DTAI

Monday May 6, 2013 at 16h30 in Celestijnenlaan 200A (auditorium 00.225)

On the Importance of Relations for Natural Language Learning
by Mathias Verbeke (PhD student DTAI)

Memory-based learning (MBL) is a technique that is founded in the well-known k-nearest neighbor (kNN) algorithm. Since a lot of natural language learning tasks are characterized by only a few clear generalizations, with many conflicting sub-regularities and exceptions, this approach has proven to be successful for many natural language processing problems. In recent years, learning from structured data has attracted a lot of attention, due to which also the syntactic and semantic relational features have gained importance. In the first part of this seminar, we will therefore present a relational memory-based learning approach that integrates the powerful formalisms of statistical relational learning (SRL) in a memory-based setting.

In the second part of the seminar, we will illustrate the importance of context with an SRL approach to identifying evidence-based medicine categories, a problem in biomedical information retrieval. Evidence-based medicine is an approach to clinical practice whereby clinical decisions are supported by the best available findings gained from scientific research. This requires efficient access to such evidence. To this end, abstracts in evidence-based medicine can be labeled using a set of predefined medical categories, the so-called PICO criteria. Since both structural and sequential information are important for this classification task, we will illustrate the advantage of using an SRL approach for this multiclass multilabel classification problem.

Tias Guns has won the Wolsey Award for "Best OR (Operations Research) related open-source implementation" with his CP4IM software package.

For more information:

• N-side Wolsey Award page
• CP4IM website

Pieter Wuille will be defending his doctoral thesis, entitled "Functional programming abstractions for CP modeling."  All are invited.

The defense will take place on December 6th, 2011 in Auditorium De Molen. More information, including a form for confirming your presence, can be found at http://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~pieter.wuille/phd.php

On Friday, December 19, the Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence research group of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven organizes the symposium "Consistency Handling in Relational Databases" at the Computer Science Department of the K.U. Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200A, 3001 Heverlee, Belgium.

Attending the symposium is free, but registration is required (by December 16).

Program:

13:00 - "Distance Semantics for Reasoning with Inconsistency in Information Systems" by Ofer Arieli (Academic College of Tel-Aviv, Israel)
14:00 - "Consistent Query Answering: The First Ten Years" By Jan Chomicki (University at Buffalo, NY, USA)
15:00 - Coffee break
15:30 - "Consistent query answering under primary key constraints ". By Jef Wijsen Université de Mons-Hainaut, Mons, Belgium
17:00 - PhD Defense Álvaro Cortés: "Towards a Logical Reconstruction of a Theory for Locally Complete Databases"

For more information about the program, registration and location, please visit:http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~alvaro/phddefense/symposium.html