pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Ovarian Cancer Prediction from Ovarian Cysts Based on TVUS Using Machine Learning Algorithms
Authors: Laboni Akter, Nasrin Akhter
Date: 2021-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Ovarian Cancer (OC) is type of female reproductive malignancy which can be found among young girls and mostly the women in their fertile or reproductive. There are few number of cysts are dangerous and may it cause cancer. So, it is very important to predict and it can be from different types of screening are used for this detection using Transvaginal Ultrasonography (TVUS) screening. In this research, we employed an actual datasets called PLCO with TVUS screening and three machine learning (ML) techniques, respectively Random Forest KNN, and XGBoost within three target variables. We obtained a best performance from this algorithms as far as accuracy, recall, f1 score and precision with the approximations of 99.50%, 99.50%, 99.49% and 99.50% individually. The AUC score of 99.87%, 98.97% and 99.88% are observed in these Random Forest, KNN and XGB algorithms .This approach helps assist physicians and suspects in identifying ovarian risks early on, reducing ovarian malignancy-related complications and deaths.
Certifying One-Phase Technology-Assisted Reviews
Authors: David D. Lewis, Eugene Yang, Ophir Frieder
Date: 2021-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, TAR, valid

Technology-assisted review (TAR) workflows based on iterative active learning are widely used in document review applications. Most stopping rules for one-phase TAR workflows lack valid statistical guarantees, which has discouraged their use in some legal contexts. Drawing on the theory of quantile estimation, we provide the first broadly applicable and statistically valid sample-based stopping rules for one-phase TAR. We further show theoretically and empirically that overshooting a recall target, which has been treated as innocuous or desirable in past evaluations of stopping rules, is a major source of excess cost in one-phase TAR workflows. Counterintuitively, incurring a larger sampling cost to reduce excess recall leads to lower total cost in almost all scenarios.
TAR on Social Media: A Framework for Online Content Moderation
Authors: Eugene Yang, David D. Lewis, Ophir Frieder
Date: 2021-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Retrieval, TAR

Content moderation (removing or limiting the distribution of posts based on their contents) is one tool social networks use to fight problems such as harassment and disinformation. Manually screening all content is usually impractical given the scale of social media data, and the need for nuanced human interpretations makes fully automated approaches infeasible. We consider content moderation from the perspective of technology-assisted review (TAR): a human-in-the-loop active learning approach developed for high recall retrieval problems in civil litigation and other fields. We show how TAR workflows, and a TAR cost model, can be adapted to the content moderation problem. We then demonstrate on two publicly available content moderation data sets that a TAR workflow can reduce moderation costs by 20% to 55% across a variety of conditions.
Public sentiment analysis and topic modeling regarding COVID-19 vaccines on the Reddit social media platform: A call to action for strengthening vaccine confidence
Authors: Chad A Melton, Olufunto A Olusanya, Nariman Ammar, Arash Shaban-Nejad
Date: 2021-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation, Sentiment Analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic fueled one of the most rapid vaccine developments in history. However, misinformation spread through online social media often leads to negative vaccine sentiment and hesitancy. To investigate COVID-19 vaccine-related discussion in social media, we conducted a sentiment analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling on textual data collected from 13 Reddit communities focusing on the COVID-19 vaccine from Dec 1, 2020, to May 15, 2021. Data were aggregated and analyzed by month to detect changes in any sentiment and latent topics. ty analysis suggested these communities expressed more positive sentiment than negative regarding the vaccine-related discussions and has remained static over time. Topic modeling revealed community members mainly focused on side effects rather than outlandish conspiracy theories. Covid-19 vaccine-related content from 13 subreddits show that the sentiments expressed in these communities are overall more positive than negative and have not meaningfully changed since December 2020. Keywords indicating vaccine hesitancy were detected throughout the LDA topic modeling. Public sentiment and topic modeling analysis regarding vaccines could facilitate the implementation of appropriate messaging, digital interventions, and new policies to promote vaccine confidence.
VTLayout: Fusion of Visual and Text Features for Document Layout Analysis
Authors: Shoubin Li, Xuyan Ma, Shuaiqun Pan, Jun Hu, Lin Shi, Qing Wang
Date: 2021-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Layout Analysis

Documents often contain complex physical structures, which make the Document Layout Analysis (DLA) task challenging. As a pre-processing step for content extraction, DLA has the potential to capture rich information in historical or scientific documents on a large scale. Although many deep-learning-based methods from computer vision have already achieved excellent performance in detecting \emph{Figure} from documents, they are still unsatisfactory in recognizing the \emph{List}, \emph{Table}, \emph{Text} and \emph{Title} category blocks in DLA. This paper proposes a VTLayout model fusing the documents' deep visual, shallow visual, and text features to localize and identify different category blocks. The model mainly includes two stages, and the three feature extractors are built in the second stage. In the first stage, the Cascade Mask R-CNN model is applied directly to localize all category blocks of the documents. In the second stage, the deep visual, shallow visual, and text features are extracted for fusion to identify the category blocks of documents. As a result, we strengthen the classification power of different category blocks based on the existing localization technique. The experimental results show that the identification capability of the VTLayout is superior to the most advanced method of DLA based on the PubLayNet dataset, and the F1 score is as high as 0.9599.
E-Commerce Promotions Personalization via Online Multiple-Choice Knapsack with Uplift Modeling
Authors: Javier Albert, Dmitri Goldenberg
Date: 2021-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple-choice

Promotions and discounts are essential components of modern e-commerce platforms, where they are often used to incentivize customers towards purchase completion. Promotions also affect revenue and may incur a monetary loss that is often limited by a dedicated promotional budget. We study the Online Constrained Multiple-Choice Promotions Personalization Problem, where the optimization goal is to select for each customer which promotion to present in order to maximize purchase completions, while also complying with global budget limitations. Our work formalizes the problem as an Online Multiple Choice Knapsack Problem and extends the existent literature by addressing cases with negative weights and values. We provide a real-time adaptive method that guarantees budget constraints compliance and achieves above 99.7% of the optimal promotional impact on various datasets. Our method is evaluated on a large-scale experimental study at one of the leading online travel platforms in the world.
Incremental Learning for Personalized Recommender Systems
Authors: Yunbo Ouyang, Jun Shi, Haichao Wei, Huiji Gao
Date: 2021-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning, Recommendation Systems

Ubiquitous personalized recommender systems are built to achieve two seemingly conflicting goals, to serve high quality content tailored to individual user's taste and to adapt quickly to the ever changing environment. The former requires a complex machine learning model that is trained on a large amount of data; the latter requires frequent update to the model. We present an incremental learning solution to provide both the training efficiency and the model quality. Our solution is based on sequential Bayesian update and quadratic approximation. Our focus is on large-scale personalized logistic regression models, with extensions to deep learning models. This paper fills in the gap between the theory and the practice by addressing a few implementation challenges that arise when applying incremental learning to large personalized recommender systems. Detailed offline and online experiments demonstrated our approach can significantly shorten the training time while maintaining the model accuracy. The solution is deployed in LinkedIn and directly applicable to industrial scale recommender systems.
Deep Natural Language Processing for LinkedIn Search
Authors: Weiwei Guo, Xiaowei Liu, Sida Wang, Michaeel Kazi, Zhiwei Wang, Zhoutong Fu, Jun Jia, Liang Zhang, Huiji Gao, Bo Long
Date: 2021-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Ranking, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Many search systems work with large amounts of natural language data, e.g., search queries, user profiles, and documents. Building a successful search system requires a thorough understanding of textual data semantics, where deep learning based natural language processing techniques (deep NLP) can be of great help. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive study for applying deep NLP techniques to five representative tasks in search systems: query intent prediction (classification), query tagging (sequential tagging), document ranking (ranking), query auto completion (language modeling), and query suggestion (sequence to sequence). We also introduce BERT pre-training as a sixth task that can be applied to many of the other tasks. Through the model design and experiments of the six tasks, readers can find answers to four important questions: (1). When is deep NLP helpful/not helpful in search systems? (2). How to address latency challenges? (3). How to ensure model robustness? This work builds on existing efforts of LinkedIn search, and is tested at scale on LinkedIn's commercial search engines. We believe our experiences can provide useful insights for the industry and research communities.
Web image search engine based on LSH index and CNN Resnet50
Authors: Marco Parola, Alice Nannini, Stefano Poleggi
Date: 2021-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Content-Based Image Retrieval, Image Retrieval, Retrieval, Transfer Learning

To implement a good Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system, it is essential to adopt efficient search methods. One way to achieve this results is by exploiting approximate search techniques. In fact, when we deal with very large collections of data, using an exact search method makes the system very slow. In this project, we adopt the Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) index to implement a CBIR system that allows us to perform fast similarity search on deep features. Specifically, we exploit transfer learning techniques to extract deep features from images; this phase is done using two famous Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) as features extractors: Resnet50 and Resnet50v2, both pre-trained on ImageNet. Then we try out several fully connected deep neural networks, built on top of both of the previously mentioned CNNs in order to fine-tuned them on our dataset. In both of previous cases, we index the features within our LSH index implementation and within a sequential scan, to better understand how much the introduction of the index affects the results. Finally, we carry out a performance analysis: we evaluate the relevance of the result set, computing the mAP (mean Average Precision) value obtained during the different experiments with respect to the number of done comparison and varying the hyper-parameter values of the LSH index.
A Theoretical Framework for Online Information Search
Authors: Rohit Negi
Date: 2021-08-20 00:00:00

A significant part of human activity today consists of searching for a piece of information online, utilizing knowledge repositories. This endeavor may be time-consuming if the individual searching for the information is unfamiliar with the subject matter of that information. However, experts can aid individuals find relevant information by searching online. This paper describes a theoretical framework to model the dynamic process by which requests for information come to a system of experts, who then answer the requests by searching for those pieces of information.
Predicting the Factuality of Reporting of News Media Using Observations About User Attention in Their YouTube Channels
Authors: Krasimira Bozhanova, Yoan Dinkov, Ivan Koychev, Maria Castaldo, Tommaso Venturini, Preslav Nakov
Date: 2021-08-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: RANLP 2021 9

We propose a novel framework for predicting the factuality of reporting of news media outlets by studying the user attention cycles in their YouTube channels. In particular, we design a rich set of features derived from the temporal evolution of the number of views, likes, dislikes, and comments for a video, which we then aggregate to the channel level. We develop and release a dataset for the task, containing observations of user attention on YouTube channels for 489 news media. Our experiments demonstrate both complementarity and sizable improvements over state-of-the-art textual representations.
Smoothing Dialogue States for Open Conversational Machine Reading
Authors: Zhuosheng Zhang, Siru Ouyang, Hai Zhao, Masao Utiyama, Eiichiro Sumita
Date: 2021-08-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Decision Making, Decoder, Question Generation, Question-Generation, Reading Comprehension

Conversational machine reading (CMR) requires machines to communicate with humans through multi-turn interactions between two salient dialogue states of decision making and question generation processes. In open CMR settings, as the more realistic scenario, the retrieved background knowledge would be noisy, which results in severe challenges in the information transmission. Existing studies commonly train independent or pipeline systems for the two subtasks. However, those methods are trivial by using hard-label decisions to activate question generation, which eventually hinders the model performance. In this work, we propose an effective gating strategy by smoothing the two dialogue states in only one decoder and bridge decision making and question generation to provide a richer dialogue state reference. Experiments on the OR-ShARC dataset show the effectiveness of our method, which achieves new state-of-the-art results.
Generating Answer Candidates for Quizzes and Answer-Aware Question Generators
Authors: Kristiyan Vachev, Momchil Hardalov, Georgi Karadzhov, Georgi Georgiev, Ivan Koychev, Preslav Nakov
Date: 2021-08-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: RANLP 2021 9
Tasks: Question Answering, Question Generation, Question-Generation

In education, open-ended quiz questions have become an important tool for assessing the knowledge of students. Yet, manually preparing such questions is a tedious task, and thus automatic question generation has been proposed as a possible alternative. So far, the vast majority of research has focused on generating the question text, relying on question answering datasets with readily picked answers, and the problem of how to come up with answer candidates in the first place has been largely ignored. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we propose a model that can generate a specified number of answer candidates for a given passage of text, which can then be used by instructors to write questions manually or can be passed as an input to automatic answer-aware question generators. Our experiments show that our proposed answer candidate generation model outperforms several baselines.
Learning Inner-Group Relations on Point Clouds
Authors: Haoxi Ran, Wei Zhuo, Jun Liu, Li Lu
Date: 2021-08-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: 3D Classification, 3D Point Cloud Classification, 3D Semantic Segmentation, Classification, Relation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The prevalence of relation networks in computer vision is in stark contrast to underexplored point-based methods. In this paper, we explore the possibilities of local relation operators and survey their feasibility. We propose a scalable and efficient module, called group relation aggregator. The module computes a feature of a group based on the aggregation of the features of the inner-group points weighted by geometric relations and semantic relations. We adopt this module to design our RPNet. We further verify the expandability of RPNet, in terms of both depth and width, on the tasks of classification and segmentation. Surprisingly, empirical results show that wider RPNet fits for classification, while deeper RPNet works better on segmentation. RPNet achieves state-of-the-art for classification and segmentation on challenging benchmarks. We also compare our local aggregator with PointNet++, with around 30% parameters and 50% computation saving. Finally, we conduct experiments to reveal the robustness of RPNet with regard to rigid transformation and noises.
VisGraphNet: a complex network interpretation of convolutional neural features
Authors: Joao B. Florindo, Young-Sup Lee, Kyungkoo Jun, Gwanggil Jeon, Marcelo K. Albertini
Date: 2021-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Network Interpretation, Texture Classification

Here we propose and investigate the use of visibility graphs to model the feature map of a neural network. The model, initially devised for studies on complex networks, is employed here for the classification of texture images. The work is motivated by an alternative viewpoint provided by these graphs over the original data. The performance of the proposed method is verified in the classification of four benchmark databases, namely, KTHTIPS-2b, FMD, UIUC, and UMD and in a practical problem, which is the identification of plant species using scanned images of their leaves. Our method was competitive with other state-of-the-art approaches, confirming the potential of techniques used for data analysis in different contexts to give more meaningful interpretation to the use of neural networks in texture classification.
Fractal measures of image local features: an application to texture recognition
Authors: Pedro M. Silva, Joao B. Florindo
Date: 2021-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Texture Classification

Here we propose a new method for the classification of texture images combining fractal measures (fractal dimension, multifractal spectrum and lacunarity) with local binary patterns. More specifically we compute the box counting dimension of the local binary codes thresholded at different levels to compose the feature vector. The proposal is assessed in the classification of three benchmark databases: KTHTIPS-2b, UMD and UIUC as well as in a real-world problem, namely the identification of Brazilian plant species (database 1200Tex) using scanned images of their leaves. The proposed method demonstrated to be competitive with other state-of-the-art solutions reported in the literature. Such results confirmed the potential of combining a powerful local coding description with the multiscale information captured by the fractal dimension for texture classification.
On the impact of using X-ray energy response imagery for object detection via Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Neelanjan Bhowmik, Yona Falinie A. Gaus, Toby P. Breckon
Date: 2021-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Automatic detection of prohibited items within complex and cluttered X-ray security imagery is essential to maintaining transport security, where prior work on automatic prohibited item detection focus primarily on pseudo-colour (rgb}) X-ray imagery. In this work we study the impact of variant X-ray imagery, i.e., X-ray energy response (high, low}) and effective-z compared to rgb, via the use of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for the joint object detection and segmentation task posed within X-ray baggage security screening. We evaluate state-of-the-art CNN architectures (Mask R-CNN, YOLACT, CARAFE and Cascade Mask R-CNN) to explore the transferability of models trained with such 'raw' variant imagery between the varying X-ray security scanners that exhibits differing imaging geometries, image resolutions and material colour profiles. Overall, we observe maximal detection performance using CARAFE, attributable to training using combination of rgb, high, low, and effective-z X-ray imagery, obtaining 0.7 mean Average Precision (mAP) for a six class object detection problem. Our results also exhibit a remarkable degree of generalisation capability in terms of cross-scanner transferability (AP: 0.835/0.611) for a one class object detection problem by combining rgb, high, low, and effective-z imagery.
SIGN: Spatial-information Incorporated Generative Network for Generalized Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Jiaxin Cheng, Soumyaroop Nandi, Prem Natarajan, Wael Abd-Almageed
Date: 2021-08-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning, Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation

Unlike conventional zero-shot classification, zero-shot semantic segmentation predicts a class label at the pixel level instead of the image level. When solving zero-shot semantic segmentation problems, the need for pixel-level prediction with surrounding context motivates us to incorporate spatial information using positional encoding. We improve standard positional encoding by introducing the concept of Relative Positional Encoding, which integrates spatial information at the feature level and can handle arbitrary image sizes. Furthermore, while self-training is widely used in zero-shot semantic segmentation to generate pseudo-labels, we propose a new knowledge-distillation-inspired self-training strategy, namely Annealed Self-Training, which can automatically assign different importance to pseudo-labels to improve performance. We systematically study the proposed Relative Positional Encoding and Annealed Self-Training in a comprehensive experimental evaluation, and our empirical results confirm the effectiveness of our method on three benchmark datasets.
SeeTheSeams: Localized Detection of Seam Carving based Image Forgery in Satellite Imagery
Authors: Chandrakanth Gudavalli, Erik Rosten, Lakshmanan Nataraj, Shivkumar Chandrasekaran, B. S. Manjunath
Date: 2021-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retargeting

Seam carving is a popular technique for content aware image retargeting. It can be used to deliberately manipulate images, for example, change the GPS locations of a building or insert/remove roads in a satellite image. This paper proposes a novel approach for detecting and localizing seams in such images. While there are methods to detect seam carving based manipulations, this is the first time that robust localization and detection of seam carving forgery is made possible. We also propose a seam localization score (SLS) metric to evaluate the effectiveness of localization. The proposed method is evaluated extensively on a large collection of images from different sources, demonstrating a high level of detection and localization performance across these datasets. The datasets curated during this work will be released to the public.