Recently, a new convex formulation of IBM Model 2 was introduced. In this paper we develop the theory further and introduce a class of convex relaxations for latent variable models which include IBM Model 2. When applied to IBM Model 2, our relaxation class subsumes the previous relaxation as a special case. As proof of concept, we study a new relaxation of IBM Model 2 which is simpler than the previous algorithm: the new relaxation relies on the use of nothing more than a multinomial EM algorithm, does not require the tuning of a learning rate, and has some favorable comparisons to IBM Model 2 in terms of F-Measure. The ideas presented could be applied to a wide range of NLP and machine learning problems.

We explore the idea that authoring a piece of text is an act of maximizing one's expected utility.To make this idea concrete, we consider the societally important decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States.Extensive past work in quantitative political science provides a framework for empirically modeling the decisions of justices and how they relate to text.We incorporate into such a model texts authored by amici curiae (``friends of the court'' separate from the litigants) who seek to weigh in on the decision, then explicitly model their goals in a random utility model.We demonstrate the benefits of this approach in improved vote prediction and the ability to perform counterfactual analysis.

The n-gram model has been widely used to capture the local ordering of words, yet its exploding feature space often causes an estimation issue. This paper presents local context sparse coding (LCSC), a non-probabilistic topic model that effectively handles large feature spaces using sparse coding. In addition, it introduces a new concept of locality, local contexts, which provides a representation that can generate locally coherent topics and document representations. Our model efficiently finds topics and representations by applying greedy coordinate descent updates. The model is useful for discovering local topics and the semantic flow of a document, as well as constructing predictive models.

Attributes of words and relations between two words are central to numerous tasks in Artificial Intelligence such as knowledge representation, similarity measurement, and analogy detection. Often when two words share one or more attributes in common, they are con- nected by some semantic relations. On the other hand, if there are numerous semantic relations between two words, we can expect some of the attributes of one of the words to be inherited by the other. Motivated by this close connection between attributes and relations, given a relational graph in which words are inter-connected via numerous semantic relations, we propose a method to learn a latent representation for the individual words. The proposed method considers not only the co-occurrences of words as done by existing approaches for word representation learning, but also the semantic relations in which two words co-occur. To evaluate the accuracy of the word representations learnt using the proposed method, we use the learnt word representa- tions to solve semantic word analogy problems. Our experimental results show that it is possible to learn better word representations by using semantic semantics between words.

Many various types of sensors coming from different complex devices collect data from a city. Their underlying data representation follows specific manufacturer specifications that have possibly incomplete descriptions (in ontology) alignments. This paper addresses the problem of determining accurate and complete matching of ontologies given some common descriptions and their pre-determined high level alignments. In this context the problem of ontology matching consists of automatically determining all matching given the latter alignments, and manually verifying the matching results. Especially for applications where it is crucial that ontologies are matched correctly the latter can turn into a very time-consuming task for the user. This paper tackles this challenge and addresses the problem of computing the minimum number of user inputs needed to verify all matchings. We show how to represent this problem as a reasoning problem over a bipartite graph and how to encode it over pseudo Boolean constraints. Experiments show that our approach can be successfully applied to real-world data sets.

Applications of description logics (DLs) such as ontology-based data access (OBDA) require understanding of how to pose database queries over DL knowledge bases. While there have been many studies regarding traditional relational query formalisms such as conjunctive queries and their extensions, little attention has been paid to graph database queries, despite the fact that graph databases have essentially the same structure as knowledge bases. In particular, not much is known about the interplay between DLs and XPath. The latter is a powerful formalism for querying semistructured data: it is in the core of most practical query languages for XML trees, and it is also gaining popularity in theory and practice of graph databases. In this paper we make a step towards coupling knowledge bases and graph databases by studying how to answer powerful XPath-style queries over simple DLs like DL-Lite and EL. We start with adapting the definition of XPath to the DL context, and then proceed to study the complexity of evaluating XPath queries over knowledge bases. Results show that, while query answering is undecidable for the full XPath, by carefully tuning the shape of negation allowed in the queries we can arrive at XPath fragments that have a potential to be used in practice.

Abstract argumentation framework ( AF ) is a unifying framework able to encompass a variety of nonmonotonic reasoning approaches, logic programming and computational argumentation. Yet, efficient approaches for most of the decision and enumeration problems associated to AF s are missing, thus limiting the efficacy of argumentation-based approaches in real domains. In this paper, we present an algorithm for enumerating the preferred extensions of abstract argumentation frameworks which exploits parallel computation. To this purpose, the SCC-recursive semantics definition schema is adopted, where extensions are defined at the level of specific sub-frameworks. The algorithm shows significant performance improvements in large frameworks, in terms of number of solutions found and speedup.

The recent years have seen several proposals aimed at placing the revision of logic programs within the belief change frameworks established for classical logic. A crucial challenge of this task lies in the nonmonotonicity of standard logic programming semantics. Existing approaches have thus used the monotonic characterisation via SE-models to develop semantic revision operators, which however neglect any syntactic information, or reverted to a syntax-oriented belief base approach altogether. In this paper, we bridge the gap between semantic and syntactic techniques by adapting the idea of a partial meet construction from classical belief change. This type of construction allows us to define new model-based operators for revising as well as contracting logic programs that preserve the syntactic structure of the programs involved. We demonstrate the rationality of our operators by testing them against the classic AGM or alternative belief change postulates adapted to the logic programming setting. We further present an algorithm that reduces the partial meet revision or contraction of a logic program to performing revision or contraction only on the relevant subsets of that program.

Module extraction — the task of computing a (preferably small) fragment M of an ontology T that preserves entailments over a signature S — has found many applications in recent years. Extracting modules of minimal size is, however, computationally hard, and often algorithmically infeasible. Thus, practical techniques are based on approximations, where M provably captures the relevant entailments, but is not guaranteed to be minimal. Existing approximations, however, ensure that M preserves all second-order entailments of T w.r.t. S, which is stronger than is required in many applications, and may lead to large modules in practice. In this paper we propose a novel approach in which module extraction is reduced to a reasoning problem in datalog. Our approach not only generalises existing approximations in an elegant way, but it can also be tailored to preserve only specific kinds of entailments, which allows us to extract significantly smaller modules. An evaluation on widely-used ontologies has shown very encouraging results.

Stackelberg security games have been widely deployed to protect real-word assets. The main solution concept there is the Strong Stackelberg Equilibrium (SSE), which optimizes the defender's random allocation of limited security resources. However, solely deploying the SSE mixed strategy has limitations. In the extreme case, there are security games where the defender is able to defend all the assets ``almost perfectly" at the SSE, but she still sustains significant loss. In this paper, we propose an approach for improving the defender's utility in such scenarios. Perhaps surprisingly, our approach is to strategically reveal to the attacker information about the sampled pure strategy. Specifically, we propose a two-stage security game model, where in the first stage the defender allocates resources and the attacker selects a target to attack, and in the second stage the defender strategically reveals local information about that target, potentially deterring the attacker's attack plan. We then study how the defender can play optimally in both stages. We show, theoretically and experimentally, that the two-stage security game model allows the defender to gain strictly better utility than SSE.