pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Comparing and Combining Approximate Computing Frameworks
Authors: Saeid Barati, Gordon Kindlmann, Hank Hoffmann
Date: 2021-02-16 00:00:00

Approximate computing frameworks configure applications so they can operate at a range of points in an accuracy-performance trade-off space. Prior work has introduced many frameworks to create approximate programs. As approximation frameworks proliferate, it is natural to ask how they can be compared and combined to create even larger, richer trade-off spaces. We address these questions by presenting VIPER and BOA. VIPER compares trade-off spaces induced by different approximation frameworks by visualizing performance improvements across the full range of possible accuracies. BOA is a family of exploration techniques that quickly locate Pareto-efficient points in the immense trade-off space produced by the combination of two or more approximation frameworks. We use VIPER and BOA to compare and combine three different approximation frameworks from across the system stack, including: one that changes numerical precision, one that skips loop iterations, and one that manipulates existing application parameters. Compared to simply looking at Pareto-optimal curves, we find VIPER's visualizations provide a quicker and more convenient way to determine the best approximation technique for any accuracy loss. Compared to a state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithm, we find that BOA explores 14x fewer configurations yet locates 35% more Pareto-efficient points.
A Knowledge-based Approach for the Automatic Construction of Skill Graphs for Online Monitoring
Authors: Inga Jatzkowski, Till Menzel, Ansgar Bock, Markus Maurer
Date: 2021-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: graph construction

Automated vehicles need to be aware of the capabilities they currently possess. Skill graphs are directed acylic graphs in which a vehicle's capabilities and the dependencies between these capabilities are modeled. The skills a vehicle requires depend on the behaviors the vehicle has to perform and the operational design domain (ODD) of the vehicle. Skill graphs were originally proposed for online monitoring of the current capabilities of an automated vehicle. They have also been shown to be useful during other parts of the development process, e.g. system design, system verification. Skill graph construction is an iterative, expert-based, manual process with little to no guidelines. This process is, thus, prone to errors and inconsistencies especially regarding the propagation of changes in the vehicle's intended ODD into the skill graphs. In order to circumnavigate this problem, we propose to formalize expert knowledge regarding skill graph construction into a knowledge base and automate the construction process. Thus, all changes in the vehicle's ODD are reflected in the skill graphs automatically leading to a reduction in inconsistencies and errors in the constructed skill graphs.
An Objective Laboratory Protocol for Evaluating Cognition of Non-Human Systems Against Human Cognition
Authors: David J. Jilk
Date: 2021-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics

In this paper I describe and reduce to practice an objective protocol for evaluating the cognitive capabilities of a non-human system against human cognition in a laboratory environment. This is important because the existence of a non-human system with cognitive capabilities comparable to those of humans might make once-philosophical questions of safety and ethics immediate and urgent. Past attempts to devise evaluation methods, such as the Turing Test and many others, have not met this need; most of them either emphasize a single aspect of human cognition or a single theory of intelligence, fail to capture the human capacity for generality and novelty, or require success in the physical world. The protocol is broadly Bayesian, in that its primary output is a confidence statistic in relation to a claim. Further, it provides insight into the areas where and to what extent a particular system falls short of human cognition, which can help to drive further progress or precautions.
TableLab: An Interactive Table Extraction System with Adaptive Deep Learning
Authors: Nancy Xin Ru Wang, Douglas Burdick, Yunyao Li
Date: 2021-02-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Table Extraction

Table extraction from PDF and image documents is a ubiquitous task in the real-world. Perfect extraction quality is difficult to achieve with one single out-of-box model due to (1) the wide variety of table styles, (2) the lack of training data representing this variety and (3) the inherent ambiguity and subjectivity of table definitions between end-users. Meanwhile, building customized models from scratch can be difficult due to the expensive nature of annotating table data. We attempt to solve these challenges with TableLab by providing a system where users and models seamlessly work together to quickly customize high-quality extraction models with a few labelled examples for the user's document collection, which contains pages with tables. Given an input document collection, TableLab first detects tables with similar structures (templates) by clustering embeddings from the extraction model. Document collections often contain tables created with a limited set of templates or similar structures. It then selects a few representative table examples already extracted with a pre-trained base deep learning model. Via an easy-to-use user interface, users provide feedback to these selections without necessarily having to identify every single error. TableLab then applies such feedback to finetune the pre-trained model and returns the results of the finetuned model back to the user. The user can choose to repeat this process iteratively until obtaining a customized model with satisfactory performance.
Integrating Pre-trained Model into Rule-based Dialogue Management
Authors: Jun Quan, Meng Yang, Qiang Gan, Deyi Xiong, Yiming Liu, Yuchen Dong, Fangxin Ouyang, Jun Tian, Ruiling Deng, Yongzhi Li, Yang Yang, Daxin Jiang
Date: 2021-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Management, Management, Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Rule-based dialogue management is still the most popular solution for industrial task-oriented dialogue systems for their interpretablility. However, it is hard for developers to maintain the dialogue logic when the scenarios get more and more complex. On the other hand, data-driven dialogue systems, usually with end-to-end structures, are popular in academic research and easier to deal with complex conversations, but such methods require plenty of training data and the behaviors are less interpretable. In this paper, we propose a method to leverages the strength of both rule-based and data-driven dialogue managers (DM). We firstly introduce the DM of Carina Dialog System (CDS, an advanced industrial dialogue system built by Microsoft). Then we propose the "model-trigger" design to make the DM trainable thus scalable to scenario changes. Furthermore, we integrate pre-trained models and empower the DM with few-shot capability. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and strong few-shot capability of our method.
A Discrete-Time Switching System Analysis of Q-learning
Authors: Donghwan Lee, Jianghai Hu, Niao He
Date: 2021-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning

This paper develops a novel control-theoretic framework to analyze the non-asymptotic convergence of Q-learning. We show that the dynamics of asynchronous Q-learning with a constant step-size can be naturally formulated as a discrete-time stochastic affine switching system. Moreover, the evolution of the Q-learning estimation error is over- and underestimated by trajectories of two simpler dynamical systems. Based on these two systems, we derive a new finite-time error bound of asynchronous Q-learning when a constant stepsize is used. Our analysis also sheds light on the overestimation phenomenon of Q-learning. We further illustrate and validate the analysis through numerical simulations.
Towards Faithfulness in Open Domain Table-to-text Generation from an Entity-centric View
Authors: Tianyu Liu, Xin Zheng, Baobao Chang, Zhifang Sui
Date: 2021-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Table-to-Text Generation, Text Generation

In open domain table-to-text generation, we notice that the unfaithful generation usually contains hallucinated content which can not be aligned to any input table record. We thus try to evaluate the generation faithfulness with two entity-centric metrics: table record coverage and the ratio of hallucinated entities in text, both of which are shown to have strong agreement with human judgements. Then based on these metrics, we quantitatively analyze the correlation between training data quality and generation fidelity which indicates the potential usage of entity information in faithful generation. Motivated by these findings, we propose two methods for faithful generation: 1) augmented training by incorporating the auxiliary entity information, including both an augmented plan-based model and an unsupervised model and 2) training instance selection based on faithfulness ranking. We show these approaches improve generation fidelity in both full dataset setting and few shot learning settings by both automatic and human evaluations.
Towards Utility-based Prioritization of Requirements in Open Source Environments
Authors: Alexander Felfernig, Martin Stettinger, Müslüm Atas, Ralph Samer, Jennifer Nerlich, Simon Scholz, Juha Tiihonen, Mikko Raatikainen
Date: 2021-02-17 00:00:00

Requirements Engineering in open source projects such as Eclipse faces the challenge of having to prioritize requirements for individual contributors in a more or less unobtrusive fashion. In contrast to conventional industrial software development projects, contributors in open source platforms can decide on their own which requirements to implement next. In this context, the main role of prioritization is to support contributors in figuring out the most relevant and interesting requirements to be implemented next and thus avoid time-consuming and inefficient search processes. In this paper, we show how utility-based prioritization approaches can be used to support contributors in conventional as well as in open source Requirements Engineering scenarios. As an example of an open source environment, we use Bugzilla. In this context, we also show how dependencies can be taken into account in utility-based prioritization processes.
Using exoskeletons to assist medical staff during prone positioning of mechanically ventilated COVID-19 patients: a pilot study
Authors: Serena Ivaldi, Pauline Maurice, Waldez Gomes, Jean Theurel, Liên Wioland, Jean-Jacques Atain-Kouadio, Laurent Claudon, Hind Hani, Antoine Kimmoun, Jean-Marc Sellal, Bruno Levy, Jean Paysant, Sergueï Malikov, Bruno Chenuel, Nicla Settembre
Date: 2021-02-11 00:00:00

We conducted a pilot study to evaluate the potential and feasibility of back-support exoskeletons to help the caregivers in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the University Hospital of Nancy (France) executing Prone Positioning (PP) maneuvers on patients suffering from severe COVID-19-related Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. After comparing four commercial exoskeletons, the Laevo passive exoskeleton was selected and used in the ICU in April 2020. The first volunteers using the Laevo reported very positive feedback and reduction of effort, confirmed by EMG and ECG analysis. Laevo has been since used to physically assist during PP in the ICU of the Hospital of Nancy, following the recrudescence of COVID-19, with an overall positive feedback.
Large-Scale Benchmarks for the Job Shop Scheduling Problem
Authors: Giacomo Da Col, Erich Teppan
Date: 2021-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Job Shop Scheduling, Scheduling

This report contains the description of two novel job shop scheduling benchmarks that resemble instances of real scheduling problem as they appear in industry. In particular, the aim was to provide large-scale benchmarks (up to 1 million operations) to test the state-of-the-art scheduling solutions on problems that are closer to what occurs in a real industrial context. The first benchmark is an extension of the well known Taillard benchmark (1992), while the second is a collection of scheduling instances with a known-optimum solution.
Sparsely Factored Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Noe Casas, Jose A. R. Fonollosa, Marta R. Costa-jussà
Date: 2021-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, POS, Translation

The standard approach to incorporate linguistic information to neural machine translation systems consists in maintaining separate vocabularies for each of the annotated features to be incorporated (e.g. POS tags, dependency relation label), embed them, and then aggregate them with each subword in the word they belong to. This approach, however, cannot easily accommodate annotation schemes that are not dense for every word. We propose a method suited for such a case, showing large improvements in out-of-domain data, and comparable quality for the in-domain data. Experiments are performed in morphologically-rich languages like Basque and German, for the case of low-resource scenarios.
Searching for Search Errors in Neural Morphological Inflection
Authors: Martina Forster, Clara Meister, Ryan Cotterell
Date: 2021-02-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: EACL 2021 2
Tasks: Morphological Inflection, Text Generation

Neural sequence-to-sequence models are currently the predominant choice for language generation tasks. Yet, on word-level tasks, exact inference of these models reveals the empty string is often the global optimum. Prior works have speculated this phenomenon is a result of the inadequacy of neural models for language generation. However, in the case of morphological inflection, we find that the empty string is almost never the most probable solution under the model. Further, greedy search often finds the global optimum. These observations suggest that the poor calibration of many neural models may stem from characteristics of a specific subset of tasks rather than general ill-suitedness of such models for language generation.
A Context-Enhanced De-identification System
Authors: Kahyun Lee, Mehmet Kayaalp, Sam Henry, Özlem Uzuner
Date: 2021-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Boundary Detection, De-identification, Sentence

Many modern entity recognition systems, including the current state-of-the-art de-identification systems, are based on bidirectional long short-term memory (biLSTM) units augmented by a conditional random field (CRF) sequence optimizer. These systems process the input sentence by sentence. This approach prevents the systems from capturing dependencies over sentence boundaries and makes accurate sentence boundary detection a prerequisite. Since sentence boundary detection can be problematic especially in clinical reports, where dependencies and co-references across sentence boundaries are abundant, these systems have clear limitations. In this study, we built a new system on the framework of one of the current state-of-the-art de-identification systems, NeuroNER, to overcome these limitations. This new system incorporates context embeddings through forward and backward n-grams without using sentence boundaries. Our context-enhanced de-identification (CEDI) system captures dependencies over sentence boundaries and bypasses the sentence boundary detection problem altogether. We enhanced this system with deep affix features and an attention mechanism to capture the pertinent parts of the input. The CEDI system outperforms NeuroNER on the 2006 i2b2 de-identification challenge dataset, the 2014 i2b2 shared task de-identification dataset, and the 2016 CEGS N-GRID de-identification dataset (p<0.01). All datasets comprise narrative clinical reports in English but contain different note types varying from discharge summaries to psychiatric notes. Enhancing CEDI with deep affix features and the attention mechanism further increased performance.
ATCSpeechNet: A multilingual end-to-end speech recognition framework for air traffic control systems
Authors: Yi Lin, Bo Yang, Linchao Li, Dongyue Guo, Jianwei Zhang, Hu Chen, Yi Zhang
Date: 2021-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Feature Engineering, Representation Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Representation Learning

In this paper, a multilingual end-to-end framework, called as ATCSpeechNet, is proposed to tackle the issue of translating communication speech into human-readable text in air traffic control (ATC) systems. In the proposed framework, we focus on integrating the multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) into one model, in which an end-to-end paradigm is developed to convert speech waveform into text directly, without any feature engineering or lexicon. In order to make up for the deficiency of the handcrafted feature engineering caused by ATC challenges, a speech representation learning (SRL) network is proposed to capture robust and discriminative speech representations from the raw wave. The self-supervised training strategy is adopted to optimize the SRL network from unlabeled data, and further to predict the speech features, i.e., wave-to-feature. An end-to-end architecture is improved to complete the ASR task, in which a grapheme-based modeling unit is applied to address the multilingual ASR issue. Facing the problem of small transcribed samples in the ATC domain, an unsupervised approach with mask prediction is applied to pre-train the backbone network of the ASR model on unlabeled data by a feature-to-feature process. Finally, by integrating the SRL with ASR, an end-to-end multilingual ASR framework is formulated in a supervised manner, which is able to translate the raw wave into text in one model, i.e., wave-to-text. Experimental results on the ATCSpeech corpus demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves a high performance with a very small labeled corpus and less resource consumption, only 4.20% label error rate on the 58-hour transcribed corpus. Compared to the baseline model, the proposed approach obtains over 100% relative performance improvement which can be further enhanced with the increasing of the size of the transcribed samples.
First Target and Opinion then Polarity: Enhancing Target-opinion Correlation for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction
Authors: Lianzhe Huang, Peiyi Wang, Sujian Li, Tianyu Liu, Xiaodong Zhang, Zhicong Cheng, Dawei Yin, Houfeng Wang
Date: 2021-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction, Sentence, Triplet

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract triplets from a sentence, including target entities, associated sentiment polarities, and opinion spans which rationalize the polarities. Existing methods are short on building correlation between target-opinion pairs, and neglect the mutual interference among different sentiment triplets. To address these issues, we utilize a two-stage framework to enhance the correlation between targets and opinions: at stage one, we extract targets and opinions through sequence tagging; then we append a group of artificial tags named Perceivable Pair, which indicate the span of a specific target-opinion tuple, to the input sentence to obtain closer correlated target-opinion pair representation. Meanwhile, we reduce the negative interference between triplets by restricting tokens' attention field. Finally, the polarity is identified according to the representation of the Perceivable Pair. We conduct experiments on four datasets, and the experimental results show the effectiveness of our model.
Decoding EEG Brain Activity for Multi-Modal Natural Language Processing
Authors: Nora Hollenstein, Cedric Renggli, Benjamin Glaus, Maria Barrett, Marius Troendle, Nicolas Langer, Ce Zhang
Date: 2021-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

Until recently, human behavioral data from reading has mainly been of interest to researchers to understand human cognition. However, these human language processing signals can also be beneficial in machine learning-based natural language processing tasks. Using EEG brain activity to this purpose is largely unexplored as of yet. In this paper, we present the first large-scale study of systematically analyzing the potential of EEG brain activity data for improving natural language processing tasks, with a special focus on which features of the signal are most beneficial. We present a multi-modal machine learning architecture that learns jointly from textual input as well as from EEG features. We find that filtering the EEG signals into frequency bands is more beneficial than using the broadband signal. Moreover, for a range of word embedding types, EEG data improves binary and ternary sentiment classification and outperforms multiple baselines. For more complex tasks such as relation detection, further research is needed. Finally, EEG data shows to be particularly promising when limited training data is available.
Towards generalisable hate speech detection: a review on obstacles and solutions
Authors: Wenjie Yin, Arkaitz Zubiaga
Date: 2021-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Hate Speech Detection

Hate speech is one type of harmful online content which directly attacks or promotes hate towards a group or an individual member based on their actual or perceived aspects of identity, such as ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. With online hate speech on the rise, its automatic detection as a natural language processing task is gaining increasing interest. However, it is only recently that it has been shown that existing models generalise poorly to unseen data. This survey paper attempts to summarise how generalisable existing hate speech detection models are, reason why hate speech models struggle to generalise, sums up existing attempts at addressing the main obstacles, and then proposes directions of future research to improve generalisation in hate speech detection.
THEaiTRE 1.0: Interactive generation of theatre play scripts
Authors: Rudolf Rosa, Tomáš Musil, Ondřej Dušek, Dominik Jurko, Patrícia Schmidtová, David Mareček, Ondřej Bojar, Tom Kocmi, Daniel Hrbek, David Košťák, Martina Kinská, Marie Nováková, Josef Doležal, Klára Vosecká, Tomáš Studeník, Petr Žabka
Date: 2021-02-17 00:00:00

We present the first version of a system for interactive generation of theatre play scripts. The system is based on a vanilla GPT-2 model with several adjustments, targeting specific issues we encountered in practice. We also list other issues we encountered but plan to only solve in a future version of the system. The presented system was used to generate a theatre play script planned for premiere in February 2021.
Data-Driven Logistic Regression Ensembles With Applications in Genomics
Authors: Anthony-Alexander Christidis, Stefan Van Aelst, Ruben Zamar
Date: 2021-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Diversity, General Classification, regression

Advances in data collecting technologies in genomics have significantly increased the need for tools designed to study the genetic basis of many diseases. Effective statistical methods should excel in both prediction accuracy and biomarker identification. We introduce a novel approach to high-dimensional binary classification that integrates regularization with ensembling techniques. Our method constructs compact ensembles of interpretable models derived by optimizing a global objective function. In medical genomics applications, our approach identifies critical biomarkers overlooked by competing methods. We develop a variable importance ranking system to help researchers prioritize promising genes. The method's asymptotic properties are established, and an efficient computational algorithm is provided. Through extensive simulations across complex scenarios and analysis of genomics datasets for cancer, multiple sclerosis, and psoriasis, we demonstrate strong predictive performance. Based on our numerical experiments, we offer practical guidelines for determining optimal ensemble size.