Learning representations for Information Retrieval

La recherche d'informations s'intéresse, entre autres, à répondre à des questions comme: est-ce qu'un document est pertinent à une requête ? Est-ce que deux requêtes ou deux documents sont similaires ? Comment la similarité entre deux requêtes ou documents peut être utilisée pour améliorer l'estimation de la pertinence ? Pour donner réponse à ces questions, il est nécessaire d'associer chaque document et requête à des représentations interprétables par ordinateur. Une fois ces représentations estimées, la similarité peut correspondre, par exemple, à une distance ou une divergence qui opère dans l'espace de représentation. On admet généralement que la qualité d'une représentation a un impact direct sur l'erreur d'estimation par rapport à la vraie pertinence, jugée par un humain. Estimer de bonnes représentations des documents et des requêtes a longtemps été un problème central de la recherche d'informations. Le but de cette thèse est de proposer des nouvelles méthodes pour estimer les représentations des documents et des requêtes, la relation de pertinence entre eux et ainsi modestement avancer l'état de l'art du domaine. Nous présentons quatre articles publiés dans des conférences internationales et un article publié dans un forum d'évaluation. Les deux premiers articles concernent des méthodes qui créent l'espace de représentation selon une connaissance à priori sur les caractéristiques qui sont importantes pour la tâche à accomplir. Ceux-ci nous amènent à présenter un nouveau modèle de recherche d'informations qui diffère des modèles existants sur le plan théorique et de l'efficacité expérimentale. Les deux derniers articles marquent un changement fondamental dans l'approche de construction des représentations. Ils bénéficient notamment de l'intérêt de recherche dont les techniques d'apprentissage profond par réseaux de neurones, ou deep learning, ont fait récemment l'objet. Ces modèles d'apprentissage élicitent automatiquement les caractéristiques importantes pour la tâche demandée à partir d'une quantité importante de données. Nous nous intéressons à la modélisation des relations sémantiques entre documents et requêtes ainsi qu'entre deux ou plusieurs requêtes. Ces derniers articles marquent les premières applications de l'apprentissage de représentations par réseaux de neurones à la recherche d'informations. Les modèles proposés ont aussi produit une performance améliorée sur des collections de test standard. Nos travaux nous mènent à la conclusion générale suivante: la performance en recherche d'informations pourrait drastiquement être améliorée en se basant sur les approches d'apprentissage de représentations.

Section 3 : job training, employment, and contracting opportunities for low-income persons.

Includes index.

Italy and the war;

The moral reason of our war, by G. del Vecchio.--The national ideal and the duty of Italy; by P. Fedozzi.--The political reasons of our war, by P. Bonfante.--The rights of Italy over the Alps and the Adriatic, by C. Errere.--The unredeemed provinces in the history of Italy, by P. S. Leicht.--The national struggle in the unreddemed provinces, by L. Bianchi.--Denunciation of the treaty of the Triple alliance, by P. Fedozzi.--Italy's war and Italy's wealth, by G. Arias.--Necessity and reason for the present war with Turkey, by A. Solmi.--Artes et arma, by G. Albini.

Some things that matter,/

How to concentrate -- How to deserve -- How to read -- The art of public speaking -- Maxims for speakers -- The use of the dictionary -- The fly-wheel of civilization : importance of habit -- How to think -- How to judge things -- Circumstantial evidence -- Facts and inferences --Hearsay and what is relevant -- How to find things out -- The laws of thought -- Legal maxims -- The moral duty of belief.

Literary style : and other essays /

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Pray for the Holy Spirit /

Includes bibliographical references.

Religious pamphlets

A collection of miscellaneous pamphlets on religion.

Pan-Anglican Congress, 1908.

Binders title: Official report.

Sublima ristningar : Sökandet efter bronsåldersideologi i hällristningsområden kring Enköping, Norrköping och Skåne

The aim of this study has been to revaluate Bronze Age society using rock art as an archaeological material. It has also sought to question certain prevailing interpretative trends within the research of rock art; ascribing it as ritual practices, expression of a social elite and the adoption of symbols from cultures along the Mediterranean Sea. This has chiefly been made possible through the application of Slavoj Žižeks ideas about the ideological fantasy and the sublime object of ideology. The thesis proposes a connection between art and ideology. A selected sampling of rock carvings from three areas in Sweden has been made in order to further investigate the relationship between different figurative motives both at a regional level, as well as a local. This study claims that rather than having been under the control of an elite, rock art has been accessible for the majority of the population both to produce and view. The depiction of human representation as rock carving does not depict a clear social stratification. It is also argued that the idea of images displayed on the rocks having roots in the imagery of Mediterranean civilizations is a construct of current western ideology, as the symbolic connection between the cultures is tenable at best, according to this study. 

Representación política y confianza institucional : Una visión latinoamericana

¿Bajo qué condiciones los ciudadanos desconfían de las instituciones políticas? Las respuestas a esta pregunta son variadas y pueden ubicarse en dos grandes corrientes: la culturalista que destaca la importancia de los valores culturales y b) la racional culturalista, según la cual la desconfianza es resultado de los deficientes desempeños de los gobiernos democráticos. La presente investigación analiza tres diferentes dimensiones de la performance, vinculadas todas ellas al concepto de representación y relacionadas con etapas, actividades y actores específicos: 1. la calidad institucional (relativa a las reglas de juego y su funcionamiento); 2. la calidad de la política (relativa a los a la calidad de los procesos de deliberación, negociación y sanción de leyes, así como a la productividad legislativa); 3. la calidad de los resultados (vinculada al impacto de las políticas públicas sobre el bienestar social). Si bien se presentan algunos datos estadísticos, la evidencia empírica es muy preliminar

Queering U.S. History Museums: Heteronormative Histories, Digital Disruptions

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Hierarchical indexing structure for efficient similarity search in video retrieval

With the rapid increase in both centralized video archives and distributed WWW video resources, content-based video retrieval is gaining its importance. To support such applications efficiently, content-based video indexing must be addressed. Typically, each video is represented by a sequence of frames. Due to the high dimensionality of frame representation and the large number of frames, video indexing introduces an additional degree of complexity. In this paper, we address the problem of content-based video indexing and propose an efficient solution, called the Ordered VA-File (OVA-File) based on the VA-file. OVA-File is a hierarchical structure and has two novel features: 1) partitioning the whole file into slices such that only a small number of slices are accessed and checked during k Nearest Neighbor (kNN) search and 2) efficient handling of insertions of new vectors into the OVA-File, such that the average distance between the new vectors and those approximations near that position is minimized. To facilitate a search, we present an efficient approximate kNN algorithm named Ordered VA-LOW (OVA-LOW) based on the proposed OVA-File. OVA-LOW first chooses possible OVA-Slices by ranking the distances between their corresponding centers and the query vector, and then visits all approximations in the selected OVA-Slices to work out approximate kNN. The number of possible OVA-Slices is controlled by a user-defined parameter delta. By adjusting delta, OVA-LOW provides a trade-off between the query cost and the result quality. Query by video clip consisting of multiple frames is also discussed. Extensive experimental studies using real video data sets were conducted and the results showed that our methods can yield a significant speed-up over an existing VA-file-based method and iDistance with high query result quality. Furthermore, by incorporating temporal correlation of video content, our methods achieved much more efficient performance.

Learning to play Pac-Man: An evolutionary, rule-based approach

Pac-Man is a well-known, real-time computer game that provides an interesting platform for research. We describe an initial approach to developing an artificial agent that replaces the human to play a simplified version of Pac-Man. The agent is specified as a simple finite state machine and ruleset. with parameters that control the probability of movement by the agent given the constraints of the maze at some instant of time. In contrast to previous approaches, the agent represents a dynamic strategy for playing Pac-Man, rather than a pre-programmed maze-solving method. The agent adaptively "learns" through the application of population-based incremental learning (PBIL) to adjust the agents' parameters. Experimental results are presented that give insight into some of the complexities of the game, as well as highlighting the limitations and difficulties of the representation of the agent.

A constituição da representação no local de trabalho na região do Grande ABC

Este estudo visa pesquisar e compreender o fenômeno social da Representação dos Trabalhadores no Local de Trabalho na região do Grande ABC. Inicialmente, através de uma revisão de literatura, traçar um histórico da comissão de fábrica e organizações semelhantes pelo mundo, observando sua prática nestes países e abordando administração participativa e o socialismo europeu e a sua autodeterminação. Na sequência abordar a comissão de fábrica no Brasil, narrar a história da primeira comissão de fábrica oficial instalada no país, na fábrica da Ford em São Bernardo do Campo. Segue estudo de tabulação de pesquisa de campo efetuada, com ênfase aos seguintes aspectos: constata-se a prática da RLT pelas empresas; constitui-se a RLT através de empregados indicados pelos trabalhadores, empresas ou pelos sindicatos de trabalhadores; regulamenta-se a RLT através de estatuto; efetiva-se a participação e influência do sindicato dos trabalhadores na RLT; a quais interesses atende a RLT, empresas, sindicatos de trabalhadores ou trabalhadores. A metodologia a ser utilizada é qualitativa, seguida de pesquisa de campo realizada em grupo, com entrelaçamento destes dados com a experiência profissional do autor. A conclusão do estudo é que a RLT é pouco praticada, seus membros são indicados pelos trabalhadores e respectivos sindicatos, prevalece a RLT regulamentada, havendo participação e influência dos sindicatos de trabalhadores. A RLT atende prioritariamente aos interesses das empresas, seguido dos interesses dos sindicatos de trabalhadores e por último, os interesses dos trabalhadores.(AU)

A PAIXÃO DE CRISTO SEGUNDO SÃO MATEUS: ESTRATÉGIAS NARRATIVAS

A literatura é um tipo de conhecimento que faz uso da palavra com a finalidade de projetar realidades possíveis. Para tanto, a mimese literária tem na experiência vivencial a verossimilhança que torna possível a apreensão da obra literária como fenômeno interpretativo. Nesse processo de composição, o gênero literário converte-se no conjunto de convenções que o autor se vale para fazer-se inteligível a seu público. As narrativas bíblicas e, em especial, o Evangelho Segundo São Mateus, possuem elementos que permitem sua leitura como obras literárias próprias da Antiguidade, cujas estratégias narrativas se mostram construtoras de representação verossímil da realidade. Para tanto, o narrador do Evangelho Segundo São Mateus utilizou-se daquelas convenções que se conformavam ao horizonte de expectativas de seu público e que articulam experiências advindas da literatura greco-romana e da literatura judaica. No caso da Paixão de Cristo Segundo São Mateus, o narrador empreende um conjunto de estratégias narrativas que favorecem sua condução da leitura da narrativa de acordo com sua perspectiva. Nesse processo, vale-se de uma estrutura que combina a biografia greco-romana àquela já consagrada na literatura bíblica. Dessa forma, a Paixão de Cristo nos é apresentada como parte final da história, numa perspectiva paradigmática e, ao mesmo tempo, como realização das Escrituras, que figuram e profetizam a respeito de Jesus e a natureza redimensionadora e universalizadora da salvação.