pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Symbolic Computation in Software Science
Authors: Temur Kutsia
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00

This volume contains papers presented at the Ninth International Symposium on Symbolic Computation in Software Science, SCSS 2021. Symbolic Computation is the science of computing with symbolic objects (terms, formulae, programs, representations of algebraic objects, etc.). Powerful algorithms have been developed during the past decades for the major subareas of symbolic computation: computer algebra and computational logic. These algorithms and methods are successfully applied in various fields, including software science, which covers a broad range of topics about software construction and analysis. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence methods and machine learning algorithms are widely used nowadays in various domains and, in particular, combined with symbolic computation. Several approaches mix artificial intelligence and symbolic methods and tools deployed over large corpora to create what is known as cognitive systems. Cognitive computing focuses on building systems that interact with humans naturally by reasoning, aiming at learning at scale. The purpose of SCSS is to promote research on theoretical and practical aspects of symbolic computation in software science, combined with modern artificial intelligence techniques. These proceedings contain the keynote paper by Bruno Buchberger and ten contributed papers. Besides, the conference program included three invited talks, nine short and work-in-progress papers, and a special session on computer algebra and computational logic. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the symposium was held completely online. It was organized by the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation (RISC) of the Johannes Kepler University Linz on September 8--10, 2021.
Active Learning for Automated Visual Inspection of Manufactured Products
Authors: Elena Trajkova, Jože M. Rožanec, Paulien Dam, Blaž Fortuna, Dunja Mladenić
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning

Quality control is a key activity performed by manufacturing enterprises to ensure products meet quality standards and avoid potential damage to the brand's reputation. The decreased cost of sensors and connectivity enabled an increasing digitalization of manufacturing. In addition, artificial intelligence enables higher degrees of automation, reducing overall costs and time required for defect inspection. In this research, we compare three active learning approaches and five machine learning algorithms applied to visual defect inspection with real-world data provided by Philips Consumer Lifestyle BV. Our results show that active learning reduces the data labeling effort without detriment to the models' performance.
Learning to Perform Downlink Channel Estimation in Massive MIMO Systems
Authors: Amin Ghazanfari, Trinh Van Chien, Emil Björnson, Erik G. Larsson
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00

We study downlink (DL) channel estimation in a multi-cell Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system operating in a time-division duplex. The users must know their effective channel gains to decode their received DL data signals. A common approach is to use the mean value as the estimate, motivated by channel hardening, but this is associated with a substantial performance loss in non-isotropic scattering environments. We propose two novel estimation methods. The first method is model-aided and utilizes asymptotic arguments to identify a connection between the effective channel gain and the average received power during a coherence block. The second one is a deep-learning-based approach that uses a neural network to identify a mapping between the available information and the effective channel gain. We compare the proposed methods against other benchmarks in terms of normalized mean-squared error and spectral efficiency (SE). The proposed methods provide substantial improvements, with the learning-based solution being the best of the considered estimators.
Detection of Insider Threats using Artificial Intelligence and Visualisation
Authors: Vasileios Koutsouvelis, Stavros Shiaeles, Bogdan Ghita, Gueltoum Bendiab
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00

Insider threats are one of the most damaging risk factors for the IT systems and infrastructure of a company or an organization; identification of insider threats has prompted the interest of the world academic research community, with several solutions having been proposed to alleviate their potential impact. For the implementation of the experimental stage described in this study, the Convolutional Neural Network (from now on CNN) algorithm was used and implemented via the Google TensorFlow program, which was trained to identify potential threats from images produced by the available dataset. From the examination of the images that were produced and with the help of Machine Learning, the question of whether the activity of each user is classified as malicious or not for the Information System was answered.
Data Science Kitchen at GermEval 2021: A Fine Selection of Hand-Picked Features, Delivered Fresh from the Oven
Authors: Niclas Hildebrandt, Benedikt Boenninghoff, Dennis Orth, Christopher Schymura
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: GermEval 2021 9
Tasks: Fact Checking, Feature Engineering

This paper presents the contribution of the Data Science Kitchen at GermEval 2021 shared task on the identification of toxic, engaging, and fact-claiming comments. The task aims at extending the identification of offensive language, by including additional subtasks that identify comments which should be prioritized for fact-checking by moderators and community managers. Our contribution focuses on a feature-engineering approach with a conventional classification backend. We combine semantic and writing style embeddings derived from pre-trained deep neural networks with additional numerical features, specifically designed for this task. Classifier ensembles are used to derive predictions for each subtask via a majority voting scheme. Our best submission achieved macro-averaged F1-scores of 66.8\%,\,69.9\% and 72.5\% for the identification of toxic, engaging, and fact-claiming comments.
From Alignment to Assignment: Frustratingly Simple Unsupervised Entity Alignment
Authors: Xin Mao, Wenting Wang, Yuanbin Wu, Man Lan
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Entity Alignment

Cross-lingual entity alignment (EA) aims to find the equivalent entities between crosslingual KGs, which is a crucial step for integrating KGs. Recently, many GNN-based EA methods are proposed and show decent performance improvements on several public datasets. Meanwhile, existing GNN-based EA methods inevitably inherit poor interpretability and low efficiency from neural networks. Motivated by the isomorphic assumption of GNNbased methods, we successfully transform the cross-lingual EA problem into the assignment problem. Based on this finding, we propose a frustratingly Simple but Effective Unsupervised entity alignment method (SEU) without neural networks. Extensive experiments show that our proposed unsupervised method even beats advanced supervised methods across all public datasets and has high efficiency, interpretability, and stability.
Pointspectrum: Equivariance Meets Laplacian Filtering for Graph Representation Learning
Authors: Marinos Poiitis, Pavlos Sermpezis, Athena Vakali
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning

Graph Representation Learning (GRL) has become essential for modern graph data mining and learning tasks. GRL aims to capture the graph's structural information and exploit it in combination with node and edge attributes to compute low-dimensional representations. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been used in state-of-the-art GRL architectures, they have been shown to suffer from over smoothing when many GNN layers need to be stacked. In a different GRL approach, spectral methods based on graph filtering have emerged addressing over smoothing; however, up to now, they employ traditional neural networks that cannot efficiently exploit the structure of graph data. Motivated by this, we propose PointSpectrum, a spectral method that incorporates a set equivariant network to account for a graph's structure. PointSpectrum enhances the efficiency and expressiveness of spectral methods, while it outperforms or competes with state-of-the-art GRL methods. Overall, PointSpectrum addresses over smoothing by employing a graph filter and captures a graph's structure through set equivariance, lying on the intersection of GNNs and spectral methods. Our findings are promising for the benefits and applicability of this architectural shift for spectral methods and GRL.
Method for making multi-attribute decisions in wargames by combining intuitionistic fuzzy numbers with reinforcement learning
Authors: Yuxiang Sun, Bo Yuan, Yufan Xue, Jiawei Zhou, XiaoYu Zhang, Xianzhong Zhou
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Decision Making, Management, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Researchers are increasingly focusing on intelligent games as a hot research area.The article proposes an algorithm that combines the multi-attribute management and reinforcement learning methods, and that combined their effect on wargaming, it solves the problem of the agent's low rate of winning against specific rules and its inability to quickly converge during intelligent wargame training.At the same time, this paper studied a multi-attribute decision making and reinforcement learning algorithm in a wargame simulation environment, and obtained data on red and blue conflict.Calculate the weight of each attribute based on the intuitionistic fuzzy number weight calculations. Then determine the threat posed by each opponent's chess pieces.Using the red side reinforcement learning reward function, the AC framework is trained on the reward function, and an algorithm combining multi-attribute decision-making with reinforcement learning is obtained. A simulation experiment confirms that the algorithm of multi-attribute decision-making combined with reinforcement learning presented in this paper is significantly more intelligent than the pure reinforcement learning algorithm.By resolving the shortcomings of the agent's neural network, coupled with sparse rewards in large-map combat games, this robust algorithm effectively reduces the difficulties of convergence. It is also the first time in this field that an algorithm design for intelligent wargaming combines multi-attribute decision making with reinforcement learning.Attempt interdisciplinary cross-innovation in the academic field, like designing intelligent wargames and improving reinforcement learning algorithms.
Information Theory-Guided Heuristic Progressive Multi-View Coding
Authors: Jiangmeng Li, Wenwen Qiang, Hang Gao, Bing Su, Farid Razzak, Jie Hu, Changwen Zheng, Hui Xiong
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, MULTI-VIEW LEARNING, Representation Learning

Multi-view representation learning captures comprehensive information from multiple views of a shared context. Recent works intuitively apply contrastive learning (CL) to learn representations, regarded as a pairwise manner, which is still scalable: view-specific noise is not filtered in learning view-shared representations; the fake negative pairs, where the negative terms are actually within the same class as the positive, and the real negative pairs are coequally treated; and evenly measuring the similarities between terms might interfere with optimization. Importantly, few works research the theoretical framework of generalized self-supervised multi-view learning, especially for more than two views. To this end, we rethink the existing multi-view learning paradigm from the information theoretical perspective and then propose a novel information theoretical framework for generalized multi-view learning. Guided by it, we build a multi-view coding method with a three-tier progressive architecture, namely Information theory-guided heuristic Progressive Multi-view Coding (IPMC). In the distribution-tier, IPMC aligns the distribution between views to reduce view-specific noise. In the set-tier, IPMC builds self-adjusted pools for contrasting, which utilizes a view filter to adaptively modify the pools. Lastly, in the instance-tier, we adopt a designed unified loss to learn discriminative representations and reduce the gradient interference. Theoretically and empirically, we demonstrate the superiority of IPMC over state-of-the-art methods.
Hindsight Reward Tweaking via Conditional Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Ning Wei, Jiahua Liang, Di Xie, ShiLiang Pu
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, MuJoCo, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny adjustment on them is expensive to evaluate due to the drastically increasing cost of training. To this end, we propose a hindsight reward tweaking approach by designing a novel paradigm for deep reinforcement learning to model the influences of reward functions within a near-optimal space. We simply extend the input observation with a condition vector linearly correlated with the effective environment reward parameters and train the model in a conventional manner except for randomizing reward configurations, obtaining a hyper-policy whose characteristics are sensitively regulated over the condition space. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach and study one of its potential application in policy performance boosting with multiple MuJoCo tasks.
LightTag: Text Annotation Platform
Authors: Tal Perry
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (ACL) 2021 11
Tasks: text annotation

Text annotation tools assume that their user's goal is to create a labeled corpus. However, users view annotation as a necessary evil on the way to deliver business value through NLP. Thus an annotation tool should optimize for the throughput of the global NLP process, not only the productivity of individual annotators. LightTag is a text annotation tool designed and built on that principle. This paper shares our design rationale, data modeling choices, and user interface decisions then illustrates how those choices serve the full NLP lifecycle.
Enhancing Visual Dialog Questioner with Entity-based Strategy Learning and Augmented Guesser
Authors: Duo Zheng, Zipeng Xu, Fandong Meng, Xiaojie Wang, Jiaan Wang, Jie zhou
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Diversity, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Visual Dialog

Considering the importance of building a good Visual Dialog (VD) Questioner, many researchers study the topic under a Q-Bot-A-Bot image-guessing game setting, where the Questioner needs to raise a series of questions to collect information of an undisclosed image. Despite progress has been made in Supervised Learning (SL) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), issues still exist. Firstly, previous methods do not provide explicit and effective guidance for Questioner to generate visually related and informative questions. Secondly, the effect of RL is hampered by an incompetent component, i.e., the Guesser, who makes image predictions based on the generated dialogs and assigns rewards accordingly. To enhance VD Questioner: 1) we propose a Related entity enhanced Questioner (ReeQ) that generates questions under the guidance of related entities and learns entity-based questioning strategy from human dialogs; 2) we propose an Augmented Guesser (AugG) that is strong and is optimized for the VD setting especially. Experimental results on the VisDial v1.0 dataset show that our approach achieves state-of-theart performance on both image-guessing task and question diversity. Human study further proves that our model generates more visually related, informative and coherent questions.
Improving Numerical Reasoning Skills in the Modular Approach for Complex Question Answering on Text
Authors: Xiao-Yu Guo, Yuan-Fang Li, Gholamreza Haffari
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Question Answering

Numerical reasoning skills are essential for complex question answering (CQA) over text. It requires opertaions including counting, comparison, addition and subtraction. A successful approach to CQA on text, Neural Module Networks (NMNs), follows the programmer-interpreter paradigm and leverages specialised modules to perform compositional reasoning. However, the NMNs framework does not consider the relationship between numbers and entities in both questions and paragraphs. We propose effective techniques to improve NMNs' numerical reasoning capabilities by making the interpreter question-aware and capturing the relationship between entities and numbers. On the same subset of the DROP dataset for CQA on text, experimental results show that our additions outperform the original NMNs by 3.0 points for the overall F1 score.
MONITOR: A Multimodal Fusion Framework to Assess Message Veracity in Social Networks
Authors: Abderrazek Azri, Cécile Favre, Nouria Harbi, Jérôme Darmont, Camille Noûs
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Image Quality Assessment

Users of social networks tend to post and share content with little restraint. Hence, rumors and fake news can quickly spread on a huge scale. This may pose a threat to the credibility of social media and can cause serious consequences in real life. Therefore, the task of rumor detection and verification has become extremely important. Assessing the veracity of a social media message (e.g., by fact checkers) involves analyzing the text of the message, its context and any multimedia attachment. This is a very time-consuming task that can be much helped by machine learning. In the literature, most message veracity verification methods only exploit textual contents and metadata. Very few take both textual and visual contents, and more particularly images, into account. In this paper, we second the hypothesis that exploiting all of the components of a social media post enhances the accuracy of veracity detection. To further the state of the art, we first propose using a set of advanced image features that are inspired from the field of image quality assessment, which effectively contributes to rumor detection. These metrics are good indicators for the detection of fake images, even for those generated by advanced techniques like generative adversarial networks (GANs). Then, we introduce the Multimodal fusiON framework to assess message veracIty in social neTwORks (MONITOR), which exploits all message features (i.e., text, social context, and image features) by supervised machine learning. Such algorithms provide interpretability and explainability in the decisions taken, which we believe is particularly important in the context of rumor verification. Experimental results show that MONITOR can detect rumors with an accuracy of 96% and 89% on the MediaEval benchmark and the FakeNewsNet dataset, respectively. These results are significantly better than those of state-of-the-art machine learning baselines.
STaCK: Sentence Ordering with Temporal Commonsense Knowledge
Authors: Deepanway Ghosal, Navonil Majumder, Rada Mihalcea, Soujanya Poria
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Edge Classification, Sentence, Sentence Ordering

Sentence order prediction is the task of finding the correct order of sentences in a randomly ordered document. Correctly ordering the sentences requires an understanding of coherence with respect to the chronological sequence of events described in the text. Document-level contextual understanding and commonsense knowledge centered around these events are often essential in uncovering this coherence and predicting the exact chronological order. In this paper, we introduce STaCK -- a framework based on graph neural networks and temporal commonsense knowledge to model global information and predict the relative order of sentences. Our graph network accumulates temporal evidence using knowledge of `past' and `future' and formulates sentence ordering as a constrained edge classification problem. We report results on five different datasets, and empirically show that the proposed method is naturally suitable for order prediction. The implementation of this work is publicly available at: https://github.com/declare-lab/sentence-ordering.
BERT might be Overkill: A Tiny but Effective Biomedical Entity Linker based on Residual Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Tuan Lai, Heng Ji, ChengXiang Zhai
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Entity Linking

Biomedical entity linking is the task of linking entity mentions in a biomedical document to referent entities in a knowledge base. Recently, many BERT-based models have been introduced for the task. While these models have achieved competitive results on many datasets, they are computationally expensive and contain about 110M parameters. Little is known about the factors contributing to their impressive performance and whether the over-parameterization is needed. In this work, we shed some light on the inner working mechanisms of these large BERT-based models. Through a set of probing experiments, we have found that the entity linking performance only changes slightly when the input word order is shuffled or when the attention scope is limited to a fixed window size. From these observations, we propose an efficient convolutional neural network with residual connections for biomedical entity linking. Because of the sparse connectivity and weight sharing properties, our model has a small number of parameters and is highly efficient. On five public datasets, our model achieves comparable or even better linking accuracy than the state-of-the-art BERT-based models while having about 60 times fewer parameters.
Fairness via AI: Bias Reduction in Medical Information
Authors: Shiri Dori-Hacohen, Roberto Montenegro, Fabricio Murai, Scott A. Hale, Keen Sung, Michela Blain, Jennifer Edwards-Johnson
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Bias Detection, Fairness, Misinformation, Recommendation Systems, Sociology

Most Fairness in AI research focuses on exposing biases in AI systems. A broader lens on fairness reveals that AI can serve a greater aspiration: rooting out societal inequities from their source. Specifically, we focus on inequities in health information, and aim to reduce bias in that domain using AI. The AI algorithms under the hood of search engines and social media, many of which are based on recommender systems, have an outsized impact on the quality of medical and health information online. Therefore, embedding bias detection and reduction into these recommender systems serving up medical and health content online could have an outsized positive impact on patient outcomes and wellbeing. In this position paper, we offer the following contributions: (1) we propose a novel framework of Fairness via AI, inspired by insights from medical education, sociology and antiracism; (2) we define a new term, bisinformation, which is related to, but distinct from, misinformation, and encourage researchers to study it; (3) we propose using AI to study, detect and mitigate biased, harmful, and/or false health information that disproportionately hurts minority groups in society; and (4) we suggest several pillars and pose several open problems in order to seed inquiry in this new space. While part (3) of this work specifically focuses on the health domain, the fundamental computer science advances and contributions stemming from research efforts in bias reduction and Fairness via AI have broad implications in all areas of society.