A frequent goal of a researcher is to publish his/her work in appropriate conferences and journals. With a large number of options for venues in the microdomains of every research discipline, the issue of selecting suitable locations for publishing cannot be underestimated. Further, the venues diversify themselves in the form of workshops, symposiums, and challenges. Several publishers such as IEEE and Springer have recognized the need to address this issue and have developed journal recommenders. In this thesis, our goal is to design and develop a similar recommendation system for the ACM dataset. We view this recommendation problem from a classification perspective. With the success of deep learning classifiers in recent times and their pervasiveness in several domains, we modeled several 1D Convolutional neural network classifiers for the different venues. When given some submission information like title, keywords, abstract, etc. about a paper, the recommender uses these developed classifier predictions to recommend suitable venues to the user. The dataset used for the project is the ACM Digital Library metadata that includes textual information for research papers and journals submitted at various conferences and journals over the past 60 years. We developed the recommender based on two approaches: 1) A binary CNN classifier per venue (single classifiers), and 2) Group CNN classifiers for venue groups (group classifiers). Our system has achieved a MAP of 0.55 and 0.51 for single and group classifiers. We also show that our system has a high recall rate. / Master of Science / A frequent goal of a researcher is to publish his/her research work in the form of papers and journals at recognized publication conferences and journals. Conferences limit the number of pages in a submission, whereas journals tend to be flexible with the length. In general, academic conferences are held annually, while journals have a submission cut off date on a monthly/trimonthly or so basis. These conferences and journals are publication venues. With a large number of options for venues in the microdomains of every research discipline, the issue of selecting suitable locations for publishing is a complicated task. Further, the venues diversify themselves in the form of workshops, symposiums, and challenges. Submitting a work to the wrong venue often leads to a rejection. Every author who is about to publish faces this question of ``Where can I publish my work so that it gets accepted?". This thesis is an attempt to address this question through a recommendation system. Recommendation systems help us in the decision making process. A well-known example is the ``Customers who bought this also bought item y'' message we find in eCommerce websites. These systems help users navigate a product catalog better to address their needs. The goal of this thesis is to develop one such recommendation system that can help researchers to choose venues. When an author is about to publish, they structure their paper/journal in the form of a research title, brief abstract, relevant keywords in the paper, and a detailed explanation of the research carried out. Our system can take any of these as input and suggest appropriate venues based on the submission content. The dataset used for the project is the ACM Digital Library metadata. We developed the recommender using deep learning techniques. Our system can be helpful for finding a single best venue, or a group of suitable venues.

In the Information Age, a proliferation of unstructured text electronic documents exists. Processing these documents by humans is a daunting task as humans have limited cognitive abilities for processing large volumes of documents that can often be extremely lengthy. To address this problem, text data computer algorithms are being developed. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) are two text data computer algorithms that have received much attention individually in the text data literature for topic extraction studies but not for document classification nor for comparison studies. Since classification is considered an important human function and has been studied in the areas of cognitive science and information science, in this dissertation a research study was performed to compare LDA, LSA and humans as document classifiers. The research questions posed in this study are: R1: How accurate is LDA and LSA in classifying documents in a corpus of textual data over a known set of topics? R2: How accurate are humans in performing the same classification task? R3: How does LDA classification performance compare to LSA classification performance? To address these questions, a classification study involving human subjects was designed where humans were asked to generate and classify documents (customer comments) at two levels of abstraction for a quality assurance setting. Then two computer algorithms, LSA and LDA, were used to perform classification on these documents. The results indicate that humans outperformed all computer algorithms and had an accuracy rate of 94% at the higher level of abstraction and 76% at the lower level of abstraction. At the high level of abstraction, the accuracy rates were 84% for both LSA and LDA and at the lower level, the accuracy rate were 67% for LSA and 64% for LDA. The findings of this research have many strong implications for the improvement of information systems that process unstructured text. Document classifiers have many potential applications in many fields (e.g., fraud detection, information retrieval, national security, and customer management). Development and refinement of algorithms that classify text is a fruitful area of ongoing research and this dissertation contributes to this area.

A idéia de capacitar uma máquina a reconhecer o ambiente em que atua tem motivado pesquisadores a investir esforços no estudo do mais complexo dos sentidos humanos, a visão. A visão é, antes de tudo, uma tarefa de representação e processamento de informações, sendo portanto adequada ao tratamento computacional. Visto que ainda não se possuem métodos que tenham resultados equivalentes ao que seria obtido com um usuário humano, tem-se estudado intensamente a utilização de feições para um melhor aproveitamento de seu potencial. Dentre estas feições, a forma de um objeto proporciona um poderoso indício de sua identidade e funcionalidade, podendo ser utilizada para seu reconhecimento. Isso distingue a forma de outras feições visuais elementares, como a cor, o movimento ou a textura, que, apesar de igualmente importantes, normalmente não revelam a identidade de um objeto. Assim sendo, a possibilidade de avaliar a robustez e a estabilidade de técnicas alternativas para a representação de forma é vital para prever o desempenho de cada técnica na presença de alguma incerteza ou discrepância. Neste trabalho, alguns descritores de forma descritos na literatura foram implementados e utilizados em estudos de caso para avaliar sua eficácia. Estes estudos de caso foram realizados utilizando-se caracteres, todavia, com finalidades bastante distintas. O primeiro estudo de caso é voltado para aplicações como a robótica móvel, com reconhecimento de comandos localizados no ambiente por parte do robô. Já o estudo de caso principal está direcionado para aplicações de reconhecimento de placas de automóveis, que poderia tanto ser utilizado para monitoramento e controle do fluxo de trânsito, quanto para controle de infrações. Muitas aplicações, incluindo aquelas que envolvem a recuperação e indexação de objetos visuais, são apropriadas para a utilização de feições de forma. Outra característica importante do presente trabalho é a de realçar que a seleção de um bom descritor reduz o esforço necessário na etapa de classificação, o qual é computacionalmente elevado. / The idea of enabling a machine to recognize the environment with which it interacts has motivated researchers to dedicate efforts in studying the most complex of the human senses: vision. Vision is essentially a task of information representation and processing, what makes it suitable for computational treatment. Given that currently there are no methods that perform equivalently to humans, the use of features has been intensively studied in order to improve the performance of the existing methods. Among these features, the shape of an object provides a powerful sign of its identity and functionality, what enables the exploitation of this feature with the purpose of recognition. This evidence distinguishes shape from other visual features, such as color, motion or texture, which, although equally important, normally do not reveal the identity of an object. As a result, the possibility of evaluating the robustness and stability of alternate techniques for shape representation is essential in order to measure the performance of each technique in the presence of uncertainty. In this work, some shape descriptors available in the literature were implemented and used in case studies aiming at evaluating their effectiveness. These case studies were carried out using characters, although, with very different purposes. The first case study is geared towards applications such as mobile robotics, where the robot recognizes commands available in the environment. The main case study is focused on applications of license plate recognition, which could be used both in situations of surveillance and traffic control and in situations of infraction. Many applications, including those that involve the search and indexing of visual objects, are suited for the use of shape features. Another important characteristic of this work is that it emphasizes that the selection of a good shape description reduces the effort during the classification step, which is computationally elevated.

A idéia de capacitar uma máquina a reconhecer o ambiente em que atua tem motivado pesquisadores a investir esforços no estudo do mais complexo dos sentidos humanos, a visão. A visão é, antes de tudo, uma tarefa de representação e processamento de informações, sendo portanto adequada ao tratamento computacional. Visto que ainda não se possuem métodos que tenham resultados equivalentes ao que seria obtido com um usuário humano, tem-se estudado intensamente a utilização de feições para um melhor aproveitamento de seu potencial. Dentre estas feições, a forma de um objeto proporciona um poderoso indício de sua identidade e funcionalidade, podendo ser utilizada para seu reconhecimento. Isso distingue a forma de outras feições visuais elementares, como a cor, o movimento ou a textura, que, apesar de igualmente importantes, normalmente não revelam a identidade de um objeto. Assim sendo, a possibilidade de avaliar a robustez e a estabilidade de técnicas alternativas para a representação de forma é vital para prever o desempenho de cada técnica na presença de alguma incerteza ou discrepância. Neste trabalho, alguns descritores de forma descritos na literatura foram implementados e utilizados em estudos de caso para avaliar sua eficácia. Estes estudos de caso foram realizados utilizando-se caracteres, todavia, com finalidades bastante distintas. O primeiro estudo de caso é voltado para aplicações como a robótica móvel, com reconhecimento de comandos localizados no ambiente por parte do robô. Já o estudo de caso principal está direcionado para aplicações de reconhecimento de placas de automóveis, que poderia tanto ser utilizado para monitoramento e controle do fluxo de trânsito, quanto para controle de infrações. Muitas aplicações, incluindo aquelas que envolvem a recuperação e indexação de objetos visuais, são apropriadas para a utilização de feições de forma. Outra característica importante do presente trabalho é a de realçar que a seleção de um bom descritor reduz o esforço necessário na etapa de classificação, o qual é computacionalmente elevado. / The idea of enabling a machine to recognize the environment with which it interacts has motivated researchers to dedicate efforts in studying the most complex of the human senses: vision. Vision is essentially a task of information representation and processing, what makes it suitable for computational treatment. Given that currently there are no methods that perform equivalently to humans, the use of features has been intensively studied in order to improve the performance of the existing methods. Among these features, the shape of an object provides a powerful sign of its identity and functionality, what enables the exploitation of this feature with the purpose of recognition. This evidence distinguishes shape from other visual features, such as color, motion or texture, which, although equally important, normally do not reveal the identity of an object. As a result, the possibility of evaluating the robustness and stability of alternate techniques for shape representation is essential in order to measure the performance of each technique in the presence of uncertainty. In this work, some shape descriptors available in the literature were implemented and used in case studies aiming at evaluating their effectiveness. These case studies were carried out using characters, although, with very different purposes. The first case study is geared towards applications such as mobile robotics, where the robot recognizes commands available in the environment. The main case study is focused on applications of license plate recognition, which could be used both in situations of surveillance and traffic control and in situations of infraction. Many applications, including those that involve the search and indexing of visual objects, are suited for the use of shape features. Another important characteristic of this work is that it emphasizes that the selection of a good shape description reduces the effort during the classification step, which is computationally elevated.

A idéia de capacitar uma máquina a reconhecer o ambiente em que atua tem motivado pesquisadores a investir esforços no estudo do mais complexo dos sentidos humanos, a visão. A visão é, antes de tudo, uma tarefa de representação e processamento de informações, sendo portanto adequada ao tratamento computacional. Visto que ainda não se possuem métodos que tenham resultados equivalentes ao que seria obtido com um usuário humano, tem-se estudado intensamente a utilização de feições para um melhor aproveitamento de seu potencial. Dentre estas feições, a forma de um objeto proporciona um poderoso indício de sua identidade e funcionalidade, podendo ser utilizada para seu reconhecimento. Isso distingue a forma de outras feições visuais elementares, como a cor, o movimento ou a textura, que, apesar de igualmente importantes, normalmente não revelam a identidade de um objeto. Assim sendo, a possibilidade de avaliar a robustez e a estabilidade de técnicas alternativas para a representação de forma é vital para prever o desempenho de cada técnica na presença de alguma incerteza ou discrepância. Neste trabalho, alguns descritores de forma descritos na literatura foram implementados e utilizados em estudos de caso para avaliar sua eficácia. Estes estudos de caso foram realizados utilizando-se caracteres, todavia, com finalidades bastante distintas. O primeiro estudo de caso é voltado para aplicações como a robótica móvel, com reconhecimento de comandos localizados no ambiente por parte do robô. Já o estudo de caso principal está direcionado para aplicações de reconhecimento de placas de automóveis, que poderia tanto ser utilizado para monitoramento e controle do fluxo de trânsito, quanto para controle de infrações. Muitas aplicações, incluindo aquelas que envolvem a recuperação e indexação de objetos visuais, são apropriadas para a utilização de feições de forma. Outra característica importante do presente trabalho é a de realçar que a seleção de um bom descritor reduz o esforço necessário na etapa de classificação, o qual é computacionalmente elevado. / The idea of enabling a machine to recognize the environment with which it interacts has motivated researchers to dedicate efforts in studying the most complex of the human senses: vision. Vision is essentially a task of information representation and processing, what makes it suitable for computational treatment. Given that currently there are no methods that perform equivalently to humans, the use of features has been intensively studied in order to improve the performance of the existing methods. Among these features, the shape of an object provides a powerful sign of its identity and functionality, what enables the exploitation of this feature with the purpose of recognition. This evidence distinguishes shape from other visual features, such as color, motion or texture, which, although equally important, normally do not reveal the identity of an object. As a result, the possibility of evaluating the robustness and stability of alternate techniques for shape representation is essential in order to measure the performance of each technique in the presence of uncertainty. In this work, some shape descriptors available in the literature were implemented and used in case studies aiming at evaluating their effectiveness. These case studies were carried out using characters, although, with very different purposes. The first case study is geared towards applications such as mobile robotics, where the robot recognizes commands available in the environment. The main case study is focused on applications of license plate recognition, which could be used both in situations of surveillance and traffic control and in situations of infraction. Many applications, including those that involve the search and indexing of visual objects, are suited for the use of shape features. Another important characteristic of this work is that it emphasizes that the selection of a good shape description reduces the effort during the classification step, which is computationally elevated.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

There is a great need to develop systems that can continuously provide correct information about road surface status depending on the prevailing weather conditions. This will minimize accidents and optimize transportation. In this thesis different methods for the determination of the road surface status have been studied and analyzed, and suggestions of new technology are proposed. Information about the road surface status is obtained traditionally from various sensors mounted directly in the road surface. This information must then be analyzed to create automated warning systems for road users and road maintenance personnel. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how existing technologies can be used to obtain a more accurate description of the current road conditions. Another purpose is also to investigate how existing technologies can be used to obtain a more accurate description of the current road conditions. Furthermore, the aim is to develop non-contact technologies able to determine and classify road conditions over a larger area, since there is no system available today that can identify differences in road surface status in the wheel tracks and between the wheel tracks. Literature studies have been carried out to find the latest state of the art research and technology, and the research work is mainly based on empirical studies. A large part of the research has involved planning and setting up laboratory experiments to test and verify hypotheses that have emerged from the literature studies. Initially a few traditional road-mounted sensors were analyzed regarding their ability to determine the road conditions and the impact on their measured values when the sensors were exposed to contamination agents such as glycol and oil. Furthermore, non-contact methods for determining the status of the road surface have been studied. Images from cameras working in the visible range, together data from the Swedish Transportation Administration road weather stations, have been used to develop computerized road status classification models that can distinguish between a dry, wet, icy and snowy surface. Field observations have also been performed to get the ground truth for developing these models. In order to improve the ability to accurately distinguish between different surface statuses, measurement systems involving sensors working in the Near-Infrared (NIR) range have been utilized. In this thesis a new imaging method for determining road conditions with NIR camera technology is developed and described. This method was tested in a field study performed during the winter 2013-2014 with successful results. The results show that some traditional sensors could be used even with future user-friendly de-icing chemicals. The findings from using visual camera systems and meteorological parameters to determine the road status showed that they provide previously unknown information about road conditions. It was discovered that certain road conditions such as black ice is not always detectable using this technology. Therefore, research was performed that utilized the NIR region where it proved to be possible to detect and distinguish different road conditions, such as black ice. NIR camera technology was introduced in the research since the aim of the thesis was to find a method that provides information on the status of the road over a larger area. The results show that if several images taken in different spectral bands are analyzed with the support of advanced computer models, it is possible to distinguish between a dry, wet, icy and snowy surface. This resulted in the development of a NIR camera system that can distinguish between different surface statuses. Finally, two of these prototype systems for road condition classification were evaluated. These systems were installed at E14 on both sides of the border between Sweden and Norway. The results of these field tests show that this new road status classification, based on NIR imaging spectral analysis, provides new information about the status of the road surface, compared to what can be obtained from existing measurement systems, particularly for detecting differences in and between the wheel tracks.

The increasing variety of data mining tools offers a large palette of types and representation formats for predictive models. Managing the models then becomes a big challenge, as well as reusing the models and keeping the consistency of model and data repositories. Sustainable access and quality assessment of these models become limited to researchers. The approach for the Data and Model Governance (DMG) makes easier to process and support complex solutions. In this thesis, contributions are proposed towards ensembles of models with a focus on model representation, comparison and usage. Predictive Toxicology was chosen as an application field to demonstrate the proposed approach to represent predictive models linked to data for DMG. Further analysing methods such as predictive models comparison and predictive models combination for reusing the models from a collection of models were studied. Thus in this thesis, an original structure of the pool of models was proposed to represent predictive toxicology models called Predictive Toxicology Markup Language (PTML). PTML offers a representation scheme for predictive toxicology data and models generated by data mining tools. In this research, the proposed representation offers possibilities to compare models and select the relevant models based on different performance measures using proposed similarity measuring techniques. The relevant models were selected using a proposed cost function which is a composite of performance measures such as Accuracy (Acc), False Negative Rate (FNR) and False Positive Rate (FPR). The cost function will ensure that only quality models be selected as the candidate models for an ensemble. The proposed algorithm for optimisation and combination of Acc, FNR and FPR of ensemble models using double fault measure as the diversity measure improves Acc between 0.01 to 0.30 for all toxicology data sets compared to other ensemble methods such as Bagging, Stacking, Bayes and Boosting. The highest improvements for Acc were for data sets Bee (0.30), Oral Quail (0.13) and Daphnia (0.10). A small improvement (of about 0.01) in Acc was achieved for Dietary Quail and Trout. Important results by combining all the three performance measures are also related to reducing the distance between FNR and FPR for Bee, Daphnia, Oral Quail and Trout data sets for about 0.17 to 0.28. For Dietary Quail data set the improvement was about 0.01 though, but this data set is well known as a difficult learning exercise. For five UCI data sets tested, similar results were achieved with Acc improvement between 0.10 to 0.11, closing more the gaps between FNR and FPR. As a conclusion, the results show that by combining performance measures (Acc, FNR and FPR), as proposed within this thesis, the Acc increased and the distance between FNR and FPR decreased.

by Wai-Hoo Au Yeung. / Thesis submitted in 1997. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves i-v (3rd gp.)). / Abstract also in Chinese. / Acknowledgments / Abstract / Contents / Abbreviations & Tables / Chapter 1. --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1. --- What is a parameter? / Chapter 1.2. --- Parameter resetting in SLA / Chapter 1.3. --- Parameter as feature checking / Chapter 1.4. --- Research goals and outline of the thesis / Chapter 2. --- PARAMETERIZATION IN CHINESE NOMINALS --- p.18 / Chapter 2.1. --- DP-analysis and its parameterization / Chapter 2.2. --- Evaluation of the four models of Chinese nominal structures / Chapter 2.3. --- Parameterization in Cantonese and Mandarin nominals / Chapter 2.4. --- The Lexical CL Parameter / Chapter 3. --- METHODOLOGY --- p.86 / Chapter 3.1. --- The subject / Chapter 3.2. --- Timing of recording / Chapter 3.3. --- What is recorded / Chapter 3.4. --- The corpus / Chapter 3.5. --- Criteria of counting utterances and point of acquisition / Chapter 4. --- THE ACQUISITION OF CANTONESE NOMINALS --- p.92 / Chapter 4.1. --- Overall development of Cantonese nominal structure / Chapter 4.2. --- Acquisition of Cantonese-specific CLP properties / Chapter 4.3. --- Comparison with native Cantonese children's data / Chapter 4.4. --- Acquisition by resetting the Lexical CL Parameter / Chapter 5. --- AN INFORMAL EXPERIMENT ON GENERIC di AND di-N PHRASES --- p.118 / Chapter 5.1. --- Design of the experiment / Chapter 5.2. --- Materials / Chapter 5.3. --- Procedures and results / Chapter 5.4. --- Comparison between Ching's and native children's results / Chapter 6. --- CONCLUSION --- p.134 / Chapter 6.1. --- Theoretical and acquisition findings / Chapter 6.2. --- Further evidence for parameter resetting / Chapter 6.3. --- Implications for future research / Chapter 6.4. --- Concluding remarks / References / Appendix A: 3 sample files of the corpus

In light of the observation made by Bowers (1991: 19) that Mandarin classifiers are phonetic realization of a functional head Nm, whose semantic function is to turn properties into propositional functions, it is postulated that classifiers in Nuosu Yi can also be identified as this type of predication operator (Pr). / The classifier in Nuosu Yi can appear in possessives. Its function is to link the possessor noun and possessed noun and form a possession relation between them. However, Pr in Nuosu Yi possessives may not always be realized as a CL. When a Nuosu Yi speaker does not want to specify the number of the possessed item, he will not use classifiers to link the possessor and the possessed noun. In this case, Pr has no phonetic realization. Based on this observation, we propose that classifiers in East Asian classifier languages are likely to be grammaticalized into Pr, but this grammaticalization path is not unitary. Besides classifiers, Pr may take on other forms such as possessive marker ge in Cantonese, possessive marker de in Mandarin, possessive marker a in Jingpo, and an empty possessive marker in Nuosu Yi. / The conclusion of this thesis is that possessive markers and relative markers are indeed of the same syntactic category Pr and they come into narrow syntax computation (from Numeration to LF) in the same manner. / The nature of predication within complex nominals is studied through examination of the syntax and semantics of possessive and relative constructions in Nuosu Yi. The proposed theory is also shown to be applicable to Mandarin, Cantonese, and Jingpo. / The whole picture of the complex nominal structure in Yi is further complicated by the cooccurrence of su and a classifier with a RC. In this case, su is analyzed as a D-element. The real predication operator is still the classifier. / When classifiers serve as RC markers in Nuosu Yi, we are able to tell the exact number of the relativized item. When a Nuosu Yi speaker does not want to specify the exact number of the relativized item, he will use the morpheme su. Semantically, it does not specify the number of the relativized noun, but it renders the relativized noun definite. We propose that this morpheme su is a definite article D, which plays a deciding role in encoding the definiteness of the whole complex nominal which contains a RC. The relative clause marker, in this case, is a phonetically null element. / Liu, Hongyong. / "November 2006." / Adviser: Yang Gu. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-08, Section: A, page: 3369. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-245). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.