Abstract

Abstract
Assigning a category to a given word (tagging) depends on the particular word and on the categories (tags) of neighboring words. A theory that is able to assign tags to a given text can naturally be viewed as a recursive logic program. This article describes how iterative induction, a technique that has been proven powerful in the synthesis of recursive logic programs, has been applied to the task of part-of-speech tagging. The main strategy consists of inducing a succession T1, T2,…, Tn of theories, using in the induction of theory Ti all the previously induced theories. Each theory in the sequence may have lexical rules, context rules and hybrid ones. This iterative strategy is, to a large extent, independent of the inductive algorithm underneath. Here we consider one particular relational learning algorithm, CSC(RC), and we induce first order theories from positive examples and background knowledge that are able to successfully tag a relatively large corpus in Portuguese. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000.

Abstract

Abstract
We are developing a new method for the identification of rib boundaries in chest x-ray images. The identification of rib boundaries is important for radiologist diagnosis of lung diseases as TB. The radiologists use the ribs as reference for location and can be used to eliminate false positives in the detection of abnormalities. Our method automatically identifies rib boundaries from raw images through a sequence of steps using a combination of image processing techniques. Radiographs are still very relevant in practice because in Portugal and many other countries it is the first step for TB detection. We have access a large database of x-ray images provided by the pneumological screening centre (CDP) of Vila Nova de Gaia, in Portugal.

Abstract
Long-term travel time prediction (TTP) can be an important planning tool for both freight transport and public transport companies. In both cases it is expected that the use of long-term TTP can improve the quality of the planned services by reducing the error between the actual and the planned travel times. However, for reasons that we try to stretch out along this paper, long-term TTP is almost not mentioned in the scientific literature. In this paper we discuss the relevance of this study and compare three non-parametric state-of-the-art regression methods: Projection Pursuit Regression (PPR), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forests (RF). For each one of these methods we study the best combination of input parameters. We also study the impact of different methods for the pre-processing tasks (feature selection, example selection and domain values definition) in the accuracy of those algorithms. We use bus travel time's data from a bus dispatch system. From an off-the-shelf point-of-view, our experiments show that RF is the most promising approach from the three we have tested. However, it is possible to obtain more accurate results using PPR but with extra pre-processing work, namely on example selection and domain values definition.

Abstract
In this paper we propose a framework for defining and discovering optimal association rules involving a numerical attribute A in the consequent. The consequent has the form of interval conditions (A < x, A >= x or A is an element of I where I is an interval or a set of intervals of the form [x(l), x(u))). The optimality is with respect to leverage, one well known association rule interest measure. The generated rules are called Maximal Leverage Rules (MLR) and are generated from Distribution Rules. The principle for finding the MLR is related to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov goodness of fit statistical test. We propose different methods for MLR generation, taking into account leverage optimallity and readability. We theoretically demonstrate the optimality of the main exact methods, and measure the leverage loss of approximate methods. We show empirically that the discovery process is scalable.