Computer Sciences Commons^™

Resource-Bounded Information Acquisition And Learning, Pallika H. Kanani

Open Access Dissertations

In many scenarios it is desirable to augment existing data with information acquired from an external source. For example, information from the Web can be used to fill missing values in a database or to correct errors. In many machine learning and data mining scenarios, acquiring additional feature values can lead to improved data quality and accuracy. However, there is often a cost associated with such information acquisition, and we typically need to operate under limited resources. In this thesis, I explore different aspects of Resource-bounded Information Acquisition and Learning.

The process of acquiring information from an external source involves …

Topic Regression, David Mimno

Open Access Dissertations

Text documents are generally accompanied by non-textual information, such as authors, dates, publication sources, and, increasingly, automatically recognized named entities. Work in text analysis has often involved predicting these non-text values based on text data for tasks such as document classification and author identification. This thesis considers the opposite problem: predicting the textual content of documents based on non-text data. In this work I study several regression-based methods for estimating the influence of specific metadata elements in determining the content of text documents. Such topic regression methods allow users of document collections to test hypotheses about the underlying environments that …