pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Self-Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend with Large-Scale Multi-Subject Question-Answering Data
Authors: Dian Yu, Kai Sun, Dong Yu, Claire Cardie
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Machine Reading Comprehension, Multiple-choice, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension

In spite of much recent research in the area, it is still unclear whether subject-area question-answering data is useful for machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks. In this paper, we investigate this question. We collect a large-scale multi-subject multiple-choice question-answering dataset, ExamQA, and use incomplete and noisy snippets returned by a web search engine as the relevant context for each question-answering instance to convert it into a weakly-labeled MRC instance. We then propose a self-teaching paradigm to better use the generated weakly-labeled MRC instances to improve a target MRC task. Experimental results show that we can obtain +5.1% in accuracy on a multiple-choice MRC dataset, C^3, and +3.8% in exact match on an extractive MRC dataset, CMRC 2018 over state-of-the-art MRC baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework and the usefulness of large-scale subject-area question-answering data for different types of machine reading comprehension tasks.
The impact of external innovation on new drug approvals: A retrospective analysis
Authors: Xiong Liu, Craig E. Thomas, Christian C. Felder
Date: 2021-02-02 00:00:00

Pharmaceutical companies are relying more often on external sources of innovation to boost their discovery research productivity. However, more in-depth knowledge about how external innovation may translate to successful product launches is still required in order to better understand how to best leverage the innovation ecosystem. We analyzed the pre-approval publication histories for FDA-approved new molecular entities (NMEs) and new biologic entities (NBEs) launched by 13 top research pharma companies during the last decade (2006-2016). We found that academic institutions contributed the majority of pre-approval publications and that publication subject matter is closely aligned with the strengths of the respective innovator. We found this to also be true for candidate drugs terminated in Phase 3, but the volume of literature on these molecules is substantially less than for approved drugs. This may suggest that approved drugs are often associated with a more robust dataset provided by a large number of institutes. Collectively, the results of our analysis support the hypothesis that a collaborative research innovation environment spanning across academia, industry and government is highly conducive to successful drug approvals.
MultiTalk: A Highly-Branching Dialog Testbed for Diverse Conversations
Authors: Yao Dou, Maxwell Forbes, Ari Holtzman, Yejin Choi
Date: 2021-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Matching, Text Generation

We study conversational dialog in which there are many possible responses to a given history. We present the MultiTalk Dataset, a corpus of over 320,000 sentences of written conversational dialog that balances a high branching factor (10) with several conversation turns (6) through selective branch continuation. We make multiple contributions to study dialog generation in the highly branching setting. In order to evaluate a diverse set of generations, we propose a simple scoring algorithm, based on bipartite graph matching, to optimally incorporate a set of diverse references. We study multiple language generation tasks at different levels of predictive conversation depth, using textual attributes induced automatically from pretrained classifiers. Our culminating task is a challenging theory of mind problem, a controllable generation task which requires reasoning about the expected reaction of the listener.
Neural Data Augmentation via Example Extrapolation
Authors: Kenton Lee, Kelvin Guu, Luheng He, Tim Dozat, Hyung Won Chung
Date: 2021-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity, Few-Shot Learning, intent-classification, Intent Classification, Relation Extraction, slot-filling, Slot Filling

In many applications of machine learning, certain categories of examples may be underrepresented in the training data, causing systems to underperform on such "few-shot" cases at test time. A common remedy is to perform data augmentation, such as by duplicating underrepresented examples, or heuristically synthesizing new examples. But these remedies often fail to cover the full diversity and complexity of real examples. We propose a data augmentation approach that performs neural Example Extrapolation (Ex2). Given a handful of exemplars sampled from some distribution, Ex2 synthesizes new examples that also belong to the same distribution. The Ex2 model is learned by simulating the example generation procedure on data-rich slices of the data, and it is applied to underrepresented, few-shot slices. We apply Ex2 to a range of language understanding tasks and significantly improve over state-of-the-art methods on multiple few-shot learning benchmarks, including for relation extraction (FewRel) and intent classification + slot filling (SNIPS).
An Improved Baseline for Sentence-level Relation Extraction
Authors: Wenxuan Zhou, Muhao Chen
Date: 2021-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation, Relation Extraction, Sentence

Sentence-level relation extraction (RE) aims at identifying the relationship between two entities in a sentence. Many efforts have been devoted to this problem, while the best performing methods are still far from perfect. In this paper, we revisit two problems that affect the performance of existing RE models, namely entity representation and noisy or ill-defined labels. Our improved RE baseline, incorporated with entity representations with typed markers, achieves an F1 of 74.6% on TACRED, significantly outperforms previous SOTA methods. Furthermore, the presented new baseline achieves an F1 of 91.1% on the refined Re-TACRED dataset, demonstrating that the pretrained language models (PLMs) achieve high performance on this task. We release our code to the community for future research.
Two Demonstrations of the Machine Translation Applications to Historical Documents
Authors: Miguel Domingo, Francisco Casacuberta
Date: 2021-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

We present our demonstration of two machine translation applications to historical documents. The first task consists in generating a new version of a historical document, written in the modern version of its original language. The second application is limited to a document's orthography. It adapts the document's spelling to modern standards in order to achieve an orthography consistency and accounting for the lack of spelling conventions. We followed an interactive, adaptive framework that allows the user to introduce corrections to the system's hypothesis. The system reacts to these corrections by generating a new hypothesis that takes them into account. Once the user is satisfied with the system's hypothesis and validates it, the system adapts its model following an online learning strategy. This system is implemented following a client-server architecture. We developed a website which communicates with the neural models. All code is open-source and publicly available. The demonstration is hosted at http://demosmt.prhlt.upv.es/mthd/.
MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontiers
Authors: Krishna Pillutla, Swabha Swayamdipta, Rowan Zellers, John Thickstun, Sean Welleck, Yejin Choi, Zaid Harchaoui
Date: 2021-02-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Text Generation

As major progress is made in open-ended text generation, measuring how close machine-generated text is to human language remains a critical open problem. We introduce MAUVE, a comparison measure for open-ended text generation, which directly compares the learnt distribution from a text generation model to the distribution of human-written text using divergence frontiers. MAUVE scales up to modern text generation models by computing information divergences in a quantized embedding space. Through an extensive empirical study on three open-ended generation tasks, we find that MAUVE identifies known properties of generated text, scales naturally with model size, and correlates with human judgments, with fewer restrictions than existing distributional evaluation metrics.
Universal Neural Vocoding with Parallel WaveNet
Authors: Yunlong Jiao, Adam Gabrys, Georgi Tinchev, Bartosz Putrycz, Daniel Korzekwa, Viacheslav Klimkov
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis

We present a universal neural vocoder based on Parallel WaveNet, with an additional conditioning network called Audio Encoder. Our universal vocoder offers real-time high-quality speech synthesis on a wide range of use cases. We tested it on 43 internal speakers of diverse age and gender, speaking 20 languages in 17 unique styles, of which 7 voices and 5 styles were not exposed during training. We show that the proposed universal vocoder significantly outperforms speaker-dependent vocoders overall. We also show that the proposed vocoder outperforms several existing neural vocoder architectures in terms of naturalness and universality. These findings are consistent when we further test on more than 300 open-source voices.
The Hitachi-JHU DIHARD III System: Competitive End-to-End Neural Diarization and X-Vector Clustering Systems Combined by DOVER-Lap
Authors: Shota Horiguchi, Nelson Yalta, Paola Garcia, Yuki Takashima, Yawen Xue, Desh Raj, Zili Huang, Yusuke Fujita, Shinji Watanabe, Sanjeev Khudanpur
Date: 2021-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

This paper provides a detailed description of the Hitachi-JHU system that was submitted to the Third DIHARD Speech Diarization Challenge. The system outputs the ensemble results of the five subsystems: two x-vector-based subsystems, two end-to-end neural diarization-based subsystems, and one hybrid subsystem. We refine each system and all five subsystems become competitive and complementary. After the DOVER-Lap based system combination, it achieved diarization error rates of 11.58 % and 14.09 % in Track 1 full and core, and 16.94 % and 20.01 % in Track 2 full and core, respectively. With their results, we won second place in all the tasks of the challenge.
Internal Language Model Training for Domain-Adaptive End-to-End Speech Recognition
Authors: Zhong Meng, Naoyuki Kanda, Yashesh Gaur, Sarangarajan Parthasarathy, Eric Sun, Liang Lu, Xie Chen, Jinyu Li, Yifan Gong
Date: 2021-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Decoder, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

The efficacy of external language model (LM) integration with existing end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems can be improved significantly using the internal language model estimation (ILME) method. In this method, the internal LM score is subtracted from the score obtained by interpolating the E2E score with the external LM score, during inference. To improve the ILME-based inference, we propose an internal LM training (ILMT) method to minimize an additional internal LM loss by updating only the E2E model components that affect the internal LM estimation. ILMT encourages the E2E model to form a standalone LM inside its existing components, without sacrificing ASR accuracy. After ILMT, the more modular E2E model with matched training and inference criteria enables a more thorough elimination of the source-domain internal LM, and therefore leads to a more effective integration of the target-domain external LM. Experimented with 30K-hour trained recurrent neural network transducer and attention-based encoder-decoder models, ILMT with ILME-based inference achieves up to 31.5% and 11.4% relative word error rate reductions from standard E2E training with Shallow Fusion on out-of-domain LibriSpeech and in-domain Microsoft production test sets, respectively.
ADePT: Auto-encoder based Differentially Private Text Transformation
Authors: Satyapriya Krishna, Rahul Gupta, Christophe Dupuy
Date: 2021-01-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: EACL 2021 2

Privacy is an important concern when building statistical models on data containing personal information. Differential privacy offers a strong definition of privacy and can be used to solve several privacy concerns (Dwork et al., 2014). Multiple solutions have been proposed for the differentially-private transformation of datasets containing sensitive information. However, such transformation algorithms offer poor utility in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks due to noise added in the process. In this paper, we address this issue by providing a utility-preserving differentially private text transformation algorithm using auto-encoders. Our algorithm transforms text to offer robustness against attacks and produces transformations with high semantic quality that perform well on downstream NLP tasks. We prove the theoretical privacy guarantee of our algorithm and assess its privacy leakage under Membership Inference Attacks(MIA) (Shokri et al., 2017) on models trained with transformed data. Our results show that the proposed model performs better against MIA attacks while offering lower to no degradation in the utility of the underlying transformation process compared to existing baselines.
Diagnosis of Acute Poisoning Using Explainable Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Michael Chary, Ed W Boyer, Michele M Burns
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Explainable artificial intelligence

Medical toxicology is the clinical specialty that treats the toxic effects of substances, be it an overdose, a medication error, or a scorpion sting. The volume of toxicological knowledge and research has, as with other medical specialties, outstripped the ability of the individual clinician to entirely master and stay current with it. The application of machine learning techniques to medical toxicology is challenging because initial treatment decisions are often based on a few pieces of textual data and rely heavily on prior knowledge. ML techniques often do not represent knowledge in a way that is transparent for the physician, raising barriers to usability. Rule-based systems and decision tree learning are more transparent approaches, but often generalize poorly and require expert curation to implement and maintain. Here, we construct a probabilistic logic network to represent a portion of the knowledge base of a medical toxicologist. Our approach transparently mimics the knowledge representation and clinical decision-making of practicing clinicians. The software, dubbed Tak, performs comparably to humans on straightforward cases and intermediate difficulty cases, but is outperformed by humans on challenging clinical cases. Tak outperforms a decision tree classifier at all levels of difficulty. Probabilistic logic provides one form of explainable artificial intelligence that may be more acceptable for use in healthcare, if it can achieve acceptable levels of performance.
The 4th International Workshop on Smart Simulation and Modelling for Complex Systems
Authors: Xing Su, Yan Kong, Weihua Li
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00

Computer-based modelling and simulation have become useful tools to facilitate humans to understand systems in different domains, such as physics, astrophysics, chemistry, biology, economics, engineering and social science. A complex system is featured with a large number of interacting components (agents, processes, etc.), whose aggregate activities are nonlinear and self-organized. Complex systems are hard to be simulated or modelled by using traditional computational approaches due to complex relationships among system components, distributed features of resources, and dynamics of environments. Meanwhile, smart systems such as multi-agent systems have demonstrated advantages and great potentials in modelling and simulating complex systems.
Detection of Racial Bias from Physiological Responses
Authors: Fateme Nikseresht, Runze Yan, Rachel Lew, Yingzheng Liu, Rose M. Sebastian, Afsaneh Doryab
Date: 2021-02-02 00:00:00

Despite the evolution of norms and regulations to mitigate the harm from biases, harmful discrimination linked to an individual's unconscious biases persists. Our goal is to better understand and detect the physiological and behavioral indicators of implicit biases. This paper investigates whether we can reliably detect racial bias from physiological responses, including heart rate, conductive skin response, skin temperature, and micro-body movements. We analyzed data from 46 subjects whose physiological data was collected with Empatica E4 wristband while taking an Implicit Association Test (IAT). Our machine learning and statistical analysis show that implicit bias can be predicted from physiological signals with 76.1% accuracy. Our results also show that the EDA signal associated with skin response has the strongest correlation with racial bias and that there are significant differences between the values of EDA features for biased and unbiased participants.
Modular approach to data preprocessing in ALOHA and application to a smart industry use case
Authors: Cristina Chesta, Luca Rinelli
Date: 2021-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Keyword Spotting

Applications in the smart industry domain, such as interaction with collaborative robots using vocal commands or machine vision systems often requires the deployment of deep learning algorithms on heterogeneous low power computing platforms. The availability of software tools and frameworks to automatize different design steps can support the effective implementation of DL algorithms on embedded systems, reducing related effort and costs. One very important aspect for the acceptance of the framework, is its extensibility, i.e. the capability to accommodate different datasets and define customized preprocessing, without requiring advanced skills. The paper addresses a modular approach, integrated into the ALOHA tool flow, to support the data preprocessing and transformation pipeline. This is realized through customizable plugins and allows the easy extension of the tool flow to encompass new use cases. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, we present some experimental results related to a keyword spotting use case and we outline possible extensions to different use cases.
Enterprise domain ontology learning from web-based corpus
Authors: Andrei Vasilateanu, Nicolae Goga, Elena-Alice Tanase, Iuliana Marin
Date: 2021-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Enterprise knowledge is a key asset in the competing and fast-changing corporate landscape. The ability to learn, store and distribute implicit and explicit knowledge can be the difference between success and failure. While enterprise knowledge management is a well-defined research domain, current implementations lack orientation towards small and medium enterprise. We propose a semantic search engine for relevant documents in an enterprise, based on automatic generated domain ontologies. In this paper we focus on the component for ontology learning and population.
A Survey On (Stochastic Fractal Search) Algorithm
Authors: Mohammed ElKomy
Date: 2021-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms, Survey

Evolutionary Algorithms are naturally inspired approximation optimisation algorithms that usually interfere with science problems when common mathematical methods are unable to provide a good solution or finding the exact solution requires an unreasonable amount of time using traditional exhaustive search algorithms. The success of these population-based frameworks is mainly due to their flexibility and ease of adaptation to the most different and complex optimisation problems. This paper presents a metaheuristic algorithm called Stochastic Fractal Search, inspired by the natural phenomenon of growth based on a mathematical concept called the fractal, which is shown to be able to explore the search space more efficiently. This paper also focuses on the algorithm steps and some example applications of engineering design optimisation problems commonly used in the literature being applied to the proposed algorithm.
A Matrix-based Distance of Pythagorean Fuzzy Set and its Application in Medical Diagnosis
Authors: Yuanpeng He, Lijian Li, Tianxiang Zhan
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Diagnosis

The pythagorean fuzzy set (PFS) which is developed based on intuitionistic fuzzy set, is more efficient in elaborating and disposing uncertainties in indeterminate situations, which is a very reason of that PFS is applied in various kinds of fields. How to measure the distance between two pythagorean fuzzy sets is still an open issue. Mnay kinds of methods have been proposed to present the of the question in former reaserches. However, not all of existing methods can accurately manifest differences among pythagorean fuzzy sets and satisfy the property of similarity. And some other kinds of methods neglect the relationship among three variables of pythagorean fuzzy set. To addrees the proplem, a new method of measuring distance is proposed which meets the requirements of axiom of distance measurement and is able to indicate the degree of distinction of PFSs well. Then some numerical examples are offered to to verify that the method of measuring distances can avoid the situation that some counter? intuitive and irrational results are produced and is more effective, reasonable and advanced than other similar methods. Besides, the proposed method of measuring distances between PFSs is applied in a real environment of application which is the medical diagnosis and is compared with other previous methods to demonstrate its superiority and efficiency. And the feasibility of the proposed method in handling uncertainties in practice is also proved at the same time.
MalNet: A Large-Scale Image Database of Malicious Software
Authors: Scott Freitas, Rahul Duggal, Duen Horng Chau
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, imbalanced classification, Malware Detection

Computer vision is playing an increasingly important role in automated malware detection with the rise of the image-based binary representation. These binary images are fast to generate, require no feature engineering, and are resilient to popular obfuscation methods. Significant research has been conducted in this area, however, it has been restricted to small-scale or private datasets that only a few industry labs and research teams have access to. This lack of availability hinders examination of existing work, development of new research, and dissemination of ideas. We release MalNet-Image, the largest public cybersecurity image database, offering 24x more images and 70x more classes than existing databases (available at https://mal-net.org). MalNet-Image contains over 1.2 million malware images -- across 47 types and 696 families -- democratizing image-based malware capabilities by enabling researchers and practitioners to evaluate techniques that were previously reported in propriety settings. We report the first million-scale malware detection results on binary images. MalNet-Image unlocks new and unique opportunities to advance the frontiers of machine learning, enabling new research directions into vision-based cyber defenses, multi-class imbalanced classification, and interpretable security.