Computer Science Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2756
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Item Temporal Context Modeling for Text Streams(2018) Rao, Jinfeng; Lin, Jimmy; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)There is increasing recognition that time plays an essential role in many information seeking tasks. This dissertation explores temporal models on evolving streams of text and the role that such models play in improving information access. I consider two cases: a stream of social media posts by many users for tweet search and a stream of queries by an individual user for voice search. My work explores the relationship between temporal models and context models: for tweet search, the evolution of an event serves as the context of clustering relevant tweets; for voice search, the user's history of queries provides the context for helping understand her true information need. First, I tackle the tweet search problem by modeling the temporal contexts of the underlying collection. The intuition is that an information need in Twitter usually correlates with a breaking news event, thus tweets posted during that event are more likely to be relevant. I explore techniques to model two different types of temporal signals: pseudo trend and query trend. The pseudo trend is estimated through the distribution of timestamps from an initial list of retrieved documents given a query, which I model through continuous hidden Markov approach as well as neural network-based methods for relevance ranking and sequence modeling. As an alternative, the query trend, is directly estimated from the temporal statistics of query terms, obviating the need for an initial retrieval. I propose two different approaches to exploit query trends: a linear feature-based ranking model and a regression-based model that recover the distribution of relevant documents directly from query trends. Extensive experiments on standard Twitter collections demonstrate the superior effectivenesses of my proposed techniques. Second, I introduce the novel problem of voice search on an entertainment platform, where users interact with a voice-enabled remote controller through voice requests to search for TV programs. Such queries range from specific program navigation (i.e., watch a movie) to requests with vague intents and even queries that have nothing to do with watching TV. I present successively richer neural network architectures to tackle this challenge based on two key insights: The first is that session context can be exploited to disambiguate queries and recover from ASR errors, which I operationalize with hierarchical recurrent neural networks. The second insight is that query understanding requires evidence integration across multiple related tasks, which I identify as program prediction, intent classification, and query tagging. I present a novel multi-task neural architecture that jointly learns to accomplish all three tasks. The first model, already deployed in production, serves millions of queries daily with an improved customer experience. The multi-task learning model is evaluated on carefully-controlled laboratory experiments, which demonstrates further gains in effectiveness and increased system capabilities. This work now serves as the core technology in Comcast Xfinity X1 entertainment platform, which won an Emmy award in 2017 for the technical contribution in advancing television technologies. This dissertation presents families of techniques for modeling temporal information as contexts to assist applications with streaming inputs, such as tweet search and voice search. My models not only establish the state-of-the-art effectivenesses on many related tasks, but also reveal insights of how various temporal patterns could impact real information-seeking processes.Item The Influence of Collective Working Memory Strategies on Agent Teams(2007-08-03) Winder, Ransom Kershaw; Reggia, James A.; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Past self-organizing models of collectively moving "particles" (simulated bird flocks, fish schools, etc.) typically have been based on purely reflexive agents that have no significant memory of past movements or environmental obstacles. These agent collectives usually operate in abstract environments, but as these domains take on a greater realism, the collective requires behaviors use not only presently observed stimuli but also remembered information. It is hypothesized that the addition of a limited working memory of the environment, distributed among the collective's individuals can improve efficiency in performing tasks. This is first approached in a more traditional particle system in an abstract environment. Then it is explored for a single agent, and finally a team of agents, operating in a simulated 3-dimensional environment of greater realism. In the abstract environment, a limited distributed working memory produced a significant improvement in travel between locations, in some cases improving performance over time, while in others surprisingly achieving an immediate benefit from the influence of memory. When strategies for accumulating and manipulating memory were subsequently explored for a more realistic single agent in the 3-dimensional environment, if the agent kept a local or a cumulative working memory, its performance improved on different tasks, both when navigating nearby obstacles and, in the case of cumulative memory, when covering previously traversed terrain. When investigating a team of these agents engaged in a pursuit scenario, it was determined that a communicating and coordinating team still benefited from a working memory of the environment distributed among the agents, even with limited memory capacity. This demonstrates that a limited distributed working memory in a multi-agent system improves performance on tasks in domains of increasing complexity. This is true even though individual agents know only a fraction of the collective's entire memory, using this partial memory and interactions with others in the team to perform tasks. These results may prove useful in improving existing methodologies for control of collective movements for robotic teams, computer graphics, particle swarm optimization, and computer games, and in interpreting future experimental research on group movements in biological populations.Item Neural Network Generation of Temporal Sequences from Single Static Vector Inputs using Varying Length Distal Target Sequences(2007-04-10) Gittens, Shaun; Reggia, James; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Training an agent to operate in an environment whose mappings are largely unknown is generally recognized to be exceptionally difficult. Further, granting such a learning agent the ability to produce an appropriate sequence of actions entirely from a single input stimulus remains a key problem. Various reinforcement learning techniques have been utilized to handle such learning tasks, but convergence to optimal policies is not guaranteed for many of these methods. Traditional supervised learning methods hold more assurances of convergence, but these methods are not well suited for tasks where desired actions in the output space of the learner, termed proximal actions, are not available for training. Rather, target outputs from the environment are distal from where the learning takes place. For example, a child acquiring language skill who makes speech errors must learn to correct them based on heard information that reaches his/her auditory cortex, which is distant from the motor cortical regions that control speech output. While distal supervised learning techniques for neural networks have been devised, it remains to be established how they can be trained to produce sequences of proximal actions from only a single static input. The architecture demonstrated here incorporates recurrent multi-layered neural networks, each maintaining some manner of memory in the form of a context vector, into the distal supervised learning framework. This enables it to train learners capable of generating correct proximal sequences from single static input stimuli. This is in contrast to existing distal learning methods designed for non-recurrent neural network learners that utilize no concept of memory of their prior behavior. Also, a technique known as teacher forcing was adapted for use in distal sequential learning settings which is shown to result in more efficient usage of the recurrent neural network's context layer. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by applying it in training recurrent learners to acquire phoneme sequence generating behavior using only previously heard and stored auditory phoneme sequences. The results indicate that recurrent networks can be integrated with distal learning methods to create effective sequence generators even when constantly updating current state information is unavailable.