pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
WER we are and WER we think we are
Authors: Piotr Szymański, Piotr Żelasko, Mikolaj Morzy, Adrian Szymczak, Marzena Żyła-Hoppe, Joanna Banaszczak, Lukasz Augustyniak, Jan Mizgajski, Yishay Carmiel
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Natural language processing of conversational speech requires the availability of high-quality transcripts. In this paper, we express our skepticism towards the recent reports of very low Word Error Rates (WERs) achieved by modern Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems on benchmark datasets. We outline several problems with popular benchmarks and compare three state-of-the-art commercial ASR systems on an internal dataset of real-life spontaneous human conversations and HUB'05 public benchmark. We show that WERs are significantly higher than the best reported results. We formulate a set of guidelines which may aid in the creation of real-life, multi-domain datasets with high quality annotations for training and testing of robust ASR systems.
Exploiting non-i.i.d. data towards more robust machine learning algorithms
Authors: Wim Casteels, Peter Hellinckx
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Clustering

In the field of machine learning there is a growing interest towards more robust and generalizable algorithms. This is for example important to bridge the gap between the environment in which the training data was collected and the environment where the algorithm is deployed. Machine learning algorithms have increasingly been shown to excel in finding patterns and correlations from data. Determining the consistency of these patterns and for example the distinction between causal correlations and nonsensical spurious relations has proven to be much more difficult. In this paper a regularization scheme is introduced that prefers universal causal correlations. This approach is based on 1) the robustness of causal correlations and 2) the data not being independently and identically distribute (i.i.d.). The scheme is demonstrated with a classification task by clustering the (non-i.i.d.) training set in subpopulations. A non-i.i.d. regularization term is then introduced that penalizes weights that are not invariant over these clusters. The resulting algorithm favours correlations that are universal over the subpopulations and indeed a better performance is obtained on an out-of-distribution test set with respect to a more conventional l_2-regularization.
Cross-lingual Extended Named Entity Classification of Wikipedia Articles
Authors: The Viet Bui, Phuong Le-Hong
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Classification, General Classification

The FPT.AI team participated in the SHINRA2020-ML subtask of the NTCIR-15 SHINRA task. This paper describes our method to solving the problem and discusses the official results. Our method focuses on learning cross-lingual representations, both on the word level and document level for page classification. We propose a three-stage approach including multilingual model pre-training, monolingual model fine-tuning and cross-lingual voting. Our system is able to achieve the best scores for 25 out of 30 languages; and its accuracy gaps to the best performing systems of the other five languages are relatively small.
Knowledge-Based Learning of Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos
Authors: Tom Z. Jiahao, M. Ani Hsieh, Eric Forgoston
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Extracting predictive models from nonlinear systems is a central task in scientific machine learning. One key problem is the reconciliation between modern data-driven approaches and first principles. Despite rapid advances in machine learning techniques, embedding domain knowledge into data-driven models remains a challenge. In this work, we present a universal learning framework for extracting predictive models from nonlinear systems based on observations. Our framework can readily incorporate first principle knowledge because it naturally models nonlinear systems as continuous-time systems. This both improves the extracted models' extrapolation power and reduces the amount of data needed for training. In addition, our framework has the advantages of robustness to observational noise and applicability to irregularly sampled data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme by learning predictive models for a wide variety of systems including a stiff Van der Pol oscillator, the Lorenz system, and the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. For the Lorenz system, different types of domain knowledge are incorporated to demonstrate the strength of knowledge embedding in data-driven system identification.
Efficient Inference For Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Yi-Te Hsu, Sarthak Garg, Yi-Hsiu Liao, Ilya Chatsviorkin
Date: 2020-10-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (sustainlp) 2020 11
Tasks: CPU, Decoder, GPU, Machine Translation, Translation

Large Transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in neural machine translation and have become standard in the field. In this work, we look for the optimal combination of known techniques to optimize inference speed without sacrificing translation quality. We conduct an empirical study that stacks various approaches and demonstrates that combination of replacing decoder self-attention with simplified recurrent units, adopting a deep encoder and a shallow decoder architecture and multi-head attention pruning can achieve up to 109% and 84% speedup on CPU and GPU respectively and reduce the number of parameters by 25% while maintaining the same translation quality in terms of BLEU.
Dual Reconstruction: a Unifying Objective for Semi-Supervised Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Weijia Xu, Xing Niu, Marine Carpuat
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

While Iterative Back-Translation and Dual Learning effectively incorporate monolingual training data in neural machine translation, they use different objectives and heuristic gradient approximation strategies, and have not been extensively compared. We introduce a novel dual reconstruction objective that provides a unified view of Iterative Back-Translation and Dual Learning. It motivates a theoretical analysis and controlled empirical study on German-English and Turkish-English tasks, which both suggest that Iterative Back-Translation is more effective than Dual Learning despite its relative simplicity.
Learning Mesh-Based Simulation with Graph Networks
Authors: Tobias Pfaff, Meire Fortunato, Alvaro Sanchez-Gonzalez, Peter W. Battaglia
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Numerical Integration

Mesh-based simulations are central to modeling complex physical systems in many disciplines across science and engineering. Mesh representations support powerful numerical integration methods and their resolution can be adapted to strike favorable trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency. However, high-dimensional scientific simulations are very expensive to run, and solvers and parameters must often be tuned individually to each system studied. Here we introduce MeshGraphNets, a framework for learning mesh-based simulations using graph neural networks. Our model can be trained to pass messages on a mesh graph and to adapt the mesh discretization during forward simulation. Our results show it can accurately predict the dynamics of a wide range of physical systems, including aerodynamics, structural mechanics, and cloth. The model's adaptivity supports learning resolution-independent dynamics and can scale to more complex state spaces at test time. Our method is also highly efficient, running 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than the simulation on which it is trained. Our approach broadens the range of problems on which neural network simulators can operate and promises to improve the efficiency of complex, scientific modeling tasks.
Machine learning for recovery factor estimation of an oil reservoir: a tool for de-risking at a hydrocarbon asset evaluation
Authors: Ivan Makhotin, Denis Orlov, Dmitry Koroteev, Evgeny Burnaev, Aram Karapetyan, Dmitry Antonenko
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Prediction Intervals

Well known oil recovery factor estimation techniques such as analogy, volumetric calculations, material balance, decline curve analysis, hydrodynamic simulations have certain limitations. Those techniques are time-consuming, require specific data and expert knowledge. Besides, though uncertainty estimation is highly desirable for this problem, the methods above do not include this by default. In this work, we present a data-driven technique for oil recovery factor estimation using reservoir parameters and representative statistics. We apply advanced machine learning methods to historical worldwide oilfields datasets (more than 2000 oil reservoirs). The data-driven model might be used as a general tool for rapid and completely objective estimation of the oil recovery factor. In addition, it includes the ability to work with partial input data and to estimate the prediction interval of the oil recovery factor. We perform the evaluation in terms of accuracy and prediction intervals coverage for several tree-based machine learning techniques in application to the following two cases: (1) using parameters only related to geometry, geology, transport, storage and fluid properties, (2) using an extended set of parameters including development and production data. For both cases model proved itself to be robust and reliable. We conclude that the proposed data-driven approach overcomes several limitations of the traditional methods and is suitable for rapid, reliable and objective estimation of oil recovery factor for hydrocarbon reservoir.
Universal Weighting Metric Learning for Cross-Modal Matching
Authors: Jiwei Wei, Xing Xu, Yang Yang, Yanli Ji, Zheng Wang, Heng Tao Shen
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Image-text matching, Metric Learning, Text Matching

Cross-modal matching has been a highlighted research topic in both vision and language areas. Learning appropriate mining strategy to sample and weight informative pairs is crucial for the cross-modal matching performance. However, most existing metric learning methods are developed for unimodal matching, which is unsuitable for cross-modal matching on multimodal data with heterogeneous features. To address this problem, we propose a simple and interpretable universal weighting framework for cross-modal matching, which provides a tool to analyze the interpretability of various loss functions. Furthermore, we introduce a new polynomial loss under the universal weighting framework, which defines a weight function for the positive and negative informative pairs respectively. Experimental results on two image-text matching benchmarks and two video-text matching benchmarks validate the efficacy of the proposed method.
Why do you think that? Exploring Faithful Sentence-Level Rationales Without Supervision
Authors: Max Glockner, Ivan Habernal, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Decision Making, Sentence

Evaluating the trustworthiness of a model's prediction is essential for differentiating between `right for the right reasons' and `right for the wrong reasons'. Identifying textual spans that determine the target label, known as faithful rationales, usually relies on pipeline approaches or reinforcement learning. However, such methods either require supervision and thus costly annotation of the rationales or employ non-differentiable models. We propose a differentiable training-framework to create models which output faithful rationales on a sentence level, by solely applying supervision on the target task. To achieve this, our model solves the task based on each rationale individually and learns to assign high scores to those which solved the task best. Our evaluation on three different datasets shows competitive results compared to a standard BERT blackbox while exceeding a pipeline counterpart's performance in two cases. We further exploit the transparent decision-making process of these models to prefer selecting the correct rationales by applying direct supervision, thereby boosting the performance on the rationale-level.
Physics-constrained Bayesian inference of state functions in classical density-functional theory
Authors: Peter Yatsyshin, Serafim Kalliadasis, Andrew B. Duncan
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Uncertainty Quantification

We develop a novel data-driven approach to the inverse problem of classical statistical mechanics: given experimental data on the collective motion of a classical many-body system, how does one characterise the free energy landscape of that system? By combining non-parametric Bayesian inference with physically-motivated constraints, we develop an efficient learning algorithm which automates the construction of approximate free energy functionals. In contrast to optimisation-based machine learning approaches, which seek to minimise a cost function, the central idea of the proposed Bayesian inference is to propagate a set of prior assumptions through the model, derived from physical principles. The experimental data is used to probabilistically weigh the possible model predictions. This naturally leads to humanly interpretable algorithms with full uncertainty quantification of predictions. In our case, the output of the learning algorithm is a probability distribution over a family of free energy functionals, consistent with the observed particle data. We find that surprisingly small data samples contain sufficient information for inferring highly accurate analytic expressions of the underlying free energy functionals, making our algorithm highly data efficient. We consider excluded volume particle interactions, which are ubiquitous in nature, whilst being highly challenging for modelling in terms of free energy. To validate our approach we consider the paradigmatic case of one-dimensional fluid and develop inference algorithms for the canonical and grand-canonical statistical-mechanical ensembles. Extensions to higher-dimensional systems are conceptually straightforward, whilst standard coarse-graining techniques allow one to easily incorporate attractive interactions.
Toward Stance-based Personas for Opinionated Dialogues
Authors: Thomas Scialom, Serra Sinem Tekiroglu, Jacopo Staiano, Marco Guerini
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Text Generation

In the context of chit-chat dialogues it has been shown that endowing systems with a persona profile is important to produce more coherent and meaningful conversations. Still, the representation of such personas has thus far been limited to a fact-based representation (e.g. "I have two cats."). We argue that these representations remain superficial w.r.t. the complexity of human personality. In this work, we propose to make a step forward and investigate stance-based persona, trying to grasp more profound characteristics, such as opinions, values, and beliefs to drive language generation. To this end, we introduce a novel dataset allowing to explore different stance-based persona representations and their impact on claim generation, showing that they are able to grasp abstract and profound aspects of the author persona.
The Short Anthropological Guide to the Study of Ethical AI
Authors: Alexandrine Royer
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics

Over the next few years, society as a whole will need to address what core values it wishes to protect when dealing with technology. Anthropology, a field dedicated to the very notion of what it means to be human, can provide some interesting insights into how to cope and tackle these changes in our Western society and other areas of the world. It can be challenging for social science practitioners to grasp and keep up with the pace of technological innovation, with many being unfamiliar with the jargon of AI. This short guide serves as both an introduction to AI ethics and social science and anthropological perspectives on the development of AI. It intends to provide those unfamiliar with the field with an insight into the societal impact of AI systems and how, in turn, these systems can lead us to rethink how our world operates.
Interpreting Imagined Speech Waves with Machine Learning techniques
Authors: Abhiram Singh, Ashwin Gumaste
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG)

This work explores the possibility of decoding Imagined Speech (IS) signals which can be used to create a new design of Human-Computer Interface (HCI). Since the underlying process generating EEG signals is unknown, various feature extraction methods, along with different neural network (NN) models, are used to approximate data distribution and classify IS signals. Based on the experimental results, feed-forward NN model with ensemble and covariance matrix transformed features showed the highest performance in comparison to other existing methods. For comparison, three publicly available datasets were used. We report a mean classification accuracy of 80% between rest and imagined state, 96% and 80% for decoding long and short words on two datasets. These results show that it is possible to differentiate brain signals (generated during rest state) from the IS brain signals. Based on the experimental results, we suggest that the word length and complexity can be used to decode IS signals with high accuracy, and a BCI system can be designed with IS signals for computer interaction. These ideas, and results give direction for the development of a commercial level IS based BCI system, which can be used for human-computer interaction in daily life.
Slice-Aware Neural Ranking
Authors: Gustavo Penha, Claudia Hauff
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (scai) 2020 11

Understanding when and why neural ranking models fail for an IR task via error analysis is an important part of the research cycle. Here we focus on the challenges of (i) identifying categories of difficult instances (a pair of question and response candidates) for which a neural ranker is ineffective and (ii) improving neural ranking for such instances. To address both challenges we resort to slice-based learning for which the goal is to improve effectiveness of neural models for slices (subsets) of data. We address challenge (i) by proposing different slicing functions (SFs) that select slices of the dataset---based on prior work we heuristically capture different failures of neural rankers. Then, for challenge (ii) we adapt a neural ranking model to learn slice-aware representations, i.e. the adapted model learns to represent the question and responses differently based on the model's prediction of which slices they belong to. Our experimental results (the source code and data are available at https://github.com/Guzpenha/slice_based_learning) across three different ranking tasks and four corpora show that slice-based learning improves the effectiveness by an average of 2% over a neural ranker that is not slice-aware.
Deep Learning in Diabetic Foot Ulcers Detection: A Comprehensive Evaluation
Authors: Moi Hoon Yap, Ryo Hachiuma, Azadeh Alavi, Raphael Brungel, Bill Cassidy, Manu Goyal, Hongtao Zhu, Johannes Ruckert, Moshe Olshansky, Xiao Huang, Hideo Saito, Saeed Hassanpour, Christoph M. Friedrich, David Ascher, Anping Song, Hiroki Kajita, David Gillespie, Neil D. Reeves, Joseph Pappachan, Claire O'Shea, Eibe Frank
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Deep Learning, object-detection, Object Detection

There has been a substantial amount of research involving computer methods and technology for the detection and recognition of diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs), but there is a lack of systematic comparisons of state-of-the-art deep learning object detection frameworks applied to this problem. DFUC2020 provided participants with a comprehensive dataset consisting of 2,000 images for training and 2,000 images for testing. This paper summarises the results of DFUC2020 by comparing the deep learning-based algorithms proposed by the winning teams: Faster R-CNN, three variants of Faster R-CNN and an ensemble method; YOLOv3; YOLOv5; EfficientDet; and a new Cascade Attention Network. For each deep learning method, we provide a detailed description of model architecture, parameter settings for training and additional stages including pre-processing, data augmentation and post-processing. We provide a comprehensive evaluation for each method. All the methods required a data augmentation stage to increase the number of images available for training and a post-processing stage to remove false positives. The best performance was obtained from Deformable Convolution, a variant of Faster R-CNN, with a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.6940 and an F1-Score of 0.7434. Finally, we demonstrate that the ensemble method based on different deep learning methods can enhanced the F1-Score but not the mAP.
Improving QA Generalization by Concurrent Modeling of Multiple Biases
Authors: Mingzhu Wu, Nafise Sadat Moosavi, Andreas Rücklé, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Extractive Question-Answering, Question Answering

Existing NLP datasets contain various biases that models can easily exploit to achieve high performances on the corresponding evaluation sets. However, focusing on dataset-specific biases limits their ability to learn more generalizable knowledge about the task from more general data patterns. In this paper, we investigate the impact of debiasing methods for improving generalization and propose a general framework for improving the performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets by concurrent modeling of multiple biases in the training data. Our framework weights each example based on the biases it contains and the strength of those biases in the training data. It then uses these weights in the training objective so that the model relies less on examples with high bias weights. We extensively evaluate our framework on extractive question answering with training data from various domains with multiple biases of different strengths. We perform the evaluations in two different settings, in which the model is trained on a single domain or multiple domains simultaneously, and show its effectiveness in both settings compared to state-of-the-art debiasing methods.