CMSC 691B Discussion Questions
February 6, 2006

Cohen et al., "Learning to order things"

Kamishima and Akaho, "Learning from order examples"

  • What are the main claims of the paper? Does the paper present theoretical and/or empirical evidence for these claims?
  • Does the paper position itself thoroughly and accurately with respect to related work?
  • Specific technical questions:
  • What does this paper use as the loss function for measuring the effectiveness of the algorithm? Do you think this is a good loss function to use? How does it differ from the loss function used by Cohen et al.?
  • What is the difference between a "classification-based" and a "regression-based" approach for learning ordering functions?
  • What is the "Bayesian estimator with Dirichlet prior" (p. 646) used for?
  • What is the difference between the SumClass and ProductClass sorting strategies?  How woudl one decide which to use?
  • What is the "Type I quantification method" used for the regression approach?
  • What is being evaluated by the experiments in Section 5? Are these results convincing? Why or why not? Are the conclusions drawn by the authors supported by the results?
  • What are the key results of the paper?
  • What do you think are the most important/interesting next steps/future work for this paper?
  • What  references would you follow up on if you were to do further reading on this topic?
  • What were the good and bad aspects of the presentation (organization, writing quality, clarity) of this paper? Is the paper self-contained, or would you need to do further background reading (or correspond with the authors ) to understand the details of the methods and results?
  • Comparing the papers