pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
CASA-NLU: Context-Aware Self-Attentive Natural Language Understanding for Task-Oriented Chatbots
Authors: Arshit Gupta, Peng Zhang, Garima Lalwani, Mona Diab
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Dialogue Management, intent-classification, Intent Classification, Management, Natural Language Understanding

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a core component of dialog systems. It typically involves two tasks - intent classification (IC) and slot labeling (SL), which are then followed by a dialogue management (DM) component. Such NLU systems cater to utterances in isolation, thus pushing the problem of context management to DM. However, contextual information is critical to the correct prediction of intents and slots in a conversation. Prior work on contextual NLU has been limited in terms of the types of contextual signals used and the understanding of their impact on the model. In this work, we propose a context-aware self-attentive NLU (CASA-NLU) model that uses multiple signals, such as previous intents, slots, dialog acts and utterances over a variable context window, in addition to the current user utterance. CASA-NLU outperforms a recurrent contextual NLU baseline on two conversational datasets, yielding a gain of up to 7% on the IC task for one of the datasets. Moreover, a non-contextual variant of CASA-NLU achieves state-of-the-art performance for IC task on standard public datasets - Snips and ATIS.
Alleviating Sequence Information Loss with Data Overlapping and Prime Batch Sizes
Authors: Noémien Kocher, Christian Scuito, Lorenzo Tarantino, Alexandros Lazaridis, Andreas Fischer, Claudiu Musat
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: CONLL 2019 11
Tasks: Language Modelling

In sequence modeling tasks the token order matters, but this information can be partially lost due to the discretization of the sequence into data points. In this paper, we study the imbalance between the way certain token pairs are included in data points and others are not. We denote this a token order imbalance (TOI) and we link the partial sequence information loss to a diminished performance of the system as a whole, both in text and speech processing tasks. We then provide a mechanism to leverage the full token order information -Alleviated TOI- by iteratively overlapping the token composition of data points. For recurrent networks, we use prime numbers for the batch size to avoid redundancies when building batches from overlapped data points. The proposed method achieved state of the art performance in both text and speech related tasks.
Sentiment-Aware Recommendation System for Healthcare using Social Media
Authors: Alan Aipe, Mukuntha Narayanan Sundararaman, Asif Ekbal
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

Over the last decade, health communities (known as forums) have evolved into platforms where more and more users share their medical experiences, thereby seeking guidance and interacting with people of the community. The shared content, though informal and unstructured in nature, contains valuable medical and/or health-related information and can be leveraged to produce structured suggestions to the common people. In this paper, at first we propose a stacked deep learning model for sentiment analysis from the medical forum data. The stacked model comprises of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) followed by a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) and then by another CNN. For a blog classified with positive sentiment, we retrieve the top-n similar posts. Thereafter, we develop a probabilistic model for suggesting the suitable treatments or procedures for a particular disease or health condition. We believe that integration of medical sentiment and suggestion would be beneficial to the users for finding the relevant contents regarding medications and medical conditions, without having to manually stroll through a large amount of unstructured contents.
Deep Latent Space Learning for Cross-modal Mapping of Audio and Visual Signals
Authors: Shah Nawaz, Muhammad Kamran Janjua, Ignazio Gallo, Arif Mahmood, Alessandro Calefati
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Retrieval, Triplet

We propose a novel deep training algorithm for joint representation of audio and visual information which consists of a single stream network (SSNet) coupled with a novel loss function to learn a shared deep latent space representation of multimodal information. The proposed framework characterizes the shared latent space by leveraging the class centers which helps to eliminate the need for pairwise or triplet supervision. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the proposed approach on VoxCeleb, a benchmarks audio-visual dataset on a multitude of tasks including cross-modal verification, cross-modal matching, and cross-modal retrieval. State-of-the-art performance is achieved on cross-modal verification and matching while comparable results are observed on the remaining applications. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique for cross-modal biometric applications.
Cross-Lingual Contextual Word Embeddings Mapping With Multi-Sense Words In Mind
Authors: Zheng Zhang, Ruiqing Yin, Jun Zhu, Pierre Zweigenbaum
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Bilingual Lexicon Induction, Word Embeddings

Recent work in cross-lingual contextual word embedding learning cannot handle multi-sense words well. In this work, we explore the characteristics of contextual word embeddings and show the link between contextual word embeddings and word senses. We propose two improving solutions by considering contextual multi-sense word embeddings as noise (removal) and by generating cluster level average anchor embeddings for contextual multi-sense word embeddings (replacement). Experiments show that our solutions can improve the supervised contextual word embeddings alignment for multi-sense words in a microscopic perspective without hurting the macroscopic performance on the bilingual lexicon induction task. For unsupervised alignment, our methods significantly improve the performance on the bilingual lexicon induction task for more than 10 points.
Wasserstein Distance Based Domain Adaptation for Object Detection
Authors: Pengcheng Xu, Prudhvi Gurram, Gene Whipps, Rama Chellappa
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

In this paper, we present an adversarial unsupervised domain adaptation framework for object detection. Prior approaches utilize adversarial training based on cross entropy between the source and target domain distributions to learn a shared feature mapping that minimizes the domain gap. Here, we minimize the Wasserstein distance between the two distributions instead of cross entropy or Jensen-Shannon divergence to improve the stability of domain adaptation in high-dimensional feature spaces that are inherent to object detection task. Additionally, we remove the exact consistency constraint of the shared feature mapping between the source and target domains, so that the target feature mapping can be optimized independently, which is necessary in the case of significant domain gap. We empirically show that the proposed framework can mitigate domain shift in different scenarios, and provide improved target domain object detection performance.
Do We Need Neural Models to Explain Human Judgments of Acceptability?
Authors: Wang Jing, M. A. Kelly, David Reitter
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Word Embeddings, Word Similarity

Native speakers can judge whether a sentence is an acceptable instance of their language. Acceptability provides a means of evaluating whether computational language models are processing language in a human-like manner. We test the ability of computational language models, simple language features, and word embeddings to predict native English speakers judgments of acceptability on English-language essays written by non-native speakers. We find that much of the sentence acceptability variance can be captured by a combination of features including misspellings, word order, and word similarity (Pearson's r = 0.494). While predictive neural models fit acceptability judgments well (r = 0.527), we find that a 4-gram model with statistical smoothing is just as good (r = 0.528). Thanks to incorporating a count of misspellings, our 4-gram model surpasses both the previous unsupervised state-of-the art (Lau et al., 2015; r = 0.472), and the average non-expert native speaker (r = 0.46). Our results demonstrate that acceptability is well captured by n-gram statistics and simple language features.
Automated detection of oral pre-cancerous tongue lesions using deep learning for early diagnosis of oral cavity cancer
Authors: Mohammed Zubair M. Shamim, Sadatullah Syed, Mohammad Shiblee, Mohammed Usman, Syed Ali
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Management, Small Data Image Classification, Specificity, Transfer Learning

Discovering oral cavity cancer (OCC) at an early stage is an effective way to increase patient survival rate. However, current initial screening process is done manually and is expensive for the average individual, especially in developing countries worldwide. This problem is further compounded due to the lack of specialists in such areas. Automating the initial screening process using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect pre-cancerous lesions can prove to be an effective and inexpensive technique that would allow patients to be triaged accordingly to receive appropriate clinical management. In this study, we have applied and evaluated the efficacy of six deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) models using transfer learning, for identifying pre-cancerous tongue lesions directly using a small data set of clinically annotated photographic images to diagnose early signs of OCC. DCNN model based on Vgg19 architecture was able to differentiate between benign and pre-cancerous tongue lesions with a mean classification accuracy of 0.98, sensitivity 0.89 and specificity 0.97. Additionally, the ResNet50 DCNN model was able to distinguish between five types of tongue lesions i.e. hairy tongue, fissured tongue, geographic tongue, strawberry tongue and oral hairy leukoplakia with a mean classification accuracy of 0.97. Preliminary results using an (AI+Physician) ensemble model demonstrate that an automated initial screening process of tongue lesions using DCNNs can achieve near-human level classification performance for diagnosing early signs of OCC in patients.
Grid Anchor based Image Cropping: A New Benchmark and An Efficient Model
Authors: Hui Zeng, Lida Li, Zisheng Cao, Lei Zhang
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU, Image Cropping

Image cropping aims to improve the composition as well as aesthetic quality of an image by removing extraneous content from it. Most of the existing image cropping databases provide only one or several human-annotated bounding boxes as the groundtruths, which can hardly reflect the non-uniqueness and flexibility of image cropping in practice. The employed evaluation metrics such as intersection-over-union cannot reliably reflect the real performance of a cropping model, either. This work revisits the problem of image cropping, and presents a grid anchor based formulation by considering the special properties and requirements (e.g., local redundancy, content preservation, aspect ratio) of image cropping. Our formulation reduces the searching space of candidate crops from millions to no more than ninety. Consequently, a grid anchor based cropping benchmark is constructed, where all crops of each image are annotated and more reliable evaluation metrics are defined. To meet the practical demands of robust performance and high efficiency, we also design an effective and lightweight cropping model. By simultaneously considering the region of interest and region of discard, and leveraging multi-scale information, our model can robustly output visually pleasing crops for images of different scenes. With less than 2.5M parameters, our model runs at a speed of 200 FPS on one single GTX 1080Ti GPU and 12 FPS on one i7-6800K CPU. The code is available at: \url{https://github.com/HuiZeng/Grid-Anchor-based-Image-Cropping-Pytorch}.
Bibliothèque de la communauté assomptionniste : saisie informatique et classement Dewey
Authors: Benoit Soubeyran
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

The Library of Saint Peter in Gallicantu has had an eventful history and different phases of classification. It was constituted by the contribution of various private libraries of Religious of the Holy Land. Its history is intimately linked to the Assumptionist presence in Jerusalem. The computerization work carried out from 2018 onwards made it possible to clarify the classification framework based on Dewey's decimal classification and to use the databases - Wikidata, VIAF - to improve the BNF catalogue.
Corporate IT-support Help-Desk Process Hybrid-Automation Solution with Machine Learning Approach
Authors: Kuruparan Shanmugalingam, Nisal Chandrasekara, Calvin Hindle, Gihan Fernando, Chanaka Gunawardhana
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Word Embeddings

Comprehensive IT support teams in large scale organizations require more man power for handling engagement and requests of employees from different channels on a 24*7 basis. Automated email technical queries help desk is proposed to have instant real-time quick solutions and email categorisation. Email topic modelling with various machine learning, deep-learning approaches are compared with different features for a scalable, generalised solution along with sure-shot static rules. Email's title, body, attachment, OCR text, and some feature engineered custom features are given as input elements. XGBoost cascaded hierarchical models, Bi-LSTM model with word embeddings perform well showing 77.3 overall accuracy For the real world corporate email data set. By introducing the thresholding techniques, the overall automation system architecture provides 85.6 percentage of accuracy for real world corporate emails. Combination of quick fixes, static rules, ML categorization as a low cost inference solution reduces 81 percentage of the human effort in the process of automation and real time implementation.
Quantitative Impact of Label Noise on the Quality of Segmentation of Brain Tumors on MRI scans
Authors: Michał Marcinkiewicz, Grzegorz Mrukwa
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Tumor Segmentation, Deep Learning, text-classification, Text Classification, Tumor Segmentation

Over the last few years, deep learning has proven to be a great solution to many problems, such as image or text classification. Recently, deep learning-based solutions have outperformed humans on selected benchmark datasets, yielding a promising future for scientific and real-world applications. Training of deep learning models requires vast amounts of high quality data to achieve such supreme performance. In real-world scenarios, obtaining a large, coherent, and properly labeled dataset is a challenging task. This is especially true in medical applications, where high-quality data and annotations are scarce and the number of expert annotators is limited. In this paper, we investigate the impact of corrupted ground-truth masks on the performance of a neural network for a brain tumor segmentation task. Our findings suggest that a) the performance degrades about 8% less than it could be expected from simulations, b) a neural network learns the simulated biases of annotators, c) biases can be partially mitigated by using an inversely-biased dice loss function.
Scalable Deep Unsupervised Clustering with Concrete GMVAEs
Authors: Mark Collier, Hector Urdiales
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Discrete random variables are natural components of probabilistic clustering models. A number of VAE variants with discrete latent variables have been developed. Training such methods requires marginalizing over the discrete latent variables, causing training time complexity to be linear in the number clusters. By applying a continuous relaxation to the discrete variables in these methods we can achieve a reduction in the training time complexity to be constant in the number of clusters used. We demonstrate that in practice for one such method, the Gaussian Mixture VAE, the use of a continuous relaxation has no negative effect on the quality of the clustering but provides a substantial reduction in training time, reducing training time on CIFAR-100 with 20 clusters from 47 hours to less than 6 hours.
Large e-retailer image dataset for visual search and product classification
Authors: Arnaud Bellétoile
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Recommendation Systems

Recent results of deep convolutional networks in visual recognition challenges open the path to a whole new set of disruptive user experiences such as visual search or recommendation. The list of companies offering this type of service is growing everyday but the adoption rate and the relevancy of results may vary a lot. We believe that the availability of large and diverse datasets is a necessary condition to improve the relevancy of such recommendation systems and facilitate their adoption. For that purpose, we wish to share with the community this dataset of more than 12M images of the 7M products of our online store classified into 5K categories. This original dataset is introduced in this article and several features are described. We also present some aspects of the winning solutions of our image classification challenge that was organized on the Kaggle platform around this set of images.
Voting with Random Classifiers (VORACE): Theoretical and Experimental Analysis
Authors: Cristina Cornelio, Michele Donini, Andrea Loreggia, Maria Silvia Pini, Francesca Rossi
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Selection

In many machine learning scenarios, looking for the best classifier that fits a particular dataset can be very costly in terms of time and resources. Moreover, it can require deep knowledge of the specific domain. We propose a new technique which does not require profound expertise in the domain and avoids the commonly used strategy of hyper-parameter tuning and model selection. Our method is an innovative ensemble technique that uses voting rules over a set of randomly-generated classifiers. Given a new input sample, we interpret the output of each classifier as a ranking over the set of possible classes. We then aggregate these output rankings using a voting rule, which treats them as preferences over the classes. We show that our approach obtains good results compared to the state-of-the-art, both providing a theoretical analysis and an empirical evaluation of the approach on several datasets.
Induction of Non-monotonic Logic Programs To Explain Statistical Learning Models
Authors: Farhad Shakerin
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive logic programming

We present a fast and scalable algorithm to induce non-monotonic logic programs from statistical learning models. We reduce the problem of search for best clauses to instances of the High-Utility Itemset Mining (HUIM) problem. In the HUIM problem, feature values and their importance are treated as transactions and utilities respectively. We make use of TreeExplainer, a fast and scalable implementation of the Explainable AI tool SHAP, to extract locally important features and their weights from ensemble tree models. Our experiments with UCI standard benchmarks suggest a significant improvement in terms of classification evaluation metrics and running time of the training algorithm compared to ALEPH, a state-of-the-art Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) system.
Class Feature Pyramids for Video Explanation
Authors: Alexandros Stergiou, Georgios Kapidis, Grigorios Kalliatakis, Christos Chrysoulas, Ronald Poppe, Remco Veltkamp
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Temporal Action Localization

Deep convolutional networks are widely used in video action recognition. 3D convolutions are one prominent approach to deal with the additional time dimension. While 3D convolutions typically lead to higher accuracies, the inner workings of the trained models are more difficult to interpret. We focus on creating human-understandable visual explanations that represent the hierarchical parts of spatio-temporal networks. We introduce Class Feature Pyramids, a method that traverses the entire network structure and incrementally discovers kernels at different network depths that are informative for a specific class. Our method does not depend on the network's architecture or the type of 3D convolutions, supporting grouped and depth-wise convolutions, convolutions in fibers, and convolutions in branches. We demonstrate the method on six state-of-the-art 3D convolution neural networks (CNNs) on three action recognition (Kinetics-400, UCF-101, and HMDB-51) and two egocentric action recognition datasets (EPIC-Kitchens and EGTEA Gaze+).
Strong Equivalence for LPMLN Programs
Authors: Joohyung Lee, Man Luo
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00

LPMLN is a probabilistic extension of answer set programs with the weight scheme adapted from Markov Logic. We study the concept of strong equivalence in LPMLN, which is a useful mathematical tool for simplifying a part of an LPMLN program without looking at the rest of it. We show that the verification of strong equivalence in LPMLN can be reduced to equivalence checking in classical logic via a reduct and choice rules as well as to equivalence checking under the "soft" logic of here-and-there. The result allows us to leverage an answer set solver for LPMLN strong equivalence checking. The study also suggests us a few reformulations of the LPMLN semantics using choice rules, the logic of here-and-there, and classical logic.
Impact of novel aggregation methods for flexible, time-sensitive EHR prediction without variable selection or cleaning
Authors: Jacob Deasy, Ari Ercole, Pietro Liò
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Variable Selection

Dynamic assessment of patient status (e.g. by an automated, continuously updated assessment of outcome) in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is of paramount importance for early alerting, decision support and resource allocation. Extraction and cleaning of expert-selected clinical variables discards information and protracts collaborative efforts to introduce machine learning in medicine. We present improved aggregation methods for a flexible deep learning architecture which learns a joint representation of patient chart, lab and output events. Our models outperform recent deep learning models for patient mortality classification using ICU timeseries, by embedding and aggregating all events with no pre-processing or variable selection. Our model achieves a strong performance of AUROC 0.87 at 48 hours on the MIMIC-III dataset while using 13,233 unique un-preprocessed variables in an interpretable manner via hourly softmax aggregation. This demonstrates how our method can be easily combined with existing electronic health record systems for automated, dynamic patient risk analysis.