neural text compression

[Juergen Schmidhuber]

                   Now available online:

      SEQUENTIAL NEURAL TEXT COMPRESSION (9 pages, 68 K)
   IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 7(1):142-146, 1996

     Juergen Schmidhuber, IDSIA          Stefan Heil, TUM
    http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen

Abstract: Neural nets may be promising tools for loss-free data
compression. We combine predictive neural nets and statistical
coding techniques to compress text files. We apply our methods
to short newspaper articles and obtain compression ratios exceeding
those of widely used Lempel-Ziv algorithms (the basis of UNIX
functions `compress' and `gzip'). The main disadvantage of our
methods is: on conventional machines they are about three orders
of magnitude slower than standard methods.

To obtain a copy, cut and paste this:
netscape ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/textcompression.ps.gz

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P.S.: Have you got a question on recent work on "learning to learn"
and "incremental self-improvement"? Stewart Wilson asked me to place
the corresponding paper "Environment-independent reinforcement
acceleration" in his NetQ web site. Now it is sitting there and
waiting for a friendly question or two (questions may be anonymous):
netscape http://netq.rowland.org

Juergen Schmidhuber, IDSIA