Sharif Digital Repository

The ability to accurately determine temporal relations between events is an important task for several natural language processing applications such as Question Answering, Summarization, and Information Extraction. Since current supervised methods require large corpora, which for many languages do not exist, we have focused our attention on approaches with less supervision as much as possible. This paper presents a fully generative model for temporal relation extraction based on the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. Our experiments show that the performance of the proposed algorithm, regarding its little supervision, is considerable in temporal relation learning  

In this paper, we focus on the mixing matrix estimation which is the first step of Sparse Component Analysis. We propose a novel algorithm based on Expectation- Maximization (EM) algorithm in the case of two-sensor set up. Then, a novel iterative Bayesian clustering is applied to yield better results in estimating the mixing matrix. Also, we compute the Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimates of the elements of the second row of the mixing matrix based on each cluster. The simulations show that the proposed method has better accuracy and less failure than the EM-Laplacian Mixture Model (EM-LMM) method. copyright by EURASIP  

Discrete Phase-Type (DPH) distributions have one property that is not shared by Continuous Phase-Type (CPH) distributions, i.e., representing a deterministic value as a DPH random variable. This property distinguishes the application of DPH in stochastic modeling of real-life problems, such as stochastic scheduling, in which service time random variables should be compared with a deadline that is usually a constant value. In this paper, we consider a restricted class of DPH distributions, called Mixed Shifted Negative Binomial (MSNB), and show its flexibility in producing a wide range of variances as well as its adequacy in fitting fat-tailed distributions. These properties render MSNB... 

Discrete Phase-Type (DPH) distributions have one property that is not shared by Continuous Phase-Type (CPH) distributions, i.e., representing a deterministic value as a DPH random variable. This property distinguishes the application of DPH in stochastic modeling of real-life problems, such as stochastic scheduling, in which service time random variables should be compared with a deadline that is usually a constant value. In this paper, we consider a restricted class of DPH distributions, called Mixed Shifted Negative Binomial (MSNB), and show its flexibility in producing a wide range of variances as well as its adequacy in fitting fat-tailed distributions. These properties render MSNB... 

One of the most important goals of any organization for a product that goes into the design or manufacturing process is to improve its reliability. Reliability growth is defined as improving a product's criteria (input parameters) during operation using changes in design or production. This paper presents a hardware-centric approach for the reliability growth of systems following normal distribution based on the Non-Homogeneous Poisson Process (NHPP). To reach this goal, the reliability growth modeling equations for the NHPP with the assumption of the normal distribution for failure data are extracted and obtained. Then, the maximum likelihood estimation technique based on the... 

The performance of several regression methods is investigated to estimate the distribution of engineering demand parameters conditioned on intensity measures (EDP|IM) for small record sets. In particular, the performance of the multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS), a simultaneous mean-variance regression (MVR) done by a penalized weighted least-square loss function, and a mean-covariance/variance regression based on expectation maximization method (EM) are assessed. The efficiency of the introduced methods is compared with FEMA-P58 methodology. Performance assessment of EM and MVR methods shows that the overall increase in efficiency is about 25–45% for maximum inter-story drift ratios,... 

Automatic extraction of temporal relations between event pairs is an important task for several natural language processing applications such as Question Answering, Information Extraction, and Summarization. Since most existing methods are supervised and require large corpora, which for many languages do not exist, we have concentrated our efforts to reduce the need for annotated data as much as possible. This paper presents two different algorithms towards this goal. The first algorithm is a weakly supervised machine learning approach for classification of temporal relations between events. In the first stage, the algorithm learns a general classifier from an annotated corpus. Then,... 

Point Set Registration (PSR) of anatomic parts is used in different fields such as Patient Specific Implant (PSI) design in Computer Assisted Surgery (CAS) procedure. We designed a modified rigid PSR method based on student's-t mixture model. The proposed method is compared with Coherent Point Drift (CPD) registration method. Higher convergence speed and the lower error value are the advantages of the suggested algorithm in compare with CPD. In our method, the number of iterations decreases by about 69%, and the final error improvement was about 7% in comparison with CPD. The robustness of the proposed algorithm makes it beneficial to be used in the procedure of designing PSI in both... 

In this paper, a new algorithm for source recovery in under-determined Sparse Component Analysis (SCA) or atomic decomposition on over-complete dictionaries is presented in the noisy case. The algorithm is essentially a method for obtaining sufficiently sparse solutions of under-determined systems of linear equations with additive Gaussian noise. The method is based on iterative Expectation-Maximization of a Maximum A Posteriori estimation of sources (EM-MAP) and a new steepest-descent method is introduced for the optimization in the Mstep. The solution obtained by the proposed algorithm is compared to the minimum ℓ1-norm solution achieved by Linear Programming (LP). It is experimentally... 

The performance of several regression methods is investigated to estimate the distribution of engineering demand parameters conditioned on intensity measures (EDP|IM) for small record sets. In particular, the performance of the multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS), a simultaneous mean-variance regression (MVR) done by a penalized weighted least-square loss function, and a mean-covariance/variance regression based on expectation maximization method (EM) are assessed. The efficiency of the introduced methods is compared with FEMA-P58 methodology. Performance assessment of EM and MVR methods shows that the overall increase in efficiency is about 25–45% for maximum inter-story drift ratios,...