Africa
Continuous-time Infinite Dynamic Topic Models
Topic models are probabilistic models for discovering topical themes in collections of documents. In real world applications, these models provide us with the means of organizing what would otherwise be unstructured collections. They can help us cluster a huge collection into different topics or find a subset of the collection that resembles the topical theme found in an article at hand. The first wave of topic models developed were able to discover the prevailing topics in a big collection of documents spanning a period of time. It was later realized that these time-invariant models were not capable of modeling 1) the time varying number of topics they discover and 2) the time changing structure of these topics. Few models were developed to address this two deficiencies. The online-hierarchical Dirichlet process models the documents with a time varying number of topics. It varies the structure of the topics over time as well. However, it relies on document order, not timestamps to evolve the model over time. The continuous-time dynamic topic model evolves topic structure in continuous-time. However, it uses a fixed number of topics over time. In this dissertation, I present a model, the continuous-time infinite dynamic topic model, that combines the advantages of these two models 1) the online-hierarchical Dirichlet process, and 2) the continuous-time dynamic topic model. More specifically, the model I present is a probabilistic topic model that does the following: 1) it changes the number of topics over continuous time, and 2) it changes the topic structure over continuous-time. I compared the model I developed with the two other models with different setting values. The results obtained were favorable to my model and showed the need for having a model that has a continuous-time varying number of topics and topic structure.
Generating Extractive Summaries of Scientific Paradigms
Qazvinian, V., Radev, D. R., Mohammad, S. M., Dorr, B., Zajic, D., Whidby, M., Moon, T.
Researchers and scientists increasingly find themselves in the position of having to quickly understand large amounts of technical material. Our goal is to effectively serve this need by using bibliometric text mining and summarization techniques to generate summaries of scientific literature. We show how we can use citations to produce automatically generated, readily consumable, technical extractive summaries. We first propose C-LexRank, a model for summarizing single scientific articles based on citations, which employs community detection and extracts salient information-rich sentences. Next, we further extend our experiments to summarize a set of papers, which cover the same scientific topic. We generate extractive summaries of a set of Question Answering (QA) and Dependency Parsing (DP) papers, their abstracts, and their citation sentences and show that citations have unique information amenable to creating a summary.
Evaluating Indirect Strategies for Chinese-Spanish Statistical Machine Translation
Costa-jussà, M. R., Henríquez, C. A., Banchs, R. E.
Although, Chinese and Spanish are two of the most spoken languages in the world, not much research has been done in machine translation for this language pair. This paper focuses on investigating the state-of-the-art of Chinese-to-Spanish statistical machine translation (Smt), which nowadays is one of the most popular approaches to machine translation. For this purpose, we report details of the available parallel corpus which are Basic Traveller Expressions Corpus (Btec), Holy Bible and United Nations (Un). Additionally, we conduct experimental work with the largest of these three corpora to explore alternative Smt strategies by means of using a pivot language. Three alternatives are considered for pivoting: cascading, pseudo-corpus and triangulation. As pivot language, we use either English, Arabic or French. Results show that, for a phrase-based Smt system, English is the best pivot language between Chinese and Spanish. We propose a system output combination using the pivot strategies which is capable of outperforming the direct translation strategy. The main objective of this work is motivating and involving the research community to work in this important pair of languages given their demographic impact.
Visualization and clustering by 3D cellular automata: Application to unstructured data
Hamou, Reda Mohamed, Amine, Abdelmalek, Lokbani, Ahmed Chaouki, Simonet, Michel
Given the limited performance of 2D cellular automata in terms of space when the number of documents increases and in terms of visualization clusters, our motivation was to experiment these cellular automata by increasing the size to view the impact of size on quality of results. The representation of textual data was carried out by a vector model whose components are derived from the overall balancing of the used corpus, Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF). The WorldNet thesaurus has been used to address the problem of the lemmatization of the words because the representation used in this study is that of the bags of words. Another independent method of the language was used to represent textual records is that of the n-grams. Several measures of similarity have been tested. To validate the classification we have used two measures of assessment based on the recall and precision (f-measure and entropy). The results are promising and confirm the idea to increase the dimension to the problem of the spatiality of the classes. The results obtained in terms of purity class (i.e. the minimum value of entropy) shows that the number of documents over longer believes the results are better for 3D cellular automata, which was not obvious to the 2D dimension. In terms of spatial navigation, cellular automata provide very good 3D performance visualization than 2D cellular automata.
A Logic and Adaptive Approach for Efficient Diagnosis Systems using CBR
Bitar, Ibrahim El, Belouadha, Fatima-Zahra, Roudies, Ounsa
Case Based Reasoning (CBR) is an intelligent way of thinking based on experience and capitalization of already solved cases (source cases) to find a solution to a new problem (target case). Retrieval phase consists on identifying source cases that are similar to the target case. This phase may lead to erroneous results if the existing knowledge imperfections are not taken into account. This work presents a novel solution based on Fuzzy logic techniques and adaptation measures which aggregate weighted similarities to improve the retrieval results. To confirm the efficiency of our solution, we have applied it to the industrial diagnosis domain. The obtained results are more efficient results than those obtained by applying typical measures.
Dynamic Decision Support System Based on Bayesian Networks Application to fight against the Nosocomial Infections
Ltifi, Hela, Trabelsi, Ghada, Ayed, Mounir Ben, Alimi, Adel M.
The improvement of medical care quality is a significant interest for the future years. The fight against nosocomial infections (NI) in the intensive care units (ICU) is a good example. We will focus on a set of observations which reflect the dynamic aspect of the decision, result of the application of a Medical Decision Support System (MDSS). This system has to make dynamic decision on temporal data. We use dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) to model this dynamic process. It is a temporal reasoning within a real-time environment; we are interested in the Dynamic Decision Support Systems in healthcare domain (MDDSS).
Transforming Graph Data for Statistical Relational Learning
Rossi, R. A., McDowell, L. K., Aha, D. W., Neville, J.
Relational data representations have become an increasingly important topic due to the recent proliferation of network datasets (e.g., social, biological, information networks) and a corresponding increase in the application of Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) algorithms to these domains. In this article, we examine and categorize techniques for transforming graph-based relational data to improve SRL algorithms. In particular, appropriate transformations of the nodes, links, and/or features of the data can dramatically affect the capabilities and results of SRL algorithms. We introduce an intuitive taxonomy for data representation transformations in relational domains that incorporates link transformation and node transformation as symmetric representation tasks. More specifically, the transformation tasks for both nodes and links include (i) predicting their existence, (ii) predicting their label or type, (iii) estimating their weight or importance, and (iv) systematically constructing their relevant features. We motivate our taxonomy through detailed examples and use it to survey competing approaches for each of these tasks. We also discuss general conditions for transforming links, nodes, and features. Finally, we highlight challenges that remain to be addressed.
A Biomimetic Approach Based on Immune Systems for Classification of Unstructured Data
Hamou, Mohamed, Amine, Abdelmalek, Lokbani, Ahmed Chaouki
In this paper we present the results of unstructured data clustering in this case a textual data from Reuters 21578 corpus with a new biomimetic approach using immune system. Before experimenting our immune system, we digitalized textual data by the n-grams approach. The novelty lies on hybridization of n-grams and immune systems for clustering. The experimental results show that the recommended ideas are promising and prove that this method can solve the text clustering problem.
Dimensionality Reduction and Classification feature using Mutual Information applied to Hyperspectral Images : A Filter strategy based algorithm
Sarhrouni, ELkebir, Hammouch, Ahmed, Aboutajdine, Driss
Hyperspectral images (HIS) classification is a high technical remote sensing tool. The goal is to reproduce a thematic map that will be compared with a reference ground truth map (GT), constructed by expecting the region. The HIS contains more than a hundred bidirectional measures, called bands (or simply images), of the same region. They are taken at juxtaposed frequencies. Unfortunately, some bands contain redundant information, others are affected by the noise, and the high dimensionality of features made the accuracy of classification lower. The problematic is how to find the good bands to classify the pixels of regions. Some methods use Mutual Information (MI) and threshold, to select relevant bands, without treatment of redundancy. Others control and eliminate redundancy by selecting the band top ranking the MI, and if its neighbors have sensibly the same MI with the GT, they will be considered redundant and so discarded. This is the most inconvenient of this method, because this avoids the advantage of hyperspectral images: some precious information can be discarded. In this paper we'll accept the useful redundancy. A band contains useful redundancy if it contributes to produce an estimated reference map that has higher MI with the GT.nTo control redundancy, we introduce a complementary threshold added to last value of MI. This process is a Filter strategy; it gets a better performance of classification accuracy and not expensive, but less preferment than Wrapper strategy.
Multi-Agents Dynamic Case Based Reasoning and The Inverse Longest Common Sub-Sequence And Individualized Follow-up of Learners in The CEHL
Zouhair, Abdelhamid, En-Naimi, El Mokhtar, Amami, Benaissa, Boukachour, Hadhoum, Person, Patrick, Bertelle, Cyrille
In E-learning, there is still the problem of knowing how to ensure an individualized and continuous learner's follow-up during learning process, indeed among the numerous tools proposed, very few systems concentrate on a real time learner's follow-up. Our work in this field develops the design and implementation of a Multi-Agents System Based on Dynamic Case Based Reasoning which can initiate learning and provide an individualized follow-up of learner. When interacting with the platform, every learner leaves his/her traces in the machine. These traces are stored in a basis under the form of scenarios which enrich collective past experience. The system monitors, compares and analyses these traces to keep a constant intelligent watch and therefore detect difficulties hindering progress and/or avoid possible dropping out. The system can support any learning subject. The success of a case-based reasoning system depends critically on the performance of the retrieval step used and, more specifically, on similarity measure used to retrieve scenarios that are similar to the course of the learner (traces in progress). We propose a complementary similarity measure, named Inverse Longest Common Sub-Sequence (ILCSS). To help and guide the learner, the system is equipped with combined virtual and human tutors.