We describe a new variational lower-bound on the minimum energy configuration of a planar binary Markov Random Field (MRF). Our method is based on adding auxiliary nodes to every face of a planar embedding of the graph in order to capture the effect of unary potentials. A ground state of the resulting approximation can be computed efficiently by reduction to minimum-weight perfect matching. We show that optimization of variational parameters achieves the same lower-bound as dual-decomposition into the set of all cycles of the original graph. We demonstrate that our variational optimization converges quickly and provides high-quality solutions to hard combinatorial problems 10-100x faster than competing algorithms that optimize the same bound.

In this paper, we present a novel approach of translating natural languages specification to SBVR business rules. The business rules constraint business structure or control behaviour of a business process. In modern business modelling, one of the important phases is writing business rules. Typically, a business rule analyst has to manually write hundreds of business rules in a natural language (NL) and then manually translate NL specification of all the rules in a particular rule language such as SBVR, or OCL, as required. However, the manual translation of NL rule specification to formal representation as SBVR rule is not only difficult, complex and time consuming but also can result in erroneous business rules. In this paper, we propose an automated approach that automatically translates the NL (such as English) specification of business rules to SBVR (Semantic Business Vocabulary and Rules) rules. The major challenge in NL to SBVR translation was complex semantic analysis of English language. We have used a rule based algorithm for robust semantic analysis of English and generate SBVR rules. Automated generation of SBVR based Business rules can help in improved and efficient constrained business aspects in a typical business modelling.

We describe Cobot, a mixed initiative socio-semantic conversational search and recommendation system for finding health information. With Cobot, users can start a real time conversation about their health concerns. Cobot then connects relevant users together in the conversation also providing contextual recommendations relevant to the conversation. Conventional search engines and content portals provide a solitary search experience inundating the health information seeker with a hoard of information often confusing and frustrating them. Cobot brings relevant healthcare information directly or through other users without any search through natural language conversation.

Recent approaches to multi-view learning have shown that factorizing the information into parts that are shared across all views and parts that are private to each view could effectively account for the dependencies and independencies between the different input modalities. Unfortunately, these approaches involve minimizing non-convex objective functions. In this paper, we propose an approach to learning such factorized representations inspired by sparse coding techniques. In particular, we show that structured sparsity allows us to address the multi-view learning problem by alternately solving two convex optimization problems. Furthermore, the resulting factorized latent spaces generalize over existing approaches in that they allow :having latent dimensions shared between any subset of the views instead of between all the views only. We show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the task of human pose estimation.

While traditional research on text clustering has largely focused on grouping documents by topic, it is conceivable that a user may want to cluster documents along other dimensions, such as the author's mood, gender, age, or sentiment. Without knowing the user's intention, a clustering algorithm will only group documents along the most prominent dimension, which may not be the one the user desires. To address the problem of clustering documents along the user-desired dimension, previous work has focused on learning a similarity metric from data manually annotated with the user's intention or having a human construct a feature space in an interactive manner during the clustering process. With the goal of reducing reliance on human knowledge for fine-tuning the similarity function or selecting the relevant features required by these approaches, we propose a novel active clustering algorithm, which allows a user to easily select the dimension along which she wants to cluster the documents by inspecting only a small number of words. We demonstrate the viability of our algorithm on a variety of commonly-used sentiment datasets.

The paper uses the SCOP theory of concepts to model the role of environmental context on three levels of entrepreneurial opportunity: idea generation, idea development, and entrepreneurial decision. The role of contextual-fit in the generation and development of ideas is modeled as the collapse of their superposition state into one of the potential states that composes this superposition. The projection of this collapsed state on the socio-economic basis results in interference between the developed idea and the perceptions of the supporting community, undergoing an eventual collapse for an entrepreneurial decision that reflects the shared vision of its stakeholders. The developed idea may continue to evolve due to continuous or discontinuous changes in the environment. The model offers unique insights into the effects of external influences on entrepreneurial decisions.

In multimedia information retrieval, where a document may contain both textual and visual content features, the ranking of documents is often computed by heuristically combining the feature spaces of different media types or combining the ranking scores computed independently from different feature spaces. In this paper, we propose a principled approach inspired by quantum theory. Specifically, we propose a tensor product based model aiming to represent textual and visual content features of an image as a non-separable composite system. The ranking scores of the images are then computed in the form of a quantum measurement. In addition, the correlations between features of different media types are incorporated in the framework. Experiments on ImageClef2007 show a promising performance of the tensor based approach.

The physical actions performed by any robot can be used to convey meaning to a user in human-robot interaction. While the analysis of physical actions as communicative acts is not new, it is less clear how dialogue planning policies for human-robot interaction should be influenced by the co-occurrence of physical tasks actions. In this short paper we report on a study which analyses the relative importance of omitting verbal feedback in situated human-robot dialogue. Results indicate that while a lack of explicit feedback can and does lead to more errors in dialogue, overall task performance times are improved, while users perceive the resultant system as better performing on a number of subjective measures.

So, we have a variety of people here with different interests and backgrounds that I asked to talk about not just the key challenges ahead but potential opportunities and promising pathways, trajectories to solving those problems, and their predictions about how R&D might proceed in terms of the timing of various kinds of development over time. I asked the panelists briefly to frame their comments sharing a little bit about fundamental questions, such as, "What is the research goal?" Not everybody stays up late at night hunched over a computer or a simulation or a robotic system, pondering the foundations of intelligence and human-level AI. We have here today Lise Getoor from the University ipate the liability and insurance industry; and the of Maryland; Devika Subramanian, who other one, that it was a human interface problem, comes to us from Rice University; we have Carlos that people don't necessarily want to go and type Guestrin from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU); a bunch of yes/no questions into a computer to get James Hendler from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute an answer, even with a rule-based explanation, (RPI); Mike Wellman at the University of that if you'd taken that just a step further and Michigan; Henry Kautz at tjhe University of solved the human problem, it might have worked. Rochester; and Joe Konstan, who comes to us from Related to that, I was remembering a bunch of the Midwest, as our Minneapolis person here on these smart house projects. And I have to admit I the panel. I think everyone Joe Konstan: I was actually surprised when you hates smart spaces. I think of myself at the core there's nobody there, do you warn people and give in human-computer interaction. So I went back them a chance to answer? There's no good answer and started looking at what I knew of artificial to this question. I can tell you if that person is in intelligence to try to see where the path forward bed asleep, the answer is no, don't wake them up was, and I was inspired by the past.

A key challenge in computational narrative is story generation. In this paper we focus on analogy-based story generation, and, specifically, on how to generate both story and text using analogy. We present a dual representation formalism where a human-understandable representation (composed of English sentences) and a computer-understandable representation (consisting in a graph) are linked together in order to generate both story and natural language text by analogy. We have implemented our technique in the Riu interactive narrative system.