TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.
PROBLEM: Knowledge Bases (KBs) are becoming increasingly large, sparse and probabilistic. These KBs are typically used to perform query inferences and rule mining. But their efficacy is only as high as their completeness. Efficiently utilizing incomplete KBs remains a major challenge as the current KB completion techniques either do not take into account the inherent uncertainty associated with each KB tuple or do not scale to large KBs.

 Probabilistic rule learning not only considers the probability of every KB tuple but also tackles the problem of KB completion in an explainable way. For any given probabilistic KB, it learns probabilistic first-order rules from its relations to identify interesting patterns. But, the current probabilistic rule learning techniques perform grounding to do probabilistic inference for evaluation of candidate rules. It does not scale well to large KBs as the time complexity of inference using grounding is exponential over the size of the KB. In this paper, we present SafeLearner -- a scalable solution to probabilistic KB completion that performs probabilistic rule learning using lifted probabilistic inference -- as faster approach instead of grounding. 

 We compared SafeLearner to the state-of-the-art probabilistic rule learner ProbFOIL+ and to its deterministic contemporary AMIE+ on standard probabilistic KBs of NELL (Never-Ending Language Learner) and Yago. Our results demonstrate that SafeLearner scales as good as AMIE+ when learning simple rules and is also significantly faster than ProbFOIL+.

SOLUTION: Probabilistic Rule Learning system using Lifted Inference

PROBLEM: We propose Automating Science Journalism (ASJ), the process of producing a press release from a scientific paper, as a novel task that can serve as a new benchmark for neural abstractive summarization. ASJ is a challenging task as it requires long source texts to be summarized to long target texts, while also paraphrasing complex scientific concepts to be understood by the general audience. For this purpose, we introduce a specialized dataset for ASJ that contains scientific papers and their press releases from Science Daily. While state-of-the-art sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models could easily generate convincing press releases for ASJ, these are generally nonfactual and deviate from the source. To address this issue, we improve seq2seq generation via transfer learning by co-training with new targets: (i) scientific abstracts of sources and (ii) partitioned press releases. We further design a measure for factuality that scores how pertinent to the scientific papers the press releases under our seq2seq models are. Our quantitative and qualitative evaluation shows sizable improvements over a strong baseline, suggesting that the proposed framework could improve seq2seq summarization beyond ASJ.

SOLUTION: New: application of seq2seq modelling to automating sciene journalism; highly abstractive dataset; transfer learning tricks; automatic evaluation measure.

PROBLEM: Spatiotemporal forecasting has become an increasingly important prediction task in machine learning and statistics due to its vast applications, such as climate modeling, traffic prediction, video caching predictions, and so on. While numerous studies have been conducted, most existing works assume that the data from different sources or across different locations are equally reliable. Due to cost, accessibility, or other factors, it is inevitable that the data quality could vary, which introduces significant biases into the model and leads to unreliable prediction results. The problem could be exacerbated in black-box prediction models, such as deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose a novel solution that can automatically infer data quality levels of different sources through local variations of spatiotemporal signals without explicit labels. Furthermore, we integrate the estimate of data quality level with graph convolutional networks to exploit their efficient structures. We evaluate our proposed method on forecasting temperatures in Los Angeles.

SOLUTION:
We propose a method that infers the time-varying data quality level for spatiotemporal forecasting without explicitly assigned labels.