Bayesian Optimization (BO) methods are often used to optimize an unknown function f(•) that is costly to evaluate. They typically work in an iterative manner. In each iteration, given a set of observation points, BO algorithms select k ≥ 1 points to be evaluated. The results of those points are...
In bioacoustics, automatic animal voice detection and recognition from audio recordings is an emerging topic for animal preservation. Our research focuses on bird bioacoustics, where the goal is to segment bird syllables from the recording and predict the bird species for the syllables. Traditional methods for this task addresses the...
Recent work in machine learning concerns the detection and identification of bird species from audio recordings of their vocalizations. Such analysis can yield valuable ecological information concerning the activity and distribution of species in the wild. Current species-identification methods require individual syllables of bird audio as input, but field-collected audio...
Bioacoustics analysis can be used to conduct environmental monitoring by detecting the presence of birds species. This analysis usually involves identifying the species from their calls. In most frameworks, bird song syllables are extracted from audio recordings and individual syllables are input to a classifier to identify the species. Extraction...
Information about named entities (real-world objects) is usually harvested from different sources and organized as a multiple relational directed graph in Knowledge Bases (KBs). KBs play essential roles in many NLP modules including question answering, fact-checking, search engines, etc. KBs are big but still incomplete: relational information among entities is...
Automatic event extraction from natural text is an important and challenging task for natural language understanding. Traditional event detection methods heavily rely on manually engineered rich features. Recent deep learning approaches alleviate this problem by automatic feature engineering. But such efforts, like tradition methods, have so far only focused on...
Easy-first, a search-based structured prediction approach, has been applied to many NLP tasks including dependency parsing and coreference resolution. This approach employs a learned greedy policy (action scoring function) to make easy decisions first, which constrains the remaining decisions and makes them easier. This thesis studies the problem of learning...
Semi-supervised clustering aims to improve clustering performance by considering user supervision in the form of pairwise constraints. In this paper, we study the active learning problem of selecting pairwise must-link and cannot-link constraints for semisupervised clustering. We consider active learning in an iterative manner where in each iteration queries are...
The advent of deep learning models leads to a substantial improvement in a wide range of NLP tasks, achieving state-of-art performances without any hand-crafted features. However, training deep models requires a massive amount of labeled data. Labeling new data as a new task or domain emerges consumes time and efforts...
Natural Language Comprehension is a challenging domain of Natural Language Processing. To improve a model’s language comprehension/understanding, one approach would be to enrich the structure of the model to enhance its capability in learning the latent rules of the language.
In this dissertation, we will first introduce several deep models...