Neural Machine Translation from Latex to English without sufficient training data - neural-network

I'm trying to build a Neural Machine Translation model that translates Latex-code into English.
An example for this would be: "\frac{1^{n}}{12}" -> "One to the power of n divided by 12".
The problem is that I don't have nearly enough labeled training data to produce a good result.
Is there a way to train the model with s small data set or to artificially increase the amount of training data for this problem?
I have found solutions for machine translation without parallel data, that built a dictionary "by aligning monolingual word embedding spaces in an unsupervised way". These approaches seem to rely on the fact that human languages are very similar in nature. But Latex-code is very different than human languages and I don't think that's going to yield great results.

Related

How much data is actually required to train a doc2Vec model?

I have been using gensim's libraries to train a doc2Vec model. After experimenting with different datasets for training, I am fairly confused about what should be an ideal training data size for doc2Vec model?
I will be sharing my understanding here. Please feel free to correct me/suggest changes-
Training on a general purpose dataset- If I want to use a model trained on a general purpose dataset, in a specific use case, I need to train on a lot of data.
Training on the context related dataset- If I want to train it on the data having the same context as my use case, usually the training data size can have a smaller size.
But what are the number of words used for training, in both these cases?
On a general note, we stop training a ML model, when the error graph reaches an "elbow point", where further training won't help significantly in decreasing error. Has any study being done in this direction- where doc2Vec model's training is stopped after reaching an elbow ?
There are no absolute guidelines - it depends a lot on your dataset and specific application goals. There's some discussion of the sizes of datasets used in published Doc2Vec work at:
what is the minimum dataset size needed for good performance with doc2vec?
If your general-purpose corpus doesn't match your domain's vocabulary – including the same words, or using words in the same senses – that's a problem that can't be fixed with just "a lot of data". More data could just 'pull' word contexts and representations more towards generic, rather than domain-specific, values.
You really need to have your own quantitative, automated evaluation/scoring method, so you can measure whether results with your specific data and goals are sufficient, or improving with more data or other training tweaks.
Sometimes parameter tweaks can help get the most out of thin data – in particular, more training iterations or a smaller model (fewer vector-dimensions) can slightly offset some issues with small corpuses, sometimes. But the Word2Vec/Doc2Vec really benefit from lots of subtly-varied, domain-specific data - it's the constant, incremental tug-of-war between all the text-examples during training that helps the final representations settle into a useful constellation-of-arrangements, with the desired relative-distance/relative-direction properties.

What is the Difference between evolutionary computing and classification?

I am looking for some comprehensive description. I couldn't find it via browsing as things are more clustered on the web and its not in my scope currently.
Classification and evolutionary computing is comparing oranges to apples. Let me explain:
Classification is a type of problem, where the goal is to determine a label given some input. (Typical example, given pixel values, determine image label).
Evolutionary computing is a family of algorithms to solve different types of problems. They work with a "population" of candidates (imagine a set of different neural networks trying to solve a given problem). Somehow you evaluate how good each candidate is in the given task (typically using a "fitness function", but there are other methods). Then a new generation of candidates is produced, taking the best candidates from the previous generation as a model, and including mutations and cross-over (that is, introducing changes). Repeat until happy.
Evolutionary computing can absolutely be used for classification! But there are examples where it is used in different ways. You may use evolutionary computing to create an artificial neural network controlling a robot (in this case, inputs are sensor values, outputs are commands for actuators). Or to create original content free of a given goal, as in Picbreeder.
Classification may be solved using evolutionary computation (maybe this is why you where confused in the first place) but other techniques are also common. You can use decision trees, or notably deep-learning (based on backpropagation).
Deep-learning based on backpropagation may sound similar to evolutionary computation, but it is quite different. Here you have only one artificial neural network, and a clear rule (backpropagation) telling you which changes to introduce every iteration.
Hope this helps to complement other answers!
Classification algorithms and evolutionary computing are different approaches. However, they are related in some ways.
Classification algorithms aim to identify the class label of new instances. They are trained with some labeled instances. For example, recognition of digits is a classification algorithm.
Evolutionary algorithms are used to find out the minimum or maximum solution of an optimization problem. They randomly explore the solution space of the given problem. They can find a good solution in a reasonable time and are not able to find the global optimum in all problems.
In some classification approaches, evolutionary algorithms are used to find out the optimal value of the parameters.

Use a trained neural network to imitate its training data

I'm in the overtures of designing a prose imitation system. It will read a bunch of prose, then mimic it. It's mostly for fun so the mimicking prose doesn't need to make too much sense, but I'd like to make it as good as I can, with a minimal amount of effort.
My first idea is to use my example prose to train a classifying feed-forward neural network, which classifies its input as either part of the training data or not part. Then I'd like to somehow invert the neural network, finding new random inputs that also get classified by the trained network as being part of the training data. The obvious and stupid way of doing this is to randomly generate word lists and only output the ones that get classified above a certain threshold, but I think there is a better way, using the network itself to limit the search to certain regions of the input space. For example, maybe you could start with a random vector and do gradient descent optimisation to find a local maximum around the random starting point. Is there a word for this kind of imitation process? What are some of the known methods?
How about Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN, Goodfellow 2014) and their more advanced siblings like Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks? There are plenty of proper research articles out there, and also more gentle introductions like this one on DCGAN and this on GAN. To quote the latter:
GANs are an interesting idea that were first introduced in 2014 by a
group of researchers at the University of Montreal lead by Ian
Goodfellow (now at OpenAI). The main idea behind a GAN is to have two
competing neural network models. One takes noise as input and
generates samples (and so is called the generator). The other model
(called the discriminator) receives samples from both the generator
and the training data, and has to be able to distinguish between the
two sources. These two networks play a continuous game, where the
generator is learning to produce more and more realistic samples, and
the discriminator is learning to get better and better at
distinguishing generated data from real data. These two networks are
trained simultaneously, and the hope is that the competition will
drive the generated samples to be indistinguishable from real data.
(DC)GAN should fit your task quite well.

Multiclass Classifiers

I am working on a audio multi class classification problem (noise,vessels,2 types of animals) by using MFCC features. I am getting different results with different classifiers. I tried Bayesian type, Artificial Neural Networks, MSVM and decision trees.
Can anybody tell me what are the strengths and weaknesses of each of those 4 classifiers?
Many thanks
There is no “best” classifier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem
Averaged over all possible types of data distributions,
all classifi ers perform the same. Th us, we cannot say which algorithm
... is the “best”. Over any given data distribution or set of
data distributions, however, there is usually a best classifi er. Th us, when
faced with real data it’s a good idea to try many classifi ers. Consider
your purpose: Is it just to get the right score, or is it to interpret the
data? Do you seek fast computation, small memory requirements, or
confi dence bounds on the decisions? Diff erent classifi ers have diff erent
properties along these dimensions.
Learning OpenCV page 465

Which predictive modelling technique will be most helpful?

I have a training dataset which gives me the ranking of various cricket players(2008) on the basis of their performance in the past years(2005-2007).
I've to develop a model using this data and then apply it on another dataset to predict the ranking of players(2012) using the data already given to me(2009-2011).
Which predictive modelling will be best for this? What are the pros and cons of using the different forms of regression or neural networks?
The type of model to use depends on different factors:
Amount of data: if you have very little data, you better opt for a simple prediction model like linear regression. If you use a prediction model which is too powerful you run into the risk of over-fitting your model with the effect that it generalizes bad on new data. Now you might ask, what is little data? That depends on the number of input dimensions and on the underlying distributions of your data.
Your experience with the model. Neural networks can be quite tricky to handle if you have little experience with them. There are quite a few parameters to be optimized, like the network layer structure, the number of iterations, the learning rate, the momentum term, just to mention a few. Linear prediction is a lot easier to handle with respect to this "meta-optimization"
A pragmatic approach for you, if you still cannot opt for one of the methods, would be to evaluate a couple of different prediction methods. You take some of your data where you already have target values (the 2008 data), split it into training and test data (take some 10% as test data, e.g.), train and test using cross-validation and compute the error rate by comparing the predicted values with the target values you already have.
One great book, which is also on the web, is Pattern recognition and machine learning by C. Bishop. It has a great introductory section on prediction models.
Which predictive modelling will be best for this? 2. What are the pros
and cons of using the different forms of regression or neural
networks?
"What is best" depends on the resources you have. Full Bayesian Networks (or k-Dependency Bayesian Networks) with information theoretically learned graphs, are the ultimate 'assumptionless' models, and often perform extremely well. Sophisticated Neural Networks can perform impressively well too. The problem with such models is that they can be very computationally expensive, so models that employ methods of approximation may be more appropriate. There are mathematical similarities connecting regression, neural networks and bayesian networks.
Regression is actually a simple form of Neural Networks with some additional assumptions about the data. Neural Networks can be constructed to make less assumptions about the data, but as Thomas789 points out at the cost of being considerably more difficult to understand (sometimes monumentally difficult to debug).
As a rule of thumb - the more assumptions and approximations in a model the easier it is to A: understand and B: find the computational power necessary, but potentially at the cost of performance or "overfitting" (this is when a model suits the training data well, but doesn't extrapolate to the general case).
Free online books:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/
http://ciml.info/dl/v0_8/ciml-v0_8-all.pdf