xcit'ed

Abstract: The use of semantic resources is common in modern NLP systems, but methods to extract lexical semantics have only recently begun to perform well enough for practical use. We evaluate existing and new similarity metrics for thesaurus extraction, and experiment with the tradeoff between extraction performance and efficiency. We propose an approximation algorithm, based on canonical attributes and coarse- and fine-grained matching, that reduces the time complexity and execution time of thesaurus extraction with only a marginal performance penalty.

well constructed thesaurus has long been recognized as a valuable tool in the effective operation of an information retrieval system. This paper reports the results of experiments designed to determine the validity of an approach to the automatic construction of global thesauri (described originally by Crouch in [1] and [2]) based on a clustering of the document collection. The authors validate the approach by showing that the use of thesauri generated by this method results in substantial improvements in retrieval effectiveness in four test collections. The term discrimination value theory, used in the thesaurus generation algorithm to determine a term¡Çs membership in a particular thesaurus class, is found not to be useful in distinguishing between thesaurus classes (i.e., in differentiating a ¡Ègood¡É from an ¡Èindifferent¡É or ¡Èpoor¡É thesaurus class). In conclusion, the authors suggest an alternate approach to automatic thesaurus construction which greatly simplifies the work of producing viable thesaurus classes. Experimental results show that the alternate approach described herein in some cases produces thesauri which are comparable in retrieval effectiveness to those produced by the first method at much lower cost.

Abstract: Context is used in many NLP systems as an indicator of a term's syntactic and semantic function. The accuracy of the system is dependent on the quality and quantity of contextual information available to describe each term. However, the quantity variable is no longer fixed by limited corpus resources. Given fixed training time and computational resources, it makes sense for systems to invest time in extracting high quality contextual information from a fixed corpus. However, with an effectively limitless quantity of text available, extraction rate and representation size need to be considered. We use thesaurus extraction with a range of context extracting tools to demonstrate the interaction between context quantity, time and size on a corpus of 300 million words.

Motivation. How to selecting a small subset out of the thousands of genes in microarray data is important for accurate classification of phenotypes. Widely used methods typically rank genes according to their differential expressions among phenotypes and pick the top-ranked genes. We observe that feature sets so obtained have certain redundancy and study methods to minimize it. Results. We propose a minimum redundancy – maximum relevance (MRMR) feature selection framework. Genes selected via MRMR provide a more balanced coverage of the space and capture broader characteristics of phenotypes. They lead to significantly improved class predictions in extensive experiments on 5 gene expression data sets: NCI, Lymphoma, Lung, Leukemia and Colon. Improvements are observed consistently among 4 classification methods: Na¾­¥Áve Bayes, Linear discriminant analysis, Logistic regression and Support vector machines. Supplimentary: The top 60 MRMR genes for each of the dataset are listed in http://www.nersc.gov/~cding/MRMR/

To improve the proficiency of text processing such as information retrieval or text mining, it is necessary to construct a synonym dictionary, but it is very tiresome to make it by hands. In some fields, such as aviation, synonym nouns are mixed with kanji/hiragana, katakana, alphabet and their abbreviations. As new words always come to be used, the dictionary update is a big issue. In this paper, we propose a tool for constructing a synonym dictionary. The system will return synonym candidates against a query. A synonym can be easily registered in dictionary by looking the synonym candidates. We experimented the system performance by aviation pilot report and evaluated it by average precision.