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Description
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is one of the main formalisms in Knowledge Representation (KR) that is being widely applied in a large number of applications. While ASP is effective on Boolean decision problems, it has difficulty in expressing quantitative uncertainty and probability in a natural way.

Logic Programs under the answer

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is one of the main formalisms in Knowledge Representation (KR) that is being widely applied in a large number of applications. While ASP is effective on Boolean decision problems, it has difficulty in expressing quantitative uncertainty and probability in a natural way.

Logic Programs under the answer set semantics and Markov Logic Network (LPMLN) is a recent extension of answer set programs to overcome the limitation of the deterministic nature of ASP by adopting the log-linear weight scheme of Markov Logic. This thesis investigates the relationships between LPMLN and two other extensions of ASP: weak constraints to express a quantitative preference among answer sets, and P-log to incorporate probabilistic uncertainty. The studied relationships show how different extensions of answer set programs are related to each other, and how they are related to formalisms in Statistical Relational Learning, such as Problog and MLN, which have shown to be closely related to LPMLN. The studied relationships compare the properties of the involved languages and provide ways to compute one language using an implementation of another language.

This thesis first presents a translation of LPMLN into programs with weak constraints. The translation allows for computing the most probable stable models (i.e., MAP estimates) or probability distribution in LPMLN programs using standard ASP solvers so that the well-developed techniques in ASP can be utilized. This result can be extended to other formalisms, such as Markov Logic, ProbLog, and Pearl’s Causal Models, that are shown to be translatable into LPMLN.

This thesis also presents a translation of P-log into LPMLN. The translation tells how probabilistic nonmonotonicity (the ability of the reasoner to change his probabilistic model as a result of new information) of P-log can be represented in LPMLN, which yields a way to compute P-log using standard ASP solvers or MLN solvers.
ContributorsYang, Zhun (Author) / Lee, Joohyung (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
In recent years, several methods have been proposed to encode sentences into fixed length continuous vectors called sentence representation or sentence embedding. With the recent advancements in various deep learning methods applied in Natural Language Processing (NLP), these representations play a crucial role in tasks such as named entity recognition,

In recent years, several methods have been proposed to encode sentences into fixed length continuous vectors called sentence representation or sentence embedding. With the recent advancements in various deep learning methods applied in Natural Language Processing (NLP), these representations play a crucial role in tasks such as named entity recognition, question answering and sentence classification.

Traditionally, sentence vector representations are learnt from its constituent word representations, also known as word embeddings. Various methods to learn the distributed representation (embedding) of words have been proposed using the notion of Distributional Semantics, i.e. “meaning of a word is characterized by the company it keeps”. However, principle of compositionality states that meaning of a sentence is a function of the meanings of words and also the way they are syntactically combined. In various recent methods for sentence representation, the syntactic information like dependency or relation between words have been largely ignored.

In this work, I have explored the effectiveness of sentence representations that are composed of the representation of both, its constituent words and the relations between the words in a sentence. The word and relation embeddings are learned based on their context. These general-purpose embeddings can also be used as off-the- shelf semantic and syntactic features for various NLP tasks. Similarity Evaluation tasks was performed on two datasets showing the usefulness of the learned word embeddings. Experiments were conducted on three different sentence classification tasks showing that our sentence representations outperform the original word-based sentence representations, when used with the state-of-the-art Neural Network architectures.
ContributorsRath, Trideep (Author) / Baral, Chitta (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Goal specification is an important aspect of designing autonomous agents. A goal does not only refer to the set of states for the agent to reach. A goal also defines restrictions on the paths the agent should follow. Temporal logics are widely used in goal specification. However, they lack the

Goal specification is an important aspect of designing autonomous agents. A goal does not only refer to the set of states for the agent to reach. A goal also defines restrictions on the paths the agent should follow. Temporal logics are widely used in goal specification. However, they lack the ability to represent goals in a non-deterministic domain, goals that change non-monotonically, and goals with preferences. This dissertation defines new goal specification languages by extending temporal logics to address these issues. First considered is the goal specification in non-deterministic domains, in which an agent following a policy leads to a set of paths. A logic is proposed to distinguish paths of the agent from all paths in the domain. In addition, to address the need of comparing policies for finding the best ones, a language capable of quantifying over policies is proposed. As policy structures of agents play an important role in goal specification, languages are also defined by considering different policy structures. Besides, after an agent is given an initial goal, the agent may change its expectations or the domain may change, thus goals that are previously specified may need to be further updated, revised, partially retracted, or even completely changed. Non-monotonic goal specification languages that can make these changes in an elaboration tolerant manner are needed. Two languages that rely on labeling sub-formulas and connecting multiple rules are developed to address non-monotonicity in goal specification. Also, agents may have preferential relations among sub-goals, and the preferential relations may change as agents achieve other sub-goals. By nesting a comparison operator with other temporal operators, a language with dynamic preferences is proposed. Various goals that cannot be expressed in other languages are expressed in the proposed languages. Finally, plans are given for some goals specified in the proposed languages.
ContributorsZhao, Jicheng (Author) / Baral, Chitta (Thesis advisor) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Committee member) / Lee, Joohyung (Committee member) / Lifschitz, Vladimir (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
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Description
Due to its difficult nature, organic chemistry is receiving much research attention across the nation to develop more efficient and effective means to teach it. As part of that, Dr. Ian Gould at ASU is developing an online organic chemistry educational website that provides help to students, adapts to their

Due to its difficult nature, organic chemistry is receiving much research attention across the nation to develop more efficient and effective means to teach it. As part of that, Dr. Ian Gould at ASU is developing an online organic chemistry educational website that provides help to students, adapts to their responses, and collects data about their performance. This thesis creative project addresses the design and implementation of an input parser for organic chemistry reagent questions, to appear on his website. After students used the form to submit questions throughout the Spring 2013 semester in Dr. Gould's organic chemistry class, the data gathered from their usage was analyzed, and feedback was collected. The feedback obtained from students was positive, and suggested that the input parser accomplished the educational goals that it sought to meet.
ContributorsBeerman, Eric Christopher (Author) / Gould, Ian (Thesis director) / Wilkerson, Kelly (Committee member) / Mosca, Vince (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2013-05
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Description
Natural Language Processing is a subject that combines computer science and linguistics, aiming to provide computers with the ability to understand natural language and to develop a more intuitive human-computer interaction. The research community has developed ways to translate natural language to mathematical formalisms. It has not yet been shown,

Natural Language Processing is a subject that combines computer science and linguistics, aiming to provide computers with the ability to understand natural language and to develop a more intuitive human-computer interaction. The research community has developed ways to translate natural language to mathematical formalisms. It has not yet been shown, however, how to automatically translate different kinds of knowledge in English to distinct formal languages. Most of the recent work presents the problem that the translation method aims to a specific formal language or is hard to generalize. In this research, I take a first step to overcome this difficulty and present two algorithms which take as input two lambda-calculus expressions G and H and compute a lambda-calculus expression F. The expression F returned by the first algorithm satisfies F@G=H and, in the case of the second algorithm, we obtain G@F=H. The lambda expressions represent the meanings of words and sentences. For each formal language that one desires to use with the algorithms, the language must be defined in terms of lambda calculus. Also, some additional concepts must be included. After doing this, given a sentence, its representation and knowing the representation of several words in the sentence, the algorithms can be used to obtain the representation of the other words in that sentence. In this work, I define two languages and show examples of their use with the algorithms. The algorithms are illustrated along with soundness and completeness proofs, the latter with respect to typed lambda-calculus formulas up to the second order. These algorithms are a core part of a natural language semantics system that translates sentences from English to formulas in different formal languages.
ContributorsAlvarez Gonzalez, Marcos (Author) / Baral, Chitta (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Joohyung (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
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Description
The omnipresent data, growing number of network devices, and evolving attack techniques have been challenging organizations’ security defenses over the past decade. With humongous volumes of logs generated by those network devices, looking for patterns of malicious activities and identifying them in time is growing beyond the capabilities of their

The omnipresent data, growing number of network devices, and evolving attack techniques have been challenging organizations’ security defenses over the past decade. With humongous volumes of logs generated by those network devices, looking for patterns of malicious activities and identifying them in time is growing beyond the capabilities of their defense systems. Deep Learning, a subset of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), fills in this gapwith its ability to learn from huge amounts of data, and improve its performance as the data it learns from increases. In this dissertation, I bring forward security issues pertaining to two top threats that most organizations fear, Advanced Persistent Threat (APT), and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), along with deep learning models built towards addressing those security issues. First, I present a deep learning model, APT Detection, capable of detecting anomalous activities in a system. Evaluation of this model demonstrates how it can contribute to early detection of an APT attack with an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of up to 91% on a Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve. Second, I present DAPT2020, a first of its kind dataset capturing an APT attack exploiting web and system vulnerabilities in an emulated organization’s production network. Evaluation of the dataset using well known machine learning models demonstrates the need for better deep learning models to detect APT attacks. I then present DAPT2021, a semi-synthetic dataset capturing an APT attackexploiting human vulnerabilities, alongside 2 less skilled attacks. By emulating the normal behavior of the employees in a set target organization, DAPT2021 has been created to enable researchers study the causations and correlations among the captured data, a much-needed information to detect an underlying threat early. Finally, I present a distributed defense framework, SmartDefense, that can detect and mitigate over 90% of DDoS traffic at the source and over 97.5% of the remaining DDoS traffic at the Internet Service Provider’s (ISP’s) edge network. Evaluation of this work shows how by using attributes sent by customer edge network, SmartDefense can further help ISPs prevent up to 51.95% of the DDoS traffic from going to the destination.
ContributorsMyneni, Sowmya (Author) / Xue, Guoliang (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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Description
In the era of information explosion and multi-modal data, information retrieval (IR) and question answering (QA) systems have become essential in daily human activities. IR systems aim to find relevant information in response to user queries, while QA systems provide concise and accurate answers to user questions. IR and

In the era of information explosion and multi-modal data, information retrieval (IR) and question answering (QA) systems have become essential in daily human activities. IR systems aim to find relevant information in response to user queries, while QA systems provide concise and accurate answers to user questions. IR and QA are two of the most crucial challenges in the realm of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with wide-ranging real-world applications such as search engines and dialogue systems. This dissertation investigates and develops novel models and training objectives to enhance current retrieval systems in textual and multi-modal contexts. Moreover, it examines QA systems, emphasizing generalization and robustness, and creates new benchmarks to promote their progress. Neural retrievers have surfaced as a viable solution, capable of surpassing the constraints of traditional term-matching search algorithms. This dissertation presents Poly-DPR, an innovative multi-vector model architecture that manages test-query, and ReViz, a comprehensive multimodal model to tackle multi-modality queries. By utilizing IR-focused pretraining tasks and producing large-scale training data, the proposed methodology substantially improves the abilities of existing neural retrievers.Concurrently, this dissertation investigates the realm of QA systems, referred to as ``readers'', by performing an exhaustive analysis of current extractive and generative readers, which results in a reliable guidance for selecting readers for downstream applications. Additionally, an original reader (Two-in-One) is designed to effectively choose the pertinent passages and sentences from a pool of candidates for multi-hop reasoning. This dissertation also acknowledges the significance of logical reasoning in real-world applications and has developed a comprehensive testbed, LogiGLUE, to further the advancement of reasoning capabilities in QA systems.
ContributorsLuo, Man (Author) / Baral, Chitta (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Blanco, Eduardo (Committee member) / Chen, Danqi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
Artificial Intelligence, as the hottest research topic nowadays, is mostly driven by data. There is no doubt that data is the king in the age of AI. However, natural high-quality data is precious and rare. In order to obtain enough and eligible data to support AI tasks, data processing is

Artificial Intelligence, as the hottest research topic nowadays, is mostly driven by data. There is no doubt that data is the king in the age of AI. However, natural high-quality data is precious and rare. In order to obtain enough and eligible data to support AI tasks, data processing is always required. To be even worse, the data preprocessing tasks are often dull and heavy, which require huge human labors to deal with. Statistics show 70% - 80% of the data scientists' time is spent on data integration process. Among various reasons, schema changes that commonly exist in the data warehouse are one significant obstacle that impedes the automation of the end-to-end data integration process. Traditional data integration applications rely on data processing operators such as join, union, aggregation and so on. Those operations are fragile and can be easily interrupted by schema changes. Whenever schema changes happen, the data integration applications will require human labors to solve the interruptions and downtime. The industries as well as the data scientists need a new mechanism to handle the schema changes in data integration tasks. This work proposes a new direction of data integration applications based on deep learning models. The data integration problem is defined in the scenario of integrating tabular-format data with natural schema changes, using the cell-based data abstraction. In addition, data augmentation and adversarial learning are investigated to boost the model robustness to schema changes. The experiments are tested on two real-world data integration scenarios, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
ContributorsWang, Zijie (Author) / Zou, Jia (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Candan, K. Selcuk (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
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Description
Enabling robots to physically engage with their environment in a safe and efficient manner is an essential step towards human-robot interaction. To date, robots usually operate as pre-programmed workers that blindly execute tasks in highly structured environments crafted by skilled engineers. Changing the robots’ behavior to cover new duties or

Enabling robots to physically engage with their environment in a safe and efficient manner is an essential step towards human-robot interaction. To date, robots usually operate as pre-programmed workers that blindly execute tasks in highly structured environments crafted by skilled engineers. Changing the robots’ behavior to cover new duties or handle variability is an expensive, complex, and time-consuming process. However, with the advent of more complex sensors and algorithms, overcoming these limitations becomes within reach. This work proposes innovations in artificial intelligence, language understanding, and multimodal integration to enable next-generation grasping and manipulation capabilities in autonomous robots. The underlying thesis is that multimodal observations and instructions can drastically expand the responsiveness and dexterity of robot manipulators. Natural language, in particular, can be used to enable intuitive, bidirectional communication between a human user and the machine. To this end, this work presents a system that learns context-aware robot control policies from multimodal human demonstrations. Among the main contributions presented are techniques for (a) collecting demonstrations in an efficient and intuitive fashion, (b) methods for leveraging physical contact with the environment and objects, (c) the incorporation of natural language to understand context, and (d) the generation of robust robot control policies. The presented approach and systems are evaluated in multiple grasping and manipulation settings ranging from dexterous manipulation to pick-and-place, as well as contact-rich bimanual insertion tasks. Moreover, the usability of these innovations, especially when utilizing human task demonstrations and communication interfaces, is evaluated in several human-subject studies.
ContributorsStepputtis, Simon (Author) / Ben Amor, Heni (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Lee, Stefan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
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Description
Instructional prompts are a novel technique that can significantly improve the performance of natural language processing tasks by specifying the task instruction to the language model. This is the first paper that uses instructional prompts to improve performance of the question answering task in biomedical domain. This work makes two

Instructional prompts are a novel technique that can significantly improve the performance of natural language processing tasks by specifying the task instruction to the language model. This is the first paper that uses instructional prompts to improve performance of the question answering task in biomedical domain. This work makes two significant contributions. Firstly, a question answer dataset of 600K question answer pairs has been developed by using the medical textbook ‘Differential Diagnosis Primary Care’, which contains information on how to diagnose a patient by observing their disease symptoms. Secondly, a question answering language model augmented with instructional prompts has been developed by training on the medical information extracted from the book ‘Differential Diagnosis Primary Care’. Experiments have been conducted to demonstrate that it performs better than a normal question answering model that does not use instructional prompts. Instructional prompts are based on prompt tuning and prefix tuning, which are novel techniques which can help train language model to do specific downstream tasks by keeping majority of model parameters frozen, and only optimizing a small number of continuous task-specific vectors (called the prefixes).
ContributorsSaxena, Sharad (Author) / Baral, Chitta (Thesis advisor) / Blanco, Eduardo (Committee member) / Anwar, Saadat (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021