pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Unifying Training and Inference for Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Qizhu Li, Xiaojuan Qi, Philip H. S. Torr
Date: 2020-01-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation

We present an end-to-end network to bridge the gap between training and inference pipeline for panoptic segmentation, a task that seeks to partition an image into semantic regions for "stuff" and object instances for "things". In contrast to recent works, our network exploits a parametrised, yet lightweight panoptic segmentation submodule, powered by an end-to-end learnt dense instance affinity, to capture the probability that any pair of pixels belong to the same instance. This panoptic submodule gives rise to a novel propagation mechanism for panoptic logits and enables the network to output a coherent panoptic segmentation map for both "stuff" and "thing" classes, without any post-processing. Reaping the benefits of end-to-end training, our full system sets new records on the popular street scene dataset, Cityscapes, achieving 61.4 PQ with a ResNet-50 backbone using only the fine annotations. On the challenging COCO dataset, our ResNet-50-based network also delivers state-of-the-art accuracy of 43.4 PQ. Moreover, our network flexibly works with and without object mask cues, performing competitively under both settings, which is of interest for applications with computation budgets.
Auto Completion of User Interface Layout Design Using Transformer-Based Tree Decoders
Authors: Yang Li, Julien Amelot, Xin Zhou, Samy Bengio, Si Si
Date: 2020-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Layout Design, Prediction

It has been of increasing interest in the field to develop automatic machineries to facilitate the design process. In this paper, we focus on assisting graphical user interface (UI) layout design, a crucial task in app development. Given a partial layout, which a designer has entered, our model learns to complete the layout by predicting the remaining UI elements with a correct position and dimension as well as the hierarchical structures. Such automation will significantly ease the effort of UI designers and developers. While we focus on interface layout prediction, our model can be generally applicable for other layout prediction problems that involve tree structures and 2-dimensional placements. Particularly, we design two versions of Transformer-based tree decoders: Pointer and Recursive Transformer, and experiment with these models on a public dataset. We also propose several metrics for measuring the accuracy of tree prediction and ground these metrics in the domain of user experience. These contribute a new task and methods to deep learning research.
A BERT based Sentiment Analysis and Key Entity Detection Approach for Online Financial Texts
Authors: Lingyun Zhao, Lin Li, Xinhao Zheng
Date: 2020-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Ensemble Learning, Machine Reading Comprehension, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Reading Comprehension, Sentence, Sentiment Analysis

The emergence and rapid progress of the Internet have brought ever-increasing impact on financial domain. How to rapidly and accurately mine the key information from the massive negative financial texts has become one of the key issues for investors and decision makers. Aiming at the issue, we propose a sentiment analysis and key entity detection approach based on BERT, which is applied in online financial text mining and public opinion analysis in social media. By using pre-train model, we first study sentiment analysis, and then we consider key entity detection as a sentence matching or Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) task in different granularity. Among them, we mainly focus on negative sentimental information. We detect the specific entity by using our approach, which is different from traditional Named Entity Recognition (NER). In addition, we also use ensemble learning to improve the performance of proposed approach. Experimental results show that the performance of our approach is generally higher than SVM, LR, NBM, and BERT for two financial sentiment analysis and key entity detection datasets.
Dialectal Layers in West Iranian: a Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Approach to Linguistic Relationships
Authors: Chundra Aroor Cathcart
Date: 2020-01-13 00:00:00

This paper addresses a series of complex and unresolved issues in the historical phonology of West Iranian languages. The West Iranian languages (Persian, Kurdish, Balochi, and other languages) display a high degree of non-Lautgesetzlich behavior. Most of this irregularity is undoubtedly due to language contact; we argue, however, that an oversimplified view of the processes at work has prevailed in the literature on West Iranian dialectology, with specialists assuming that deviations from an expected outcome in a given non-Persian language are due to lexical borrowing from some chronological stage of Persian. It is demonstrated that this qualitative approach yields at times problematic conclusions stemming from the lack of explicit probabilistic inferences regarding the distribution of the data: Persian may not be the sole donor language; additionally, borrowing at the lexical level is not always the mechanism that introduces irregularity. In many cases, the possibility that West Iranian languages show different reflexes in different conditioning environments remains under-explored. We employ a novel Bayesian approach designed to overcome these problems and tease apart the different determinants of irregularity in patterns of West Iranian sound change. Our methodology allows us to provisionally resolve a number of outstanding questions in the literature on West Iranian dialectology concerning the dialectal affiliation of certain sound changes. We outline future directions for work of this sort.
Detecting New Word Meanings: A Comparison of Word Embedding Models in Spanish
Authors: Andrés Torres-Rivera, Juan-Manuel Torres-Moreno
Date: 2020-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Keyword Extraction, POS, TAG, valid, Word Sense Disambiguation

Semantic neologisms (SN) are defined as words that acquire a new word meaning while maintaining their form. Given the nature of this kind of neologisms, the task of identifying these new word meanings is currently performed manually by specialists at observatories of neology. To detect SN in a semi-automatic way, we developed a system that implements a combination of the following strategies: topic modeling, keyword extraction, and word sense disambiguation. The role of topic modeling is to detect the themes that are treated in the input text. Themes within a text give clues about the particular meaning of the words that are used, for example: viral has one meaning in the context of computer science (CS) and another when talking about health. To extract keywords, we used TextRank with POS tag filtering. With this method, we can obtain relevant words that are already part of the Spanish lexicon. We use a deep learning model to determine if a given keyword could have a new meaning. Embeddings that are different from all the known meanings (or topics) indicate that a word might be a valid SN candidate. In this study, we examine the following word embedding models: Word2Vec, Sense2Vec, and FastText. The models were trained with equivalent parameters using Wikipedia in Spanish as corpora. Then we used a list of words and their concordances (obtained from our database of neologisms) to show the different embeddings that each model yields. Finally, we present a comparison of these outcomes with the concordances of each word to show how we can determine if a word could be a valid candidate for SN.
Urdu-English Machine Transliteration using Neural Networks
Authors: Usman Mohy ud Din
Date: 2020-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation, Transliteration

Machine translation has gained much attention in recent years. It is a sub-field of computational linguistic which focus on translating text from one language to other language. Among different translation techniques, neural network currently leading the domain with its capabilities of providing a single large neural network with attention mechanism, sequence-to-sequence and long-short term modelling. Despite significant progress in domain of machine translation, translation of out-of-vocabulary words(OOV) which include technical terms, named-entities, foreign words are still a challenge for current state-of-art translation systems, and this situation becomes even worse while translating between low resource languages or languages having different structures. Due to morphological richness of a language, a word may have different meninges in different context. In such scenarios, translation of word is not only enough in order provide the correct/quality translation. Transliteration is a way to consider the context of word/sentence during translation. For low resource language like Urdu, it is very difficult to have/find parallel corpus for transliteration which is large enough to train the system. In this work, we presented transliteration technique based on Expectation Maximization (EM) which is un-supervised and language independent. Systems learns the pattern and out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words from parallel corpus and there is no need to train it on transliteration corpus explicitly. This approach is tested on three models of statistical machine translation (SMT) which include phrasebased, hierarchical phrase-based and factor based models and two models of neural machine translation which include LSTM and transformer model.
Tensor Graph Convolutional Networks for Text Classification
Authors: Xien Liu, Xinxin You, Xiao Zhang, Ji Wu, Ping Lv
Date: 2020-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Compared to sequential learning models, graph-based neural networks exhibit some excellent properties, such as ability capturing global information. In this paper, we investigate graph-based neural networks for text classification problem. A new framework TensorGCN (tensor graph convolutional networks), is presented for this task. A text graph tensor is firstly constructed to describe semantic, syntactic, and sequential contextual information. Then, two kinds of propagation learning perform on the text graph tensor. The first is intra-graph propagation used for aggregating information from neighborhood nodes in a single graph. The second is inter-graph propagation used for harmonizing heterogeneous information between graphs. Extensive experiments are conducted on benchmark datasets, and the results illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. Our proposed TensorGCN presents an effective way to harmonize and integrate heterogeneous information from different kinds of graphs.
Embedding Compression with Isotropic Iterative Quantization
Authors: Siyu Liao, Jie Chen, Yanzhi Wang, Qinru Qiu, Bo Yuan
Date: 2020-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Quantization, Retrieval

Continuous representation of words is a standard component in deep learning-based NLP models. However, representing a large vocabulary requires significant memory, which can cause problems, particularly on resource-constrained platforms. Therefore, in this paper we propose an isotropic iterative quantization (IIQ) approach for compressing embedding vectors into binary ones, leveraging the iterative quantization technique well established for image retrieval, while satisfying the desired isotropic property of PMI based models. Experiments with pre-trained embeddings (i.e., GloVe and HDC) demonstrate a more than thirty-fold compression ratio with comparable and sometimes even improved performance over the original real-valued embedding vectors.
Exploring and Improving Robustness of Multi Task Deep Neural Networks via Domain Agnostic Defenses
Authors: Kashyap Coimbatore Murali
Date: 2020-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding

In this paper, we explore the robustness of the Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks (MT-DNN) against non-targeted adversarial attacks across Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks as well as some possible ways to defend against them. Liu et al., have shown that the Multi-Task Deep Neural Network, due to the regularization effect produced when training as a result of its cross task data, is more robust than a vanilla BERT model trained only on one task (1.1%-1.5% absolute difference). We further show that although the MT-DNN has generalized better, making it easily transferable across domains and tasks, it can still be compromised as after only 2 attacks (1-character and 2-character) the accuracy drops by 42.05% and 32.24% for the SNLI and SciTail tasks. Finally, we propose a domain agnostic defense which restores the model's accuracy (36.75% and 25.94% respectively) as opposed to a general-purpose defense or an off-the-shelf spell checker.
Authorship Attribution in Bangla literature using Character-level CNN
Authors: Aisha Khatun, Anisur Rahman, Md. Saiful Islam, Marium-E-Jannat
Date: 2020-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Authorship Attribution

Characters are the smallest unit of text that can extract stylometric signals to determine the author of a text. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of character-level signals in Authorship Attribution of Bangla Literature and show that the results are promising but improvable. The time and memory efficiency of the proposed model is much higher than the word level counterparts but accuracy is 2-5% less than the best performing word-level models. Comparison of various word-based models is performed and shown that the proposed model performs increasingly better with larger datasets. We also analyze the effect of pre-training character embedding of diverse Bangla character set in authorship attribution. It is seen that the performance is improved by up to 10% on pre-training. We used 2 datasets from 6 to 14 authors, balancing them before training and compare the results.
A Continuous Space Neural Language Model for Bengali Language
Authors: Hemayet Ahmed Chowdhury, Md. Azizul Haque Imon, Anisur Rahman, Aisha Khatun, Md. Saiful Islam
Date: 2020-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Summarization, Translation

Language models are generally employed to estimate the probability distribution of various linguistic units, making them one of the fundamental parts of natural language processing. Applications of language models include a wide spectrum of tasks such as text summarization, translation and classification. For a low resource language like Bengali, the research in this area so far can be considered to be narrow at the very least, with some traditional count based models being proposed. This paper attempts to address the issue and proposes a continuous-space neural language model, or more specifically an ASGD weight dropped LSTM language model, along with techniques to efficiently train it for Bengali Language. The performance analysis with some currently existing count based models illustrated in this paper also shows that the proposed architecture outperforms its counterparts by achieving an inference perplexity as low as 51.2 on the held out data set for Bengali.
Improving Spoken Language Understanding By Exploiting ASR N-best Hypotheses
Authors: Mingda Li, Weitong Ruan, Xinyue Liu, Luca Soldaini, Wael Hamza, Chengwei Su
Date: 2020-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), intent-classification, Intent Classification, Natural Language Understanding, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Spoken Language Understanding

In a modern spoken language understanding (SLU) system, the natural language understanding (NLU) module takes interpretations of a speech from the automatic speech recognition (ASR) module as the input. The NLU module usually uses the first best interpretation of a given speech in downstream tasks such as domain and intent classification. However, the ASR module might misrecognize some speeches and the first best interpretation could be erroneous and noisy. Solely relying on the first best interpretation could make the performance of downstream tasks non-optimal. To address this issue, we introduce a series of simple yet efficient models for improving the understanding of semantics of the input speeches by collectively exploiting the n-best speech interpretations from the ASR module.
A Comprehensive Survey on the Ambulance Routing and Location Problems
Authors: Joseph Tassone, Salimur Choudhury
Date: 2020-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

In this research, an extensive literature review was performed on the recent developments of the ambulance routing problem (ARP) and ambulance location problem (ALP). Both are respective modifications of the vehicle routing problem (VRP) and maximum covering problem (MCP), with modifications to objective functions and constraints. Although alike, a key distinction is emergency service systems (EMS) are considered critical and the optimization of these has become all the more important as a result. Similar to their parent problems, these are NP-hard and must resort to approximations if the space size is too large. Much of the current work has simply been on modifying existing systems through simulation to achieve a more acceptable result. There has been attempts towards using meta-heuristics, though practical experimentation is lacking when compared to VRP or MCP. The contributions of this work are a comprehensive survey of current methodologies, summarized models, and suggested future improvements.
Algorithms for Optimizing Fleet Staging of Air Ambulances
Authors: Joseph Tassone, Geoffrey Pond, Salimur Choudhury
Date: 2020-01-10 00:00:00

In a disaster situation, air ambulance rapid response will often be the determining factor in patient survival. Obstacles intensify this circumstance, with geographical remoteness and limitations in vehicle placement making it an arduous task. Considering these elements, the arrangement of responders is a critical decision of the utmost importance. Utilizing real mission data, this research structured an optimal coverage problem with integer linear programming. For accurate comparison, the Gurobi optimizer was programmed with the developed model and timed for performance. A solution implementing base ranking followed by both local and Tabu search-based algorithms was created. The local search algorithm proved insufficient for maximizing coverage, while the Tabu search achieved near-optimal results. In the latter case, the total vehicle travel distance was minimized and the runtime significantly outperformed the one generated by Gurobi. Furthermore, variations utilizing parallel CUDA processing further decreased the algorithmic runtime. These proved superior as the number of test missions increased, while also maintaining the same minimized distance.
A Supervised Learning Algorithm for Multilayer Spiking Neural Networks Based on Temporal Coding Toward Energy-Efficient VLSI Processor Design
Authors: Yusuke Sakemi, Kai Morino, Takashi Morie, Kazuyuki Aihara
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are brain-inspired mathematical models with the ability to process information in the form of spikes. SNNs are expected to provide not only new machine-learning algorithms, but also energy-efficient computational models when implemented in VLSI circuits. In this paper, we propose a novel supervised learning algorithm for SNNs based on temporal coding. A spiking neuron in this algorithm is designed to facilitate analog VLSI implementations with analog resistive memory, by which ultra-high energy efficiency can be achieved. We also propose several techniques to improve the performance on a recognition task, and show that the classification accuracy of the proposed algorithm is as high as that of the state-of-the-art temporal coding SNN algorithms on the MNIST dataset. Finally, we discuss the robustness of the proposed SNNs against variations that arise from the device manufacturing process and are unavoidable in analog VLSI implementation. We also propose a technique to suppress the effects of variations in the manufacturing process on the recognition performance.
The empirical structure of word frequency distributions
Authors: Michael Ramscar
Date: 2020-01-09 00:00:00

The frequencies at which individual words occur across languages follow power law distributions, a pattern of findings known as Zipf's law. A vast literature argues over whether this serves to optimize the efficiency of human communication, however this claim is necessarily post hoc, and it has been suggested that Zipf's law may in fact describe mixtures of other distributions. From this perspective, recent findings that Sinosphere first (family) names are geometrically distributed are notable, because this is actually consistent with information theoretic predictions regarding optimal coding. First names form natural communicative distributions in most languages, and I show that when analyzed in relation to the communities in which they are used, first name distributions across a diverse set of languages are both geometric and, historically, remarkably similar, with power law distributions only emerging when empirical distributions are aggregated. I then show this pattern of findings replicates in communicative distributions of English nouns and verbs. These results indicate that if lexical distributions support efficient communication, they do so because their functional structures directly satisfy the constraints described by information theory, and not because of Zipf's law. Understanding the function of these information structures is likely to be key to explaining humankind's remarkable communicative capacities.
Language Models Are An Effective Patient Representation Learning Technique For Electronic Health Record Data
Authors: Ethan Steinberg, Ken Jung, Jason A. Fries, Conor K. Corbin, Stephen R. Pfohl, Nigam H. Shah
Date: 2020-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Representation Learning

Widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) has fueled the development of using machine learning to build prediction models for various clinical outcomes. This process is often constrained by having a relatively small number of patient records for training the model. We demonstrate that using patient representation schemes inspired from techniques in natural language processing can increase the accuracy of clinical prediction models by transferring information learned from the entire patient population to the task of training a specific model, where only a subset of the population is relevant. Such patient representation schemes enable a 3.5% mean improvement in AUROC on five prediction tasks compared to standard baselines, with the average improvement rising to 19% when only a small number of patient records are available for training the clinical prediction model.
Efficient Programmable Random Variate Generation Accelerator from Sensor Noise
Authors: James Timothy Meech, Phillip Stanley-Marbell
Date: 2020-01-10 00:00:00

We introduce a method for non-uniform random number generation based on sampling a physical process in a controlled environment. We demonstrate one proof-of-concept implementation of the method that reduces the error of Monte Carlo integration of a univariate Gaussian by 1068 times while doubling the speed of the Monte Carlo simulation. We show that the supply voltage and temperature of the physical process must be controlled to prevent the mean and standard deviation of the random number generator from drifting.