From the post:
There’s been a lot of buzz recently on reddit and HN about genetic algorithms. Some impressive new demos have surfaced and I’d like to take this opportunity to review some of the cool things people have done with genetic algorithms, a fascinating subfield of evolutionary computing / machine learning (which is itself a part of the broader study of artificial intelligence (ah how academics love to classify things (and nest parentheses (especially computer scientists)))).
Interesting collection of examples of uses of genetic algorithms.
Posted here to provoke thinking about the use of genetic algorithms in topic maps.
See also the author’s tutorial: Genetic Algorithm For Hello World.
Have you used genetic algorithms with a topic map?
Appreciate a note if you have.
Hi, I suspect you’d be better off looking at unsupervised learning like clustering for topic maps. Topic maps are new to me, but based on my information retrieval studies I’d say that k-means on words would produce topic clusters. Getting the topic name of the generated clusters would be more difficult unless you already had a named space.
If you were to use a genetic algorithm, what would the fitness function be trying to maximise?
Or perhaps I’ve got the wrong end of the stick entirely? Either way, glad you liked my little blog post!
Comment by Howard Yeend — March 6, 2011 @ 4:44 pm
@Howard, Sorry, did not mean to neglect your response!
I will post a longer answer, hopefully this week, but in brief, the use of genetic algorithms would be part of a process of discovering the subjects you want to identify with a topic map. For reasons I happen to agree with, the original topic map effort assumed the existence of a topic map and said nothing of how you got there.
In hindsight, perhaps not the best strategy. But, we can only go forward from where we are.
So in my blog I try to give a taste of everything from subject discovery and disclosure of identity to topic map models to what looks interesting in terms of CS research.
Comment by Patrick Durusau — March 8, 2011 @ 7:56 pm