Machine translation between Hebrew and Arabic

Hebrew and Arabic are related but mutually incomprehensible languages with complex morphology and scarce parallel corpora. Machine translation between the two languages is therefore interesting and challenging. We discuss similarities and differences between Hebrew and Arabic, the benefits and challenges that they induce, respectively, and their implications on machine translation. We highlight the shortcomings of using English as a pivot language and advocate a direct, transfer-based and linguistically-informed (but still statistical, and hence scalable) approach. We report preliminary results of the two systems we are currently developing, for translation in both directions.     

A finite mixture model for simultaneous high-dimensional clustering, localized feature selection and outlier rejection

Model-based approaches and in particular finite mixture models are widely used for data clustering which is a crucial step in several applications of practical importance. Indeed, many pattern recognition, computer vision and image processing applications can be approached as feature space clustering problems. For complex high-dimensional data, however, the use of these approaches presents several challenges such as the presence of many irrelevant features which may affect the speed and also compromise the accuracy of the used learning algorithm. Another problem is the presence of outliers which potentially influence the resulting model’s parameters. For this purpose, we propose and discuss an algorithm that partitions a given data set without a priori information about the number of clusters, the saliency of the features or the number of outliers. We illustrate the performance of our approach using different applications involving synthetic data, real data and objects shape clustering.     

Spatial color image segmentation based on finite non-Gaussian mixture models

Finite mixture models are one of the most widely and commonly used probabilistic techniques for image segmentation. Although the most well known and commonly used distribution when considering mixture models is the Gaussian, it is certainly not the best approximation for image segmentation and other related image processing problems. In this paper, we propose and investigate the use of several other mixture models based namely on Dirichlet, generalized Dirichlet and Beta–Liouville distributions, which offer more flexibility in data modeling, for image segmentation. A maximum likelihood (ML) based algorithm is applied for estimating the resulted segmentation model’s parameters. Spatial information is also employed for figuring out the number of regions in an image and several color spaces are investigated and compared. The experimental results show that the proposed segmentation framework yields good overall performance, on various color scenes, that is better than comparable techniques.     

A new sliding function for discrete predictive sliding mode control of time delay systems

The control of time delay systems is still an open area for research. This paper proposes an enhanced model predictive discrete-time sliding mode control with a new sliding function for a linear system with state delay. Firstly, a new sliding function including a present value and a past value of the state, called dynamic surface, is designed by means of linear matrix inequalities （LMIs）. Then, using this dynamic function and the rolling optimization method in the predictive control strategy, a discrete predictive sliding mode controller is synthesized. This new strategy is proposed to eliminate the undesirable effect of the delay term in the closed loop system. Also, the designed control strategy is more robust, and has a chattering reduction property and a faster convergence of the system s state. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control.     

Mise au point d'un absorbeur par voie semi-sèche à base d'un venturi haute énergie

In order to minimize the absorber's volume, the research deals with the development of a wet-dry treatment device for acid flue gases (SO₂ in air) constituted by a high energy venturi. An experimental comparison between the three apparatus studied allows, according to identified experimental parameters, to choose the device, called C, where the evaporation and the sulfur dioxide absorption efficiencies are clearly greater than those obtained with the other two devices. Then, for this device, we specify the optimum geometrical and experimental conditions. The sulfur dioxide is absorbed by a NaOH solution or a Ca(OH)₂ slurry. With a basic slurry of Ca(OH)₂, the results obtained are better than those found in the literature, dealing with the more conventional devices constituted by a spray dryer.     

Non-Gaussian Data Clustering via Expectation Propagation Learning of Finite Dirichlet Mixture Models and Applications

Learning appropriate statistical models is a fundamental data analysis task which has been the topic of continuing interest. Recently, finite Dirichlet mixture models have proved to be an effective and flexible model learning technique in several machine learning and data mining applications. In this article, the problem of learning and selecting finite Dirichlet mixture models is addressed using an expectation propagation (EP) inference framework. Within the proposed EP learning method, for finite mixture models, all the involved parameters and the model complexity (i.e. the number of mixture components), can be evaluated simultaneously in a single optimization framework. Extensive simulations using synthetic data along with two challenging real-world applications involving automatic image annotation and human action videos categorization demonstrate that our approach is able to achieve better results than comparable techniques.     

Damage identification in three-dimensional structures using single-objective evolutionary algorithms and finite element model updating: evaluation and comparison

This study presents a methodology which integrates single-objective evolutionary algorithms (EAs) and finite element (FE) model updating for damage inference in three-dimensional (3D) structures. First, original well-known EAs, namely the genetic algorithm, differential evolution (DE) and particle swarm optimization (PSO), are combined with FE model updating for detecting damage in a 3D four-storey modular structure and their performances are compared. Next, to obtain more accurate results, hybrid Lévy flights–DE and hybrid artificial bee colony–PSO are developed for enhancing damage identification. With each method, the objective function composed of modal strain energy and mode shape residuals, taken from the FE model of the intact structure and the simulated damage responses, is initially created. Then, the performance of each algorithm combined with FE model updating for damage detection is assessed in terms of three characteristics: consistency, computational cost and accuracy, and the best performing algorithm is recommended.     

A study of spam filtering using support vector machines

Electronic mail is a major revolution taking place over traditional communication systems due to its convenient, economical, fast, and easy to use nature. A major bottleneck in electronic communications is the enormous dissemination of unwanted, harmful emails known as spam emails. A major concern is the developing of suitable filters that can adequately capture those emails and achieve high performance rate. Machine learning (ML) researchers have developed many approaches in order to tackle this problem. Within the context of machine learning, support vector machines (SVM) have made a large contribution to the development of spam email filtering. Based on SVM, different schemes have been proposed through text classification approaches (TC). A crucial problem when using SVM is the choice of kernels as they directly affect the separation of emails in the feature space. This paper presents thorough investigation of several distance-based kernels and specify spam filtering behaviors using SVM. The majority of used kernels in recent studies concern continuous data and neglect the structure of the text. In contrast to classical kernels, we propose the use of various string kernels for spam filtering. We show how effectively string kernels suit spam filtering problem. On the other hand, data preprocessing is a vital part of text classification where the objective is to generate feature vectors usable by SVM kernels. We detail a feature mapping variants in TC that yield improved performance for the standard SVM in filtering task. Furthermore, to cope for realtime scenarios we propose an online active framework for spam filtering. We present empirical results from an extensive study of online, transductive, and online active methods for classifying spam emails in real time. We show that active online method using string kernels achieves higher precision and recall rates.     

Bayesian learning of inverted Dirichlet mixtures for SVM kernels generation

We describe approaches for positive data modeling and classification using both finite inverted Dirichlet mixture models and support vector machines (SVMs). Inverted Dirichlet mixture models are used to tackle an outstanding challenge in SVMs namely the generation of accurate kernels. The kernels generation approaches, grounded on ideas from information theory that we consider, allow the incorporation of data structure and its structural constraints. Inverted Dirichlet mixture models are learned within a principled Bayesian framework using both Gibbs sampler and Metropolis-Hastings for parameter estimation and Bayes factor for model selection (i.e., determining the number of mixture’s components). Our Bayesian learning approach uses priors, which we derive by showing that the inverted Dirichlet distribution belongs to the family of exponential distributions, over the model parameters, and then combines these priors with information from the data to build posterior distributions. We illustrate the merits and the effectiveness of the proposed method with two real-world challenging applications namely object detection and visual scenes analysis and classification.     

A Hybrid Feature Extraction Selection Approach for High-Dimensional Non-Gaussian Data Clustering

This paper presents an unsupervised approach for feature selection and extraction in mixtures of generalized Dirichlet (GD) distributions. Our method defines a new mixture model that is able to extract independent and non-Gaussian features without loss of accuracy. The proposed model is learned using the Expectation-Maximization algorithm by minimizing the message length of the data set. Experimental results show the merits of the proposed methodology in the categorization of object images.