We consider here the problem of building a never-ending language learner; that is, an intelligent computer agent that runs forever and that each day must (1) extract, or read, information from the web to populate a growing structured knowledge base, and (2) learn to perform this task better than on the previous day. In particular, we propose an approach and a set of design principles for such an agent, describe a partial implementation of such a system that has already learned to extract a knowledge base containing over 242,000 beliefs with an estimated precision of 74 % after running for 67 days, and discuss lessons learned from this preliminary attempt to build a never-ending learning agent.

Abstract—This paper addresses some of the problems that arise when applying active learning to the context of human–robot interaction (HRI). Active learning is an attractive strategy for robot learners because it has the potential to improve the accuracy and the speed of learning, but it can cause issues from an interaction perspective. Here we present three interaction modes that enable a robot to use active learning queries. The three modes differ in when they make queries: the first makes a query every turn, the second makes a query only under certain conditions, and the third makes a query only when explicitly requested by the teacher. We conduct an experiment in which 24 human subjects teach concepts to our upper-torso humanoid robot, Simon, in each interaction mode, and we compare these modes against a baseline mode using only passive supervised learning. We report results from both a learning and an interaction perspective. The data show that the three modes using active learning are preferable to the mode using passive supervised learning both in terms of performance and human subject preference, but each mode has advantages and disadvantages. Based on our results, we lay out several guidelines that can inform the design of future robotic systems that use active learning in an HRI setting. Index Terms—Active learning, human–robot interaction. I.

This paper describes DUALIST, an active learning annotation paradigm which solicits and learns from labels on both features (e.g., words) and instances (e.g., documents). We present a novel semi-supervised training algorithm developed for this setting, which is (1) fast enough to support real-time interactive speeds, and (2) at least as accurate as preexisting methods for learning with mixed feature and instance labels. Human annotators in user studies were able to produce near-stateof-the-art classifiers—on several corpora in a variety of application domains—with only a few minutes of effort. 1

We present ReGroup, a novel end-user interactive machine learning system for helping people create custom, on-demand groups in online social networks. As a person adds members to a group, ReGroup iteratively learns a probabilistic model of group membership specific to that group. ReGroup then uses its currently learned model to suggest additional members and group characteristics for filtering. Our evaluation shows that ReGroup is effective for helping people create large and varied groups, whereas traditional methods (searching by name or selecting from an alphabetical list) are better suited for small groups whose members can be easily recalled by name. By facilitating on-demand group creation, ReGroup can enable in-context sharing and potentially encourage better online privacy practices. In addition, applying interactive machine learning to social network group creation introduces several challenges for designing effective end-user interaction with machine learning. We identify these challenges and discuss how we address them in ReGroup. Author Keywords Interactive machine learning, social network group creation, access control lists, example and feature-based interaction.

We consider here the problem of building a never-ending language learner; that is, an intelligent computer agent that runs forever and that each day must (1) extract, or read, information from the web to populate a growing structured knowledge base, and (2) learn to perform this task better than on the previous day. In particular, we propose an approach and a set of design principles for such an agent, describe a partial implementation of such a system that has already learned to extract a knowledge base containing over 242,000 beliefs with an estimated precision of 74 % after running for 67 days, and discuss lessons learned from this preliminary attempt to build a never-ending learning agent.

I am motivated by the prospect of computers that learn, by interacting and collaborating with humans, how to solve problems. Such systems might take several forms. For example, imagine you are an entrepreneur and you want to train a computer to help you analyze what people are saying about your products. You have domain knowledge about your business and the decisions you want the system to make, such as identifying positive vs. negative product reviews across the Internet. You might want to initialize the system with your background knowledge (e.g., the words “wonderful” and “terrible ” indicate high and low customer satisfaction, respectively), inspect substantial amounts of relevant text data, and then allow it ask questions to help refine its understanding of your goals (e.g., is “predictable ” a positive word for your product? — which may depend on whether you make kitchen appliances or write novels). Alternatively, imagine you are a biologist with a highthroughput laboratory technique to test hundreds of proteins in tandem. You would like it to analyze hundreds (even thousands) of these measurements, induce hypotheses that might explain the data and communicate them to you (which you might want to edit based on your knowledge or intuition), and let it propose subsequent experiments in order to refine these hypotheses, or potentially discover other proteins with the properties you study.

Abstract. In this paper, we harness the synergy between two important learning paradigms, namely, active learning and domain adaptation. We show how active learning in a target domain can leverage information from a different but related source domain. Our proposed framework, Active Learning Domain Adapted (Alda), uses source domain knowledge to transfer information that facilitates active learning in the target domain. We propose two variants of Alda: a batch B-Alda and an online O-Alda. Empirical comparisons with numerous baselines on real-world datasets establish the efficacy of the proposed methods. Key words: active learning, domain adaptation, batch, online

This dissertation was produced in accordance with guidelines which permit the inclusion as part of the dissertation the text of an original paper or papers submitted for publication. The dissertation must still conform to all other requirements explained in the “Guide for the Preparation of Master’s Theses and Doctoral Dissertations at The University of Texas at Dallas. ” It must include a comprehensive abstract, a full introduction and literature review and a final overall conclusion. Additional material (procedural and design data as well as descriptions of equipment) must be provided in sufficient detail to allow a clear and precise judgment to be made of the importance and originality of the research reported. It is acceptable for this dissertation to include as chapters authentic copies of papers already published, provided these meet type size, margin and legibility requirements. In such cases, connectingtextswhichprovidelogical bridgesbetweendifferentmanuscriptsaremandatory. Where the student is not the sole author of a manuscript, the student is required to make an explicit statement in the introductory material to that manuscript describing the student’s contribution to the work and acknowledging the contribution of the other authors. The signatures of the Supervising Committee which precede all other material in the dissertation

While traditional research on text clustering has largely focused on grouping documents by topic, it is conceivable that a user may want to cluster documents along other dimensions, such as the author’s mood, gender, age, or sentiment. Without knowing the user’s intention, a clustering algorithm will only group documents along the most prominent dimension, which may not be the one the user desires. To address the problem of clustering documents along the user-desired dimension, previous work has focused on learning a similarity metric from data manually annotated with the user’s intention or having a human construct a feature space in an interactive manner during the clustering process. With the goal of reducing reliance on human knowledge for fine-tuning the similarity function or selecting the relevant features required by these approaches, we propose a novel active clustering algorithm, which allows a user to easily select the dimension along which she wants to cluster the documents by inspecting only a small number of words. We demonstrate the viability of our algorithm on a variety of commonly-used sentiment datasets. 1.

We present an active learning approach to choose image annotation requests among both object category labels and the objects ’ attribute labels. The goal is to solicit those labels that will best use human effort when training a multiclass object recognition model. In contrast to previous work in active visual category learning, our approach directly exploits the dependencies between human-nameable visual attributes and the objects they describe, shifting its requests in either label space accordingly. We adopt a discriminative latent model that captures object-attribute and attribute-attribute relationships, and then define a suitable entropy reduction selection criterion to predict the influence a new label might have throughout those connections. On three challenging datasets, we demonstrate that the method can more successfully accelerate object learning relative to both passive learning and traditional active learning approaches. 1.