Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
A Span-Based Model for Joint Overlapped and Discontinuous Named Entity Recognition

Research on overlapped and discontinuous named entity recognition (NER) has received increasing attention.The majority of previous work focuses on either overlapped or discontinuous entities.In this paper, we propose a novel span-based model that can recognize both overlapped and discontinuous entities jointly.The model includes two major steps.First, entity fragments are recognized by traversing over all possible text spans, thus, overlapped entities can be recognized.Second, we perform relation classification to judge whether a given pair of entity fragments to be overlapping or succession.In this way, we can recognize not only discontinuous entities, and meanwhile doubly check the overlapped entities.As a whole, our model can be regarded as a relation extraction paradigm essentially.Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets (i.e., CLEF, GENIA and ACE05) show that our model is highly competitive for overlapped and discontinuous NER.
Storage and Proximity Management for Centralized Personal Health Records Using an IPFS-Based Optimization Algorithm

Centralized Personal Health Records (PHR) are mutable with compromised security as it may lead to a single point of failure. Confidentiality, protection and security are the common issues in clinical record frameworks. Specific security and protection schemes are being used to secure clinical records. Accordingly, using the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized PHR can be maintained to allow patients to access their records without delay. Moreover, a Kademlia-based distributed hash table provides fault tolerance and enables patients to keep track of their medical history. However, a significant issue in IPFS is data availability. It is only available on the web until users or hosts of the network request each peer, later it leads to a permanent loss of data. We propose an architecture that aims to provide faster retrieval and constant PHR availability using Blockchain and IPFS. The results show that an optimal node is selected in each iteration amongst all the available adjacent nodes.
A hybrid DNN–LSTM model for detecting phishing URLs

Phishing is an attack targeting to imitate the official websites of corporations such as banks, e-commerce, financial institutions, and governmental institutions. Phishing websites aim to access and retrieve users' important information such as personal identification, social security number, password, e-mail, credit card, and other account information. Several anti-phishing techniques have been developed to cope with the increasing number of phishing attacks so far. Machine learning and particularly, deep learning algorithms are nowadays the most crucial techniques used to detect and prevent phishing attacks because of their strong learning abilities on massive datasets and their state-of-the-art results in many classification problems. Previously, two types of feature extraction techniques [i.e., character embedding-based and manual natural language processing (NLP) feature extraction] were used in isolation. However, researchers did not consolidate these features and therefore, the performance was not remarkable. Unlike previous works, our study presented an approach that utilizes both feature extraction techniques. We discussed how to combine these feature extraction techniques to fully utilize from the available data. This paper proposes hybrid deep learning models based on long short-term memory and deep neural network algorithms for detecting phishing uniform resource locator and evaluates the performance of the models on phishing datasets. The proposed hybrid deep learning models utilize both character embedding and NLP features, thereby simultaneously exploiting deep connections between characters and revealing NLP-based high-level connections. Experimental results showed that the proposed models achieve superior performance than the other phishing detection models in terms of accuracy metric.
Efficient Local Path Planning Algorithm Using Artificial Potential Field Supported by Augmented Reality

Mobile robots in industry are commonly used in warehouses and factories. To achieve the highest production rate, requirements for path planning algorithms have caused researchers to pay significant attention to this problem. The artificial potential field algorithm, which is a local path planning algorithm, has been previously modified to obtain higher smoothness of path, to solve the stagnation problem and to jump off the local minimum. The last itemized problem is taken into account in this paper—local minimum avoidance. Most of the modifications of artificial potential field algorithms focus on a mechanism to jump off a local minimum when robots stagnate. From the efficiency point of view, the mobile robot should bypass the local minimum instead of jumping off it. This paper proposes a novel artificial potential field supported by augmented reality to bypass the upcoming local minimum. The algorithm predicts the upcoming local minimum, and then the mobile robot’s perception is augmented to bypass it. The proposed method allows the generation of shorter paths compared with jumping-off techniques, due to lack of stagnation in a local minimum. This method was experimentally verified using a Husarion ROSbot 2.0 PRO mobile robot and Robot Operating System in a laboratory environment.
Hybrid Blockchain Platforms for the Internet of Things (IoT): A Systematic Literature Review

In recent years, research into blockchain technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) has grown rapidly due to an increase in media coverage. Many different blockchain applications and platforms have been developed for different purposes, such as food safety monitoring, cryptocurrency exchange, and secure medical data sharing. However, blockchain platforms cannot store all the generated data. Therefore, they are supported with data warehouses, which in turn is called a hybrid blockchain platform. While several systems have been developed based on this idea, a current state-of-the-art systematic overview on the use of hybrid blockchain platforms is lacking. Therefore, a systematic literature review (SLR) study has been carried out by us to investigate the motivations for adopting them, the domains at which they were used, the adopted technologies that made this integration effective, and, finally, the challenges and possible solutions. This study shows that security, transparency, and efficiency are the top three motivations for adopting these platforms. The energy, agriculture, health, construction, manufacturing, and supply chain domains are the top domains. The most adopted technologies are cloud computing, fog computing, telecommunications, and edge computing. While there are several benefits of using hybrid blockchains, there are also several challenges reported in this study.
Human-Computer Interaction in Customer Service: The Experience with AI Chatbots—A Systematic Literature Review

Artificial intelligence (AI) conversational agents (CA) or chatbots represent one of the technologies that can provide automated customer service for companies, a trend encountered in recent years. Chatbot use is beneficial for companies when associated with positive customer experience. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the overall customer experience with customer service chatbots in order to identify the main influencing factors for customer experience with customer service chatbots and to identify the resulting dimensions of customer experience (such as perceptions/attitudes and feelings and also responses and behaviors). The analysis uses the systematic literature review (SLR) method and includes a sample of 40 publications that present empirical studies. The results illustrate that the main influencing factors of customer experience with chatbots are grouped in three categories: chatbot-related, customer-related, and context-related factors, where the chatbot-related factors are further categorized in: functional features of chatbots, system features of chatbots and anthropomorphic features of chatbots. The multitude of factors of customer experience result in either positive or negative perceptions/attitudes and feelings of customers. At the same time, customers respond by manifesting their intentions and/or their behaviors towards either the technology itself (chatbot usage continuation and acceptance of chatbot recommendations) or towards the company (buying and recommending products). According to empirical studies, the most influential factors when using chatbots for customer service are response relevance and problem resolution, which usually result in positive customer satisfaction, increased probability for chatbots usage continuation, product purchases, and product recommendations.
Classifying the Political Leaning of News Articles and Users from User Votes

Social news aggregator services generate readers’ subjective reactions to news opinion articles. Can we use those as a resource to classify articles as liberal or conservative, even without knowing the self-identified political leaning of most users? We applied three semi-supervised learning methods that propagate classifications of political news articles and users as conservative or liberal, based on the assumption that liberal users will vote for liberal articles more often, and similarly for conservative users and articles. Starting from a few labeled articles and users, the algorithms propagate political leaning labels to the entire graph. In cross-validation, the best algorithm achieved 99.6% accuracy on held-out users and 96.3% accuracy on held-out articles. Adding social data such as users’ friendship or text features such as cosine similarity did not improve accuracy. The propagation algorithms, using the subjective liking data from users, also performed better than an SVM based text classifier, which achieved 92.0% accuracy on articles.
Hadamard Response: Estimating Distributions Privately, Efficiently, and with Little Communication

We study the problem of estimating $k$-ary distributions under $\eps$-local differential privacy. $n$ samples are distributed across users who send privatized versions of their sample to a central server. All previously known sample optimal algorithms require linear (in $k$) communication from each user in the high privacy regime $(\eps=O(1))$, and run in time that grows as $n\cdot k$, which can be prohibitive for large domain size $k$. We propose Hadamard Response (HR), a local privatization scheme that requires no shared randomness and is symmetric with respect to the users. Our scheme has order optimal sample complexity for all $\eps$, a communication of at most $\log k+2$ bits per user, and nearly linear running time of $\tilde{O}(n + k)$. Our encoding and decoding are based on Hadamard matrices and are simple to implement. The statistical performance relies on the coding theoretic aspects of Hadamard matrices, ie, the large Hamming distance between the rows. An efficient implementation of the algorithm using the Fast Walsh-Hadamard transform gives the computational gains.We compare our approach with Randomized Response (RR), RAPPOR, and subset-selection mechanisms (SS), both theoretically, and experimentally. For $k=10000$, our algorithm runs about 100x faster than SS, and RAPPOR.
MMFace: A Multi-Metric Regression Network for Unconstrained Face Reconstruction

We propose to address the face reconstruction in the wild by using a multi-metric regression network, MMFace, to align a 3D face morphable model (3DMM) to an input image. The key idea is to utilize a volumetric sub-network to estimate an intermediate geometry representation, and a parametric sub-network to regress the 3DMM parameters. Our parametric sub-network consists of identity loss, expression loss, and pose loss which greatly improves the aligned geometry details by incorporating high level loss functions directly defined in the 3DMM parametric spaces. Our high-quality reconstruction is robust under large variations of expressions, poses, illumination conditions, and even with large partial occlusions. We evaluate our method by comparing the performance with state-of-the-art approaches on latest 3D face dataset LS3D-W and Florence. We achieve significant improvements both quantitatively and qualitatively. Due to our high-quality reconstruction, our method can be easily extended to generate high-quality geometry sequences for video inputs.
COP: Customized Deep Model Compression via Regularized Correlation-Based Filter-Level Pruning

Neural network compression empowers the effective yet unwieldy deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) to be deployed in resource-constrained scenarios. Most state-of-the-art approaches prune the model in filter-level according to the "importance" of filters. Despite their success, we notice they suffer from at least two of the following problems: 1) The redundancy among filters is not considered because the importance is evaluated independently. 2) Cross-layer filter comparison is unachievable since the importance is defined locally within each layer. Consequently, we must manually specify layer-wise pruning ratios. 3) They are prone to generate sub-optimal solutions because they neglect the inequality between reducing parameters and reducing computational cost. Reducing the same number of parameters in different positions in the network may reduce different computational cost. To address the above problems, we develop a novel algorithm named as COP (correlation-based pruning), which can detect the redundant filters efficiently. We enable the cross-layer filter comparison through global normalization. We add parameter-quantity and computational-cost regularization terms to the importance, which enables the users to customize the compression according to their preference (smaller or faster). Extensive experiments have shown COP outperforms the others significantly. The code is released at https://github.com/ZJULearning/COP.
Overview of GermEval Task 2, 2019 shared task on the identification of offensive language

We present the second edition of the GermEval Shared Task on the Identification of Offensive Language. This shared task deals with the classification of German tweets from Twitter. Two subtasks were continued from the first edition, namely a coarse-grained binary classification task and a fine-grained multi-class classification task. As a novel subtask, we introduce the classification of offensive tweets as explicit or implicit.The shared task had 13 participating groups submitting 28 runs for the coarse-grainedtask, another 28 runs for the fine-grained task, and 17 runs for the implicit-explicittask.We evaluate the results of the systems submitted to the shared task. The shared task homepage can be found at https://projects.fzai.h-da.de/iggsa/
Adaptive Auxiliary Task Weighting for Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning is known to be sample inefficient, preventing its application to many real-world problems, especially with high dimensional observations like images. Transferring knowledge from other auxiliary tasks is a powerful tool for improving the learning efficiency. However, the usage of auxiliary tasks has been limited so far due to the difficulty in selecting and combining different auxiliary tasks. In this work, we propose a principled online learning algorithm that dynamically combines different auxiliary tasks to speed up training for reinforcement learning. Our method is based on the idea that auxiliary tasks should provide gradient directions that, in the long term, help to decrease the loss of the main task. We show in various environments that our algorithm can effectively combine a variety of different auxiliary tasks and achieves significant speedup compared to previous heuristic approches of adapting auxiliary task weights.
Transformer based contextualization of pre-trained word embeddings for irony detection in Twitter

Human communication using natural language, specially in social media, is influenced by the use of figurative language like irony. Recently, several workshops are intended to explore the task of irony detection in Twitter by using computational approaches. This paper describes a model for irony detection based on the contextualization of pre-trained Twitter word embeddings by means of the Transformer architecture. This approach is based on the same powerful architecture as BERT but, differently to it, our approach allows us to use in-domain embeddings. We performed an extensive evaluation on two corpora, one for the English language and another for the Spanish language. Our system was the first ranked system in the Spanish corpus and, to our knowledge, it has achieved the second-best result on the English corpus. These results support the correctness and adequacy of our proposal. We also studied and interpreted how the multi-head self-attention mechanisms are specialized on detecting irony by means of considering the polarity and relevance of individual words and even the relationships among words. This analysis is a first step towards understanding how the multi-head self-attention mechanisms of the Transformer architecture address the irony detection problem.
An image steganography approach based on k-least significant bits (k-LSB)

Image steganography is the operation of hiding a message into a cover image. the message can be text, codes, or image. Hiding an image into another is the proposed approach in this paper. Based on LSB coding, a k-LSB-based method is proposed using k least bits to hide the image. For decoding the hidden image, a region detection operation is used to know the blocks contains the hidden image. The resolution of stego image can be affected, for that, an image quality enhancement method is used to enhance the image resolution. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we compare it with some of the state-of-the-art methods.
A Survey on Blockchain-Fog Integration Approaches

Fog computing (FC) is the extension of Cloud Computing (CC), from the core of the internet architecture to the edge of the network, with the aim to perform processes closer to end-users.This extension is proven to enhance security, and to reduce latency and energy consumption.Blockchain (BC), on the other hand, is the base technology behind crypto-currencies, yet is implemented in wide range of different applications.The security and reliability, along with the distributed trust management criteria proposed in BC, excited the research community to integrate it with FC, in a step towards reaching a distributed and trusted, Data, Payment, Reputation, and Identity management systems.In this survey we present the upto-date state-of-the-art of FC-BC integration with a detailed literature review and classification.We discuss and categorize the related papers according to the year of publication, domain, used algorithms, BC roles, and the placement of the BC in the FC architecture.Our research presents detailed observations, analysis, and open challenges for the BC-FC integration.We believe such conclusions may clarify the vision of the BC-FC integration, and calibrate the compass towards open issues and future research directions.
Towards Verifying Robustness of Neural Networks Against A Family of Semantic Perturbations

Towards verifying robustness of neural networks against a family of semantic perturbations
Facial Micro-Expression Recognition Using Two-Dimensional Landmark Feature Maps

Emotion recognition based on facial expressions is very important for effective interaction of humans with artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as social robots. On the other hand, in real environment, it is much harder to recognize facial micro-expressions (FMEs) than facial general-expressions having rich emotions. In this paper, we propose a two-dimensional (2D) landmark feature map for effectively recognizing such FMEs. The proposed 2D landmark feature map (LFM) is obtained by transforming conventional coordinate-based landmark information into 2D image information. LFM is designed to have an advantageous property independent of the intensity of facial expression change. Also, we propose an LFM-based emotion recognition method that is an integrated framework of convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM). Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves about 71% and 74% in the well-known micro-expression datasets, i.e., SMIC and CASME II, respectively, which outperforms the conventional methods. The performance of the proposed method was also verified through experiments on composite micro-expression dataset, which consists of SMIC, CAMSE II and SAMM, and cross-dataset validation using SMIC and CAMSE II. In addition, we prove that the proposed method is independent of facial expression intensity through an experiment on CK+ dataset. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed method is valid even for the MAHNOB-HCI and MEVIEW datasets that are produced to monitor actual and wild emotional responses.
Intelligent Forecasting Model of COVID-19 Novel Coronavirus Outbreak Empowered with Deep Extreme Learning Machine

An epidemic is a quick and widespread disease that threatens many lives and damages the economy. The epidemic lifetime should be accurate so that timely and remedial steps are determined. These include the closing of borders schools, suspension of community and commuting services. The forecast of an outbreak effectively is a very necessary but difficult task. A predictive model that provides the best possible forecast is a great challenge for machine learning with only a few samples of training available. This work proposes and examines a prediction model based on a deep extreme learning machine (DELM). This methodology is used to carry out an experiment based on the recent Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. An optimized prediction model that has been developed, namely DELM, is demonstrated to be able to make a prediction that is fairly best. The results show that the new methodology is useful in developing an appropriate forecast when the samples are far from abundant during the critical period of the disease. During the investigation, it is shown that the proposed approach has the highest accuracy rate of 97.59% with 70% of training, 30% of test and validation. Simulation results validate the prediction effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
SENSE: a Student Performance Quantifier using Sentiment Analysis

Academic feedback is essential in secondary schools to keep a rapport between students, teachers, and parents and guardians. There are three main factors that contribute towards a student's progress: attitude, attendance and aptitude. Monitoring their progress is key to a student's development in school and allows both teachers and parents or guardians to support them to a greater extent. Annual reports are sent to a student's home to summarise their performance over the academic year, following set criterion from the government. One aspect of a student's report is the teacher's written comment, providing more details on a student's attitude towards their learning. However, families whose primary language is not English may struggle to interpret this information. Working in schools has demonstrated the diversity of students and their wide range of backgrounds, including - but not limited to - language barriers. This work proposes a system called SENSE (Student pErformance quaNtifier using SEntiment analysis) for improving the information conveyed in secondary school reports through means of natural language processing. By combining the three key features which contribute towards a student's progress, a numerical representation is produced for an easier interpretation. This reduces the likelihood of a tarnished relationship between home and schools through better means of conveying information and maintains communication between students, teachers and parents or guardians.