pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FAE: A Fairness-Aware Ensemble Framework
Authors: Vasileios Iosifidis, Besnik Fetahu, Eirini Ntoutsi
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Decision Making, Fairness

Automated decision making based on big data and machine learning (ML) algorithms can result in discriminatory decisions against certain protected groups defined upon personal data like gender, race, sexual orientation etc. Such algorithms designed to discover patterns in big data might not only pick up any encoded societal biases in the training data, but even worse, they might reinforce such biases resulting in more severe discrimination. The majority of thus far proposed fairness-aware machine learning approaches focus solely on the pre-, in- or post-processing steps of the machine learning process, that is, input data, learning algorithms or derived models, respectively. However, the fairness problem cannot be isolated to a single step of the ML process. Rather, discrimination is often a result of complex interactions between big data and algorithms, and therefore, a more holistic approach is required. The proposed FAE (Fairness-Aware Ensemble) framework combines fairness-related interventions at both pre- and postprocessing steps of the data analysis process. In the preprocessing step, we tackle the problems of under-representation of the protected group (group imbalance) and of class-imbalance by generating balanced training samples. In the post-processing step, we tackle the problem of class overlapping by shifting the decision boundary in the direction of fairness.
CryptoSPN: Privacy-preserving Sum-Product Network Inference
Authors: Amos Treiber, Alejandro Molina, Christian Weinert, Thomas Schneider, Kristian Kersting
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

AI algorithms, and machine learning (ML) techniques in particular, are increasingly important to individuals' lives, but have caused a range of privacy concerns addressed by, e.g., the European GDPR. Using cryptographic techniques, it is possible to perform inference tasks remotely on sensitive client data in a privacy-preserving way: the server learns nothing about the input data and the model predictions, while the client learns nothing about the ML model (which is often considered intellectual property and might contain traces of sensitive data). While such privacy-preserving solutions are relatively efficient, they are mostly targeted at neural networks, can degrade the predictive accuracy, and usually reveal the network's topology. Furthermore, existing solutions are not readily accessible to ML experts, as prototype implementations are not well-integrated into ML frameworks and require extensive cryptographic knowledge. In this paper, we present CryptoSPN, a framework for privacy-preserving inference of sum-product networks (SPNs). SPNs are a tractable probabilistic graphical model that allows a range of exact inference queries in linear time. Specifically, we show how to efficiently perform SPN inference via secure multi-party computation (SMPC) without accuracy degradation while hiding sensitive client and training information with provable security guarantees. Next to foundations, CryptoSPN encompasses tools to easily transform existing SPNs into privacy-preserving executables. Our empirical results demonstrate that CryptoSPN achieves highly efficient and accurate inference in the order of seconds for medium-sized SPNs.
Scoring Graspability based on Grasp Regression for Better Grasp Prediction
Authors: Amaury Depierre, Emmanuel Dellandréa, Liming Chen
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Grasping objects is one of the most important abilities that a robot needs to master in order to interact with its environment. Current state-of-the-art methods rely on deep neural networks trained to jointly predict a graspability score together with a regression of an offset with respect to grasp reference parameters. However, these two predictions are performed independently, which can lead to a decrease in the actual graspability score when applying the predicted offset. Therefore, in this paper, we extend a state-of-the-art neural network with a scorer that evaluates the graspability of a given position, and introduce a novel loss function which correlates regression of grasp parameters with graspability score. We show that this novel architecture improves performance from 82.13% for a state-of-the-art grasp detection network to 85.74% on Jacquard dataset. When the learned model is transferred onto a real robot, the proposed method correlating graspability and grasp regression achieves a 92.4% rate compared to 88.1% for the baseline trained without the correlation.
Transforming Spectrum and Prosody for Emotional Voice Conversion with Non-Parallel Training Data
Authors: Kun Zhou, Berrak Sisman, Haizhou Li
Date: 2020-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Voice Conversion

Emotional voice conversion aims to convert the spectrum and prosody to change the emotional patterns of speech, while preserving the speaker identity and linguistic content. Many studies require parallel speech data between different emotional patterns, which is not practical in real life. Moreover, they often model the conversion of fundamental frequency (F0) with a simple linear transform. As F0 is a key aspect of intonation that is hierarchical in nature, we believe that it is more adequate to model F0 in different temporal scales by using wavelet transform. We propose a CycleGAN network to find an optimal pseudo pair from non-parallel training data by learning forward and inverse mappings simultaneously using adversarial and cycle-consistency losses. We also study the use of continuous wavelet transform (CWT) to decompose F0 into ten temporal scales, that describes speech prosody at different time resolution, for effective F0 conversion. Experimental results show that our proposed framework outperforms the baselines both in objective and subjective evaluations.
Single Channel Speech Enhancement Using Temporal Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Jingdong Li, HUI ZHANG, Xueliang Zhang, Changliang Li
Date: 2020-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

In recent decades, neural network based methods have significantly improved the performace of speech enhancement. Most of them estimate time-frequency (T-F) representation of target speech directly or indirectly, then resynthesize waveform using the estimated T-F representation. In this work, we proposed the temporal convolutional recurrent network (TCRN), an end-to-end model that directly map noisy waveform to clean waveform. The TCRN, which is combined convolution and recurrent neural network, is able to efficiently and effectively leverage short-term ang long-term information. Futuremore, we present the architecture that repeatedly downsample and upsample speech during forward propagation. We show that our model is able to improve the performance of model, compared with existing convolutional recurrent networks. Futuremore, We present several key techniques to stabilize the training process. The experimental results show that our model consistently outperforms existing speech enhancement approaches, in terms of speech intelligibility and quality.
A Survey on Knowledge Graphs: Representation, Acquisition and Applications
Authors: Shaoxiong Ji, Shirui Pan, Erik Cambria, Pekka Marttinen, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2020-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Graph Representation Learning, Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graphs, Relational Reasoning, Representation Learning, Survey, World Knowledge

Human knowledge provides a formal understanding of the world. Knowledge graphs that represent structural relations between entities have become an increasingly popular research direction towards cognition and human-level intelligence. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of knowledge graph covering overall research topics about 1) knowledge graph representation learning, 2) knowledge acquisition and completion, 3) temporal knowledge graph, and 4) knowledge-aware applications, and summarize recent breakthroughs and perspective directions to facilitate future research. We propose a full-view categorization and new taxonomies on these topics. Knowledge graph embedding is organized from four aspects of representation space, scoring function, encoding models, and auxiliary information. For knowledge acquisition, especially knowledge graph completion, embedding methods, path inference, and logical rule reasoning, are reviewed. We further explore several emerging topics, including meta relational learning, commonsense reasoning, and temporal knowledge graphs. To facilitate future research on knowledge graphs, we also provide a curated collection of datasets and open-source libraries on different tasks. In the end, we have a thorough outlook on several promising research directions.
WaveTTS: Tacotron-based TTS with Joint Time-Frequency Domain Loss
Authors: Rui Liu, Berrak Sisman, Feilong Bao, Guanglai Gao, Haizhou Li
Date: 2020-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Tacotron-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems directly synthesize speech from text input. Such frameworks typically consist of a feature prediction network that maps character sequences to frequency-domain acoustic features, followed by a waveform reconstruction algorithm or a neural vocoder that generates the time-domain waveform from acoustic features. As the loss function is usually calculated only for frequency-domain acoustic features, that doesn't directly control the quality of the generated time-domain waveform. To address this problem, we propose a new training scheme for Tacotron-based TTS, referred to as WaveTTS, that has 2 loss functions: 1) time-domain loss, denoted as the waveform loss, that measures the distortion between the natural and generated waveform; and 2) frequency-domain loss, that measures the Mel-scale acoustic feature loss between the natural and generated acoustic features. WaveTTS ensures both the quality of the acoustic features and the resulting speech waveform. To our best knowledge, this is the first implementation of Tacotron with joint time-frequency domain loss. Experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms the baselines and achieves high-quality synthesized speech.
How Far are We from Effective Context Modeling? An Exploratory Study on Semantic Parsing in Context
Authors: Qian Liu, Bei Chen, Jiaqi Guo, Jian-Guang Lou, Bin Zhou, Dongmei Zhang
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Parsing

Recently semantic parsing in context has received considerable attention, which is challenging since there are complex contextual phenomena. Previous works verified their proposed methods in limited scenarios, which motivates us to conduct an exploratory study on context modeling methods under real-world semantic parsing in context. We present a grammar-based decoding semantic parser and adapt typical context modeling methods on top of it. We evaluate 13 context modeling methods on two large complex cross-domain datasets, and our best model achieves state-of-the-art performances on both datasets with significant improvements. Furthermore, we summarize the most frequent contextual phenomena, with a fine-grained analysis on representative models, which may shed light on potential research directions. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/ContextualSP.
Agent-Based Proof Design via Lemma Flow Diagram
Authors: Keehang Kwon, Daeseong Kang
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: LEMMA

We discuss an agent-based approach to proof design and implementation, which we call {\it Lemma Flow Diagram} (LFD). This approach is based on the multicut rule with $shared$ cuts. This approach is modular and easy to use, read and automate. Thus, we consider LFD an appealing alternative to `flow proof' which is popular in mathematical education. Some examples are provided.
Asking Questions the Human Way: Scalable Question-Answer Generation from Text Corpus
Authors: Bang Liu, Haojie Wei, Di Niu, Haolan Chen, Yancheng He
Date: 2020-01-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Answer Generation, Chatbot, Machine Reading Comprehension, Question-Answer-Generation, Question Answering, Question Generation, Question-Generation, Reading Comprehension

The ability to ask questions is important in both human and machine intelligence. Learning to ask questions helps knowledge acquisition, improves question-answering and machine reading comprehension tasks, and helps a chatbot to keep the conversation flowing with a human. Existing question generation models are ineffective at generating a large amount of high-quality question-answer pairs from unstructured text, since given an answer and an input passage, question generation is inherently a one-to-many mapping. In this paper, we propose Answer-Clue-Style-aware Question Generation (ACS-QG), which aims at automatically generating high-quality and diverse question-answer pairs from unlabeled text corpus at scale by imitating the way a human asks questions. Our system consists of: i) an information extractor, which samples from the text multiple types of assistive information to guide question generation; ii) neural question generators, which generate diverse and controllable questions, leveraging the extracted assistive information; and iii) a neural quality controller, which removes low-quality generated data based on text entailment. We compare our question generation models with existing approaches and resort to voluntary human evaluation to assess the quality of the generated question-answer pairs. The evaluation results suggest that our system dramatically outperforms state-of-the-art neural question generation models in terms of the generation quality, while being scalable in the meantime. With models trained on a relatively smaller amount of data, we can generate 2.8 million quality-assured question-answer pairs from a million sentences found in Wikipedia.
Joint Contextual Modeling for ASR Correction and Language Understanding
Authors: Yue Weng, Sai Sumanth Miryala, Chandra Khatri, Runze Wang, Huaixiu Zheng, Piero Molino, Mahdi Namazifar, Alexandros Papangelis, Hugh Williams, Franziska Bell, Gokhan Tur
Date: 2020-01-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Dialogue State Tracking, Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

The quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) is critical to Dialogue Systems as ASR errors propagate to and directly impact downstream tasks such as language understanding (LU). In this paper, we propose multi-task neural approaches to perform contextual language correction on ASR outputs jointly with LU to improve the performance of both tasks simultaneously. To measure the effectiveness of this approach we used a public benchmark, the 2nd Dialogue State Tracking (DSTC2) corpus. As a baseline approach, we trained task-specific Statistical Language Models (SLM) and fine-tuned state-of-the-art Generalized Pre-training (GPT) Language Model to re-rank the n-best ASR hypotheses, followed by a model to identify the dialog act and slots. i) We further trained ranker models using GPT and Hierarchical CNN-RNN models with discriminatory losses to detect the best output given n-best hypotheses. We extended these ranker models to first select the best ASR output and then identify the dialogue act and slots in an end to end fashion. ii) We also proposed a novel joint ASR error correction and LU model, a word confusion pointer network (WCN-Ptr) with multi-head self-attention on top, which consumes the word confusions populated from the n-best. We show that the error rates of off the shelf ASR and following LU systems can be reduced significantly by 14% relative with joint models trained using small amounts of in-domain data.
Project CLAI: Instrumenting the Command Line as a New Environment for AI Agents
Authors: Mayank Agarwal, Jorge J. Barroso, Tathagata Chakraborti, Eli M. Dow, Kshitij Fadnis, Borja Godoy, Madhavan Pallan, Kartik Talamadupula
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent

This whitepaper reports on Project CLAI (Command Line AI), which aims to bring the power of AI to the command line interface (CLI). The CLAI platform sets up the CLI as a new environment for AI researchers to conquer by surfacing the command line as a generic environment that researchers can interface to using a simple sense-act API, much like the traditional AI agent architecture. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of the platform in detail, through illustrative use cases of new end user interaction patterns enabled by this design, and through quantitative evaluation of the system footprint of a CLAI-enabled terminal. We also report on some early user feedback on CLAI's features from an internal survey.
A Neural-embedded Choice Model: TasteNet-MNL Modeling Taste Heterogeneity with Flexibility and Interpretability
Authors: Yafei Han, Francisco Camara Pereira, Moshe Ben-Akiva, Christopher Zegras
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Discrete Choice Models

Discrete choice models (DCMs) require a priori knowledge of the utility functions, especially how tastes vary across individuals. Utility misspecification may lead to biased estimates, inaccurate interpretations and limited predictability. In this paper, we utilize a neural network to learn taste representation. Our formulation consists of two modules: a neural network (TasteNet) that learns taste parameters (e.g., time coefficient) as flexible functions of individual characteristics; and a multinomial logit (MNL) model with utility functions defined with expert knowledge. Taste parameters learned by the neural network are fed into the choice model and link the two modules. Our approach extends the L-MNL model (Sifringer et al., 2020) by allowing the neural network to learn the interactions between individual characteristics and alternative attributes. Moreover, we formalize and strengthen the interpretability condition - requiring realistic estimates of behavior indicators (e.g., value-of-time, elasticity) at the disaggregated level, which is crucial for a model to be suitable for scenario analysis and policy decisions. Through a unique network architecture and parameter transformation, we incorporate prior knowledge and guide the neural network to output realistic behavior indicators at the disaggregated level. We show that TasteNet-MNL reaches the ground-truth model's predictability and recovers the nonlinear taste functions on synthetic data. Its estimated value-of-time and choice elasticities at the individual level are close to the ground truth. On a publicly available Swissmetro dataset, TasteNet-MNL outperforms benchmarking MNLs and Mixed Logit model's predictability. It learns a broader spectrum of taste variations within the population and suggests a higher average value-of-time.
Unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction Across Writing Systems
Authors: Parker Riley, Daniel Gildea
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Bilingual Lexicon Induction

Recent embedding-based methods in unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction have shown good results, but generally have not leveraged orthographic (spelling) information, which can be helpful for pairs of related languages. This work augments a state-of-the-art method with orthographic features, and extends prior work in this space by proposing methods that can learn and utilize orthographic correspondences even between languages with different scripts. We demonstrate this by experimenting on three language pairs with different scripts and varying degrees of lexical similarity.
Improving Domain-Adapted Sentiment Classification by Deep Adversarial Mutual Learning
Authors: Qianming Xue, Wei zhang, Hongyuan Zha
Date: 2020-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

Domain-adapted sentiment classification refers to training on a labeled source domain to well infer document-level sentiment on an unlabeled target domain. Most existing relevant models involve a feature extractor and a sentiment classifier, where the feature extractor works towards learning domain-invariant features from both domains, and the sentiment classifier is trained only on the source domain to guide the feature extractor. As such, they lack a mechanism to use sentiment polarity lying in the target domain. To improve domain-adapted sentiment classification by learning sentiment from the target domain as well, we devise a novel deep adversarial mutual learning approach involving two groups of feature extractors, domain discriminators, sentiment classifiers, and label probers. The domain discriminators enable the feature extractors to obtain domain-invariant features. Meanwhile, the label prober in each group explores document sentiment polarity of the target domain through the sentiment prediction generated by the classifier in the peer group, and guides the learning of the feature extractor in its own group. The proposed approach achieves the mutual learning of the two groups in an end-to-end manner. Experiments on multiple public datasets indicate our method obtains the state-of-the-art performance, validating the effectiveness of mutual learning through label probers.
Bridging Text and Video: A Universal Multimodal Transformer for Video-Audio Scene-Aware Dialog
Authors: Zekang Li, Zongjia Li, Jinchao Zhang, Yang Feng, Cheng Niu, Jie zhou
Date: 2020-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Multi-Task Learning, Text Generation

Audio-Visual Scene-Aware Dialog (AVSD) is a task to generate responses when chatting about a given video, which is organized as a track of the 8th Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC8). To solve the task, we propose a universal multimodal transformer and introduce the multi-task learning method to learn joint representations among different modalities as well as generate informative and fluent responses. Our method extends the natural language generation pre-trained model to multimodal dialogue generation task. Our system achieves the best performance in both objective and subjective evaluations in the challenge.
Novel Language Resources for Hindi: An Aesthetics Text Corpus and a Comprehensive Stop Lemma List
Authors: Gayatri Venugopal-Wairagade, Jatinderkumar R. Saini, Dhanya Pramod
Date: 2020-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: LEMMA

This paper is an effort to complement the contributions made by researchers working toward the inclusion of non-English languages in natural language processing studies. Two novel Hindi language resources have been created and released for public consumption. The first resource is a corpus consisting of nearly thousand pre-processed fictional and nonfictional texts spanning over hundred years. The second resource is an exhaustive list of stop lemmas created from 12 corpora across multiple domains, consisting of over 13 million words, from which more than 200,000 lemmas were generated, and 11 publicly available stop word lists comprising over 1000 words, from which nearly 400 unique lemmas were generated. This research lays emphasis on the use of stop lemmas instead of stop words owing to the presence of various, but not all morphological forms of a word in stop word lists, as opposed to the presence of only the root form of the word, from which variations could be derived if required. It was also observed that stop lemmas were more consistent across multiple sources as compared to stop words. In order to generate a stop lemma list, the parts of speech of the lemmas were investigated but rejected as it was found that there was no significant correlation between the rank of a word in the frequency list and its part of speech. The stop lemma list was assessed using a comparative method. A formal evaluation method is suggested as future work arising from this study.