OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Open-domain Topic Identification of Out-of-domain Utterances using Wikipedia
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Users of spoken dialogue systems (SDS) expect high quality interactions across a wide range of diverse topics. However, the implementation of SDS capable of responding to every conceivable user utterance in an informative way is a challenging problem. Multi-domain SDS must necessarily identify and deal with out-of-domain (OOD) utterances to generate appropriate responses as users do not always know in advance what domains the SDS can handle. To address this problem, we extend the current state-of-the-art in multi-domain SDS by estimating the topic of OOD utterances using external knowledge representation from Wikipedia. Experimental results on real human-to-human dialogues showed that our approach does not degrade domain prediction performance when compared to the base model. But more significantly, our joint training achieves more accurate predictions of the nearest Wikipedia article by up to about 30% when compared to the benchmarks.
Pseudo Polynomial Size LP Formulation for Calculating the Least Core Value of Weighted Voting Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we propose a pseudo polynomial size LP formulation for finding a payoff vector in the least core of a weighted voting game. The numbers of variables and constraints in our formulation are both bounded by $\mbox{O}(n W_+)$, where $n$ is the number of players and $W_+$ is the total sum of (integer) voting weights. When we employ our formulation, a commercial LP solver calculates a payoff vector in the least core of practical weighted voting games in a few seconds. We also extend our approach to vector weighted voting games.
Evolutionary Generative Adversarial Networks with Crossover Based Knowledge Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) is an adversarial model, and it has been demonstrated to be effective for various generative tasks. However, GAN and its variants also suffer from many training problems, such as mode collapse and gradient vanish. In this paper, we firstly propose a general crossover operator, which can be widely applied to GANs using evolutionary strategies. Then we design an evolutionary GAN framework C-GAN based on it. And we combine the crossover operator with evolutionary generative adversarial networks (EGAN) to implement the evolutionary generative adversarial networks with crossover (CE-GAN). Under the premise that a variety of loss functions are used as mutation operators to generate mutation individuals, we evaluate the generated samples and allow the mutation individuals to learn experiences from the output in a knowledge distillation manner, imitating the best output outcome, resulting in better offspring. Then, we greedily selected the best offspring as parents for subsequent training using discriminator as evaluator. Experiments on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CE-GAN and show that our method is competitive in terms of generated images quality and time efficiency.
Automatic image annotation base on Naive Bayes and Decision Tree classifiers using MPEG-7
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Recently it has become essential to search for and retrieve high-resolution and efficient images easily due to swift development of digital images, many present annotation algorithms facing a big challenge which is the variance for represent the image where high level represent image semantic and low level illustrate the features, this issue is known as semantic gab. This work has been used MPEG-7 standard to extract the features from the images, where the color feature was extracted by using Scalable Color Descriptor (SCD) and Color Layout Descriptor (CLD), whereas the texture feature was extracted by employing Edge Histogram Descriptor (EHD), the CLD produced high dimensionality feature vector therefore it is reduced by Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The features that have extracted by these three descriptors could be passing to the classifiers (Naive Bayes and Decision Tree) for training. Finally, they annotated the query image. In this study TUDarmstadt image bank had been used. The results of tests and comparative performance evaluation indicated better precision and executing time of Naive Bayes classification in comparison with Decision Tree classification.
e-ACJ: Accurate Junction Extraction For Event Cameras
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Junctions reflect the important geometrical structure information of the image, and are of primary significance to applications such as image matching and motion analysis. Previous event-based feature extraction methods are mainly focused on corners, which mainly find their locations, however, ignoring the geometrical structure information like orientations and scales of edges. This paper adapts the frame-based a-contrario junction detector(ACJ) to event data, proposing the event-based a-contrario junction detector(e-ACJ), which yields junctions' locations while giving the scales and orientations of their branches. The proposed method relies on an a-contrario model and can operate on asynchronous events directly without generating synthesized event frames. We evaluate the performance on public event datasets. The result shows our method successfully finds the orientations and scales of branches, while maintaining high accuracy in junction's location.
Alaska: A Flexible Benchmark for Data Integration Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

Data integration is a long-standing interest of the data management community and has many disparate applications, including business, science and government. We have recently witnessed impressive results in specific data integration tasks, such as Entity Resolution, thanks to the increasing availability of benchmarks. A limitation of such benchmarks is that they typically come with their own task definition and it can be difficult to leverage them for complex integration pipelines. As a result, evaluating end-to-end pipelines for the entire data integration process is still an elusive goal. In this work, we present Alaska, the first benchmark based on real-world dataset to support seamlessly multiple tasks (and their variants) of the data integration pipeline. The dataset consists of ~70k heterogeneous product specifications from 71 e-commerce websites with thousands of different product attributes. Our benchmark comes with profiling meta-data, a set of pre-defined use cases with diverse characteristics, and an extensive manually curated ground truth. We demonstrate the flexibility of our benchmark by focusing on several variants of two crucial data integration tasks, Schema Matching and Entity Resolution. Our experiments show that our benchmark enables the evaluation of a variety of methods that previously were difficult to compare, and can foster the design of more holistic data integration solutions.
Enquire One's Parent and Child Before Decision: Fully Exploit Hierarchical Structure for Self-Supervised Taxonomy Expansion
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Taxonomy is a hierarchically structured knowledge graph that plays a crucial role in machine intelligence. The taxonomy expansion task aims to find a position for a new term in an existing taxonomy to capture the emerging knowledge in the world and keep the taxonomy dynamically updated. Previous taxonomy expansion solutions neglect valuable information brought by the hierarchical structure and evaluate the correctness of merely an added edge, which downgrade the problem to node-pair scoring or mini-path classification. In this paper, we propose the Hierarchy Expansion Framework (HEF), which fully exploits the hierarchical structure's properties to maximize the coherence of expanded taxonomy. HEF makes use of taxonomy's hierarchical structure in multiple aspects: i) HEF utilizes subtrees containing most relevant nodes as self-supervision data for a complete comparison of parental and sibling relations; ii) HEF adopts a coherence modeling module to evaluate the coherence of a taxonomy's subtree by integrating hypernymy relation detection and several tree-exclusive features; iii) HEF introduces the Fitting Score for position selection, which explicitly evaluates both path and level selections and takes full advantage of parental relations to interchange information for disambiguation and self-correction. Extensive experiments show that by better exploiting the hierarchical structure and optimizing taxonomy's coherence, HEF vastly surpasses the prior state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets by an average improvement of 46.7% in accuracy and 32.3% in mean reciprocal rank.
"Can I Touch This?": Survey of Virtual Reality Interactions via Haptic Solutions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Haptic feedback has become crucial to enhance the user experiences in Virtual Reality (VR). This justifies the sudden burst of novel haptic solutions proposed these past years in the HCI community. This article is a survey of Virtual Reality interactions, relying on haptic devices. We propose two dimensions to describe and compare the current haptic solutions: their degree of physicality, as well as their degree of actuation. We depict a compromise between the user and the designer, highlighting how the range of required or proposed stimulation in VR is opposed to the haptic interfaces flexibility and their deployment in real-life use-cases. This paper (1) outlines the variety of haptic solutions and provides a novel perspective for analysing their associated interactions, (2) highlights the limits of the current evaluation criteria regarding these interactions, and finally (3) reflects the interaction, operation and conception potentials of "encountered-type of haptic devices".
A Note on the Representation Power of GHHs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this note we prove a sharp lower bound on the necessary number of nestings of nested absolute-value functions of generalized hinging hyperplanes (GHH) to represent arbitrary CPWL functions. Previous upper bound states that $n+1$ nestings is sufficient for GHH to achieve universal representation power, but the corresponding lower bound was unknown. We prove that $n$ nestings is necessary for universal representation power, which provides an almost tight lower bound. We also show that one-hidden-layer neural networks don't have universal approximation power over the whole domain. The analysis is based on a key lemma showing that any finite sum of periodic functions is either non-integrable or the zero function, which might be of independent interest.
How to Evaluate a Summarizer: Study Design and Statistical Analysis for Manual Linguistic Quality Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Manual evaluation is essential to judge progress on automatic text summarization. However, we conduct a survey on recent summarization system papers that reveals little agreement on how to perform such evaluation studies. We conduct two evaluation experiments on two aspects of summaries' linguistic quality (coherence and repetitiveness) to compare Likert-type and ranking annotations and show that best choice of evaluation method can vary from one aspect to another. In our survey, we also find that study parameters such as the overall number of annotators and distribution of annotators to annotation items are often not fully reported and that subsequent statistical analysis ignores grouping factors arising from one annotator judging multiple summaries. Using our evaluation experiments, we show that the total number of annotators can have a strong impact on study power and that current statistical analysis methods can inflate type I error rates up to eight-fold. In addition, we highlight that for the purpose of system comparison the current practice of eliciting multiple judgements per summary leads to less powerful and reliable annotations given a fixed study budget.
Systematic Evaluation and Usability Analysis of Formal Tools for Railway System Design
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Formal methods and supporting tools have a long record of success in the development of safety-critical systems. However, no single tool has emerged as the dominant solution for system design. Each tool differs from the others in terms of the modeling language used, its verification capabilities and other complementary features, and each development context has peculiar needs that require different tools. This is particularly problematic for the railway industry, in which formal methods are highly recommended by the norms, but no actual guidance is provided for the selection of tools. To guide companies in the selection of the most appropriate formal tools to adopt in their contexts, a clear assessment of the features of the currently available tools is required. To address this goal, this paper considers a set of 13 formal tools that have been used for railway system design, and it presents a systematic evaluation of such tools and a preliminary usability analysis of a subset of 7 tools, involving railway practitioners. The results are discussed considering the most desired aspects by industry and earlier related studies. While the focus is on the railway domain, the overall methodology can be applied to similar contexts. Our study thus contributes with a systematic evaluation of formal tools and it shows that despite the poor graphical interfaces, usability and maturity of the tools are not major problems, as claimed by contributions from the literature. Instead, support for process integration is the most relevant obstacle for the adoption of most of the tools.
Adversarial Stylometry in the Wild: Transferable Lexical Substitution Attacks on Author Profiling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Written language contains stylistic cues that can be exploited to automatically infer a variety of potentially sensitive author information. Adversarial stylometry intends to attack such models by rewriting an author's text. Our research proposes several components to facilitate deployment of these adversarial attacks in the wild, where neither data nor target models are accessible. We introduce a transformer-based extension of a lexical replacement attack, and show it achieves high transferability when trained on a weakly labeled corpus -- decreasing target model performance below chance. While not completely inconspicuous, our more successful attacks also prove notably less detectable by humans. Our framework therefore provides a promising direction for future privacy-preserving adversarial attacks.
See-Through Captions: Real-Time Captioning on Transparent Display for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing People
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Real-time captioning is a useful technique for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) people to talk to hearing people. With the improvement in device performance and the accuracy of automatic speech recognition (ASR), real-time captioning is becoming an important tool for helping DHH people in their daily lives. To realize higher-quality communication and overcome the limitations of mobile and augmented-reality devices, real-time captioning that can be used comfortably while maintaining nonverbal communication and preventing incorrect recognition is required. Therefore, we propose a real-time captioning system that uses a transparent display. In this system, the captions are presented on both sides of the display to address the problem of incorrect ASR, and the highly transparent display makes it possible to see both the body language and the captions.
Inheritance-guided Hierarchical Assignment for Clinical Automatic Diagnosis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Clinical diagnosis, which aims to assign diagnosis codes for a patient based on the clinical note, plays an essential role in clinical decision-making. Considering that manual diagnosis could be error-prone and time-consuming, many intelligent approaches based on clinical text mining have been proposed to perform automatic diagnosis. However, these methods may not achieve satisfactory results due to the following challenges. First, most of the diagnosis codes are rare, and the distribution is extremely unbalanced. Second, existing methods are challenging to capture the correlation between diagnosis codes. Third, the lengthy clinical note leads to the excessive dispersion of key information related to codes. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel framework to combine the inheritance-guided hierarchical assignment and co-occurrence graph propagation for clinical automatic diagnosis. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical joint prediction strategy to address the challenge of unbalanced codes distribution. Then, we utilize graph convolutional neural networks to obtain the correlation and semantic representations of medical ontology. Furthermore, we introduce multi attention mechanisms to extract crucial information. Finally, extensive experiments on MIMIC-III dataset clearly validate the effectiveness of our method.
Recent Trends in Named Entity Recognition (NER)
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The availability of large amounts of computer-readable textual data and hardware that can process the data has shifted the focus of knowledge projects towards deep learning architecture. Natural Language Processing, particularly the task of Named Entity Recognition is no exception. The bulk of the learning methods that have produced state-of-the-art results have changed the deep learning model, the training method used, the training data itself or the encoding of the output of the NER system. In this paper, we review significant learning methods that have been employed for NER in the recent past and how they came about from the linear learning methods of the past. We also cover the progress of related tasks that are upstream or downstream to NER, e.g., sequence tagging, entity linking, etc., wherever the processes in question have also improved NER results.
Fake News Detection System using XLNet model with Topic Distributions: CONSTRAINT@AAAI2021 Shared Task
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

With the ease of access to information, and its rapid dissemination over the internet (both velocity and volume), it has become challenging to filter out truthful information from fake ones. The research community is now faced with the task of automatic detection of fake news, which carries real-world socio-political impact. One such research contribution came in the form of the Constraint@AAA12021 Shared Task on COVID19 Fake News Detection in English. In this paper, we shed light on a novel method we proposed as a part of this shared task. Our team introduced an approach to combine topical distributions from Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with contextualized representations from XLNet. We also compared our method with existing baselines to show that XLNet + Topic Distributions outperforms other approaches by attaining an F1-score of 0.967.
An Explainable CNN Approach for Medical Codes Prediction from Clinical Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Method: We develop CNN-based methods for automatic ICD coding based on clinical text from intensive care unit (ICU) stays. We come up with the Shallow and Wide Attention convolutional Mechanism (SWAM), which allows our model to learn local and low-level features for each label. The key idea behind our model design is to look for the presence of informative snippets in the clinical text that correlated with each code, and we infer that there exists a correspondence between "informative snippet" and convolution filter. Results: We evaluate our approach on MIMIC-III, an open-access dataset of ICU medical records. Our approach substantially outperforms previous results on top-50 medical code prediction on MIMIC-III dataset. We attribute this improvement to SWAM, by which the wide architecture gives the model ability to more extensively learn the unique features of different codes, and we prove it by ablation experiment. Besides, we perform manual analysis of the performance imbalance between different codes, and preliminary conclude the characteristics that determine the difficulty of learning specific codes. Conclusions: We present SWAM, an explainable CNN approach for multi-label document classification, which employs a wide convolution layer to learn local and low-level features for each label, yields strong improvements over previous metrics on the ICD-9 code prediction task, while providing satisfactory explanations for its internal mechanics.
Utilizing Uncertainty Estimation in Deep Learning Segmentation of Fluorescence Microscopy Images with Missing Markers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Fluorescence microscopy images contain several channels, each indicating a marker staining the sample. Since many different marker combinations are utilized in practice, it has been challenging to apply deep learning based segmentation models, which expect a predefined channel combination for all training samples as well as at inference for future application. Recent work circumvents this problem using a modality attention approach to be effective across any possible marker combination. However, for combinations that do not exist in a labeled training dataset, one cannot have any estimation of potential segmentation quality if that combination is encountered during inference. Without this, not only one lacks quality assurance but one also does not know where to put any additional imaging and labeling effort. We herein propose a method to estimate segmentation quality on unlabeled images by (i) estimating both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties of convolutional neural networks for image segmentation, and (ii) training a Random Forest model for the interpretation of uncertainty features via regression to their corresponding segmentation metrics. Additionally, we demonstrate that including these uncertainty measures during training can provide an improvement on segmentation performance.
Randori: Local Differential Privacy for All
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Polls are a common way of collecting data, including product reviews and feedback forms. However, few data collectors give upfront privacy guarantees. Additionally, when privacy guarantees are given upfront, they are often vague claims about 'anonymity'. Instead, we propose giving quantifiable privacy guarantees through the statistical notion of differential privacy. Nevertheless, privacy does not come for free. At the heart of differential privacy lies an inherent trade-off between accuracy and privacy that needs to be balanced. Thus, it is vital to properly adjust the accuracy-privacy trade-off before setting out to collect data. Altogether, getting started with differentially private data collection can be challenging. Ideally, a data analyst should not have to be concerned about all the details of differential privacy, but rather get differential privacy by design. Still, to the best of our knowledge, no tools for gathering poll data under differential privacy exists. Motivated by the lack of tools to gather poll data under differential privacy, we set out to engineer our own tool. Specifically, to make local differential privacy accessible for all, in this systems paper we present Randori, a set of novel open source tools for differentially private poll data collection. Randori is intended to help data analysts keep their focus on what data their poll is collecting, as opposed to how they should collect it. Our tools also allow the data analysts to analytically predict the accuracy of their poll. Furthermore, we show that differential privacy alone is not enough to achieve end-to-end privacy in a server-client setting. Consequently, we also investigate and mitigate implicit data leaks in Randori.