Banff
A Large-Scale Study of Language Models for Chord Prediction
Korzeniowski, Filip, Sears, David R. W., Widmer, Gerhard
We conduct a large-scale study of language models for chord prediction. Specifically, we compare N-gram models to various flavours of recurrent neural networks on a comprehensive dataset comprising all publicly available datasets of annotated chords known to us. This large amount of data allows us to systematically explore hyper-parameter settings for the recurrent neural networks---a crucial step in achieving good results with this model class. Our results show not only a quantitative difference between the models, but also a qualitative one: in contrast to static N-gram models, certain RNN configurations adapt to the songs at test time. This finding constitutes a further step towards the development of chord recognition systems that are more aware of local musical context than what was previously possible.
AI's intelligence and stupidity in one photo stitch fail
A Google panorama photo fail from a Reddit user has again shown how good AI can be at weirdly specific tasks and how bad it is at seeing, well, the big picture. A skier with the handle MalletsDarker snapped three photos of friends at the Lake Louise ski resort in Banff, Alberta, and as it does, Google Photos offered to stitch them together. To be sure, the algorithm did a masterful job of blending the three photos. However, it failed to grasp basics like "humans are not eighty feet tall" and turned MalletsDarker's friend into a lurking, Gulliver-sized figure. Looking at the three photos, it's easy to see why Google Photos offered to do a stitch.
Explicit Document Modeling through Weighted Multiple-Instance Learning
Pappas, Nikolaos, Popescu-Belis, Andrei
Representing documents is a crucial component in many NLP tasks, for instance predicting aspect ratings in reviews. Previous methods for this task treat documents globally, and do not acknowledge that target categories are often assigned by their authors with generally no indication of the specific sentences that motivate them. To address this issue, we adopt a weakly supervised learning model, which jointly learns to focus on relevant parts of a document according to the context along with a classifier for the target categories. Derived from the weighted multiple-instance regression (MIR) framework, the model learns decomposable document vectors for each individual category and thus overcomes the representational bottleneck in previous methods due to a fixed-length document vector. During prediction, the estimated relevance or saliency weights explicitly capture the contribution of each sentence to the predicted rating, thus offering an explanation of the rating. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on multi-aspect sentiment analysis, improving over several baselines. Moreover, the predicted saliency weights are close to human estimates obtained by crowdsourcing, and increase the performance of lexical and topical features for review segmentation and summarization.
What's Hot at CPAIOR (Extended Abstract)
Quimper, Claude-Guy (Université Laval)
The 13th International Conference on Integration of Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research Techniques in Constraint Programming (CPAIOR 2016), was held in Banff, Canada, May 29 - June 1, 2016. In order to trigger exchanges between the constraint programming and the operations research community, CPAIOR was co-located with CORS 2016, the Canadian Operational Research society's conference.
A Factorization Machine Framework for Testing Bigram Embeddings in Knowledgebase Completion
Welbl, Johannes, Bouchard, Guillaume, Riedel, Sebastian
Embedding-based Knowledge Base Completion models have so far mostly combined distributed representations of individual entities or relations to compute truth scores of missing links. Facts can however also be represented using pairwise embeddings, i.e. embeddings for pairs of entities and relations. In this paper we explore such bigram embeddings with a flexible Factorization Machine model and several ablations from it. We investigate the relevance of various bigram types on the fb15k237 dataset and find relative improvements compared to a compositional model.
Topic Segmentation and Labeling in Asynchronous Conversations
Joty, S., Carenini, G., Ng, R. T.
Topic segmentation and labeling is often considered a prerequisite for higher-level conversation analysis and has been shown to be useful in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. We present two new corpora of email and blog conversations annotated with topics, and evaluate annotator reliability for the segmentation and labeling tasks in these asynchronous conversations. We propose a complete computational framework for topic segmentation and labeling in asynchronous conversations. Our approach extends state-of-the-art methods by considering a fine-grained structure of an asynchronous conversation, along with other conversational features by applying recent graph-based methods for NLP. For topic segmentation, we propose two novel unsupervised models that exploit the fine-grained conversational structure, and a novel graph-theoretic supervised model that combines lexical, conversational and topic features. For topic labeling, we propose two novel (unsupervised) random walk models that respectively capture conversation specific clues from two different sources: the leading sentences and the fine-grained conversational structure. Empirical evaluation shows that the segmentation and the labeling performed by our best models beat the state-of-the-art, and are highly correlated with human annotations.
Parameterized Complexity Results for Exact Bayesian Network Structure Learning
Bayesian network structure learning is the notoriously difficult problem of discovering a Bayesian network that optimally represents a given set of training data. In this paper we study the computational worst-case complexity of exact Bayesian network structure learning under graph theoretic restrictions on the (directed) super-structure. The super-structure is an undirected graph that contains as subgraphs the skeletons of solution networks. We introduce the directed super-structure as a natural generalization of its undirected counterpart. Our results apply to several variants of score-based Bayesian network structure learning where the score of a network decomposes into local scores of its nodes. Results: We show that exact Bayesian network structure learning can be carried out in non-uniform polynomial time if the super-structure has bounded treewidth, and in linear time if in addition the super-structure has bounded maximum degree. Furthermore, we show that if the directed super-structure is acyclic, then exact Bayesian network structure learning can be carried out in quadratic time. We complement these positive results with a number of hardness results. We show that both restrictions (treewidth and degree) are essential and cannot be dropped without loosing uniform polynomial time tractability (subject to a complexity-theoretic assumption). Similarly, exact Bayesian network structure learning remains NP-hard for "almost acyclic" directed super-structures. Furthermore, we show that the restrictions remain essential if we do not search for a globally optimal network but aim to improve a given network by means of at most k arc additions, arc deletions, or arc reversals (k-neighborhood local search).
Replanning in Domains with Partial Information and Sensing Actions
Replanning via determinization is a recent, popular approach for online planning in MDPs. In this paper we adapt this idea to classical, non-stochastic domains with partial information and sensing actions, presenting a new planner: SDR (Sample, Determinize, Replan). At each step we generate a solution plan to a classical planning problem induced by the original problem. We execute this plan as long as it is safe to do so. When this is no longer the case, we replan. The classical planning problem we generate is based on the translation-based approach for conformant planning introduced by Palacios and Geffner. The state of the classical planning problem generated in this approach captures the belief state of the agent in the original problem. Unfortunately, when this method is applied to planning problems with sensing, it yields a non-deterministic planning problem that is typically very large. Our main contribution is the introduction of state sampling techniques for overcoming these two problems. In addition, we introduce a novel, lazy, regression-based method for querying the agent's belief state during run-time. We provide a comprehensive experimental evaluation of the planner, showing that it scales better than the state-of-the-art CLG planner on existing benchmark problems, but also highlighting its weaknesses with new domains. We also discuss its theoretical guarantees.
Riffled Independence for Efficient Inference with Partial Rankings
Huang, J., Kapoor, A., Guestrin, C.
Distributions over rankings are used to model data in a multitude of real world settings such as preference analysis and political elections. Modeling such distributions presents several computational challenges, however, due to the factorial size of the set of rankings over an item set. Some of these challenges are quite familiar to the artificial intelligence community, such as how to compactly represent a distribution over a combinatorially large space, and how to efficiently perform probabilistic inference with these representations. With respect to ranking, however, there is the additional challenge of what we refer to as human task complexity -- users are rarely willing to provide a full ranking over a long list of candidates, instead often preferring to provide partial ranking information. Simultaneously addressing all of these challenges -- i.e., designing a compactly representable model which is amenable to efficient inference and can be learned using partial ranking data -- is a difficult task, but is necessary if we would like to scale to problems with nontrivial size. In this paper, we show that the recently proposed riffled independence assumptions cleanly and efficiently address each of the above challenges. In particular, we establish a tight mathematical connection between the concepts of riffled independence and of partial rankings. This correspondence not only allows us to then develop efficient and exact algorithms for performing inference tasks using riffled independence based representations with partial rankings, but somewhat surprisingly, also shows that efficient inference is not possible for riffle independent models (in a certain sense) with observations which do not take the form of partial rankings. Finally, using our inference algorithm, we introduce the first method for learning riffled independence based models from partially ranked data.