We present ASemiNER, a semisupervised algorithm for identifying Named Entities (NEs) in Arabic text. ASemiNER does not require annotated training data, or gazetteers. It also can be easily adapted to handle more than the three standard NE types (Person, Location, and Organisation). To our knowledge, our algorithm is the first study that intensively investigates the semi-supervised pattern-based...

The amount of unlabeled linguistic data available to us is much larger and growing much faster than the amount of labeled data. Semi-supervised learning algorithms combine unlabeled data with a small labeled training set to train better models. This tutorial emphasizes practical applications of semisupervised learning; we treat semi-supervised learning methods as tools for building effective mo...

In multimedia annotation, labeling a large amount of training data by human is both time-consuming and tedious. Therefore, to automate this process, a number of methods that leverage unlabeled training data have been proposed. Normally, a given multimedia sample is associated with multiple labels, which may have inherent correlations in real world. Classical multimedia annotation algorithms add...

This paper describes a technique for modeling and controlling emotional expressivity of speech in HMM-based speech synthesis. A problem of conventional emotional speech synthesis based on HMM is that the intensity of an emotional expression appearing in synthetic speech completely depends on the database used for model training. To take into account the emotional expressivity that listeners act...

Many organizations maintain identity information for their customers, vendors, and employees, etc. However, identities being compromised cannot be retrieved effectively. In this paper we first present a case study on identity problems existing in a local police department. The study show that more than half of the sampled suspects have altered identities existing in the police information syste...

We present a semi-supervised language modeling technique to improve search performance on terms without training data. Probabilities estimated from automatic transcripts of a large corpus of in-domain audio are added to an existing LM. Requiring neither development data or external resources, our method achieves 70% of the possible gain for manual transcription of the same audio. This is in sha...

The present work describes a classification schema for irony detection in Greek political tweets. Our hypothesis states that humorous political tweets could predict actual election results. The irony detection concept is based on subjective perceptions, so only relying on human-annotator driven labor might not be the best route. The proposed approach relies on limited labeled training data, thu...

State-of-the-art approaches for image captioning require supervised training data consisting of captions with paired image data. These methods are typically unable to use unsupervised data such as textual data with no corresponding images, which is a much more abundant commodity. We here propose a novel way of using such textual data by artificially generating missing visual information. We eva...

Software testing is difficult to automate, especially in programs which have no oracle, or method of determining which output is correct. Metamorphic testing is a solution this problem. Metamorphic testing uses metamorphic relations to define test cases and expected outputs. A large amount of time is needed for a domain expert to determine which metamorphic relations can be used to test a given...

Mining online discussions to extract answers is an important research problem. Methods proposed in the past used supervised classifiers trained on labeled data. But, collecting training data for each target forum is labor intensive and time consuming, thus limiting their deployment. A recent approach had proposed to extract answers in an unsupervised manner, by taking cues from their repetition...