pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Predicting the Accuracy of a Few-Shot Classifier
Authors: Myriam Bontonou, Louis Béthune, Vincent Gripon
Date: 2020-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning

In the context of few-shot learning, one cannot measure the generalization ability of a trained classifier using validation sets, due to the small number of labeled samples. In this paper, we are interested in finding alternatives to answer the question: is my classifier generalizing well to previously unseen data? We first analyze the reasons for the variability of generalization performances. We then investigate the case of using transfer-based solutions, and consider three settings: i) supervised where we only have access to a few labeled samples, ii) semi-supervised where we have access to both a few labeled samples and a set of unlabeled samples and iii) unsupervised where we only have access to unlabeled samples. For each setting, we propose reasonable measures that we empirically demonstrate to be correlated with the generalization ability of considered classifiers. We also show that these simple measures can be used to predict generalization up to a certain confidence. We conduct our experiments on standard few-shot vision datasets.
A Survey on Transfer Learning in Natural Language Processing
Authors: Zaid Alyafeai, Maged Saeed AlShaibani, Irfan Ahmad
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Machine Translation, Survey, Transfer Learning, Translation

Deep learning models usually require a huge amount of data. However, these large datasets are not always attainable. This is common in many challenging NLP tasks. Consider Neural Machine Translation, for instance, where curating such large datasets may not be possible specially for low resource languages. Another limitation of deep learning models is the demand for huge computing resources. These obstacles motivate research to question the possibility of knowledge transfer using large trained models. The demand for transfer learning is increasing as many large models are emerging. In this survey, we feature the recent transfer learning advances in the field of NLP. We also provide a taxonomy for categorizing different transfer learning approaches from the literature.
Cooking Is All About People: Comment Classification On Cookery Channels Using BERT and Classification Models (Malayalam-English Mix-Code)
Authors: Subramaniam Kazhuparambil, Abhishek Kaushik
Date: 2020-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Classification, General Classification, Language Modelling

The scope of a lucrative career promoted by Google through its video distribution platform YouTube has attracted a large number of users to become content creators. An important aspect of this line of work is the feedback received in the form of comments which show how well the content is being received by the audience. However, volume of comments coupled with spam and limited tools for comment classification makes it virtually impossible for a creator to go through each and every comment and gather constructive feedback. Automatic classification of comments is a challenge even for established classification models, since comments are often of variable lengths riddled with slang, symbols and abbreviations. This is a greater challenge where comments are multilingual as the messages are often rife with the respective vernacular. In this work, we have evaluated top-performing classification models for classifying comments which are a mix of different combinations of English and Malayalam (only English, only Malayalam and Mix of English and Malayalam). The statistical analysis of results indicates that Multinomial Naive Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest and Decision Trees offer similar level of accuracy in comment classification. Further, we have also evaluated 3 multilingual transformer based language models (BERT, DISTILBERT and XLM) and compared their performance to the traditional machine learning classification techniques. XLM was the top-performing BERT model with an accuracy of 67.31. Random Forest with Term Frequency Vectorizer was the best performing model out of all the traditional classification models with an accuracy of 63.59.
A Benchmark of Medical Out of Distribution Detection
Authors: Tianshi Cao, Chin-wei Huang, David Yu-Tung Hui, Joseph Paul Cohen
Date: 2020-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Medical Diagnosis, Out-of-Distribution Detection

Motivation: Deep learning models deployed for use on medical tasks can be equipped with Out-of-Distribution Detection (OoDD) methods in order to avoid erroneous predictions. However it is unclear which OoDD method should be used in practice. Specific Problem: Systems trained for one particular domain of images cannot be expected to perform accurately on images of a different domain. These images should be flagged by an OoDD method prior to diagnosis. Our approach: This paper defines 3 categories of OoD examples and benchmarks popular OoDD methods in three domains of medical imaging: chest X-ray, fundus imaging, and histology slides. Results: Our experiments show that despite methods yielding good results on some categories of out-of-distribution samples, they fail to recognize images close to the training distribution. Conclusion: We find a simple binary classifier on the feature representation has the best accuracy and AUPRC on average. Users of diagnostic tools which employ these OoDD methods should still remain vigilant that images very close to the training distribution yet not in it could yield unexpected results.
Graph Neural Networks for the Prediction of Substrate-Specific Organic Reaction Conditions
Authors: Serim Ryou, Michael R. Maser, Alexander Y. Cui, Travis J. DeLano, Yisong Yue, Sarah E. Reisman
Date: 2020-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

We present a systematic investigation using graph neural networks (GNNs) to model organic chemical reactions. To do so, we prepared a dataset collection of four ubiquitous reactions from the organic chemistry literature. We evaluate seven different GNN architectures for classification tasks pertaining to the identification of experimental reagents and conditions. We find that models are able to identify specific graph features that affect reaction conditions and lead to accurate predictions. The results herein show great promise in advancing molecular machine learning.
Deep Fiducial Inference
Authors: Gang Li, Jan Hannig
Date: 2020-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Since the mid-2000s, there has been a resurrection of interest in modern modifications of fiducial inference. To date, the main computational tool to extract a generalized fiducial distribution is Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We propose an alternative way of computing a generalized fiducial distribution that could be used in complex situations. In particular, to overcome the difficulty when the unnormalized fiducial density (needed for MCMC), we design a fiducial autoencoder (FAE). The fitted autoencoder is used to generate generalized fiducial samples of the unknown parameters. To increase accuracy, we then apply an approximate fiducial computation (AFC) algorithm, by rejecting samples that when plugged into a decoder do not replicate the observed data well enough. Our numerical experiments show the effectiveness of our FAE-based inverse solution and the excellent coverage performance of the AFC corrected FAE solution.
Self-Supervised Policy Adaptation during Deployment
Authors: Nicklas Hansen, Rishabh Jangir, Yu Sun, Guillem Alenyà, Pieter Abbeel, Alexei A. Efros, Lerrel Pinto, Xiaolong Wang
Date: 2020-07-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1

In most real world scenarios, a policy trained by reinforcement learning in one environment needs to be deployed in another, potentially quite different environment. However, generalization across different environments is known to be hard. A natural solution would be to keep training after deployment in the new environment, but this cannot be done if the new environment offers no reward signal. Our work explores the use of self-supervision to allow the policy to continue training after deployment without using any rewards. While previous methods explicitly anticipate changes in the new environment, we assume no prior knowledge of those changes yet still obtain significant improvements. Empirical evaluations are performed on diverse simulation environments from DeepMind Control suite and ViZDoom, as well as real robotic manipulation tasks in continuously changing environments, taking observations from an uncalibrated camera. Our method improves generalization in 31 out of 36 environments across various tasks and outperforms domain randomization on a majority of environments.
Evaluating German Transformer Language Models with Syntactic Agreement Tests
Authors: Karolina Zaczynska, Nils Feldhus, Robert Schwarzenberg, Aleksandra Gabryszak, Sebastian Möller
Date: 2020-07-07 00:00:00

Pre-trained transformer language models (TLMs) have recently refashioned natural language processing (NLP): Most state-of-the-art NLP models now operate on top of TLMs to benefit from contextualization and knowledge induction. To explain their success, the scientific community conducted numerous analyses. Besides other methods, syntactic agreement tests were utilized to analyse TLMs. Most of the studies were conducted for the English language, however. In this work, we analyse German TLMs. To this end, we design numerous agreement tasks, some of which consider peculiarities of the German language. Our experimental results show that state-of-the-art German TLMs generally perform well on agreement tasks, but we also identify and discuss syntactic structures that push them to their limits.
Cross-lingual Inductive Transfer to Detect Offensive Language
Authors: Kartikey Pant, Tanvi Dadu
Date: 2020-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Identification, Position, XLM-R, Zero-Shot Learning

With the growing use of social media and its availability, many instances of the use of offensive language have been observed across multiple languages and domains. This phenomenon has given rise to the growing need to detect the offensive language used in social media cross-lingually. In OffensEval 2020, the organizers have released the \textit{multilingual Offensive Language Identification Dataset} (mOLID), which contains tweets in five different languages, to detect offensive language. In this work, we introduce a cross-lingual inductive approach to identify the offensive language in tweets using the contextual word embedding \textit{XLM-RoBERTa} (XLM-R). We show that our model performs competitively on all five languages, obtaining the fourth position in the English task with an F1-score of $0.919$ and eighth position in the Turkish task with an F1-score of $0.781$. Further experimentation proves that our model works competitively in a zero-shot learning environment, and is extensible to other languages.
ISA: An Intelligent Shopping Assistant
Authors: Tuan Manh Lai, Trung Bui, Nedim Lipka
Date: 2020-07-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: Asian Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020

Despite the growth of e-commerce, brick-and-mortar stores are still the preferred destinations for many people. In this paper, we present ISA, a mobile-based intelligent shopping assistant that is designed to improve shopping experience in physical stores. ISA assists users by leveraging advanced techniques in computer vision, speech processing, and natural language processing. An in-store user only needs to take a picture or scan the barcode of the product of interest, and then the user can talk to the assistant about the product. The assistant can also guide the user through the purchase process or recommend other similar products to the user. We take a data-driven approach in building the engines of ISA's natural language processing component, and the engines achieve good performance.
Language Modeling with Reduced Densities
Authors: Tai-Danae Bradley, Yiannis Vlassopoulos
Date: 2020-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

This work originates from the observation that today's state-of-the-art statistical language models are impressive not only for their performance, but also - and quite crucially - because they are built entirely from correlations in unstructured text data. The latter observation prompts a fundamental question that lies at the heart of this paper: What mathematical structure exists in unstructured text data? We put forth enriched category theory as a natural answer. We show that sequences of symbols from a finite alphabet, such as those found in a corpus of text, form a category enriched over probabilities. We then address a second fundamental question: How can this information be stored and modeled in a way that preserves the categorical structure? We answer this by constructing a functor from our enriched category of text to a particular enriched category of reduced density operators. The latter leverages the Loewner order on positive semidefinite operators, which can further be interpreted as a toy example of entailment.
Research on multi-dimensional end-to-end phrase recognition algorithm based on background knowledge
Authors: Zheng Li, Gang Tu, Guang Liu, Zhi-Qiang Zhan, Yi-Jian Liu
Date: 2020-07-08 00:00:00

At present, the deep end-to-end method based on supervised learning is used in entity recognition and dependency analysis. There are two problems in this method: firstly, background knowledge cannot be introduced; secondly, multi granularity and nested features of natural language cannot be recognized. In order to solve these problems, the annotation rules based on phrase window are proposed, and the corresponding multi-dimensional end-to-end phrase recognition algorithm is designed. This annotation rule divides sentences into seven types of nested phrases, and indicates the dependency between phrases. The algorithm can not only introduce background knowledge, recognize all kinds of nested phrases in sentences, but also recognize the dependency between phrases. The experimental results show that the annotation rule is easy to use and has no ambiguity; the matching algorithm is more consistent with the multi granularity and diversity characteristics of syntax than the traditional end-to-end algorithm. The experiment on CPWD dataset, by introducing background knowledge, the new algorithm improves the accuracy of the end-to-end method by more than one point. The corresponding method was applied to the CCL 2018 competition and won the first place in the task of Chinese humor type recognition.
KQA Pro: A Dataset with Explicit Compositional Programs for Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Base
Authors: Shulin Cao, Jiaxin Shi, Liangming Pan, Lunyiu Nie, Yutong Xiang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Bin He, Hanwang Zhang
Date: 2020-07-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Attribute, Diagnostic, Diversity, Question Answering, Semantic Parsing

Complex question answering over knowledge base (Complex KBQA) is challenging because it requires various compositional reasoning capabilities, such as multi-hop inference, attribute comparison, set operation. Existing benchmarks have some shortcomings that limit the development of Complex KBQA: 1) they only provide QA pairs without explicit reasoning processes; 2) questions are poor in diversity or scale. To this end, we introduce KQA Pro, a dataset for Complex KBQA including ~120K diverse natural language questions. We introduce a compositional and interpretable programming language KoPL to represent the reasoning process of complex questions. For each question, we provide the corresponding KoPL program and SPARQL query, so that KQA Pro serves for both KBQA and semantic parsing tasks. Experimental results show that SOTA KBQA methods cannot achieve promising results on KQA Pro as on current datasets, which suggests that KQA Pro is challenging and Complex KBQA requires further research efforts. We also treat KQA Pro as a diagnostic dataset for testing multiple reasoning skills, conduct a thorough evaluation of existing models and discuss further directions for Complex KBQA. Our codes and datasets can be obtained from https://github.com/shijx12/KQAPro_Baselines.
Audio-Visual Understanding of Passenger Intents for In-Cabin Conversational Agents
Authors: Eda Okur, Shachi H. Kumar, Saurav Sahay, Lama Nachman
Date: 2020-07-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7
Tasks: Dialogue Understanding, Intent Detection

Building multimodal dialogue understanding capabilities situated in the in-cabin context is crucial to enhance passenger comfort in autonomous vehicle (AV) interaction systems. To this end, understanding passenger intents from spoken interactions and vehicle vision systems is a crucial component for developing contextual and visually grounded conversational agents for AV. Towards this goal, we explore AMIE (Automated-vehicle Multimodal In-cabin Experience), the in-cabin agent responsible for handling multimodal passenger-vehicle interactions. In this work, we discuss the benefits of a multimodal understanding of in-cabin utterances by incorporating verbal/language input together with the non-verbal/acoustic and visual clues from inside and outside the vehicle. Our experimental results outperformed text-only baselines as we achieved improved performances for intent detection with a multimodal approach.
Best-First Beam Search
Authors: Clara Meister, Tim Vieira, Ryan Cotterell
Date: 2020-07-08 00:00:00

Decoding for many NLP tasks requires an effective heuristic algorithm for approximating exact search since the problem of searching the full output space is often intractable, or impractical in many settings. The default algorithm for this job is beam search -- a pruned version of breadth-first search. Quite surprisingly, beam search often returns better results than exact inference due to beneficial search bias for NLP tasks. In this work, we show that the standard implementation of beam search can be made up to 10x faster in practice. Our method assumes that the scoring function is monotonic in the sequence length, which allows us to safely prune hypotheses that cannot be in the final set of hypotheses early on. We devise effective monotonic approximations to popular nonmonontic scoring functions, including length normalization and mutual information decoding. Lastly, we propose a memory-reduced variant of Best-First Beam Search, which has a similar beneficial search bias in terms of downstream performance, but runs in a fraction of the time.
Generalizing Tensor Decomposition for N-ary Relational Knowledge Bases
Authors: Yu Liu, Quanming Yao, Yong Li
Date: 2020-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Link Prediction, Tensor Decomposition

With the rapid development of knowledge bases (KBs), link prediction task, which completes KBs with missing facts, has been broadly studied in especially binary relational KBs (a.k.a knowledge graph) with powerful tensor decomposition related methods. However, the ubiquitous n-ary relational KBs with higher-arity relational facts are paid less attention, in which existing translation based and neural network based approaches have weak expressiveness and high complexity in modeling various relations. Tensor decomposition has not been considered for n-ary relational KBs, while directly extending tensor decomposition related methods of binary relational KBs to the n-ary case does not yield satisfactory results due to exponential model complexity and their strong assumptions on binary relations. To generalize tensor decomposition for n-ary relational KBs, in this work, we propose GETD, a generalized model based on Tucker decomposition and Tensor Ring decomposition. The existing negative sampling technique is also generalized to the n-ary case for GETD. In addition, we theoretically prove that GETD is fully expressive to completely represent any KBs. Extensive evaluations on two representative n-ary relational KB datasets demonstrate the superior performance of GETD, significantly improving the state-of-the-art methods by over 15\%. Moreover, GETD further obtains the state-of-the-art results on the benchmark binary relational KB datasets.
Improving Conversational Recommender Systems via Knowledge Graph based Semantic Fusion
Authors: Kun Zhou, Wayne Xin Zhao, Shuqing Bian, Yuanhang Zhou, Ji-Rong Wen, Jingsong Yu
Date: 2020-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Recommendation Systems, Text Generation

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend high-quality items to users through interactive conversations. Although several efforts have been made for CRS, two major issues still remain to be solved. First, the conversation data itself lacks of sufficient contextual information for accurately understanding users' preference. Second, there is a semantic gap between natural language expression and item-level user preference. To address these issues, we incorporate both word-oriented and entity-oriented knowledge graphs (KG) to enhance the data representations in CRSs, and adopt Mutual Information Maximization to align the word-level and entity-level semantic spaces. Based on the aligned semantic representations, we further develop a KG-enhanced recommender component for making accurate recommendations, and a KG-enhanced dialog component that can generate informative keywords or entities in the response text. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in yielding better performance on both recommendation and conversation tasks.
Learning Neural Textual Representations for Citation Recommendation
Authors: Binh Thanh Kieu, Inigo Jauregi Unanue, Son Bao Pham, Hieu Xuan Phan, Massimo Piccardi
Date: 2020-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Citation Recommendation, Sentence, Triplet

With the rapid growth of the scientific literature, manually selecting appropriate citations for a paper is becoming increasingly challenging and time-consuming. While several approaches for automated citation recommendation have been proposed in the recent years, effective document representations for citation recommendation are still elusive to a large extent. For this reason, in this paper we propose a novel approach to citation recommendation which leverages a deep sequential representation of the documents (Sentence-BERT) cascaded with Siamese and triplet networks in a submodular scoring function. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to combine deep representations and submodular selection for a task of citation recommendation. Experiments have been carried out using a popular benchmark dataset - the ACL Anthology Network corpus - and evaluated against baselines and a state-of-the-art approach using metrics such as the MRR and F1-at-k score. The results show that the proposed approach has been able to outperform all the compared approaches in every measured metric.