pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning from Easy to Complex: Adaptive Multi-curricula Learning for Neural Dialogue Generation
Authors: Hengyi Cai, Hongshen Chen, Cheng Zhang, Yonghao Song, Xiaofang Zhao, Yangxi Li, Dongsheng Duan, Dawei Yin
Date: 2020-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Reinforcement Learning, Specificity

Current state-of-the-art neural dialogue systems are mainly data-driven and are trained on human-generated responses. However, due to the subjectivity and open-ended nature of human conversations, the complexity of training dialogues varies greatly. The noise and uneven complexity of query-response pairs impede the learning efficiency and effects of the neural dialogue generation models. What is more, so far, there are no unified dialogue complexity measurements, and the dialogue complexity embodies multiple aspects of attributes---specificity, repetitiveness, relevance, etc. Inspired by human behaviors of learning to converse, where children learn from easy dialogues to complex ones and dynamically adjust their learning progress, in this paper, we first analyze five dialogue attributes to measure the dialogue complexity in multiple perspectives on three publicly available corpora. Then, we propose an adaptive multi-curricula learning framework to schedule a committee of the organized curricula. The framework is established upon the reinforcement learning paradigm, which automatically chooses different curricula at the evolving learning process according to the learning status of the neural dialogue generation model. Extensive experiments conducted on five state-of-the-art models demonstrate its learning efficiency and effectiveness with respect to 13 automatic evaluation metrics and human judgments.
Style Example-Guided Text Generation using Generative Adversarial Transformers
Authors: Kuo-Hao Zeng, Mohammad Shoeybi, Ming-Yu Liu
Date: 2020-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Sentence, Text Generation

We introduce a language generative model framework for generating a styled paragraph based on a context sentence and a style reference example. The framework consists of a style encoder and a texts decoder. The style encoder extracts a style code from the reference example, and the text decoder generates texts based on the style code and the context. We propose a novel objective function to train our framework. We also investigate different network design choices. We conduct extensive experimental validation with comparison to strong baselines to validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework using a newly collected dataset with diverse text styles. Both code and dataset will be released upon publication.
PhoBERT: Pre-trained language models for Vietnamese
Authors: Dat Quoc Nguyen, Anh Tuan Nguyen
Date: 2020-03-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Dependency Parsing, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Natural Language Inference, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, Vietnamese Language Models, XLM-R

We present PhoBERT with two versions, PhoBERT-base and PhoBERT-large, the first public large-scale monolingual language models pre-trained for Vietnamese. Experimental results show that PhoBERT consistently outperforms the recent best pre-trained multilingual model XLM-R (Conneau et al., 2020) and improves the state-of-the-art in multiple Vietnamese-specific NLP tasks including Part-of-speech tagging, Dependency parsing, Named-entity recognition and Natural language inference. We release PhoBERT to facilitate future research and downstream applications for Vietnamese NLP. Our PhoBERT models are available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/PhoBERT
Identification of primary and collateral tracks in stuttered speech
Authors: Rachid Riad, Anne-Catherine Bachoud-Lévi, Frank Rudzicz, Emmanuel Dupoux
Date: 2020-03-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Diagnostic

Disfluent speech has been previously addressed from two main perspectives: the clinical perspective focusing on diagnostic, and the Natural Language Processing (NLP) perspective aiming at modeling these events and detect them for downstream tasks. In addition, previous works often used different metrics depending on whether the input features are text or speech, making it difficult to compare the different contributions. Here, we introduce a new evaluation framework for disfluency detection inspired by the clinical and NLP perspective together with the theory of performance from \cite{clark1996using} which distinguishes between primary and collateral tracks. We introduce a novel forced-aligned disfluency dataset from a corpus of semi-directed interviews, and present baseline results directly comparing the performance of text-based features (word and span information) and speech-based (acoustic-prosodic information). Finally, we introduce new audio features inspired by the word-based span features. We show experimentally that using these features outperformed the baselines for speech-based predictions on the present dataset.
What Emotions Make One or Five Stars? Understanding Ratings of Online Product Reviews by Sentiment Analysis and XAI
Authors: Chaehan So
Date: 2020-02-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Feature Importance, Sentiment Analysis

When people buy products online, they primarily base their decisions on the recommendations of others given in online reviews. The current work analyzed these online reviews by sentiment analysis and used the extracted sentiments as features to predict the product ratings by several machine learning algorithms. These predictions were disentangled by various meth-ods of explainable AI (XAI) to understand whether the model showed any bias during prediction. Study 1 benchmarked these algorithms (knn, support vector machines, random forests, gradient boosting machines, XGBoost) and identified random forests and XGBoost as best algorithms for predicting the product ratings. In Study 2, the analysis of global feature importance identified the sentiment joy and the emotional valence negative as most predictive features. Two XAI visualization methods, local feature attributions and partial dependency plots, revealed several incorrect prediction mechanisms on the instance-level. Performing the benchmarking as classification, Study 3 identified a high no-information rate of 64.4% that indicated high class imbalance as underlying reason for the identified problems. In conclusion, good performance by machine learning algorithms must be taken with caution because the dataset, as encountered in this work, could be biased towards certain predictions. This work demonstrates how XAI methods reveal such prediction bias.
Pathological speech detection using x-vector embeddings
Authors: Catarina Botelho, Francisco Teixeira, Thomas Rolland, Alberto Abad, Isabel Trancoso
Date: 2020-03-02 00:00:00

The potential of speech as a non-invasive biomarker to assess a speaker's health has been repeatedly supported by the results of multiple works, for both physical and psychological conditions. Traditional systems for speech-based disease classification have focused on carefully designed knowledge-based features. However, these features may not represent the disease's full symptomatology, and may even overlook its more subtle manifestations. This has prompted researchers to move in the direction of general speaker representations that inherently model symptoms, such as Gaussian Supervectors, i-vectors and, x-vectors. In this work, we focus on the latter, to assess their applicability as a general feature extraction method to the detection of Parkinson's disease (PD) and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). We test our approach against knowledge-based features and i-vectors, and report results for two European Portuguese corpora, for OSA and PD, as well as for an additional Spanish corpus for PD. Both x-vector and i-vector models were trained with an out-of-domain European Portuguese corpus. Our results show that x-vectors are able to perform better than knowledge-based features in same-language corpora. Moreover, while x-vectors performed similarly to i-vectors in matched conditions, they significantly outperform them when domain-mismatch occurs.
Policy-Aware Model Learning for Policy Gradient Methods
Authors: Romina Abachi, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Amir-Massoud Farahmand
Date: 2020-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Policy Gradient Methods, Reinforcement Learning

This paper considers the problem of learning a model in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL). We examine how the planning module of an MBRL algorithm uses the model, and propose that the model learning module should incorporate the way the planner is going to use the model. This is in contrast to conventional model learning approaches, such as those based on maximum likelihood estimate, that learn a predictive model of the environment without explicitly considering the interaction of the model and the planner. We focus on policy gradient type of planning algorithms and derive new loss functions for model learning that incorporate how the planner uses the model. We call this approach Policy-Aware Model Learning (PAML). We theoretically analyze a generic model-based policy gradient algorithm and provide a convergence guarantee for the optimized policy. We also empirically evaluate PAML on some benchmark problems, showing promising results.
Scaling up Hybrid Probabilistic Inference with Logical and Arithmetic Constraints via Message Passing
Authors: Zhe Zeng, Paolo Morettin, Fanqi Yan, Antonio Vergari, Guy Van Den Broeck
Date: 2020-02-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1

Weighted model integration (WMI) is a very appealing framework for probabilistic inference: it allows to express the complex dependencies of real-world problems where variables are both continuous and discrete, via the language of Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT), as well as to compute probabilistic queries with complex logical and arithmetic constraints. Yet, existing WMI solvers are not ready to scale to these problems. They either ignore the intrinsic dependency structure of the problem at all, or they are limited to too restrictive structures. To narrow this gap, we derive a factorized formalism of WMI enabling us to devise a scalable WMI solver based on message passing, MP-WMI. Namely, MP-WMI is the first WMI solver which allows to: 1) perform exact inference on the full class of tree-structured WMI problems; 2) compute all marginal densities in linear time; 3) amortize inference inter query. Experimental results show that our solver dramatically outperforms the existing WMI solvers on a large set of benchmarks.
Entity Profiling in Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Xiang Zhang, Qingqing Yang, Jinru Ding, Ziyue Wang
Date: 2020-02-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Representation Learning

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are graph-structured knowledge bases storing factual information about real-world entities. Understanding the uniqueness of each entity is crucial to the analyzing, sharing, and reusing of KGs. Traditional profiling technologies encompass a vast array of methods to find distinctive features in various applications, which can help to differentiate entities in the process of human understanding of KGs. In this work, we present a novel profiling approach to identify distinctive entity features. The distinctiveness of features is carefully measured by a HAS model, which is a scalable representation learning model to produce a multi-pattern entity embedding. We fully evaluate the quality of entity profiles generated from real KGs. The results show that our approach facilitates human understanding of entities in KGs.
A Finite State Transducer Based Morphological Analyzer of Maithili Language
Authors: Raza Rahi, Sumant Pushp, Arif Khan, Smriti Kumar Sinha
Date: 2020-02-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation, Word Sense Disambiguation

Morphological analyzers are the essential milestones for many linguistic applications like; machine translation, word sense disambiguation, spells checkers, and search engines etc. Therefore, development of an effective morphological analyzer has a greater impact on the computational recognition of a language. In this paper, we present a finite state transducer based inflectional morphological analyzer for a resource poor language of India, known as Maithili. Maithili is an eastern Indo-Aryan language spoken in the eastern and northern regions of Bihar in India and the southeastern plains, known as tarai of Nepal. This work can be recognized as the first work towards the computational development of Maithili which may attract researchers around the country to up-rise the language to establish in computational world.
Causal Learning by a Robot with Semantic-Episodic Memory in an Aesop's Fable Experiment
Authors: Ajaz A. Bhat, Vishwanathan Mohan
Date: 2020-02-29 00:00:00

Corvids, apes, and children solve The Crow and The Pitcher task (from Aesop's Fables) indicating a causal understanding of the task. By cumulatively interacting with different objects, how can cognitive agents abstract the underlying cause-effect relations to predict affordances of novel objects? We address this question by re-enacting the Aesop's Fable task on a robot and present a) a brain-guided neural model of semantic-episodic memory; with b) four task-agnostic learning rules that compare expectations from recalled past episodes with the current scenario to progressively extract the hidden causal relations. The ensuing robot behaviours illustrate causal learning; and predictions for novel objects converge to Archimedes' principle, independent of both the objects explored during learning and the order of their cumulative exploration.
Graph Neural Networks Meet Neural-Symbolic Computing: A Survey and Perspective
Authors: Luis C. Lamb, Artur Garcez, Marco Gori, Marcelo Prates, Pedro Avelar, Moshe Vardi
Date: 2020-02-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Relational Reasoning

Neural-symbolic computing has now become the subject of interest of both academic and industry research laboratories. Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have been widely used in relational and symbolic domains, with widespread application of GNNs in combinatorial optimization, constraint satisfaction, relational reasoning and other scientific domains. The need for improved explainability, interpretability and trust of AI systems in general demands principled methodologies, as suggested by neural-symbolic computing. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art on the use of GNNs as a model of neural-symbolic computing. This includes the application of GNNs in several domains as well as its relationship to current developments in neural-symbolic computing.
Data Pre-Processing and Evaluating the Performance of Several Data Mining Methods for Predicting Irrigation Water Requirement
Authors: Mahmood A. Khan, Md Zahidul Islam, Mohsin Hafeez
Date: 2020-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Demand Forecasting, Management

Recent drought and population growth are planting unprecedented demand for the use of available limited water resources. Irrigated agriculture is one of the major consumers of freshwater. A large amount of water in irrigated agriculture is wasted due to poor water management practices. To improve water management in irrigated areas, models for estimation of future water requirements are needed. Developing a model for forecasting irrigation water demand can improve water management practices and maximise water productivity. Data mining can be used effectively to build such models. In this study, we prepare a dataset containing information on suitable attributes for forecasting irrigation water demand. The data is obtained from three different sources namely meteorological data, remote sensing images and water delivery statements. In order to make the prepared dataset useful for demand forecasting and pattern extraction, we pre-process the dataset using a novel approach based on a combination of irrigation and data mining knowledge. We then apply and compare the effectiveness of different data mining methods namely decision tree (DT), artificial neural networks (ANNs), systematically developed forest (SysFor) for multiple trees, support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression, and the traditional Evapotranspiration (ETc) methods and evaluate the performance of these models to predict irrigation water demand. Our experimental results indicate the usefulness of data pre-processing and the effectiveness of different classifiers. Among the six methods we used, SysFor produces the best prediction with 97.5% accuracy followed by a decision tree with 96% and ANN with 95% respectively by closely matching the predictions with actual water usage. Therefore, we recommend using SysFor and DT models for irrigation water demand forecasting.
A Study on Multimodal and Interactive Explanations for Visual Question Answering
Authors: Kamran Alipour, Jurgen P. Schulze, Yi Yao, Avi Ziskind, Giedrius Burachas
Date: 2020-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Prediction, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Explainability and interpretability of AI models is an essential factor affecting the safety of AI. While various explainable AI (XAI) approaches aim at mitigating the lack of transparency in deep networks, the evidence of the effectiveness of these approaches in improving usability, trust, and understanding of AI systems are still missing. We evaluate multimodal explanations in the setting of a Visual Question Answering (VQA) task, by asking users to predict the response accuracy of a VQA agent with and without explanations. We use between-subjects and within-subjects experiments to probe explanation effectiveness in terms of improving user prediction accuracy, confidence, and reliance, among other factors. The results indicate that the explanations help improve human prediction accuracy, especially in trials when the VQA system's answer is inaccurate. Furthermore, we introduce active attention, a novel method for evaluating causal attentional effects through intervention by editing attention maps. User explanation ratings are strongly correlated with human prediction accuracy and suggest the efficacy of these explanations in human-machine AI collaboration tasks.
Differential Evolution with Individuals Redistribution for Real Parameter Single Objective Optimization
Authors: Cheng-Jun Li, Yang Li
Date: 2020-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Differential Evolution (DE) is quite powerful for real parameter single objective optimization. However, the ability of extending or changing search area when falling into a local optimum is still required to be developed in DE for accommodating extremely complicated fitness landscapes with a huge number of local optima. We propose a new flow of DE, termed DE with individuals redistribution, in which a process of individuals redistribution will be called when progress on fitness is low for generations. In such a process, mutation and crossover are standardized, while trial vectors are all kept in selection. Once diversity exceeds a predetermined threshold, our opposition replacement is executed, then algorithm behavior returns to original mode. In our experiments based on two benchmark test suites, we apply individuals redistribution in ten DE algorithms. Versions of the ten DE algorithms based on individuals redistribution are compared with not only original version but also version based on complete restart, where individuals redistribution and complete restart are based on the same entry criterion. Experimental results indicate that, for most of the DE algorithms, version based on individuals redistribution performs better than both original version and version based on complete restart.
GPM: A Generic Probabilistic Model to Recover Annotator's Behavior and Ground Truth Labeling
Authors: Jing Li, Suiyi Ling, Junle Wang, Zhi Li, Patrick Le Callet
Date: 2020-03-01 00:00:00

In the big data era, data labeling can be obtained through crowdsourcing. Nevertheless, the obtained labels are generally noisy, unreliable or even adversarial. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic graphical annotation model to infer the underlying ground truth and annotator's behavior. To accommodate both discrete and continuous application scenarios (e.g., classifying scenes vs. rating videos on a Likert scale), the underlying ground truth is considered following a distribution rather than a single value. In this way, the reliable but potentially divergent opinions from "good" annotators can be recovered. The proposed model is able to identify whether an annotator has worked diligently towards the task during the labeling procedure, which could be used for further selection of qualified annotators. Our model has been tested on both simulated data and real-world data, where it always shows superior performance than the other state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy and robustness.
How Do We Move: Modeling Human Movement with System Dynamics
Authors: Hua Wei, Dongkuan Xu, Junjie Liang, Zhenhui Li
Date: 2020-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

Modeling how human moves in the space is useful for policy-making in transportation, public safety, and public health. Human movements can be viewed as a dynamic process that human transits between states (\eg, locations) over time. In the human world where intelligent agents like humans or vehicles with human drivers play an important role, the states of agents mostly describe human activities, and the state transition is influenced by both the human decisions and physical constraints from the real-world system (\eg, agents need to spend time to move over a certain distance). Therefore, the modeling of state transition should include the modeling of the agent's decision process and the physical system dynamics. In this paper, we propose \ours to model state transition in human movement from a novel perspective, by learning the decision model and integrating the system dynamics. \ours learns the human movement with Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning and integrates the stochastic constraints from system dynamics in the learning process. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to learn to model the state transition of moving agents with system dynamics. In extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method can generate trajectories similar to real-world ones, and outperform the state-of-the-art methods in predicting the next location and generating long-term future trajectories.
Permutohedral-GCN: Graph Convolutional Networks with Global Attention
Authors: Hesham Mostafa, Marcel Nassar
Date: 2020-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Node Classification

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) update a node's feature vector by aggregating features from its neighbors in the graph. This ignores potentially useful contributions from distant nodes. Identifying such useful distant contributions is challenging due to scalability issues (too many nodes can potentially contribute) and oversmoothing (aggregating features from too many nodes risks swamping out relevant information and may result in nodes having different labels but indistinguishable features). We introduce a global attention mechanism where a node can selectively attend to, and aggregate features from, any other node in the graph. The attention coefficients depend on the Euclidean distance between learnable node embeddings, and we show that the resulting attention-based global aggregation scheme is analogous to high-dimensional Gaussian filtering. This makes it possible to use efficient approximate Gaussian filtering techniques to implement our attention-based global aggregation scheme. By employing an approximate filtering method based on the permutohedral lattice, the time complexity of our proposed global aggregation scheme only grows linearly with the number of nodes. The resulting GCNs, which we term permutohedral-GCNs, are differentiable and trained end-to-end, and they achieve state of the art performance on several node classification benchmarks.