Learning general functional dependencies between arbitrary input and output spaces is one of the key challenges in computational intelligence. While recent progress in machine learning has mainly focused on designing flexible and powerful input representations, this paper addresses the complementary issue of designing classification algorithms that can deal with more complex outputs, such as trees, sequences, or sets. More generally, we consider problems involving multiple dependent output variables, structured output spaces, and classification problems with class attributes. In order to accomplish this, we propose to appropriately generalize the well-known notion of a separation margin and derive a corresponding maximum-margin formulation. While this leads to a quadratic program with a potentially prohibitive, i.e. exponential, number of constraints, we present a cutting plane algorithm that solves the optimization problem in polynomial time for a large class of problems. The proposed method has important applications in areas such as computational biology, natural language processing, information retrieval/extraction, and optical character recognition. Experiments from various domains involving different types of output spaces emphasize the breadth and generality of our approach.

Learning general functional dependencies is one of the main goals in machine learning. Recent progress in kernel-based methods has focused on designing flexible and powerful input representations. This paper addresses the complementary issue of problems involving complex outputs such as multiple dependent output variables and structured output spaces. We propose to generalize multiclass Support Vector Machine learning in a formulation that involves features extracted jointly from inputs and outputs. The resulting optimization problem is solved efficiently by a cutting plane algorithm that exploits the sparseness and structural decomposition of the problem. We demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of our method on problems ranging from supervised grammar learning and named-entity recognition, to taxonomic text classification and sequence alignment.

This paper presents a new method for topic-based document segmentation, i.e., the identification of boundaries between parts of a document that bear on different topics. The method combines the use of the Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) model with the method of selecting segmentation points based on the similarity values between pairs of adjacent blocks. The use of PLSA allows for a better representation of sparse information in a text block, such as a sentence or a sequence of sentences. Furthermore, segmentation performance is improved by combining different instantiations of the same model, either using different random initializations or different numbers of latent classes. Results on commonly available data sets are significantly better than those of other state-of-the-art systems.

This paper presents two new formulations of multiple-instance learning as a maximum margin problem. The proposed extensions of the Support Vector Machine (SVM) learning approach lead to mixed integer quadratic programs that can be solved heuristically. Our generalization of SVMs makes a state-of-the-art classification technique, including non-linear classification via kernels, available to an area that up to now has been largely dominated by special purpose methods. We present experimental results on a pharma(cid:173) ceutical data set and on applications in automated image indexing and document categorization.