pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards Confident Machine Reading Comprehension
Authors: Rishav Chakravarti, Avirup Sil
Date: 2021-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: answerability prediction, Extractive Question-Answering, Machine Reading Comprehension, Prediction, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension

There has been considerable progress on academic benchmarks for the Reading Comprehension (RC) task with State-of-the-Art models closing the gap with human performance on extractive question answering. Datasets such as SQuAD 2.0 & NQ have also introduced an auxiliary task requiring models to predict when a question has no answer in the text. However, in production settings, it is also necessary to provide confidence estimates for the performance of the underlying RC model at both answer extraction and "answerability" detection. We propose a novel post-prediction confidence estimation model, which we call Mr.C (short for Mr. Confident), that can be trained to improve a system's ability to refrain from making incorrect predictions with improvements of up to 4 points as measured by Area Under the Curve (AUC) scores. Mr.C can benefit from a novel white-box feature that leverages the underlying RC model's gradients. Performance prediction is particularly important in cases of domain shift (as measured by training RC models on SQUAD 2.0 and evaluating on NQ), where Mr.C not only improves AUC, but also traditional answerability prediction (as measured by a 5 point improvement in F1).
Divide and Conquer: An Ensemble Approach for Hostile Post Detection in Hindi
Authors: Varad Bhatnagar, Prince Kumar, Sairam Moghili, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Date: 2021-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-class Classification, Multi-Label Text Classification

Recently the NLP community has started showing interest towards the challenging task of Hostile Post Detection. This paper present our system for Shared Task at Constraint2021 on "Hostile Post Detection in Hindi". The data for this shared task is provided in Hindi Devanagari script which was collected from Twitter and Facebook. It is a multi-label multi-class classification problem where each data instance is annotated into one or more of the five classes: fake, hate, offensive, defamation, and non-hostile. We propose a two level architecture which is made up of BERT based classifiers and statistical classifiers to solve this problem. Our team 'Albatross', scored 0.9709 Coarse grained hostility F1 score measure on Hostile Post Detection in Hindi subtask and secured 2nd rank out of 45 teams for the task. Our submission is ranked 2nd and 3rd out of a total of 156 submissions with Coarse grained hostility F1 score of 0.9709 and 0.9703 respectively. Our fine grained scores are also very encouraging and can be improved with further finetuning. The code is publicly available.
The Challenges of Persian User-generated Textual Content: A Machine Learning-Based Approach
Authors: Mohammad Kasra Habib
Date: 2021-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Feature Engineering, Sentiment Analysis

Over recent years a lot of research papers and studies have been published on the development of effective approaches that benefit from a large amount of user-generated content and build intelligent predictive models on top of them. This research applies machine learning-based approaches to tackle the hurdles that come with Persian user-generated textual content. Unfortunately, there is still inadequate research in exploiting machine learning approaches to classify/cluster Persian text. Further, analyzing Persian text suffers from a lack of resources; specifically from datasets and text manipulation tools. Since the syntax and semantics of the Persian language is different from English and other languages, the available resources from these languages are not instantly usable for Persian. In addition, recognition of nouns and pronouns, parts of speech tagging, finding words' boundary, stemming or character manipulations for Persian language are still unsolved issues that require further studying. Therefore, efforts have been made in this research to address some of the challenges. This presented approach uses a machine-translated datasets to conduct sentiment analysis for the Persian language. Finally, the dataset has been rehearsed with different classifiers and feature engineering approaches. The results of the experiments have shown promising state-of-the-art performance in contrast to the previous efforts; the best classifier was Support Vector Machines which achieved a precision of 91.22%, recall of 91.71%, and F1 score of 91.46%.
A survey of joint intent detection and slot-filling models in natural language understanding
Authors: H. Weld, X. Huang, S. Long, J. Poon, S. C. Han
Date: 2021-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, intent-classification, Intent Classification, Intent Classification and Slot Filling, Intent Detection, Natural Language Understanding, slot-filling, Slot Filling

Intent classification and slot filling are two critical tasks for natural language understanding. Traditionally the two tasks have been deemed to proceed independently. However, more recently, joint models for intent classification and slot filling have achieved state-of-the-art performance, and have proved that there exists a strong relationship between the two tasks. This article is a compilation of past work in natural language understanding, especially joint intent classification and slot filling. We observe three milestones in this research so far: Intent detection to identify the speaker's intention, slot filling to label each word token in the speech/text, and finally, joint intent classification and slot filling tasks. In this article, we describe trends, approaches, issues, data sets, evaluation metrics in intent classification and slot filling. We also discuss representative performance values, describe shared tasks, and provide pointers to future work, as given in prior works. To interpret the state-of-the-art trends, we provide multiple tables that describe and summarise past research along different dimensions, including the types of features, base approaches, and dataset domain used.
Learning to Augment for Data-Scarce Domain BERT Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Lingyun Feng, Minghui Qiu, Yaliang Li, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ying Shen
Date: 2021-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

Despite pre-trained language models such as BERT have achieved appealing performance in a wide range of natural language processing tasks, they are computationally expensive to be deployed in real-time applications. A typical method is to adopt knowledge distillation to compress these large pre-trained models (teacher models) to small student models. However, for a target domain with scarce training data, the teacher can hardly pass useful knowledge to the student, which yields performance degradation for the student models. To tackle this problem, we propose a method to learn to augment for data-scarce domain BERT knowledge distillation, by learning a cross-domain manipulation scheme that automatically augments the target with the help of resource-rich source domains. Specifically, the proposed method generates samples acquired from a stationary distribution near the target data and adopts a reinforced selector to automatically refine the augmentation strategy according to the performance of the student. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on four different tasks, and for the data-scarce domains, the compressed student models even perform better than the original large teacher model, with much fewer parameters (only ${\sim}13.3\%$) when only a few labeled examples available.
Active Learning for Sequence Tagging with Deep Pre-trained Models and Bayesian Uncertainty Estimates
Authors: Artem Shelmanov, Dmitri Puzyrev, Lyubov Kupriyanova, Denis Belyakov, Daniil Larionov, Nikita Khromov, Olga Kozlova, Ekaterina Artemova, Dmitry V. Dylov, Alexander Panchenko
Date: 2021-01-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: EACL 2021 2
Tasks: Active Learning, Transfer Learning

Annotating training data for sequence tagging of texts is usually very time-consuming. Recent advances in transfer learning for natural language processing in conjunction with active learning open the possibility to significantly reduce the necessary annotation budget. We are the first to thoroughly investigate this powerful combination for the sequence tagging task. We conduct an extensive empirical study of various Bayesian uncertainty estimation methods and Monte Carlo dropout options for deep pre-trained models in the active learning framework and find the best combinations for different types of models. Besides, we also demonstrate that to acquire instances during active learning, a full-size Transformer can be substituted with a distilled version, which yields better computational performance and reduces obstacles for applying deep active learning in practice.
Can Taxonomy Help? Improving Semantic Question Matching using Question Taxonomy
Authors: Deepak Gupta, Rajkumar Pujari, Asif Ekbal, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Anutosh Maitra, Tom Jain, Shubhashis Sengupta
Date: 2021-01-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2018 8
Tasks: Deep Learning

In this paper, we propose a hybrid technique for semantic question matching. It uses our proposed two-layered taxonomy for English questions by augmenting state-of-the-art deep learning models with question classes obtained from a deep learning based question classifier. Experiments performed on three open-domain datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. We achieve state-of-the-art results on partial ordering question ranking (POQR) benchmark dataset. Our empirical analysis shows that coupling standard distributional features (provided by the question encoder) with knowledge from taxonomy is more effective than either deep learning (DL) or taxonomy-based knowledge alone.
Data-to-text Generation by Splicing Together Nearest Neighbors
Authors: Sam Wiseman, Arturs Backurs, Karl Stratos
Date: 2021-01-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Conditional Text Generation, Data-to-Text Generation, Text Generation

We propose to tackle data-to-text generation tasks by directly splicing together retrieved segments of text from "neighbor" source-target pairs. Unlike recent work that conditions on retrieved neighbors but generates text token-by-token, left-to-right, we learn a policy that directly manipulates segments of neighbor text, by inserting or replacing them in partially constructed generations. Standard techniques for training such a policy require an oracle derivation for each generation, and we prove that finding the shortest such derivation can be reduced to parsing under a particular weighted context-free grammar. We find that policies learned in this way perform on par with strong baselines in terms of automatic and human evaluation, but allow for more interpretable and controllable generation.
Using Full-text Content of Academic Articles to Build a Methodology Taxonomy of Information Science in China
Authors: Heng Zhang, Chengzhi Zhang
Date: 2021-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Clustering

Research on the construction of traditional information science methodology taxonomy is mostly conducted manually. From the limited corpus, researchers have attempted to summarize some of the research methodology entities into several abstract levels (generally three levels); however, they have been unable to provide a more granular hierarchy. Moreover, updating the methodology taxonomy is traditionally a slow process. In this study, we collected full-text academic papers related to information science. First, we constructed a basic methodology taxonomy with three levels by manual annotation. Then, the word vectors of the research methodology entities were trained using the full-text data. Accordingly, the research methodology entities were clustered and the basic methodology taxonomy was expanded using the clustering results to obtain a methodology taxonomy with more levels. This study provides new concepts for constructing a methodology taxonomy of information science. The proposed methodology taxonomy is semi-automated; it is more detailed than conventional schemes and the speed of taxonomy renewal has been enhanced.
HIVE-4-MAT: Advancing the Ontology Infrastructure for Materials Science
Authors: Jane Greenberg, Xintong Zhao, Joseph Adair, Joan Boone, Xiaohua Tony Hu
Date: 2021-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation, Relation Extraction

Introduces HIVE-4-MAT - Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering for Materials Science, an automatic linked data ontology application. Covers contextual background for materials science, shared ontology infrastructures, and reviews the knowledge extraction and indexing process. HIVE-4-MAT's vocabulary browsing, term search and selection, and knowledge extraction and indexing are reviewed, and plans to integrate named entity recognition. Conclusion highlights next steps with relation extraction to support better ontologies.
Open-Domain Conversational Search Assistant with Transformers
Authors: Rafael Ferreira, Mariana Leite, David Semedo, Joao Magalhaes
Date: 2021-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Search, Retrieval

Open-domain conversational search assistants aim at answering user questions about open topics in a conversational manner. In this paper we show how the Transformer architecture achieves state-of-the-art results in key IR tasks, leveraging the creation of conversational assistants that engage in open-domain conversational search with single, yet informative, answers. In particular, we propose an open-domain abstractive conversational search agent pipeline to address two major challenges: first, conversation context-aware search and second, abstractive search-answers generation. To address the first challenge, the conversation context is modeled with a query rewriting method that unfolds the context of the conversation up to a specific moment to search for the correct answers. These answers are then passed to a Transformer-based re-ranker to further improve retrieval performance. The second challenge, is tackled with recent Abstractive Transformer architectures to generate a digest of the top most relevant passages. Experiments show that Transformers deliver a solid performance across all tasks in conversational search, outperforming the best TREC CAsT 2019 baseline.
Multi-Task Network Pruning and Embedded Optimization for Real-time Deployment in ADAS
Authors: Flora Dellinger, Thomas Boulay, Diego Mendoza Barrenechea, Said El-Hachimi, Isabelle Leang, Fabien Bürger
Date: 2021-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Network Pruning, object-detection, Object Detection, Quantization, Semantic Segmentation

Camera-based Deep Learning algorithms are increasingly needed for perception in Automated Driving systems. However, constraints from the automotive industry challenge the deployment of CNNs by imposing embedded systems with limited computational resources. In this paper, we propose an approach to embed a multi-task CNN network under such conditions on a commercial prototype platform, i.e. a low power System on Chip (SoC) processing four surround-view fisheye cameras at 10 FPS. The first focus is on designing an efficient and compact multi-task network architecture. Secondly, a pruning method is applied to compress the CNN, helping to reduce the runtime and memory usage by a factor of 2 without lowering the performances significantly. Finally, several embedded optimization techniques such as mixed-quantization format usage and efficient data transfers between different memory areas are proposed to ensure real-time execution and avoid bandwidth bottlenecks. The approach is evaluated on the hardware platform, considering embedded detection performances, runtime and memory bandwidth. Unlike most works from the literature that focus on classification task, we aim here to study the effect of pruning and quantization on a compact multi-task network with object detection, semantic segmentation and soiling detection tasks.
The Devils in the Point Clouds: Studying the Robustness of Point Cloud Convolutions
Authors: Xingyi Li, Wenxuan Wu, Xiaoli Z. Fern, Li Fuxin
Date: 2021-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Recently, there has been a significant interest in performing convolution over irregularly sampled point clouds. Since point clouds are very different from regular raster images, it is imperative to study the generalization of the convolution networks more closely, especially their robustness under variations in scale and rotations of the input data. This paper investigates different variants of PointConv, a convolution network on point clouds, to examine their robustness to input scale and rotation changes. Of the variants we explored, two are novel and generated significant improvements. The first is replacing the multilayer perceptron based weight function with much simpler third degree polynomials, together with a Sobolev norm regularization. Secondly, for 3D datasets, we derive a novel viewpoint-invariant descriptor by utilizing 3D geometric properties as the input to PointConv, in addition to the regular 3D coordinates. We have also explored choices of activation functions, neighborhood, and subsampling methods. Experiments are conducted on the 2D MNIST & CIFAR-10 datasets as well as the 3D SemanticKITTI & ScanNet datasets. Results reveal that on 2D, using third degree polynomials greatly improves PointConv's robustness to scale changes and rotations, even surpassing traditional 2D CNNs for the MNIST dataset. On 3D datasets, the novel viewpoint-invariant descriptor significantly improves the performance as well as robustness of PointConv. We achieve the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation performance on the SemanticKITTI dataset, as well as comparable performance with the current highest framework on the ScanNet dataset among point-based approaches.
DyLoc: Dynamic Localization for Massive MIMO Using Predictive Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Farzam Hejazi, Katarina Vuckovic, Nazanin Rahnavard
Date: 2021-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

This paper presents a data-driven localization framework with high precision in time-varying complex multipath environments, such as dense urban areas and indoors, where GPS and model-based localization techniques come short. We consider the angle-delay profile (ADP), a linear transformation of channel state information (CSI), in massive MIMO systems and show that ADPs preserve users' motion when stacked temporally. We discuss that given a static environment, future frames of ADP time-series are predictable employing a video frame prediction algorithm. We express that a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) can be employed to learn the background static scattering environment. To detect foreground changes in the environment, corresponding to path blockage or addition, we introduce an algorithm taking advantage of the trained DCNN. Furthermore, we present DyLoc, a data-driven framework to recover distorted ADPs due to foreground changes and to obtain precise location estimations. We evaluate the performance of DyLoc in several dynamic scenarios employing DeepMIMO dataset to generate geo-tagged CSI datasets for indoor and outdoor environments. We show that previous DCNN-based techniques fail to perform with desirable accuracy in dynamic environments, while DyLoc pursues localization precisely. Moreover, simulations show that as the environment gets richer in terms of the number of multipath, DyLoc gets more robust to foreground changes.
Machine-Generated Hierarchical Structure of Human Activities to Reveal How Machines Think
Authors: Mahsun Altın, Furkan Gürsoy, Lina Xu
Date: 2021-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Human Activity Recognition

Deep-learning based computer vision models have proved themselves to be ground-breaking approaches to human activity recognition (HAR). However, most existing works are dedicated to improve the prediction accuracy through either creating new model architectures, increasing model complexity, or refining model parameters by training on larger datasets. Here, we propose an alternative idea, differing from existing work, to increase model accuracy and also to shape model predictions to align with human understandings through automatically creating higher-level summarizing labels for similar groups of human activities. First, we argue the importance and feasibility of constructing a hierarchical labeling system for human activity recognition. Then, we utilize the predictions of a black box HAR model to identify similarities between different activities. Finally, we tailor hierarchical clustering methods to automatically generate hierarchical trees of activities and conduct experiments. In this system, the activity labels on the same level will have a designed magnitude of accuracy and reflect a specific amount of activity details. This strategy enables a trade-off between the extent of the details in the recognized activity and the user privacy by masking some sensitive predictions; and also provides possibilities for the use of formerly prohibited invasive models in privacy-concerned scenarios. Since the hierarchy is generated from the machine's perspective, the predictions at the upper levels provide better accuracy, which is especially useful when there are too detailed labels in the training set that are rather trivial to the final prediction goal. Moreover, the analysis of the structure of these trees can reveal the biases in the prediction model and guide future data collection strategies.
Joint Learning of 3D Shape Retrieval and Deformation
Authors: Mikaela Angelina Uy, Vladimir G. Kim, Minhyuk Sung, Noam Aigerman, Siddhartha Chaudhuri, Leonidas Guibas
Date: 2021-01-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: 3D Shape Retrieval, Retrieval

We propose a novel technique for producing high-quality 3D models that match a given target object image or scan. Our method is based on retrieving an existing shape from a database of 3D models and then deforming its parts to match the target shape. Unlike previous approaches that independently focus on either shape retrieval or deformation, we propose a joint learning procedure that simultaneously trains the neural deformation module along with the embedding space used by the retrieval module. This enables our network to learn a deformation-aware embedding space, so that retrieved models are more amenable to match the target after an appropriate deformation. In fact, we use the embedding space to guide the shape pairs used to train the deformation module, so that it invests its capacity in learning deformations between meaningful shape pairs. Furthermore, our novel part-aware deformation module can work with inconsistent and diverse part-structures on the source shapes. We demonstrate the benefits of our joint training not only on our novel framework, but also on other state-of-the-art neural deformation modules proposed in recent years. Lastly, we also show that our jointly-trained method outperforms various non-joint baselines.