pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TCT: A Cross-supervised Learning Method for Multimodal Sequence Representation
Authors: Wubo Li, Wei Zou, Xiangang Li
Date: 2019-10-23 00:00:00

Multimodalities provide promising performance than unimodality in most tasks. However, learning the semantic of the representations from multimodalities efficiently is extremely challenging. To tackle this, we propose the Transformer based Cross-modal Translator (TCT) to learn unimodal sequence representations by translating from other related multimodal sequences on a supervised learning method. Combined TCT with Multimodal Transformer Network (MTN), we evaluate MTN-TCT on the video-grounded dialogue which uses multimodality. The proposed method reports new state-of-the-art performance on video-grounded dialogue which indicates representations learned by TCT are more semantics compared to directly use unimodality.
Sentiment Analysis for Arabic in Social Media Network: A Systematic Mapping Study
Authors: Mohamed Elhag M. Abo, Ram Gopal Raj, Atika Qazi, Abubakar Zakari
Date: 2019-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Arabic Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Analysis

With the expansion in tenders on the Internet and social media, Arabic Sentiment Analysis (ASA) has assumed a significant position in the field of text mining study and has since remained used to explore the sentiments of users about services, various products or topics conversed over the Internet. This mapping paper designs to comprehensively investigate the papers demographics, fertility, and directions of the ASA research domain. Furthermore, plans to analyze current ASA techniques and find movements in the research. This paper describes a systematic mapping study (SMS) of 51 primary selected studies (PSS) is handled with the approval of an evidence-based systematic method to ensure handling of all related papers. The analyzed results showed the increase of both the ASA research area and numbers of publications per year since 2015. Three main research facets were found, i.e. validation, solution, and evaluation research, with solution research becoming more treatment than another research type. Therefore numerous contribution facets were singled out. In totality, the general demographics of the ASA research field were highlighted and discussed
M3ER: Multiplicative Multimodal Emotion Recognition Using Facial, Textual, and Speech Cues
Authors: Trisha Mittal, Uttaran Bhattacharya, Rohan Chandra, Aniket Bera, Dinesh Manocha
Date: 2019-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Multimodal Emotion Recognition

We present M3ER, a learning-based method for emotion recognition from multiple input modalities. Our approach combines cues from multiple co-occurring modalities (such as face, text, and speech) and also is more robust than other methods to sensor noise in any of the individual modalities. M3ER models a novel, data-driven multiplicative fusion method to combine the modalities, which learn to emphasize the more reliable cues and suppress others on a per-sample basis. By introducing a check step which uses Canonical Correlational Analysis to differentiate between ineffective and effective modalities, M3ER is robust to sensor noise. M3ER also generates proxy features in place of the ineffectual modalities. We demonstrate the efficiency of our network through experimentation on two benchmark datasets, IEMOCAP and CMU-MOSEI. We report a mean accuracy of 82.7% on IEMOCAP and 89.0% on CMU-MOSEI, which, collectively, is an improvement of about 5% over prior work.
Sparse estimation via $\ell_q$ optimization method in high-dimensional linear regression
Authors: Xin Li, Yaohua Hu, Chong Li, Xiaoqi Yang, Tianzi Jiang
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

In this paper, we discuss the statistical properties of the $\ell_q$ optimization methods $(0<q\leq 1)$, including the $\ell_q$ minimization method and the $\ell_q$ regularization method, for estimating a sparse parameter from noisy observations in high-dimensional linear regression with either a deterministic or random design. For this purpose, we introduce a general $q$-restricted eigenvalue condition (REC) and provide its sufficient conditions in terms of several widely-used regularity conditions such as sparse eigenvalue condition, restricted isometry property, and mutual incoherence property. By virtue of the $q$-REC, we exhibit the stable recovery property of the $\ell_q$ optimization methods for either deterministic or random designs by showing that the $\ell_2$ recovery bound $O(\epsilon^2)$ for the $\ell_q$ minimization method and the oracle inequality and $\ell_2$ recovery bound $O(\lambda^{\frac{2}{2-q}}s)$ for the $\ell_q$ regularization method hold respectively with high probability. The results in this paper are nonasymptotic and only assume the weak $q$-REC. The preliminary numerical results verify the established statistical property and demonstrate the advantages of the $\ell_q$ regularization method over some existing sparse optimization methods.
AI in Pursuit of Happiness, Finding Only Sadness: Multi-Modal Facial Emotion Recognition Challenge
Authors: Carl Norman
Date: 2019-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Facial Emotion Recognition

The importance of automated Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) grows the more common human-machine interactions become, which will only continue to increase dramatically with time. A common method to describe human sentiment or feeling is the categorical model the `7 basic emotions', consisting of `Angry', `Disgust', `Fear', `Happiness', `Sadness', `Surprise' and `Neutral'. The `Emotion Recognition in the Wild' (EmotiW) competition is now in its 7th year and has become the standard benchmark for measuring FER performance. The focus of this paper is the EmotiW sub-challenge of classifying videos in the `Acted Facial Expression in the Wild' (AFEW) dataset, consisting of both visual and audio modalities, into one of the above classes. Machine learning has exploded as a research topic in recent years, with advancements in `Deep Learning' a key part of this. Although Deep Learning techniques have been widely applied to the FER task by entrants in previous years, this paper has two main contributions: (i) to apply the latest `state-of-the-art' visual and temporal networks and (ii) exploring various methods of fusing features extracted from the visual and audio elements to enrich the information available to the final model making the prediction. There are a number of complex issues that arise when trying to classify emotions for `in-the-wild' video sequences, which the above two approaches attempt to directly address. There are some positive findings when comparing the results of this paper to past submissions, indicating that further research into the proposed methods and fine-tuning of the models deployed, could result in another step forwards in the field of automated FER.
Fast Glare Detection in Document Images
Authors: Dmitry Rodin, Nikita Orlov
Date: 2019-10-24 00:00:00

Glare is a phenomenon that occurs when the scene has a reflection of a light source or has one in it. This luminescence can hide useful information from the image, making text recognition virtually impossible. In this paper, we propose an approach to detect glare in images taken by users via mobile devices. Our method divides the document into blocks and collects luminance features from the original image and black-white strokes histograms of the binarized image. Finally, glare is detected using a convolutional neural network on the aforementioned histograms and luminance features. The network consists of several feature extraction blocks, one for each type of input, and the detection block, which calculates the resulting glare heatmap based on the output of the extraction part. The proposed solution detects glare with high recall and f-score.
Mining urban lifestyles: urban computing, human behavior and recommender systems
Authors: Sharon Xu, Riccardo Di Clemente, Marta C. González
Date: 2019-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

In the last decade, the digital age has sharply redefined the way we study human behavior. With the advancement of data storage and sensing technologies, electronic records now encompass a diverse spectrum of human activity, ranging from location data, phone and email communication to Twitter activity and open-source contributions on Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. In particular, the study of the shopping and mobility patterns of individual consumers has the potential to give deeper insight into the lifestyles and infrastructure of the region. Credit card records (CCRs) provide detailed insight into purchase behavior and have been found to have inherent regularity in consumer shopping patterns; call detail records (CDRs) present new opportunities to understand human mobility, analyze wealth, and model social network dynamics. In this chapter, we jointly model the lifestyles of individuals, a more challenging problem with higher variability when compared to the aggregated behavior of city regions. Using collective matrix factorization, we propose a unified dual view of lifestyles. Understanding these lifestyles will not only inform commercial opportunities, but also help policymakers and nonprofit organizations understand the characteristics and needs of the entire region, as well as of the individuals within that region. The applications of this range from targeted advertisements and promotions to the diffusion of digital financial services among low-income groups.
Attentive Geo-Social Group Recommendation
Authors: Fei Yu, Feiyi Fan, Shouxu Jiang, Kaiping Zheng
Date: 2019-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Single Particle Analysis

Social activities play an important role in people's daily life since they interact. For recommendations based on social activities, it is vital to have not only the activity information but also individuals' social relations. Thanks to the geo-social networks and widespread use of location-aware mobile devices, massive geo-social data is now readily available for exploitation by the recommendation system. In this paper, a novel group recommendation method, called attentive geo-social group recommendation, is proposed to recommend the target user with both activity locations and a group of users that may join the activities. We present an attention mechanism to model the influence of the target user $u_T$ in candidate user groups that satisfy the social constraints. It helps to retrieve the optimal user group and activity topic candidates, as well as explains the group decision-making process. Once the user group and topics are retrieved, a novel efficient spatial query algorithm SPA-DF is employed to determine the activity location under the constraints of the given user group and activity topic candidates. The proposed method is evaluated in real-world datasets and the experimental results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms baseline methods.
Multi-MotifGAN (MMGAN): Motif-targeted Graph Generation and Prediction
Authors: Anuththari Gamage, Eli Chien, Jianhao Peng, Olgica Milenkovic
Date: 2019-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Graph Generation, Prediction

Generative graph models create instances of graphs that mimic the properties of real-world networks. Generative models are successful at retaining pairwise associations in the underlying networks but often fail to capture higher-order connectivity patterns known as network motifs. Different types of graphs contain different network motifs, an example of which are triangles that often arise in social and biological networks. It is hence vital to capture these higher-order structures to simulate real-world networks accurately. We propose Multi-MotifGAN (MMGAN), a motif-targeted Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) that generalizes the benchmark NetGAN approach. The generalization consists of combining multiple biased random walks, each of which captures a different motif structure. MMGAN outperforms NetGAN at creating new graphs that accurately reflect the network motif statistics of input graphs such as Citeseer, Cora and Facebook.
Diffusion Improves Graph Learning
Authors: Johannes Gasteiger, Stefan Weißenberger, Stephan Günnemann
Date: 2019-10-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Clustering, Graph Learning, Node Classification

Graph convolution is the core of most Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and usually approximated by message passing between direct (one-hop) neighbors. In this work, we remove the restriction of using only the direct neighbors by introducing a powerful, yet spatially localized graph convolution: Graph diffusion convolution (GDC). GDC leverages generalized graph diffusion, examples of which are the heat kernel and personalized PageRank. It alleviates the problem of noisy and often arbitrarily defined edges in real graphs. We show that GDC is closely related to spectral-based models and thus combines the strengths of both spatial (message passing) and spectral methods. We demonstrate that replacing message passing with graph diffusion convolution consistently leads to significant performance improvements across a wide range of models on both supervised and unsupervised tasks and a variety of datasets. Furthermore, GDC is not limited to GNNs but can trivially be combined with any graph-based model or algorithm (e.g. spectral clustering) without requiring any changes to the latter or affecting its computational complexity. Our implementation is available online.
Fair treatment allocations in social networks
Authors: James Atwood, Hansa Srinivasan, Yoni Halpern, D. Sculley
Date: 2019-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Simulations of infectious disease spread have long been used to understand how epidemics evolve and how to effectively treat them. However, comparatively little attention has been paid to understanding the fairness implications of different treatment strategies -- that is, how might such strategies distribute the expected disease burden differentially across various subgroups or communities in the population? In this work, we define the precision disease control problem -- the problem of optimally allocating vaccines in a social network in a step-by-step fashion -- and we use the ML Fairness Gym to simulate epidemic control and study it from both an efficiency and fairness perspective. We then present an exploratory analysis of several different environments and discuss the fairness implications of different treatment strategies.
UrbanRhythm: Revealing Urban Dynamics Hidden in Mobility Data
Authors: Sirui Song, Tong Xia, Depeng Jin, Pan Hui, Yong Li
Date: 2019-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Understanding urban dynamics, i.e., how the types and intensity of urban residents' activities in the city change along with time, is of urgent demand for building an efficient and livable city. Nonetheless, this is challenging due to the expanding urban population and the complicated spatial distribution of residents. In this paper, to reveal urban dynamics, we propose a novel system UrbanRhythm to reveal the urban dynamics hidden in human mobility data. UrbanRhythm addresses three questions: 1) What mobility feature should be used to present residents' high-dimensional activities in the city? 2) What are basic components of urban dynamics? 3) What are the long-term periodicity and short-term regularity of urban dynamics? In UrbanRhythm, we extract staying, leaving, arriving three attributes of mobility and use a image processing method Saak transform to calculate the mobility distribution feature. For the second question, several city states are identified by hierarchy clustering as the basic components of urban dynamics, such as sleeping states and working states. We further characterize the urban dynamics as the transform of city states along time axis. For the third question, we directly observe the long-term periodicity of urban dynamics from visualization. Then for the short-term regularity, we design a novel motif analysis method to discovery motifs as well as their hierarchy relationships. We evaluate our proposed system on two real-life datesets and validate the results according to App usage records. This study sheds light on urban dynamics hidden in human mobility and can further pave the way for more complicated mobility behavior modeling and deeper urban understanding.
Concept Drift Adaptive Physical Event Detection for Social Media Streams
Authors: Abhijit Suprem, Aibek Musaev, Calton Pu
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Event Detection

Event detection has long been the domain of physical sensors operating in a static dataset assumption. The prevalence of social media and web access has led to the emergence of social, or human sensors who report on events globally. This warrants development of event detectors that can take advantage of the truly dense and high spatial and temporal resolution data provided by more than 3 billion social users. The phenomenon of concept drift, which causes terms and signals associated with a topic to change over time, renders static machine learning ineffective. Towards this end, we present an application for physical event detection on social sensors that improves traditional physical event detection with concept drift adaptation. Our approach continuously updates its machine learning classifiers automatically, without the need for human intervention. It integrates data from heterogeneous sources and is designed to handle weak-signal events (landslides, wildfires) with around ten posts per event in addition to large-signal events (hurricanes, earthquakes) with hundreds of thousands of posts per event. We demonstrate a landslide detector on our application that detects almost 350% more land-slides compared to static approaches. Our application has high performance: using classifiers trained in 2014, achieving event detection accuracy of 0.988, compared to 0.762 for static approaches.
Correlated Feature Selection for Tweet Spam Classification
Authors: Prakamya Mishra
Date: 2019-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, feature selection, General Classification

The identification of spam messages on social networks is a very challenging task. Social media sites like Twitter \& Facebook attracts a lot of users and companies to advertise and attract users of personal gains. These advertisements most of the time leads to spamming, which in return leads to poor user experience. The purpose of this paper is to undertake the analysis of spamming on Twitter. To classify spams efficiently, it is necessary to first understand the features of the spam tweets as well as identify attributes of the spammer. We extract both tweet based features and user-based features for our analysis and observe the correlation between these features. This step is necessary as we can reduce the training time if we combine the highly correlated features. Our proposed approach uses a classification model based on artificial neural networks to classify the tweets as spam or non-spam giving the highest accuracy of 97.57\% when compared with four other standard classifiers namely, SVM, K Nearest Neighbours, Naive Bayes, and Random Forest.
Temporal Graph Kernels for Classifying Dissemination Processes
Authors: Lutz Oettershagen, Nils M. Kriege, Christopher Morris, Petra Mutzel
Date: 2019-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Graph Classification

Many real-world graphs or networks are temporal, e.g., in a social network persons only interact at specific points in time. This information directs dissemination processes on the network, such as the spread of rumors, fake news, or diseases. However, the current state-of-the-art methods for supervised graph classification are designed mainly for static graphs and may not be able to capture temporal information. Hence, they are not powerful enough to distinguish between graphs modeling different dissemination processes. To address this, we introduce a framework to lift standard graph kernels to the temporal domain. Specifically, we explore three different approaches and investigate the trade-offs between loss of temporal information and efficiency. Moreover, to handle large-scale graphs, we propose stochastic variants of our kernels with provable approximation guarantees. We evaluate our methods on a wide range of real-world social networks. Our methods beat static kernels by a large margin in terms of accuracy while still being scalable to large graphs and data sets. Hence, we confirm that taking temporal information into account is crucial for the successful classification of dissemination processes.
Going Negative Online? -- A Study of Negative Advertising on Social Media
Authors: Hongtao Liu
Date: 2019-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Visualization, Sentiment Analysis

A growing number of empirical studies suggest that negative advertising is effective in campaigning, while the mechanisms are rarely mentioned. With the scandal of Cambridge Analytica and Russian intervention behind the Brexit and the 2016 presidential election, people have become aware of the political ads on social media and have pressured congress to restrict political advertising on social media. Following the related legislation, social media companies began disclosing their political ads archive for transparency during the summer of 2018 when the midterm election campaign was just beginning. This research collects the data of the related political ads in the context of the U.S. midterm elections since August to study the overall pattern of political ads on social media and uses sets of machine learning methods to conduct sentiment analysis on these ads to classify the negative ads. A novel approach is applied that uses AI image recognition to study the image data. Through data visualization, this research shows that negative advertising is still the minority, Republican advertisers and third party organizations are more likely to engage in negative advertising than their counterparts. Based on ordinal regressions, this study finds that anger evoked information-seeking is one of the main mechanisms causing negative ads to be more engaging and effective rather than the negative bias theory. Overall, this study provides a unique understanding of political advertising on social media by applying innovative data science methods. Further studies can extend the findings, methods, and datasets in this study, and several suggestions are given for future research.
Accurate Protein Structure Prediction by Embeddings and Deep Learning Representations
Authors: Iddo Drori, Darshan Thaker, Arjun Srivatsa, Daniel Jeong, Yueqi Wang, Linyong Nan, Fan Wu, Dimitri Leggas, Jinhao Lei, Weiyi Lu, Weilong Fu, Yuan Gao, Sashank Karri, Anand Kannan, Antonio Moretti, Mohammed AlQuraishi, Chen Keasar, Itsik Pe'er
Date: 2019-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Drug Design, Multiple Sequence Alignment, Prediction, Protein Structure Prediction

Proteins are the major building blocks of life, and actuators of almost all chemical and biophysical events in living organisms. Their native structures in turn enable their biological functions which have a fundamental role in drug design. This motivates predicting the structure of a protein from its sequence of amino acids, a fundamental problem in computational biology. In this work, we demonstrate state-of-the-art protein structure prediction (PSP) results using embeddings and deep learning models for prediction of backbone atom distance matrices and torsion angles. We recover 3D coordinates of backbone atoms and reconstruct full atom protein by optimization. We create a new gold standard dataset of proteins which is comprehensive and easy to use. Our dataset consists of amino acid sequences, Q8 secondary structures, position specific scoring matrices, multiple sequence alignment co-evolutionary features, backbone atom distance matrices, torsion angles, and 3D coordinates. We evaluate the quality of our structure prediction by RMSD on the latest Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) test data and demonstrate competitive results with the winning teams and AlphaFold in CASP13 and supersede the results of the winning teams in CASP12. We make our data, models, and code publicly available.