pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Could AI Democratise Education? Socio-Technical Imaginaries of an EdTech Revolution
Authors: Sahan Bulathwela, María Pérez-Ortiz, Catherine Holloway, John Shawe-Taylor
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Education has been said to have the potential for building more personalised curricula, as well as democratising education worldwide and creating a Renaissance of new ways of teaching and learning. Millions of students are already starting to benefit from the use of these technologies, but millions more around the world are not. If this trend continues, the first delivery of AI in Education could be greater educational inequality, along with a global misallocation of educational resources motivated by the current technological determinism narrative. In this paper, we focus on speculating and posing questions around the future of AI in Education, with the aim of starting the pressing conversation that would set the right foundations for the new generation of education that is permeated by technology. This paper starts by synthesising how AI might change how we learn and teach, focusing specifically on the case of personalised learning companions, and then move to discuss some socio-technical features that will be crucial for avoiding the perils of these AI systems worldwide (and perhaps ensuring their success). This paper also discusses the potential of using AI together with free, participatory and democratic resources, such as Wikipedia, Open Educational Resources and open-source tools. We also emphasise the need for collectively designing human-centered, transparent, interactive and collaborative AI-based algorithms that empower and give complete agency to stakeholders, as well as support new emerging pedagogies. Finally, we ask what would it take for this educational revolution to provide egalitarian and empowering access to education, beyond any political, cultural, language, geographical and learning ability barriers.
Malakai: Music That Adapts to the Shape of Emotions
Authors: Zack Harris, Liam Atticus Clarke, Pietro Gagliano, Dante Camarena, Manal Siddiqui, Pablo S. Castro
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00

The advent of ML music models such as Google Magenta's MusicVAE now allow us to extract and replicate compositional features from otherwise complex datasets. These models allow computational composers to parameterize abstract variables such as style and mood. By leveraging these models and combining them with procedural algorithms from the last few decades, it is possible to create a dynamic song that composes music in real-time to accompany interactive experiences. Malakai is a tool that helps users of varying skill levels create, listen to, remix and share such dynamic songs. Using Malakai, a Composer can create a dynamic song that can be interacted with by a Listener
Cyberphysical Sequencing for Distributed Asset Management with Broad Traceability
Authors: Joshua Siegel, Gregory Falco
Date: 2021-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Asset Management, Management

Cyber-Physical systems (CPS) have complex lifecycles involving multiple stakeholders, and the transparency of both hardware and software components' supply chain is opaque at best. This raises concerns for stakeholders who may not trust that what they receive is what was requested. There is an opportunity to build a cyberphysical titling process offering universal traceability and the ability to differentiate systems based on provenance. Today, RFID tags and barcodes address some of these needs, though they are easily manipulated due to non-linkage with an object or system's intrinsic characteristics. We propose cyberphysical sequencing as a low-cost, light-weight and pervasive means of adding track-and-trace capabilities to any asset that ties a system's physical identity to a unique and invariant digital identifier. CPS sequencing offers benefits similar Digital Twins' for identifying and managing the provenance and identity of an asset throughout its life with far fewer computational and other resources.
Data-Free Neural Architecture Search via Recursive Label Calibration
Authors: Zechun Liu, Zhiqiang Shen, Yun Long, Eric Xing, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Chas Leichner
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Neural Architecture Search

This paper aims to explore the feasibility of neural architecture search (NAS) given only a pre-trained model without using any original training data. This is an important circumstance for privacy protection, bias avoidance, etc., in real-world scenarios. To achieve this, we start by synthesizing usable data through recovering the knowledge from a pre-trained deep neural network. Then we use the synthesized data and their predicted soft-labels to guide neural architecture search. We identify that the NAS task requires the synthesized data (we target at image domain here) with enough semantics, diversity, and a minimal domain gap from the natural images. For semantics, we propose recursive label calibration to produce more informative outputs. For diversity, we propose a regional update strategy to generate more diverse and semantically-enriched synthetic data. For minimal domain gap, we use input and feature-level regularization to mimic the original data distribution in latent space. We instantiate our proposed framework with three popular NAS algorithms: DARTS, ProxylessNAS and SPOS. Surprisingly, our results demonstrate that the architectures discovered by searching with our synthetic data achieve accuracy that is comparable to, or even higher than, architectures discovered by searching from the original ones, for the first time, deriving the conclusion that NAS can be done effectively with no need of access to the original or called natural data if the synthesis method is well designed.
Class-agnostic Reconstruction of Dynamic Objects from Videos
Authors: Zhongzheng Ren, Xiaoming Zhao, Alexander G. Schwing
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Dynamic Reconstruction, Object

We introduce REDO, a class-agnostic framework to REconstruct the Dynamic Objects from RGBD or calibrated videos. Compared to prior work, our problem setting is more realistic yet more challenging for three reasons: 1) due to occlusion or camera settings an object of interest may never be entirely visible, but we aim to reconstruct the complete shape; 2) we aim to handle different object dynamics including rigid motion, non-rigid motion, and articulation; 3) we aim to reconstruct different categories of objects with one unified framework. To address these challenges, we develop two novel modules. First, we introduce a canonical 4D implicit function which is pixel-aligned with aggregated temporal visual cues. Second, we develop a 4D transformation module which captures object dynamics to support temporal propagation and aggregation. We study the efficacy of REDO in extensive experiments on synthetic RGBD video datasets SAIL-VOS 3D and DeformingThings4D++, and on real-world video data 3DPW. We find REDO outperforms state-of-the-art dynamic reconstruction methods by a margin. In ablation studies we validate each developed component.
Coupling Vision and Proprioception for Navigation of Legged Robots
Authors: Zipeng Fu, Ashish Kumar, Ananye Agarwal, Haozhi Qi, Jitendra Malik, Deepak Pathak
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1

We exploit the complementary strengths of vision and proprioception to develop a point-goal navigation system for legged robots, called VP-Nav. Legged systems are capable of traversing more complex terrain than wheeled robots, but to fully utilize this capability, we need a high-level path planner in the navigation system to be aware of the walking capabilities of the low-level locomotion policy in varying environments. We achieve this by using proprioceptive feedback to ensure the safety of the planned path by sensing unexpected obstacles like glass walls, terrain properties like slipperiness or softness of the ground and robot properties like extra payload that are likely missed by vision. The navigation system uses onboard cameras to generate an occupancy map and a corresponding cost map to reach the goal. A fast marching planner then generates a target path. A velocity command generator takes this as input to generate the desired velocity for the walking policy. A safety advisor module adds sensed unexpected obstacles to the occupancy map and environment-determined speed limits to the velocity command generator. We show superior performance compared to wheeled robot baselines, and ablation studies which have disjoint high-level planning and low-level control. We also show the real-world deployment of VP-Nav on a quadruped robot with onboard sensors and computation. Videos at https://navigation-locomotion.github.io
PLSUM: Generating PT-BR Wikipedia by Summarizing Multiple Websites
Authors: André Seidel Oliveira, Anna Helena Reali Costa
Date: 2021-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive

Wikipedia is an important free source of intelligible knowledge. Despite that, Brazilian Portuguese Wikipedia still lacks descriptions for many subjects. In an effort to expand the Brazilian Wikipedia, we contribute PLSum, a framework for generating wiki-like abstractive summaries from multiple descriptive websites. The framework has an extractive stage followed by an abstractive one. In particular, for the abstractive stage, we fine-tune and compare two recent variations of the Transformer neural network, PTT5, and Longformer. To fine-tune and evaluate the model, we created a dataset with thousands of examples, linking reference websites to Wikipedia. Our results show that it is possible to generate meaningful abstractive summaries from Brazilian Portuguese web content.
A Survey on Awesome Korean NLP Datasets
Authors: Byunghyun Ban
Date: 2021-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

English based datasets are commonly available from Kaggle, GitHub, or recently published papers. Although benchmark tests with English datasets are sufficient to show off the performances of new models and methods, still a researcher need to train and validate the models on Korean based datasets to produce a technology or product, suitable for Korean processing. This paper introduces 15 popular Korean based NLP datasets with summarized details such as volume, license, repositories, and other research results inspired by the datasets. Also, I provide high-resolution instructions with sample or statistics of datasets. The main characteristics of datasets are presented on a single table to provide a rapid summarization of datasets for researchers.
Multilingual Text Classification for Dravidian Languages
Authors: Xiaotian Lin, Nankai Lin, Kanoksak Wattanachote, Shengyi Jiang, Lianxi Wang
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Multilingual text classification, Multi-Task Learning, text-classification, Text Classification

As the fourth largest language family in the world, the Dravidian languages have become a research hotspot in natural language processing (NLP). Although the Dravidian languages contain a large number of languages, there are relatively few public available resources. Besides, text classification task, as a basic task of natural language processing, how to combine it to multiple languages in the Dravidian languages, is still a major difficulty in Dravidian Natural Language Processing. Hence, to address these problems, we proposed a multilingual text classification framework for the Dravidian languages. On the one hand, the framework used the LaBSE pre-trained model as the base model. Aiming at the problem of text information bias in multi-task learning, we propose to use the MLM strategy to select language-specific words, and used adversarial training to perturb them. On the other hand, in view of the problem that the model cannot well recognize and utilize the correlation among languages, we further proposed a language-specific representation module to enrich semantic information for the model. The experimental results demonstrated that the framework we proposed has a significant performance in multilingual text classification tasks with each strategy achieving certain improvements.
Multitask Finetuning for Improving Neural Machine Translation in Indian Languages
Authors: Shaily Desai, Atharva Kshirsagar, Manisha Marathe
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Language Modeling, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Question Answering, text-classification, Text Classification, Translation

Transformer based language models have led to impressive results across all domains in Natural Language Processing. Pretraining these models on language modeling tasks and finetuning them on downstream tasks such as Text Classification, Question Answering and Neural Machine Translation has consistently shown exemplary results. In this work, we propose a Multitask Finetuning methodology which combines the Bilingual Machine Translation task with an auxiliary Causal Language Modeling task to improve performance on the former task on Indian Languages. We conduct an empirical study on three language pairs, Marathi-Hindi, Marathi-English and Hindi-English, where we compare the multitask finetuning approach to the standard finetuning approach, for which we use the mBART50 model. Our study indicates that the multitask finetuning method could be a better technique than standard finetuning, and could improve Bilingual Machine Translation across language pairs.
BBS-KWS:The Mandarin Keyword Spotting System Won the Video Keyword Wakeup Challenge
Authors: Yuting Yang, Binbin Du, Yingxin Zhang, Wenxuan Wang, Yuke Li
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Keyword Spotting, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This paper introduces the system submitted by the Yidun NISP team to the video keyword wakeup challenge. We propose a mandarin keyword spotting system (KWS) with several novel and effective improvements, including a big backbone (B) model, a keyword biasing (B) mechanism and the introduction of syllable modeling units (S). By considering this, we term the total system BBS-KWS as an abbreviation. The BBS-KWS system consists of an end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) module and a KWS module. The ASR module converts speech features to text representations, which applies a big backbone network to the acoustic model and takes syllable modeling units into consideration as well. In addition, the keyword biasing mechanism is used to improve the recall rate of keywords in the ASR inference stage. The KWS module applies multiple criteria to determine the absence or presence of the keywords, such as multi-stage matching, fuzzy matching, and connectionist temporal classification (CTC) prefix score. To further improve our system, we conduct semi-supervised learning on the CN-Celeb dataset for better generalization. In the VKW task, the BBS-KWS system achieves significant gains over the baseline and won the first place in two tracks.
Creating and Managing a large annotated parallel corpora of Indian languages
Authors: Ritesh Kumar, Shiv Bhusan Kaushik, Pinkey Nainwani, Girish Nath Jha
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, POS

This paper presents the challenges in creating and managing large parallel corpora of 12 major Indian languages (which is soon to be extended to 23 languages) as part of a major consortium project funded by the Department of Information Technology (DIT), Govt. of India, and running parallel in 10 different universities of India. In order to efficiently manage the process of creation and dissemination of these huge corpora, the web-based (with a reduced stand-alone version also) annotation tool ILCIANN (Indian Languages Corpora Initiative Annotation Tool) has been developed. It was primarily developed for the POS annotation as well as the management of the corpus annotation by people with differing amount of competence and at locations physically situated far apart. In order to maintain consistency and standards in the creation of the corpora, it was necessary that everyone works on a common platform which was provided by this tool.
Translating Politeness Across Cultures: Case of Hindi and English
Authors: Ritesh Kumar, Girish Nath Jha
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

In this paper, we present a corpus based study of politeness across two languages-English and Hindi. It studies the politeness in a translated parallel corpus of Hindi and English and sees how politeness in a Hindi text is translated into English. We provide a detailed theoretical background in which the comparison is carried out, followed by a brief description of the translated data within this theoretical model. Since politeness may become one of the major reasons of conflict and misunderstanding, it is a very important phenomenon to be studied and understood cross-culturally, particularly for such purposes as machine translation.
Automatic evaluation of scientific abstracts through natural language processing
Authors: Lucas G. O. Lopes, Thales M. A. Vieira, William W. M. Lira
Date: 2021-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis, text-classification, Text Classification

This work presents a framework to classify and evaluate distinct research abstract texts which are focused on the description of processes and their applications. In this context, this paper proposes natural language processing algorithms to classify, segment and evaluate the results of scientific work. Initially, the proposed framework categorize the abstract texts into according to the problems intended to be solved by employing a text classification approach. Then, the abstract text is segmented into problem description, methodology and results. Finally, the methodology of the abstract is ranked based on the sentiment analysis of its results. The proposed framework allows us to quickly rank the best methods to solve specific problems. To validate the proposed framework, oil production anomaly abstracts were experimented and achieved promising results.
Evaluating NLP Systems On a Novel Cloze Task: Judging the Plausibility of Possible Fillers in Instructional Texts
Authors: Zizhao Hu, Ravikiran Chanumolu, Xingyu Lin, Nayela Ayaz, Vincent Chi
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00

Cloze task is a widely used task to evaluate an NLP system's language understanding ability. However, most of the existing cloze tasks only require NLP systems to give the relative best prediction for each input data sample, rather than the absolute quality of all possible predictions, in a consistent way across the input domain. Thus a new task is proposed: predicting if a filler word in a cloze task is a good, neutral, or bad candidate. Complicated versions can be extended to predicting more discrete classes or continuous scores. We focus on subtask A in Semeval 2022 task 7, explored some possible architectures to solve this new task, provided a detailed comparison of them, and proposed an ensemble method to improve traditional models in this new task.
HS-BAN: A Benchmark Dataset of Social Media Comments for Hate Speech Detection in Bangla
Authors: Nauros Romim, Mosahed Ahmed, Md Saiful Islam, Arnab Sen Sharma, Hriteshwar Talukder, Mohammad Ruhul Amin
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Hate Speech Detection

In this paper, we present HS-BAN, a binary class hate speech (HS) dataset in Bangla language consisting of more than 50,000 labeled comments, including 40.17% hate and rest are non hate speech. While preparing the dataset a strict and detailed annotation guideline was followed to reduce human annotation bias. The HS dataset was also preprocessed linguistically to extract different types of slang currently people write using symbols, acronyms, or alternative spellings. These slang words were further categorized into traditional and non-traditional slang lists and included in the results of this paper. We explored traditional linguistic features and neural network-based methods to develop a benchmark system for hate speech detection for the Bangla language. Our experimental results show that existing word embedding models trained with informal texts perform better than those trained with formal text. Our benchmark shows that a Bi-LSTM model on top of the FastText informal word embedding achieved 86.78% F1-score. We will make the dataset available for public use.
MetaQA: Combining Expert Agents for Multi-Skill Question Answering
Authors: Haritz Puerto, Gözde Gül Şahin, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

The recent explosion of question answering (QA) datasets and models has increased the interest in the generalization of models across multiple domains and formats by either training on multiple datasets or by combining multiple models. Despite the promising results of multi-dataset models, some domains or QA formats may require specific architectures, and thus the adaptability of these models might be limited. In addition, current approaches for combining models disregard cues such as question-answer compatibility. In this work, we propose to combine expert agents with a novel, flexible, and training-efficient architecture that considers questions, answer predictions, and answer-prediction confidence scores to select the best answer among a list of answer candidates. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments we show that our model i) creates a collaboration between agents that outperforms previous multi-agent and multi-dataset approaches in both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios, ii) is highly data-efficient to train, and iii) can be adapted to any QA format. We release our code and a dataset of answer predictions from expert agents for 16 QA datasets to foster future developments of multi-agent systems on https://github.com/UKPLab/MetaQA.
Augmenting Customer Support with an NLP-based Receptionist
Authors: André Barbosa, Alan Godoy
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

In this paper, we show how a Portuguese BERT model can be combined with structured data in order to deploy a chatbot based on a finite state machine to create a conversational AI system that helps a real-estate company to predict its client's contact motivation. The model achieves human level results in a dataset that contains 235 unbalanced labels. Then, we also show its benefits considering the business impact comparing it against classical NLP methods.
LMR-CBT: Learning Modality-fused Representations with CB-Transformer for Multimodal Emotion Recognition from Unaligned Multimodal Sequences
Authors: Ziwang Fu, Feng Liu, HanYang Wang, Siyuan Shen, Jiahao Zhang, Jiayin Qi, Xiangling Fu, Aimin Zhou
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Efficient Neural Network, Emotion Recognition, Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Learning modality-fused representations and processing unaligned multimodal sequences are meaningful and challenging in multimodal emotion recognition. Existing approaches use directional pairwise attention or a message hub to fuse language, visual, and audio modalities. However, those approaches introduce information redundancy when fusing features and are inefficient without considering the complementarity of modalities. In this paper, we propose an efficient neural network to learn modality-fused representations with CB-Transformer (LMR-CBT) for multimodal emotion recognition from unaligned multimodal sequences. Specifically, we first perform feature extraction for the three modalities respectively to obtain the local structure of the sequences. Then, we design a novel transformer with cross-modal blocks (CB-Transformer) that enables complementary learning of different modalities, mainly divided into local temporal learning,cross-modal feature fusion and global self-attention representations. In addition, we splice the fused features with the original features to classify the emotions of the sequences. Finally, we conduct word-aligned and unaligned experiments on three challenging datasets, IEMOCAP, CMU-MOSI, and CMU-MOSEI. The experimental results show the superiority and efficiency of our proposed method in both settings. Compared with the mainstream methods, our approach reaches the state-of-the-art with a minimum number of parameters.