pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Breath analysis by ultra-sensitive broadband laser spectroscopy detects SARS-CoV-2 infection
Authors: Qizhong Liang, Ya-Chu Chan, Jutta Toscano, Kristen K. Bjorkman, Leslie A. Leinwand, Roy Parker, Eva S. Nozik, David J. Nesbitt, Jun Ye
Date: 2022-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Rapid testing is essential to fighting pandemics such as COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Exhaled human breath contains multiple volatile molecules providing powerful potential for non-invasive diagnosis of diverse medical conditions. We investigated breath detection of SARS-CoV-2 infection using cavity-enhanced direct frequency comb spectroscopy (CE-DFCS), a state-of-the-art laser spectroscopic technique capable of a real-time massive collection of broadband molecular absorption features at ro-vibrational quantum state resolution and at parts-per-trillion volume detection sensitivity. Using a total of 170 individual breath samples (83 positive and 87 negative with SARS-CoV-2 based on Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction tests), we report excellent discrimination capability for SARS-CoV-2 infection with an area under the Receiver-Operating-Characteristics curve of 0.849(4). Our results support the development of CE-DFCS as an alternative, rapid, non-invasive test for COVID-19 and highlight its remarkable potential for optical diagnoses of diverse biological conditions and disease states.
Cedille: A large autoregressive French language model
Authors: Martin Müller, Florian Laurent
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, Zero-Shot Learning

Scaling up the size and training of autoregressive language models has enabled novel ways of solving Natural Language Processing tasks using zero-shot and few-shot learning. While extreme-scale language models such as GPT-3 offer multilingual capabilities, zero-shot learning for languages other than English remain largely unexplored. Here, we introduce Cedille, a large open source auto-regressive language model, specifically trained for the French language. Our results show that Cedille outperforms existing French language models and is competitive with GPT-3 on a range of French zero-shot benchmarks. Furthermore, we provide an in-depth comparison of the toxicity exhibited by these models, showing that Cedille marks an improvement in language model safety thanks to dataset filtering.
Robust Dialogue State Tracking with Weak Supervision and Sparse Data
Authors: Michael Heck, Nurul Lubis, Carel van Niekerk, Shutong Feng, Christian Geishauser, Hsien-Chin Lin, Milica Gašić
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue State Tracking

Generalising dialogue state tracking (DST) to new data is especially challenging due to the strong reliance on abundant and fine-grained supervision during training. Sample sparsity, distributional shift and the occurrence of new concepts and topics frequently lead to severe performance degradation during inference. In this paper we propose a training strategy to build extractive DST models without the need for fine-grained manual span labels. Two novel input-level dropout methods mitigate the negative impact of sample sparsity. We propose a new model architecture with a unified encoder that supports value as well as slot independence by leveraging the attention mechanism. We combine the strengths of triple copy strategy DST and value matching to benefit from complementary predictions without violating the principle of ontology independence. Our experiments demonstrate that an extractive DST model can be trained without manual span labels. Our architecture and training strategies improve robustness towards sample sparsity, new concepts and topics, leading to state-of-the-art performance on a range of benchmarks. We further highlight our model's ability to effectively learn from non-dialogue data.
Efficient Adapter Transfer of Self-Supervised Speech Models for Automatic Speech Recognition
Authors: Bethan Thomas, Samuel Kessler, Salah Karout
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Self-Supervised Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a powerful tool that allows learning of underlying representations from unlabeled data. Transformer based models such as wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT are leading the field in the speech domain. Generally these models are fine-tuned on a small amount of labeled data for a downstream task such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). This involves re-training the majority of the model for each task. Adapters are small lightweight modules which are commonly used in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to adapt pre-trained models to new tasks. In this paper we propose applying adapters to wav2vec 2.0 to reduce the number of parameters required for downstream ASR tasks, and increase scalability of the model to multiple tasks or languages. Using adapters we can perform ASR while training fewer than 10% of parameters per task compared to full fine-tuning with little degradation of performance. Ablations show that applying adapters into just the top few layers of the pre-trained network gives similar performance to full transfer, supporting the theory that higher pre-trained layers encode more phonemic information, and further optimizing efficiency.
Moving Other Way: Exploring Word Mover Distance Extensions
Authors: Ilya Smirnov, Ivan P. Yamshchikov
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Document Classification, Position, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

The word mover's distance (WMD) is a popular semantic similarity metric for two texts. This position paper studies several possible extensions of WMD. We experiment with the frequency of words in the corpus as a weighting factor and the geometry of the word vector space. We validate possible extensions of WMD on six document classification datasets. Some proposed extensions show better results in terms of the k-nearest neighbor classification error than WMD.
Document-Level Event Extraction via Human-Like Reading Process
Authors: Shiyao Cui, Xin Cong, Bowen Yu, Tingwen Liu, Yucheng Wang, Jinqiao Shi
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Document-level Event Extraction, Event Extraction

Document-level Event Extraction (DEE) is particularly tricky due to the two challenges it poses: scattering-arguments and multi-events. The first challenge means that arguments of one event record could reside in different sentences in the document, while the second one reflects one document may simultaneously contain multiple such event records. Motivated by humans' reading cognitive to extract information of interests, in this paper, we propose a method called HRE (Human Reading inspired Extractor for Document Events), where DEE is decomposed into these two iterative stages, rough reading and elaborate reading. Specifically, the first stage browses the document to detect the occurrence of events, and the second stage serves to extract specific event arguments. For each concrete event role, elaborate reading hierarchically works from sentences to characters to locate arguments across sentences, thus the scattering-arguments problem is tackled. Meanwhile, rough reading is explored in a multi-round manner to discover undetected events, thus the multi-events problem is handled. Experiment results show the superiority of HRE over prior competitive methods.
Machine Translation from Signed to Spoken Languages: State of the Art and Challenges
Authors: Mathieu De Coster, Dimitar Shterionov, Mieke Van Herreweghe, Joni Dambre
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sign Language Translation, Systematic Literature Review, Translation

Automatic translation from signed to spoken languages is an interdisciplinary research domain, lying on the intersection of computer vision, machine translation and linguistics. Nevertheless, research in this domain is performed mostly by computer scientists in isolation. As the domain is becoming increasingly popular - the majority of scientific papers on the topic of sign language translation have been published in the past three years - we provide an overview of the state of the art as well as some required background in the different related disciplines. We give a high-level introduction to sign language linguistics and machine translation to illustrate the requirements of automatic sign language translation. We present a systematic literature review to illustrate the state of the art in the domain and then, harking back to the requirements, lay out several challenges for future research. We find that significant advances have been made on the shoulders of spoken language machine translation research. However, current approaches are often not linguistically motivated or are not adapted to the different input modality of sign languages. We explore challenges related to the representation of sign language data, the collection of datasets, the need for interdisciplinary research and requirements for moving beyond research, towards applications. Based on our findings, we advocate for interdisciplinary research and to base future research on linguistic analysis of sign languages. Furthermore, the inclusion of deaf and hearing end users of sign language translation applications in use case identification, data collection and evaluation is of the utmost importance in the creation of useful sign language translation models. We recommend iterative, human-in-the-loop, design and development of sign language translation models.
Gender stereotypes in the mediated personalization of politics: Empirical evidence from a lexical, syntactic and sentiment analysis
Authors: Emanuele Brugnoli, Rosaria Simone, Marco Delmastro
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

The media attention to the personal sphere of famous and important individuals has become a key element of the gender narrative. Here we combine lexical, syntactic and sentiment analysis to investigate the role of gender in the personalization of a wide range of political office holders in Italy during the period 2017-2020. On the basis of a score for words that is introduced to account for gender unbalance in both representative and news coverage, we show that the political personalization in Italy is more detrimental for women than men, with the persistence of entrenched stereotypes including a masculine connotation of leadership, the resulting women's unsuitability to hold political functions, and a greater deal of focus on their attractiveness and body parts. In addition, women politicians are covered with a more negative tone than their men counterpart when personal details are reported. Further, the major contribution to the observed gender differences comes from online news rather than print news, suggesting that the expression of certain stereotypes may be better conveyed when click baiting and personal targeting have a major impact.
Towards Learning Through Open-Domain Dialog
Authors: Eugénio Ribeiro, Ricardo Ribeiro, David Martins de Matos
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Open-Domain Dialog

The development of artificial agents able to learn through dialog without domain restrictions has the potential to allow machines to learn how to perform tasks in a similar manner to humans and change how we relate to them. However, research in this area is practically nonexistent. In this paper, we identify the modifications required for a dialog system to be able to learn from the dialog and propose generic approaches that can be used to implement those modifications. More specifically, we discuss how knowledge can be extracted from the dialog, used to update the agent's semantic network, and grounded in action and observation. This way, we hope to raise awareness for this subject, so that it can become a focus of research in the future.
Comparison and Combination of Sentence Embeddings Derived from Different Supervision Signals
Authors: Hayato Tsukagoshi, Ryohei Sasano, Koichi Takeda
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: *SEM (NAACL) 2022 7
Tasks: Natural Language Inference, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding, Sentence Embeddings, STS

There have been many successful applications of sentence embedding methods. However, it has not been well understood what properties are captured in the resulting sentence embeddings depending on the supervision signals. In this paper, we focus on two types of sentence embedding methods with similar architectures and tasks: one fine-tunes pre-trained language models on the natural language inference task, and the other fine-tunes pre-trained language models on word prediction task from its definition sentence, and investigate their properties. Specifically, we compare their performances on semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks using STS datasets partitioned from two perspectives: 1) sentence source and 2) superficial similarity of the sentence pairs, and compare their performances on the downstream and probing tasks. Furthermore, we attempt to combine the two methods and demonstrate that combining the two methods yields substantially better performance than the respective methods on unsupervised STS tasks and downstream tasks.
User Satisfaction Estimation with Sequential Dialogue Act Modeling in Goal-oriented Conversational Systems
Authors: Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Wai Lam, Hong Cheng, Helen Meng
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00

User Satisfaction Estimation (USE) is an important yet challenging task in goal-oriented conversational systems. Whether the user is satisfied with the system largely depends on the fulfillment of the user's needs, which can be implicitly reflected by users' dialogue acts. However, existing studies often neglect the sequential transitions of dialogue act or rely heavily on annotated dialogue act labels when utilizing dialogue acts to facilitate USE. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, namely USDA, to incorporate the sequential dynamics of dialogue acts for predicting user satisfaction, by jointly learning User Satisfaction Estimation and Dialogue Act Recognition tasks. In specific, we first employ a Hierarchical Transformer to encode the whole dialogue context, with two task-adaptive pre-training strategies to be a second-phase in-domain pre-training for enhancing the dialogue modeling ability. In terms of the availability of dialogue act labels, we further develop two variants of USDA to capture the dialogue act information in either supervised or unsupervised manners. Finally, USDA leverages the sequential transitions of both content and act features in the dialogue to predict the user satisfaction. Experimental results on four benchmark goal-oriented dialogue datasets across different applications show that the proposed method substantially and consistently outperforms existing methods on USE, and validate the important role of dialogue act sequences in USE.
RerrFact: Reduced Evidence Retrieval Representations for Scientific Claim Verification
Authors: Ashish Rana, Deepanshu Khanna, Tirthankar Ghosal, Muskaan Singh, Harpreet Singh, Prashant Singh Rana
Date: 2022-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Binary Classification, Claim Verification, Misinformation, Retrieval

Exponential growth in digital information outlets and the race to publish has made scientific misinformation more prevalent than ever. However, the task to fact-verify a given scientific claim is not straightforward even for researchers. Scientific claim verification requires in-depth knowledge and great labor from domain experts to substantiate supporting and refuting evidence from credible scientific sources. The SciFact dataset and corresponding task provide a benchmarking leaderboard to the community to develop automatic scientific claim verification systems via extracting and assimilating relevant evidence rationales from source abstracts. In this work, we propose a modular approach that sequentially carries out binary classification for every prediction subtask as in the SciFact leaderboard. Our simple classifier-based approach uses reduced abstract representations to retrieve relevant abstracts. These are further used to train the relevant rationale-selection model. Finally, we carry out two-step stance predictions that first differentiate non-relevant rationales and then identify supporting or refuting rationales for a given claim. Experimentally, our system RerrFact with no fine-tuning, simple design, and a fraction of model parameters fairs competitively on the leaderboard against large-scale, modular, and joint modeling approaches. We make our codebase available at https://github.com/ashishrana160796/RerrFact.
Classification on Sentence Embeddings for Legal Assistance
Authors: Arka Mitra
Date: 2022-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Sentence, Sentence Embeddings

Legal proceedings take plenty of time and also cost a lot. The lawyers have to do a lot of work in order to identify the different sections of prior cases and statutes. The paper tries to solve the first tasks in AILA2021 (Artificial Intelligence for Legal Assistance) that will be held in FIRE2021 (Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation). The task is to semantically segment the document into different assigned one of the 7 predefined labels or "rhetorical roles." The paper uses BERT to obtain the sentence embeddings from a sentence, and then a linear classifier is used to output the final prediction. The experiments show that when more weightage is assigned to the class with the highest frequency, the results are better than those when more weightage is given to the class with a lower frequency. In task 1, the team legalNLP obtained a F1 score of 0.22.
Multilingual Hate Speech and Offensive Content Detection using Modified Cross-entropy Loss
Authors: Arka Mitra, Priyanshu Sankhala
Date: 2022-02-05 00:00:00

The number of increased social media users has led to a lot of people misusing these platforms to spread offensive content and use hate speech. Manual tracking the vast amount of posts is impractical so it is necessary to devise automated methods to identify them quickly. Large language models are trained on a lot of data and they also make use of contextual embeddings. We fine-tune the large language models to help in our task. The data is also quite unbalanced; so we used a modified cross-entropy loss to tackle the issue. We observed that using a model which is fine-tuned in hindi corpora performs better. Our team (HNLP) achieved the macro F1-scores of 0.808, 0.639 in English Subtask A and English Subtask B respectively. For Hindi Subtask A, Hindi Subtask B our team achieved macro F1-scores of 0.737, 0.443 respectively in HASOC 2021.
Improving Probabilistic Models in Text Classification via Active Learning
Authors: Mitchell Bosley, Saki Kuzushima, Ted Enamorado, Yuki Shiraito
Date: 2022-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Articles, Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Social scientists often classify text documents to use the resulting labels as an outcome or a predictor in empirical research. Automated text classification has become a standard tool, since it requires less human coding. However, scholars still need many human-labeled documents to train automated classifiers. To reduce labeling costs, we propose a new algorithm for text classification that combines a probabilistic model with active learning. The probabilistic model uses both labeled and unlabeled data, and active learning concentrates labeling efforts on difficult documents to classify. Our validation study shows that the classification performance of our algorithm is comparable to state-of-the-art methods at a fraction of the computational cost. Moreover, we replicate two recently published articles and reach the same substantive conclusions with only a small proportion of the original labeled data used in those studies. We provide activeText, an open-source software to implement our method.
LST: Lexicon-Guided Self-Training for Few-Shot Text Classification
Authors: Hazel Kim, Jaeman Son, Yo-Sub Han
Date: 2022-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Few-Shot Text Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Self-training provides an effective means of using an extremely small amount of labeled data to create pseudo-labels for unlabeled data. Many state-of-the-art self-training approaches hinge on different regularization methods to prevent overfitting and improve generalization. Yet they still rely heavily on predictions initially trained with the limited labeled data as pseudo-labels and are likely to put overconfident label belief on erroneous classes depending on the first prediction. To tackle this issue in text classification, we introduce LST, a simple self-training method that uses a lexicon to guide the pseudo-labeling mechanism in a linguistically-enriched manner. We consistently refine the lexicon by predicting confidence of the unseen data to teach pseudo-labels better in the training iterations. We demonstrate that this simple yet well-crafted lexical knowledge achieves 1.0-2.0% better performance on 30 labeled samples per class for five benchmark datasets than the current state-of-the-art approaches.
Optimization of a Real-Time Wavelet-Based Algorithm for Improving Speech Intelligibility
Authors: Tianqu Kang, Anh-Dung Dinh, Binghong Wang, Tianyuan Du, Yijia Chen, Kevin Chau
Date: 2022-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement, Speech-to-Text

The optimization of a wavelet-based algorithm to improve speech intelligibility along with the full data set and results are reported. The discrete-time speech signal is split into frequency sub-bands via a multi-level discrete wavelet transform. Various gains are applied to the sub-band signals before they are recombined to form a modified version of the speech. The sub-band gains are adjusted while keeping the overall signal energy unchanged, and the speech intelligibility under various background interference and simulated hearing loss conditions is enhanced and evaluated objectively and quantitatively using Google Speech-to-Text transcription. A universal set of sub-band gains can work over a range of noise-to-signal ratios up to 4.8 dB. For noise-free speech, overall intelligibility is improved, and the Google transcription accuracy is increased by 16.9 percentage points on average and 86.7 maximum by reallocating the spectral energy toward the mid-frequency sub-bands. For speech already corrupted by noise, improving intelligibility is challenging but still realizable with an increased transcription accuracy of 9.5 percentage points on average and 71.4 maximum. The proposed algorithm is implementable for real-time speech processing and comparatively simpler than previous algorithms. Potential applications include speech enhancement, hearing aids, machine listening, and a better understanding of speech intelligibility.
Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis through EDU-level Attentions
Authors: Ting Lin, Aixin Sun, Yequan Wang
Date: 2022-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), Sentence, Sentiment Analysis

A sentence may express sentiments on multiple aspects. When these aspects are associated with different sentiment polarities, a model's accuracy is often adversely affected. We observe that multiple aspects in such hard sentences are mostly expressed through multiple clauses, or formally known as elementary discourse units (EDUs), and one EDU tends to express a single aspect with unitary sentiment towards that aspect. In this paper, we propose to consider EDU boundaries in sentence modeling, with attentions at both word and EDU levels. Specifically, we highlight sentiment-bearing words in EDU through word-level sparse attention. Then at EDU level, we force the model to attend to the right EDU for the right aspect, by using EDU-level sparse attention and orthogonal regularization. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our simple EDU-Attention model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Because EDU can be automatically segmented with high accuracy, our model can be applied to sentences directly without the need of manual EDU boundary annotation.