Daisuke Takuma

Faster upper bounding of intersection sizes

There is a long history of developing efficient algorithms for set intersection, which is a fundamental operation in information retrieval and databases. In this paper, we describe a new data structure, a Cardinality Filter, to quickly compute an upper bound on the size of a set intersection. Knowing an upper bound of the size can be used to accelerate many applications such as top-k query processing in text mining. Given finite sets A and B, the expected computation time for the upper bound of the size of the intersection |A cap B| is O( (|A| + |B|) w), where w is the machine word length. This is much faster than the current best algorithm for the exact intersection, which runs in O((|A| + |B|) / √w + |A cap B|) expected time. Our performance studies show that our implementations of Cardinality Filters are from 2 to 10 times faster than existing set intersection algorithms, and the time for a top-k query in a text mining application can be reduced by half.

Phoneme-to-Text Transcription System with an Infinite Vocabulary

The noisy channel model approach is successfully applied to various natural language processing tasks. Currently the main research focus of this approach is adaptation methods, how to capture characteristics of words and expressions in a target domain given example sentences in that domain. As a solution we describe a method enlarging the vocabulary of a language model to an almost infinite size and capturing their context information. Especially the new method is suitable for languages in which words are not delimited by whitespace. We applied our method to a phoneme-to-text transcription task in Japanese and reduced about 10% of the errors in the results of an existing method.