pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Stochastic Adversarial Koopman Model for Dynamical Systems
Authors: Kaushik Balakrishnan, Devesh Upadhyay
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Dynamical systems are ubiquitous and are often modeled using a non-linear system of governing equations. Numerical solution procedures for many dynamical systems have existed for several decades, but can be slow due to high-dimensional state space of the dynamical system. Thus, deep learning-based reduced order models (ROMs) are of interest and one such family of algorithms along these lines are based on the Koopman theory. This paper extends a recently developed adversarial Koopman model (Balakrishnan \& Upadhyay, arXiv:2006.05547) to stochastic space, where the Koopman operator applies on the probability distribution of the latent encoding of an encoder. Specifically, the latent encoding of the system is modeled as a Gaussian, and is advanced in time by using an auxiliary neural network that outputs two Koopman matrices $K_{\mu}$ and $K_{\sigma}$. Adversarial and gradient losses are used and this is found to lower the prediction errors. A reduced Koopman formulation is also undertaken where the Koopman matrices are assumed to have a tridiagonal structure, and this yields predictions comparable to the baseline model with full Koopman matrices. The efficacy of the stochastic Koopman model is demonstrated on different test problems in chaos, fluid dynamics, combustion, and reaction-diffusion models. The proposed model is also applied in a setting where the Koopman matrices are conditioned on other input parameters for generalization and this is applied to simulate the state of a Lithium-ion battery in time. The Koopman models discussed in this study are very promising for the wide range of problems considered.
Data Generation Method for Learning a Low-dimensional Safe Region in Safe Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Zhehua Zhou, Ozgur S. Oguz, Yi Ren, Marion Leibold, Martin Buss
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Safe Reinforcement Learning

Safe reinforcement learning aims to learn a control policy while ensuring that neither the system nor the environment gets damaged during the learning process. For implementing safe reinforcement learning on highly nonlinear and high-dimensional dynamical systems, one possible approach is to find a low-dimensional safe region via data-driven feature extraction methods, which provides safety estimates to the learning algorithm. As the reliability of the learned safety estimates is data-dependent, we investigate in this work how different training data will affect the safe reinforcement learning approach. By balancing between the learning performance and the risk of being unsafe, a data generation method that combines two sampling methods is proposed to generate representative training data. The performance of the method is demonstrated with a three-link inverted pendulum example.
Physics-based machine learning for modeling stochastic IP3-dependent calcium dynamics
Authors: Oliver K. Ernst, Tom Bartol, Terrence Sejnowski, Eric Mjolsness
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

We present a machine learning method for model reduction which incorporates domain-specific physics through candidate functions. Our method estimates an effective probability distribution and differential equation model from stochastic simulations of a reaction network. The close connection between reduced and fine scale descriptions allows approximations derived from the master equation to be introduced into the learning problem. This representation is shown to improve generalization and allows a large reduction in network size for a classic model of inositol trisphosphate (IP3) dependent calcium oscillations in non-excitable cells.
Entity-Based Knowledge Conflicts in Question Answering
Authors: Shayne Longpre, Kartik Perisetla, Anthony Chen, Nikhil Ramesh, Chris DuBois, Sameer Singh
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Hallucination, Out-of-Distribution Generalization, Question Answering

Knowledge-dependent tasks typically use two sources of knowledge: parametric, learned at training time, and contextual, given as a passage at inference time. To understand how models use these sources together, we formalize the problem of knowledge conflicts, where the contextual information contradicts the learned information. Analyzing the behaviour of popular models, we measure their over-reliance on memorized information (the cause of hallucinations), and uncover important factors that exacerbate this behaviour. Lastly, we propose a simple method to mitigate over-reliance on parametric knowledge, which minimizes hallucination, and improves out-of-distribution generalization by 4%-7%. Our findings demonstrate the importance for practitioners to evaluate model tendency to hallucinate rather than read, and show that our mitigation strategy encourages generalization to evolving information (i.e., time-dependent queries). To encourage these practices, we have released our framework for generating knowledge conflicts.
Efficient Contrastive Learning via Novel Data Augmentation and Curriculum Learning
Authors: Seonghyeon Ye, Jiseon Kim, Alice Oh
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Continual Pretraining, Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Sentence

We introduce EfficientCL, a memory-efficient continual pretraining method that applies contrastive learning with novel data augmentation and curriculum learning. For data augmentation, we stack two types of operation sequentially: cutoff and PCA jittering. While pretraining steps proceed, we apply curriculum learning by incrementing the augmentation degree for each difficulty step. After data augmentation is finished, contrastive learning is applied on projected embeddings of original and augmented examples. When finetuned on GLUE benchmark, our model outperforms baseline models, especially for sentence-level tasks. Additionally, this improvement is capable with only 70% of computational memory compared to the baseline model.
Modeling Systems with Machine Learning based Differential Equations
Authors: Pedro Garcia
Date: 2021-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

The prediction of behavior in dynamical systems, is frequently subject to the design of models. When a time series obtained from observing the system is available, the task can be performed by designing the model from these observations without additional assumptions or by assuming a preconceived structure in the model, with the help of additional information about the system. In the second case, it is a question of adequately combining theory with observations and subsequently optimizing the mixture. In this work, we proposes the design of time-continuous models of dynamical systems as solutions of differential equations, from non-uniform sampled or noisy observations, using machine learning techniques. The performance of strategy is shown with both, several simulated data sets and experimental data from Hare-Lynx population and Coronavirus 2019 outbreack. Our results suggest that this approach to the modeling systems, can be an useful technique in the case of synthetic or experimental data.
SPARQLing Database Queries from Intermediate Question Decompositions
Authors: Irina Saparina, Anton Osokin
Date: 2021-09-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

To translate natural language questions into executable database queries, most approaches rely on a fully annotated training set. Annotating a large dataset with queries is difficult as it requires query-language expertise. We reduce this burden using grounded in databases intermediate question representations. These representations are simpler to collect and were originally crowdsourced within the Break dataset (Wolfson et al., 2020). Our pipeline consists of two parts: a neural semantic parser that converts natural language questions into the intermediate representations and a non-trainable transpiler to the SPARQL query language (a standard language for accessing knowledge graphs and semantic web). We chose SPARQL because its queries are structurally closer to our intermediate representations (compared to SQL). We observe that the execution accuracy of queries constructed by our model on the challenging Spider dataset is comparable with the state-of-the-art text-to-SQL methods trained with annotated SQL queries. Our code and data are publicly available (see https://github.com/yandex-research/sparqling-queries).
SituatedQA: Incorporating Extra-Linguistic Contexts into QA
Authors: Michael J. Q. Zhang, Eunsol Choi
Date: 2021-09-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Retrieval

Answers to the same question may change depending on the extra-linguistic contexts (when and where the question was asked). To study this challenge, we introduce SituatedQA, an open-retrieval QA dataset where systems must produce the correct answer to a question given the temporal or geographical context. To construct SituatedQA, we first identify such questions in existing QA datasets. We find that a significant proportion of information seeking questions have context-dependent answers (e.g., roughly 16.5% of NQ-Open). For such context-dependent questions, we then crowdsource alternative contexts and their corresponding answers. Our study shows that existing models struggle with producing answers that are frequently updated or from uncommon locations. We further quantify how existing models, which are trained on data collected in the past, fail to generalize to answering questions asked in the present, even when provided with an updated evidence corpus (a roughly 15 point drop in accuracy). Our analysis suggests that open-retrieval QA benchmarks should incorporate extra-linguistic context to stay relevant globally and in the future. Our data, code, and datasheet are available at https://situatedqa.github.io/ .
Beyond Isolated Utterances: Conversational Emotion Recognition
Authors: Raghavendra Pappagari, Piotr Żelasko, Jesús Villalba, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Najim Dehak
Date: 2021-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech emotion recognition is the task of recognizing the speaker's emotional state given a recording of their utterance. While most of the current approaches focus on inferring emotion from isolated utterances, we argue that this is not sufficient to achieve conversational emotion recognition (CER) which deals with recognizing emotions in conversations. In this work, we propose several approaches for CER by treating it as a sequence labeling task. We investigated transformer architecture for CER and, compared it with ResNet-34 and BiLSTM architectures in both contextual and context-less scenarios using IEMOCAP corpus. Based on the inner workings of the self-attention mechanism, we proposed DiverseCatAugment (DCA), an augmentation scheme, which improved the transformer model performance by an absolute 3.3% micro-f1 on conversations and 3.6% on isolated utterances. We further enhanced the performance by introducing an interlocutor-aware transformer model where we learn a dictionary of interlocutor index embeddings to exploit diarized conversations.
xGQA: Cross-Lingual Visual Question Answering
Authors: Jonas Pfeiffer, Gregor Geigle, Aishwarya Kamath, Jan-Martin O. Steitz, Stefan Roth, Ivan Vulić, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2021-09-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA), Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer

Recent advances in multimodal vision and language modeling have predominantly focused on the English language, mostly due to the lack of multilingual multimodal datasets to steer modeling efforts. In this work, we address this gap and provide xGQA, a new multilingual evaluation benchmark for the visual question answering task. We extend the established English GQA dataset to 7 typologically diverse languages, enabling us to detect and explore crucial challenges in cross-lingual visual question answering. We further propose new adapter-based approaches to adapt multimodal transformer-based models to become multilingual, and -- vice versa -- multilingual models to become multimodal. Our proposed methods outperform current state-of-the-art multilingual multimodal models (e.g., M3P) in zero-shot cross-lingual settings, but the accuracy remains low across the board; a performance drop of around 38 accuracy points in target languages showcases the difficulty of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer for this task. Our results suggest that simple cross-lingual transfer of multimodal models yields latent multilingual multimodal misalignment, calling for more sophisticated methods for vision and multilingual language modeling.
On Language Models for Creoles
Authors: Heather Lent, Emanuele Bugliarello, Miryam de Lhoneux, Chen Qiu, Anders Søgaard
Date: 2021-09-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: CoNLL (EMNLP) 2021 11

Creole languages such as Nigerian Pidgin English and Haitian Creole are under-resourced and largely ignored in the NLP literature. Creoles typically result from the fusion of a foreign language with multiple local languages, and what grammatical and lexical features are transferred to the creole is a complex process. While creoles are generally stable, the prominence of some features may be much stronger with certain demographics or in some linguistic situations. This paper makes several contributions: We collect existing corpora and release models for Haitian Creole, Nigerian Pidgin English, and Singaporean Colloquial English. We evaluate these models on intrinsic and extrinsic tasks. Motivated by the above literature, we compare standard language models with distributionally robust ones and find that, somewhat surprisingly, the standard language models are superior to the distributionally robust ones. We investigate whether this is an effect of over-parameterization or relative distributional stability, and find that the difference persists in the absence of over-parameterization, and that drift is limited, confirming the relative stability of creole languages.
Packed Levitated Marker for Entity and Relation Extraction
Authors: Deming Ye, Yankai Lin, Peng Li, Maosong Sun
Date: 2021-09-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Joint Entity and Relation Extraction, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation, Relation Extraction

Recent entity and relation extraction works focus on investigating how to obtain a better span representation from the pre-trained encoder. However, a major limitation of existing works is that they ignore the interrelation between spans (pairs). In this work, we propose a novel span representation approach, named Packed Levitated Markers (PL-Marker), to consider the interrelation between the spans (pairs) by strategically packing the markers in the encoder. In particular, we propose a neighborhood-oriented packing strategy, which considers the neighbor spans integrally to better model the entity boundary information. Furthermore, for those more complicated span pair classification tasks, we design a subject-oriented packing strategy, which packs each subject and all its objects to model the interrelation between the same-subject span pairs. The experimental results show that, with the enhanced marker feature, our model advances baselines on six NER benchmarks, and obtains a 4.1%-4.3% strict relation F1 improvement with higher speed over previous state-of-the-art models on ACE04 and ACE05.
Augmented Abstractive Summarization With Document-LevelSemantic Graph
Authors: Qiwei Bi, Haoyuan Li, Kun Lu, Hanfang Yang
Date: 2021-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Decoder

Previous abstractive methods apply sequence-to-sequence structures to generate summary without a module to assist the system to detect vital mentions and relationships within a document. To address this problem, we utilize semantic graph to boost the generation performance. Firstly, we extract important entities from each document and then establish a graph inspired by the idea of distant supervision \citep{mintz-etal-2009-distant}. Then, we combine a Bi-LSTM with a graph encoder to obtain the representation of each graph node. A novel neural decoder is presented to leverage the information of such entity graphs. Automatic and human evaluations show the effectiveness of our technique.
Traffic Event Detection as a Slot Filling Problem
Authors: Xiangyu Yang, Giannis Bekoulis, Nikos Deligiannis
Date: 2021-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Detection, slot-filling, Slot Filling, text-classification, Text Classification, Transfer Learning

In this paper, we introduce the new problem of extracting fine-grained traffic information from Twitter streams by also making publicly available the two (constructed) traffic-related datasets from Belgium and the Brussels capital region. In particular, we experiment with several models to identify (i) whether a tweet is traffic-related or not, and (ii) in the case that the tweet is traffic-related to identify more fine-grained information regarding the event (e.g., the type of the event, where the event happened). To do so, we frame (i) the problem of identifying whether a tweet is a traffic-related event or not as a text classification subtask, and (ii) the problem of identifying more fine-grained traffic-related information as a slot filling subtask, where fine-grained information (e.g., where an event has happened) is represented as a slot/entity of a particular type. We propose the use of several methods that process the two subtasks either separately or in a joint setting, and we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methods for solving the traffic event detection problem. Experimental results indicate that the proposed architectures achieve high performance scores (i.e., more than 95% in terms of F$_{1}$ score) on the constructed datasets for both of the subtasks (i.e., text classification and slot filling) even in a transfer learning scenario. In addition, by incorporating tweet-level information in each of the tokens comprising the tweet (for the BERT-based model) can lead to a performance improvement for the joint setting.
When is Wall a Pared and when a Muro? -- Extracting Rules Governing Lexical Selection
Authors: Aditi Chaudhary, Kayo Yin, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Graham Neubig
Date: 2021-09-13 00:00:00

Learning fine-grained distinctions between vocabulary items is a key challenge in learning a new language. For example, the noun "wall" has different lexical manifestations in Spanish -- "pared" refers to an indoor wall while "muro" refers to an outside wall. However, this variety of lexical distinction may not be obvious to non-native learners unless the distinction is explained in such a way. In this work, we present a method for automatically identifying fine-grained lexical distinctions, and extracting concise descriptions explaining these distinctions in a human- and machine-readable format. We confirm the quality of these extracted descriptions in a language learning setup for two languages, Spanish and Greek, where we use them to teach non-native speakers when to translate a given ambiguous word into its different possible translations. Code and data are publicly released here (https://github.com/Aditi138/LexSelection)
Keyword Extraction for Improved Document Retrieval in Conversational Search
Authors: Oleg Borisov, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Fabio Crestani
Date: 2021-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Search, Keyword Extraction, Retrieval, Sentence

Recent research has shown that mixed-initiative conversational search, based on the interaction between users and computers to clarify and improve a query, provides enormous advantages. Nonetheless, incorporating additional information provided by the user from the conversation poses some challenges. In fact, further interactions could confuse the system as a user might use words irrelevant to the information need but crucial for correct sentence construction in the context of multi-turn conversations. To this aim, in this paper, we have collected two conversational keyword extraction datasets and propose an end-to-end document retrieval pipeline incorporating them. Furthermore, we study the performance of two neural keyword extraction models, namely, BERT and sequence to sequence, in terms of extraction accuracy and human annotation. Finally, we study the effect of keyword extraction on the end-to-end neural IR performance and show that our approach beats state-of-the-art IR models. We make the two datasets publicly available to foster research in this area.
Analysing Mixed Initiatives and Search Strategies during Conversational Search
Authors: Mohammad Aliannejadi, Leif Azzopardi, Hamed Zamani, Evangelos Kanoulas, Paul Thomas, Nick Craswel
Date: 2021-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Search

Information seeking conversations between users and Conversational Search Agents (CSAs) consist of multiple turns of interaction. While users initiate a search session, ideally a CSA should sometimes take the lead in the conversation by obtaining feedback from the user by offering query suggestions or asking for query clarifications i.e. mixed initiative. This creates the potential for more engaging conversational searches, but substantially increases the complexity of modelling and evaluating such scenarios due to the large interaction space coupled with the trade-offs between the costs and benefits of the different interactions. In this paper, we present a model for conversational search -- from which we instantiate different observed conversational search strategies, where the agent elicits: (i) Feedback-First, or (ii) Feedback-After. Using 49 TREC WebTrack Topics, we performed an analysis comparing how well these different strategies combine with different mixed initiative approaches: (i) Query Suggestions vs. (ii) Query Clarifications. Our analysis reveals that there is no superior or dominant combination, instead it shows that query clarifications are better when asked first, while query suggestions are better when asked after presenting results. We also show that the best strategy and approach depends on the trade-offs between the relative costs between querying and giving feedback, the performance of the initial query, the number of assessments per query, and the total amount of gain required. While this work highlights the complexities and challenges involved in analyzing CSAs, it provides the foundations for evaluating conversational strategies and conversational search agents in batch/offline settings.