pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Improving Variational Autoencoder with Deep Feature Consistent and Generative Adversarial Training
Authors: Xianxu Hou, Ke Sun, Linlin Shen, Guoping Qiu
Date: 2019-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

We present a new method for improving the performances of variational autoencoder (VAE). In addition to enforcing the deep feature consistent principle thus ensuring the VAE output and its corresponding input images to have similar deep features, we also implement a generative adversarial training mechanism to force the VAE to output realistic and natural images. We present experimental results to show that the VAE trained with our new method outperforms state of the art in generating face images with much clearer and more natural noses, eyes, teeth, hair textures as well as reasonable backgrounds. We also show that our method can learn powerful embeddings of input face images, which can be used to achieve facial attribute manipulation. Moreover we propose a multi-view feature extraction strategy to extract effective image representations, which can be used to achieve state of the art performance in facial attribute prediction.
Willump: A Statistically-Aware End-to-end Optimizer for Machine Learning Inference
Authors: Peter Kraft, Daniel Kang, Deepak Narayanan, Shoumik Palkar, Peter Bailis, Matei Zaharia
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Systems for ML inference are widely deployed today, but they typically optimize ML inference workloads using techniques designed for conventional data serving workloads and miss critical opportunities to leverage the statistical nature of ML. In this paper, we present Willump, an optimizer for ML inference that introduces two statistically-motivated optimizations targeting ML applications whose performance bottleneck is feature computation. First, Willump automatically cascades feature computation for classification queries: Willump classifies most data inputs using only high-value, low-cost features selected through empirical observations of ML model performance, improving query performance by up to 5x without statistically significant accuracy loss. Second, Willump accurately approximates ML top-K queries, discarding low-scoring inputs with an automatically constructed approximate model and then ranking the remainder with a more powerful model, improving query performance by up to 10x with minimal accuracy loss. Willump automatically tunes these optimizations' parameters to maximize query performance while meeting an accuracy target. Moreover, Willump complements these statistical optimizations with compiler optimizations to automatically generate fast inference code for ML applications. We show that Willump improves the end-to-end performance of real-world ML inference pipelines curated from major data science competitions by up to 16x without statistically significant loss of accuracy.
The FacT: Taming Latent Factor Models for Explainability with Factorization Trees
Authors: Yiyi Tao, Yiling Jia, Nan Wang, Hongning Wang
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Latent factor models have achieved great success in personalized recommendations, but they are also notoriously difficult to explain. In this work, we integrate regression trees to guide the learning of latent factor models for recommendation, and use the learnt tree structure to explain the resulting latent factors. Specifically, we build regression trees on users and items respectively with user-generated reviews, and associate a latent profile to each node on the trees to represent users and items. With the growth of regression tree, the latent factors are gradually refined under the regularization imposed by the tree structure. As a result, we are able to track the creation of latent profiles by looking into the path of each factor on regression trees, which thus serves as an explanation for the resulting recommendations. Extensive experiments on two large collections of Amazon and Yelp reviews demonstrate the advantage of our model over several competitive baseline algorithms. Besides, our extensive user study also confirms the practical value of explainable recommendations generated by our model.
Grounded Human-Object Interaction Hotspots from Video (Extended Abstract)
Authors: Tushar Nagarajan, Christoph Feichtenhofer, Kristen Grauman
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Human-Object Interaction Detection, Object, Semantic Segmentation

Learning how to interact with objects is an important step towards embodied visual intelligence, but existing techniques suffer from heavy supervision or sensing requirements. We propose an approach to learn human-object interaction "hotspots" directly from video. Rather than treat affordances as a manually supervised semantic segmentation task, our approach learns about interactions by watching videos of real human behavior and anticipating afforded actions. Given a novel image or video, our model infers a spatial hotspot map indicating how an object would be manipulated in a potential interaction, even if the object is currently at rest. Through results with both first and third person video, we show the value of grounding affordances in real human-object interactions. Not only are our weakly supervised hotspots competitive with strongly supervised affordance methods, but they can also anticipate object interaction for novel object categories. Project page: http://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/interaction-hotspots/
The Computational Structure of Unintentional Meaning
Authors: Mark K. Ho, Joanna Korman, Thomas L. Griffiths
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00

Speech-acts can have literal meaning as well as pragmatic meaning, but these both involve consequences typically intended by a speaker. Speech-acts can also have unintentional meaning, in which what is conveyed goes above and beyond what was intended. Here, we present a Bayesian analysis of how, to a listener, the meaning of an utterance can significantly differ from a speaker's intended meaning. Our model emphasizes how comprehending the intentional and unintentional meaning of speech-acts requires listeners to engage in sophisticated model-based perspective-taking and reasoning about the history of the state of the world, each other's actions, and each other's observations. To test our model, we have human participants make judgments about vignettes where speakers make utterances that could be interpreted as intentional insults or unintentional faux pas. In elucidating the mechanics of speech-acts with unintentional meanings, our account provides insight into how communication both functions and malfunctions.
An Introduction to a New Text Classification and Visualization for Natural Language Processing Using Topological Data Analysis
Authors: Naiereh Elyasi, Mehdi Hosseini Moghadam
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, text-classification, Text Classification, Topological Data Analysis

Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is a novel new and fast growing field of data science providing a set of new topological and geometric tools to derive relevant features out of complex high-dimensional data. In this paper we apply two of best methods in topological data analysis, "Persistent Homology" and "Mapper", in order to classify persian poems which has been composed by two of the best Iranian poets namely "Ferdowsi" and "Hafez". This article has two main parts, in the first part we explain the mathematics behind these two methods which is easy to understand for general audience and in the second part we describe our models and the results of applying TDA tools to NLP.
Understanding Distributional Ambiguity via Non-robust Chance Constraint
Authors: Qi Wu, Shumin Ma, Cheuk Hang Leung, Wei Liu, Nanbo Peng
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Portfolio Optimization

This paper provides a non-robust interpretation of the distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problem by relating the distributional uncertainties to the chance probabilities. Our analysis allows a decision-maker to interpret the size of the ambiguity set, which is often lack of business meaning, through the chance parameters constraining the objective function. We first show that, for general $\phi$-divergences, a DRO problem is asymptotically equivalent to a class of mean-deviation problems. These mean-deviation problems are not subject to uncertain distributions, and the ambiguity radius in the original DRO problem now plays the role of controlling the risk preference of the decision-maker. We then demonstrate that a DRO problem can be cast as a chance-constrained optimization (CCO) problem when a boundedness constraint is added to the decision variables. Without the boundedness constraint, the CCO problem is shown to perform uniformly better than the DRO problem, irrespective of the radius of the ambiguity set, the choice of the divergence measure, or the tail heaviness of the center distribution. Thanks to our high-order expansion result, a notable feature of our analysis is that it applies to divergence measures that accommodate well heavy tail distributions such as the student $t$-distribution and the lognormal distribution, besides the widely-used Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, which requires the distribution of the objective function to be exponentially bounded. Using the portfolio selection problem as an example, our comprehensive testings on multivariate heavy-tail datasets, both synthetic and real-world, shows that this business-interpretation approach is indeed useful and insightful.
SemEval-2019 Task 8: Fact Checking in Community Question Answering Forums
Authors: Tsvetomila Mihaylova, Georgi Karadjov, Pepa Atanasova, Ramy Baly, Mitra Mohtarami, Preslav Nakov
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: SEMEVAL 2019 6
Tasks: Community Question Answering, Fact Checking, Question Answering

We present SemEval-2019 Task 8 on Fact Checking in Community Question Answering Forums, which features two subtasks. Subtask A is about deciding whether a question asks for factual information vs. an opinion/advice vs. just socializing. Subtask B asks to predict whether an answer to a factual question is true, false or not a proper answer. We received 17 official submissions for subtask A and 11 official submissions for Subtask B. For subtask A, all systems improved over the majority class baseline. For Subtask B, all systems were below a majority class baseline, but several systems were very close to it. The leaderboard and the data from the competition can be found at http://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/20022
ArSentD-LEV: A Multi-Topic Corpus for Target-based Sentiment Analysis in Arabic Levantine Tweets
Authors: Ramy Baly, Alaa Khaddaj, Hazem Hajj, Wassim El-Hajj, Khaled Bashir Shaban
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is a highly subjective and challenging task. Its complexity further increases when applied to the Arabic language, mainly because of the large variety of dialects that are unstandardized and widely used in the Web, especially in social media. While many datasets have been released to train sentiment classifiers in Arabic, most of these datasets contain shallow annotation, only marking the sentiment of the text unit, as a word, a sentence or a document. In this paper, we present the Arabic Sentiment Twitter Dataset for the Levantine dialect (ArSenTD-LEV). Based on findings from analyzing tweets from the Levant region, we created a dataset of 4,000 tweets with the following annotations: the overall sentiment of the tweet, the target to which the sentiment was expressed, how the sentiment was expressed, and the topic of the tweet. Results confirm the importance of these annotations at improving the performance of a baseline sentiment classifier. They also confirm the gap of training in a certain domain, and testing in another domain.
Evolution of Novel Activation Functions in Neural Network Training with Applications to Classification of Exoplanets
Authors: Snehanshu Saha, Nithin Nagaraj, Archana Mathur, Rahul Yedida
Date: 2019-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

We present analytical exploration of novel activation functions as consequence of integration of several ideas leading to implementation and subsequent use in habitability classification of exoplanets. Neural networks, although a powerful engine in supervised methods, often require expensive tuning efforts for optimized performance. Habitability classes are hard to discriminate, especially when attributes used as hard markers of separation are removed from the data set. The solution is approached from the point of investigating analytical properties of the proposed activation functions. The theory of ordinary differential equations and fixed point are exploited to justify the "lack of tuning efforts" to achieve optimal performance compared to traditional activation functions. Additionally, the relationship between the proposed activation functions and the more popular ones is established through extensive analytical and empirical evidence. Finally, the activation functions have been implemented in plain vanilla feed-forward neural network to classify exoplanets.
A Hybrid Algorithm for Metaheuristic Optimization
Authors: Sujit Pramod Khanna, Alexander Ororbia II
Date: 2019-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Metaheuristic Optimization

We propose a novel, flexible algorithm for combining together metaheuristicoptimizers for non-convex optimization problems. Our approach treatsthe constituent optimizers as a team of complex agents that communicateinformation amongst each other at various intervals during the simulationprocess. The information produced by each individual agent can be combinedin various ways via higher-level operators. In our experiments on keybenchmark functions, we investigate how the performance of our algorithmvaries with respect to several of its key modifiable properties. Finally,we apply our proposed algorithm to classification problems involving theoptimization of support-vector machine classifiers.
PatentBERT: Patent Classification with Fine-Tuning a pre-trained BERT Model
Authors: Jieh-Sheng Lee, Jieh Hsiang
Date: 2019-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Multi-Label Text Classification, Patent classification

In this work we focus on fine-tuning a pre-trained BERT model and applying it to patent classification. When applied to large datasets of over two millions patents, our approach outperforms the state of the art by an approach using CNN with word embeddings. In addition, we focus on patent claims without other parts in patent documents. Our contributions include: (1) a new state-of-the-art method based on pre-trained BERT model and fine-tuning for patent classification, (2) a large dataset USPTO-3M at the CPC subclass level with SQL statements that can be used by future researchers, (3) showing that patent claims alone are sufficient for classification task, in contrast to conventional wisdom.
Strong and Simple Baselines for Multimodal Utterance Embeddings
Authors: Paul Pu Liang, Yao Chong Lim, Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Louis-Philippe Morency
Date: 2019-05-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2019 6
Tasks: Benchmarking

Human language is a rich multimodal signal consisting of spoken words, facial expressions, body gestures, and vocal intonations. Learning representations for these spoken utterances is a complex research problem due to the presence of multiple heterogeneous sources of information. Recent advances in multimodal learning have followed the general trend of building more complex models that utilize various attention, memory and recurrent components. In this paper, we propose two simple but strong baselines to learn embeddings of multimodal utterances. The first baseline assumes a conditional factorization of the utterance into unimodal factors. Each unimodal factor is modeled using the simple form of a likelihood function obtained via a linear transformation of the embedding. We show that the optimal embedding can be derived in closed form by taking a weighted average of the unimodal features. In order to capture richer representations, our second baseline extends the first by factorizing into unimodal, bimodal, and trimodal factors, while retaining simplicity and efficiency during learning and inference. From a set of experiments across two tasks, we show strong performance on both supervised and semi-supervised multimodal prediction, as well as significant (10 times) speedups over neural models during inference. Overall, we believe that our strong baseline models offer new benchmarking options for future research in multimodal learning.
Theme-aware generation model for chinese lyrics
Authors: Jie Wang, Xinyan Zhao
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Machine Translation, model, Text Generation, Translation

With rapid development of neural networks, deep-learning has been extended to various natural language generation fields, such as machine translation, dialogue generation and even literature creation. In this paper, we propose a theme-aware language generation model for Chinese music lyrics, which improves the theme-connectivity and coherence of generated paragraphs greatly. A multi-channel sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model encodes themes and previous sentences as global and local contextual information. Moreover, attention mechanism is incorporated for sequence decoding, enabling to fuse context into predicted next texts. To prepare appropriate train corpus, LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) is applied for theme extraction. Generated lyrics is grammatically correct and semantically coherent with selected themes, which offers a valuable modelling method in other fields including multi-turn chatbots, long paragraph generation and etc.
Deep learning based mood tagging for Chinese song lyrics
Authors: Jie Wang, Yilin Yang
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Information Retrieval, Recommendation Systems, Retrieval, Sentiment Analysis

Nowadays, listening music has been and will always be an indispensable part of our daily life. In recent years, sentiment analysis of music has been widely used in the information retrieval systems, personalized recommendation systems and so on. Due to the development of deep learning, this paper commits to find an effective approach for mood tagging of Chinese song lyrics. To achieve this goal, both machine-learning and deep-learning models have been studied and compared. Eventually, a CNN-based model with pre-trained word embedding has been demonstrated to effectively extract the distribution of emotional features of Chinese lyrics, with at least 15 percentage points higher than traditional machine-learning methods (i.e. TF-IDF+SVM and LIWC+SVM), and 7 percentage points higher than other deep-learning models (i.e. RNN, LSTM). In this paper, more than 160,000 lyrics corpus has been leveraged for pre-training word embedding for mood tagging boost.
Triple-to-Text: Converting RDF Triples into High-Quality Natural Languages via Optimizing an Inverse KL Divergence
Authors: Yaoming Zhu, Juncheng Wan, Zhiming Zhou, Liheng Chen, Lin Qiu, Wei-Nan Zhang, Xin Jiang, Yong Yu
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Knowledge base is one of the main forms to represent information in a structured way. A knowledge base typically consists of Resource Description Frameworks (RDF) triples which describe the entities and their relations. Generating natural language description of the knowledge base is an important task in NLP, which has been formulated as a conditional language generation task and tackled using the sequence-to-sequence framework. Current works mostly train the language models by maximum likelihood estimation, which tends to generate lousy sentences. In this paper, we argue that such a problem of maximum likelihood estimation is intrinsic, which is generally irrevocable via changing network structures. Accordingly, we propose a novel Triple-to-Text (T2T) framework, which approximately optimizes the inverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the distributions of the real and generated sentences. Due to the nature that inverse KL imposes large penalty on fake-looking samples, the proposed method can significantly reduce the probability of generating low-quality sentences. Our experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that T2T can generate higher-quality sentences and outperform baseline models in several evaluation metrics.
Classifying Norm Conflicts using Learned Semantic Representations
Authors: João Paulo Aires, Roger Granada, Juarez Monteiro, Rodrigo C. Barros, Felipe Meneguzzi
Date: 2019-05-13 00:00:00

While most social norms are informal, they are often formalized by companies in contracts to regulate trades of goods and services. When poorly written, contracts may contain normative conflicts resulting from opposing deontic meanings or contradict specifications. As contracts tend to be long and contain many norms, manually identifying such conflicts requires human-effort, which is time-consuming and error-prone. Automating such task benefits contract makers increasing productivity and making conflict identification more reliable. To address this problem, we introduce an approach to detect and classify norm conflicts in contracts by converting them into latent representations that preserve both syntactic and semantic information and training a model to classify norm conflicts in four conflict types. Our results reach the new state of the art when compared to a previous approach.
SP-10K: A Large-scale Evaluation Set for Selectional Preference Acquisition
Authors: Hongming Zhang, Hantian Ding, Yangqiu Song
Date: 2019-05-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution

Selectional Preference (SP) is a commonly observed language phenomenon and proved to be useful in many natural language processing tasks. To provide a better evaluation method for SP models, we introduce SP-10K, a large-scale evaluation set that provides human ratings for the plausibility of 10,000 SP pairs over five SP relations, covering 2,500 most frequent verbs, nouns, and adjectives in American English. Three representative SP acquisition methods based on pseudo-disambiguation are evaluated with SP-10K. To demonstrate the importance of our dataset, we investigate the relationship between SP-10K and the commonsense knowledge in ConceptNet5 and show the potential of using SP to represent the commonsense knowledge. We also use the Winograd Schema Challenge to prove that the proposed new SP relations are essential for the hard pronoun coreference resolution problem.
Extractive Summarization via Weighted Dissimilarity and Importance Aligned Key Iterative Algorithm
Authors: Ryohto Sawada
Date: 2019-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Extractive Summarization

We present importance aligned key iterative algorithm for extractive summarization that is faster than conventional algorithms keeping its accuracy. The computational complexity of our algorithm is O($SNlogN$) to summarize original $N$ sentences into final $S$ sentences. Our algorithm maximizes the weighted dissimilarity defined by the product of importance and cosine dissimilarity so that the summary represents the document and at the same time the sentences of the summary are not similar to each other. The weighted dissimilarity is heuristically maximized by iterative greedy search and binary search to the sentences ordered by importance. We finally show a benchmark score based on summarization of customer reviews of products, which highlights the quality of our algorithm comparable to human and existing algorithms. We provide the source code of our algorithm on github https://github.com/qhapaq-49/imakita .