pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A hybrid classical-quantum workflow for natural language processing
Authors: Lee J. O'Riordan, Myles Doyle, Fabio Baruffa, Venkatesh Kannan
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

Natural language processing (NLP) problems are ubiquitous in classical computing, where they often require significant computational resources to infer sentence meanings. With the appearance of quantum computing hardware and simulators, it is worth developing methods to examine such problems on these platforms. In this manuscript we demonstrate the use of quantum computing models to perform NLP tasks, where we represent corpus meanings, and perform comparisons between sentences of a given structure. We develop a hybrid workflow for representing small and large scale corpus data sets to be encoded, processed, and decoded using a quantum circuit model. In addition, we provide our results showing the efficacy of the method, and release our developed toolkit as an open software suite.
Mining Coronavirus (COVID-19) Posts in Social Media
Authors: Negin Karisani, Payam Karisani
Date: 2020-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

World Health Organization (WHO) characterized the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) as a global pandemic on March 11th, 2020. Before this and in late January, more specifically on January 27th, while the majority of the infection cases were still reported in China and a few cruise ships, we began crawling social media user postings using the Twitter search API. Our goal was to leverage machine learning and linguistic tools to better understand the impact of the outbreak in China. Unlike our initial expectation to monitor a local outbreak, COVID-19 rapidly spread across the globe. In this short article we report the preliminary results of our study on automatically detecting the positive reports of COVID-19 from social media user postings using state-of-the-art machine learning models.
Boosting algorithms in energy research: A systematic review
Authors: Hristos Tyralis, Georgia Papacharalampous
Date: 2020-04-01 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Machine learning algorithms have been extensively exploited in energy research, due to their flexibility, automation and ability to handle big data. Among the most prominent machine learning algorithms are the boosting ones, which are known to be "garnering wisdom from a council of fools", thereby transforming weak learners to strong learners. Boosting algorithms are characterized by both high flexibility and high interpretability. The latter property is the result of recent developments by the statistical community. In this work, we provide understanding on the properties of boosting algorithms to facilitate a better exploitation of their strengths in energy research. In this respect, (a) we summarize recent advances on boosting algorithms, (b) we review relevant applications in energy research with those focusing on renewable energy (in particular those focusing on wind energy and solar energy) consisting a significant portion of the total ones, and (c) we describe how boosting algorithms are implemented and how their use is related to their properties. We show that boosting has been underexploited so far, while great advances in the energy field are possible both in terms of explanation and interpretation, and in terms of predictive performance.
Gestalt: a Stacking Ensemble for SQuAD2.0
Authors: Mohamed El-Geish
Date: 2020-04-02 00:00:00

We propose a deep-learning system -- for the SQuAD2.0 task -- that finds, or indicates the lack of, a correct answer to a question in a context paragraph. Our goal is to learn an ensemble of heterogeneous SQuAD2.0 models that, when blended properly, outperforms the best model in the ensemble per se. We created a stacking ensemble that combines top-N predictions from two models, based on ALBERT and RoBERTa, into a multiclass classification task to pick the best answer out of their predictions. We explored various ensemble configurations, input representations, and model architectures. For evaluation, we examined test-set EM and F1 scores; our best-performing ensemble incorporated a CNN-based meta-model and scored 87.117 and 90.306, respectively -- a relative improvement of 0.55% for EM and 0.61% for F1 scores, compared to the baseline performance of the best model in the ensemble, an ALBERT-based model, at 86.644 for EM and 89.760 for F1.
Generating Tertiary Protein Structures via an Interpretative Variational Autoencoder
Authors: Xiaojie Guo, Yuanqi Du, Sivani Tadepalli, Liang Zhao, Amarda Shehu
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Protein Structure Prediction, Stochastic Optimization

Much scientific enquiry across disciplines is founded upon a mechanistic treatment of dynamic systems that ties form to function. A highly visible instance of this is in molecular biology, where an important goal is to determine functionally-relevant forms/structures that a protein molecule employs to interact with molecular partners in the living cell. This goal is typically pursued under the umbrella of stochastic optimization with algorithms that optimize a scoring function. Research repeatedly shows that current scoring function, though steadily improving, correlate weakly with molecular activity. Inspired by recent momentum in generative deep learning, this paper proposes and evaluates an alternative approach to generating functionally-relevant three-dimensional structures of a protein. Though typically deep generative models struggle with highly-structured data, the work presented here circumvents this challenge via graph-generative models. A comprehensive evaluation of several deep architectures shows the promise of generative models in directly revealing the latent space for sampling novel tertiary structures, as well as in highlighting axes/factors that carry structural meaning and open the black box often associated with deep models. The work presented here is a first step towards interpretative, deep generative models becoming viable and informative complementary approaches to protein structure prediction.
Nouvelles représentations concises exactes des motifs rares
Authors: Seif Ben Chaabene
Date: 2020-04-02 00:00:00

Until a present, the majority of work in data mining were interested in the extraction of the frequent itemsets and the generation of the frequent association rules from these itemsets. Sometimes, the frequent of associations rules can revealed not-interesting in the direction where a frequent behavior is in general a normal behavior in the database. These last years, some work was focused on the exploitation and the extraction of rare itemset and shows them interest. However, the very important size of those itemset was the handicap of algorithms that exploit the rare pattern. In order to relieve this problem, the present report proposes two exact concise representations of the rare itemset, one based on the minimal generators and the other based on the closed itemset. In this context, we introduce two new algorithms called GMRare and MFRare which extract these two exact concise representations.
Melanoma Detection using Adversarial Training and Deep Transfer Learning
Authors: Hasib Zunair and A. Ben Hamza
Date: 2020-04-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: Journal of Physics in Medicine and Biology 2020 4
Tasks: Conditional Image Generation, General Classification, Image Generation, Image-to-Image Translation, Lesion Classification, Medical Image Generation, Skin Cancer Classification, Skin Lesion Classification, Transfer Learning

Skin lesion datasets consist predominantly of normal samples with only a small percentage of abnormal ones, giving rise to the class imbalance problem. Also, skin lesion images are largely similar in overall appearance owing to the low inter-class variability. In this paper, we propose a two-stage framework for automatic classification of skin lesion images using adversarial training and transfer learning toward melanoma detection. In the first stage, we leverage the inter-class variation of the data distribution for the task of conditional image synthesis by learning the inter-class mapping and synthesizing under-represented class samples from the over-represented ones using unpaired image-to-image translation. In the second stage, we train a deep convolutional neural network for skin lesion classification using the original training set combined with the newly synthesized under-represented class samples. The training of this classifier is carried out by minimizing the focal loss function, which assists the model in learning from hard examples, while down-weighting the easy ones. Experiments conducted on a dermatology image benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over several standard baseline methods, achieving significant performance improvements. Interestingly, we show through feature visualization and analysis that our method leads to context based lesion assessment that can reach an expert dermatologist level.
Multi-Objective Evolutionary approach for the Performance Improvement of Learners using Ensembling Feature selection and Discretization Technique on Medical data
Authors: Deepak Singh, Dilip Singh Sisodia, Pradeep Singh
Date: 2020-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, feature selection

Biomedical data is filled with continuous real values; these values in the feature set tend to create problems like underfitting, the curse of dimensionality and increase in misclassification rate because of higher variance. In response, pre-processing techniques on dataset minimizes the side effects and have shown success in maintaining the adequate accuracy. Feature selection and discretization are the two necessary preprocessing steps that were effectively employed to handle the data redundancies in the biomedical data. However, in the previous works, the absence of unified effort by integrating feature selection and discretization together in solving the data redundancy problem leads to the disjoint and fragmented field. This paper proposes a novel multi-objective based dimensionality reduction framework, which incorporates both discretization and feature reduction as an ensemble model for performing feature selection and discretization. Selection of optimal features and the categorization of discretized and non-discretized features from the feature subset is governed by the multi-objective genetic algorithm (NSGA-II). The two objective, minimizing the error rate during the feature selection and maximizing the information gain while discretization is considered as fitness criteria.
A Methodology for Creating Question Answering Corpora Using Inverse Data Annotation
Authors: Jan Deriu, Katsiaryna Mlynchyk, Philippe Schläpfer, Alvaro Rodrigo, Dirk von Grünigen, Nicolas Kaiser, Kurt Stockinger, Eneko Agirre, Mark Cieliebak
Date: 2020-04-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Question Answering, Semantic Parsing

In this paper, we introduce a novel methodology to efficiently construct a corpus for question answering over structured data. For this, we introduce an intermediate representation that is based on the logical query plan in a database called Operation Trees (OT). This representation allows us to invert the annotation process without losing flexibility in the types of queries that we generate. Furthermore, it allows for fine-grained alignment of query tokens to OT operations. In our method, we randomly generate OTs from a context-free grammar. Afterwards, annotators have to write the appropriate natural language question that is represented by the OT. Finally, the annotators assign the tokens to the OT operations. We apply the method to create a new corpus OTTA (Operation Trees and Token Assignment), a large semantic parsing corpus for evaluating natural language interfaces to databases. We compare OTTA to Spider and LC-QuaD 2.0 and show that our methodology more than triples the annotation speed while maintaining the complexity of the queries. Finally, we train a state-of-the-art semantic parsing model on our data and show that our corpus is a challenging dataset and that the token alignment can be leveraged to increase the performance significantly.
Reinforcement Learning in a Physics-Inspired Semi-Markov Environment
Authors: Colin Bellinger, Rory Coles, Mark Crowley, Isaac Tamblyn
Date: 2020-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), scientific discovery

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been demonstrated to have great potential in many applications of scientific discovery and design. Recent work includes, for example, the design of new structures and compositions of molecules for therapeutic drugs. Much of the existing work related to the application of RL to scientific domains, however, assumes that the available state representation obeys the Markov property. For reasons associated with time, cost, sensor accuracy, and gaps in scientific knowledge, many scientific design and discovery problems do not satisfy the Markov property. Thus, something other than a Markov decision process (MDP) should be used to plan / find the optimal policy. In this paper, we present a physics-inspired semi-Markov RL environment, namely the phase change environment. In addition, we evaluate the performance of value-based RL algorithms for both MDPs and partially observable MDPs (POMDPs) on the proposed environment. Our results demonstrate deep recurrent Q-networks (DRQN) significantly outperform deep Q-networks (DQN), and that DRQNs benefit from training with hindsight experience replay. Implications for the use of semi-Markovian RL and POMDPs for scientific laboratories are also discussed.
HybridQA: A Dataset of Multi-Hop Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data
Authors: Wenhu Chen, Hanwen Zha, Zhiyu Chen, Wenhan Xiong, Hong Wang, William Wang
Date: 2020-04-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Multi-hop Question Answering, Question Answering

Existing question answering datasets focus on dealing with homogeneous information, based either only on text or KB/Table information alone. However, as human knowledge is distributed over heterogeneous forms, using homogeneous information alone might lead to severe coverage problems. To fill in the gap, we present HybridQA https://github.com/wenhuchen/HybridQA, a new large-scale question-answering dataset that requires reasoning on heterogeneous information. Each question is aligned with a Wikipedia table and multiple free-form corpora linked with the entities in the table. The questions are designed to aggregate both tabular information and text information, i.e., lack of either form would render the question unanswerable. We test with three different models: 1) a table-only model. 2) text-only model. 3) a hybrid model that combines heterogeneous information to find the answer. The experimental results show that the EM scores obtained by two baselines are below 20\%, while the hybrid model can achieve an EM over 40\%. This gap suggests the necessity to aggregate heterogeneous information in HybridQA. However, the hybrid model's score is still far behind human performance. Hence, HybridQA can serve as a challenging benchmark to study question answering with heterogeneous information.
Exploiting Categorical Structure Using Tree-Based Methods
Authors: Brian Lucena
Date: 2020-04-15 00:00:00

Standard methods of using categorical variables as predictors either endow them with an ordinal structure or assume they have no structure at all. However, categorical variables often possess structure that is more complicated than a linear ordering can capture. We develop a mathematical framework for representing the structure of categorical variables and show how to generalize decision trees to make use of this structure. This approach is applicable to methods such as Gradient Boosted Trees which use a decision tree as the underlying learner. We show results on weather data to demonstrate the improvement yielded by this approach.
Resolving the Optimal Metric Distortion Conjecture
Authors: Vasilis Gkatzelis, Daniel Halpern, Nisarg Shah
Date: 2020-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: LEMMA

We study the following metric distortion problem: there are two finite sets of points, $V$ and $C$, that lie in the same metric space, and our goal is to choose a point in $C$ whose total distance from the points in $V$ is as small as possible. However, rather than having access to the underlying distance metric, we only know, for each point in $V$, a ranking of its distances to the points in $C$. We propose algorithms that choose a point in $C$ using only these rankings as input and we provide bounds on their \emph{distortion} (worst-case approximation ratio). A prominent motivation for this problem comes from voting theory, where $V$ represents a set of voters, $C$ represents a set of candidates, and the rankings correspond to ordinal preferences of the voters. A major conjecture in this framework is that the optimal deterministic algorithm has distortion $3$. We resolve this conjecture by providing a polynomial-time algorithm that achieves distortion $3$, matching a known lower bound. We do so by proving a novel lemma about matching voters to candidates, which we refer to as the \emph{ranking-matching lemma}. This lemma induces a family of novel algorithms, which may be of independent interest, and we show that a special algorithm in this family achieves distortion $3$. We also provide more refined, parameterized, bounds using the notion of $\alpha$-decisiveness, which quantifies the extent to which a voter may prefer her top choice relative to all others. Finally, we introduce a new randomized algorithm with improved distortion compared to known results, and also provide improved lower bounds on the distortion of all deterministic and randomized algorithms.
Paraphrase Augmented Task-Oriented Dialog Generation
Authors: Silin Gao, Yichi Zhang, Zhijian Ou, Zhou Yu
Date: 2020-04-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Response Generation

Neural generative models have achieved promising performance on dialog generation tasks if given a huge data set. However, the lack of high-quality dialog data and the expensive data annotation process greatly limit their application in real-world settings. We propose a paraphrase augmented response generation (PARG) framework that jointly trains a paraphrase model and a response generation model to improve the dialog generation performance. We also design a method to automatically construct paraphrase training data set based on dialog state and dialog act labels. PARG is applicable to various dialog generation models, such as TSCP (Lei et al., 2018) and DAMD (Zhang et al., 2019). Experimental results show that the proposed framework improves these state-of-the-art dialog models further on CamRest676 and MultiWOZ. PARG also significantly outperforms other data augmentation methods in dialog generation tasks, especially under low resource settings.
Destination Prediction Based on Partial Trajectory Data
Authors: Patrick Ebel, Ibrahim Emre Göl, Christoph Lingenfelder, Andreas Vogelsang
Date: 2020-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Two-thirds of the people who buy a new car prefer to use a substitute instead of the built-in navigation system. However, for many applications, knowledge about a user's intended destination and route is crucial. For example, suggestions for available parking spots close to the destination can be made or ride-sharing opportunities along the route are facilitated. Our approach predicts probable destinations and routes of a vehicle, based on the most recent partial trajectory and additional contextual data. The approach follows a three-step procedure: First, a $k$-d tree-based space discretization is performed, mapping GPS locations to discrete regions. Secondly, a recurrent neural network is trained to predict the destination based on partial sequences of trajectories. The neural network produces destination scores, signifying the probability of each region being the destination. Finally, the routes to the most probable destinations are calculated. To evaluate the method, we compare multiple neural architectures and present the experimental results of the destination prediction. The experiments are based on two public datasets of non-personalized, timestamped GPS locations of taxi trips. The best performing models were able to predict the destination of a vehicle with a mean error of 1.3 km and 1.43 km respectively.
LEAN-LIFE: A Label-Efficient Annotation Framework Towards Learning from Explanation
Authors: Dong-Ho Lee, Rahul Khanna, Bill Yuchen Lin, Jamin Chen, Seyeon Lee, Qinyuan Ye, Elizabeth Boschee, Leonardo Neves, Xiang Ren
Date: 2020-04-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation Extraction, Sentiment Analysis

Successfully training a deep neural network demands a huge corpus of labeled data. However, each label only provides limited information to learn from and collecting the requisite number of labels involves massive human effort. In this work, we introduce LEAN-LIFE, a web-based, Label-Efficient AnnotatioN framework for sequence labeling and classification tasks, with an easy-to-use UI that not only allows an annotator to provide the needed labels for a task, but also enables LearnIng From Explanations for each labeling decision. Such explanations enable us to generate useful additional labeled data from unlabeled instances, bolstering the pool of available training data. On three popular NLP tasks (named entity recognition, relation extraction, sentiment analysis), we find that using this enhanced supervision allows our models to surpass competitive baseline F1 scores by more than 5-10 percentage points, while using 2X times fewer labeled instances. Our framework is the first to utilize this enhanced supervision technique and does so for three important tasks -- thus providing improved annotation recommendations to users and an ability to build datasets of (data, label, explanation) triples instead of the regular (data, label) pair.
On Reductions of Hintikka Sets for Higher-Order Logic
Authors: Alexander Steen, Christoph Benzmüller
Date: 2020-04-16 00:00:00

Steen's (2018) Hintikka set properties for Church's type theory based on primitive equality are reduced to the Hintikka set properties of Brown (2007). Using this reduction, a model existence theorem for Steen's properties is derived.
Explainable Image Classification with Evidence Counterfactual
Authors: Tom Vermeire, David Martens
Date: 2020-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, counterfactual, Counterfactual Explanation, Feature Importance, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

The complexity of state-of-the-art modeling techniques for image classification impedes the ability to explain model predictions in an interpretable way. Existing explanation methods generally create importance rankings in terms of pixels or pixel groups. However, the resulting explanations lack an optimal size, do not consider feature dependence and are only related to one class. Counterfactual explanation methods are considered promising to explain complex model decisions, since they are associated with a high degree of human interpretability. In this paper, SEDC is introduced as a model-agnostic instance-level explanation method for image classification to obtain visual counterfactual explanations. For a given image, SEDC searches a small set of segments that, in case of removal, alters the classification. As image classification tasks are typically multiclass problems, SEDC-T is proposed as an alternative method that allows specifying a target counterfactual class. We compare SEDC(-T) with popular feature importance methods such as LRP, LIME and SHAP, and we describe how the mentioned importance ranking issues are addressed. Moreover, concrete examples and experiments illustrate the potential of our approach (1) to obtain trust and insight, and (2) to obtain input for model improvement by explaining misclassifications.