pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
This Email Could Save Your Life: Introducing the Task of Email Subject Line Generation
Authors: Rui Zhang, Joel Tetreault
Date: 2019-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Document Summarization, Headline Generation, Text Summarization

Given the overwhelming number of emails, an effective subject line becomes essential to better inform the recipient of the email's content. In this paper, we propose and study the task of email subject line generation: automatically generating an email subject line from the email body. We create the first dataset for this task and find that email subject line generation favor extremely abstractive summary which differentiates it from news headline generation or news single document summarization. We then develop a novel deep learning method and compare it to several baselines as well as recent state-of-the-art text summarization systems. We also investigate the efficacy of several automatic metrics based on correlations with human judgments and propose a new automatic evaluation metric. Our system outperforms competitive baselines given both automatic and human evaluations. To our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle the problem of effective email subject line generation.
Sentence Centrality Revisited for Unsupervised Summarization
Authors: Hao Zheng, Mirella Lapata
Date: 2019-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Document Summarization, News Summarization, Representation Learning, Sentence, Unsupervised Extractive Summarization

Single document summarization has enjoyed renewed interests in recent years thanks to the popularity of neural network models and the availability of large-scale datasets. In this paper we develop an unsupervised approach arguing that it is unrealistic to expect large-scale and high-quality training data to be available or created for different types of summaries, domains, or languages. We revisit a popular graph-based ranking algorithm and modify how node (aka sentence) centrality is computed in two ways: (a)~we employ BERT, a state-of-the-art neural representation learning model to better capture sentential meaning and (b)~we build graphs with directed edges arguing that the contribution of any two nodes to their respective centrality is influenced by their relative position in a document. Experimental results on three news summarization datasets representative of different languages and writing styles show that our approach outperforms strong baselines by a wide margin.
Seeing Things from a Different Angle: Discovering Diverse Perspectives about Claims
Authors: Sihao Chen, Daniel Khashabi, Wenpeng Yin, Chris Callison-Burch, Dan Roth
Date: 2019-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 8k, Fact Checking, Natural Language Understanding

One key consequence of the information revolution is a significant increase and a contamination of our information supply. The practice of fact checking won't suffice to eliminate the biases in text data we observe, as the degree of factuality alone does not determine whether biases exist in the spectrum of opinions visible to us. To better understand controversial issues, one needs to view them from a diverse yet comprehensive set of perspectives. For example, there are many ways to respond to a claim such as "animals should have lawful rights", and these responses form a spectrum of perspectives, each with a stance relative to this claim and, ideally, with evidence supporting it. Inherently, this is a natural language understanding task, and we propose to address it as such. Specifically, we propose the task of substantiated perspective discovery where, given a claim, a system is expected to discover a diverse set of well-corroborated perspectives that take a stance with respect to the claim. Each perspective should be substantiated by evidence paragraphs which summarize pertinent results and facts. We construct PERSPECTRUM, a dataset of claims, perspectives and evidence, making use of online debate websites to create the initial data collection, and augmenting it using search engines in order to expand and diversify our dataset. We use crowd-sourcing to filter out noise and ensure high-quality data. Our dataset contains 1k claims, accompanied with pools of 10k and 8k perspective sentences and evidence paragraphs, respectively. We provide a thorough analysis of the dataset to highlight key underlying language understanding challenges, and show that human baselines across multiple subtasks far outperform ma-chine baselines built upon state-of-the-art NLP techniques. This poses a challenge and opportunity for the NLP community to address.
Learning to Predict Novel Noun-Noun Compounds
Authors: Prajit Dhar, Lonneke van der Plas
Date: 2019-06-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 8

We introduce temporally and contextually-aware models for the novel task of predicting unseen but plausible concepts, as conveyed by noun-noun compounds in a time-stamped corpus. We train compositional models on observed compounds, more specifically the composed distributed representations of their constituents across a time-stamped corpus, while giving it corrupted instances (where head or modifier are replaced by a random constituent) as negative evidence. The model captures generalisations over this data and learns what combinations give rise to plausible compounds and which ones do not. After training, we query the model for the plausibility of automatically generated novel combinations and verify whether the classifications are accurate. For our best model, we find that in around 85% of the cases, the novel compounds generated are attested in previously unseen data. An additional estimated 5% are plausible despite not being attested in the recent corpus, based on judgments from independent human raters.
Encouraging Paragraph Embeddings to Remember Sentence Identity Improves Classification
Authors: Tu Vu, Mohit Iyyer
Date: 2019-06-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Sentence

While paragraph embedding models are remarkably effective for downstream classification tasks, what they learn and encode into a single vector remains opaque. In this paper, we investigate a state-of-the-art paragraph embedding method proposed by Zhang et al. (2017) and discover that it cannot reliably tell whether a given sentence occurs in the input paragraph or not. We formulate a sentence content task to probe for this basic linguistic property and find that even a much simpler bag-of-words method has no trouble solving it. This result motivates us to replace the reconstruction-based objective of Zhang et al. (2017) with our sentence content probe objective in a semi-supervised setting. Despite its simplicity, our objective improves over paragraph reconstruction in terms of (1) downstream classification accuracies on benchmark datasets, (2) faster training, and (3) better generalization ability.
A Just and Comprehensive Strategy for Using NLP to Address Online Abuse
Authors: David Jurgens, Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Libby Hemphill
Date: 2019-06-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Position

Online abusive behavior affects millions and the NLP community has attempted to mitigate this problem by developing technologies to detect abuse. However, current methods have largely focused on a narrow definition of abuse to detriment of victims who seek both validation and solutions. In this position paper, we argue that the community needs to make three substantive changes: (1) expanding our scope of problems to tackle both more subtle and more serious forms of abuse, (2) developing proactive technologies that counter or inhibit abuse before it harms, and (3) reframing our effort within a framework of justice to promote healthy communities.
Detection and Prediction of Users Attitude Based on Real-Time and Batch Sentiment Analysis of Facebook Comments
Authors: Hieu Tran, Maxim Shcherbakov
Date: 2019-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Avg, Clustering, Position, Sentiment Analysis

The most of the people have their account on social networks (e.g. Facebook, Vkontakte) where they express their attitude to different situations and events. Facebook provides only the positive mark as a like button and share. However, it is important to know the position of a certain user on posts even though the opinion is negative. Positive, negative and neutral attitude can be extracted from the comments of users. Overall information about positive, negative and neutral opinion can bring the understanding of how people react in a position. Moreover, it is important to know how attitude is changing during the time period. The contribution of the paper is a new method based on sentiment text analysis for detection and prediction negative and positive patterns for Facebook comments which combines (i) real-time sentiment text analysis for pattern discovery and (ii) batch data processing for creating opinion forecasting algorithm. To perform forecast we propose two-steps algorithm where: (i) patterns are clustered using unsupervised clustering techniques and (ii) trend prediction is performed based on finding the nearest pattern from the certain cluster. Case studies show the efficiency and accuracy (Avg. MAE = 0.008) of the proposed method and its practical applicability. Also, we discovered three types of users attitude patterns and described them.
Predicting TED Talk Ratings from Language and Prosody
Authors: Md. Iftekhar Tanveer, Md Kamrul Hassan, Daniel Gildea, M. Ehsan Hoque
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

We use the largest open repository of public speaking---TED Talks---to predict the ratings of the online viewers. Our dataset contains over 2200 TED Talk transcripts (includes over 200 thousand sentences), audio features and the associated meta information including about 5.5 Million ratings from spontaneous visitors of the website. We propose three neural network architectures and compare with statistical machine learning. Our experiments reveal that it is possible to predict all the 14 different ratings with an average AUC of 0.83 using the transcripts and prosody features only. The dataset and the complete source code is available for further analysis.
Recovering Variable Names for Minified Code with Usage Contexts
Authors: Hieu Tran, Ngoc Tran, Son Nguyen, Hoan Nguyen, Tien Nguyen
Date: 2019-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

In modern Web technology, JavaScript (JS) code plays an important role. To avoid the exposure of original source code, the variable names in JS code deployed in the wild are often replaced by short, meaningless names, thus making the code extremely difficult to manually understand and analysis. This paper presents JSNeat, an information retrieval (IR)-based approach to recover the variable names in minified JS code. JSNeat follows a data-driven approach to recover names by searching for them in a large corpus of open-source JS code. We use three types of contexts to match a variable in given minified code against the corpus including the context of properties and roles of the variable, the context of that variable and relations with other variables under recovery, and the context of the task of the function to which the variable contributes. We performed several empirical experiments to evaluate JSNeat on the dataset of more than 322K JS files with 1M functions, and 3.5M variables with 176K unique variable names. We found that JSNeat achieves a high accuracy of 69.1%, which is the relative improvements of 66.1% and 43% over two state-of-the-art approaches JSNice and JSNaughty, respectively. The time to recover for a file or for a variable with JSNeat is twice as fast as with JSNice and 4x as fast as with JNaughty, respectively.
Deep Robust Single Image Depth Estimation Neural Network Using Scene Understanding
Authors: Haoyu Ren, Mostafa El-Khamy, Jungwon Lee
Date: 2019-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, General Classification, Scene Classification, Scene Understanding

Single image depth estimation (SIDE) plays a crucial role in 3D computer vision. In this paper, we propose a two-stage robust SIDE framework that can perform blind SIDE for both indoor and outdoor scenes. At the first stage, the scene understanding module will categorize the RGB image into different depth-ranges. We introduce two different scene understanding modules based on scene classification and coarse depth estimation respectively. At the second stage, SIDE networks trained by the images of specific depth-range are applied to obtain an accurate depth map. In order to improve the accuracy, we further design a multi-task encoding-decoding SIDE network DS-SIDENet based on depthwise separable convolutions. DS-SIDENet is optimized to minimize both depth classification and depth regression losses. This improves the accuracy compared to a single-task SIDE network. Experimental results demonstrate that training DS-SIDENet on an individual dataset such as NYU achieves competitive performance to the state-of-art methods with much better efficiency. Ours proposed robust SIDE framework also shows good performance for the ScanNet indoor images and KITTI outdoor images simultaneously. It achieves the top performance compared to the Robust Vision Challenge (ROB) 2018 submissions.
PyramNet: Point Cloud Pyramid Attention Network and Graph Embedding Module for Classification and Segmentation
Authors: Kang Zhiheng, Li Ning
Date: 2019-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Graph Embedding, Semantic Segmentation

With the tide of artificial intelligence, we try to apply deep learning to understand 3D data. Point cloud is an important 3D data structure, which can accurately and directly reflect the real world. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective network, which is named PyramNet, suites for point cloud object classification and semantic segmentation in 3D scene. We design two new operators: Graph Embedding Module(GEM) and Pyramid Attention Network(PAN). Specifically, GEM projects point cloud onto the graph and practices the covariance matrix to explore the relationship between points, so as to improve the local feature expression ability of the model. PAN assigns some strong semantic features to each point to retain fine geometric features as much as possible. Furthermore, we provide extensive evaluation and analysis for the effectiveness of PyramNet. Empirically, we evaluate our model on ModelNet40, ShapeNet and S3DIS.
HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips
Authors: Antoine Miech, Dimitri Zhukov, Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Makarand Tapaswi, Ivan Laptev, Josef Sivic
Date: 2019-06-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Action Localization, Long Video Retrieval (Background Removed), Retrieval, Text to Video Retrieval, Video Retrieval

Learning text-video embeddings usually requires a dataset of video clips with manually provided captions. However, such datasets are expensive and time consuming to create and therefore difficult to obtain on a large scale. In this work, we propose instead to learn such embeddings from video data with readily available natural language annotations in the form of automatically transcribed narrations. The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we introduce HowTo100M: a large-scale dataset of 136 million video clips sourced from 1.22M narrated instructional web videos depicting humans performing and describing over 23k different visual tasks. Our data collection procedure is fast, scalable and does not require any additional manual annotation. Second, we demonstrate that a text-video embedding trained on this data leads to state-of-the-art results for text-to-video retrieval and action localization on instructional video datasets such as YouCook2 or CrossTask. Finally, we show that this embedding transfers well to other domains: fine-tuning on generic Youtube videos (MSR-VTT dataset) and movies (LSMDC dataset) outperforms models trained on these datasets alone. Our dataset, code and models will be publicly available at: www.di.ens.fr/willow/research/howto100m/.
When Unseen Domain Generalization is Unnecessary? Rethinking Data Augmentation
Authors: Ling Zhang, Xiaosong Wang, Dong Yang, Thomas Sanford, Stephanie Harmon, Baris Turkbey, Holger Roth, Andriy Myronenko, Daguang Xu, Ziyue Xu
Date: 2019-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Domain Adaptation, Domain Generalization, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Recent advances in deep learning for medical image segmentation demonstrate expert-level accuracy. However, in clinically realistic environments, such methods have marginal performance due to differences in image domains, including different imaging protocols, device vendors and patient populations. Here we consider the problem of domain generalization, when a model is trained once, and its performance generalizes to unseen domains. Intuitively, within a specific medical imaging modality the domain differences are smaller relative to natural images domain variability. We rethink data augmentation for medical 3D images and propose a deep stacked transformations (DST) approach for domain generalization. Specifically, a series of n stacked transformations are applied to each image in each mini-batch during network training to account for the contribution of domain-specific shifts in medical images. We comprehensively evaluate our method on three tasks: segmentation of whole prostate from 3D MRI, left atrial from 3D MRI, and left ventricle from 3D ultrasound. We demonstrate that when trained on a small source dataset, (i) on average, DST models on unseen datasets degrade only by 11% (Dice score change), compared to the conventional augmentation (degrading 39%) and CycleGAN-based domain adaptation method (degrading 25%); (ii) when evaluation on the same domain, DST is also better albeit only marginally. (iii) When training on large-sized data, DST on unseen domains reaches performance of state-of-the-art fully supervised models. These findings establish a strong benchmark for the study of domain generalization in medical imaging, and can be generalized to the design of robust deep segmentation models for clinical deployment.
Video Modeling with Correlation Networks
Authors: Heng Wang, Du Tran, Lorenzo Torresani, Matt Feiszli
Date: 2019-06-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Action Classification, Action Recognition, Optical Flow Estimation

Motion is a salient cue to recognize actions in video. Modern action recognition models leverage motion information either explicitly by using optical flow as input or implicitly by means of 3D convolutional filters that simultaneously capture appearance and motion information. This paper proposes an alternative approach based on a learnable correlation operator that can be used to establish frame-toframe matches over convolutional feature maps in the different layers of the network. The proposed architecture enables the fusion of this explicit temporal matching information with traditional appearance cues captured by 2D convolution. Our correlation network compares favorably with widely-used 3D CNNs for video modeling, and achieves competitive results over the prominent two-stream network while being much faster to train. We empirically demonstrate that correlation networks produce strong results on a variety of video datasets, and outperform the state of the art on four popular benchmarks for action recognition: Kinetics, Something-Something, Diving48 and Sports1M.
Unsupervised Feature Learning with K-means and An Ensemble of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Medical Image Classification
Authors: Euijoon Ahn, Ashnil Kumar, Dagan Feng, Michael Fulham, Jinman Kim
Date: 2019-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Deep Learning, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Classification

Medical image analysis using supervised deep learning methods remains problematic because of the reliance of deep learning methods on large amounts of labelled training data. Although medical imaging data repositories continue to expand there has not been a commensurate increase in the amount of annotated data. Hence, we propose a new unsupervised feature learning method that learns feature representations to then differentiate dissimilar medical images using an ensemble of different convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and K-means clustering. It jointly learns feature representations and clustering assignments in an end-to-end fashion. We tested our approach on a public medical dataset and show its accuracy was better than state-of-the-art unsupervised feature learning methods and comparable to state-of-the-art supervised CNNs. Our findings suggest that our method could be used to tackle the issue of the large volume of unlabelled data in medical imaging repositories.
TransNet: A deep network for fast detection of common shot transitions
Authors: Tomáš Souček, Jaroslav Moravec, Jakub Lokoč
Date: 2019-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Boundary Detection, Camera shot boundary detection, GPU

Shot boundary detection (SBD) is an important first step in many video processing applications. This paper presents a simple modular convolutional neural network architecture that achieves state-of-the-art results on the RAI dataset with well above real-time inference speed even on a single mediocre GPU. The network employs dilated convolutions and operates just on small resized frames. The training process employed randomly generated transitions using selected shots from the TRECVID IACC.3 dataset. The code and a selected trained network will be available at https://github.com/soCzech/TransNet.
Global Semantic Description of Objects based on Prototype Theory
Authors: Omar Vidal Pino, Erickson Rangel Nascimento, Mario Fernando Montenegro Campos
Date: 2019-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Object

In this paper, we introduce a novel semantic description approach inspired on Prototype Theory foundations. We propose a Computational Prototype Model (CPM) that encodes and stores the central semantic meaning of objects category: the semantic prototype. Also, we introduce a Prototype-based Description Model that encodes the semantic meaning of an object while describing its features using our CPM model. Our description method uses semantic prototypes computed by CNN-classifications models to create discriminative signatures that describe an object highlighting its most distinctive features within the category. Our experiments show that: i) our CPM model (semantic prototype + distance metric) is able to describe the internal semantic structure of objects categories; ii) our semantic distance metric can be understood as the object visual typicality score within a category; iii) our descriptor encoding is semantically interpretable and significantly outperforms other image global encodings in clustering and classification tasks.
A Coarse-to-Fine Framework for Learned Color Enhancement with Non-Local Attention
Authors: Chaowei Shan, Zhizheng Zhang, Zhibo Chen
Date: 2019-06-08 00:00:00

Automatic color enhancement is aimed to adaptively adjust photos to expected styles and tones. For current learned methods in this field, global harmonious perception and local details are hard to be well-considered in a single model simultaneously. To address this problem, we propose a coarse-to-fine framework with non-local attention for color enhancement in this paper. Within our framework, we propose to divide enhancement process into channel-wise enhancement and pixel-wise refinement performed by two cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In channel-wise enhancement, our model predicts a global linear mapping for RGB channels of input images to perform global style adjustment. In pixel-wise refinement, we learn a refining mapping using residual learning for local adjustment. Further, we adopt a non-local attention block to capture the long-range dependencies from global information for subsequent fine-grained local refinement. We evaluate our proposed framework on the commonly using benchmark and conduct sufficient experiments to demonstrate each technical component within it.