Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Survey of Document Grounded Dialogue Systems (DGDS)

Dialogue system (DS) attracts great attention from industry and academia because of its wide application prospects. Researchers usually divide the DS according to the function. However, many conversations require the DS to switch between different functions. For example, movie discussion can change from chit-chat to QA, the conversational recommendation can transform from chit-chat to recommendation, etc. Therefore, classification according to functions may not be enough to help us appreciate the current development trend. We classify the DS based on background knowledge. Specifically, study the latest DS based on the unstructured document(s). We define Document Grounded Dialogue System (DGDS) as the DS that the dialogues are centering on the given document(s). The DGDS can be used in scenarios such as talking over merchandise against product Manual, commenting on news reports, etc. We believe that extracting unstructured document(s) information is the future trend of the DS because a great amount of human knowledge lies in these document(s). The research of the DGDS not only possesses a broad application prospect but also facilitates AI to better understand human knowledge and natural language. We analyze the classification, architecture, datasets, models, and future development trends of the DGDS, hoping to help researchers in this field.
Spatiotemporal Dynamics, Nowcasting and Forecasting of COVID-19 in the United States

In response to the ongoing public health emergency of COVID-19, we investigate the disease dynamics to understand the spread of COVID-19 in the United States. In particular, we focus on the spatiotemporal dynamics of the disease, accounting for the control measures, environmental effects, socioeconomic factors, health service resources, and demographic conditions that vary from different counties. In the modeling of an epidemic, mathematical models are useful, however, pure mathematical modeling is deterministic, and only demonstrates the average behavior of the epidemic; thus, it is difficult to quantify the uncertainty. Instead, statistical models provide varieties of characterization of different types of errors. In this paper, we investigate the disease dynamics by working at the interface of theoretical models and empirical data by combining the advantages of mathematical and statistical models. We develop a novel nonparametric space-time disease transmission model for the epidemic data, and to study the spatial-temporal pattern in the spread of COVID-19 at the county level. The proposed methodology can be used to dissect the spatial structure and dynamics of spread, as well as to forecast how this outbreak may unfold through time and space in the future. To assess the uncertainty, projection bands are constructed from forecast paths obtained in bootstrap replications. A dashboard is established with multiple R shiny apps embedded to provide a 7-day forecast of the COVID-19 infection count and death count up to the county level, as well as a long-term projection of the next four months. The proposed method provides remarkably accurate short-term prediction results.
Reducing catastrophic forgetting with learning on synthetic data

Catastrophic forgetting is a problem caused by neural networks’ inability to learn data in sequence. After learning two tasks in sequence, performance on the first one drops significantly. This is a serious disadvantage that prevents many deep learning applications to real-life problems where not all object classes are known beforehand; or change in data requires adjustments to the model. To reduce this problem we investigate the use of synthetic data, namely we answer a question: Is it possible to generate such data synthetically which learned in sequence does not result in catastrophic forgetting? We propose a method to generate such data in two-step optimisation process via meta-gradients. Our experimental results on Split-MNIST dataset show that training a model on such synthetic data in sequence does not result in catastrophic forgetting. We also show that our method of generating data is robust to different learning scenarios.
Multilingual Zero-shot Constituency Parsing

Zero-shot constituency parsing aims to extract parse trees from neural models such as pre-trained language models (PLMs) without further training or the need to train an additional parser. This paper improves upon existing zero-shot parsing paradigms by introducing a novel chart-based parsing method, showing gains in zero-shot parsing performance. Furthermore, we attempt to broaden the range of zero-shot parsing applications by examining languages other than English and by utilizing multilingual models, demonstrating that it is feasible to generate parse tree-like structures for sentences in eight other languages using our method.
Classical Option Pricing and Some Steps Further

This paper modifies single assumption in the base of classical option pricing model and derives further extensions for the Black-Scholes-Merton equation. We regard the price as the ratio of the cost and the volume of market transaction and apply classical assumptions on stochastic Brownian motion not to the price but to the cost and the volume. This simple replacement leads to 2-dimensional BSM-like equation with two constant volatilities. We argue that decisions on the cost and the volume of market transactions are made under agents expectations. Random perturbations of expectations impact the market transactions and through them induce stochastic behavior of the underlying price. We derive BSM-like equation driven by Brownian motion of agents expectations. Agents expectations can be based on option trading data. We show how such expectations can lead to nonlinear BSM-like equations. Further we show that the Heston stochastic volatility option pricing model can be applied to our approximations and as example derive 3-dimensional BSM-like equation that describes option pricing with stochastic cost volatility and constant volume volatility. Diversity of BSM-like equations with 2 – 5 or more dimensions emphasizes complexity of option pricing problem. Such variety states the problem of reasonable balance between the accuracy of asset and option price description and the complexity of the equations under consideration. We hope that some of BSM-like equations derived in this paper may be useful for further development of assets and option market modeling.
DeCoRIC: Decentralized Connected Resilient IoT Clustering

Maintaining peer-to-peer connectivity with low energy overhead is a key requirement for several emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications. It is also desirable to develop such connectivity solutions for non-static network topologies, so that resilience to device failures can be fully realized. De-centralized clustering has emerged as a promising technique to address this critical challenge. Clustering of nodes around cluster heads (CHs) provides an energy-efficient two-tier framework for peer-to-peer communication. At the same time, decentralization ensures that the framework can quickly adapt to a dynamically changing network topology. Although some decentralized clustering solutions have been proposed in the literature, they either lack guarantees on connectivity or incur significant energy overhead to maintain the clusters. In this paper, we present Decentralized Connected Resilient IoT Clustering (DeCoRIC), an energy-efficient clustering scheme that is self-organizing and resilient to network changes while guaranteeing connectivity. Using experiments implemented on the Contiki simulator, we show that our clustering scheme adapts itself to node faults in a time-bound manner. Our experiments show that DeCoRIC achieves 100% connectivity among all nodes while improving the power efficiency of nodes in the system compared to the state-of-the-art techniques BEEM and LEACH by up to 110% and 70%, respectively. The improved power efficiency also translates to longer lifetime before first node death with a best-case of 109% longer than BEEM and 42% longer than LEACH.
Study of genetic diversity of three Portuguese cattle breeds by 93 micro satellite markers.

The objectives of this work were to assess the genetic diversity within and between three Portuguese cattle breeds using 93 microsatellites markers. Blood samples were collected from 50 individuals of each breed, and ninety-three microsatellites were analysed to get thorough information about genetic diversity and interrelationships among three Portuguese cattle breeds: Mirandesa (MIR), Maronesa (MAR), and Barrosa (BAR). Estimates of genetic variability, observed (Ho) and expected heterozygosity (He), allelic richness for each locus were determined. The alleles were classified in three classes according to their frequency: common alleles (observed in the three sub-populations), private alleles (alleles observed in one sub-population) and rare alleles (non-private alleles with a frequency < 0.01 over the whole population). The number of rare alleles found was 52 in MAR, 33 in MIR, and 30 in BAR. The number of private alleles found was 5 in MIR and BAR, and 2 in MAR. The MIR showed the lowest genetic diversity, and the highest genetic distance to the other two breeds. The three breeds could be considered as genetically distinct populations. This study shows that measures should be taken in order to preserve the genetic diversity of MIR, MAR, and BAR cattle breeds.
Neural Machine Translation for Low-Resourced Indian Languages

A large number of significant assets are available online in English, which is frequently translated into native languages to ease the information sharing among local people who are not much familiar with English. However, manual translation is a very tedious, costly, and time-taking process. To this end, machine translation is an effective approach to convert text to a different language without any human involvement. Neural machine translation (NMT) is one of the most proficient translation techniques amongst all existing machine translation systems. In this paper, we have applied NMT on two of the most morphological rich Indian languages, i.e. English-Tamil and English-Malayalam. We proposed a novel NMT model using Multihead self-attention along with pre-trained Byte-Pair-Encoded (BPE) and MultiBPE embeddings to develop an efficient translation system that overcomes the OOV (Out Of Vocabulary) problem for low resourced morphological rich Indian languages which do not have much translation available online. We also collected corpus from different sources, addressed the issues with these publicly available data and refined them for further uses. We used the BLEU score for evaluating our system performance. Experimental results and survey confirmed that our proposed translator (24.34 and 9.78 BLEU score) outperforms Google translator (9.40 and 5.94 BLEU score) respectively.
Detecting Domain Polarity-Changes of Words in a Sentiment Lexicon

Sentiment lexicons are instrumental for sentiment analysis. One can use a set of sentiment words provided in a sentiment lexicon and a lexicon-based classifier to perform sentiment classification. One major issue with this approach is that many sentiment words are domain dependent. That is, they may be positive in some domains but negative in some others. We refer to this problem as domain polarity-changes of words. Detecting such words and correcting their sentiment for an application domain is very important. In this paper, we propose a graph-based technique to tackle this problem. Experimental results show its effectiveness on multiple real-world datasets.
Privacy-Preserving Recommender Systems Challenge on Twitter's Home Timeline

Recommender systems constitute the core engine of most social network platforms nowadays, aiming to maximize user satisfaction along with other key business objectives. Twitter is no exception. Despite the fact that Twitter data has been extensively used to understand socioeconomic and political phenomena and user behaviour, the implicit feedback provided by users on Tweets through their engagements on the Home Timeline has only been explored to a limited extent. At the same time, there is a lack of large-scale public social network datasets that would enable the scientific community to both benchmark and build more powerful and comprehensive models that tailor content to user interests. By releasing an original dataset of 160 million Tweets along with engagement information, Twitter aims to address exactly that. During this release, special attention is drawn on maintaining compliance with existing privacy laws. Apart from user privacy, this paper touches on the key challenges faced by researchers and professionals striving to predict user engagements. It further describes the key aspects of the RecSys 2020 Challenge that was organized by ACM RecSys in partnership with Twitter using this dataset.
Effective Human Activity Recognition Based on Small Datasets

Most recent work on vision-based human activity recognition (HAR) focuses on designing complex deep learning models for the task. In so doing, there is a requirement for large datasets to be collected. As acquiring and processing large training datasets are usually very expensive, the problem of how dataset size can be reduced without affecting recognition accuracy has to be tackled. To do so, we propose a HAR method that consists of three steps: (i) data transformation involving the generation of new features based on transforming of raw data, (ii) feature extraction involving the learning of a classifier based on the AdaBoost algorithm and the use of training data consisting of the transformed features, and (iii) parameter determination and pattern recognition involving the determination of parameters based on the features generated in (ii) and the use of the parameters as training data for deep learning algorithms to be used to recognize human activities. Compared to existing approaches, this proposed approach has the advantageous characteristics that it is simple and robust. The proposed approach has been tested with a number of experiments performed on a relatively small real dataset. The experimental results indicate that using the proposed method, human activities can be more accurately recognized even with smaller training data size.
Graph-to-Tree Neural Networks for Learning Structured Input-Output Translation with Applications to Semantic Parsing and Math Word Problem

The celebrated Seq2Seq technique and its numerous variants achieve excellent performance on many tasks such as neural machine translation, semantic parsing, and math word problem solving. However, these models either only consider input objects as sequences while ignoring the important structural information for encoding, or they simply treat output objects as sequence outputs instead of structural objects for decoding. In this paper, we present a novel Graph-to-Tree Neural Networks, namely Graph2Tree consisting of a graph encoder and a hierarchical tree decoder, that encodes an augmented graph-structured input and decodes a tree-structured output. In particular, we investigated our model for solving two problems, neural semantic parsing and math word problem. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our Graph2Tree model outperforms or matches the performance of other state-of-the-art models on these tasks.
Generating Safe Diversity in NLG via Imitation Learning

Deep-learning models for language generation tasks tend to produce repetitive output. Various methods have been proposed to encourage lexical diversity during decoding, but this often comes at a cost to the perceived fluency and adequacy of the output. In this work, we propose to ameliorate this cost by using an Imitation Learning approach to explore the level of diversity that a language generation model can safely produce. Specifically, we augment the decoding process with a meta-classifier trained to distinguish which words at any given timestep will lead to high-quality output. We focus our experiments on concept-to-text generation where models are sensitive to the inclusion of irrelevant words due to the strict relation between input and output. Our analysis shows that previous methods for diversity underperform in this setting, while human evaluation suggests that our proposed method achieves a high level of diversity with minimal effect to the output's fluency and adequacy.
Evaluating Dialogue Generation Systems via Response Selection

Existing automatic evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue response generation systems correlate poorly with human evaluation. We focus on evaluating response generation systems via response selection. To evaluate systems properly via response selection, we propose a method to construct response selection test sets with well-chosen false candidates. Specifically, we propose to construct test sets filtering out some types of false candidates: (i) those unrelated to the ground-truth response and (ii) those acceptable as appropriate responses. Through experiments, we demonstrate that evaluating systems via response selection with the test set developed by our method correlates more strongly with human evaluation, compared with widely used automatic evaluation metrics such as BLEU.
Are papers addressing certain diseases perceived where these diseases are prevalent? The proposal to use Twitter data as social-spatial sensors

We propose to use Twitter data as social-spatial sensors. This study deals with the question whether research papers on certain diseases are perceived by people in regions (worldwide) that are especially concerned by these diseases. Since (some) Twitter data contain location information, it is possible to spatially map the activity of Twitter users referring to certain papers (e.g., dealing with tuberculosis). The resulting maps reveal whether heavy activity on Twitter is correlated with large numbers of people having certain diseases. In this study, we focus on tuberculosis, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and malaria, since the World Health Organization ranks these diseases as the top three causes of death worldwide by a single infectious agent. The results of the social-spatial Twitter maps (and additionally performed regression models) reveal the usefulness of the proposed sensor approach. One receives an impression of how research papers on the diseases have been perceived by people in regions that are especially concerned by these diseases. Our study demonstrates a promising approach for using Twitter data for research evaluation purposes beyond simple counting of tweets.
Spontaneous symmetry breaking and Husimi Q-functions in extended Dicke model

We study the emergence of a parity breaking coherent photonic state of a photon mode coupled to finite array of two-level systems, represented by pseudospins 1/2. The pseudospin-photon interaction is realised via a shift of the photonic oscillator equilibrium position by an amount linear in Cartesian component of the total pseudospin. We demonstrate analytically, that the instability is manifested in an upturn from concave to convex of the ground state energy dependence on the total pseudospin component coupled to the photons. The perturbation, sufficient for parity breaking, tends to zero in the ultrastrong limit of light–matter coupling. We present phase diagram of finite pseudospin-photon system, that demonstrates this feature. Evolution of Husimi Q-functions of the pseudospin and photon subsystems, and of the pseudospin entropy, along different trajectories across the phase diagram is presented.
Neural Network Retraining for Model Serving

We propose incremental (re)training of a neural network model to cope with a continuous flow of new data in inference during model serving. As such, this is a life-long learning process. We address two challenges of life-long retraining: catastrophic forgetting and efficient retraining. If we combine all past and new data it can easily become intractable to retrain the neural network model. On the other hand, if the model is retrained using only new data, it can easily suffer catastrophic forgetting and thus it is paramount to strike the right balance. Moreover, if we retrain all weights of the model every time new data is collected, retraining tends to require too many computing resources. To solve these two issues, we propose a novel retraining model that can select important samples and important weights utilizing multi-armed bandits. To further address forgetting, we propose a new regularization term focusing on synapse and neuron importance. We analyze multiple datasets to document the outcome of the proposed retraining methods. Various experiments demonstrate that our retraining methodologies mitigate the catastrophic forgetting problem while boosting model performance.
Syntax-Aware Data Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation

Data augmentation is an effective method for the performance enhancement of neural machine translation (NMT) by generating additional bilingual data. In this article, we propose a novel data augmentation strategy for neural machine translation. Unlike existing data augmentation methods that simply modify words with the same probability across different sentences, we introduce a sentence-specific probability approach for word selection based on the syntactic roles of words in the sentence. Our motivation is to consider a linguistics-motivated method to obtain more ingenious language generation rather than relying on computation-motivated approaches only. We argue that high-quality aligned bilingual data is crucial for NMT, and only computation-motivated data augmentation is insufficient to provide good enough extra enhancement data. Our approach leverages dependency parse trees of input sentences to determine the selection probability of each word in the sentence using three different functions to calculate probabilities for words with different depths. Besides, our method also revises the probability for words considering the sentence length. We evaluate our methods on multiple translation tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed data augmentation method does effectively boost existing sentence-independent methods for significant improvement of performance on translation tasks. Furthermore, an ablation study shows that our method does select fewer essential words and preserves the syntactic structure.
Action Sequence Predictions of Vehicles in Urban Environments using Map and Social Context

This work studies the problem of predicting the sequence of future actions for surrounding vehicles in real-world driving scenarios. To this aim, we make three main contributions. The first contribution is an automatic method to convert the trajectories recorded in real-world driving scenarios to action sequences with the help of HD maps. The method enables automatic dataset creation for this task from large-scale driving data. Our second contribution lies in applying the method to the well-known traffic agent tracking and prediction dataset Argoverse, resulting in 228,000 action sequences. Additionally, 2,245 action sequences were manually annotated for testing. The third contribution is to propose a novel action sequence prediction method by integrating past positions and velocities of the traffic agents, map information and social context into a single end-to-end trainable neural network. Our experiments prove the merit of the data creation method and the value of the created dataset – prediction performance improves consistently with the size of the dataset and shows that our action prediction method outperforms comparing models.