Visualization and interpretability in probabilistic dimensionality reduction models 

Tosi, Alessandra (Date of defense: 2014-12-19)

Over the last few decades, data analysis has swiftly evolved from being a task addressed mainly within the remit of multivariate statistics, to an endevour in which data heterogeneity, complexity and even sheer size, driven ...

Introducing norms into practical reasoning agents 

Panagiotidi, Sofia (Date of defense: 2014-09-29)

As distributed electronic systems grow to include thousands of components, from grid to peer-to-peer nodes, from (Semantic) Web services to web-apps to computation in the cloud, governance of such systems is becoming a ...

Exploiting distributional semantics for content-based and context-aware recommendation 

Codina Busquet, Victor (Date of defense: 2014-06-13)

During the last decade, the use of recommender systems has been increasingly growing to the point that, nowadays, the success of many well-known services depends on these technologies. Recommenders Systems help people to ...

Exploration of customer churn routes using machine learning probabilistic models 

Garcia Gomez, David (Date of defense: 2014-04-10)

The ongoing processes of globalization and deregulation are changing the competitive framework in the majority of economic sectors. The appearance of new competitors and technologies entails a sharp increase in competition ...

ProCLAIM: an argument-based model for deliberating over safety critical actions 

Tolchinsky, Pancho (Date of defense: 2012-07-09)

In this Thesis we present an argument-based model – ProCLAIM – intended to provide a setting for heterogeneous agents to deliberate on whether a proposed action is safe. That is, whether or not a proposed action is expected ...

On the intelligent management of sepsis in the intensive care unit 

Ribas Ripoll, Vicent Jordi (Date of defense: 2013-01-29)

The management of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in a hospital has its own, very specific requirements that involve, amongst others, issues of risk-adjusted mortality and average length of stay; nurse turnover and communication ...

Multi-objective optimization in graphical models 

Rollón, Emma (Date of defense: 2008-11-03)

Many real-life optimization problems are combinatorial, i.e. they concern a choice of the best solution from a finite but exponentially large set of alternatives. Besides, the solution quality of many of these problems ...

The Role of preferences in logic programming: nonmonotonic reasoning, user preferences, decision under uncertainty 

Confalonieri, Roberto (Date of defense: 2011-12-02)

Intelligent systems that assist users in fulfilling complex tasks need a concise and processable representation of incomplete and uncertain information. In order to be able to choose among different options, these systems ...

Factoid question answering for spoken documents 

Comas Umbert, Pere R. (Date of defense: 2012-05-12)

In this dissertation, we present a factoid question answering system, specifically tailored for Question Answering (QA) on spoken documents. This work explores, for the first time, which techniques can be robustly adapted ...

Unsupervised learning of relation detection patterns 

Gonzàlez Pellicer, Edgar (Date of defense: 2012-06-01)

L'extracció d'informació és l'àrea del processament de llenguatge natural l'objectiu de la qual és l'obtenir dades estructurades a partir de la informació rellevant continguda en fragments textuals. L'extracció d'informació ...

A constraint-based hypergraph partitioning approach to coreference resolution 

Sapena Masip, Emili (Date of defense: 2012-05-16)

The objectives of this thesis are focused on research in machine learning for coreference resolution. Coreference resolution is a natural language processing task that consists of determining the expressions in a discourse ...

Generative manifold learning for the exploration of partially labeled data 

Cruz Barbosa, Raúl (Date of defense: 2009-10-01)

In many real-world application problems, the availability of data labels for supervised learning is rather limited. Incompletely labeled datasets are common in many of the databases generated in some of the currently most ...

Digui: a flexibe dialogue system for guiding the user interaction to guiding the user interaction to acces web services 

González Bermúdez, Meritxell (Date of defense: 2010-10-22)

Current dialogue systems can handle friendly and collaborative communication that supports diverse types of interactions, such as menus in which the user is asked to choose an option, form filling in which the user is ...

Empirical machine translation and its evaluation 

Giménez Linares, Jesús Ángel (Date of defense: 2008-07-02)

Aquesta tesi estudia l'aplicació de les tecnologies del Processament del Llenguatge Natural disponibles actualment al problema de la Traducció Automàtica basada en Mètodes Empírics i la seva Avaluació.<br/><br/>D'una banda, ...

Acquiring information extraction patterns from unannotated corpora 

Català Roig, Neus (Date of defense: 2003-07-14)

Information Extraction (IE) can be defined as the task of automatically extracting preespecified kind of information from a text document. The extracted information is encoded in the required format and then can be used, ...

Part-of-speech Tagging: A Machine Learning Approach based on Decision Trees 

Màrquez, Lluís (Date of defense: 1999-07-21)

The study and application of general Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to theclassical ambiguity problems in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) isa currently very active area of research. This trend is sometimes ...

On Collective Computation 

Delgado Pin, Jordi (Date of defense: 1997-12-05)

Heterogeneous neural networks: theory and applications 

Belanche Muñoz, Lluís A. (Lluís Antoni) (Date of defense: 2000-07-18)

Aquest treball presenta una classe de funcions que serveixen de models neuronals generalitzats per ser usats en xarxes neuronals artificials. Es defineixen com una mesura de similitud que actúa com una definició flexible ...

Peer-to-Peer Bartering: Swapping Amongst Self-interested Agents 

Cabanillas, David (Date of defense: 2009-04-01)

Large--scale distributed environments can be seen as a conflict between the selfish aims of the participants and the group welfare of the population as a whole. In order to regulate the behavior of the participants it is ...

Agent-based management of clinical guidelines 

Isern Alarcón, David (Date of defense: 2009-02-05)

Les guies de pràctica clínica (GPC) contenen un conjunt d'accions i dades que ajuden a un metge a prendre decisions sobre el diagnòstic, tractament o qualsevol altre procediment a un pacient i sobre una determinada malaltia. ...