pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
"Don't quote me on that": Finding Mixtures of Sources in News Articles
Authors: Alexander Spangher, Nanyun Peng, Jonathan May, Emilio Ferrara
Date: 2021-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Clustering

Journalists publish statements provided by people, or \textit{sources} to contextualize current events, help voters make informed decisions, and hold powerful individuals accountable. In this work, we construct an ontological labeling system for sources based on each source's \textit{affiliation} and \textit{role}. We build a probabilistic model to infer these attributes for named sources and to describe news articles as mixtures of these sources. Our model outperforms existing mixture modeling and co-clustering approaches and correctly infers source-type in 80\% of expert-evaluated trials. Such work can facilitate research in downstream tasks like opinion and argumentation mining, representing a first step towards machine-in-the-loop \textit{computational journalism} systems.
Modeling "Newsworthiness" for Lead-Generation Across Corpora
Authors: Alexander Spangher, Nanyun Peng, Jonathan May, Emilio Ferrara
Date: 2021-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

Journalists obtain "leads", or story ideas, by reading large corpora of government records: court cases, proposed bills, etc. However, only a small percentage of such records are interesting documents. We propose a model of "newsworthiness" aimed at surfacing interesting documents. We train models on automatically labeled corpora -- published newspaper articles -- to predict whether each article was a front-page article (i.e., \textbf{newsworthy}) or not (i.e., \textbf{less newsworthy}). We transfer these models to unlabeled corpora -- court cases, bills, city-council meeting minutes -- to rank documents in these corpora on "newsworthiness". A fine-tuned RoBERTa model achieves .93 AUC performance on heldout labeled documents, and .88 AUC on expert-validated unlabeled corpora. We provide interpretation and visualization for our models.
Refining Targeted Syntactic Evaluation of Language Models
Authors: Benjamin Newman, Kai-Siang Ang, Julia Gong, John Hewitt
Date: 2021-04-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2021 4
Tasks: Sentence

Targeted syntactic evaluation of subject-verb number agreement in English (TSE) evaluates language models' syntactic knowledge using hand-crafted minimal pairs of sentences that differ only in the main verb's conjugation. The method evaluates whether language models rate each grammatical sentence as more likely than its ungrammatical counterpart. We identify two distinct goals for TSE. First, evaluating the systematicity of a language model's syntactic knowledge: given a sentence, can it conjugate arbitrary verbs correctly? Second, evaluating a model's likely behavior: given a sentence, does the model concentrate its probability mass on correctly conjugated verbs, even if only on a subset of the possible verbs? We argue that current implementations of TSE do not directly capture either of these goals, and propose new metrics to capture each goal separately. Under our metrics, we find that TSE overestimates systematicity of language models, but that models score up to 40% better on verbs that they predict are likely in context.
Exploring Evolved Multicellular Life Histories in a Open-Ended Digital Evolution System
Authors: Matthew Andres Moreno, Charles Ofria
Date: 2021-04-20 00:00:00

Evolutionary transitions occur when previously-independent replicating entities unite to form more complex individuals. Such transitions have profoundly shaped natural evolutionary history and occur in two forms: fraternal transitions involve lower-level entities that are kin (e.g., transitions to multicellularity or to eusocial colonies), while egalitarian transitions involve unrelated individuals (e.g., the origins of mitochondria). The necessary conditions and evolutionary mechanisms for these transitions to arise continue to be fruitful targets of scientific interest. Here, we examine a range of fraternal transitions in populations of open-ended self-replicating computer programs. These digital cells were allowed to form and replicate kin groups by selectively adjoining or expelling daughter cells. The capability to recognize kin-group membership enabled preferential communication and cooperation between cells. We repeatedly observed group-level traits that are characteristic of a fraternal transition. These included reproductive division of labor, resource sharing within kin groups, resource investment in offspring groups, asymmetrical behaviors mediated by messaging, morphological patterning, and adaptive apoptosis. We report eight case studies from replicates where transitions occurred and explore the diverse range of adaptive evolved multicellular strategies.
Crystal structure prediction of materials with high symmetry using differential evolution
Authors: Wenhui Yang, Edirisuriya M. Dilanga Siriwardane, Rongzhi Dong, Yuxin Li, Jianjun Hu
Date: 2021-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: global-optimization, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Crystal structure determines properties of materials. With the crystal structure of a chemical substance, many physical and chemical properties can be predicted by first-principles calculations or machine learning models. Since it is relatively easy to generate a hypothetical chemically valid formula, crystal structure prediction becomes an important method for discovering new materials. In our previous work, we proposed a contact map-based crystal structure prediction method, which uses global optimization algorithms such as genetic algorithms to maximize the match between the contact map of the predicted structure and the contact map of the real crystal structure to search for the coordinates at the Wyckoff Positions(WP). However, when predicting the crystal structure with high symmetry, we found that the global optimization algorithm has difficulty to find an effective combination of WPs that satisfies the chemical formula, which is mainly caused by the inconsistency between the dimensionality of the contact map of the predicted crystal structure and the dimensionality of the contact map of the target crystal structure. This makes it challenging to predict the crystal structures of high-symmetry crystals. In order to solve this problem, here we propose to use PyXtal to generate and filter random crystal structures with given symmetry constraints based on the information such as chemical formulas and space groups. With contact map as the optimization goal, we use differential evolution algorithms to search for non-special coordinates at the Wyckoff positions to realize the structure prediction of high-symmetry crystal materials. Our experimental results show that our proposed algorithm CMCrystalHS can effectively solve the problem of inconsistent contact map dimensions and predict the crystal structures with high symmetry.
Hypervolume-Optimal $μ$-Distributions on Line/Plane-based Pareto Fronts in Three Dimensions
Authors: Ke Shang, Hisao Ishibuchi, WeiYu Chen, Yang Nan, Weiduo Liao
Date: 2021-04-20 00:00:00

Hypervolume is widely used in the evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) field to evaluate the quality of a solution set. For a solution set with $\mu$ solutions on a Pareto front, a larger hypervolume means a better solution set. Investigating the distribution of the solution set with the largest hypervolume is an important topic in EMO, which is the so-called hypervolume optimal $\mu$-distribution. Theoretical results have shown that the $\mu$ solutions are uniformly distributed on a linear Pareto front in two dimensions. However, the $\mu$ solutions are not always uniformly distributed on a single-line Pareto front in three dimensions. They are only uniform when the single-line Pareto front has one constant objective. In this paper, we further investigate the hypervolume optimal $\mu$-distribution in three dimensions. We consider the line- and plane-based Pareto fronts. For the line-based Pareto fronts, we extend the single-line Pareto front to two-line and three-line Pareto fronts, where each line has one constant objective. For the plane-based Pareto fronts, the linear triangular and inverted triangular Pareto fronts are considered. First, we show that the $\mu$ solutions are not always uniformly distributed on the line-based Pareto fronts. The uniformity depends on how the lines are combined. Then, we show that a uniform solution set on the plane-based Pareto front is not always optimal for hypervolume maximization. It is locally optimal with respect to a $(\mu+1)$ selection scheme. Our results can help researchers in the community to better understand and utilize the hypervolume indicator.
Fairly Constricted Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization
Authors: Anwesh Bhattacharya, Snehanshu Saha, Nithin Nagaraj
Date: 2021-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

It has been well documented that the use of exponentially-averaged momentum (EM) in particle swarm optimization (PSO) is advantageous over the vanilla PSO algorithm. In the single-objective setting, it leads to faster convergence and avoidance of local minima. Naturally, one would expect that the same advantages of EM carry over to the multi-objective setting. Hence, we extend the state of the art Multi-objective optimization (MOO) solver, SMPSO, by incorporating EM in it. As a consequence, we develop the mathematical formalism of constriction fairness which is at the core of extended SMPSO algorithm. The proposed solver matches the performance of SMPSO across the ZDT, DTLZ and WFG problem suites and even outperforms it in certain instances.
Particle swarm optimization in constrained maximum likelihood estimation a case study
Authors: Elvis Cui, Dongyuan Song, Weng Kee Wong
Date: 2021-04-09 00:00:00

The aim of paper is to apply two types of particle swarm optimization, global best andlocal best PSO to a constrained maximum likelihood estimation problem in pseudotime anal-ysis, a sub-field in bioinformatics. The results have shown that particle swarm optimizationis extremely useful and efficient when the optimization problem is non-differentiable and non-convex so that analytical solution can not be derived and gradient-based methods can not beapplied.
BCNN: Binary Complex Neural Network
Authors: Yanfei Li, Tong Geng, Ang Li, Huimin Yu
Date: 2021-03-28 00:00:00

Binarized neural networks, or BNNs, show great promise in edge-side applications with resource limited hardware, but raise the concerns of reduced accuracy. Motivated by the complex neural networks, in this paper we introduce complex representation into the BNNs and propose Binary complex neural network -- a novel network design that processes binary complex inputs and weights through complex convolution, but still can harvest the extraordinary computation efficiency of BNNs. To ensure fast convergence rate, we propose novel BCNN based batch normalization function and weight initialization function. Experimental results on Cifar10 and ImageNet using state-of-the-art network models (e.g., ResNet, ResNetE and NIN) show that BCNN can achieve better accuracy compared to the original BNN models. BCNN improves BNN by strengthening its learning capability through complex representation and extending its applicability to complex-valued input data. The source code of BCNN will be released on GitHub.
Bisecting for selecting: using a Laplacian eigenmaps clustering approach to create the new European football Super League
Authors: A. J. Bond, C. B. Beggs
Date: 2021-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, regression

We use European football performance data to select teams to form the proposed European football Super League, using only unsupervised techniques. We first used random forest regression to select important variables predicting goal difference, which we used to calculate the Euclidian distances between teams. Creating a Laplacian eigenmap, we bisected the Fielder vector to identify the five major European football leagues' natural clusters. Our results showed how an unsupervised approach could successfully identify four clusters based on five basic performance metrics: shots, shots on target, shots conceded, possession, and pass success. The top two clusters identify those teams who dominate their respective leagues and are the best candidates to create the most competitive elite super league.
Personalized News Recommendation with Knowledge-aware Interactive Matching
Authors: Tao Qi, Fangzhao Wu, Chuhan Wu, Yongfeng Huang
Date: 2021-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, News Recommendation

The most important task in personalized news recommendation is accurate matching between candidate news and user interest. Most of existing news recommendation methods model candidate news from its textual content and user interest from their clicked news in an independent way. However, a news article may cover multiple aspects and entities, and a user usually has different kinds of interest. Independent modeling of candidate news and user interest may lead to inferior matching between news and users. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-aware interactive matching method for news recommendation. Our method interactively models candidate news and user interest to facilitate their accurate matching. We design a knowledge-aware news co-encoder to interactively learn representations for both clicked news and candidate news by capturing their relatedness in both semantic and entities with the help of knowledge graphs. We also design a user-news co-encoder to learn candidate news-aware user interest representation and user-aware candidate news representation for better interest matching. Experiments on two real-world datasets validate that our method can effectively improve the performance of news recommendation.
B-PROP: Bootstrapped Pre-training with Representative Words Prediction for Ad-hoc Retrieval
Authors: Xinyu Ma, Jiafeng Guo, Ruqing Zhang, Yixing Fan, Yingyan Li, Xueqi Cheng
Date: 2021-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Retrieval

Pre-training and fine-tuning have achieved remarkable success in many downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Recently, pre-training methods tailored for information retrieval (IR) have also been explored, and the latest success is the PROP method which has reached new SOTA on a variety of ad-hoc retrieval benchmarks. The basic idea of PROP is to construct the \textit{representative words prediction} (ROP) task for pre-training inspired by the query likelihood model. Despite its exciting performance, the effectiveness of PROP might be bounded by the classical unigram language model adopted in the ROP task construction process. To tackle this problem, we propose a bootstrapped pre-training method (namely B-PROP) based on BERT for ad-hoc retrieval. The key idea is to use the powerful contextual language model BERT to replace the classical unigram language model for the ROP task construction, and re-train BERT itself towards the tailored objective for IR. Specifically, we introduce a novel contrastive method, inspired by the divergence-from-randomness idea, to leverage BERT's self-attention mechanism to sample representative words from the document. By further fine-tuning on downstream ad-hoc retrieval tasks, our method achieves significant improvements over baselines without pre-training or with other pre-training methods, and further pushes forward the SOTA on a variety of ad-hoc retrieval tasks.
An Analysis of Indexing and Querying Strategies on a Technologically Assisted Review Task
Authors: Alexandros Ioannidis
Date: 2021-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Task 2

This paper presents a preliminary experimentation study using the CLEF 2017 eHealth Task 2 collection for evaluating the effectiveness of different indexing methodologies of documents and query parsing techniques. Furthermore, it is an attempt to advance and share the efforts of observing the characteristics and helpfulness of various methodologies for indexing PubMed documents and for different topic parsing techniques to produce queries. For this purpose, my research includes experimentation with different document indexing methodologies, by utilising existing tools, such as the Lucene4IR (L4IR) information retrieval system, the Technology Assisted Reviews for Empirical Medicine tool for parsing topics of the CLEF collection and the TREC evaluation tool to appraise system's performance. The results showed that including a greater number of fields to the PubMed indexer of L4IR is a decisive factor for the retrieval effectiveness of L4IR.
Searching for Scientific Evidence in a Pandemic: An Overview of TREC-COVID
Authors: Kirk Roberts, Tasmeer Alam, Steven Bedrick, Dina Demner-Fushman, Kyle Lo, Ian Soboroff, Ellen Voorhees, Lucy Lu Wang, William R Hersh
Date: 2021-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

We present an overview of the TREC-COVID Challenge, an information retrieval (IR) shared task to evaluate search on scientific literature related to COVID-19. The goals of TREC-COVID include the construction of a pandemic search test collection and the evaluation of IR methods for COVID-19. The challenge was conducted over five rounds from April to July, 2020, with participation from 92 unique teams and 556 individual submissions. A total of 50 topics (sets of related queries) were used in the evaluation, starting at 30 topics for Round 1 and adding 5 new topics per round to target emerging topics at that state of the still-emerging pandemic. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the structure and results of TREC-COVID. Specifically, the paper provides details on the background, task structure, topic structure, corpus, participation, pooling, assessment, judgments, results, top-performing systems, lessons learned, and benchmark datasets.
Distributed nonlinear model predictive control of an autonomous tractor-trailer system
Authors: Erkan Kayacan, Erdal Kayacan, Herman Ramon, Wouter Saeys
Date: 2021-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control, parameter estimation

This paper addresses the trajectory tracking problem of an autonomous tractor-trailer system by using a fast distributed nonlinear model predictive control algorithm in combination with nonlinear moving horizon estimation for the state and parameter estimation in which constraints on the inputs and the states can be incorporated. The proposed control algorithm is capable of driving the tractor-trailer system to any desired trajectory ensuring high control accuracy and robustness against environmental disturbances.
Characterizing the UAV-to-Machine UWB Radio Channel in Smart Factories
Authors: Vasilii Semkin, Enrico M. Vitucci, Franco Fuschini, Marina Barbiroli, Vittorio Degli-Esposti, Claude Oestges
Date: 2021-04-19 00:00:00

In this work, the results of Ultra-Wideband air-to-ground measurements carried out in a real-world factory environment are presented and discussed. With intelligent in-dustrial deployments in mind, we envision a scenario where the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle can be used as a supplementary tool for factory operation, optimization and control. Measurements address narrow band and wide band characterization of the wireless radio channel, and can be used for link budget calculation, interference studies and time dispersion assessment in real factories, without the usual limitation for both radio terminals to be close to ground. The measurements are performed at different locations and different heights over the 3.1-5.3 GHz band. Some fundamental propagation parameters values are determined vs. distance, height and propagation conditions. The measurements are complemented with, and compared to, conventional ground-to-ground measurements with the same setup. The conducted measurement campaign gives an insight for realizing wireless applications in smart connected factories, including UAV-assisted applications.
Robust parameter design for Wiener-based binaural noise reduction methods in hearing aids
Authors: Diego M. Carmo, Ricardo Borsoi, Márcio H. Costa
Date: 2021-04-19 00:00:00

This work presents a method for designing the weighting parameter required by Wiener-based binaural noise reduction methods. This parameter establishes the desired tradeoff between noise reduction and binaural cue preservation in hearing aid applications. The proposed strategy was specially derived for the preservation of interaural level difference, interaural time difference and interaural coherence binaural cues. It is defined as a function of the average input noise power at the microphones, providing robustness against the influence of joint changes in noise and speech power (Lombard effect), as well as to signal to noise ratio (SNR) variations. A theoretical framework, based on the mathematical definition of the homogeneity degree, is presented and applied to a generic augmented Wiener-based cost function. The theoretical insights obtained are supported bycomputational simulations and psychoacoustic experiments using the multichannel Wiener filter with interaural transfer function preservation technique (MWF-ITF), as a case study. Statistical analysis indicates that the proposed dynamic structure for the weighting parameter and the design method of its fixed part provide significant robustness against changes in the original binaural cues of both speech and residual noise, at the cost of a small decrease in the noise reduction performance, as compared to the use of a purely fixed weighting parameter.
Comparison of remote experiments using crowdsourcing and laboratory experiments on speech intelligibility
Authors: Ayako Yamamoto, Toshio Irino, Kenichi Arai, Shoko Araki, Atsunori Ogawa, Keisuke Kinoshita, Tomohiro Nakatani
Date: 2021-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

Many subjective experiments have been performed to develop objective speech intelligibility measures, but the novel coronavirus outbreak has made it very difficult to conduct experiments in a laboratory. One solution is to perform remote testing using crowdsourcing; however, because we cannot control the listening conditions, it is unclear whether the results are entirely reliable. In this study, we compared speech intelligibility scores obtained in remote and laboratory experiments. The results showed that the mean and standard deviation (SD) of the remote experiments' speech reception threshold (SRT) were higher than those of the laboratory experiments. However, the variance in the SRTs across the speech-enhancement conditions revealed similarities, implying that remote testing results may be as useful as laboratory experiments to develop an objective measure. We also show that the practice session scores correlate with the SRT values. This is a priori information before performing the main tests and would be useful for data screening to reduce the variability of the SRT distribution.
Optimal Design of Electric Micromobility Vehicles
Authors: Olaf Korzilius, Olaf Borsboom, Theo Hofman, Mauro Salazar
Date: 2021-04-20 00:00:00

This paper presents a modeling and optimization framework to design battery electric micromobility vehicles, minimizing their total cost of ownership (TCO). Specifically, we first identify a model of the electric powertrain of an e-scooter and an e-moped consisting of a battery, a single electric motor and a transmission. Second, we frame an optimal joint design and control problem minimizing the TCO of the vehicles. Since this problem is nonlinear w.r.t. the motor size and the total mass of the vehicle, but convex if their value is given, we efficiently solve the problem for a range of motor sizes with an algorithm based on second-order conic programming iterating on the vehicle's mass. Finally, we showcase our framework on custom-created driving cycles for both vehicles on hilly and flat scenarios, providing an in-depth analysis of the results and a numerical validation with high-fidelity simulations. Our results show that the characteristics of the area where the vehicles are employed have a significant impact on their optimal design, whilst revealing that regenerative braking and gear-changing capabilities (as in the case of a continuously variable transmission) may not be worth implementing.