pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Clinical prediction system of complications among COVID-19 patients: a development and validation retrospective multicentre study
Authors: Ghadeer O. Ghosheh, Bana Alamad, Kai-Wen Yang, Faisil Syed, Nasir Hayat, Imran Iqbal, Fatima Al Kindi, Sara Al Junaibi, Maha Al Safi, Raghib Ali, Walid Zaher, Mariam Al Harbi, Farah E. Shamout
Date: 2020-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Selection, Prognosis

Existing prognostic tools mainly focus on predicting the risk of mortality among patients with coronavirus disease 2019. However, clinical evidence suggests that COVID-19 can result in non-mortal complications that affect patient prognosis. To support patient risk stratification, we aimed to develop a prognostic system that predicts complications common to COVID-19. In this retrospective study, we used data collected from 3,352 COVID-19 patient encounters admitted to 18 facilities between April 1 and April 30, 2020, in Abu Dhabi (AD), UAE. The hospitals were split based on geographical proximity to assess for our proposed system's learning generalizability, AD Middle region and AD Western & Eastern regions, A and B, respectively. Using data collected during the first 24 hours of admission, the machine learning-based prognostic system predicts the risk of developing any of seven complications during the hospital stay. The complications include secondary bacterial infection, AKI, ARDS, and elevated biomarkers linked to increased patient severity, including d-dimer, interleukin-6, aminotransferases, and troponin. During training, the system applies an exclusion criteria, hyperparameter tuning, and model selection for each complication-specific model. The system achieves good accuracy across all complications and both regions. In test set A (587 patient encounters), the system achieves 0.91 AUROC for AKI and >0.80 AUROC for most of the other complications. In test set B (225 patient encounters), the respective system achieves 0.90 AUROC for AKI, elevated troponin, and elevated interleukin-6, and >0.80 AUROC for most of the other complications. The best performing models, as selected by our system, were mainly gradient boosting models and logistic regression. Our results show that a data-driven approach using machine learning can predict the risk of such complications with high accuracy.
Applied Machine Learning for Games: A Graduate School Course
Authors: Yilei Zeng, Aayush Shah, Jameson Thai, Michael Zyda
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

The game industry is moving into an era where old-style game engines are being replaced by re-engineered systems with embedded machine learning technologies for the operation, analysis and understanding of game play. In this paper, we describe our machine learning course designed for graduate students interested in applying recent advances of deep learning and reinforcement learning towards gaming. This course serves as a bridge to foster interdisciplinary collaboration among graduate schools and does not require prior experience designing or building games. Graduate students enrolled in this course apply different fields of machine learning techniques such as computer vision, natural language processing, computer graphics, human computer interaction, robotics and data analysis to solve open challenges in gaming. Student projects cover use-cases such as training AI-bots in gaming benchmark environments and competitions, understanding human decision patterns in gaming, and creating intelligent non-playable characters or environments to foster engaging gameplay. Projects demos can help students open doors for an industry career, aim for publications, or lay the foundations of a future product. Our students gained hands-on experience in applying state of the art machine learning techniques to solve real-life problems in gaming.
AGenT Zero: Zero-shot Automatic Multiple-Choice Question Generation for Skill Assessments
Authors: Eric Li, Jingyi Su, Hao Sheng, Lawrence Wai
Date: 2020-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple-choice, Question Generation, Question-Generation, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) offer the most promising avenue for skill evaluation in the era of virtual education and job recruiting, where traditional performance-based alternatives such as projects and essays have become less viable, and grading resources are constrained. The automated generation of MCQs would allow assessment creation at scale. Recent advances in natural language processing have given rise to many complex question generation methods. However, the few methods that produce deployable results in specific domains require a large amount of domain-specific training data that can be very costly to acquire. Our work provides an initial foray into MCQ generation under high data-acquisition cost scenarios by strategically emphasizing paraphrasing the question context (compared to the task). In addition to maintaining semantic similarity between the question-answer pairs, our pipeline, which we call AGenT Zero, consists of only pre-trained models and requires no fine-tuning, minimizing data acquisition costs for question generation. AGenT Zero successfully outperforms other pre-trained methods in fluency and semantic similarity. Additionally, with some small changes, our assessment pipeline can be generalized to a broader question and answer space, including short answer or fill in the blank questions.
Convening during COVID-19: Lessons learnt from organizing virtual workshops in 2020
Authors: Mandana Samiei, Caroline Weis, Larissa Schiavo, Tatjana Chavdarova, Fariba Yousefi
Date: 2020-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

This report is an account of the authors' experiences as organizers of WiML's "Un-Workshop" event at ICML 2020. Un-workshops focus on participant-driven structured discussions on a pre-selected topic. For clarity, this event was different from the "WiML Workshop", which is usually co-located with NeurIPS. In this manuscript, organizers, share their experiences with the hope that it will help future organizers to host a successful virtual event under similar conditions. Women in Machine Learning (WiML)'s mission is creating connections within a small community of women working in machine learning, in order to encourage mentorship, networking, and interchange of ideas and increase the impact of women in the community.
Modeling patient flow in the emergency department using machine learning and simulation
Authors: Emad Alenany, Abdessamad Ait El Cadi
Date: 2020-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Recently, the combination of machine learning (ML) and simulation is gaining a lot of attention. This paper presents a novel application of ML within the simulation to improve patient flow within an emergency department (ED). An ML model used within a real ED simulation model to quantify the effect of detouring a patient out of the ED on the length of stay (LOS) and door-to-doctor time (DTDT) as a response to the prediction of patient admission to the hospital from the ED. The ML model trained using a set of six features including the patient age, arrival day, arrival hour of the day, and the triage level. The prediction model used a decision tree (DT) model, which is trained using historical data achieves a 75% accuracy. The set of rules extracted from the DT are coded within the simulation model. Given a certain probability of free inpatient beds, the predicted admitted patient is then pulled out from the ED to inpatient units to alleviate the crowding within the ED. The used policy combined with adding specific ED resources achieve 9.39% and 8.18% reduction in LOS and DTDT, respectively.
Learning to Characterize Matching Experts
Authors: Roee Shraga, Ofra Amir, Avigdor Gal
Date: 2020-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Integration, valid

Matching is a task at the heart of any data integration process, aimed at identifying correspondences among data elements. Matching problems were traditionally solved in a semi-automatic manner, with correspondences being generated by matching algorithms and outcomes subsequently validated by human experts. Human-in-the-loop data integration has been recently challenged by the introduction of big data and recent studies have analyzed obstacles to effective human matching and validation. In this work we characterize human matching experts, those humans whose proposed correspondences can mostly be trusted to be valid. We provide a novel framework for characterizing matching experts that, accompanied with a novel set of features, can be used to identify reliable and valuable human experts. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach using an extensive empirical evaluation. In particular, we show that our approach can improve matching results by filtering out inexpert matchers.
Sequence Generation using Deep Recurrent Networks and Embeddings: A study case in music
Authors: Sebastian Garcia-Valencia, Alejandro Betancourt, Juan G. Lalinde-Pulido
Date: 2020-12-02 00:00:00

Automatic generation of sequences has been a highly explored field in the last years. In particular, natural language processing and automatic music composition have gained importance due to the recent advances in machine learning and Neural Networks with intrinsic memory mechanisms such as Recurrent Neural Networks. This paper evaluates different types of memory mechanisms (memory cells) and analyses their performance in the field of music composition. The proposed approach considers music theory concepts such as transposition, and uses data transformations (embeddings) to introduce semantic meaning and improve the quality of the generated melodies. A set of quantitative metrics is presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture automatically, measuring the tonality of the musical compositions.
Intelligence and Learning in O-RAN for Data-driven NextG Cellular Networks
Authors: Leonardo Bonati, Salvatore D'Oro, Michele Polese, Stefano Basagni, Tommaso Melodia
Date: 2020-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Scheduling

Next Generation (NextG) cellular networks will be natively cloud-based and built upon programmable, virtualized, and disaggregated architectures. The separation of control functions from the hardware fabric and the introduction of standardized control interfaces will enable the definition of custom closed-control loops, which will ultimately enable embedded intelligence and real-time analytics, thus effectively realizing the vision of autonomous and self-optimizing networks. This article explores the disaggregated network architecture proposed by the O-RAN Alliance as a key enabler of NextG networks. Within this architectural context, we discuss the potential, the challenges, and the limitations of data-driven optimization approaches to network control over different timescales. We also present the first large-scale integration of O-RAN-compliant software components with an open-source full-stack softwarized cellular network. Experiments conducted on Colosseum, the world's largest wireless network emulator, demonstrate closed-loop integration of real-time analytics and control through deep reinforcement learning agents. We also show the feasibility of Radio Access Network (RAN) control through xApps running on the near real-time RAN Intelligent Controller, to optimize the scheduling policies of co-existing network slices, leveraging the O-RAN open interfaces to collect data at the edge of the network.
Learning from others' mistakes: Avoiding dataset biases without modeling them
Authors: Victor Sanh, Thomas Wolf, Yonatan Belinkov, Alexander M. Rush
Date: 2020-12-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1

State-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models often learn to model dataset biases and surface form correlations instead of features that target the intended underlying task. Previous work has demonstrated effective methods to circumvent these issues when knowledge of the bias is available. We consider cases where the bias issues may not be explicitly identified, and show a method for training models that learn to ignore these problematic correlations. Our approach relies on the observation that models with limited capacity primarily learn to exploit biases in the dataset. We can leverage the errors of such limited capacity models to train a more robust model in a product of experts, thus bypassing the need to hand-craft a biased model. We show the effectiveness of this method to retain improvements in out-of-distribution settings even if no particular bias is targeted by the biased model.
Automatically Identifying Language Family from Acoustic Examples in Low Resource Scenarios
Authors: Peter Wu, Yifan Zhong, Alan W Black
Date: 2020-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Existing multilingual speech NLP works focus on a relatively small subset of languages, and thus current linguistic understanding of languages predominantly stems from classical approaches. In this work, we propose a method to analyze language similarity using deep learning. Namely, we train a model on the Wilderness dataset and investigate how its latent space compares with classical language family findings. Our approach provides a new direction for cross-lingual data augmentation in any speech-based NLP task.
Automatic Extraction of Ranked SNP-Phenotype Associations from Literature through Detecting Neural Candidates, Negation and Modality Markers
Authors: Behrouz Bokharaeian, Alberto Diaz
Date: 2020-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Negation, Negation Detection, Relation, Relation Extraction

Genome-wide association (GWA) constitutes a prominent portion of studies which have been conducted on personalized medicine and pharmacogenomics. Recently, very few methods have been developed for extracting mutation-diseases associations. However, there is no available method for extracting the association of SNP-phenotype from text which considers degree of confidence in associations. In this study, first a relation extraction method relying on linguistic-based negation detection and neutral candidates is proposed. The experiments show that negation cues and scope as well as detecting neutral candidates can be employed for implementing a superior relation extraction method which outperforms the kernel-based counterparts due to a uniform innate polarity of sentences and small number of complex sentences in the corpus. Moreover, a modality based approach is proposed to estimate the confidence level of the extracted association which can be used to assess the reliability of the reported association. Keywords: SNP, Phenotype, Biomedical Relation Extraction, Negation Detection.
How Can We Know When Language Models Know? On the Calibration of Language Models for Question Answering
Authors: Zhengbao Jiang, Jun Araki, Haibo Ding, Graham Neubig
Date: 2020-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Question Answering

Recent works have shown that language models (LM) capture different types of knowledge regarding facts or common sense. However, because no model is perfect, they still fail to provide appropriate answers in many cases. In this paper, we ask the question "how can we know when language models know, with confidence, the answer to a particular query?" We examine this question from the point of view of calibration, the property of a probabilistic model's predicted probabilities actually being well correlated with the probabilities of correctness. We examine three strong generative models -- T5, BART, and GPT-2 -- and study whether their probabilities on QA tasks are well calibrated, finding the answer is a relatively emphatic no. We then examine methods to calibrate such models to make their confidence scores correlate better with the likelihood of correctness through fine-tuning, post-hoc probability modification, or adjustment of the predicted outputs or inputs. Experiments on a diverse range of datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. We also perform analysis to study the strengths and limitations of these methods, shedding light on further improvements that may be made in methods for calibrating LMs. We have released the code at https://github.com/jzbjyb/lm-calibration.
Interactive Teaching for Conversational AI
Authors: Qing Ping, Feiyang Niu, Govind Thattai, Joel Chengottusseriyil, Qiaozi Gao, Aishwarya Reganti, Prashanth Rajagopal, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Prem Nataraja
Date: 2020-12-02 00:00:00

Current conversational AI systems aim to understand a set of pre-designed requests and execute related actions, which limits them to evolve naturally and adapt based on human interactions. Motivated by how children learn their first language interacting with adults, this paper describes a new Teachable AI system that is capable of learning new language nuggets called concepts, directly from end users using live interactive teaching sessions. The proposed setup uses three models to: a) Identify gaps in understanding automatically during live conversational interactions, b) Learn the respective interpretations of such unknown concepts from live interactions with users, and c) Manage a classroom sub-dialogue specifically tailored for interactive teaching sessions. We propose state-of-the-art transformer based neural architectures of models, fine-tuned on top of pre-trained models, and show accuracy improvements on the respective components. We demonstrate that this method is very promising in leading way to build more adaptive and personalized language understanding models.
It's a Thin Line Between Love and Hate: Using the Echo in Modeling Dynamics of Racist Online Communities
Authors: Eyal Arviv, Simo Hanouna, Oren Tsur
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: TAG

The (((echo))) symbol -- triple parenthesis surrounding a name, made it to mainstream social networks in early 2016, with the intensification of the U.S. Presidential race. It was used by members of the alt-right, white supremacists and internet trolls to tag people of Jewish heritage -- a modern incarnation of the infamous yellow badge (Judenstern) used in Nazi-Germany. Tracking this trending meme, its meaning, and its function has proved elusive for its semantic ambiguity (e.g., a symbol for a virtual hug). In this paper we report of the construction of an appropriate dataset allowing the reconstruction of networks of racist communities and the way they are embedded in the broader community. We combine natural language processing and structural network analysis to study communities promoting hate. In order to overcome dog-whistling and linguistic ambiguity, we propose a multi-modal neural architecture based on a BERT transformer and a BiLSTM network on the tweet level, while also taking into account the users ego-network and meta features. Our multi-modal neural architecture outperforms a set of strong baselines. We further show how the the use of language and network structure in tandem allows the detection of the leaders of the hate communities. We further study the ``intersectionality'' of hate and show that the antisemitic echo correlates with hate speech that targets other minority and protected groups. Finally, we analyze the role IRA trolls assumed in this network as part of the Russian interference campaign. Our findings allow a better understanding of recent manifestations of racism and the dynamics that facilitate it.
Retrieving and ranking short medical questions with two stages neural matching model
Authors: Xiang Li, Xinyu Fu, Zheng Lu, Ruibin Bai, Uwe Aickelin, Peiming Ge, Gong Liu
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Internet hospital is a rising business thanks to recent advances in mobile web technology and high demand of health care services. Online medical services become increasingly popular and active. According to US data in 2018, 80 percent of internet users have asked health-related questions online. Numerous data is generated in unprecedented speed and scale. Those representative questions and answers in medical fields are valuable raw data sources for medical data mining. Automated machine interpretation on those sheer amount of data gives an opportunity to assist doctors to answer frequently asked medical-related questions from the perspective of information retrieval and machine learning approaches. In this work, we propose a novel two-stage framework for the semantic matching of query-level medical questions.
Meta-KD: A Meta Knowledge Distillation Framework for Language Model Compression across Domains
Authors: Haojie Pan, Chengyu Wang, Minghui Qiu, Yichang Zhang, Yaliang Li, Jun Huang
Date: 2020-12-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Meta-Learning, Model Compression, Zero-Shot Learning

Pre-trained language models have been applied to various NLP tasks with considerable performance gains. However, the large model sizes, together with the long inference time, limit the deployment of such models in real-time applications. One line of model compression approaches considers knowledge distillation to distill large teacher models into small student models. Most of these studies focus on single-domain only, which ignores the transferable knowledge from other domains. We notice that training a teacher with transferable knowledge digested across domains can achieve better generalization capability to help knowledge distillation. Hence we propose a Meta-Knowledge Distillation (Meta-KD) framework to build a meta-teacher model that captures transferable knowledge across domains and passes such knowledge to students. Specifically, we explicitly force the meta-teacher to capture transferable knowledge at both instance-level and feature-level from multiple domains, and then propose a meta-distillation algorithm to learn single-domain student models with guidance from the meta-teacher. Experiments on public multi-domain NLP tasks show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed Meta-KD framework. Further, we also demonstrate the capability of Meta-KD in the settings where the training data is scarce.
A Computational Approach to Measuring the Semantic Divergence of Cognates
Authors: Ana-Sabina Uban, Alina-Maria Ciobanu, Liviu P. Dinu
Date: 2020-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Translation, Word Embeddings

Meaning is the foundation stone of intercultural communication. Languages are continuously changing, and words shift their meanings for various reasons. Semantic divergence in related languages is a key concern of historical linguistics. In this paper we investigate semantic divergence across languages by measuring the semantic similarity of cognate sets in multiple languages. The method that we propose is based on cross-lingual word embeddings. In this paper we implement and evaluate our method on English and five Romance languages, but it can be extended easily to any language pair, requiring only large monolingual corpora for the involved languages and a small bilingual dictionary for the pair. This language-agnostic method facilitates a quantitative analysis of cognates divergence -- by computing degrees of semantic similarity between cognate pairs -- and provides insights for identifying false friends. As a second contribution, we formulate a straightforward method for detecting false friends, and introduce the notion of "soft false friend" and "hard false friend", as well as a measure of the degree of "falseness" of a false friends pair. Additionally, we propose an algorithm that can output suggestions for correcting false friends, which could result in a very helpful tool for language learning or translation.