In a previous article, we presented a systematic computational study of the extraction of semantic representations from the word-word co-occurrence statistics of large text corpora. The conclusion was that semantic vectors of pointwise mutual information values from very small co-occurrence windows, together with a cosine distance measure, consistently resulted in the best representations across a range of psychologically relevant semantic tasks. This article extends that study by investigating the use of three further factors--namely, the application of stop-lists, word stemming, and dimensionality reduction using singular value decomposition (SVD)--that have been used to provide improved performance elsewhere. It also introduces an additional semantic task and explores the advantages of using a much larger corpus. This leads to the discovery and analysis of improved SVD-based methods for generating semantic representations (that provide new state-of-the-art performance on a standard TOEFL task) and the identification and discussion of problems and misleading results that can arise without a full systematic study.
The Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows is a complex combinatorial problem with many real-world applications in transportation and distribution logistics. Its main objective is to find the lowest distance set of routes to deliver goods, using a fleet of identical vehicles with restricted capacity, to customers with service time windows. However, there are other objectives, and having a range of solutions representing the trade-offs between objectives is crucial for many applications. Although previous research has used evolutionary methods for solving this problem, it has rarely concentrated on the optimization of more than one objective, and hardly ever explicitly considered the diversity of solutions. This paper proposes and analyzes a novel multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, which incorporates methods for measuring the similarity of solutions, to solve the multi-objective problem. The algorithm is applied to a standard benchmark problem set, showing that when the similarity measure is used appropriately, the diversity and quality of solutions is higher than when it is not used, and the algorithm achieves highly competitive results compared with previously published studies and those from a popular evolutionary multi-objective optimizer.
Abstract-Gradient descent training of sigmoidal feed-forward neural networks on binary mappings often gets stuck with some outputs totally wrong. This is because a sum-squared-error cost function leads to weight updates that depend on the derivative of the output sigmoid which goes to zero as the output approaches maximal error. Although it is easy to understand the cause, the best remedy is not so obvious. Common solutions involve modifying the training data, deviating from true gradient descent, or changing the cost function. In general, finding the best learning procedures for particular classes of problem is difficult because each usually depends on a number of interacting parameters that need to be set to optimal values for a fair comparison. In this paper I shall use simulated evolution to optimise all the relevant parameters, and come to a clear conclusion concerning the most efficient approach for learning binary mappings.
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