pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Polygonal Building Segmentation by Frame Field Learning
Authors: Nicolas Girard, Dmitriy Smirnov, Justin Solomon, Yuliya Tarabalka
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Multi-Task Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

While state of the art image segmentation models typically output segmentations in raster format, applications in geographic information systems often require vector polygons. To help bridge the gap between deep network output and the format used in downstream tasks, we add a frame field output to a deep segmentation model for extracting buildings from remote sensing images. We train a deep neural network that aligns a predicted frame field to ground truth contours. This additional objective improves segmentation quality by leveraging multi-task learning and provides structural information that later facilitates polygonization; we also introduce a polygonization algorithm that utilizes the frame field along with the raster segmentation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lydorn/Polygonization-by-Frame-Field-Learning.
Progressive Transformers for End-to-End Sign Language Production
Authors: Ben Saunders, Necati Cihan Camgoz, Richard Bowden
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Sign Language Production, Translation

The goal of automatic Sign Language Production (SLP) is to translate spoken language to a continuous stream of sign language video at a level comparable to a human translator. If this was achievable, then it would revolutionise Deaf hearing communications. Previous work on predominantly isolated SLP has shown the need for architectures that are better suited to the continuous domain of full sign sequences. In this paper, we propose Progressive Transformers, a novel architecture that can translate from discrete spoken language sentences to continuous 3D skeleton pose outputs representing sign language. We present two model configurations, an end-to-end network that produces sign direct from text and a stacked network that utilises a gloss intermediary. Our transformer network architecture introduces a counter that enables continuous sequence generation at training and inference. We also provide several data augmentation processes to overcome the problem of drift and improve the performance of SLP models. We propose a back translation evaluation mechanism for SLP, presenting benchmark quantitative results on the challenging RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014T(PHOENIX14T) dataset and setting baselines for future research.
Mind Your Inflections! Improving NLP for Non-Standard Englishes with Base-Inflection Encoding
Authors: Samson Tan, Shafiq Joty, Lav R. Varshney, Min-Yen Kan
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Morphological Inflection, Translation

Inflectional variation is a common feature of World Englishes such as Colloquial Singapore English and African American Vernacular English. Although comprehension by human readers is usually unimpaired by non-standard inflections, current NLP systems are not yet robust. We propose Base-Inflection Encoding (BITE), a method to tokenize English text by reducing inflected words to their base forms before reinjecting the grammatical information as special symbols. Fine-tuning pretrained NLP models for downstream tasks using our encoding defends against inflectional adversaries while maintaining performance on clean data. Models using BITE generalize better to dialects with non-standard inflections without explicit training and translation models converge faster when trained with BITE. Finally, we show that our encoding improves the vocabulary efficiency of popular data-driven subword tokenizers. Since there has been no prior work on quantitatively evaluating vocabulary efficiency, we propose metrics to do so.
Multi-Domain Spoken Language Understanding Using Domain- and Task-Aware Parameterization
Authors: Libo Qin, Minheng Ni, Yue Zhang, Wanxiang Che, Yangming Li, Ting Liu
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Spoken Language Understanding

Spoken language understanding has been addressed as a supervised learning problem, where a set of training data is available for each domain. However, annotating data for each domain is both financially costly and non-scalable so we should fully utilize information across all domains. One existing approach solves the problem by conducting multi-domain learning, using shared parameters for joint training across domains. We propose to improve the parameterization of this method by using domain-specific and task-specific model parameters to improve knowledge learning and transfer. Experiments on 5 domains show that our model is more effective for multi-domain SLU and obtain the best results. In addition, we show its transferability by outperforming the prior best model by 12.4\% when adapting to a new domain with little data.
TACRED Revisited: A Thorough Evaluation of the TACRED Relation Extraction Task
Authors: Christoph Alt, Aleksandra Gabryszak, Leonhard Hennig
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Relation, Relation Extraction, Unsupervised Pre-training

TACRED (Zhang et al., 2017) is one of the largest, most widely used crowdsourced datasets in Relation Extraction (RE). But, even with recent advances in unsupervised pre-training and knowledge enhanced neural RE, models still show a high error rate. In this paper, we investigate the questions: Have we reached a performance ceiling or is there still room for improvement? And how do crowd annotations, dataset, and models contribute to this error rate? To answer these questions, we first validate the most challenging 5K examples in the development and test sets using trained annotators. We find that label errors account for 8% absolute F1 test error, and that more than 50% of the examples need to be relabeled. On the relabeled test set the average F1 score of a large baseline model set improves from 62.1 to 70.1. After validation, we analyze misclassifications on the challenging instances, categorize them into linguistically motivated error groups, and verify the resulting error hypotheses on three state-of-the-art RE models. We show that two groups of ambiguous relations are responsible for most of the remaining errors and that models may adopt shallow heuristics on the dataset when entities are not masked.
6G White Paper on Edge Intelligence
Authors: Ella Peltonen, Mehdi Bennis, Michele Capobianco, Merouane Debbah, Aaron Ding, Felipe Gil-Castiñeira, Marko Jurmu, Teemu Karvonen, Markus Kelanti, Adrian Kliks, Teemu Leppänen, Lauri Lovén, Tommi Mikkonen, Ashwin Rao, Sumudu Samarakoon, Kari Seppänen, Paweł Sroka, Sasu Tarkoma, Tingting Yang
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, Management

In this white paper we provide a vision for 6G Edge Intelligence. Moving towards 5G and beyond the future 6G networks, intelligent solutions utilizing data-driven machine learning and artificial intelligence become crucial for several real-world applications including but not limited to, more efficient manufacturing, novel personal smart device environments and experiences, urban computing and autonomous traffic settings. We present edge computing along with other 6G enablers as a key component to establish the future 2030 intelligent Internet technologies as shown in this series of 6G White Papers. In this white paper, we focus in the domains of edge computing infrastructure and platforms, data and edge network management, software development for edge, and real-time and distributed training of ML/AI algorithms, along with security, privacy, pricing, and end-user aspects. We discuss the key enablers and challenges and identify the key research questions for the development of the Intelligent Edge services. As a main outcome of this white paper, we envision a transition from Internet of Things to Intelligent Internet of Intelligent Things and provide a roadmap for development of 6G Intelligent Edge.
Enriched Pre-trained Transformers for Joint Slot Filling and Intent Detection
Authors: Momchil Hardalov, Ivan Koychev, Preslav Nakov
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Intent Detection, Natural Language Understanding, slot-filling, Slot Filling

Detecting the user's intent and finding the corresponding slots among the utterance's words are important tasks in natural language understanding. Their interconnected nature makes their joint modeling a standard part of training such models. Moreover, data scarceness and specialized vocabularies pose additional challenges. Recently, the advances in pre-trained language models, namely contextualized models such as ELMo and BERT have revolutionized the field by tapping the potential of training very large models with just a few steps of fine-tuning on a task-specific dataset. Here, we leverage such models, namely BERT and RoBERTa, and we design a novel architecture on top of them. Moreover, we propose an intent pooling attention mechanism, and we reinforce the slot filling task by fusing intent distributions, word features, and token representations. The experimental results on standard datasets show that our model outperforms both the current non-BERT state of the art as well as some stronger BERT-based baselines.
The role of context in neural pitch accent detection in English
Authors: Elizabeth Nielsen, Mark Steedman, Sharon Goldwater
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11

Prosody is a rich information source in natural language, serving as a marker for phenomena such as contrast. In order to make this information available to downstream tasks, we need a way to detect prosodic events in speech. We propose a new model for pitch accent detection, inspired by the work of Stehwien et al. (2018), who presented a CNN-based model for this task. Our model makes greater use of context by using full utterances as input and adding an LSTM layer. We find that these innovations lead to an improvement from 87.5% to 88.7% accuracy on pitch accent detection on American English speech in the Boston University Radio News Corpus, a state-of-the-art result. We also find that a simple baseline that just predicts a pitch accent on every content word yields 82.2% accuracy, and we suggest that this is the appropriate baseline for this task. Finally, we conduct ablation tests that show pitch is the most important acoustic feature for this task and this corpus.
Knowledge Graph Embeddings and Explainable AI
Authors: Federico Bianchi, Gaetano Rossiello, Luca Costabello, Matteo Palmonari, Pasquale Minervini
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Knowledge graph embeddings are now a widely adopted approach to knowledge representation in which entities and relationships are embedded in vector spaces. In this chapter, we introduce the reader to the concept of knowledge graph embeddings by explaining what they are, how they can be generated and how they can be evaluated. We summarize the state-of-the-art in this field by describing the approaches that have been introduced to represent knowledge in the vector space. In relation to knowledge representation, we consider the problem of explainability, and discuss models and methods for explaining predictions obtained via knowledge graph embeddings.
Modeling Pharmacological Effects with Multi-Relation Unsupervised Graph Embedding
Authors: Dehua Chen, Amir Jalilifard, Adriano Veloso, Nivio Ziviani
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Relation

A pharmacological effect of a drug on cells, organs and systems refers to the specific biochemical interaction produced by a drug substance, which is called its mechanism of action. Drug repositioning (or drug repurposing) is a fundamental problem for the identification of new opportunities for the use of already approved or failed drugs. In this paper, we present a method based on a multi-relation unsupervised graph embedding model that learns latent representations for drugs and diseases so that the distance between these representations reveals repositioning opportunities. Once representations for drugs and diseases are obtained we learn the likelihood of new links (that is, new indications) between drugs and diseases. Known drug indications are used for learning a model that predicts potential indications. Compared with existing unsupervised graph embedding methods our method shows superior prediction performance in terms of area under the ROC curve, and we present examples of repositioning opportunities found on recent biomedical literature that were also predicted by our method.
Do Neural Models Learn Systematicity of Monotonicity Inference in Natural Language?
Authors: Hitomi Yanaka, Koji Mineshima, Daisuke Bekki, Kentaro Inui
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6

Despite the success of language models using neural networks, it remains unclear to what extent neural models have the generalization ability to perform inferences. In this paper, we introduce a method for evaluating whether neural models can learn systematicity of monotonicity inference in natural language, namely, the regularity for performing arbitrary inferences with generalization on composition. We consider four aspects of monotonicity inferences and test whether the models can systematically interpret lexical and logical phenomena on different training/test splits. A series of experiments show that three neural models systematically draw inferences on unseen combinations of lexical and logical phenomena when the syntactic structures of the sentences are similar between the training and test sets. However, the performance of the models significantly decreases when the structures are slightly changed in the test set while retaining all vocabularies and constituents already appearing in the training set. This indicates that the generalization ability of neural models is limited to cases where the syntactic structures are nearly the same as those in the training set.
Accurate Word Alignment Induction from Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Yun Chen, Yang Liu, Guanhua Chen, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Decoder, Machine Translation, Multi-Task Learning, Translation, Word Alignment

Despite its original goal to jointly learn to align and translate, prior researches suggest that Transformer captures poor word alignments through its attention mechanism. In this paper, we show that attention weights DO capture accurate word alignments and propose two novel word alignment induction methods Shift-Att and Shift-AET. The main idea is to induce alignments at the step when the to-be-aligned target token is the decoder input rather than the decoder output as in previous work. Shift-Att is an interpretation method that induces alignments from the attention weights of Transformer and does not require parameter update or architecture change. Shift-AET extracts alignments from an additional alignment module which is tightly integrated into Transformer and trained in isolation with supervision from symmetrized Shift-Att alignments. Experiments on three publicly available datasets demonstrate that both methods perform better than their corresponding neural baselines and Shift-AET significantly outperforms GIZA++ by 1.4-4.8 AER points.
A convolutional neural-network model of human cochlear mechanics and filter tuning for real-time applications
Authors: Deepak Baby, Arthur Van Den Broucke, Sarah Verhulst
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Auditory models are commonly used as feature extractors for automatic speech-recognition systems or as front-ends for robotics, machine-hearing and hearing-aid applications. Although auditory models can capture the biophysical and nonlinear properties of human hearing in great detail, these biophysical models are computationally expensive and cannot be used in real-time applications. We present a hybrid approach where convolutional neural networks are combined with computational neuroscience to yield a real-time end-to-end model for human cochlear mechanics, including level-dependent filter tuning (CoNNear). The CoNNear model was trained on acoustic speech material and its performance and applicability were evaluated using (unseen) sound stimuli commonly employed in cochlear mechanics research. The CoNNear model accurately simulates human cochlear frequency selectivity and its dependence on sound intensity, an essential quality for robust speech intelligibility at negative speech-to-background-noise ratios. The CoNNear architecture is based on parallel and differentiable computations and has the power to achieve real-time human performance. These unique CoNNear features will enable the next generation of human-like machine-hearing applications.
Multiple imputation using chained random forests: a preliminary study based on the empirical distribution of out-of-bag prediction errors
Authors: Shangzhi Hong, Yuqi Sun, Hanying Li, Henry S. Lynn
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Imputation, Prediction, valid

Missing data are common in data analyses in biomedical fields, and imputation methods based on random forests (RF) have become widely accepted, as the RF algorithm can achieve high accuracy without the need for specification of data distributions or relationships. However, the predictions from RF do not contain information about prediction uncertainty, which was unacceptable for multiple imputation. Available RF-based multiple imputation methods tried to do proper multiple imputation either by sampling directly from observations under predicting nodes without accounting for the prediction error or by making normality assumption about the prediction error distribution. In this study, a novel RF-based multiple imputation method was proposed by constructing conditional distributions the empirical distribution of out-of-bag prediction errors. The proposed method was compared with previous method with parametric assumptions about RF's prediction errors and predictive mean matching based on simulation studies on data with presence of interaction term. The proposed non-parametric method can deliver valid multiple imputation results. The accompanying R package for this study is publicly available.
Vocabulary Adaptation for Distant Domain Adaptation in Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Shoetsu Sato, Jin Sakuma, Naoki Yoshinaga, Masashi Toyoda, Masaru Kitsuregawa
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: de-en, Domain Adaptation, Machine Translation, NMT, Translation, Word Embeddings

Neural network methods exhibit strong performance only in a few resource-rich domains. Practitioners, therefore, employ domain adaptation from resource-rich domains that are, in most cases, distant from the target domain. Domain adaptation between distant domains (e.g., movie subtitles and research papers), however, cannot be performed effectively due to mismatches in vocabulary; it will encounter many domain-specific words (e.g., "angstrom") and words whose meanings shift across domains(e.g., "conductor"). In this study, aiming to solve these vocabulary mismatches in domain adaptation for neural machine translation (NMT), we propose vocabulary adaptation, a simple method for effective fine-tuning that adapts embedding layers in a given pre-trained NMT model to the target domain. Prior to fine-tuning, our method replaces the embedding layers of the NMT model by projecting general word embeddings induced from monolingual data in a target domain onto a source-domain embedding space. Experimental results indicate that our method improves the performance of conventional fine-tuning by 3.86 and 3.28 BLEU points in En-Ja and De-En translation, respectively.
ENT-DESC: Entity Description Generation by Exploring Knowledge Graph
Authors: Liying Cheng, Dekun Wu, Lidong Bing, Yan Zhang, Zhanming Jie, Wei Lu, Luo Si
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Graph-to-Sequence, KG-to-Text Generation, Knowledge Graphs, Text Generation

Previous works on knowledge-to-text generation take as input a few RDF triples or key-value pairs conveying the knowledge of some entities to generate a natural language description. Existing datasets, such as WIKIBIO, WebNLG, and E2E, basically have a good alignment between an input triple/pair set and its output text. However, in practice, the input knowledge could be more than enough, since the output description may only cover the most significant knowledge. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale and challenging dataset to facilitate the study of such a practical scenario in KG-to-text. Our dataset involves retrieving abundant knowledge of various types of main entities from a large knowledge graph (KG), which makes the current graph-to-sequence models severely suffer from the problems of information loss and parameter explosion while generating the descriptions. We address these challenges by proposing a multi-graph structure that is able to represent the original graph information more comprehensively. Furthermore, we also incorporate aggregation methods that learn to extract the rich graph information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model architecture.
STARC: Structured Annotations for Reading Comprehension
Authors: Yevgeni Berzak, Jonathan Malmaud, Roger Levy
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Multiple-choice, Reading Comprehension

We present STARC (Structured Annotations for Reading Comprehension), a new annotation framework for assessing reading comprehension with multiple choice questions. Our framework introduces a principled structure for the answer choices and ties them to textual span annotations. The framework is implemented in OneStopQA, a new high-quality dataset for evaluation and analysis of reading comprehension in English. We use this dataset to demonstrate that STARC can be leveraged for a key new application for the development of SAT-like reading comprehension materials: automatic annotation quality probing via span ablation experiments. We further show that it enables in-depth analyses and comparisons between machine and human reading comprehension behavior, including error distributions and guessing ability. Our experiments also reveal that the standard multiple choice dataset in NLP, RACE, is limited in its ability to measure reading comprehension. 47% of its questions can be guessed by machines without accessing the passage, and 18% are unanimously judged by humans as not having a unique correct answer. OneStopQA provides an alternative test set for reading comprehension which alleviates these shortcomings and has a substantially higher human ceiling performance.