Abstract: Nowadays, it is common in Historical Demography the use of individual-level data as a consequence of a predominant life-course approach for the understanding of the demographic behaviour, family transition, mobility, etc. Advanced record linkage is key since it allows increasing the data complexity and its volume to be analyzed. However, current methods are constrained to link data from the same kind of sources. Knowledge graph are flexible semantic representations, which allow to encode data variability and semantic relations in a structured manner.
In this paper we propose the use of knowledge graph methods to tackle record linkage tasks. The proposed method, named WERL, takes advantage of the main knowledge graph properties and learns embedding vectors to encode census information. These embeddings are properly weighted to maximize the record linkage performance. We have evaluated this method on benchmark data sets and we have compared it to related methods with stimulating and satisfactory results.

Abstract: In this article, we focus on the problem of large-scale instance-level image retrieval. For efficiency reasons, it is common to represent an image by a fixed-length descriptor which is subsequently encoded into a small number of bits. We note that most encoding techniques include an unsupervised dimensionality reduction step. Our goal in this work is to learn a better subspace in a supervised manner. We especially raise the following question: “can category-level labels be used to learn such a subspace?” To answer this question, we experiment with four learning techniques: the first one is based on a metric learning framework, the second one on attribute representations, the third one on Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) and the fourth one on Joint Subspace and Classifier Learning (JSCL). While the first three approaches have been applied in the past to the image retrieval problem, we believe we are the first to show the usefulness of JSCL in this context. In our experiments, we use ImageNet as a source of category-level labels and report retrieval results on two standard dataseis: INRIA Holidays and the University of Kentucky benchmark. Our experimental study shows that metric learning and attributes do not lead to any significant improvement in retrieval accuracy, as opposed to CCA and JSCL. As an example, we report on Holidays an increase in accuracy from 39.3% to 48.6% with 32-dimensional representations. Overall JSCL is shown to yield the best results.

Abstract: n this paper we present the LSDE string representation and its application to handwritten word spotting. LSDE is a novel embedding approach for representing strings that learns a space in which distances between projected points are correlated with the Levenshtein edit distance between the original strings.
We show how such a representation produces a more semantically interpretable retrieval from the user’s perspective than other state of the art ones such as PHOC and DCToW. We also conduct a preliminary handwritten word spotting experiment on the George Washington dataset.

Abstract: Since the document structure carries valuable discriminative information, plenty of efforts have been made for extracting and understanding document structure among which layout analysis approaches are the most commonly used. In this paper, Distance Transform based MSER (DTMSER) is employed to efficiently extract the document structure as a dendrogram of key-regions which roughly correspond to structural elements such as characters, words and paragraphs. Inspired by the Bag
of Words (BoW) framework, we propose an efficient method for structural document matching by representing the document image as a histogram of key-region pairs encoding structural relationships.
Applied to the scenario of document image retrieval, experimental results demonstrate a remarkable improvement when comparing the proposed method with typical BoW and pyramidal BoW methods.

Abstract: In this paper we present a method for the segmentation of continuous page streams into multipage documents and the simultaneous classification of the resulting documents. We first present an approach to combine the multiple pages of a document into a single feature vector that represents the whole document. Despite its simplicity and low computational cost, the proposed representation yields results comparable to more complex methods in multipage document classification tasks. We then exploit this representation in the context of page stream segmentation. The most plausible segmentation of a page stream into a sequence of multipage documents is obtained by optimizing a statistical model that represents the probability of each segmented multipage document belonging to a particular class. Experimental results are reported on a large sample of real administrative multipage documents.

Abstract: In this paper we present a retrieval-based application aimed at assisting a user to semi-automatically segment an incoming flow of historical newspaper images by automatically detecting a particular type of pages based on their appearance. A visual descriptor is used to assess page similarity while a relevance feedback process allow refining the results iteratively. The application is tested on a large dataset of digitised historic newspapers.

Abstract: Assessing the reliability of termination conditions for evolutionary algorithms (EAs) is of prime importance. An erroneous or weak stop criterion can negatively affect both the computational effort and the final result. We introduce a statistical framework for assessing whether a termination condition is able to stop an EA at its steady state, so that its results can not be improved anymore. We use a regression model in order to determine the requirements ensuring that a measure derived from EA evolving population is related to the distance to the optimum in decision variable space. Our framework is analyzed across 24 benchmark test functions and two standard termination criteria based on function fitness value in objective function space and EA population decision variable space distribution for the differential evolution (DE) paradigm. Results validate our framework as a powerful tool for determining the capability of a measure for terminating EA and the results also identify the decision variable space distribution as the best-suited for accurately terminating DE in real-world applications.