In this paper, we present a simplified shallow semantic parsing approach to extracting opinion targets. This is done by formulating opinion target extraction (OTE) as a shallow semantic parsing problem with the opinion expression as the predicate and the corresponding targets as its arguments. In principle, our parsing approach to OTE differs from the state-of-the-art sequence labeling one in two aspects. First, we model OTE from parse tree level, where abundant structured syntactic information is available for use, instead of word sequence level, where only lexical information is available. Second, we focus on determining whether a constituent, rather than a word, is an opinion target or not, via a simplified shallow semantic parsing framework. Evaluation on two datasets shows that structured syntactic information plays a critical role in capturing the domination relationship between an opinion expression and its targets. It also shows that our parsing approach much outperforms the state-of-the-art sequence labeling one.

Sentence compression is one of the most challenging tasks in natural language processing,which may be of increasing interest to many applicationssuch as abstractive summarization and text simplification for mobile devices.In this paper, we present a novel sentence compression model based on first-order logic, using Markov Logic Network.Sentence compression is formulated as a word/phrase deletion problem in this model.By taking advantage of first-order logic, the proposed method is able to incorporate local linguistic features and to capture global dependencies between word deletion operations. Experiments on both written and spoken corpora show that our approach produces competitive performance against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of manual evaluation measures such as importance, grammaticality, and overall quality.

Event extraction systems typically locate the role fillers for an event by analyzing sentences in isolation and identifying each role filler independently of the others. We argue that more accurate event extraction requires a view of the larger context to decide whether an entity is related to a relevant event. We propose a bottom-up approach to event extraction that initially identifies candidate role fillers independently and then uses that information as well as discourse properties to model textual cohesion. The novel component of the architecture is a sequentially structured sentence classifier that identifies event-related story contexts. The sentence classifier uses lexical associations and discourse relations across sentences, as well as domain-specific distributions of candidate role fillers within and across sentences. This approach yields state-of-the-art performance on the MUC-4 data set, achieving substantially higher precision than previous systems.

This paper describes a statistical approach to generation of Chinese classical poetry and proposes a novel method to automatically evaluate poems. The system accepts a set of keywords representing the writing intents from a writer and generates sentences one by one to form a completed poem. A statistical machine translation (SMT) system is applied to generate new sentences, given the sentences generated previously. For each line of sentence a specific model specially trained for that line is used, as opposed to using a single model for all sentences. To enhance the coherence of sentences on every line, a coherence model using mutual information is applied to select candidates with better consistency with previous sentences. In addition, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the BLEU metric for evaluation with a novel method of generating diverse references.

We present a simple EM-based grammar induction algorithm for Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) that achieves state-of-the-art performance by relying on a minimal number of very general linguistic principles. Unlike previous work on unsupervised parsing with CCGs, our approach has no prior language-specific knowledge, and discovers all categories automatically. Additionally, unlike other approaches, our grammar remains robust when parsing longer sentences, performing as well as or better than other systems. We believe this is a natural result of using an expressive grammar formalism with an extended domain of locality.

The main hindrance to a widespread market penetration of battery-powered electric vehicles (BEVs) has been their limited energy reservoir resulting in cruising ranges of few hundred kilometers unless one allows for recharging or switching of depleted batteries during a trip. Unfortunately, recharging typically takes several hours and battery switch stations providing fully recharged batteries are still quite rare – certainly not as widespread as ordinary gas stations. For not getting stranded with an empty battery, going on a BEV trip requires some planning ahead taking into account energy characteristics of the BEV as well as available battery switch stations. In this paper we consider very basic, yet fundamental problems for E-Mobility: Can I get from A to B and back with my BEV without recharging in between? Can I get from A to B when allowed to recharge? How can I minimize the number of battery switches when going from A to B? We provide efficient and mathematically sound algorithms for these problems that allow for the energy-aware planning of trips.

We propose computer-assisted techniques for helping with pedagogy in Algebra. In particular, given a proof problem p (of the form “Left-hand-side-term = Right-hand-side-term”), we show how to automatically generate problems that are similar to p. We believe that such a tool can be used by teachers in making examinations where they need to test students on problems similar to what they taught in class, and by students in generating practice problems tailored to their specific needs. Our first insight is that we can generalize p syntactically to a query Q that implicitly represents a set of problems [[Q]] (which includes p). Our second insight is that we can explore the space of problems [[Q]] automatically, use classical results from polynomial identity testing to generate only those problems in [[Q]] that are correct, and then use pruning techniques to generate only unique and interesting problems. Our third insight is that with a small amount of manual tuning on the query Q, the user can interactively guide the computer to generate problems of interest to her. We present the technical details of the above mentioned steps, and also describe a tool where these steps have been implemented. We also present an empirical evaluation on a wide variety of problems from various sub-fields of algebra including polynomials, trigonometry, calculus, determinants etc. Our tool is able to generate a rich corpus of similar problems from each given problem; while some of these similar problems were already present in the textbook, several were new!

In music, boundaries may occur because scientific domains, including artificial intelligence (Keogh of multiple changes, such as a change in instrumentation, 2011). Research on time series has a long tradition, but a change in harmony, or a change in tempo. The seminal its application to real-world datasets requires to cope with approach by Foote (2000) estimated these changes by new relevant issues, such as the multiple dimensionality of means of a so-called novelty curve, obtained by sliding a data or limited computational resources. Specifically, dealing short-time checkerboard kernel over the diagonal of a selfsimilarity with large-scale data, (1) algorithms must be efficient, matrix of pairwise sample comparisons. Works inspired i.e. they have to scale, (2) supervised approaches may become by Foote's approach explicitly make use of the concept unfeasible, and (3) solutions must use general techniques, of novelty curves (Paulus et al. 2010). Other musictargeted i.e. they should be as independent of the domain as approaches exploit homogeneities in a time series possible (see Mueen and Keogh 2010 for a more detailed by employing more refined techniques like hidden Markov discussion).

General Game Playing is the design of AI systems able to understand the rules of new games and to use such descriptions to play those games effectively. Games with imperfectinformation have recently been added as a new challenge forexisting general game-playing systems. The HyperPlay technique presents a solution to this challenge by maintaining a collection of models of the true game as a foundation for reasoning, and move selection. The technique provides existing game players with a bolt-on solution to convert from perfect-information games to imperfect-information games. In this paper we describe the HyperPlay technique, show how it was adapted for use with a Monte Carlo decision making process and give experimental results for its performance.

The pharmaceutical industry, consumer protection groups, users of medications and government oversight agencies are all strongly interested in identifying adverse reactions to drugs. While a clinical trial of a drug may use only a thousand patients, once a drug is released on the market it may be taken by millions of patients. As a result, in many cases adverse drug events (ADEs) are observed in the broader population that were not identified during clinical trials. Therefore, there is a need for continued, postmarketing surveillance of drugs to identify previously-unanticipated ADEs. This paper casts this problem as a reverse machine learning task, related to relational subgroup discovery and provides an initial evaluation of this approach based on experiments with an actual EMR/EHR and known adverse drug events.