University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Learning with Incidental Supervision

Klementiev, Alexandre A.

Content Files
Klementiev_Alexandre.pdf

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/14553

Description

Title
Learning with Incidental Supervision
Author(s)
Klementiev, Alexandre A.
Issue Date
2010-01-06T16:11:58Z
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Roth, Dan
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Roth, Dan
Committee Member(s)
  • Forsyth, David A.
  • Pereira, Fernando
  • Zhai, ChengXiang
Department of Study
Computer Science
Discipline
Computer Science
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Date of Ingest
2010-01-06T16:11:58Z
Keyword(s)
  • machine learning
  • natural language processing
  • prediction aggregation
Abstract
Recent technological advances have facilitated the collection and distribution of a plethora of increasingly diverse and complex data. Supervised learning has been able to provide the toolbox of choice for exploiting it to study and model numerous natural and social phenomena. These learning techniques typically require substantial amounts of training data in order to induce good solutions. However, generating annotation often places a significant burden on human experts, and makes supervised learning methods costly to apply. On the other hand, data itself often provides hints sufficient to induce high quality supervision and utilizing these hints can be substantially less labor intensive than producing explicit annotation. This thesis introduces a framework we call Learning with Incidental Supervision, which formalizes these concepts. In particular, we show that various aspects of the data often contain cues capable of inducing weak supervision signals, which could in turn be aggregated to produce high quality annotation. We examine both the derivation of these signals and aggregation of their predictions in the context of concrete learning tasks, making independent contributions in both cases. We use the task of Named Entity Discovery to demonstrate that inherent properties of unsupervised multilingual data readily available online can be used to derive multiple weak supervision signals capable of inducing named entity annotation in a new language. We show that combining these signals can substantially improve the resulting annotation. Next, we introduce a general unsupervised learning framework for aggregating predictions from multiple weak supervision sources in order to induce high quality annotation. We exploit agreement between the signals to estimate their relative quality and learn an effective aggregation model. The mathematical and algorithmic aggregation framework can in principle be applied to combining arbitrary types of predictions, and has a large number of applications on its own. We instantiate it and demonstrate its effectiveness for combining permutations, top-k lists, and dependency parses.
Graduation Semester
2009-12
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/14553
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2009 Alexandre Klementiev

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