pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Importance-Aware Learning for Neural Headline Editing
Authors: Qingyang Wu, Lei LI, Hao Zhou, Ying Zeng, Zhou Yu
Date: 2019-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Decoder, Headline Generation

Many social media news writers are not professionally trained. Therefore, social media platforms have to hire professional editors to adjust amateur headlines to attract more readers. We propose to automate this headline editing process through neural network models to provide more immediate writing support for these social media news writers. To train such a neural headline editing model, we collected a dataset which contains articles with original headlines and professionally edited headlines. However, it is expensive to collect a large number of professionally edited headlines. To solve this low-resource problem, we design an encoder-decoder model which leverages large scale pre-trained language models. We further improve the pre-trained model's quality by introducing a headline generation task as an intermediate task before the headline editing task. Also, we propose Self Importance-Aware (SIA) loss to address the different levels of editing in the dataset by down-weighting the importance of easily classified tokens and sentences. With the help of Pre-training, Adaptation, and SIA, the model learns to generate headlines in the professional editor's style. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves the quality of headline editing comparing against previous methods.
See and Read: Detecting Depression Symptoms in Higher Education Students Using Multimodal Social Media Data
Authors: Paulo Mann, Aline Paes, Elton H. Matsushima
Date: 2019-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering

Mental disorders such as depression and anxiety have been increasing at alarming rates in the worldwide population. Notably, the major depressive disorder has become a common problem among higher education students, aggravated, and maybe even occasioned, by the academic pressures they must face. While the reasons for this alarming situation remain unclear (although widely investigated), the student already facing this problem must receive treatment. To that, it is first necessary to screen the symptoms. The traditional way for that is relying on clinical consultations or answering questionnaires. However, nowadays, the data shared at social media is a ubiquitous source that can be used to detect the depression symptoms even when the student is not able to afford or search for professional care. Previous works have already relied on social media data to detect depression on the general population, usually focusing on either posted images or texts or relying on metadata. In this work, we focus on detecting the severity of the depression symptoms in higher education students, by comparing deep learning to feature engineering models induced from both the pictures and their captions posted on Instagram. The experimental results show that students presenting a BDI score higher or equal than 20 can be detected with 0.92 of recall and 0.69 of precision in the best case, reached by a fusion model. Our findings show the potential of large-scale depression screening, which could shed light upon students at-risk.
An Annotated Dataset of Coreference in English Literature
Authors: David Bamman, Olivia Lewke, Anya Mansoor
Date: 2019-12-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Coreference Resolution

We present in this work a new dataset of coreference annotations for works of literature in English, covering 29,103 mentions in 210,532 tokens from 100 works of fiction. This dataset differs from previous coreference datasets in containing documents whose average length (2,105.3 words) is four times longer than other benchmark datasets (463.7 for OntoNotes), and contains examples of difficult coreference problems common in literature. This dataset allows for an evaluation of cross-domain performance for the task of coreference resolution, and analysis into the characteristics of long-distance within-document coreference.
Unsupervised Inflection Generation Using Neural Language Modeling
Authors: Octavia-Maria Sulea, Steve Young
Date: 2019-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering, Transfer Learning

The use of Deep Neural Network architectures for Language Modeling has recently seen a tremendous increase in interest in the field of NLP with the advent of transfer learning and the shift in focus from rule-based and predictive models (supervised learning) to generative or unsupervised models to solve the long-standing problems in NLP like Information Extraction or Question Answering. While this shift has worked greatly for languages lacking in inflectional morphology, such as English, challenges still arise when trying to build similar systems for morphologically-rich languages, since their individual words shift forms in context more often. In this paper we investigate the extent to which these new unsupervised or generative techniques can serve to alleviate the type-token ratio disparity in morphologically rich languages. We apply an off-the-shelf neural language modeling library to the newly introduced task of unsupervised inflection generation in the nominal domain of three morphologically rich languages: Romanian, German, and Finnish. We show that this neural language model architecture can successfully generate the full inflection table of nouns without needing any pre-training on large, wikipedia-sized corpora, as long as the model is shown enough inflection examples. In fact, our experiments show that pre-training hinders the generation performance.
Cross-lingual Pre-training Based Transfer for Zero-shot Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Baijun Ji, Zhirui Zhang, Xiangyu Duan, Min Zhang, Boxing Chen, Weihua Luo
Date: 2019-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Transfer Learning, Translation

Transfer learning between different language pairs has shown its effectiveness for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) in low-resource scenario. However, existing transfer methods involving a common target language are far from success in the extreme scenario of zero-shot translation, due to the language space mismatch problem between transferor (the parent model) and transferee (the child model) on the source side. To address this challenge, we propose an effective transfer learning approach based on cross-lingual pre-training. Our key idea is to make all source languages share the same feature space and thus enable a smooth transition for zero-shot translation. To this end, we introduce one monolingual pre-training method and two bilingual pre-training methods to obtain a universal encoder for different languages. Once the universal encoder is constructed, the parent model built on such encoder is trained with large-scale annotated data and then directly applied in zero-shot translation scenario. Experiments on two public datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms strong pivot-based baseline and various multilingual NMT approaches.
Knowledge-Enriched Visual Storytelling
Authors: Chao-Chun Hsu, Zi-Yuan Chen, Chi-Yang Hsu, Chih-Chia Li, Tzu-Yuan Lin, Ting-Hao 'Kenneth' Huang, Lun-Wei Ku
Date: 2019-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Story Generation, Visual Storytelling

Stories are diverse and highly personalized, resulting in a large possible output space for story generation. Existing end-to-end approaches produce monotonous stories because they are limited to the vocabulary and knowledge in a single training dataset. This paper introduces KG-Story, a three-stage framework that allows the story generation model to take advantage of external Knowledge Graphs to produce interesting stories. KG-Story distills a set of representative words from the input prompts, enriches the word set by using external knowledge graphs, and finally generates stories based on the enriched word set. This distill-enrich-generate framework allows the use of external resources not only for the enrichment phase, but also for the distillation and generation phases. In this paper, we show the superiority of KG-Story for visual storytelling, where the input prompt is a sequence of five photos and the output is a short story. Per the human ranking evaluation, stories generated by KG-Story are on average ranked better than that of the state-of-the-art systems. Our code and output stories are available at https://github.com/zychen423/KE-VIST.
Reading the Manual: Event Extraction as Definition Comprehension
Authors: Yunmo Chen, Tongfei Chen, Seth Ebner, Aaron Steven White, Benjamin Van Durme
Date: 2019-12-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (spnlp) 2020 11
Tasks: Event Extraction

We ask whether text understanding has progressed to where we may extract event information through incremental refinement of bleached statements derived from annotation manuals. Such a capability would allow for the trivial construction and extension of an extraction framework by intended end-users through declarations such as, "Some person was born in some location at some time." We introduce an example of a model that employs such statements, with experiments illustrating we can extract events under closed ontologies and generalize to unseen event types simply by reading new definitions.
Writing Across the World's Languages: Deep Internationalization for Gboard, the Google Keyboard
Authors: Daan van Esch, Elnaz Sarbar, Tamar Lucassen, Jeremy O'Brien, Theresa Breiner, Manasa Prasad, Evan Crew, Chieu Nguyen, Françoise Beaufays
Date: 2019-12-03 00:00:00

This technical report describes our deep internationalization program for Gboard, the Google Keyboard. Today, Gboard supports 900+ language varieties across 70+ writing systems, and this report describes how and why we have been adding support for hundreds of language varieties from around the globe. Many languages of the world are increasingly used in writing on an everyday basis, and we describe the trends we see. We cover technological and logistical challenges in scaling up a language technology product like Gboard to hundreds of language varieties, and describe how we built systems and processes to operate at scale. Finally, we summarize the key take-aways from user studies we ran with speakers of hundreds of languages from around the world.
WaveFlow: A Compact Flow-based Model for Raw Audio
Authors: Wei Ping, Kainan Peng, Kexin Zhao, Zhao Song
Date: 2019-12-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: GPU, Speech Synthesis

In this work, we propose WaveFlow, a small-footprint generative flow for raw audio, which is directly trained with maximum likelihood. It handles the long-range structure of 1-D waveform with a dilated 2-D convolutional architecture, while modeling the local variations using expressive autoregressive functions. WaveFlow provides a unified view of likelihood-based models for 1-D data, including WaveNet and WaveGlow as special cases. It generates high-fidelity speech as WaveNet, while synthesizing several orders of magnitude faster as it only requires a few sequential steps to generate very long waveforms with hundreds of thousands of time-steps. Furthermore, it can significantly reduce the likelihood gap that has existed between autoregressive models and flow-based models for efficient synthesis. Finally, our small-footprint WaveFlow has only 5.91M parameters, which is 15$\times$ smaller than WaveGlow. It can generate 22.05 kHz high-fidelity audio 42.6$\times$ faster than real-time (at a rate of 939.3 kHz) on a V100 GPU without engineered inference kernels.
Facilitating on-line opinion dynamics by mining expressions of causation. The case of climate change debates on The Guardian
Authors: Tom Willaert, Sven Banisch, Paul Van Eecke, Katrien Beuls
Date: 2019-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

News website comment sections are spaces where potentially conflicting opinions and beliefs are voiced. Addressing questions of how to study such cultural and societal conflicts through technological means, the present article critically examines possibilities and limitations of machine-guided exploration and potential facilitation of on-line opinion dynamics. These investigations are guided by a discussion of an experimental observatory for mining and analyzing opinions from climate change-related user comments on news articles from the TheGuardian.com. This observatory combines causal mapping methods with computational text analysis in order to mine beliefs and visualize opinion landscapes based on expressions of causation. By (1) introducing digital methods and open infrastructures for data exploration and analysis and (2) engaging in debates about the implications of such methods and infrastructures, notably in terms of the leap from opinion observation to debate facilitation, the article aims to make a practical and theoretical contribution to the study of opinion dynamics and conflict in new media environments.
Universal Adversarial Perturbations for CNN Classifiers in EEG-Based BCIs
Authors: Zihan Liu, Lubin Meng, Xiao Zhang, Weili Fang, Dongrui Wu
Date: 2019-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG)

Multiple convolutional neural network (CNN) classifiers have been proposed for electroencephalogram (EEG) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, CNN models have been found vulnerable to universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs), which are small and example-independent, yet powerful enough to degrade the performance of a CNN model, when added to a benign example. This paper proposes a novel total loss minimization (TLM) approach to generate UAPs for EEG-based BCIs. Experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of TLM on three popular CNN classifiers for both target and non-target attacks. We also verified the transferability of UAPs in EEG-based BCI systems. To our knowledge, this is the first study on UAPs of CNN classifiers in EEG-based BCIs. UAPs are easy to construct, and can attack BCIs in real-time, exposing a potentially critical security concern of BCIs.
Estimating Numerical Distributions under Local Differential Privacy
Authors: Zitao Li, Tianhao Wang, Milan Lopuhaä-Zwakenberg, Boris Skoric, Ninghui Li
Date: 2019-12-02 00:00:00

When collecting information, local differential privacy (LDP) relieves the concern of privacy leakage from users' perspective, as user's private information is randomized before sent to the aggregator. We study the problem of recovering the distribution over a numerical domain while satisfying LDP. While one can discretize a numerical domain and then apply the protocols developed for categorical domains, we show that taking advantage of the numerical nature of the domain results in better trade-off of privacy and utility. We introduce a new reporting mechanism, called the square wave SW mechanism, which exploits the numerical nature in reporting. We also develop an Expectation Maximization with Smoothing (EMS) algorithm, which is applied to aggregated histograms from the SW mechanism to estimate the original distributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach, SW with EMS, consistently outperforms other methods in a variety of utility metrics.
Discovering Opioid Use Patterns from Social Media for Relapse Prevention
Authors: Zhou Yang, Spencer Bradshaw, Rattikorn Hewett, Fang Jin
Date: 2019-12-02 00:00:00

The United States is currently experiencing an unprecedented opioid crisis, and opioid overdose has become a leading cause of injury and death. Effective opioid addiction recovery calls for not only medical treatments, but also behavioral interventions for impacted individuals. In this paper, we study communication and behavior patterns of patients with opioid use disorder (OUD) from social media, intending to demonstrate how existing information from common activities, such as online social networking, might lead to better prediction, evaluation, and ultimately prevention of relapses. Through a multi-disciplinary and advanced novel analytic perspective, we characterize opioid addiction behavior patterns by analyzing opioid groups from Reddit.com - including modeling online discussion topics, analyzing text co-occurrence and correlations, and identifying emotional states of people with OUD. These quantitative analyses are of practical importance and demonstrate innovative ways to use information from online social media, to create technology that can assist in relapse prevention.
Bayesian-Deep-Learning Estimation of Earthquake Location from Single-Station Observations
Authors: S. Mostafa Mousavi, Gregory C. Beroza
Date: 2019-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

We present a deep learning method for single-station earthquake location, which we approach as a regression problem using two separate Bayesian neural networks. We use a multi-task temporal-convolutional neural network to learn epicentral distance and P travel time from 1-minute seismograms. The network estimates epicentral distance and P travel time with absolute mean errors of 0.23 km and 0.03 s respectively, along with their epistemic and aleatory uncertainties. We design a separate multi-input network using standard convolutional layers to estimate the back-azimuth angle, and its epistemic uncertainty. This network estimates the direction from which seismic waves arrive to the station with a mean error of 1 degree. Using this information, we estimate the epicenter, origin time, and depth along with their confidence intervals. We use a global dataset of earthquake signals recorded within 1 degree (~112 km) from the event to build the model and to demonstrate its performance. Our model can predict epicenter, origin time, and depth with mean errors of 7.3 km, 0.4 second, and 6.7 km respectively, at different locations around the world. Our approach can be used for fast earthquake source characterization with a limited number of observations, and also for estimating location of earthquakes that are sparsely recorded -- either because they are small or because stations are widely separated.
Cost-Aware Robust Tree Ensembles for Security Applications
Authors: Yizheng Chen, Shiqi Wang, Weifan Jiang, Asaf Cidon, Suman Jana
Date: 2019-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Spam detection

There are various costs for attackers to manipulate the features of security classifiers. The costs are asymmetric across features and to the directions of changes, which cannot be precisely captured by existing cost models based on $L_p$-norm robustness. In this paper, we utilize such domain knowledge to increase the attack cost of evading classifiers, specifically, tree ensemble models that are widely used by security tasks. We propose a new cost modeling method to capture the feature manipulation cost as constraint, and then we integrate the cost-driven constraint into the node construction process to train robust tree ensembles. During the training process, we use the constraint to find data points that are likely to be perturbed given the feature manipulation cost, and we use a new robust training algorithm to optimize the quality of the trees. Our cost-aware training method can be applied to different types of tree ensembles, including gradient boosted decision trees and random forest models. Using Twitter spam detection as the case study, our evaluation results show that we can increase the attack cost by 10.6X compared to the baseline. Moreover, our robust training method using cost-driven constraint can achieve higher accuracy, lower false positive rate, and stronger cost-aware robustness than the state-of-the-art training method using $L_\infty$-norm cost model. Our code is available at https://github.com/surrealyz/growtrees.
Deep Learning for Symbolic Mathematics
Authors: Guillaume Lample, François Charton
Date: 2019-12-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Deep Learning

Neural networks have a reputation for being better at solving statistical or approximate problems than at performing calculations or working with symbolic data. In this paper, we show that they can be surprisingly good at more elaborated tasks in mathematics, such as symbolic integration and solving differential equations. We propose a syntax for representing mathematical problems, and methods for generating large datasets that can be used to train sequence-to-sequence models. We achieve results that outperform commercial Computer Algebra Systems such as Matlab or Mathematica.
Spatial images from temporal data
Authors: Alex Turpin, Gabriella Musarra, Valentin Kapitany, Francesco Tonolini, Ashley Lyons, Ilya Starshynov, Federica Villa, Enrico Conca, Francesco Fioranelli, Roderick Murray-Smith, Daniele Faccio
Date: 2019-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Traditional paradigms for imaging rely on the use of a spatial structure, either in the detector (pixels arrays) or in the illumination (patterned light). Removal of the spatial structure in the detector or illumination, i.e., imaging with just a single-point sensor, would require solving a very strongly ill-posed inverse retrieval problem that to date has not been solved. Here, we demonstrate a data-driven approach in which full 3D information is obtained with just a single-point, single-photon avalanche diode that records the arrival time of photons reflected from a scene that is illuminated with short pulses of light. Imaging with single-point time-of-flight (temporal) data opens new routes in terms of speed, size, and functionality. As an example, we show how the training based on an optical time-of-flight camera enables a compact radio-frequency impulse radio detection and ranging transceiver to provide 3D images.
Generalization Error Bounds Via Rényi-, $f$-Divergences and Maximal Leakage
Authors: Amedeo Roberto Esposito, Michael Gastpar, Ibrahim Issa
Date: 2019-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning Theory

In this work, the probability of an event under some joint distribution is bounded by measuring it with the product of the marginals instead (which is typically easier to analyze) together with a measure of the dependence between the two random variables. These results find applications in adaptive data analysis, where multiple dependencies are introduced and in learning theory, where they can be employed to bound the generalization error of a learning algorithm. Bounds are given in terms of Sibson's Mutual Information, $\alpha-$Divergences, Hellinger Divergences, and $f-$Divergences. A case of particular interest is the Maximal Leakage (or Sibson's Mutual Information of order infinity), since this measure is robust to post-processing and composes adaptively. The corresponding bound can be seen as a generalization of classical bounds, such as Hoeffding's and McDiarmid's inequalities, to the case of dependent random variables.
A Data-driven Storage Control Framework for Dynamic Pricing
Authors: Jiaman Wu, Zhiqi Wang, Chenye Wu, Kui Wang, Yang Yu
Date: 2019-12-01 00:00:00

Dynamic pricing is both an opportunity and a challenge to the demand side. It is an opportunity as it better reflects the real time market conditions and hence enables an active demand side. However, demand's active participation does not necessarily lead to benefits. The challenge conventionally comes from the limited flexible resources and limited intelligent devices in demand side. The decreasing cost of storage system and the widely deployed smart meters inspire us to design a data-driven storage control framework for dynamic prices. We first establish a stylized model by assuming the knowledge and structure of dynamic price distributions, and design the optimal storage control policy. Based on Gaussian Mixture Model, we propose a practical data-driven control framework, which helps relax the assumptions in the stylized model. Numerical studies illustrate the remarkable performance of the proposed data-driven framework.