Many predictive tasks, such as diagnosing a patient based on their medical chart, are ultimately defined by the decisions of human experts. Unfortunately, encoding experts' knowledge is often time consuming and expensive. We propose a simple way to use fuzzy and informal knowledge from experts to guide discovery of interpretable latent topics in text. The underlying intuition of our approach is that latent factors should be informative about both correlations in the data and a set of relevance variables specified by an expert. Mathematically, this approach is a combination of the information bottleneck and Total Correlation Explanation (CorEx). We give a preliminary evaluation of Anchored CorEx, showing that it produces more coherent and interpretable topics on two distinct corpora.
Modern models of relation extraction for tasks like ACE are based on supervised learning of relations from small hand-labeled corpora. We investigate an alternative paradigm that does not require labeled corpora, avoiding the domain dependence of ACE-style algorithms, and allowing the use of corpora of any size. Our experiments use Freebase, a large semantic database of several thousand relations, to provide distant supervision. For each pair of entities that appears in some Freebase relation, we find all sentences containing those entities in a large unlabeled corpus and extract textual features to train a relation classifier. Our algorithm combines the advantages of supervised IE (combining 400,000 noisy pattern features in a probabilistic classifier) and unsupervised IE (extracting large numbers of relations from large corpora of any domain). Our model is able to extract 10,000 instances of 102 relations at a precision of 67.6 . We also analyze feature performance, showing that syntactic parse features are particularly helpful for relations that are ambiguous or lexically distant in their expression. Recently, there has been much effort in making databases for Inolecular biology more accessible osld interoperable. However, information in text. form, such as MEDLINE records, remains a greatly underutilized source of biological information. We have begun a research effort aimed at automatically mapping information from text. sources into structured representations, such as knowledge bases. Our approach to this task is to use machine-learning methods to induce routines for extracting facts from text. We describe two learning methods that we have applied to this task -a statistical text classification method, and a relational learning method -and our initial experiments in learning such information-extraction routines. We also present an approach to decreasing the cost of learning information-extraction routines by learning from "weakly" labeled training data.