetection, or browsing/playback is to segment the input into sentence and topic units. Speech segm entation is challenging, since the cues typically present for segmenting text (headers, paragraphs, punctuation) ar e absent in spoken language. We investigate the use of prosody (informationgleaned from the timing and melody of s peech) for these tasks. Using decision tree and hidden Markov modeling techniques, we combine prosodic cues with w ord-based approaches, and evaluate performance on two speech corpora, Broadcast News and Switchboard. Resu lts show that the prosodic model alone performs on par with, or better than, word-based statistical languag e models—for both true and automatically recognized words in news speech. The prosodic model achieves comparabl e performance with significantly less training data, and requires no hand-labeling of prosodic events. Across ta sks nd corpora, we obtain a significant improvement over word-only models using a probabilistic combination of prosodic and lexical information. Inspection reveals that the prosodic models capture language-independent bou dary indicators described in the literature. Finally, cue usage is task and corpus dependent. For example, pause and pi tch features are highly informative for segmenting news speech, whereas pause, duration and word-based cues do minate for natural conversation.

Supervised word sense disambiguation (WSD) systems are usually the best performing systems when evaluated on standard benchmarks. However, these systems need annotated training data to function properly. While there are some publicly available open source WSD systems, very few large annotated datasets are available to the research community. The two main goals of this paper are to extract and annotate a large number of samples and release them for public use, and also to evaluate this dataset against some word sense disambiguation and induction tasks. We show that the open source IMS WSD system trained on our dataset achieves stateof-the-art results in standard disambiguation tasks and a recent word sense induction task, outperforming several task submissions and strong baselines.

Bigrams and trigrams are commonly used in statistical natural language processing; this paper will describe techniques for working with much longer n-grams. Suffix arrays (Manber and Myers 1990) were first introduced to compute the frequency and location of a substring (n-gram) in a sequence (corpus) of length N. To compute frequencies over all N(N+1)/2 substrings in a corpus, the substrings are grouped into a manageable number of equivalence classes. In this way, a prohibitive computation over substrings is reduced to a manageable computation over classes. This paper presents both the algorithms and the code that were used to compute term frequency (tf) and document frequency (df) for all n-grams in two large corpora, an English corpus of 50 million words of Wall Street Journal and a Japanese corpus of 216 million characters of Mainichi Shimbun. The second half of the paper uses these frequencies to find interesting substrings. Lexicographers have been interested in n-grams with high mutual information (MI) where the joint term frequency is higher than what would be expected by chance, assuming that the parts of the n-gram combine independently. Residual inverse document frequency (RIDF) compares document frequency to another model of chance where terms with a particular term frequency are distributed randomly throughout the collection. MI tends to pick out phrases with noncompositional semantics (which often violate the independence assumption) whereas RIDF tends to highlight technical terminology, names, and good keywords for information retrieval (which tend to exhibit nonrandom distributions over documents). The combination of both MI and RIDF is better than either by itself in a Japanese word extraction task.


Question: An empirical investigation of unsupervised Chinese word segmentation techniques for SMT on extensive corpora.

This paper delves into an exploration of training methodologies for statistical machine translation (SMT) models, focusing on the limitations of conventional maximum likelihood-based approaches. A critical issue with these methods is the lack of a strong correlation between the training objective and the actual translation quality on unseen data. To address this gap, we investigate several training criteria designed to directly enhance translation quality. These criteria leverage recent advancements in automatic evaluation metrics to more closely align the training process with the ultimate goal of improving translation performance. We introduce a novel algorithm for optimizing an unsmoothed error count, which efficiently integrates the final evaluation metric into the training phase. Our findings reveal that incorporating the evaluation criterion directly into the training procedure often leads to substantial improvements in translation quality, demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach in fine-tuning SMT models for real-world applications.

This paper describes the Chinese handwriting recognition competition held at the 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2013). This third competition in the series again used the CASIA-HWDB/OLHWDB databases as the training set, and all the submitted systems were evaluated on closed datasets to report character-level correct rates. This year, 10 groups submitted 27 systems for five tasks: classification on extracted features, online/offline isolated character recognition, online/offline handwritten text recognition. The best results (correct rates) are 93.89% for classification on extracted features, 94.77% for offline character recognition, 97.39% for online character recognition, 88.76% for offline text recognition, and 95.03% for online text recognition, respectively. In addition to the test results, we also provide short descriptions of the recognition methods and brief discussions on the results.

The (batch) EM algorithm plays an important role in unsupervised induction, but it sometimes suffers from slow convergence. In this paper, we show that online variants (1) provide significant speedups and (2) can even find better solutions than those found by batch EM. We support these findings on four unsupervised tasks: part-of-speech tagging, document classification, word segmentation, and word alignment.

Since Internet has become an excellent source of consumer reviews, the area of sentiment analysis (also called sentiment extraction, opinion mining, opinion extraction, and sentiment mining) has seen a large increase in academic interest over the last few years. Sentiment analysis mines opinions at word, sentence, and document levels, and gives sentiment polarities and strengths of articles. As known, the opinions of consumers are expressed in sentiment Chinese phrases. But due to the fuzziness of Chinese characters, traditional machine learning techniques can not represent the opinion of articles very well. In this paper, we propose a multi-strategy sentiment analysis method with semantic fuzziness to solve the problem. The results show that this hybrid sentiment analysis method can achieve a good level of effectiveness.

We propose two novel model architectures for computing continuous vector representations of words from very large data sets. The quality of these representations is measured in a word similarity task, and the results are compared to the previously best performing techniques based on different types of neural networks. We observe large improvements in accuracy at much lower computational cost, i.e. it takes less than a day to learn high quality word vectors from a 1.6 billion words data set. Furthermore, we show that these vectors provide state-of-the-art performance on our test set for measuring syntactic and semantic word similarities.

Semi-structured Chinese document anlysis is the most diffcult task for complex structure and Chinese semantics. According to the generic characteristics of the semi-structured document and the specific characteristics of the resume document, the paper researched on resume document block anlysis based on pattern matching, multi-level information identification and feedback control algorithms was also prompted. Based on the research, Resume Parser system was implemented for ChinaHR, which is the biggest recruitment website. It can read, analysis, retrieval and store the information automatically. According to all kinds of experienments results, the accuracy and efficiency of this system can generally satisfy the practical requirements. As the research on the processing of the semi-structured document, it will not only be as a directive of the further research on the resume analysis, but also be as the reference to other form of the semi-structured document.

Neural machine translation (NMT) conducts end-to-end translation with a source language encoder and a target language decoder, making promising translation performance. However, as a newly emerged approach, the method has some limitations. An NMT system usually has to apply a vocabulary of certain size to avoid the time-consuming training and decoding, thus it causes a serious out-of-vocabulary problem. Furthermore, the decoder lacks a mechanism to guarantee all the source words to be translated and usually favors short translations, resulting in fluent but inadequate translations. In order to solve the above problems, we incorporate statistical machine translation (SMT) features, such as a translation model and an n-gram language model, with the NMT model under the log-linear framework. Our experiments show that the proposed method significantly improves the translation quality of the state-of-the-art NMT system on Chinese-toEnglish translation tasks. Our method produces a gain of up to 2.33 BLEU score on NIST open test sets.

Large parallel corpora that are automatically obtained from the web, documents or elsewhere often exhibit many corrupted parts that are bound to negatively affect the quality of the systems and models that learn from these corpora. This paper describes frequent problems found in data and such data affects neural machine translation systems, as well as how to identify and deal with them. The solutions are summarised in a set of scripts that remove problematic sentences from input corpora.

Trigrams'n'Tags (TnT) is an efficient statistical part-of-speech tagger. Contrary to claims found elsewhere in the literature, we argue that a tagger based on Markov models performs at least as well as other current approaches, including the Maximum Entropy framework. A recent comparison has even shown that TnT performs significantly better for the tested corpora. We describe the basic model of TnT, the techniques used for smoothing and for handling unknown words. Furthermore, we present evaluations on two corpora.

A phrase-based statistical machine translation approach the alignment template approach is described. This translation approach allows for general many-to-many relations between words. Thereby, the context of words is taken into account in the translation model, and local changes in word order from source to target language can be learned explicitly. The model is described using a log-linear modeling approach, which is a generalization of the often used source-channel approach. Thereby, the model is easier to extend than classical statistical machine translation systems. We describe in detail the process for learning phrasal translations, the feature functions used, and the search algorithm. The evaluation of this approach is performed on three different tasks. For the German-English speech Verbmobil task, we analyze the effect of various system components. On the French-English Canadian Hansards task, the alignment template system obtains significantly better results than a single-word-based translation model. In the Chinese-English 2002 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) machine translation evaluation it yields statistically significantly better NIST scores than all competing research and commercial translation systems.

Automated discourse analysis tools based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) aiming at the diagnosis of languageimpairing dementias generally extract several textual metrics of narrative transcripts. However, the absence of sentence boundary segmentation in the transcripts prevents the direct application of NLP methods which rely on these marks to function properly, such as taggers and parsers. We present the first steps taken towards automatic neuropsychological evaluation based on narrative discourse analysis, presenting a new automatic sentence segmentation method for impaired speech. Our model uses recurrent convolutional neural networks with prosodic, Part of Speech (PoS) features, and word embeddings. It was evaluated intrinsically on impaired, spontaneous speech, as well as, normal, prepared speech, and presents better results for healthy elderly (CTL) (F1 = 0.74) and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) patients (F1 = 0.70) than the Conditional Random Fields method (F1 = 0.55 and 0.53, respectively) used in the same context of our study. The results suggest that our model is robust for impaired speech and can be used in automated discourse analysis tools to differentiate narratives produced by MCI and CTL.


Question: An empirical investigation into unsupervised Chinese word segmentation techniques for SMT on extensive corpora.

This paper introduces a novel Bayesian framework for unsupervised word segmentation, featuring an efficient blocked Gibbs sampler integrated with dynamic programming for inference. The proposed model is a sophisticated hierarchical structure, incorporating a Pitman-Yor spelling model within the word model, forming a nested Pitman-Yor language model. This innovative approach has been rigorously tested and shown to surpass previously reported outcomes in unsupervised word segmentation tasks, not only in phonetic transcripts but also in standard datasets for Chinese and Japanese languages. Furthermore, the model offers a method to construct precise word n-gram language models directly from the characters of any language, eliminating the need for explicit word delimiters, thus demonstrating its versatility and adaptability in language processing.

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) has become enormously popular recently and has attracted a lot of attention. However, the existing reading comprehension datasets are mostly in English. In this paper, we introduce a SpanExtraction dataset for Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension to add language diversities in this area. The dataset is composed by near 20,000 real questions annotated by human on Wikipedia paragraphs. We also annotated a challenge set which contains the questions that need comprehensive understanding and multi-sentence inference throughout the context. With the release of the dataset, we hosted the Second Evaluation Workshop on Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension (CMRC 2018). We hope the release of the dataset could further accelerate the machine reading comprehension research in Chinese language.1

This paper presents the Multiword Expression Toolkit (mwetoolkit), an environment for type and language-independent MWE identification from corpora. The mwetoolkit provides a targeted list of MWE candidates, extracted and filtered according to a number of user-defined criteria and a set of standard statistical association measures. For generating corpus counts, the toolkit provides both a corpus indexation facility and a tool for integration with web search engines, while for evaluation, it provides validation and annotation facilities. The mwetoolkit also allows easy integration with a machine learning tool for the creation and application of supervised MWE extraction models if annotated data is available. In our experiments, the mwetoolkit was tested and evaluated in the context of MWE extraction in the biomedical domain. Our preliminary results show that the toolkit performs better than other approaches, especially concerning recall. Moreover, this first version can be extended in several ways in order to improve the quality of the results.

Recent literature has shown a wide variety of benefits to mapping traditional onehot representations of words and phrases to lower-dimensional real-valued vectors known as word embeddings. Traditionally, most word embedding algorithms treat each word as the finest meaningful semantic granularity and perform embedding by learning distinct embedding vectors for each word. Contrary to this line of thought, technical domains such as scientific and medical literature compose words from subword structures such as prefixes, suffixes, and root-words as well as compound words. Treating individual words as the finest-granularity unit discards meaningful shared semantic structure between words sharing substructures. This not only leads to poor embeddings for text corpora that have longtail distributions, but also heuristic methods for handling out-of-vocabulary words. In this paper we propose SubwordMine, an entropybased subword mining algorithm that is fast, unsupervised, and fully data-driven. We show that this allows for great cross-domain performance in identifying semantically meaningful subwords. We then investigate utilizing the mined subwords within the FastText embedding model and compare performance of the learned representations in a downstream language modeling task.

Active learning (AL) has been proven effective to reduce human annotation efforts in NLP. However, previous studies on AL are limited to applications in a single language. This paper proposes a bilingual active learning paradigm for relation classification, where the unlabeled instances are first jointly chosen in terms of their prediction uncertainty scores in two languages and then manually labeled by an oracle. Instead of using a parallel corpus, labeled and unlabeled instances in one language are translated into ones in the other language and all instances in both languages are then fed into a bilingual active learning engine as pseudo parallel corpora. Experimental results on the ACE RDC 2005 Chinese and English corpora show that bilingual active learning for relation classification significantly outperforms monolingual active learning.

We apply Support Vector Machines (SVMs) to identify English base phrases (chunks). SVMs are known to achieve high generalization performance even with input data of high dimensional feature spaces. Furthermore, by the Kernel principle, SVMs can carry out training with smaller computational overhead independent of their dimensionality. We apply weighted voting of 8 SVMsbased systems trained with distinct chunk representations. Experimental results show that our approach achieves higher accuracy than previous approaches.

This paper presents an overview of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), which is currently the dominant approach in Machine Translation (MT) research. In Way and Hearne (2010), we describe how central linguists and translators are to the MT process, so that SMT developers and researchers may better understand how to include these groups in continuing to advance the stateof-the-art. If these constituencies are to make an impact in the field of MT, they need to know how their input is used by SMT systems. Accordingly, our objective in this paper is to present the basic principles underpinning SMT in a way that linguists and translators will find accessible

Script based features are highly discriminative for text segmentation and recognition. Thus they are widely used in Optical Character Recognition(OCR) problems. But usage of script dependent features restricts the adaptation of such architectures directly for another script. With script independent systems, this problem can be solved to a certain extent for monolingual documents. But the problem aggravates in case of multilingual documents as it is very difficult for a single classifier to learn many scripts. Generally a script identification module identifies text segments and accordingly the script-dependent classifier is selected. This paper presents a unified framework of language model and multiple preprocessing hypotheses for word recognition from bilingual document images. Prior to text recognition, preprocessing steps such as binarization and segmentation are required for ease of recognition. But these steps induce huge combinatorial error propagating to final recognition accuracy. In this paper we use multiple preprocessing routines as alternate hypotheses and use a language model to verify each alternative and choose the best recognized sequence. We test this architecture for word recognition of Kannada-English and Telugu-English bilingual documents and achieved better recognition rates than single methods using same classifier.

Personal Attributes Extraction in Chinese Text Task is designed to extract person specific attributes, for example, spouse/husband, children, education, title etc. from unstructured Chinese texts. According to the characteristics of the personal attributes extraction, we propose a new method based on deep learning to extract attributes from the documents in this paper. Experiments show that this method can improve the accuracy of personal attributes extraction effectively.

There are immense efforts to design a complete OCR for most of the world’s leading languages, however, multilingual documents either of handwritten or of printed form. As a united attempt, Unicode based OCRs were studied mostly with some positive outcomes, despite the fact that a large character set slows down the recognition significantly. In this paper, we come out with a method to classify words to a language as the word segmentation is complete. For the purpose, we identified the characteristics of writings of several languages and utilized projecting method combined with some other feature extraction methods. In addition, this paper intends a modified statistical approach to correct the skewness before processing a segmented document. The proposed procedure, evaluated for a collection of both handwritten and printed documents, came with excellent outcomes in assigning words to languages. General Terms Pattern Recognition, Document Processing, Optical Character Recognition.

This paper describes a system which uses entity and topic coherence for improved Text Segmentation (TS) accuracy. First, Linear Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm was used to obtain topics for sentences in the document. We then performed entity mapping across a window in order to discover the transition of entities within sentences. We used the information obtained to support our LDA-based boundary detection for proper boundary adjustment. We report the significance of the entity coherence approach as well as the superiority of our algorithm over existing works.