Unsupervised Activity Recognition Using Automatically Mined Common Sense

Abstract

A fundamental difficulty in recognizing human activities is obtaining the labeled data needed to learn models of those activities. Given emerging sensor technology, however, it is possible to view activity data as a stream of natural language terms. Activity models are then mappings from such terms to activity names, and may be extracted from text corpora such as the web. We show that models so extracted are sufficient to automatically produce labeled segmentations of activity data with an accuracy of 42% over 26 activities, well above the 3.8% baseline. The segmentation so obtained is sufficient to bootstrap learning, with accuracy of learned models increasing to 52%. To our knowledge, this is the first human activity inferencing system shown to learn from sensed activity data with no human intervention per activity learned, even for labeling.