pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
slimTrain -- A Stochastic Approximation Method for Training Separable Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Elizabeth Newman, Julianne Chung, Matthias Chung, Lars Ruthotto
Date: 2021-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensitivity, Stochastic Optimization

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown their success as high-dimensional function approximators in many applications; however, training DNNs can be challenging in general. DNN training is commonly phrased as a stochastic optimization problem whose challenges include non-convexity, non-smoothness, insufficient regularization, and complicated data distributions. Hence, the performance of DNNs on a given task depends crucially on tuning hyperparameters, especially learning rates and regularization parameters. In the absence of theoretical guidelines or prior experience on similar tasks, this requires solving many training problems, which can be time-consuming and demanding on computational resources. This can limit the applicability of DNNs to problems with non-standard, complex, and scarce datasets, e.g., those arising in many scientific applications. To remedy the challenges of DNN training, we propose slimTrain, a stochastic optimization method for training DNNs with reduced sensitivity to the choice hyperparameters and fast initial convergence. The central idea of slimTrain is to exploit the separability inherent in many DNN architectures; that is, we separate the DNN into a nonlinear feature extractor followed by a linear model. This separability allows us to leverage recent advances made for solving large-scale, linear, ill-posed inverse problems. Crucially, for the linear weights, slimTrain does not require a learning rate and automatically adapts the regularization parameter. Since our method operates on mini-batches, its computational overhead per iteration is modest. In our numerical experiments, slimTrain outperforms existing DNN training methods with the recommended hyperparameter settings and reduces the sensitivity of DNN training to the remaining hyperparameters.
IGLU: Efficient GCN Training via Lazy Updates
Authors: S Deepak Narayanan, Aditya Sinha, Prateek Jain, Purushottam Kar, Sundararajan Sellamanickam
Date: 2021-09-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4

Training multi-layer Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) using standard SGD techniques scales poorly as each descent step ends up updating node embeddings for a large portion of the graph. Recent attempts to remedy this sub-sample the graph that reduces compute but introduce additional variance and may offer suboptimal performance. This paper develops the IGLU method that caches intermediate computations at various GCN layers thus enabling lazy updates that significantly reduce the compute cost of descent. IGLU introduces bounded bias into the gradients but nevertheless converges to a first-order saddle point under standard assumptions such as objective smoothness. Benchmark experiments show that IGLU offers up to 1.2% better accuracy despite requiring up to 88% less compute.
Symbolic Brittleness in Sequence Models: on Systematic Generalization in Symbolic Mathematics
Authors: Sean Welleck, Peter West, Jize Cao, Yejin Choi
Date: 2021-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Generalization, Systematic Generalization

Neural sequence models trained with maximum likelihood estimation have led to breakthroughs in many tasks, where success is defined by the gap between training and test performance. However, their ability to achieve stronger forms of generalization remains unclear. We consider the problem of symbolic mathematical integration, as it requires generalizing systematically beyond the test set. We develop a methodology for evaluating generalization that takes advantage of the problem domain's structure and access to a verifier. Despite promising in-distribution performance of sequence-to-sequence models in this domain, we demonstrate challenges in achieving robustness, compositionality, and out-of-distribution generalization, through both carefully constructed manual test suites and a genetic algorithm that automatically finds large collections of failures in a controllable manner. Our investigation highlights the difficulty of generalizing well with the predominant modeling and learning approach, and the importance of evaluating beyond the test set, across different aspects of generalization.
Guidelines for the Computational Testing of Machine Learning approaches to Vehicle Routing Problems
Authors: Luca Accorsi, Andrea Lodi, Daniele Vigo
Date: 2021-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Despite the extensive research efforts and the remarkable results obtained on Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) by using algorithms proposed by the Machine Learning community that are partially or entirely based on data-driven analysis, most of these approaches are still seldom employed by the Operations Research (OR) community. Among the possible causes, we believe, the different approach to the computational evaluation of the proposed methods may play a major role. With the current work, we want to highlight a number of challenges (and possible ways to handle them) arising during the computational studies of heuristic approaches to VRPs that, if appropriately addressed, may produce a computational study having the characteristics of those presented in OR papers, thus hopefully promoting the collaboration between the two communities.
Risk averse non-stationary multi-armed bandits
Authors: Leo Benac, Frédéric Godin
Date: 2021-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits

This paper tackles the risk averse multi-armed bandits problem when incurred losses are non-stationary. The conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) is used as the objective function. Two estimation methods are proposed for this objective function in the presence of non-stationary losses, one relying on a weighted empirical distribution of losses and another on the dual representation of the CVaR. Such estimates can then be embedded into classic arm selection methods such as epsilon-greedy policies. Simulation experiments assess the performance of the arm selection algorithms based on the two novel estimation approaches, and such policies are shown to outperform naive benchmarks not taking non-stationarity into account.
An Accelerated Stochastic Gradient for Canonical Polyadic Decomposition
Authors: Ioanna Siaminou, Athanasios P. Liavas
Date: 2021-09-28 00:00:00

We consider the problem of structured canonical polyadic decomposition. If the size of the problem is very big, then stochastic gradient approaches are viable alternatives to classical methods, such as Alternating Optimization and All-At-Once optimization. We extend a recent stochastic gradient approach by employing an acceleration step (Nesterov momentum) in each iteration. We compare our approach with state-of-the-art alternatives, using both synthetic and real-world data, and find it to be very competitive.
Smart at what cost? Characterising Mobile Deep Neural Networks in the wild
Authors: Mario Almeida, Stefanos Laskaridis, Abhinav Mehrotra, Lukasz Dudziak, Ilias Leontiadis, Nicholas D. Lane
Date: 2021-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: 16k

With smartphones' omnipresence in people's pockets, Machine Learning (ML) on mobile is gaining traction as devices become more powerful. With applications ranging from visual filters to voice assistants, intelligence on mobile comes in many forms and facets. However, Deep Neural Network (DNN) inference remains a compute intensive workload, with devices struggling to support intelligence at the cost of responsiveness.On the one hand, there is significant research on reducing model runtime requirements and supporting deployment on embedded devices. On the other hand, the strive to maximise the accuracy of a task is supported by deeper and wider neural networks, making mobile deployment of state-of-the-art DNNs a moving target. In this paper, we perform the first holistic study of DNN usage in the wild in an attempt to track deployed models and match how these run on widely deployed devices. To this end, we analyse over 16k of the most popular apps in the Google Play Store to characterise their DNN usage and performance across devices of different capabilities, both across tiers and generations. Simultaneously, we measure the models' energy footprint, as a core cost dimension of any mobile deployment. To streamline the process, we have developed gaugeNN, a tool that automates the deployment, measurement and analysis of DNNs on devices, with support for different frameworks and platforms. Results from our experience study paint the landscape of deep learning deployments on smartphones and indicate their popularity across app developers. Furthermore, our study shows the gap between bespoke techniques and real-world deployments and the need for optimised deployment of deep learning models in a highly dynamic and heterogeneous ecosystem.
An Energy Efficient Health Monitoring Approach with Wireless Body Area Networks
Authors: Seemandhar Jain, Prarthi Jain, Prabhat K. Upadhyay, Jules M. Moualeu, Abhishek Srivastava
Date: 2021-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) comprise a network of sensors subcutaneously implanted or placed near the body surface and facilitate continuous monitoring of health parameters of a patient. Research endeavours involving WBAN are directed towards effective transmission of detected parameters to a Local Processing Unit (LPU, usually a mobile device) and analysis of the parameters at the LPU or a back-end cloud. An important concern in WBAN is the lightweight nature of WBAN nodes and the need to conserve their energy. This is especially true for subcutaneously implanted nodes that cannot be recharged or regularly replaced. Work in energy conservation is mostly aimed at optimising the routing of signals to minimise energy expended. In this paper, a simple yet innovative approach to energy conservation and detection of alarming health status is proposed. Energy conservation is ensured through a two-tier approach wherein the first tier eliminates `uninteresting' health parameter readings at the site of a sensing node and prevents these from being transmitted across the WBAN to the LPU. A reading is categorised as uninteresting if it deviates very slightly from its immediately preceding reading and does not provide new insight on the patient's well being. In addition to this, readings that are faulty and emanate from possible sensor malfunctions are also eliminated. These eliminations are done at the site of the sensor using algorithms that are light enough to effectively function in the extremely resource-constrained environments of the sensor nodes. We notice, through experiments, that this eliminates and thus reduces around 90% of the readings that need to be transmitted to the LPU leading to significant energy savings. Furthermore, the proper functioning of these algorithms in such constrained environments is confirmed and validated over a hardware simulation set up. The second tier of assessment includes a proposed anomaly detection model at the LPU that is capable of identifying anomalies from streaming health parameter readings and indicates an adverse medical condition. In addition to being able to handle streaming data, the model works within the resource-constrained environments of an LPU and eliminates the need of transmitting the data to a back-end cloud, ensuring further energy savings. The anomaly detection capability of the model is validated using data available from the critical care units of hospitals and is shown to be superior to other anomaly detection techniques.
BiQUE: Biquaternionic Embeddings of Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Jia Guo, Stanley Kok
Date: 2021-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Knowledge Graph Embeddings, Knowledge Graphs, Translation

Knowledge graph embeddings (KGEs) compactly encode multi-relational knowledge graphs (KGs). Existing KGE models rely on geometric operations to model relational patterns. Euclidean (circular) rotation is useful for modeling patterns such as symmetry, but cannot represent hierarchical semantics. In contrast, hyperbolic models are effective at modeling hierarchical relations, but do not perform as well on patterns on which circular rotation excels. It is crucial for KGE models to unify multiple geometric transformations so as to fully cover the multifarious relations in KGs. To do so, we propose BiQUE, a novel model that employs biquaternions to integrate multiple geometric transformations, viz., scaling, translation, Euclidean rotation, and hyperbolic rotation. BiQUE makes the best trade-offs among geometric operators during training, picking the best one (or their best combination) for each relation. Experiments on five datasets show BiQUE's effectiveness.
StoryDB: Broad Multi-language Narrative Dataset
Authors: Alexey Tikhonov, Igor Samenko, Ivan P. Yamshchikov
Date: 2021-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (Eval4NLP) 2021 11

This paper presents StoryDB - a broad multi-language dataset of narratives. StoryDB is a corpus of texts that includes stories in 42 different languages. Every language includes 500+ stories. Some of the languages include more than 20 000 stories. Every story is indexed across languages and labeled with tags such as a genre or a topic. The corpus shows rich topical and language variation and can serve as a resource for the study of the role of narrative in natural language processing across various languages including low resource ones. We also demonstrate how the dataset could be used to benchmark three modern multilanguage models, namely, mDistillBERT, mBERT, and XLM-RoBERTa.
EDGAR-CORPUS: Billions of Tokens Make The World Go Round
Authors: Lefteris Loukas, Manos Fergadiotis, Ion Androutsopoulos, Prodromos Malakasiotis
Date: 2021-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (ECONLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Word Embeddings

We release EDGAR-CORPUS, a novel corpus comprising annual reports from all the publicly traded companies in the US spanning a period of more than 25 years. To the best of our knowledge, EDGAR-CORPUS is the largest financial NLP corpus available to date. All the reports are downloaded, split into their corresponding items (sections), and provided in a clean, easy-to-use JSON format. We use EDGAR-CORPUS to train and release EDGAR-W2V, which are WORD2VEC embeddings for the financial domain. We employ these embeddings in a battery of financial NLP tasks and showcase their superiority over generic GloVe embeddings and other existing financial word embeddings. We also open-source EDGAR-CRAWLER, a toolkit that facilitates downloading and extracting future annual reports.
EdinSaar@WMT21: North-Germanic Low-Resource Multilingual NMT
Authors: Svetlana Tchistiakova, Jesujoba Alabi, Koel Dutta Chowdhury, Sourav Dutta, Dana Ruiter
Date: 2021-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: WMT (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

We describe the EdinSaar submission to the shared task of Multilingual Low-Resource Translation for North Germanic Languages at the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT2021). We submit multilingual translation models for translations to/from Icelandic (is), Norwegian-Bokmal (nb), and Swedish (sv). We employ various experimental approaches, including multilingual pre-training, back-translation, fine-tuning, and ensembling. In most translation directions, our models outperform other submitted systems.
Multilingual Fact Linking
Authors: Keshav Kolluru, Martin Rezk, Pat Verga, William W. Cohen, Partha Talukdar
Date: 2021-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: AKBC 2021 10
Tasks: Re-Ranking, Retrieval, Sentence, valid

Knowledge-intensive NLP tasks can benefit from linking natural language text with facts from a Knowledge Graph (KG). Although facts themselves are language-agnostic, the fact labels (i.e., language-specific representation of the fact) in the KG are often present only in a few languages. This makes it challenging to link KG facts to sentences in languages other than the limited set of languages. To address this problem, we introduce the task of Multilingual Fact Linking (MFL) where the goal is to link fact expressed in a sentence to corresponding fact in the KG, even when the fact label in the KG is not available in the language of the sentence. To facilitate research in this area, we present a new evaluation dataset, IndicLink. This dataset contains 11,293 linked WikiData facts and 6,429 sentences spanning English and six Indian languages. We propose a Retrieval+Generation model, ReFCoG, that can scale to millions of KG facts by combining Dual Encoder based retrieval with a Seq2Seq based generation model which is constrained to output only valid KG facts. ReFCoG outperforms standard Retrieval+Re-ranking models by 10.7 pts in Precision@1. In spite of this gain, the model achieves an overall score of 52.1, showing ample scope for improvement in the task.ReFCoG code and IndicLink data are available at https://github.com/SaiKeshav/mfl
Call Larisa Ivanovna: Code-Switching Fools Multilingual NLU Models
Authors: Alexey Birshert, Ekaterina Artemova
Date: 2021-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Intent Recognition, Natural Language Understanding, slot-filling, Slot Filling

Practical needs of developing task-oriented dialogue assistants require the ability to understand many languages. Novel benchmarks for multilingual natural language understanding (NLU) include monolingual sentences in several languages, annotated with intents and slots. In such setup models for cross-lingual transfer show remarkable performance in joint intent recognition and slot filling. However, existing benchmarks lack of code-switched utterances, which are difficult to gather and label due to complexity in the grammatical structure. The evaluation of NLU models seems biased and limited, since code-switching is being left out of scope. Our work adopts recognized methods to generate plausible and naturally-sounding code-switched utterances and uses them to create a synthetic code-switched test set. Based on experiments, we report that the state-of-the-art NLU models are unable to handle code-switching. At worst, the performance, evaluated by semantic accuracy, drops as low as 15\% from 80\% across languages. Further we show, that pre-training on synthetic code-mixed data helps to maintain performance on the proposed test set at a comparable level with monolingual data. Finally, we analyze different language pairs and show that the closer the languages are, the better the NLU model handles their alternation. This is in line with the common understanding of how multilingual models conduct transferring between languages
BLEU, METEOR, BERTScore: Evaluation of Metrics Performance in Assessing Critical Translation Errors in Sentiment-oriented Text
Authors: Hadeel Saadany, Constantin Orasan
Date: 2021-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: TRITON 2021 7
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Social media companies as well as authorities make extensive use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to monitor postings of hate speech, celebrations of violence or profanity. Since AI software requires massive volumes of data to train computers, Machine Translation (MT) of the online content is commonly used to process posts written in several languages and hence augment the data needed for training. However, MT mistakes are a regular occurrence when translating sentiment-oriented user-generated content (UGC), especially when a low-resource language is involved. The adequacy of the whole process relies on the assumption that the evaluation metrics used give a reliable indication of the quality of the translation. In this paper, we assess the ability of automatic quality metrics to detect critical machine translation errors which can cause serious misunderstanding of the affect message. We compare the performance of three canonical metrics on meaningless translations where the semantic content is seriously impaired as compared to meaningful translations with a critical error which exclusively distorts the sentiment of the source text. We conclude that there is a need for fine-tuning of automatic metrics to make them more robust in detecting sentiment critical errors.
Who speaks like a style of Vitamin: Towards Syntax-Aware DialogueSummarization using Multi-task Learning
Authors: Seolhwa Lee, Kisu Yang, Chanjun Park, João Sedoc, Heuiseok Lim
Date: 2021-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Dialogue Summarization, Articles, Multi-Task Learning, POS, POS Tagging, Text Summarization

Abstractive dialogue summarization is a challenging task for several reasons. First, most of the important pieces of information in a conversation are scattered across utterances through multi-party interactions with different textual styles. Second, dialogues are often informal structures, wherein different individuals express personal perspectives, unlike text summarization, tasks that usually target formal documents such as news articles. To address these issues, we focused on the association between utterances from individual speakers and unique syntactic structures. Speakers have unique textual styles that can contain linguistic information, such as voiceprint. Therefore, we constructed a syntax-aware model by leveraging linguistic information (i.e., POS tagging), which alleviates the above issues by inherently distinguishing sentences uttered from individual speakers. We employed multi-task learning of both syntax-aware information and dialogue summarization. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first method to apply multi-task learning to the dialogue summarization task. Experiments on a SAMSum corpus (a large-scale dialogue summarization corpus) demonstrated that our method improved upon the vanilla model. We further analyze the costs and benefits of our approach relative to baseline models.
Context based Roman-Urdu to Urdu Script Transliteration System
Authors: H Muhammad Shakeel, Rashid Khan, Muhammad Waheed
Date: 2021-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Transliteration

Now a day computer is necessary for human being and it is very useful in many fields like search engine, text processing, short messaging services, voice chatting and text recognition. Since last many years there are many tools and techniques that have been developed to support the writing of language script. Most of the Asian languages like Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Chains and Korean are written in Roman alphabets. Roman alphabets are the most commonly used for transliteration of languages, which have non-Latin scripts. For writing Urdu characters as an input, there are many layouts which are already exist. Mostly Urdu speaker prefer to use Roman-Urdu for different applications, because mostly user is not familiar with Urdu language keyboard. The objective of this work is to improve the context base transliteration of Roman-Urdu to Urdu script. In this paper, we propose an algorithm which effectively solve the transliteration issues. The algorithm work like, convert the encoding roman words into the words in the standard Urdu script and match it with the lexicon. If match found, then display the word in the text editor. The highest frequency words are displayed if more than one match found in the lexicon. Display the first encoded and converted instance and set it to the default if there is not a single instance of the match is found and then adjust the given ambiguous word to their desire location according to their context. The outcome of this algorithm proved the efficiency and significance as compare to other models and algorithms which work for transliteration of Raman-Urdu to Urdu on context.
Reflexivity in Issues of Scale and Representation in a Digital Humanities Project
Authors: Annie T. Chen, Camille Lyans Cole
Date: 2021-09-29 00:00:00

In this paper, we explore issues that we have encountered in developing a pipeline that combines natural language processing with data analysis and visualization techniques. The characteristics of the corpus - being comprised of diaries of a single person spanning several decades - present both conceptual challenges in terms of issues of representation, and affordances as a source for historical research. We consider these issues in a team context with a particular focus on the generation and interpretation of visualizations.