Government
Opinion Mining for Relating Subjective Expressions and Annual Earnings in US Financial Statements
Chen, Chien-Liang, Liu, Chao-Lin, Chang, Yuan-Chen, Tsai, Hsiang-Ping
Financial statements contain quantitative information and manager's subjective evaluation of firm's financial status. Using information released in U.S. 10-K filings. Both qualitative and quantitative appraisals are crucial for quality financial decisions. To extract such opinioned statements from the reports, we built tagging models based on the conditional random field (CRF) techniques, considering a variety of combinations of linguistic factors including morphology, orthography, predicate-argument structure, syntax, and simple semantics. Our results show that the CRF models are reasonably effective to find opinion holders in experiments when we adopted the popular MPQA corpus for training and testing. The contribution of our paper is to identify opinion patterns in multiword expressions (MWEs) forms rather than in single word forms. We find that the managers of corporations attempt to use more optimistic words to obfuscate negative financial performance and to accentuate the positive financial performance. Our results also show that decreasing earnings were often accompanied by ambiguous and mild statements in the reporting year and that increasing earnings were stated in assertive and positive way.
Quick Summary
Quick Summary is an innovate implementation of an automatic document summarizer that inputs a document in the English language and evaluates each sentence. The scanner or evaluator determines criteria based on its grammatical structure and place in the paragraph. The program then asks the user to specify the number of sentences the person wishes to highlight. For example should the user ask to have three of the most important sentences, it would highlight the first and most important sentence in green. Commonly this is the sentence containing the conclusion. Then Quick Summary finds the second most important sentence usually called a satellite and highlights it in yellow. This is usually the topic sentence. Then the program finds the third most important sentence and highlights it in red. The implementations of this technology are useful in a society of information overload when a person typically receives 42 emails a day (Microsoft). The paper also is a candid look at difficulty that machine learning has in textural translating. However, it speaks on how to overcome the obstacles that historically prevented progress. This paper proposes mathematical meta-data criteria that justify the place of importance of a sentence. Just as tools for the study of relational symmetry in bio-informatics, this tool seeks to classify words with greater clarity. "Survey Finds Workers Average Only Three Productive Days per Week." Microsoft News Center. Microsoft. Web. 31 Mar. 2012.
AAAI News
Hamilton, Carol M. (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence)
He has been chairman/president the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. Board of Trustees, as well as treasurer 100 Americans most likely to shape Manuela Veloso, incoming AAAI President, of SSAISB and ECCAI. He is presently the next century; TIME Digital selected and Eric Horvitz, AAAI Past editor-in-chief of the AAAI Press, Spatial her as a member of the Cyber-Elite; President and Awards Committee Cognition and Computation, and the World Economic Forum honored Chair, presented the AAAI Awards in the Artificial Intelligence Journal. He was her with the title Global Leader for Tomorrow; August at AAAI-12 in Toronto. She holds bachelor's and or 1-650-328-3123.)
Reports of the AAAI 2012 Spring Symposia
Alani, Harith (The Open University) | An, Bo (University of Southern California) | Jain, Manish (University of Southern California) | Kido, Takashi (Rikengenesis) | Konidaris, George (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Lawless, William (Paine College) | Martin, David (Apple Computer) | Pantofaru, Caroline (Willow Garage, Inc.) | Sofge, Donald (Naval Research Laboratory) | Takadama, Keiki (University of Electro-Communications) | Tambe, Milind (University of Southern California) | Vitvar, Tomas (Czech Technical University)
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford Universityโs Department of Computer Science, was pleased to present the 2012 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, March 26โ28, 2012 at Stanford University, Stanford, California USA. The six symposia held were AI, The Fundamental Social Aggregation Challenge (cochaired by W. F. Lawless, Don Sofge, Mark Klein, and Laurent Chaudron); Designing Intelligent Robots (cochaired by George Konidaris, Byron Boots, Stephen Hart, Todd Hester, Sarah Osentoski, and David Wingate); Game Theory for Security, Sustainability, and Health (cochaired by Bo An and Manish Jain); Intelligent Web Services Meet Social Computing (cochaired by Tomas Vitvar, Harith Alani, and David Martin); Self-Tracking and Collective Intelligence for Personal Wellness (cochaired by Takashi Kido and Keiki Takadama); and Wisdom of the Crowd (cochaired by Caroline Pantofaru, Sonia Chernova, and Alex Sorokin). The papers of the six symposia were published in the AAAI technical report series.
An Overview of Recent Application Trends at the AAMAS Conference: Security, Sustainability and Safety
Jain, Manish (University of Southern California) | An, Bo (University of Southern California) | Tambe, Milind (University of Southern California)
A key feature of the AAMAS conference is its emphasis on ties to real-world applications. The focus of this article is to provide a broad overview of application-focused papers published at the AAMAS 2010 and 2011 conferences. More specifically, recent applications at AAMAS could be broadly categorized as belonging to research areas of security, sustainability and safety. We outline the domains of applications, key research thrusts underlying each such application area, and emerging trends.
Counting in Graph Covers: A Combinatorial Characterization of the Bethe Entropy Function
We present a combinatorial characterization of the Bethe entropy function of a factor graph, such a characterization being in contrast to the original, analytical, definition of this function. We achieve this combinatorial characterization by counting valid configurations in finite graph covers of the factor graph. Analogously, we give a combinatorial characterization of the Bethe partition function, whose original definition was also of an analytical nature. As we point out, our approach has similarities to the replica method, but also stark differences. The above findings are a natural backdrop for introducing a decoder for graph-based codes that we will call symbolwise graph-cover decoding, a decoder that extends our earlier work on blockwise graph-cover decoding. Both graph-cover decoders are theoretical tools that help towards a better understanding of message-passing iterative decoding, namely blockwise graph-cover decoding links max-product (min-sum) algorithm decoding with linear programming decoding, and symbolwise graph-cover decoding links sum-product algorithm decoding with Bethe free energy function minimization at temperature one. In contrast to the Gibbs entropy function, which is a concave function, the Bethe entropy function is in general not concave everywhere. In particular, we show that every code picked from an ensemble of regular low-density parity-check codes with minimum Hamming distance growing (with high probability) linearly with the block length has a Bethe entropy function that is convex in certain regions of its domain.
Aesthetic Considerations for Automated Platformer Design
Cook, Michael (Imperial College, London) | Colton, Simon (Imperial College, London ) | Pease, Alison (Imperial College, London)
We describe ANGELINA3, a system that can automatically develop games along a defined theme, by selecting appropriate multimedia content from a variety of sources and incorporating it into a game's design. We discuss these capabilities in the context of the FACE model for assessing progress in the building of creative systems, and discuss how ANGELINA3 can be improved through further work.
Fast Conical Hull Algorithms for Near-separable Non-negative Matrix Factorization
Kumar, Abhishek, Sindhwani, Vikas, Kambadur, Prabhanjan
The separability assumption (Donoho & Stodden, 2003; Arora et al., 2012) turns non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) into a tractable problem. Recently, a new class of provably-correct NMF algorithms have emerged under this assumption. In this paper, we reformulate the separable NMF problem as that of finding the extreme rays of the conical hull of a finite set of vectors. From this geometric perspective, we derive new separable NMF algorithms that are highly scalable and empirically noise robust, and have several other favorable properties in relation to existing methods. A parallel implementation of our algorithm demonstrates high scalability on shared- and distributed-memory machines.
The Issue-Adjusted Ideal Point Model
Gerrish, Sean M., Blei, David M.
We develop a model of issue-specific voting behavior. This model can be used to explore lawmakers' personal voting patterns of voting by issue area, providing an exploratory window into how the language of the law is correlated with political support. We derive approximate posterior inference algorithms based on variational methods. Across 12 years of legislative data, we demonstrate both improvement in heldout prediction performance and the model's utility in interpreting an inherently multi-dimensional space.
High-dimensional regression with noisy and missing data: Provable guarantees with nonconvexity
Loh, Po-Ling, Wainwright, Martin J.
Although the standard formulations of prediction problems involve fully-observed and noiseless data drawn in an i.i.d. manner, many applications involve noisy and/or missing data, possibly involving dependence, as well. We study these issues in the context of high-dimensional sparse linear regression, and propose novel estimators for the cases of noisy, missing and/or dependent data. Many standard approaches to noisy or missing data, such as those using the EM algorithm, lead to optimization problems that are inherently nonconvex, and it is difficult to establish theoretical guarantees on practical algorithms. While our approach also involves optimizing nonconvex programs, we are able to both analyze the statistical error associated with any global optimum, and more surprisingly, to prove that a simple algorithm based on projected gradient descent will converge in polynomial time to a small neighborhood of the set of all global minimizers. On the statistical side, we provide nonasymptotic bounds that hold with high probability for the cases of noisy, missing and/or dependent data. On the computational side, we prove that under the same types of conditions required for statistical consistency, the projected gradient descent algorithm is guaranteed to converge at a geometric rate to a near-global minimizer. We illustrate these theoretical predictions with simulations, showing close agreement with the predicted scalings.