pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Sources of Transfer in Multilingual Named Entity Recognition
Authors: David Mueller, Nicholas Andrews, Mark Dredze
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Multilingual Named Entity Recognition, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

Named-entities are inherently multilingual, and annotations in any given language may be limited. This motivates us to consider polyglot named-entity recognition (NER), where one model is trained using annotated data drawn from more than one language. However, a straightforward implementation of this simple idea does not always work in practice: naive training of NER models using annotated data drawn from multiple languages consistently underperforms models trained on monolingual data alone, despite having access to more training data. The starting point of this paper is a simple solution to this problem, in which polyglot models are fine-tuned on monolingual data to consistently and significantly outperform their monolingual counterparts. To explain this phenomena, we explore the sources of multilingual transfer in polyglot NER models and examine the weight structure of polyglot models compared to their monolingual counterparts. We find that polyglot models efficiently share many parameters across languages and that fine-tuning may utilize a large number of those parameters.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks to Diagnose COVID-19 and other Pneumonia Diseases from Posteroanterior Chest X-Rays
Authors: Pierre G. B. Moutounet-Cartan
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensitivity

The article explores different deep convolutional neural network architectures trained and tested on posteroanterior chest X-rays of 327 patients who are healthy (152 patients), diagnosed with COVID-19 (125), and other types of pneumonia (48). In particular, this paper looks at the deep convolutional neural networks VGG16 and VGG19, InceptionResNetV2 and InceptionV3, as well as Xception, all followed by a flat multi-layer perceptron and a final 30% drop-out. The paper has found that the best performing network is VGG16 with a final $30$% drop-out trained over 3 classes (COVID-19, No Finding, Other Pneumonia). It has an internal cross-validated accuracy of $93.9(\pm3.4)$%, a COVID-19 sensitivity of $87.7(-1.9,+2)$%, and a No Finding sensitivity of $96.8(\pm0.8)$%. The respective external cross-validated values are $84.1(\pm13.5)$%, $87.7(-1.9,2)$%, and $96.8(\pm0.8)$%. The model optimizer was Adam with a 1e-4 learning rate, and categorical cross-entropy loss. It is hoped that, once this research will be put to practice in hospitals, healthcare professionals will be able in the medium to long-term to diagnosing through machine learning tools possible pneumonia, and if detected, whether it is linked to a COVID-19 infection, allowing the detection of new possible COVID-19 foyers after the end of possible "stop-and-go" lockdowns as expected by until a vaccine is found and widespread. Furthermore, in the short-term, it is hoped practitioners can compare the diagnosis from the deep convolutional neural networks with possible RT-PCR testing results, and if clashing, a Computed Tomography could be performed as they are more accurate in showing COVID-19 pneumonia.
Derivation of a Constant Velocity Motion Model for Visual Tracking
Authors: Nathanael L. Baisa
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Tracking, Visual Tracking

Motion models play a great role in visual tracking applications for predicting the possible locations of objects in the next frame. Unlike target tracking in radar or aerospace domain which considers only points, object tracking in computer vision involves sizes of objects. Constant velocity motion model is the most widely used motion model for visual tracking, however, there is no clear and understandable derivation involving sizes of objects specially for new researchers joining this research field. In this document, we derive the constant velocity motion model that incorporates sizes of objects that, we think, can help the new researchers to adapt to it very quickly.
Language Models as an Alternative Evaluator of Word Order Hypotheses: A Case Study in Japanese
Authors: Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Takumi Ito, Jun Suzuki, Kentaro Inui
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: valid

We examine a methodology using neural language models (LMs) for analyzing the word order of language. This LM-based method has the potential to overcome the difficulties existing methods face, such as the propagation of preprocessor errors in count-based methods. In this study, we explore whether the LM-based method is valid for analyzing the word order. As a case study, this study focuses on Japanese due to its complex and flexible word order. To validate the LM-based method, we test (i) parallels between LMs and human word order preference, and (ii) consistency of the results obtained using the LM-based method with previous linguistic studies. Through our experiments, we tentatively conclude that LMs display sufficient word order knowledge for usage as an analysis tool. Finally, using the LM-based method, we demonstrate the relationship between the canonical word order and topicalization, which had yet to be analyzed by large-scale experiments.
Decision Support for Intoxication Prediction Using Graph Convolutional Networks
Authors: Hendrik Burwinkel, Matthias Keicher, David Bani-Harouni, Tobias Zellner, Florian Eyer, Nassir Navab, Seyed-Ahmad Ahmadi
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00

Every day, poison control centers (PCC) are called for immediate classification and treatment recommendations if an acute intoxication is suspected. Due to the time-sensitive nature of these cases, doctors are required to propose a correct diagnosis and intervention within a minimal time frame. Usually the toxin is known and recommendations can be made accordingly. However, in challenging cases only symptoms are mentioned and doctors have to rely on their clinical experience. Medical experts and our analyses of a regional dataset of intoxication records provide evidence that this is challenging, since occurring symptoms may not always match the textbook description due to regional distinctions, inter-rater variance, and institutional workflow. Computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) can provide decision support, but approaches so far do not consider additional information of the reported cases like age or gender, despite their potential value towards a correct diagnosis. In this work, we propose a new machine learning based CADx method which fuses symptoms and meta information of the patients using graph convolutional networks. We further propose a novel symptom matching method that allows the effective incorporation of prior knowledge into the learning process and evidently stabilizes the poison prediction. We validate our method against 10 medical doctors with different experience diagnosing intoxication cases for 10 different toxins from the PCC in Munich and show our method's superiority in performance for poison prediction.
Towards Deep Learning Methods for Quality Assessment of Computer-Generated Imagery
Authors: Markus Utke, Saman Zadtootaghaj, Steven Schmidt, Sebastian Möller
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00

Video gaming streaming services are growing rapidly due to new services such as passive video streaming, e.g. Twitch.tv, and cloud gaming, e.g. Nvidia Geforce Now. In contrast to traditional video content, gaming content has special characteristics such as extremely high motion for some games, special motion patterns, synthetic content and repetitive content, which makes the state-of-the-art video and image quality metrics perform weaker for this special computer generated content. In this paper, we outline our plan to build a deep learningbased quality metric for video gaming quality assessment. In addition, we present initial results by training the network based on VMAF values as a ground truth to give some insights on how to build a metric in future. The paper describes the method that is used to choose an appropriate Convolutional Neural Network architecture. Furthermore, we estimate the size of the required subjective quality dataset which achieves a sufficiently high performance. The results show that by taking around 5k images for training of the last six modules of Xception, we can obtain a relatively high performance metric to assess the quality of distorted video games.
DroTrack: High-speed Drone-based Object Tracking Under Uncertainty
Authors: Ali Hamdi, Flora Salim, Du Yong Kim
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: drone-based object tracking, Object, Object Tracking, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

We present DroTrack, a high-speed visual single-object tracking framework for drone-captured video sequences. Most of the existing object tracking methods are designed to tackle well-known challenges, such as occlusion and cluttered backgrounds. The complex motion of drones, i.e., multiple degrees of freedom in three-dimensional space, causes high uncertainty. The uncertainty problem leads to inaccurate location predictions and fuzziness in scale estimations. DroTrack solves such issues by discovering the dependency between object representation and motion geometry. We implement an effective object segmentation based on Fuzzy C Means (FCM). We incorporate the spatial information into the membership function to cluster the most discriminative segments. We then enhance the object segmentation by using a pre-trained Convolution Neural Network (CNN) model. DroTrack also leverages the geometrical angular motion to estimate a reliable object scale. We discuss the experimental results and performance evaluation using two datasets of 51,462 drone-captured frames. The combination of the FCM segmentation and the angular scaling increased DroTrack precision by up to $9\%$ and decreased the centre location error by $162$ pixels on average. DroTrack outperforms all the high-speed trackers and achieves comparable results in comparison to deep learning trackers. DroTrack offers high frame rates up to 1000 frame per second (fps) with the best location precision, more than a set of state-of-the-art real-time trackers.
Learning Model Predictive Control for Competitive Autonomous Racing
Authors: Lukas Brunke
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Racing, model, Model Predictive Control

The goal of this thesis is to design a learning model predictive controller (LMPC) that allows multiple agents to race competitively on a predefined race track in real-time. This thesis addresses two major shortcomings in the already existing single-agent formulation. Previously, the agent determines a locally optimal trajectory but does not explore the state space, which may be necessary for overtaking maneuvers. Additionally, obstacle avoidance for LMPC has been achieved in the past by using a non-convex terminal set, which increases the complexity for determining a solution to the optimization problem. The proposed algorithm for multi-agent racing explores the state space by executing the LMPC for multiple different initializations, which yields a richer terminal safe set. Furthermore, a new method for selecting states in the terminal set is developed, which keeps the convexity for the terminal safe set and allows for taking suboptimal states.
Generalized Entropy Regularization or: There's Nothing Special about Label Smoothing
Authors: Clara Meister, Elizabeth Salesky, Ryan Cotterell
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Text Generation

Prior work has explored directly regularizing the output distributions of probabilistic models to alleviate peaky (i.e. over-confident) predictions, a common sign of overfitting. This class of techniques, of which label smoothing is one, has a connection to entropy regularization. Despite the consistent success of label smoothing across architectures and data sets in language generation tasks, two problems remain open: (1) there is little understanding of the underlying effects entropy regularizers have on models, and (2) the full space of entropy regularization techniques is largely unexplored. We introduce a parametric family of entropy regularizers, which includes label smoothing as a special case, and use it to gain a better understanding of the relationship between the entropy of a model and its performance on language generation tasks. We also find that variance in model performance can be explained largely by the resulting entropy of the model. Lastly, we find that label smoothing provably does not allow for sparsity in an output distribution, an undesirable property for language generation models, and therefore advise the use of other entropy regularization methods in its place.
A survey on modern trainable activation functions
Authors: Andrea Apicella, Francesco Donnarumma, Francesco Isgrò, Roberto Prevete
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

In neural networks literature, there is a strong interest in identifying and defining activation functions which can improve neural network performance. In recent years there has been a renovated interest of the scientific community in investigating activation functions which can be trained during the learning process, usually referred to as "trainable", "learnable" or "adaptable" activation functions. They appear to lead to better network performance. Diverse and heterogeneous models of trainable activation function have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we present a survey of these models. Starting from a discussion on the use of the term "activation function" in literature, we propose a taxonomy of trainable activation functions, highlight common and distinctive proprieties of recent and past models, and discuss main advantages and limitations of this type of approach. We show that many of the proposed approaches are equivalent to adding neuron layers which use fixed (non-trainable) activation functions and some simple local rule that constraints the corresponding weight layers.
DQI: Measuring Data Quality in NLP
Authors: Swaroop Mishra, Anjana Arunkumar, Bhavdeep Sachdeva, Chris Bryan, Chitta Baral
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Benchmarking

Neural language models have achieved human level performance across several NLP datasets. However, recent studies have shown that these models are not truly learning the desired task; rather, their high performance is attributed to overfitting using spurious biases, which suggests that the capabilities of AI systems have been over-estimated. We introduce a generic formula for Data Quality Index (DQI) to help dataset creators create datasets free of such unwanted biases. We evaluate this formula using a recently proposed approach for adversarial filtering, AFLite. We propose a new data creation paradigm using DQI to create higher quality data. The data creation paradigm consists of several data visualizations to help data creators (i) understand the quality of data and (ii) visualize the impact of the created data instance on the overall quality. It also has a couple of automation methods to (i) assist data creators and (ii) make the model more robust to adversarial attacks. We use DQI along with these automation methods to renovate biased examples in SNLI. We show that models trained on the renovated SNLI dataset generalize better to out of distribution tasks. Renovation results in reduced model performance, exposing a large gap with respect to human performance. DQI systematically helps in creating harder benchmarks using active learning. Our work takes the process of dynamic dataset creation forward, wherein datasets evolve together with the evolving state of the art, therefore serving as a means of benchmarking the true progress of AI.
Social Biases in NLP Models as Barriers for Persons with Disabilities
Authors: Ben Hutchinson, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Emily Denton, Kellie Webster, Yu Zhong, Stephen Denuyl
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

Building equitable and inclusive NLP technologies demands consideration of whether and how social attitudes are represented in ML models. In particular, representations encoded in models often inadvertently perpetuate undesirable social biases from the data on which they are trained. In this paper, we present evidence of such undesirable biases towards mentions of disability in two different English language models: toxicity prediction and sentiment analysis. Next, we demonstrate that the neural embeddings that are the critical first step in most NLP pipelines similarly contain undesirable biases towards mentions of disability. We end by highlighting topical biases in the discourse about disability which may contribute to the observed model biases; for instance, gun violence, homelessness, and drug addiction are over-represented in texts discussing mental illness.
MultiQT: Multimodal Learning for Real-Time Question Tracking in Speech
Authors: Jakob D. Havtorn, Jan Latko, Joakim Edin, Lasse Borgholt, Lars Maaløe, Lorenzo Belgrano, Nicolai F. Jacobsen, Regitze Sdun, Željko Agić
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

We address a challenging and practical task of labeling questions in speech in real time during telephone calls to emergency medical services in English, which embeds within a broader decision support system for emergency call-takers. We propose a novel multimodal approach to real-time sequence labeling in speech. Our model treats speech and its own textual representation as two separate modalities or views, as it jointly learns from streamed audio and its noisy transcription into text via automatic speech recognition. Our results show significant gains of jointly learning from the two modalities when compared to text or audio only, under adverse noise and limited volume of training data. The results generalize to medical symptoms detection where we observe a similar pattern of improvements with multimodal learning.
Enhancing Text-based Reinforcement Learning Agents with Commonsense Knowledge
Authors: Keerthiram Murugesan, Mattia Atzeni, Pushkar Shukla, Mrinmaya Sachan, Pavan Kapanipathi, Kartik Talamadupula
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this paper, we consider the recent trend of evaluating progress on reinforcement learning technology by using text-based environments and games as evaluation environments. This reliance on text brings advances in natural language processing into the ambit of these agents, with a recurring thread being the use of external knowledge to mimic and better human-level performance. We present one such instantiation of agents that use commonsense knowledge from ConceptNet to show promising performance on two text-based environments.
Dimensions of Diversity in Human Perceptions of Algorithmic Fairness
Authors: Nina Grgić-Hlača, Gabriel Lima, Adrian Weller, Elissa M. Redmiles
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diversity, Fairness

A growing number of oversight boards and regulatory bodies seek to monitor and govern algorithms that make decisions about people's lives. Prior work has explored how people believe algorithmic decisions should be made, but there is little understanding of how individual factors like sociodemographics or direct experience with a decision-making scenario may affect their ethical views. We take a step toward filling this gap by exploring how people's perceptions of one aspect of procedural algorithmic fairness (the fairness of using particular features in an algorithmic decision) relate to their (i) demographics (age, education, gender, race, political views) and (ii) personal experiences with the algorithmic decision-making scenario. We find that political views and personal experience with the algorithmic decision context significantly influence perceptions about the fairness of using different features for bail decision-making. Drawing on our results, we discuss the implications for stakeholder engagement and algorithmic oversight including the need to consider multiple dimensions of diversity in composing oversight and regulatory bodies.
Teaching Machine Comprehension with Compositional Explanations
Authors: Qinyuan Ye, Xiao Huang, Elizabeth Boschee, Xiang Ren
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Machine Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension, World Knowledge

Advances in machine reading comprehension (MRC) rely heavily on the collection of large scale human-annotated examples in the form of (question, paragraph, answer) triples. In contrast, humans are typically able to generalize with only a few examples, relying on deeper underlying world knowledge, linguistic sophistication, and/or simply superior deductive powers. In this paper, we focus on "teaching" machines reading comprehension, using a small number of semi-structured explanations that explicitly inform machines why answer spans are correct. We extract structured variables and rules from explanations and compose neural module teachers that annotate instances for training downstream MRC models. We use learnable neural modules and soft logic to handle linguistic variation and overcome sparse coverage; the modules are jointly optimized with the MRC model to improve final performance. On the SQuAD dataset, our proposed method achieves 70.14% F1 score with supervision from 26 explanations, comparable to plain supervised learning using 1,100 labeled instances, yielding a 12x speed up.
Knowledge Base Completion: Baseline strikes back (Again)
Authors: Prachi Jain, Sushant Rathi, Mausam, Soumen Chakrabarti
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Knowledge Base Completion, Knowledge Base Population, Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction

Knowledge Base Completion (KBC) has been a very active area lately. Several recent KBCpapers propose architectural changes, new training methods, or even new formulations. KBC systems are usually evaluated on standard benchmark datasets: FB15k, FB15k-237, WN18, WN18RR, and Yago3-10. Most existing methods train with a small number of negative samples for each positive instance in these datasets to save computational costs. This paper discusses how recent developments allow us to use all available negative samples for training. We show that Complex, when trained using all available negative samples, gives near state-of-the-art performance on all the datasets. We call this approach COMPLEX-V2. We also highlight how various multiplicative KBC methods, recently proposed in the literature, benefit from this train-ing regime and become indistinguishable in terms of performance on most datasets. Our work calls for a reassessment of their individual value, in light of these findings.
Lagrangian Neural Style Transfer for Fluids
Authors: Byung-soo Kim, Vinicius C. Azevedo, Markus Gross, Barbara Solenthaler
Date: 2020-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer

Artistically controlling the shape, motion and appearance of fluid simulations pose major challenges in visual effects production. In this paper, we present a neural style transfer approach from images to 3D fluids formulated in a Lagrangian viewpoint. Using particles for style transfer has unique benefits compared to grid-based techniques. Attributes are stored on the particles and hence are trivially transported by the particle motion. This intrinsically ensures temporal consistency of the optimized stylized structure and notably improves the resulting quality. Simultaneously, the expensive, recursive alignment of stylization velocity fields of grid approaches is unnecessary, reducing the computation time to less than an hour and rendering neural flow stylization practical in production settings. Moreover, the Lagrangian representation improves artistic control as it allows for multi-fluid stylization and consistent color transfer from images, and the generality of the method enables stylization of smoke and liquids likewise.