pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Testing the Robustness of a BiLSTM-based Structural Story Classifier
Authors: Aftab Hussain, Sai Durga Prasad Nanduri, Sneha Seenuvasavarathan
Date: 2022-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Fake News Detection

The growing prevalence of counterfeit stories on the internet has fostered significant interest towards fast and scalable detection of fake news in the machine learning community. While several machine learning techniques for this purpose have emerged, we observe that there is a need to evaluate the impact of noise on these techniques' performance, where noise constitutes news articles being mistakenly labeled as fake (or real). This work takes a step in that direction, where we examine the impact of noise on a state-of-the-art, structural model based on BiLSTM (Bidirectional Long-Short Term Model) for fake news detection, Hierarchical Discourse-level Structure for Fake News Detection by Karimi and Tang (Reference no. 9).
Towards Trustworthy AutoGrading of Short, Multi-lingual, Multi-type Answers
Authors: Johannes Schneider, Robin Richner, Micha Riser
Date: 2022-01-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

Autograding short textual answers has become much more feasible due to the rise of NLP and the increased availability of question-answer pairs brought about by a shift to online education. Autograding performance is still inferior to human grading. The statistical and black-box nature of state-of-the-art machine learning models makes them untrustworthy, raising ethical concerns and limiting their practical utility. Furthermore, the evaluation of autograding is typically confined to small, monolingual datasets for a specific question type. This study uses a large dataset consisting of about 10 million question-answer pairs from multiple languages covering diverse fields such as math and language, and strong variation in question and answer syntax. We demonstrate the effectiveness of fine-tuning transformer models for autograding for such complex datasets. Our best hyperparameter-tuned model yields an accuracy of about 86.5\%, comparable to the state-of-the-art models that are less general and more tuned to a specific type of question, subject, and language. More importantly, we address trust and ethical concerns. By involving humans in the autograding process, we show how to improve the accuracy of automatically graded answers, achieving accuracy equivalent to that of teaching assistants. We also show how teachers can effectively control the type of errors made by the system and how they can validate efficiently that the autograder's performance on individual exams is close to the expected performance.
A Deep Learning Approach to Integrate Human-Level Understanding in a Chatbot
Authors: Afia Fairoose Abedin, Amirul Islam Al Mamun, Rownak Jahan Nowrin, Amitabha Chakrabarty, Moin Mostakim, Sudip Kumar Naskar
Date: 2021-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, intent-classification, Intent Classification, Management, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Sentiment Analysis

In recent times, a large number of people have been involved in establishing their own businesses. Unlike humans, chatbots can serve multiple customers at a time, are available 24/7 and reply in less than a fraction of a second. Though chatbots perform well in task-oriented activities, in most cases they fail to understand personalized opinions, statements or even queries which later impact the organization for poor service management. Lack of understanding capabilities in bots disinterest humans to continue conversations with them. Usually, chatbots give absurd responses when they are unable to interpret a user's text accurately. Extracting the client reviews from conversations by using chatbots, organizations can reduce the major gap of understanding between the users and the chatbot and improve their quality of products and services.Thus, in our research we incorporated all the key elements that are necessary for a chatbot to analyse and understand an input text precisely and accurately. We performed sentiment analysis, emotion detection, intent classification and named-entity recognition using deep learning to develop chatbots with humanistic understanding and intelligence. The efficiency of our approach can be demonstrated accordingly by the detailed analysis.
Cognitive Computing to Optimize IT Services
Authors: Abbas Raza Ali
Date: 2021-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Identification, Text Summarization, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

In this paper, the challenges of maintaining a healthy IT operational environment have been addressed by proactively analyzing IT Service Desk tickets, customer satisfaction surveys, and social media data. A Cognitive solution goes beyond the traditional structured data analysis by deep analyses of both structured and unstructured text. The salient features of the proposed platform include language identification, translation, hierarchical extraction of the most frequently occurring topics, entities and their relationships, text summarization, sentiments, and knowledge extraction from the unstructured text using Natural Language Processing techniques. Moreover, the insights from unstructured text combined with structured data allow the development of various classification, segmentation, and time-series forecasting use-cases on the incident, problem, and change datasets. Further, the text and predictive insights together with raw data are used for visualization and exploration of actionable insights on a rich and interactive dashboard. However, it is hard not only to find these insights using traditional structured data analysis but it might also take a very long time to discover them, especially while dealing with a massive amount of unstructured data. By taking action on these insights, organizations can benefit from a significant reduction of ticket volume, reduced operational costs, and increased customer satisfaction. In various experiments, on average, upto 18-25% of yearly ticket volume has been reduced using the proposed approach.
Traffic event description based on Twitter data using Unsupervised Learning Methods for Indian road conditions
Authors: Yasaswi Sri Chandra Gandhi Kilaru, Indrajit Ghosh
Date: 2021-12-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Word Embeddings

Non-recurrent and unpredictable traffic events directly influence road traffic conditions. There is a need for dynamic monitoring and prediction of these unpredictable events to improve road network management. The problem with the existing traditional methods (flow or speed studies) is that the coverage of many Indian roads is very sparse and reproducible methods to identify and describe the events are not available. Addition of some other form of data is essential to help with this problem. This could be real-time speed monitoring data like Google Maps, Waze, etc. or social data like Twitter, Facebook, etc. In this paper, an unsupervised learning model is used to perform effective tweet classification for enhancing Indian traffic data. The model uses word-embeddings to calculate semantic similarity and achieves a test score of 94.7%.
Adaptive Beam Search to Enhance On-device Abstractive Summarization
Authors: Harichandana B S S, Sumit Kumar
Date: 2021-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Knowledge Distillation

We receive several essential updates on our smartphones in the form of SMS, documents, voice messages, etc. that get buried beneath the clutter of content. We often do not realize the key information without going through the full content. SMS notifications sometimes help by giving an idea of what the message is about, however, they merely offer a preview of the beginning content. One way to solve this is to have a single efficient model that can adapt and summarize data from varied sources. In this paper, we tackle this issue and for the first time, propose a novel Adaptive Beam Search to improve the quality of on-device abstractive summarization that can be applied to SMS, voice messages and can be extended to documents. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first on-device abstractive summarization pipeline to be proposed that can adapt to multiple data sources addressing privacy concerns of users as compared to the majority of existing summarization systems that send data to a server. We reduce the model size by 30.9% using knowledge distillation and show that this model with a 97.6% lesser memory footprint extracts the same or more key information as compared to BERT.
Best of Both Worlds: A Hybrid Approach for Multi-Hop Explanation with Declarative Facts
Authors: Shane Storks, Qiaozi Gao, Aishwarya Reganti, Govind Thattai
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: AAAI Workshop CLeaR 2022 2
Tasks: Explanation Generation, Retrieval

Language-enabled AI systems can answer complex, multi-hop questions to high accuracy, but supporting answers with evidence is a more challenging task which is important for the transparency and trustworthiness to users. Prior work in this area typically makes a trade-off between efficiency and accuracy; state-of-the-art deep neural network systems are too cumbersome to be useful in large-scale applications, while the fastest systems lack reliability. In this work, we integrate fast syntactic methods with powerful semantic methods for multi-hop explanation generation based on declarative facts. Our best system, which learns a lightweight operation to simulate multi-hop reasoning over pieces of evidence and fine-tunes language models to re-rank generated explanation chains, outperforms a purely syntactic baseline from prior work by up to 7% in gold explanation retrieval rate.
NILC-Metrix: assessing the complexity of written and spoken language in Brazilian Portuguese
Authors: Sidney Evaldo Leal, Magali Sanches Duran, Carolina Evaristo Scarton, Nathan Siegle Hartmann, Sandra Maria Aluísio
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive

This paper presents and makes publicly available the NILC-Metrix, a computational system comprising 200 metrics proposed in studies on discourse, psycholinguistics, cognitive and computational linguistics, to assess textual complexity in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). These metrics are relevant for descriptive analysis and the creation of computational models and can be used to extract information from various linguistic levels of written and spoken language. The metrics in NILC-Metrix were developed during the last 13 years, starting in 2008 with Coh-Metrix-Port, a tool developed within the scope of the PorSimples project. Coh-Metrix-Port adapted some metrics to BP from the Coh-Metrix tool that computes metrics related to cohesion and coherence of texts in English. After the end of PorSimples in 2010, new metrics were added to the initial 48 metrics of Coh-Metrix-Port. Given the large number of metrics, we present them following an organisation similar to the metrics of Coh-Metrix v3.0 to facilitate comparisons made with metrics in Portuguese and English. In this paper, we illustrate the potential of NILC-Metrix by presenting three applications: (i) a descriptive analysis of the differences between children's film subtitles and texts written for Elementary School I and II (Final Years); (ii) a new predictor of textual complexity for the corpus of original and simplified texts of the PorSimples project; (iii) a complexity prediction model for school grades, using transcripts of children's story narratives told by teenagers. For each application, we evaluate which groups of metrics are more discriminative, showing their contribution for each task.
Bayesian Consistency with the Supremum Metric
Authors: Nhat Ho, Stephen G. Walker
Date: 2022-01-10 00:00:00

We present simple conditions for Bayesian consistency in the supremum metric. The key to the technique is a triangle inequality which allows us to explicitly use weak convergence, a consequence of the standard Kullback--Leibler support condition for the prior. A further condition is to ensure that smoothed versions of densities are not too far from the original density, thus dealing with densities which could track the data too closely. A key result of the paper is that we demonstrate supremum consistency using weaker conditions compared to those currently used to secure $\mathbb{L}_1$ consistency.
Learning polytopes with fixed facet directions
Authors: Maria Dostert, Katharina Jochemko
Date: 2022-01-10 00:00:00

We consider the task of reconstructing polytopes with fixed facet directions from finitely many support function evaluations. We show that for a fixed simplicial normal fan the least-squares estimate is given by a convex quadratic program. We study the geometry of the solution set and give a combinatorial characterization for the uniqueness of the reconstruction in this case. We provide an algorithm that, under mild assumptions, converges to the unknown input shape as the number of noisy support function evaluations increases. We also discuss limitations of our results if the restriction on the normal fan is removed.
Selecting the Best Optimizing System
Authors: Nian Si, Zeyu Zheng
Date: 2022-01-09 00:00:00

We formulate selecting the best optimizing system (SBOS) problems and provide solutions for those problems. In an SBOS problem, a finite number of systems are contenders. Inside each system, a continuous decision variable affects the system's expected performance. An SBOS problem compares different systems based on their expected performances under their own optimally chosen decision to select the best, without advance knowledge of expected performances of the systems nor the optimizing decision inside each system. We design easy-to-implement algorithms that adaptively chooses a system and a choice of decision to evaluate the noisy system performance, sequentially eliminates inferior systems, and eventually recommends a system as the best after spending a user-specified budget. The proposed algorithms integrate the stochastic gradient descent method and the sequential elimination method to simultaneously exploit the structure inside each system and make comparisons across systems. For the proposed algorithms, we prove exponential rates of convergence to zero for the probability of false selection, as the budget grows to infinity. We conduct three numerical examples that represent three practical cases of SBOS problems. Our proposed algorithms demonstrate consistent and stronger performances in terms of the probability of false selection over benchmark algorithms under a range of problem settings and sampling budgets.
Smooth Nested Simulation: Bridging Cubic and Square Root Convergence Rates in High Dimensions
Authors: Wenjia Wang, Yanyuan Wang, Xiaowei Zhang
Date: 2022-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Uncertainty Quantification

Nested simulation concerns estimating functionals of a conditional expectation via simulation. In this paper, we propose a new method based on kernel ridge regression to exploit the smoothness of the conditional expectation as a function of the multidimensional conditioning variable. Asymptotic analysis shows that the proposed method can effectively alleviate the curse of dimensionality on the convergence rate as the simulation budget increases, provided that the conditional expectation is sufficiently smooth. The smoothness bridges the gap between the cubic root convergence rate (that is, the optimal rate for the standard nested simulation) and the square root convergence rate (that is, the canonical rate for the standard Monte Carlo simulation). We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method via numerical examples from portfolio risk management and input uncertainty quantification.
A Cross Validation Framework for Signal Denoising with Applications to Trend Filtering, Dyadic CART and Beyond
Authors: Anamitra Chaudhuri, Sabyasachi Chatterjee
Date: 2022-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, regression

This paper formulates a general cross validation framework for signal denoising. The general framework is then applied to nonparametric regression methods such as Trend Filtering and Dyadic CART. The resulting cross validated versions are then shown to attain nearly the same rates of convergence as are known for the optimally tuned analogues. There did not exist any previous theoretical analyses of cross validated versions of Trend Filtering or Dyadic CART. To illustrate the generality of the framework we also propose and study cross validated versions of two fundamental estimators; lasso for high dimensional linear regression and singular value thresholding for matrix estimation. Our general framework is inspired by the ideas in Chatterjee and Jafarov (2015) and is potentially applicable to a wide range of estimation methods which use tuning parameters.
Disentangled Graph Neural Networks for Session-based Recommendation
Authors: Ansong Li, Zhiyong Cheng, Fan Liu, Zan Gao, Weili Guan, Yuxin Peng
Date: 2022-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Session-Based Recommendations

Session-based recommendation (SBR) has drawn increasingly research attention in recent years, due to its great practical value by only exploiting the limited user behavior history in the current session. Existing methods typically learn the session embedding at the item level, namely, aggregating the embeddings of items with or without the attention weights assigned to items. However, they ignore the fact that a user's intent on adopting an item is driven by certain factors of the item (e.g., the leading actors of an movie). In other words, they have not explored finer-granularity interests of users at the factor level to generate the session embedding, leading to sub-optimal performance. To address the problem, we propose a novel method called Disentangled Graph Neural Network (Disen-GNN) to capture the session purpose with the consideration of factor-level attention on each item. Specifically, we first employ the disentangled learning technique to cast item embeddings into the embedding of multiple factors, and then use the gated graph neural network (GGNN) to learn the embedding factor-wisely based on the item adjacent similarity matrix computed for each factor. Moreover, the distance correlation is adopted to enhance the independence between each pair of factors. After representing each item with independent factors, an attention mechanism is designed to learn user intent to different factors of each item in the session. The session embedding is then generated by aggregating the item embeddings with attention weights of each item's factors. To this end, our model takes user intents at the factor level into account to infer the user purpose in a session. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing methods.
State of the Art of User Simulation approaches for conversational information retrieval
Authors: Pierre Erbacher, Laure Soulier, Ludovic Denoyer
Date: 2022-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Information Retrieval, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Retrieval, Sequential Decision Making, User Simulation

Conversational Information Retrieval (CIR) is an emerging field of Information Retrieval (IR) at the intersection of interactive IR and dialogue systems for open domain information needs. In order to optimize these interactions and enhance the user experience, it is necessary to improve IR models by taking into account sequential heterogeneous user-system interactions. Reinforcement learning has emerged as a paradigm particularly suited to optimize sequential decision making in many domains and has recently appeared in IR. However, training these systems by reinforcement learning on users is not feasible. One solution is to train IR systems on user simulations that model the behavior of real users. Our contribution is twofold: 1)reviewing the literature on user modeling and user simulation for information access, and 2) discussing the different research perspectives for user simulations in the context of CIR
Watch Less and Uncover More: Could Navigation Tools Help Users Search and Explore Videos?
Authors: Maria Perez-Ortiz, Sahan Bulathwela, Claire Dormann, Meghana Verma, Stefan Kreitmayer, Richard Noss, John Shawe-Taylor, Yvonne Rogers, Emine Yilmaz
Date: 2022-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Video Retrieval

Prior research has shown how 'content preview tools' improve speed and accuracy of user relevance judgements across different information retrieval tasks. This paper describes a novel user interface tool, the Content Flow Bar, designed to allow users to quickly identify relevant fragments within informational videos to facilitate browsing, through a cognitively augmented form of navigation. It achieves this by providing semantic "snippets" that enable the user to rapidly scan through video content. The tool provides visually-appealing pop-ups that appear in a time series bar at the bottom of each video, allowing to see in advance and at a glance how topics evolve in the content. We conducted a user study to evaluate how the tool changes the users search experience in video retrieval, as well as how it supports exploration and information seeking. The user questionnaire revealed that participants found the Content Flow Bar helpful and enjoyable for finding relevant information in videos. The interaction logs of the user study, where participants interacted with the tool for completing two informational tasks, showed that it holds promise for enhancing discoverability of content both across and within videos. This discovered potential could leverage a new generation of navigation tools in search and information retrieval.
Better Modeling the Programming World with Code Concept Graphs-augmented Multi-modal Learning
Authors: Martin Weyssow, Houari Sahraoui, Bang Liu
Date: 2022-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Search, Graph Neural Network, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

The progress made in code modeling has been tremendous in recent years thanks to the design of natural language processing learning approaches based on state-of-the-art model architectures. Nevertheless, we believe that the current state-of-the-art does not focus enough on the full potential that data may bring to a learning process in software engineering. Our vision articulates on the idea of leveraging multi-modal learning approaches to modeling the programming world. In this paper, we investigate one of the underlying idea of our vision whose objective based on concept graphs of identifiers aims at leveraging high-level relationships between domain concepts manipulated through particular language constructs. In particular, we propose to enhance an existing pretrained language model of code by joint-learning it with a graph neural network based on our concept graphs. We conducted a preliminary evaluation that shows gain of effectiveness of the models for code search using a simple joint-learning method and prompts us to further investigate our research vision.