A major opportunity for NLP to have a realworld impact is in helping educators score student writing, particularly content-based writing (i.e., the task of automated short answer scoring). A major challenge in this enterprise is that scored responses to a particular question (i.e., labeled data) are valuable for modeling but limited in quantity. Additional information from the scoring guideline...

Existing statistical approaches to natural language problems are very coarse approximations to the true complexity of language processing. As such, no single technique will be best for all problem instances. Many researchers are examining ensemble methods that combine the output of successful, separately developed modules to create more accurate solutions. This paper examines three merging rule...

Decision tree learning is a machine learning technique that allows us to generate accurate and comprehensible models. Accuracy can be improved by ensemble methods which combine the predictions of a set of different trees. However, a large amount of resources is necessary to generate the ensemble. In this paper, we introduce a new ensemble method that minimises the usage of resources by sharing ...

Ensemble models can achieve more accurate predictions than single learners. Selective ensembles further improve the predictions by selecting an informative subset of the full ensemble. We consider reinforcement learning ensembles, where the members are neural networks. In this context we study a new algorithm for ensemble subset selection in reinforcement learning scenarios. The aim of the prop...

Negative correlation learning (NCL) is a successful approach to constructing neural network ensembles. In batch learning mode, NCL outperforms many other ensemble learning approaches. Recently, NCL has also shown to be a potentially powerful approach to incremental learning, while the advantages of NCL have not yet been fully exploited. In this paper, we propose a selective NCL (SNCL) algorithm...

This paper is concerned with the question of how to online combine an ensemble of active learners so as to expedite the learning progress during a pool-based active learning session. We develop a powerful active learning master algorithm, based a known competitive algorithm for the multi-armed bandit problem and a novel semi-supervised performance evaluation statistic. Taking an ensemble contai...

Model averaging (MA) estimators in the linear instrumental variables regression framework are considered. The obtaining of weights for averaging across individual estimates by direct smoothing of selection criteria arising from the estimation stage is proposed. This is particularly relevant in applications in which there is a large number of candidate instruments and, therefore, a considerable ...

The present paper investigates the problem of prediction in the context of dynamically changing environment, where data arrive over time. A Dynamic online Ensemble Learning Algorithm (DELA) is introduced. The adaptivity concerns three levels: structural adaptivity, combination adaptivity and model adaptivity. In particular, the structure of the ensemble is sought to evolve in order to be able t...

Ensemble methods improve accuracy by combining the predictions of a set of different hypotheses. However, there are two important shortcomings associated with ensemble methods. Huge amounts of memory are required to store a set of multiple hypotheses and, more importantly, comprehensibility of a single hypothesis is lost. In this work, we devise a new method to extract one single solution from ...