Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
67th Open Seminar on Acoustics September 14 – 17, 2021

The Open Seminar on Acoustics is an annual conference, the largest acoustics conference in Poland.It has been bringing all Polish acousticians together for over sixty years.It is organized in turns by different divisions of Polish Acoustical Society -in 2021 by the Krakow Division with the Department of Mechanics and Vibroacoustics, AGH -University of Science and Technology in Krakow and The Committee on Acoustics of Polish Academy of Science.The conference was supported by The International Commission for Acoustics and The Acoustical Society of America, and also by the City of Krakow.The conference presents all sections of acoustics, such as: physical acoustics, environmental, speech, hearing, musical, architectural acoustics, vibroacoustics etc.The Open Seminar on Acoustics was joined with the XXIV Conference of Acoustical and Biomedical Engineering and the 36 Symposium on Hydroacoustics.The conferences were online and were organized as part of the International Year of Sound 2020-2021.The seminar was joined with special session "In Memoriam Professor Zbigniew Engel" and the Workshop "Common noise assessment methods in Europe (CNOSSOS-EU)".
SCHash: Speedy Simplicial Complex Neural Networks via Randomized Hashing

Graphs, as a non-linear data structure, are ubiquitous in practice, and efficient graph analysis can benefit important information retrieval applications in the era of big data. Currently, one of the fundamental graph mining problems is graph embedding, which aims to represent the graph as a low-dimensional feature vector with the content and structural information in the graph preserved. Although the graph embedding technique has evolved considerably, traditional methods mainly focus on node pairwise relationship in graphs, which makes the representational power of such schemes limited. Recently, a number of works have explored the simplicial complexes, which describe the higher-order interactions between nodes in the graphs, and further proposed several Graph Neural Network (GNN) algorithms based on simplicial complexes. However, these GNN approaches are highly inefficient in terms of running time and space, due to massive parameter learning. In this paper, we propose a simple and speedy graph embedding algorithm dubbed SCHash. Through adopting the Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) technique, SCHash captures the higher-order information derived from the simplicial complex in the GNN framework, and it can achieve a good balance between accuracy and efficiency. Our extensive experiments clearly show that, in terms of accuracy, the performance of our proposed SCHash algorithm is comparable to that of state-of-the-art GNN algorithms; also, SCHash achieves higher accuracy than the existing LSH algorithms. In terms of efficiency, SCHash runs faster than GNN algorithms by 2 ~ 4 orders of magnitude, and is more efficient than the existing LSH algorithms.
TAML: Time-Aware Meta Learning for Cold-Start Problem in News Recommendation

Meta-learning has become a widely used method for the user cold-start problem in recommendation systems, as it allows the model to learn from similar learning tasks and transfer the knowledge to new tasks. However, most existing meta-learning methods do not consider the temporal factor of users' preferences, which is crucial for news recommendation scenarios where news streams change dynamically over time. In this paper, we propose Time-Aware Meta-Learning (TAML), a novel framework that focuses on cold-start users in news recommendation systems. TAML factorizes user preferences into time-specifc and time-shift representations that jointly affect users' news preferences. These temporal factors are further incorporated into the meta-learning framework to achieve accurate and timely cold-start recommendations. Extensive experiments are conducted on two real-world datasets, demonstrating the superior performance of TAML over state-of-the-art methods.
Explainable Information Retrieval

This tutorial presents explainable information retrieval (ExIR), an emerging area focused on fostering responsible and trustworthy deployment of machine learning systems in the context of information retrieval. As the field has rapidly evolved in the past 4-5 years, numerous approaches have been proposed that focus on different access modes, stakeholders, and model development stages. This tutorial aims to introduce IR-centric notions, classification, and evaluation styles in ExIR, while focusing on IR-specific tasks such as ranking, text classification, and learning-to-rank systems. We will delve into method families and their adaptations to IR, extensively covering post-hoc methods, axiomatic and probing approaches, and recent advances in interpretability-by-design approaches. We will also discuss ExIR applications for different stakeholders, such as researchers, practitioners, and end-users, in contexts like web search, patent and legal search, and high-stakes decision-making tasks. To facilitate practical understanding, we will provide a hands-on session on applying ExIR methods, reducing the entry barrier for students, researchers, and practitioners alike.
DeviceGPT: A Generative Pre-Training Transformer on the Heterogenous Graph for Internet of Things

Recently, Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been adopted to model a wide range of structured data from academic and industry fields. With the rapid development of Internet technology, there are more and more meaningful applications for Internet devices, including device identification, geolocation and others, whose performance needs improvement. To replicate the several claimed successes of GNNs, this paper proposes DeviceGPT based on a generative pre-training transformer on a heterogeneous graph via self-supervised learning to learn interactions-rich information of devices from its large-scale databases well. The experiments on the dataset constructed from the real world show DeviceGPT could achieve competitive results in multiple Internet applications.
SciMine: An Efficient Systematic Prioritization Model Based on Richer Semantic Information

Systematic review is a crucial method that has been widely used. by scholars from different research domains. However, screening for relevant scientific literature from paper candidates remains an extremely time-consuming process so the task of screening prioritization has been established to reduce the human workload. Various methods under the human-in-the-loop fashion are proposed to solve this task by using lexical features. These methods, even though achieving better performance than more sophisticated feature-based models such as BERT, omit rich and essential semantic information, therefore suffered from feature bias. In this study, we propose a novel framework SciMine to accelerate this screening process by capturing semantic feature representations from both background and the corpus. In particular, based on contextual representation learned from the pre-trained language models, our approach utilizes an autoencoder-based classifier and a feature-dependent classification module to extract general document-level and phrase-level information. Then a ranking ensemble strategy is used to combine these two complementary pieces of information. Experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that SciMine achieves state-of-the-art performance and comprehensive analysis further shows the efficacy of SciMine to solve feature bias.
Searching for Products in Virtual Reality: Understanding the Impact of Context and Result Presentation on User Experience

Immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and head-mounted displays (HMD) have seen increased adoption in recent years. In this work, we study two factors that influence users' experience when shopping in VR through voice queries: (1) context alignment of the search environment and (2) the level of detail on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). To this end, we developed a search system for VR and conducted a within-subject exploratory study (N=18) to understand the impact of the two experimental conditions. Our results suggest that both context alignment and SERP are important factors for information-seeking in VR, which present unique opportunities and challenges. More specifically, based on our findings, we suggest that search systems for VR must be able to: (1) provide cues for information-seeking in both the VR environment and SERP, (2) distribute attention between the VR environment and the search interface, (3) reduce distractions in the VR environment and (4) provide a ''sense of control'' to search in the VR environment.
Dimension-Prompts Boost Commonsense Consolidation

Neural knowledge models emerged and advanced common-sense-centric knowledge grounding. They parameterize a small seed curated commonsense knowledge graph (CS-KG) in a language model to generalize more. A current trend is to scale the seed up by directly mixing multiple sources of CS-KG (e.g., ATOMIC, ConceptNet) into one model. But, such brute-force mixing inevitably hinders effective knowledge consolidation due to i) ambiguous, polysemic, and/or inconsistent relations across sources and ii) knowledge learned in an entangled manner despite distinct types (e.g., causal, temporal). To mitigate this, we adopt a concept of commonsense knowledge dimension and propose a brand-new dimension-disentangled knowledge model (D2KM) learning paradigm with multiple sources. That is, a generative language model with dimension-specific soft prompts is trained to disentangle knowledge acquisitions along with different dimensions and facilitate potential intra-dimension consolidation across CS-KG sources. Experiments show our knowledge model outperforms its baselines in both standard and zero-shot scenarios.
Asymmetric Hashing for Fast Ranking via Neural Network Measures

Fast item ranking is an important task in recommender systems. In previous works, graph-based Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) approaches have demonstrated good performance on item ranking tasks with generic searching/matching measures (including complex measures such as neural network measures). However, since these ANN approaches must go through the neural measures several times during ranking, the computation is not practical if the neural measure is a large network. On the other hand, fast item ranking using existing hashing-based approaches, such as Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH), only works with a limited set of measures, such as cosine and Euclidean distance, but not with general search measures such as neural networks. Given an arbitrary searching measure, previous learning-to-hash approaches are also not suitable to solve the fast item ranking problem since they can take a significant amount of time and computation to train the hash functions to approximate the searching measure due to a large number of possible training pairs in this problem. Hashing approaches, however, are attractive because they provide a principal and efficient way to retrieve candidate items. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective learning-to-hash approach for the fast item ranking problem that can be used to efficiently approximate any type of measure, including neural network measures. Specifically, we solve this problem with an asymmetric hashing framework based on discrete inner product fitting. We learn a pair of related hash functions that map heterogeneous objects (e.g., users and items) into a common discrete space where the inner product of their binary codes reveals their true similarity defined via the original searching measure. The fast ranking problem is reduced to an ANN search via this asymmetric hashing scheme. Then, we propose a sampling strategy to efficiently select relevant and contrastive samples to train the hashing model. We empirically validate the proposed method against the existing state-of-the-art fast item ranking methods in several combinations of non-linear searching functions and prominent datasets.
Reducing Spurious Correlations for Relation Extraction by Feature Decomposition and Semantic Augmentation

Deep neural models have become mainstream in relation extraction (RE), yielding state-of-the-art performance. However, most existing neural models are prone to spurious correlations between input features and prediction labels, making the models suffer from low robustness and generalization.In this paper, we propose a spurious correlation reduction method for RE via feature decomposition and semantic augmentation (denoted as FDSA). First, we decompose the original sentence representation into class-related features and context-related features. To obtain better context-related features, we devise a contrastive learning method to pull together the context-related features of the anchor sentence and its augmented sentences, and push away the context-related features of different anchor sentences. In addition, we propose gradient-based semantic augmentation on context-related features in order to improve the robustness of the RE model. Experiments on four datasets show that our model outperforms the strong competitors.
DCBT: A Simple But Effective Way for Unified Warm and Cold Recommendation

The cold-start problem of conversion rate prediction is a common challenge in online advertising systems. To alleviate this problem, a large number of methods either use content information or uncertainty methods, or use meta-learning based methods to improve the ranking performance of cold-start items. However, they can work for cold-start scenarios but fail to adaptively unify warm and cold recommendations into one model, requiring additional human efforts or knowledge to adapt to different scenarios. Meanwhile, none of them pay attention to the discrepancy between model predictions and true likelihoods of cold items, while over- or under-estimation is harmful to the ROI (Return on Investment) of advertising placements. In this paper, in order to address the above issues, we propose a framework called Distribution-Constrained Batch Transformer (DCBT). Specifically, the framework introduces a Transformer module into the batch dimension to automatically choose proper information from warm samples to enhance the representation of cold samples and preserve the property of warm samples. In addition, to avoid the distribution of cold samples being affected by the warm samples, the framework adds MMD loss to constrain the sample distribution before and after feeding into the Transformer module. Extensive offline experiments on two real-world datasets show that our proposed method attains state-of-the-art performance in AUC and PCOC (Predicted CVR over CVR) for cold items and warm items. An online A/B test demonstrates that the DCBT model obtained a 20.08% improvement in CVR and a 13.21% increase in GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume).
Simple Approach for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction Using Span-Based Segment Tagging and Dual Extractors

Aspect sentiment triplet extraction (ASTE) is a task which extracts aspect terms, opinion terms, and sentiment polarities as triplets from review sentences. Existing approaches have developed bidirectional structures for term interaction. Sentiment polarities are subsequently extracted from aspect-opinion pairs. These solutions suffer from: 1) high dependency on custom bidirectional structures, 2) inadequate representation of the information through existing tagging schemes, and 3) insufficient usage of all available sentiment data. To address the above issues, we propose a simple span-based solution named SimSTAR with Segment Tagging And dual extRactors. SimSTAR does not introduce any additional bidirectional mechanism. The segment tagging scheme is capable to indicate all possible cases of spans and reveals more information through negative labels. Dual extractors are employed to make the sentiment extraction independent of the term extraction. We evaluate our model on four ASTE datasets. The experimental results show that our simple method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Cone: Unsupervised Contrastive Opinion Extraction

Contrastive opinion extraction aims to extract a structured summary or key points organised as positive and negative viewpoints towards a common aspect or topic. Most recent works for unsupervised key point extraction is largely built on sentence clustering or opinion summarisation based on the popularity of opinions expressed in text. However, these methods tend to generate aspect clusters with incoherent sentences, conflicting viewpoints, redundant aspects. To address these problems, we propose a novel unsupervised Contrastive OpinioN Extraction model, called Cone, which learns disentangled latent aspect and sentiment representations based on pseudo aspect and sentiment labels by combining contrastive learning with iterative aspect/sentiment clustering refinement. Apart from being able to extract contrastive opinions, it is also able to quantify the relative popularity of aspects and their associated sentiment distributions. The model has been evaluated on both a hotel review dataset and a Twitter dataset about COVID vaccines. The results show that despite using no label supervision or aspect-denoted seed words, Cone outperforms a number of competitive baselines on contrastive opinion extraction. The results of Cone can be used to offer a better recommendation of products and services online.
Robust Causal Inference for Recommender System to Overcome Noisy Confounders

Recently, there has been growing interest in integrating causal inference into recommender systems to answer the hypothetical question: "what would be the potential feedback when a user is recommended a product?" Various unbiased estimators, including Inverse Propensity Score (IPS) and Doubly Robust (DR), have been proposed to address this question. However, these estimators often assume that confounders are precisely observable, which is not always the case in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method called Adversarial Training-based IPS (AT-IPS), which uses adversarial training to handle noisy confounders. The proposed method defines a feasible region for the confounders, obtains the worst-case noise (adversarial noise) within the region, and jointly trains the propensity model and the prediction model against such noise to improve their robustness. We provide a theoretical analysis of the accuracy-robustness tradeoff of AT-IPS and demonstrate its superior performance compared to other popular estimators on both real-world and semi-synthetic datasets.
Online feature selection for hierarchical classification learning based on improved ReliefF

Abstract In hierarchical classification learning, the feature space of data has high dimensionality and is unknown with emergent features. To solve the above problems, we propose an online hierarchical feature selection algorithm based on adaptive ReliefF. Firstly, ReliefF is adaptively improved via using the density information of instances around the target sample, making it unnecessary to prespecify parameters. Secondly, the hierarchical relationship between classes is used, and a new method for calculating the feature weight of hierarchical data is defined. Then, an online correlation analysis method based on feature interaction is designed. Finally, the adaptive ReliefF algorithm is improved based on feature redundancy, and the feature weight is scaled by the correlation between features in order to achieve the dynamic updating of feature redundancy. A large number of experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Text Extraction and Recognition System for Myanmar Warning Signboard Images

Text extraction and character recognition are the computer vision tasks which became important after smart phones with good camera. Character recognition from scene text images is still challenging area, because the camera captured text images have various background noise and the text also varies in shape, font, color. In this research, a camera captured based text extraction and character recognition system is developed for Myanmar warning text images. One major challenge of this research is that Myanmar OCR system has been greatly under-researched on the camera captured images. This research therefore considers these challenges of Myanmar OCR system and proposes a new algorithm for segmentation and recognition of Myanmar script. In the character segmentation, zone-based character segmentation is performed using position and size of connected component objects. Combination of features with chain code, pixel density, a new shape-based features of boundary-centroid distance and centroid-boundary distance, are explored and exploited in recognition process. This system uses K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) classifiers to recognize the segmented characters. From the experiment, this system achieves satisfied results 93.9% segmentation accuracy and 92.77% classification accuracy.
Privacy Preserving Human Fall Recognition Using Human Skeleton Data

Fall is a critical danger for a person because he/she can loss any recontroled and stable posture and can face to any associated injuries without any caregiver. Therefore, automatic fall recognition systems have been developed to assist the person falling in short time in place. Moreover, these human-fall recognition systems have also strongly impacted from privacy and the issue of privacy is a challenge and an important societal problem for it. The aim of this paper is to propose an automatic fall recognition from human skeleton joints captured by RGB-Depth Kinect camera supporting a privacy-preservation. The recognition assesses skeleton joints of a person and measures two posture balance (body orientation and centroid height) and two gait motions (velocity and angular acceleration) of this person based on the fall and fall-like representations generated in system's virtual environment. The system has not de-identified the personal information from original captures of a person and preserves privacy which is highly impacted in fall recognition systems. Experiments on system's collected human activities using Support Vector Machine learning classification, will support to detect falls in unseen real environments with moderately high recognition accuracy.
Morse Code Audio Recognition using LSTM-CTC Model

In media transmission, Morse code is utilized to encode text characters as sequences of two different duration of a signal. Morse code audio is also utilized for SOS of maritime. The popular audio recognition algorithms are Hidden Markov Model, Gaussian Mixture Model, LSTM, and so on. This paper focuses on Morse code audio recognition using LSTM. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is selected because it is the best deep learning algorithm for the sequence-to-sequence model. Morse code audio dataset was created text characters to Morse code audio. Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) algorithm is used to extract features of the dataset. LSTM handles to get related information of each Morse code audio by using MFCCs features. Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) decides to get the related label by using LSTM information. This paper aims to help the Morse code audio listener by getting the right information about the input data.