Max Whitney will defend his MSc thesis on Thursday August 23 2012.
Whitney, M. Bootstrapping via graph propagation.
abstract: The Yarowsky algorithm is a simple self-training algorithm for bootstrapping learning from a small number of initial seed rules which has proven very effective in several natural language processing tasks. Bootstrapping a classifier from a small set of seed rules can be viewed as the propagation of labels between examples via features shared between them. This thesis introduces a novel variant of the Yarowsky algorithm based on this view. It is a bootstrapping learning method which uses a graph propagation algorithm with a well defined objective function. The experimental results show that our proposed bootstrapping algorithm achieves state of the art performance or better on several different natural language data sets.
This work expands on the [ACL 2012 paper](publications/whitneysarkar2012 of the same name.
