My paper was accepted accepted for oral presentation at the 28th International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, held in the picturesque town of Killarney in Ireland. The title of the paper is quite a mouthful – “Discriminative Learning and Inference in the Recurrent Temporal RBM for Melody Modelling” and its abstract is the following:
“We are interested in modelling musical pitch sequences in melodies in the symbolic form. The task here is to learn a model to predict the probability distribution over the various possible values of pitch of the next note in a melody, given those leading up to it. For this task, we propose the Recurrent Temporal Discriminative Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RTDRBM). It is obtained by carrying out discriminative learning and inference as put forward in the Discriminative RBM (DRBM), in a temporal setting by incorporating the recurrent structure of the Recurrent Temporal RBM (RTRBM). The model is evaluated on the cross entropy of its predictions using a corpus containing 8 datasets of folk and chorale melodies, and compared with n-grams and other standard connectionist models. Results show that the RTDRBM has a better predictive performance than the rest of the models, and that the improvement is statistically significant.
I presented the paper in the session on Recurrent Neural Networks. The model that we proposed in the paper – the RTDRBM – was the first original Machine Learning contribution of my PhD. And it was a pleasure to collaborate with my friend and colleague Son Tran in the work. He presented a second paper at the conference titled, “Efficient Representation Ranking for Transfer Learning” .
Yet again a conference has taken me to a place in the world that I probably would’ve never visited otherwise! This doesn’t at all mean that the visit wasn’t worthwhile. The lush green Irish landscape, the charming town of Killarney and the abounding nature around it, and a friendly and welcoming hostel all made this a very memorable trip! Unfortunately, I had sore throat and a fever during much of my stay so I chose Irish coffee over a pint of Guinness (which I heard tastes much better in Ireland) when I had the chance. I regret this, but maybe that’s another reason to visit Ireland once again sometime!
