pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
JUCBNMT at WMT2018 News Translation Task: Character Based Neural Machine Translation of Finnish to English
Authors: Sainik Kumar Mahata, Dipankar Das, Sivaji Bandyopadhyay
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2018 10
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

In the current work, we present a description of the system submitted to WMT 2018 News Translation Shared task. The system was created to translate news text from Finnish to English. The system used a Character Based Neural Machine Translation model to accomplish the given task. The current paper documents the preprocessing steps, the description of the submitted system and the results produced using the same. Our system garnered a BLEU score of 12.9.
Sentiment Analysis at SEPLN (TASS)-2019: Sentiment Analysis at Tweet level using Deep Learning
Authors: Avishek Garain, Sainik Kumar Mahata
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

This paper describes the system submitted to "Sentiment Analysis at SEPLN (TASS)-2019" shared task. The task includes sentiment analysis of Spanish tweets, where the tweets are in different dialects spoken in Spain, Peru, Costa Rica, Uruguay and Mexico. The tweets are short (up to 240 characters) and the language is informal, i.e., it contains misspellings, emojis, onomatopeias etc. Sentiment analysis includes classification of the tweets into 4 classes, viz., Positive, Negative, Neutral and None. For preparing the proposed system, we use Deep Learning networks like LSTMs.
Solving a Flowshop Scheduling Problem with Answer Set Programming: Exploiting the Problem to Reduce the Number of Combinations
Authors: Carmen Leticia García-Mata, Pedro Rafael Márquez-Gutiérrez
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Planning and scheduling have been a central theme of research in computer science. In particular, the simplicity of the theoretical approach of a no-wait flowshop scheduling problem does not allow to perceive the problem complexity at first sight. In this paper the applicability of the Answer Set Programming language is explored for the solution of the Automated Wet-etching scheduling problem in Semiconductor Manufacturing Systems. A method based in ranges is proposed in order to reduce the huge number of combinations.
Hateful People or Hateful Bots? Detection and Characterization of Bots Spreading Religious Hatred in Arabic Social Media
Authors: Nuha Albadi, Maram Kurdi, Shivakant Mishra
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation

Arabic Twitter space is crawling with bots that fuel political feuds, spread misinformation, and proliferate sectarian rhetoric. While efforts have long existed to analyze and detect English bots, Arabic bot detection and characterization remains largely understudied. In this work, we contribute new insights into the role of bots in spreading religious hatred on Arabic Twitter and introduce a novel regression model that can accurately identify Arabic language bots. Our assessment shows that existing tools that are highly accurate in detecting English bots don't perform as well on Arabic bots. We identify the possible reasons for this poor performance, perform a thorough analysis of linguistic, content, behavioral and network features, and report on the most informative features that distinguish Arabic bots from humans as well as the differences between Arabic and English bots. Our results mark an important step toward understanding the behavior of malicious bots on Arabic Twitter and pave the way for a more effective Arabic bot detection tools.
Domain-Independent Cost-Optimal Planning in ASP
Authors: David Spies, Jia-Huai You, Ryan Hayward
Date: 2019-07-31 00:00:00

We investigate the problem of cost-optimal planning in ASP. Current ASP planners can be trivially extended to a cost-optimal one by adding weak constraints, but only for a given makespan (number of steps). It is desirable to have a planner that guarantees global optimality. In this paper, we present two approaches to addressing this problem. First, we show how to engineer a cost-optimal planner composed of two ASP programs running in parallel. Using lessons learned from this, we then develop an entirely new approach to cost-optimal planning, stepless planning, which is completely free of makespan. Experiments to compare the two approaches with the only known cost-optimal planner in SAT reveal good potentials for stepless planning in ASP. The paper is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.
Session-Based Hotel Recommendations: Challenges and Future Directions
Authors: Jens Adamczak, Gerard-Paul Leyson, Peter Knees, Yashar Deldjoo, Farshad Bakhshandegan Moghaddam, Julia Neidhardt, Wolfgang Wörndl, Philipp Monreal
Date: 2019-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

In the year 2019, the Recommender Systems Challenge deals with a real-world task from the area of e-tourism for the first time, namely the recommendation of hotels in booking sessions. In this context, this article aims at identifying and investigating what we believe are important domain-specific challenges recommendation systems research in hotel search is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We focus on three main challenges, namely dealing with (1) multiple stakeholders and value-awareness in recommendations, (2) sparsity of user data and the extensive cold-start problem, and (3) dynamic input data and computational requirements. To this end, we review the state of the art toward solving these challenges and discuss shortcomings. We detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further evolution of the field. This article should, therefore, serve two purposes: giving the interested reader an overview of current challenges in the field and inspiring new approaches for the ACM Recommender Systems Challenge 2019 and beyond.
GraphFlow: Exploiting Conversation Flow with Graph Neural Networks for Conversational Machine Comprehension
Authors: Yu Chen, Lingfei Wu, Mohammed J. Zaki
Date: 2019-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Graph structure learning, Machine Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension

Conversational machine comprehension (MC) has proven significantly more challenging compared to traditional MC since it requires better utilization of conversation history. However, most existing approaches do not effectively capture conversation history and thus have trouble handling questions involving coreference or ellipsis. Moreover, when reasoning over passage text, most of them simply treat it as a word sequence without exploring rich semantic relationships among words. In this paper, we first propose a simple yet effective graph structure learning technique to dynamically construct a question and conversation history aware context graph at each conversation turn. Then we propose a novel Recurrent Graph Neural Network, and based on that, we introduce a flow mechanism to model the temporal dependencies in a sequence of context graphs. The proposed GraphFlow model can effectively capture conversational flow in a dialog, and shows competitive performance compared to existing state-of-the-art methods on CoQA, QuAC and DoQA benchmarks. In addition, visualization experiments show that our proposed model can offer good interpretability for the reasoning process.
Deduction Theorem: The Problematic Nature of Common Practice in Game Theory
Authors: Holger I. Meinhardt
Date: 2019-07-31 00:00:00

We consider the Deduction Theorem used in the literature of game theory to run a purported proof by contradiction. In the context of game theory, it is stated that if we have a proof of $\phi \vdash \varphi$, then we also have a proof of $\phi \Rightarrow \varphi$. Hence, the proof of $\phi \Rightarrow \varphi$ is deduced from a previously known statement. However, we argue that one has to manage to establish that a proof exists for the clauses $\phi$ and $\varphi$, i.e., they are known true statements in order to show that $\phi \vdash \varphi$ is provable, and that therefore $\phi \Rightarrow \varphi$ is provable as well. Thus, we are not allowed to assume that the clause $\phi$ or $\varphi$ is a true statement. This leads immediately to a wrong conclusion. Apart from this, we stress to other facts why the Deduction Theorem is not applicable to run a proof by contradiction. Finally, we present an example from industrial cooperation where the Deduction Theorem is not correctly applied with the consequence that the obtained result contradicts the well-known aggregation issue.
Ablate, Variate, and Contemplate: Visual Analytics for Discovering Neural Architectures
Authors: Dylan Cashman, Adam Perer, Remco Chang, Hendrik Strobelt
Date: 2019-07-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Deep learning models require the configuration of many layers and parameters in order to get good results. However, there are currently few systematic guidelines for how to configure a successful model. This means model builders often have to experiment with different configurations by manually programming different architectures (which is tedious and time consuming) or rely on purely automated approaches to generate and train the architectures (which is expensive). In this paper, we present Rapid Exploration of Model Architectures and Parameters, or REMAP, a visual analytics tool that allows a model builder to discover a deep learning model quickly via exploration and rapid experimentation of neural network architectures. In REMAP, the user explores the large and complex parameter space for neural network architectures using a combination of global inspection and local experimentation. Through a visual overview of a set of models, the user identifies interesting clusters of architectures. Based on their findings, the user can run ablation and variation experiments to identify the effects of adding, removing, or replacing layers in a given architecture and generate new models accordingly. They can also handcraft new models using a simple graphical interface. As a result, a model builder can build deep learning models quickly, efficiently, and without manual programming. We inform the design of REMAP through a design study with four deep learning model builders. Through a use case, we demonstrate that REMAP allows users to discover performant neural network architectures efficiently using visual exploration and user-defined semi-automated searches through the model space.
EcoLens: Visual Analysis of Urban Region Dynamics Using Traffic Data
Authors: Zhuochen Jin, Nan Cao, Yang Shi, Hanghang Tong, Yingcai Wu
Date: 2019-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Segmentation

The rapid development of urbanization during the past decades has significantly improved people's lives but also introduced new challenges on effective functional urban planning and transportation management. The functional regions defined based on a static boundary rarely reflect an individual's daily experience of the space in which they live and visit for a variety of purposes. Fortunately, the increasing availability of spatiotemporal data provides unprecedented opportunities for understanding the structure of an urban area in terms of people's activity pattern and how they form the latent regions over time. These ecological regions, where people temporarily share a similar moving behavior during a short period of time, could provide insights into urban planning and smart-city services. However, existing solutions are limited in their capacity of capturing the evolutionary patterns of dynamic latent regions within urban context. In this work, we introduce an interactive visual analysis approach, EcoLens, that allows analysts to progressively explore and analyze the complex dynamic segmentation patterns of a city using traffic data. We propose an extended non-negative Matrix Factorization based algorithm smoothed over both spatial and temporal dimensions to capture the spatiotemporal dynamics of the city. The algorithm also ensures the orthogonality of its result to facilitate the interpretation of different patterns. A suite of visualizations is designed to illustrate the dynamics of city segmentation and the corresponding interactions are added to support the exploration of the segmentation patterns over time. We evaluate the effectiveness of our system via case studies using a real-world dataset and a qualitative interview with the domain expert.
Why Does My Model Fail? Contrastive Local Explanations for Retail Forecasting
Authors: Ana Lucic, Hinda Haned, Maarten de Rijke
Date: 2019-07-17 00:00:00

In various business settings, there is an interest in using more complex machine learning techniques for sales forecasting. It is difficult to convince analysts, along with their superiors, to adopt these techniques since the models are considered to be "black boxes," even if they perform better than current models in use. We examine the impact of contrastive explanations about large errors on users' attitudes towards a "black-box'" model. We propose an algorithm, Monte Carlo Bounds for Reasonable Predictions. Given a large error, MC-BRP determines (1) feature values that would result in a reasonable prediction, and (2) general trends between each feature and the target, both based on Monte Carlo simulations. We evaluate on a real dataset with real users by conducting a user study with 75 participants to determine if explanations generated by MC-BRP help users understand why a prediction results in a large error, and if this promotes trust in an automatically-learned model. Our study shows that users are able to answer objective questions about the model's predictions with overall 81.1% accuracy when provided with these contrastive explanations. We show that users who saw MC-BRP explanations understand why the model makes large errors in predictions significantly more than users in the control group. We also conduct an in-depth analysis on the difference in attitudes between Practitioners and Researchers, and confirm that our results hold when conditioning on the users' background.
Learning Effective Embeddings From Crowdsourced Labels: An Educational Case Study
Authors: Guowei Xu, Wenbiao Ding, Jiliang Tang, Songfan Yang, Gale Yan Huang, Zitao Liu
Date: 2019-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Learning representation has been proven to be helpful in numerous machine learning tasks. The success of the majority of existing representation learning approaches often requires a large amount of consistent and noise-free labels. However, labels are not accessible in many real-world scenarios and they are usually annotated by the crowds. In practice, the crowdsourced labels are usually inconsistent among crowd workers given their diverse expertise and the number of crowdsourced labels is very limited. Thus, directly adopting crowdsourced labels for existing representation learning algorithms is inappropriate and suboptimal. In this paper, we investigate the above problem and propose a novel framework of \textbf{R}epresentation \textbf{L}earning with crowdsourced \textbf{L}abels, i.e., "RLL", which learns representation of data with crowdsourced labels by jointly and coherently solving the challenges introduced by limited and inconsistent labels. The proposed representation learning framework is evaluated in two real-world education applications. The experimental results demonstrate the benefits of our approach on learning representation from limited labeled data from the crowds, and show RLL is able to outperform state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, detailed experiments are conducted on RLL to fully understand its key components and the corresponding performance.
GraphDTA: prediction of drug–target binding affinity using graph convolutional networks
Authors: Thin Nguyen, Hang Le, Svetha Venkatesh
Date: 2019-07-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: bioRxiv 2019 7
Tasks: Deep Learning, Drug Discovery, Recommendation Systems

While the development of new drugs is costly, time consuming, and often accompanied with safety issues, drug repurposing, where old drugs with established safety are used for medical conditions other than originally developed, is an attractive alternative. Then, how the old drugs work on new targets becomes a crucial part of drug repurposing and gains much of interest. Several statistical and machine learning models have been proposed to estimate drug–target binding affinity and deep learning approaches have been shown to be among state-of-the-art methods. However, drugs and targets in these models were commonly represented in 1D strings, regardless the fact that molecules are by nature formed by the chemical bonding of atoms. In this work, we propose GraphDTA to capture the structural information of drugs, possibly enhancing the predictive power of the affinity. In particular, unlike competing methods, drugs are represented as graphs and graph convolutional networks are used to learn drug–target binding affinity. We trial our method on two benchmark drug–target binding affinity datasets and compare the performance with state-of-the-art models in the field. The results show that our proposed method can not only predict the affinity better than non-deep learning models, but also outperform competing deep learning approaches. This demonstrates the practical advantages of graph-based representation for molecules in providing accurate prediction of drug–target binding affinity. The application may also include any recommendation systems where either or both of the user- and product-like sides can be represented in graphs.
Performance prediction of data streams on high-performance architecture
Authors: Bhaskar Gautam, Annappa Basava
Date: 2019-01-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences 2019 1
Tasks: Benchmarking, Dimensionality Reduction, Gaussian Processes, Management, Prediction, regression, Scheduling, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Worldwide sensor streams are expanding continuously with unbounded velocity in volume, and for this acceleration, there is an adaptation of large stream data processing system from the homogeneous to rack-scale architecture which makes serious concern in the domain of workload optimization, scheduling, and resource management algorithms. Our proposed framework is based on providing architecture independent performance prediction model to enable resource adaptive distributed stream data processing platform. It is comprised of seven pre-defined domain for dynamic data stream metrics including a self-driven model which tries to fit these metrics using ridge regularization regression algorithm. Another significant contribution lies in fully-automated performance prediction model inherited from the state-of-the-art distributed data management system for distributed stream processing systems using Gaussian processes regression that cluster metrics with the help of dimensionality reduction algorithm. We implemented its base on Apache Heron and evaluated with proposed Benchmark Suite comprising of five domain-specific topologies. To assess the proposed methodologies, we forcefully ingest tuple skewness among the benchmarking topologies to set up the ground truth for predictions and found that accuracy of predicting the performance of data streams increased up to 80.62% from 66.36% along with the reduction of error from 37.14 to 16.06%.
Text Data Augmentation Made Simple By Leveraging NLP Cloud APIs
Authors: Claude Coulombe
Date: 2018-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Text Augmentation

In practice, it is common to find oneself with far too little text data to train a deep neural network. This "Big Data Wall" represents a challenge for minority language communities on the Internet, organizations, laboratories and companies that compete the GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft). While most of the research effort in text data augmentation aims on the long-term goal of finding end-to-end learning solutions, which is equivalent to "using neural networks to feed neural networks", this engineering work focuses on the use of practical, robust, scalable and easy-to-implement data augmentation pre-processing techniques similar to those that are successful in computer vision. Several text augmentation techniques have been experimented. Some existing ones have been tested for comparison purposes such as noise injection or the use of regular expressions. Others are modified or improved techniques like lexical replacement. Finally more innovative ones, such as the generation of paraphrases using back-translation or by the transformation of syntactic trees, are based on robust, scalable, and easy-to-use NLP Cloud APIs. All the text augmentation techniques studied, with an amplification factor of only 5, increased the accuracy of the results in a range of 4.3% to 21.6%, with significant statistical fluctuations, on a standardized task of text polarity prediction. Some standard deep neural network architectures were tested: the multilayer perceptron (MLP), the long short-term memory recurrent network (LSTM) and the bidirectional LSTM (biLSTM). Classical XGBoost algorithm has been tested with up to 2.5% improvements.
Semantic Concept Spaces: Guided Topic Model Refinement using Word-Embedding Projections
Authors: Mennatallah El-Assady, Rebecca Kehlbeck, Christopher Collins, Daniel Keim, Oliver Deussen
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

We present a framework that allows users to incorporate the semantics of their domain knowledge for topic model refinement while remaining model-agnostic. Our approach enables users to (1) understand the semantic space of the model, (2) identify regions of potential conflicts and problems, and (3) readjust the semantic relation of concepts based on their understanding, directly influencing the topic modeling. These tasks are supported by an interactive visual analytics workspace that uses word-embedding projections to define concept regions which can then be refined. The user-refined concepts are independent of a particular document collection and can be transferred to related corpora. All user interactions within the concept space directly affect the semantic relations of the underlying vector space model, which, in turn, change the topic modeling. In addition to direct manipulation, our system guides the users' decision-making process through recommended interactions that point out potential improvements. This targeted refinement aims at minimizing the feedback required for an efficient human-in-the-loop process. We confirm the improvements achieved through our approach in two user studies that show topic model quality improvements through our visual knowledge externalization and learning process.
A Natural-language-based Visual Query Approach of Uncertain Human Trajectories
Authors: Zhaosong Huang, Ye Zhao, Wei Chen, Shengjie Gao, Kejie Yu, Weixia Xu, Mingjie Tang, Minfeng Zhu, Mingliang Xu
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

Visual querying is essential for interactively exploring massive trajectory data. However, the data uncertainty imposes profound challenges to fulfill advanced analytics requirements. On the one hand, many underlying data does not contain accurate geographic coordinates, e.g., positions of a mobile phone only refer to the regions (i.e., mobile cell stations) in which it resides, instead of accurate GPS coordinates. On the other hand, domain experts and general users prefer a natural way, such as using a natural language sentence, to access and analyze massive movement data. In this paper, we propose a visual analytics approach that can extract spatial-temporal constraints from a textual sentence and support an effective query method over uncertain mobile trajectory data. It is built up on encoding massive, spatially uncertain trajectories by the semantic information of the POIs and regions covered by them, and then storing the trajectory documents in text database with an effective indexing scheme. The visual interface facilitates query condition specification, situation-aware visualization, and semantic exploration of large trajectory data. Usage scenarios on real-world human mobility datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.