To Örebro University

Machine learning systems can be distinguished along two dimensions. The first is concerned with whether they deal with a feature based (propositional) or a relational representation; the second with the use of eager or lazy learning techniques. The advantage of relational learning is that it can capture structural information. We compare several machine learning techniques along these two dimensions on a binary sentence classification task (hedge cue detection). In particular, we use SVMs for eager learning, and kNN for lazy learning. Furthermore, we employ kLog, a kernel-based statistical relational learning framework as the relational framework. Within this framework we also contribute a novel lazy relational learning system. Our experiments show that relational learners are particularly good at handling long sentences, because of long distance dependencies.