bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Knowledge-aware Leap-LSTM: Integrating Prior Knowledge into Leap-LSTM towards Faster Long Text Classification
Authors: Du Jinhua , Huang Yan , Moilanen Karo
Published: September 2022

While widely used in industry, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are known to have deficiencies in dealing with long sequences (e.g. slow inference, vanishing gradients etc.). Recent research has attempted to accelerate RNN models by developing mechanisms to skip irrelevant words in input. Due to the lack of labelled data, it remains as a challenge to decide which words to skip, especially for low-resource classification tasks. In this paper, we propose Knowledge-AwareLeap-LSTM (KALL), a novel architecture which integrates prior human knowledge (created either manually or automatically) like in-domain keywords, terminologies or lexicons into Leap-LSTM to partially supervise the skipping process. More specifically, we propose a knowledge-oriented cost function for KALL; furthermore, we propose two strategies to integrate the knowledge: (1) the Factored KALL approach involves a keyword indicator as a soft constraint for the skip-ping process, and (2) the Gated KALL enforces the inclusion of keywords while maintaining a differentiable network in training. Experiments on different public datasets show that our approaches are1.1x~2.6x faster than LSTM with better accuracy and 23.6x faster than XLNet in a resource-limited CPU-only environment.
Self-Attention Attribution: Interpreting Information Interactions Inside Transformer
Authors: Hao Yaru , Dong Li , Wei Furu , Xu Ke
Published: September 2022

The great success of Transformer-based models benefits from the powerful multi-head self-attention mechanism, which learns token dependencies and encodes contextual information from the input. Prior work strives to attribute model decisions to individual input features with different saliency measures, but they fail to explain how these input features interact with each other to reach predictions. In this paper, we propose a self-attention attribution method to interpret the information interactions inside Transformer. We take BERT as an example to conduct extensive studies. Firstly, we apply self-attention attribution to identify the important attention heads, while others can be pruned with marginal performance degradation. Furthermore, we extract the most salient dependencies in each layer to construct an attribution tree, which reveals the hierarchical interactions inside Transformer. Finally, we show that the attribution results can be used as adversarial patterns to implement non-targeted attacks towards BERT.
Unsupervised Learning of Discourse Structures using a Tree Autoencoder
Authors: Huber Patrick , Carenini Giuseppe
Published: September 2022

Discourse information, as postulated by popular discourse theories, such as RST and PDTB, has been shown to improve an increasing number of downstream NLP tasks, showing positive effects and synergies of discourse with important real-world applications. While methods for incorporating discourse become more and more sophisticated, the growing need for robust and general discourse structures has not been sufficiently met by current discourse parsers, usually trained on small scale datasets in a strictly limited number of domains. This makes the prediction for arbitrary tasks noisy and unreliable. The overall resulting lack of high-quality, high-quantity discourse trees poses a severe limitation to further progress.
In order the alleviate this shortcoming, we propose a new strategy to generate tree structures in a task-agnostic, unsupervised fashion by extending a latent tree induction framework with an auto-encoding objective. The proposed approach can be applied to any tree-structured objective, such as syntactic parsing, discourse parsing and others. However, due to the especially difficult annotation process to generate discourse trees, we initially develop a method to generate larger and more diverse discourse treebanks. In this paper we are inferring general tree structures of natural text in multiple domains, showing promising results on a diverse set of tasks.
SALNet: Semi-supervised Few-Shot Text Classification with Attention-based Lexicon Construction
Authors: Lee Ju-Hyoung , Ko Sang-Ki , Han Yo-Sub
Published: September 2022

We propose a semi-supervised bootstrap learning framework for few-shot text classification. From a small amount of the initial dataset, our framework obtains a larger set of reliable training data by using the attention weights from an LSTM-based trained classifier. We first train an LSTM-based text classifier from a given labeled dataset using the attention mechanism. Then, we collect a set of words for each class called a lexicon, which is supposed to be a representative set of words for each class based on the attention weights calculated for the classification task. We bootstrap the classifier using the new data that are labeled by the combination of the classifier and the constructed lexicons to improve the prediction accuracy. As a result, our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods including semi-supervised learning algorithms and pretraining algorithms for few-shot text classification task on four publicly available benchmark datasets. Moreover, we empirically confirm that the constructed lexicons are reliable enough and substantially improve the performance of the original classifier.
Towards Topic-Aware Slide Generation For Academic Papers With Unsupervised Mutual Learning
Authors: Li Da-Wei , Huang Danqing , Ma Tingting , Lin Chin-Yew
Published: September 2022

Slides are commonly used to present information and tell stories. In academic and research communities, slides are typically used to summarize findings in accepted papers for presentation in meetings and conferences.
These slides for academic papers usually contain common and essential topics such as major contributions, model design, experiment details and future work. In this paper, we aim to automatically generate slides for academic papers. We first conducted an in-depth analysis of how humans create slides. We then mined frequently used slide topics. Given a topic, our approach extracts relevant sentences in the paper to provide the draft slides. Due to the lack of labeling data, we integrate prior knowledge of ground truth sentences into a log-linear model to create an initial pseudo-target distribution. Two sentence extractors are learned collaboratively and bootstrap the performance of each other. Evaluation results on a labeled test set show that our model can extract more relevant sentences than baseline methods. Human evaluation also shows slides generated by our model can serve as a good basis for preparing the final presentations.
Interpretable NLG for Task-oriented Dialogue Systems with Heterogeneous Rendering Machines
Authors: Li Yangming , Yao Kaisheng
Published: September 2022

End-to-end neural networks have achieved promising performances in natural language generation (NLG). However, they are treated as black boxes and lack interpretability. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework, heterogeneous rendering machines (HRM), that interprets how neural generators render an input dialogue act (DA) into an utterance. HRM consists of a renderer set and a mode switcher. The renderer set contains multiple decoders that vary in both structure and functionality. For every generation step, the mode switcher selects an appropriate decoder from the renderer set to generate an item (a word or a phrase). To verify the effectiveness of our method, we have conducted extensive experiments on 5 benchmark datasets. In terms of automatic metrics (e.g., BLEU), our model is competitive with the current state-of-the-art method. The qualitative analysis shows that our model can interpret the rendering process of neural generators well. Human evaluation also confirms the interpretability of our proposed approach.
How to Train Your Agent to Read and Write
Authors: Liu Li , He Mengge , Xu Guanghui , Tan Mingkui , Wu Qi
Published: September 2022

Reading and writing research papers is one of the most privileged abilities that a qualified researcher should master. However, it is difficult for new researchers (e.g., students) to fully grasp this ability. It would be fascinating if we could train an intelligent agent to help people read and summarize papers, and perhaps even discover and exploit the potential knowledge clues to write novel papers. Although there have been existing works focusing on summarizing (i.e., reading) the knowledge in a given text or generating (i.e., writing) a text based on the given knowledge, the ability of simultaneously reading and writing is still under development. Typically, this requires an agent to fully understand the knowledge from the given text materials and generate correct and fluent novel paragraphs, which is very challenging in practice. In this paper, we propose a Deep ReAder-Writer (DRAW) network, which consists of a Reader that can extract knowledge graphs (KGs) from input paragraphs and discover potential knowledge,
a graph-to-text Writer that generates a novel paragraph, and a Reviewer that reviews the generated paragraph from three different aspects. Extensive experiments show that our DRAW network outperforms considered baselines and several state-of-the-art methods on AGENDA and M-AGENDA datasets. Our code and supplementary are released at https://github.com/menggehe/DRAW.
CrossNER: Evaluating Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Liu Zihan , Xu Yan , Yu Tiezheng , Dai Wenliang , Ji Ziwei , Cahyawijaya Samuel , Madotto Andrea , Fung Pascale
Published: September 2022

Cross-domain named entity recognition (NER) models are able to cope with the scarcity issue of NER samples in target domains. However, most of the existing NER benchmarks lack domain-specialized entity types or do not focus on a certain domain, leading to a less effective cross-domain evaluation. To address these obstacles, we introduce a cross-domain NER dataset (CrossNER), a fully-labeled collection of NER data spanning over five diverse domains with specialized entity categories for different domains. Additionally, we also provide a domain-related corpus since using it to continue pre-training language models (domain-adaptive pre-training) is effective for the domain adaptation. We then conduct comprehensive experiments to explore the effectiveness of leveraging different levels of the domain corpus and pre-training strategies to do domain-adaptive pre-training for the cross-domain task. Results show that focusing on the fractional corpus containing domain-specialized entities and utilizing a more challenging pre-training strategy in domain-adaptive pre-training are beneficial for the NER domain adaptation, and our proposed method can consistently outperform existing cross-domain NER baselines. Nevertheless, experiments also illustrate the challenge of this cross-domain NER task. We hope that our dataset and baselines will catalyze research in the NER domain adaptation area. The code and data are available at https://github.com/zliucr/CrossNER.
LET: Linguistic Knowledge Enhanced Graph Transformer for Chinese Short Text Matching
Authors: Lyu Boer , Chen Lu , Zhu Su , Yu Kai
Published: September 2022

Chinese short text matching is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Existing approaches usually take Chinese characters or words as input tokens. They have two limitations: 1) Some Chinese words are polysemous, and semantic information is not fully utilized. 2) Some models suffer potential issues caused by word segmentation. Here we introduce HowNet as an external knowledge base and propose a Linguistic knowledge Enhanced graph Transformer (LET) to deal with word ambiguity. Additionally, we adopt the word lattice graph as input to maintain multi-granularity information. Our model is also complementary to pre-trained language models. Experimental results on two Chinese datasets show that our models outperform various typical text matching approaches. Ablation study also indicates that both semantic information and multi-granularity information are important for text matching modeling.
Disentangled Motif-aware Graph Learning for Phrase Grounding
Authors: Mu Zongshen , Tang Siliang , Tan Jie , Yu Qiang , Zhuang Yueting
Published: September 2022

In this paper, we propose a novel graph learning framework for phrase grounding in the image. Developing from the sequential to the dense graph model, existing works capture coarse-grained context but fail to distinguish the diversity of context among phrases and image regions. In contrast, we pay special attention to different motifs implied in the context of the scene graph and devise the disentangled graph network to integrate the motif-aware contextual information into representations. Besides, we adopt interventional strategies at the feature and the structure levels to consolidate and generalize representations. Finally, the cross-modal attention network is utilized to fuse intra-modal features, where each phrase can be computed similarity with regions to select the best-grounded one. We validate the efficiency of disentangled and interventional graph network (DIGN) through a series of ablation studies, and our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on Flickr30K Entities and ReferIt Game benchmarks.
Conceptualized and Contextualized Gaussian Embedding
Authors: Qian Chen , Feng Fuli , Wen Lijie , Chua Tat-Seng
Published: September 2022

Word embedding can represent a word as a point vector or a Gaussian distribution in high-dimensional spaces. Gaussian distribution is innately more expressive than point vector owing to the ability to additionally capture semantic uncertainties of words, and thus can express asymmetric relations among words more naturally (e.g., animal entails cat but not the reverse. However, previous Gaussian embedders neglect inner-word conceptual knowledge and lack tailored Gaussian contextualizer, leading to inferior performance on both intrinsic (context-agnostic) and extrinsic (context-sensitive) tasks. In this paper, we first propose a novel Gaussian embedder which explicitly accounts for inner-word conceptual units (sememes) to represent word semantics more precisely; during learning, we propose Gaussian Distribution Attention over Gaussian representations to adaptively aggregate multiple sememe distributions into a word distribution, which guarantees the Gaussian linear combination property. Additionally, we propose a Gaussian contextualizer to utilize outer-word contexts in a sentence, producing contextualized Gaussian representations for context-sensitive tasks. Extensive experiments on intrinsic and extrinsic tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance with near 5.00% relative improvement.
Semantics Altering Modifications for Evaluating Comprehension in Machine Reading
Authors: Schlegel Viktor , Nenadic Goran , Batista-Navarro Riza
Published: September 2022

Advances in NLP have yielded impressive results for the task of machine reading comprehension (MRC), with approaches having been reported to achieve performance comparable to that of humans. In this paper, we investigate whether state-of-the-art MRC models are able to correctly process Semantics Altering Modifications (SAM): linguistically-motivated phenomena that alter the semantics of a sentence while preserving most of its lexical surface form. We present a method to automatically generate and align challenge sets featuring original and altered examples. We further propose a novel evaluation methodology to correctly assess the capability of MRC systems to process these examples independent of the data they were optimised on, by discounting for effects introduced by domain shift. In a large-scale empirical study, we apply the methodology in order to evaluate extractive MRC models with regard to their capability to correctly process SAM-enriched data. We comprehensively cover 12 different state-of-the-art neural architecture configurations and four training datasets and find that -- despite their well-known remarkable performance -- optimised models consistently struggle to correctly process semantically altered data.
Nutri-bullets: Summarizing Health Studies by Composing Segments
Authors: Shah Darsh J , Yu Lili , Lei Tao , Barzilay Regina
Published: September 2022

We introduce Nutri-bullets, a multi-document summarization task for health and nutrition. First, we present two datasets of food and health summaries from multiple scientific studies. Furthermore, we propose a novel extract-compose model to solve the problem in the regime of limited parallel data. We explicitly select key spans from several abstracts using a policy network, followed by composing the selected spans to present a summary via a task specific language model. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach leads to more faithful, relevant and diverse summarization -- properties imperative to this application. For instance, on the BreastCancer dataset our approach gets a more than 50% improvement on relevance and faithfulness.
Effective Slot Filling via Weakly-Supervised Dual-Model Learning
Authors: Wang Jue , Chen Ke , Shou Lidan , Wu Sai , Chen Gang
Published: September 2022

Slot filling is a challenging task in Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). Supervised methods usually require large amounts of annotation to maintain desirable performance. A solution to relieve the heavy dependency on labeled data is to employ bootstrapping, which leverages unlabeled data. However, bootstrapping is known to suffer from semantic drift. We argue that semantic drift can be tackled by exploiting the correlation between slot values (phrases) and their respective types. By using some particular weakly labeled data, namely the plain phrases included in sentences, we propose a weakly-supervised slot filling approach. Our approach trains two models, namely a classifier and a tagger, which can effectively learn from each other on the weakly labeled data. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves better results than standard baselines on multiple datasets, especially in the low-resource setting.
Do Response Selection Models Really Know What’s Next? Utterance Manipulation Strategies for Multi-turn Response Selection
Authors: Whang Taesun , Lee Dongyub , Oh Dongsuk , Lee Chanhee , Han Kijong , Lee Dong-hun , Lee Saebyeok
Published: September 2022

In this paper, we study the task of selecting the optimal response given a user and system utterance history in retrieval-based multi-turn dialog systems. Recently, pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa, and ELECTRA) showed significant improvements in various natural language processing tasks. This and similar response selection tasks can also be solved using such language models by formulating the tasks as dialog--response binary classification tasks. Although existing works using this approach successfully obtained state-of-the-art results, we observe that language models trained in this manner tend to make predictions based on the relatedness of history and candidates, ignoring the sequential nature of multi-turn dialog systems. This suggests that the response selection task alone is insufficient for learning temporal dependencies between utterances. To this end, we propose utterance manipulation strategies (UMS) to address this problem. Specifically, UMS consist of several strategies (i.e., insertion, deletion, and search), which aid the response selection model towards maintaining dialog coherence. Further, UMS are self-supervised methods that do not require additional annotation and thus can be easily incorporated into existing approaches. Extensive evaluation across multiple languages and models shows that UMS are highly effective in teaching dialog consistency, which leads to models pushing the state-of-the-art with significant margins on multiple public benchmark datasets.
Evidence Inference Networks for Interpretable Claim Verification
Authors: Wu Lianwei , Rao Yuan , Sun Ling , He Wangbo
Published: September 2022

Existing approaches construct appropriate interaction models to explore semantic conflicts between claims and relevant articles, which provides practical solutions for interpretable claim verification. However, these conflicts are not necessarily all about questioning the false part of claims, which makes considerable semantic conflicts difficult to be used as evidence to explain the results of claim verification. In this paper, we propose evidence inference networks (EVIN), which focus on the conflicts questioning the core semantics of claims and serve as evidence for interpretable claim verification. Specifically, EVIN first captures the core semantic segments of claims and the users' principal opinions in relevant articles. Then, it finely-grained identifies the semantic conflicts contained in each relevant article from these opinions. Finally, it constructs coherence modeling to match the conflicts that queries the core semantic fragments of claims as explainable evidence. Experiments on two widely used datasets demonstrate that EVIN not only achieves satisfactory performance but also provides explainable evidence for end-users.
Learning an Effective Context-Response Matching Model with Self-Supervised Tasks for Retrieval-based Dialogues
Authors: Xu Ruijian , Tao Chongyang , Jiang Daxin , Zhao Xueliang , Zhao Dongyan , Yan Rui
Published: September 2022

Building an intelligent dialogue system with the ability to select a proper response according to a multi-turn context is a great challenging task.
Existing studies focus on building a context-response matching model with various neural architectures or pretrained language models (PLMs)
and typically learning with a single response prediction task.
These approaches overlook many potential training signals contained in dialogue data, which might be beneficial for context understanding and produce better features for response prediction.
Besides, the response retrieved from existing dialogue systems supervised by the conventional way
still faces some critical challenges, including incoherence and inconsistency.
To address these issues, in this paper, we propose learning a context-response matching model with auxiliary self-supervised tasks designed for the dialogue data based on pre-trained language models.
Specifically, we introduce four self-supervised tasks including next session prediction, utterance restoration, incoherence detection and consistency discrimination, and jointly train the PLM-based response selection model with these auxiliary tasks in a multi-task manner.
By this means, the auxiliary tasks can guide the learning of the matching model to achieve a better local optimum and select a more proper response.
Experiment results on two benchmarks indicate that the proposed auxiliary self-supervised tasks bring significant improvement for multi-turn response selection in retrieval-based dialogues, and our model achieves new state-of-the-art results on both datasets.
A Supervised Multi-Head Self-Attention Network for Nested Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Xu Yongxiu , Huang Heyan , Feng Chong , Hu Yue
Published: September 2022

In recent years, researchers have shown an increased interest in recognizing the overlapping entities that have nested structures. However, most existing models ignore the semantic correlation between words under different entity types. Considering words in sentence play different roles under different entity types, we argue that the correlation intensities of pairwise words in sentence for each entity type should be considered. In this paper, we treat named entity recognition as a multi-class classification of word pairs and design a simple neural model to handle this issue. Our model applies a supervised multi-head self-attention mechanism, where each head corresponds to one entity type, to construct the word-level correlations for each type. Our model can flexibly predict the span type by the correlation intensities of its head and tail under the corresponding type. In addition, we fuse entity boundary detection and entity classification by a multitask learning framework, which can capture the dependencies between these two tasks. To verify the performance of our model, we conduct extensive experiments on both nested and flat datasets. The experimental results show that our model can outperform the previous state-of-the-art methods on multiple tasks without any extra NLP tools or human annotations.
Building Interpretable Interaction Trees for Deep NLP Models
Authors: Zhang Die , Zhang Hao , Zhou Huilin , Bao Xiaoyi , Huo Da , Chen Ruizhao , Cheng Xu , Wu Mengyue , Zhang Quanshi
Published: September 2022

This paper proposes a method to disentangle and quantify interactions among words that are encoded inside a DNN for natural language processing. We construct a tree to encode salient interactions extracted by the DNN. Six metrics are proposed to analyze properties of interactions between constituents in a sentence. The interaction is defined based on Shapley values of words, which are considered as an unbiased estimation of word contributions to the network prediction. Our method is used to quantify word interactions encoded inside the BERT, ELMo, LSTM, CNN, and Transformer networks. Experimental results have provided a new perspective to understand these DNNs, and have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method.
Learning to Check Contract Inconsistencies
Authors: Zhang Shuo , Zhao Junzhou , Wang Pinghui , Xu Nuo , Yang Yang , Liu Yiting , Huang Yi , Feng Junlan
Published: September 2022

Contract consistency is important in ensuring the legal validity of the contract. In many scenarios, a contract is written by filling the blanks in a precompiled form. Due to carelessness, two blanks that should be filled with the same (or different) content may be incorrectly filled with different (or same) content. This will result in the issue of contract inconsistencies, which may severely impair the legal validity of the contract. Traditional methods to address this issue mainly rely on manual contract review, which is labor-intensive and costly. In this work, we formulate a novel Contract Inconsistency Checking (CIC) problem, and design an end-to-end framework, called Pair-wise Blank Resolution (PBR), to solve the CIC problem with high accuracy. Our PBR model contains a novel BlankCoder to address the challenge of modeling meaningless blanks. BlankCoder adopts a two-stage attention mechanism that adequately associates a meaningless blank with its relevant descriptions while avoiding the incorporation of irrelevant context words. Experiments conducted on real-world datasets show the promising performance of our method with a balanced accuracy of 94.05% and an F1 score of 90.90% in the CIC problem.
Dynamic Modeling Cross- and Self-Lattice Attention Network for Chinese NER
Authors: Zhao Shan , Hu Minghao , Cai Zhiping , Chen Haiwen , Liu Fang
Published: September 2022

Word-character lattice models have been proved to be effective for Chinese named entity recognition (NER), in which word boundary information is fused into character sequences for enhancing character representations. However, prior approaches have only used simple methods such as feature concatenation or position encoding to integrate word-character lattice information, but fail to capture fine-grained correlations in word-character spaces. In this paper, we propose DCSAN, a Dynamic Cross- and Self-lattice Attention Network that aims to model dense interactions over word-character lattice structure for Chinese NER. By carefully combining cross-lattice and self-lattice attention modules with gated word-character semantic fusion unit, the network can explicitly capture fine-grained correlations across different spaces (e.g., word-to-character and character-to-character), thus significantly improving model performance. Experiments on four Chinese NER datasets show that DCSAN obtains stateof-the-art results as well as efficiency compared to several competitive approaches.
A Unified Multi-Task Learning Framework for Joint Extraction of Entities and Relations
Authors: Zhao Tianyang , Yan Zhao , Cao Yunbo , Li Zhoujun
Published: September 2022

Joint extraction of entities and relations focuses on detecting entity pairs and their relations simultaneously with a unified model. Based on the extraction order, previous works mainly solve this task through relation-last, relation-first and relation-middle manner. However, these methods still suffer from the template-dependency, non-entity detection and non-predefined relation prediction problem. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we propose a unified multi-task learning framework to divide the task into three interacted sub-tasks. Specifically, we first introduce the type-attentional method for subject extraction to provide prior type information explicitly. Then, the subject-aware relation prediction is presented to select useful relations based on the combination of global and local semantics. Third, we propose a question generation based QA method for object extraction to obtain diverse queries automatically. Notably, our method detects subjects or objects without relying on NER models and thus it is capable of dealing with the non-entity scenario. Finally, three sub-tasks are integrated into a unified model through parameter sharing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms all the baseline methods on two benchmark datasets, and further achieve excellent performance for non-predefined relations.
K-N-MOMDPs: Towards Interpretable Solutions for Adaptive Management
Authors: Ferrer-Mestres Jonathan , Dietterich Thomas G. , Buffet Olivier , Chades Iadine
Published: September 2022

In biodiversity conservation, adaptive management (AM) is the principal tool for decision making under uncertainty. AM problems are planning problems that can be modelled using Mixed Observability MDPs (MOMDPs). MOMDPs tackle decision problems where state variables are completely or partially observable. Unfortunately, MOMDP solutions (policy graphs) are too complex to be interpreted by human decision-makers. Here, we provide algorithms to solve K-N-MOMDPs, where K represents the maximum number of fully observable states and N represents the maximum number of alpha-vectors. Our algorithms calculate compact and more interpretable policy graphs from existing MOMDP models and solutions. We apply these algorithms to two computational sustainability applications: optimal release of bio-control agents to prevent dengue epidemics and conservation of the threatened bird species Gouldian finch. The methods dramatically reduce the number of states and alpha-vectors in MOMDP problems without significantly reducing their quality. The resulting policies have small policy graphs (4-6 nodes) that can be easily interpreted by human decision-makers.
Abusive Language Detection in Heterogeneous Contexts: Dataset Collection and the Role of Supervised Attention
Authors: Gong Hongyu , Valido Alberto , Ingram Katherine M. , Fanti Giulia , Bhat Suma , Espelage Dorothy L.
Published: September 2022

Abusive language is a massive problem in online social platforms. Existing abusive language detection techniques are particularly ill-suited to comments containing heterogeneous abusive language patterns, i.e., both abusive and non-abusive parts. This is due in part to the lack of datasets that explicitly annotate heterogeneity in abusive language. We tackle this challenge by providing an annotated dataset of abusive language in over 11,000 comments from YouTube. We account for heterogeneity in this dataset by separately annotating both the comment as a whole and the individual sentences that comprise each comment. We then propose an algorithm that uses a supervised attention mechanism to detect and categorize abusive content using multi-task learning. We empirically demonstrate the challenges of using traditional techniques on heterogeneous content and the comparative gains in performance of the proposed approach over state-of-the-art methods.
Computational Visual Ceramicology: Matching Image Outlines to Catalog Sketches
Authors: Itkin Barak , Wolf Lior , Dershowitz Nachum
Published: September 2022

Field archeologists are called upon to identify potsherds, for which they rely on their professional experience and on reference works.
We have developed a recognition method starting from images captured on site, which relies on the shape of the sherd's fracture outline.
The method sets up a new target for deep-learning, integrating information from points along inner and outer surfaces to learn about shapes.
Training the classifiers required tackling multiple challenges that arose on account of our working with real-world archeological data: paucity of labeled data; extreme imbalance between instances of different categories; and the need to avoid neglecting rare classes and to take note of minute distinguishing features of some classes.
The scarcity of training data was overcome by using synthetically-produced virtual potsherds and by employing multiple data-augmentation techniques.
A novel form of training loss allowed us to overcome classification problems caused by under-populated classes and inhomogeneous distribution of discriminative features.
Goten: GPU-Outsourcing Trusted Execution of Neural Network Training
Authors: Ng Lucien K. L. , Chow Sherman S. M. , Woo Anna P. Y. , Wong Donald P. H. , Zhao Yongjun
Published: September 2022

Deep learning unlocks applications with societal impacts, e.g., detecting child exploitation imagery and genomic analysis of rare diseases. Deployment, however, needs compliance with stringent privacy regulations. Training algorithms that preserve the privacy of training data are in pressing need.

Purely cryptographic approaches can protect privacy, but they are still costly, even when they rely on two or more non-colluding servers. Seemingly-"trivial" operations in plaintext quickly become prohibitively inefficient when a series of them are "crypto-processed," e.g., (dynamic) quantization for ensuring the intermediate values would not overflow.

Slalom, recently proposed by Tramer and Boneh, is the first solution that leverages both GPU (for efficient batch computation) and a trusted execution environment (TEE) (for minimizing the use of cryptography). Roughly, it works by a lot of pre-computation over known and fixed weights, and hence it only supports private inference. Five related problems for private training are left unaddressed.

Goten, our privacy-preserving training and prediction framework, tackles all five problems simultaneously via our careful design over the "mismatched" cryptographic and GPU data types (due to the tension between precision and efficiency) and our round-optimal GPU-outsourcing protocol (hence minimizing the communication cost between servers). It 1) stochastically trains a low-bitwidth yet accurate model, 2) supports dynamic quantization (a challenge left by Slalom), 3) minimizes the memory-swapping overhead of the memory-limited TEE and its communication with GPU, 4) crypto-protects the (dynamic) model weight from untrusted GPU, and 5) outperforms a pure-TEE system, even without pre-computation (needed by Slalom). As a baseline, we build CaffeScone that secures Caffe using TEE but not GPU; Goten shows a 6.84x speed-up of the whole VGG-11. Goten also outperforms Falcon proposed by Wagh et al., the latest secure multi-server cryptographic solution, by 132.64x using VGG-11. Lastly, we demonstrate Goten's efficacy in training models for breast cancer diagnosis over sensitive images.
Combining Machine Learning & Reasoning for Biodiversity Data Intelligence
Authors: Sen Atriya , Sterner Beckett , Franz Nico , Powel Caleb , Upham Nathan
Published: September 2022

The current crisis in global natural resource management makes it imperative that we better leverage the vast data sources associated with taxonomic entities (such as recognized species of plants and animals), which are known collectively as biodiversity data. However, these data pose considerable challenges for artificial intelligence: while growing rapidly in volume, they remain highly incomplete for many taxonomic groups, often show conflicting signals from different sources, and are multi-modal and therefore constantly changing in structure. In this paper, we motivate, describe, and present a novel workflow combining machine learning and automated reasoning, to discover patterns of taxonomic identity and change - i.e. “taxonomic intelligence” - leading to scalable and broadly impactful AI solutions within the bio-data realm.
Enhancing E-commerce Recommender System Adaptability with Online Deep Controllable Learning-To-Rank
Authors: Zeng Anxiang , Yu Han , He Hualin , Ni Yabo , Li Yongliang , Zhou Jingren , Miao Chunyan
Published: September 2022

In the past decade, recommender systems for e-commerce have witnessed significant advancement. Recommendation scenarios can be divided into different type (e.g., pre-, during-, post-purchase, campaign, promotion, bundle) for different user groups or different businesses. For different scenarios, the goals of recommendation are different. This is reflected by the different performance metrics employed. In addition, online promotional campaigns, which attract high traffic volumes, are also a critical factor affecting e-commerce recommender systems. Typically, prior to a promotional campaign, the Add-to-Cart Rate (ACR) is the target of optimization. During the campaign, this changes to Gross Merchandise Volumes (GMV). Immediately after the campaign, it becomes Click Through Rates CTR. Dynamically adapting among these potentially conflicting optimization objectives is an important capability for recommender systems deployed in real-world e-commerce platforms. In this paper, we report our experience designing and deploying the Deep Controllable Learning-To-Rank (DC-LTR) recommender system to address this challenge. It enhances the feedback controller in LTR with multi-objective optimization so as to maximize different objectives under constraints. Its ability to dynamically adapt to changing business objectives has resulted in significant business advantages. Since September 2019, DC-LTR has become a core service enabling adaptive online training and real-time deployment ranking models based on changing business objectives in AliExpress and Lazada. Under both everyday use scenarios and peak load scenarios during large promotional campaigns, DC-LTR has achieved significant improvements in satisfying real-world business objectives.
A Novel AI-based Methodology for Identifying Cyber Attacks in Honey Pots
Authors: AbuOdeh Muhammed , Adkins Christian , Setayeshfar Omid , Doshi Prashant , Lee Kyu H.
Published: September 2022

We present a novel AI-based methodology that identifies phases of a host-level cyber attack simply from system call logs. System calls emanating from cyber attacks on hosts such as honey pots are often recorded in audit logs. Our methodology first involves efficiently loading, caching, processing, and querying system events contained in audit logs in support of computer forensics. Output of queries remains at the system call level and is difficult to process. The next step is to infer a sequence of abstracted actions, which we colloquially call a storyline, from the system calls given as observations to a latent-state probabilistic model. These storylines are then accurately identified with class labels using a learned classifier. We qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate methods and models for each step of the methodology using 114 different attack phases collected by logging the attacks of a red team on a server, on some likely benign sequences containing regular user activities, and on traces from a recent DARPA project. The resulting end-to-end system, which we call Cyberian, identifies the attack phases with a high level of accuracy illustrating the benefit that this machine learning-based methodology brings to security forensics.
Finding Needles in Heterogeneous Haystacks
Authors: Adhikari Bijaya , Li Liangyue , Rao Nikhil , Subbian Karthik
Published: September 2022

Due to intense competition and lack of real estate on the front page of large e-commerce platforms, sellers are sometimes motivated to garner non-genuine signals (clicks, add-to-carts, purchases) on their products, to make them appear more appealing to customers. This hurts customers' trust on the platform, and also hurts genuine sellers who sell their items without looking to game the system. While it is important to find the sellers and the buyers who are colluding to garner these non-genuine signals, doing so is highly nontrivial. Firstly, the set of bad actors in the system is a very small fraction of all the buyers/sellers on the platform. Secondly, bad actors ``hide" with the good ones, making them hard to detect. In this paper, we develop CONGCN, a context aware heterogeneous graph convolutional network to detect bad actors on a large heterogeneous graph. While our method is motivated by abuse detection in e-commerce, the method is applicable to other areas such as computational biology and finance, where large heterogeneous graphs are pervasive, and the amount of labeled data is very limited. We train CONGCN via novel sampling methods, and context aware message passing in a semi-supervised fashion to predict dishonest buyers and sellers in e-commerce. Extensive experiments show that our method is effective, beating several baselines; generalizable to an inductive setting and highly scalable
Deepening the Sense of Touch in Planetary Exploration with Geometric and Topological Deep Learning
Authors: Chen Yuzhou , Marchetti Yuliya , Gel Yulia R.
Published: September 2022

Tactile and embedded sensing is a new concept that has recently appeared in the context of rovers and planetary exploration missions. Various sensors such as those measuring pressure and integrated directly on wheels have the potential to add a "sense of touch" to exploratory vehicles. We investigate the utility of deep learning (DL), from conventional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to emerging geometric and topological DL, to terrain classification for planetary exploration based on a novel dataset from an experimental tactile wheel concept. The dataset includes 2D conductivity images from a pressure sensor array, which is wrapped around a rover wheel and is able to read pressure signatures of the ground beneath the wheel. Neither newer nor traditional DL tools have been previously applied to tactile sensing data. We discuss insights into advantages and limitations of these methods for the analysis of non-traditional pressure images and their potential use in planetary surface science.
Personalizing Individual Comfort in the Group Setting
Authors: Laftchiev Emil , Romeres Diego , Nikovski Daniel
Published: September 2022

Maintaining individual thermal comfort in indoor spaces shared by multiple occupants is difficult because it requires both intuition about the thermal properties of the room, as well as an understanding of the thermal comfort preferences of each individual. We explore an approach to optimizing individual thermal comfort within a group through temperature set-point optimization of HVAC equipment. We propose a weakly-supervised algorithm to learn the individual thermal comfort preferences and an autoencoding framework to learn static approximations of room thermodynamics. We further propose two approaches to learn a control law that sets the HVAC set-points subject to the preferred user temperatures. The proposed method is tested on a real data-set obtained from workers in an open office. The results show that, on average, the temperature in the room at each user's location can be regulated to within 0.5C of the user's desired temperature.
Reinforcement Learning-based Product Delivery Frequency Control
Authors: Liu Yang , Chen Zhengxing , Virochsiri Kittipat , Wang Juan , Wu Jiahao , Liang Feng
Published: September 2022

Frequency control is an important problem in modern recommender systems. It dictates the delivery frequency of recommendations to maintain product quality and efficiency. For example, the frequency of delivering promotional notifications impacts daily metrics as well as the infrastructure resource consumption (e.g. CPU and memory usage). There remain open questions on what objective we should optimize to represent business values in the long term best, and how we should balance between daily metrics and resource consumption in a dynamically fluctuating environment. We propose a personalized methodology for the frequency control problem, which combines long-term value optimization using reinforcement learning (RL) with a robust volume control technique we termed "Effective Factor". We demonstrate statistically significant improvement in daily metrics and resource efficiency by our method in several notification applications at a scale of billions of users. To our best knowledge, our study represents the first deep RL application on the frequency control problem at such an industrial scale.
Representing the Unification of Text Featurization using a Context-Free Grammar
Authors: Kilitcioglu Doruk , Kadioglu Serdar
Published: September 2022

We propose a novel context-free grammar to represent text embeddings in conjunction with their various transformations. We show how this grammar can serve as a unification layer on top of different featurization techniques, and their hybridization thereof. The approach is embodied in an open-source library, called TextWiser, with a high-level user interface to serve researchers and practitioners. The goal of TextWiser is to enable rapid experimentation with various featurization methods and to serve as a building block within AI applications consuming unstructured data. We highlight several key benefits that are desirable especially in industrial settings where rapid experimentation, reusability, reproducibility, and time to market are of great interest. Finally, we showcase a deployed service powered by TextWiser as a proof-of-concept enterprise application.
Opponent Hand Estimation in the Game of Gin Rummy
Authors: Francis Peter E. , Just Hoang A. , Neller Todd W.
Published: September 2022

In this article, we describe various approaches to opponent hand estimation in the card game Gin Rummy. We use an application of Bayes' rule, as well as both simple and convolutional neural networks, to recognize patterns in simulated game play and predict the opponent's hand. We also present a new minimal-sized construction for using arrays to pre-populate hand representation images. Finally, we define various metrics for evaluating estimations, and evaluate the strengths of our different estimations at different stages of the game.
Extracting Learned Discard and Knocking Strategies from a Gin Rummy Bot
Authors: Goldstein Benjamin , Astudillo Guerra Jean-Pierre , Haigh Emily , Cruz Ulloa Bryan , Blum Jeremy
Published: September 2022

Various Gin Rummy strategy guides provide heuristics for human players to improve their gameplay. Often these heuristics are either conflicting or contain ambiguity that limits their applicability, especially for discard and end-of-game decisions. This paper describes an approach to analyzing the machine learning capabilities of a Gin Rummy agent to help resolve these conflicts and ambiguities. There are three main decision points in the game: when to draw from the discard pile, which card to discard from the player's hand, and when to knock. The agent us-es a learning approach to estimate the expected utility for discards. An analysis of these utility values provides in-sight into resolving ambiguities in tips for discard decisions in human play. The agent’s end-of-game, or knocking, strategy was derived using Monte Carlo Counterfactual regret minimization (MCCFR). This approach was applied to estimate Nash equilibrium knocking strategies under different rules of the game. The analysis suggests that conflicts in the end-of-game playing tips are due in part to different rules used in common Gin Rummy variants.