With rise of digital age, there is an explosion of information in the form of news, articles, social media, and so on. Much of this data lies in unstructured form and manually managing and effectively making use of it is tedious, boring and labor intensive. This explosion of information and need for more sophisticated and efficient information handling tools gives rise to Information Extraction(IE) and Information Retrieval(IR) technology. Information Extraction systems takes natural language text as input and produces structured information specified by certain criteria, that is relevant to a particular application. Various sub-tasks of IE such as Named Entity Recognition, Coreference Resolution, Named Entity Linking, Relation Extraction, Knowledge Base reasoning forms the building blocks of various high end Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as Machine Translation, Question-Answering System, Natural Language Understanding, Text Summarization and Digital Assistants like Siri, Cortana and Google Now. This paper introduces Information Extraction technology, its various sub-tasks, highlights state-of-the-art research in various IE subtasks, current challenges and future research directions.

Research in the social sciences is increasingly based on large and complex data collections, where individual data sets from different domains are linked and integrated to allow advanced analytics. A popular type of data used in such a context are historical censuses, as well as birth, death, and marriage certificates. Individually, such data sets however limit the types of studies that can be conducted. Specifically, it is impossible to track individuals, families, or households over time. Once such data sets are linked and family trees spanning several decades are available it is possible to, for example, investigate how education, health, mobility, employment, and social status influence each other and the lives of people over two or even more generations. A major challenge is however the accurate linkage of historical data sets which is due to data quality and commonly also the lack of ground truth data being available. Unsupervised techniques need to be employed, which can be based on similarity graphs generated by comparing individual records. In this paper we present initial results from clustering birth records from Scotland where we aim to identify all births of the same mother and group siblings into clusters. We extend an existing clustering technique for record linkage by incorporating temporal constraints that must hold between births by the same mother, and propose a novel greedy temporal clustering technique. Experimental results show improvements over non-temporary approaches, however further work is needed to obtain links of high quality.

The paper presents an extension of Shannon fuzzy entropy for intuitionistic fuzzy one. Firstly, we presented a new formula for calculating the distance and similarity of intuitionistic fuzzy information. Then, we constructed measures for information features like score, certainty and uncertainty. Also, a new concept was introduced, namely escort fuzzy information. Then, using the escort fuzzy information, Shannon's formula for intuitionistic fuzzy information was obtained. It should be underlined that Shannon's entropy for intuitionistic fuzzy information verifies the four defining conditions of intuitionistic fuzzy uncertainty. The measures of its two components were also identified: fuzziness (ambiguity) and incompleteness (ignorance).

In early years, text classification is typically accomplished by feature-based machine learning models; recently, deep neural networks, as a powerful learning machine, make it possible to work with raw input as the text stands. However, exiting end-to-end neural networks lack explicit interpretation of the prediction. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, JUMPER, inspired by the cognitive process of text reading, that models text classification as a sequential decision process. Basically, JUMPER is a neural system that scans a piece of text sequentially and makes classification decisions at the time it wishes. Both the classification result and when to make the classification are part of the decision process, which is controlled by a policy network and trained with reinforcement learning. Experimental results show that a properly trained JUMPER has the following properties: (1) It can make decisions whenever the evidence is enough, therefore reducing total text reading by 30-40% and often finding the key rationale of prediction. (2) It achieves classification accuracy better than or comparable to state-of-the-art models in several benchmark and industrial datasets.

We describe a novel weakly supervised deep learning framework that combines both the discriminative and generative models to learn meaningful representation in the multiple instance learning (MIL) setting. MIL is a weakly supervised learning problem where labels are associated with groups of instances (referred as bags) instead of individual instances. To address the essential challenge in MIL problems raised from the uncertainty of positive instances label, we use a discriminative model regularized by variational autoencoders (VAEs) to maximize the differences between latent representations of all instances and negative instances. As a result, the hidden layer of the variational autoencoder learns meaningful representation. This representation can effectively be used for MIL problems as illustrated by better performance on the standard benchmark datasets comparing to the state-of-the-art approaches. More importantly, unlike most related studies, the proposed framework can be easily scaled to large dataset problems, as illustrated by the audio event detection and segmentation task. Visualization also confirms the effectiveness of the latent representation in discriminating positive and negative classes.

The design of personalized incentives or recommendations to improve user engagement is gaining prominence as digital platform providers continually emerge. We propose a multi-armed bandit framework for matching incentives to users, whose preferences are unknown a priori and evolving dynamically in time, in a resource constrained environment. We design an algorithm that combines ideas from three distinct domains: (i) a greedy matching paradigm, (ii) the upper confidence bound algorithm (UCB) for bandits, and (iii) mixing times from the theory of Markov chains. For this algorithm, we provide theoretical bounds on the regret and demonstrate its performance via both synthetic and realistic (matching supply and demand in a bike-sharing platform) examples.

Estimating causal effects in the presence of latent confounding is a frequently occurring problem in several tasks. In real world applications such as medicine, accounting for the effects of latent confounding is even more challenging as a result of high-dimensional and noisy data. In this work, we propose estimating the causal effect from the perspective of the information bottleneck principle by explicitly identifying a low-dimensional representation of latent confounding. In doing so, we prove theoretically that the proposed model can be used to recover the average causal effect. Experiments on both synthetic data and existing causal benchmarks illustrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of prediction accuracy and sample efficiency, without sacrificing interpretability.

Adversarial self-play in two-player games has delivered impressive results when used with reinforcement learning algorithms that combine deep neural networks and tree search. Algorithms like AlphaZero and Expert Iteration learn tabula-rasa, producing highly informative training data on the fly. However, the self-play training strategy is not directly applicable to single-player games. Recently, several practically important combinatorial optimization problems, such as the traveling salesman problem and the bin packing problem, have been reformulated as reinforcement learning problems, increasing the importance of enabling the benefits of self-play beyond two-player games. We present the Ranked Reward (R2) algorithm which accomplishes this by ranking the rewards obtained by a single agent over multiple games to create a relative performance metric. Results from applying the R2 algorithm to instances of a two-dimensional bin packing problem show that it outperforms generic Monte Carlo tree search, heuristic algorithms and reinforcement learning algorithms not using ranked rewards.

The pioneer deep neural networks (DNNs) have emerged to be deeper or wider for improving their accuracy in various applications of artificial intelligence. However, DNNs are often too heavy to deploy in practice, and it is often required to control their architectures dynamically given computing resource budget, i.e., anytime prediction. While most existing approaches have focused on training multiple shallow sub-networks jointly, we study training thin sub-networks instead. To this end, we first build many inclusive thin sub-networks (of the same depth) under a minor modification of existing multi-branch DNNs, and found that they can significantly outperform the state-of-art dense architecture for anytime prediction. This is remarkable due to their simplicity and effectiveness, but training many thin sub-networks jointly faces a new challenge on training complexity. To address the issue, we also propose a novel DNN architecture by forcing a certain sparsity pattern on multi-branch network parameters, making them train efficiently for the purpose of anytime prediction. In our experiments on the ImageNet dataset, its sub-networks have up to $43.3\%$ smaller sizes (FLOPs) compared to those of the state-of-art anytime model with respect to the same accuracy. Finally, we also propose an alternative task under the proposed architecture using a hierarchical taxonomy, which brings a new angle for anytime prediction.

Unsupervised domain adaptation techniques have been successful for a wide range of problems where supervised labels are limited. The task is to classify an unlabeled `target' dataset by leveraging a labeled `source' dataset that comes from a slightly similar distribution. We propose metric-based adversarial discriminative domain adaptation (M-ADDA) which performs two main steps. First, it uses a metric learning approach to train the source model on the source dataset by optimizing the triplet loss function. This results in clusters where embeddings of the same label are close to each other and those with different labels are far from one another. Next, it uses the adversarial approach (as that used in ADDA \cite{2017arXiv170205464T}) to make the extracted features from the source and target datasets indistinguishable. Simultaneously, we optimize a novel loss function that encourages the target dataset's embeddings to form clusters. While ADDA and M-ADDA use similar architectures, we show that M-ADDA performs significantly better on the digits adaptation datasets of MNIST and USPS. This suggests that using metric-learning for domain adaptation can lead to large improvements in classification accuracy for the domain adaptation task. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/IssamLaradji/M-ADDA}.