pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Deep Gradient Boosting Network for Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation
Authors: Qing Liu, Beiji Zou, Yang Zhao, Yixiong Liang
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Segmentation

Segmentation of optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) is critical in automated fundus image analysis system. Existing state-of-the-arts focus on designing deep neural networks with one or multiple dense prediction branches. Such kind of designs ignore connections among prediction branches and their learning capacity is limited. To build connections among prediction branches, this paper introduces gradient boosting framework to deep classification model and proposes a gradient boosting network called BoostNet. Specifically, deformable side-output unit and aggregation unit with deep supervisions are proposed to learn base functions and expansion coefficients in gradient boosting framework. By stacking aggregation units in a deep-to-shallow manner, models' performances are gradually boosted along deep to shallow stages. BoostNet achieves superior results to existing deep OD and OC segmentation networks on the public dataset ORIGA.
New Potential-Based Bounds for Prediction with Expert Advice
Authors: Vladimir A. Kobzar, Robert V. Kohn, Zhilei Wang
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00

This work addresses the classic machine learning problem of online prediction with expert advice. We consider the finite-horizon version of this zero-sum, two-person game. Using verification arguments from optimal control theory, we view the task of finding better lower and upper bounds on the value of the game (regret) as the problem of finding better sub- and supersolutions of certain partial differential equations (PDEs). These sub- and supersolutions serve as the potentials for player and adversary strategies, which lead to the corresponding bounds. To get explicit bounds, we use closed-form solutions of specific PDEs. Our bounds hold for any given number of experts and horizon; in certain regimes (which we identify) they improve upon the previous state of the art. For two and three experts, our bounds provide the optimal leading order term.
A Deep Learning approach for Hindi Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Bansi Shah, Sunil Kumar Kopparapu
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Sentence, Word Embeddings

Named Entity Recognition is one of the most important text processing requirement in many NLP tasks. In this paper we use a deep architecture to accomplish the task of recognizing named entities in a given Hindi text sentence. Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (BiLSTM) based techniques have been used for NER task in literature. In this paper, we first tune BiLSTM low-resource scenario to work for Hindi NER and propose two enhancements namely (a) de-noising auto-encoder (DAE) LSTM and (b) conditioning LSTM which show improvement in NER task compared to the BiLSTM approach. We use pre-trained word embedding to represent the words in the corpus, and the NER tags of the words are as defined by the used annotated corpora. Experiments have been performed to analyze the performance of different word embeddings and batch sizes which is essential for training deep models.
RNN-T For Latency Controlled ASR With Improved Beam Search
Authors: Mahaveer Jain, Kjell Schubert, Jay Mahadeokar, Ching-Feng Yeh, Kaustubh Kalgaonkar, Anuroop Sriram, Christian Fuegen, Michael L. Seltzer
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Computational Efficiency, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Text Normalization

Neural transducer-based systems such as RNN Transducers (RNN-T) for automatic speech recognition (ASR) blend the individual components of a traditional hybrid ASR systems (acoustic model, language model, punctuation model, inverse text normalization) into one single model. This greatly simplifies training and inference and hence makes RNN-T a desirable choice for ASR systems. In this work, we investigate use of RNN-T in applications that require a tune-able latency budget during inference time. We also improved the decoding speed of the originally proposed RNN-T beam search algorithm. We evaluated our proposed system on English videos ASR dataset and show that neural RNN-T models can achieve comparable WER and better computational efficiency compared to a well tuned hybrid ASR baseline.
Sparse Lifting of Dense Vectors: Unifying Word and Sentence Representations
Authors: Wenye Li, Senyue Hao
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

As the first step in automated natural language processing, representing words and sentences is of central importance and has attracted significant research attention. Different approaches, from the early one-hot and bag-of-words representation to more recent distributional dense and sparse representations, were proposed. Despite the successful results that have been achieved, such vectors tend to consist of uninterpretable components and face nontrivial challenge in both memory and computational requirement in practical applications. In this paper, we designed a novel representation model that projects dense word vectors into a higher dimensional space and favors a highly sparse and binary representation of word vectors with potentially interpretable components, while trying to maintain pairwise inner products between original vectors as much as possible. Computationally, our model is relaxed as a symmetric non-negative matrix factorization problem which admits a fast yet effective solution. In a series of empirical evaluations, the proposed model exhibited consistent improvement and high potential in practical applications.
Incremental Sense Weight Training for the Interpretation of Contextualized Word Embeddings
Authors: Xinyi Jiang, Zhengzhe Yang, Jinho D. Choi
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings, Word Sense Disambiguation

We present a novel online algorithm that learns the essence of each dimension in word embeddings by minimizing the within-group distance of contextualized embedding groups. Three state-of-the-art neural-based language models are used, Flair, ELMo, and BERT, to generate contextualized word embeddings such that different embeddings are generated for the same word type, which are grouped by their senses manually annotated in the SemCor dataset. We hypothesize that not all dimensions are equally important for downstream tasks so that our algorithm can detect unessential dimensions and discard them without hurting the performance. To verify this hypothesis, we first mask dimensions determined unessential by our algorithm, apply the masked word embeddings to a word sense disambiguation task (WSD), and compare its performance against the one achieved by the original embeddings. Several KNN approaches are experimented to establish strong baselines for WSD. Our results show that the masked word embeddings do not hurt the performance and can improve it by 3%. Our work can be used to conduct future research on the interpretability of contextualized embeddings.
Adversarial Language Games for Advanced Natural Language Intelligence
Authors: Yuan Yao, Haoxi Zhong, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Xiaozhi Wang, Chaojun Xiao, Guoyang Zeng, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Board Games

We study the problem of adversarial language games, in which multiple agents with conflicting goals compete with each other via natural language interactions. While adversarial language games are ubiquitous in human activities, little attention has been devoted to this field in natural language processing. In this work, we propose a challenging adversarial language game called Adversarial Taboo as an example, in which an attacker and a defender compete around a target word. The attacker is tasked with inducing the defender to utter the target word invisible to the defender, while the defender is tasked with detecting the target word before being induced by the attacker. In Adversarial Taboo, a successful attacker must hide its intention and subtly induce the defender, while a competitive defender must be cautious with its utterances and infer the intention of the attacker. Such language abilities can facilitate many important downstream NLP tasks. To instantiate the game, we create a game environment and a competition platform. Comprehensive experiments and empirical studies on several baseline attack and defense strategies show promising and interesting results. Based on the analysis on the game and experiments, we discuss multiple promising directions for future research.
Discrete Argument Representation Learning for Interactive Argument Pair Identification
Authors: Lu Ji, Zhongyu Wei, Jing Li, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2021 4
Tasks: Representation Learning

In this paper, we focus on extracting interactive argument pairs from two posts with opposite stances to a certain topic. Considering opinions are exchanged from different perspectives of the discussing topic, we study the discrete representations for arguments to capture varying aspects in argumentation languages (e.g., the debate focus and the participant behavior). Moreover, we utilize hierarchical structure to model post-wise information incorporating contextual knowledge. Experimental results on the large-scale dataset collected from CMV show that our proposed framework can significantly outperform the competitive baselines. Further analyses reveal why our model yields superior performance and prove the usefulness of our learned representations.
Knowing What, How and Why: A Near Complete Solution for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Haiyun Peng, Lu Xu, Lidong Bing, Fei Huang, Wei Lu, Luo Si
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), Aspect Extraction, Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification, Triplet

Target-based sentiment analysis or aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) refers to addressing various sentiment analysis tasks at a fine-grained level, which includes but is not limited to aspect extraction, aspect sentiment classification, and opinion extraction. There exist many solvers of the above individual subtasks or a combination of two subtasks, and they can work together to tell a complete story, i.e. the discussed aspect, the sentiment on it, and the cause of the sentiment. However, no previous ABSA research tried to provide a complete solution in one shot. In this paper, we introduce a new subtask under ABSA, named aspect sentiment triplet extraction (ASTE). Particularly, a solver of this task needs to extract triplets (What, How, Why) from the inputs, which show WHAT the targeted aspects are, HOW their sentiment polarities are and WHY they have such polarities (i.e. opinion reasons). For instance, one triplet from "Waiters are very friendly and the pasta is simply average" could be ('Waiters', positive, 'friendly'). We propose a two-stage framework to address this task. The first stage predicts what, how and why in a unified model, and then the second stage pairs up the predicted what (how) and why from the first stage to output triplets. In the experiments, our framework has set a benchmark performance in this novel triplet extraction task. Meanwhile, it outperforms a few strong baselines adapted from state-of-the-art related methods.
Quasi-Monte Carlo sampling for machine-learning partial differential equations
Authors: Jingrun Chen, Rui Du, Panchi Li, Liyao Lyu
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Numerical Integration

Solving partial differential equations in high dimensions by deep neural network has brought significant attentions in recent years. In many scenarios, the loss function is defined as an integral over a high-dimensional domain. Monte-Carlo method, together with the deep neural network, is used to overcome the curse of dimensionality, while classical methods fail. Often, a deep neural network outperforms classical numerical methods in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we propose to use quasi-Monte Carlo sampling, instead of Monte-Carlo method to approximate the loss function. To demonstrate the idea, we conduct numerical experiments in the framework of deep Ritz method proposed by Weinan E and Bing Yu. For the same accuracy requirement, it is observed that quasi-Monte Carlo sampling reduces the size of training data set by more than two orders of magnitude compared to that of MC method. Under some assumptions, we prove that quasi-Monte Carlo sampling together with the deep neural network generates a convergent series with rate proportional to the approximation accuracy of quasi-Monte Carlo method for numerical integration. Numerically the fitted convergence rate is a bit smaller, but the proposed approach always outperforms Monte Carlo method. It is worth mentioning that the convergence analysis is generic whenever a loss function is approximated by the quasi-Monte Carlo method, although observations here are based on deep Ritz method.
AReN: Assured ReLU NN Architecture for Model Predictive Control of LTI Systems
Authors: James Ferlez, Yasser Shoukry
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control

In this paper, we consider the problem of automatically designing a Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) Neural Network (NN) architecture that is sufficient to implement the optimal Model Predictive Control (MPC) strategy for an LTI system with quadratic cost. Specifically, we propose AReN, an algorithm to generate Assured ReLU Architectures. AReN takes as input an LTI system with quadratic cost specification, and outputs a ReLU NN architecture with the assurance that there exist network weights that exactly implement the associated MPC controller. AReN thus offers new insight into the design of ReLU NN architectures for the control of LTI systems: instead of training a heuristically chosen NN architecture on data -- or iterating over many architectures until a suitable one is found -- AReN can suggest an adequate NN architecture before training begins. While several previous works were inspired by the fact that both ReLU NN controllers and optimal MPC controller are both Continuous, Piecewise-Linear (CPWL) functions, exploiting this similarity to design NN architectures with correctness guarantees has remained elusive. AReN achieves this using two novel features. First, we reinterpret a recent result about the implementation of CPWL functions via ReLU NNs to show that a CPWL function may be implemented by a ReLU architecture that is determined by the number of distinct affine regions in the function. Second, we show that we can efficiently over-approximate the number of affine regions in the optimal MPC controller without solving the MPC problem exactly. Together, these results connect the MPC problem to a ReLU NN implementation without explicitly solving the MPC and directly translates this feature to a ReLU NN architecture that comes with the assurance that it can implement the MPC controller. We show through numerical results the effectiveness of AReN in designing an NN architecture.
Integrating Dictionary Feature into A Deep Learning Model for Disease Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Hamada A. Nayel, Shashrekha H. L
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, POS, POS Tagging, Translation, Word Embeddings

In recent years, Deep Learning (DL) models are becoming important due to their demonstrated success at overcoming complex learning problems. DL models have been applied effectively for different Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as part-of-Speech (PoS) tagging and Machine Translation (MT). Disease Named Entity Recognition (Disease-NER) is a crucial task which aims at extracting disease Named Entities (NEs) from text. In this paper, a DL model for Disease-NER using dictionary information is proposed and evaluated on National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) disease corpus and BC5CDR dataset. Word embeddings trained over general domain texts as well as biomedical texts have been used to represent input to the proposed model. This study also compares two different Segment Representation (SR) schemes, namely IOB2 and IOBES for Disease-NER. The results illustrate that using dictionary information, pre-trained word embeddings, character embeddings and CRF with global score improves the performance of Disease-NER system.
LIDA: Lightweight Interactive Dialogue Annotator
Authors: Edward Collins, Nikolai Rozanov, Bingbing Zhang
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11

Dialogue systems have the potential to change how people interact with machines but are highly dependent on the quality of the data used to train them. It is therefore important to develop good dialogue annotation tools which can improve the speed and quality of dialogue data annotation. With this in mind, we introduce LIDA, an annotation tool designed specifically for conversation data. As far as we know, LIDA is the first dialogue annotation system that handles the entire dialogue annotation pipeline from raw text, as may be the output of transcription services, to structured conversation data. Furthermore it supports the integration of arbitrary machine learning models as annotation recommenders and also has a dedicated interface to resolve inter-annotator disagreements such as after crowdsourcing annotations for a dataset. LIDA is fully open source, documented and publicly available [ https://github.com/Wluper/lida ]
Improving Bidirectional Decoding with Dynamic Target Semantics in Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Yong Shan, Yang Feng, Jinchao Zhang, Fandong Meng, Wen Zhang
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Machine Translation, Translation

Generally, Neural Machine Translation models generate target words in a left-to-right (L2R) manner and fail to exploit any future (right) semantics information, which usually produces an unbalanced translation. Recent works attempt to utilize the right-to-left (R2L) decoder in bidirectional decoding to alleviate this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{I}nteraction \textbf{M}odule (\textbf{DIM}) to dynamically exploit target semantics from R2L translation for enhancing the L2R translation quality. Different from other bidirectional decoding approaches, DIM firstly extracts helpful target information through addressing and reading operations, then updates target semantics for tracking the interactive history. Additionally, we further introduce an \textbf{agreement regularization} term into the training objective to narrow the gap between L2R and R2L translations. Experimental results on NIST Chinese$\Rightarrow$English and WMT'16 English$\Rightarrow$Romanian translation tasks show that our system achieves significant improvements over baseline systems, which also reaches comparable results compared to the state-of-the-art Transformer model with much fewer parameters of it.
Improving Long Handwritten Text Line Recognition with Convolutional Multi-way Associative Memory
Authors: Duc Nguyen, Nhan Tran, Hung Le
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Scene Text Recognition

Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks (CRNNs) excel at scene text recognition. Unfortunately, they are likely to suffer from vanishing/exploding gradient problems when processing long text images, which are commonly found in scanned documents. This poses a major challenge to goal of completely solving Optical Character Recognition (OCR) problem. Inspired by recently proposed memory-augmented neural networks (MANNs) for long-term sequential modeling, we present a new architecture dubbed Convolutional Multi-way Associative Memory (CMAM) to tackle the limitation of current CRNNs. By leveraging recent memory accessing mechanisms in MANNs, our architecture demonstrates superior performance against other CRNN counterparts in three real-world long text OCR datasets.
Deep Collaborative Discrete Hashing with Semantic-Invariant Structure
Authors: Zijian Wang, Zheng Zhang, Yadan Luo, Zi Huang
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Hashing

Existing deep hashing approaches fail to fully explore semantic correlations and neglect the effect of linguistic context on visual attention learning, leading to inferior performance. This paper proposes a dual-stream learning framework, dubbed Deep Collaborative Discrete Hashing (DCDH), which constructs a discriminative common discrete space by collaboratively incorporating the shared and individual semantics deduced from visual features and semantic labels. Specifically, the context-aware representations are generated by employing the outer product of visual embeddings and semantic encodings. Moreover, we reconstruct the labels and introduce the focal loss to take advantage of frequent and rare concepts. The common binary code space is built on the joint learning of the visual representations attended by language, the semantic-invariant structure construction and the label distribution correction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method.
DeepRacer: Educational Autonomous Racing Platform for Experimentation with Sim2Real Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Bharathan Balaji, Sunil Mallya, Sahika Genc, Saurabh Gupta, Leo Dirac, Vineet Khare, Gourav Roy, Tao Sun, Yunzhe Tao, Brian Townsend, Eddie Calleja, Sunil Muralidhara, Dhanasekar Karuppasamy
Date: 2019-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Racing, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

DeepRacer is a platform for end-to-end experimentation with RL and can be used to systematically investigate the key challenges in developing intelligent control systems. Using the platform, we demonstrate how a 1/18th scale car can learn to drive autonomously using RL with a monocular camera. It is trained in simulation with no additional tuning in physical world and demonstrates: 1) formulation and solution of a robust reinforcement learning algorithm, 2) narrowing the reality gap through joint perception and dynamics, 3) distributed on-demand compute architecture for training optimal policies, and 4) a robust evaluation method to identify when to stop training. It is the first successful large-scale deployment of deep reinforcement learning on a robotic control agent that uses only raw camera images as observations and a model-free learning method to perform robust path planning. We open source our code and video demo on GitHub: https://git.io/fjxoJ.