Latent Code and Text-Based GAN (LATEXT-GAN)
Text generation with generative adversarial networks (GANs) can be divided into the text-based and code-based categories according to the type of signals used for discrimination. In this work, we introduce a novel text-based approach called Soft-GAN to effectively exploit GAN setup for text generation. We demonstrate how autoencoders (AEs) can be used for providing a continuous representation of sentences, which we will refer to as soft-text. This soft representation will be used in GAN discrimination to synthesize similar soft-texts. We also propose hybrid latent code and text-based GAN (LATEXT-GAN) approaches with one or more discriminators, in which a combination of the latent code and the soft-text is used for GAN discriminations. We perform a number of subjective and objective experiments on two well-known datasets (SNLI and Image COCO) to validate our techniques. We discuss the results using several evaluation metrics and show that the proposed techniques outperform the traditional GAN-based text-generation methods. …

DEXON
A blockchain system is a replicated state machine that must be fault tolerant. When designing a blockchain system, there is usually a trade-off between decentralization, scalability, and security. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain system, DEXON, which achieves high scalability while remaining decentralized and robust in the real-world environment. We have two main contributions. First, we present a highly scalable sharding framework for blockchain. This framework takes an arbitrary number of single chains and transforms them into the \textit{blocklattice} data structure, enabling \textit{high scalability} and \textit{low transaction confirmation latency} with asymptotically optimal communication overhead. Second, we propose a single-chain protocol based on our novel verifiable random function and a new Byzantine agreement that achieves high decentralization and low latency. …

Apache Lucene
The goal of Apache Lucene and Solr is to provide world class search capabilities. The Apache Lucene project develops open-source search software, including:
· Lucene Core, our flagship sub-project, provides Java-based indexing and search technology, as well as spellchecking, hit highlighting and advanced analysis/tokenization capabilities.
· Solr is a high performance search server built using Lucene Core, with XML/HTTP and JSON/Python/Ruby APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, and a web admin interface.
· Open Relevance Project is a subproject with the aim of collecting and distributing free materials for relevance testing and performance.
· PyLucene is a Python port of the Core project.
http://…/structure-apache-lucene …

KFHE-HOMER
Multi-label classification allows a datapoint to be labelled with more than one class at the same time. Ensemble methods generally perform much better than single classifiers. Except bagging style ensembles like ECC, RAkEL, in multi-label classification, other ensemble methods have not been explored much. KFHE (Kalman Filter-based Heuristic Ensemble), is a recent ensemble method which uses the Kalman filter to combine several models. KFHE views the final ensemble to be learned as a state to be estimated which it estimates using multiple noisy ‘measurements’. These ‘measurements’ are essentially component classifiers trained under different settings. This work extends KFHE to multi-label domain by proposing KFHE-HOMER which enhances the performance of HOMER using the KFHE framework. KFHE-HOMER sequentially trains multiple HOMER classifiers using weighted training datapoints and random hyperparameters. These models are considered as measurements and their related error as the uncertainty of the measurements. Then the Kalman filter framework is used to combine these measurements to get a more accurate estimate. The method was tested on 10 multi-label datasets and compared with other multi-label classification algorithms. Results show that KFHE-HOMER performs consistently better than similar multi-label ensemble methods. …