pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Age Prediction Performance Varies Across Deep, Superficial, and Cerebellar White Matter Connections
Authors: Yuxiang Wei, Tengfei Xue, Yogesh Rathi, Nikos Makris, Fan Zhang, Lauren J. O'Donnell
Date: 2022-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

The brain's white matter (WM) undergoes developmental and degenerative processes during the human lifespan. To investigate the relationship between WM anatomical regions and age, we study diffusion magnetic resonance imaging tractography that is finely parcellated into fiber clusters in the deep, superficial, and cerebellar WM. We propose a deep-learning-based age prediction model that leverages large convolutional kernels and inverted bottlenecks. We improve performance using novel discrete multi-faceted mix data augmentation and a novel prior-knowledge-based loss function that encourages age predictions in the expected range. We study a dataset of 965 healthy young adults (22-37 years) derived from the Human Connectome Project (HCP). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves a mean absolute error of 2.59 years and outperforms compared methods. We find that the deep WM is the most informative for age prediction in this cohort, while the superficial WM is the least informative. Overall, the most predictive WM tracts are the thalamo-frontal tract from the deep WM and the intracerebellar input and Purkinje tract from the cerebellar WM.
FinBERT-LSTM: Deep Learning based stock price prediction using News Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Shayan Halder
Date: 2022-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Sentiment Analysis, Stock Price Prediction

Economy is severely dependent on the stock market. An uptrend usually corresponds to prosperity while a downtrend correlates to recession. Predicting the stock market has thus been a centre of research and experiment for a long time. Being able to predict short term movements in the market enables investors to reap greater returns on their investments. Stock prices are extremely volatile and sensitive to financial market. In this paper we use Deep Learning networks to predict stock prices, assimilating financial, business and technology news articles which present information about the market. First, we create a simple Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) network and then expand into more complex Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) like Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), and finally propose FinBERT-LSTM model, which integrates news article sentiments to predict stock price with greater accuracy by analysing short-term market information. We then train the model on NASDAQ-100 index stock data and New York Times news articles to evaluate the performance of MLP, LSTM, FinBERT-LSTM models using mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and accuracy metrics.
Efficient HLA imputation from sequential SNPs data by Transformer
Authors: Kaho Tanaka, Kosuke Kato, Naoki Nonaka, Jun Seita
Date: 2022-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Imputation

Human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes are associated with a variety of diseases, however direct typing of HLA is time and cost consuming. Thus various imputation methods using sequential SNPs data have been proposed based on statistical or deep learning models, e.g. CNN-based model, named DEEP*HLA. However, imputation efficiency is not sufficient for in frequent alleles and a large size of reference panel is required. Here, we developed a Transformer-based model to impute HLA alleles, named "HLA Reliable IMputatioN by Transformer (HLARIMNT)" to take advantage of sequential nature of SNPs data. We validated the performance of HLARIMNT using two different reference panels; Pan-Asian reference panel (n = 530) and Type 1 Diabetes Genetics Consortium (T1DGC) reference panel (n = 5,225), as well as the mixture of those two panels (n = 1,060). HLARIMNT achieved higher accuracy than DEEP*HLA by several indices, especially for infrequent alleles. We also varied the size of data used for training, and HLARIMNT imputed more accurately among any size of training data. These results suggest that Transformer-based model may impute efficiently not only HLA types but also any other gene types from sequential SNPs data.
Reconstruction of gene regulatory network via sparse optimization
Authors: Jiashu Lou, Leyi Cui, Wenxuan Qiu
Date: 2022-11-11 00:00:00

In this paper, we tested several sparse optimization algorithms based on the public dataset of the DREAM5 Gene Regulatory Network Inference Challenge. And we find that introducing 20% of the regulatory network as a priori known data can provide a basis for parameter selection of inference algorithms, thus improving prediction efficiency and accuracy. In addition to testing common sparse optimization methods, we also developed voting algorithms by bagging them. Experiments on the DREAM5 dataset show that the sparse optimization-based inference of the moderation relation works well, achieving better results than the official DREAM5 results on three datasets. However, the performance of traditional independent algorithms varies greatly in the face of different datasets, while our voting algorithm achieves the best results on three of the four datasets.
Artificial neural networks for predicting the viscosity of lead-containing glasses
Authors: Patrick dos Anjos, Lucas A. Quaresma, Marcelo L. P. Machado
Date: 2022-11-11 00:00:00

The viscosity of lead-containing glasses is of fundamental importance for the manufacturing process, and can be predicted by algorithms such as artificial neural networks. The SciGlass database was used to provide training, validation and test data of chemical composition, temperature and viscosity for the construction of artificial neural networks with node variation in the hidden layer. The best model built with training data and validation data was compared with 7 other models from the literature, demonstrating better statistical evaluations of mean absolute error and coefficient of determination to the test data, with subsequent sensitivity analysis in agreement with the literature. Skewness and kurtosis were calculated and there is a good correlation between the values predicted by the best neural network built with the test data.
Language Agnostic Code-Mixing Data Augmentation by Predicting Linguistic Patterns
Authors: Shuyue Stella Li, Kenton Murray
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Sentiment Analysis

In this work, we focus on intrasentential code-mixing and propose several different Synthetic Code-Mixing (SCM) data augmentation methods that outperform the baseline on downstream sentiment analysis tasks across various amounts of labeled gold data. Most importantly, our proposed methods demonstrate that strategically replacing parts of sentences in the matrix language with a constant mask significantly improves classification accuracy, motivating further linguistic insights into the phenomenon of code-mixing. We test our data augmentation method in a variety of low-resource and cross-lingual settings, reaching up to a relative improvement of 7.73% on the extremely scarce English-Malayalam dataset. We conclude that the code-switch pattern in code-mixing sentences is also important for the model to learn. Finally, we propose a language-agnostic SCM algorithm that is cheap yet extremely helpful for low-resource languages.
Semantic Similarity Models for Depression Severity Estimation
Authors: Anxo Pérez, Neha Warikoo, Kexin Wang, Javier Parapar, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

Depressive disorders constitute a severe public health issue worldwide. However, public health systems have limited capacity for case detection and diagnosis. In this regard, the widespread use of social media has opened up a way to access public information on a large scale. Computational methods can serve as support tools for rapid screening by exploiting this user-generated social media content. This paper presents an efficient semantic pipeline to study depression severity in individuals based on their social media writings. We select test user sentences for producing semantic rankings over an index of representative training sentences corresponding to depressive symptoms and severity levels. Then, we use the sentences from those results as evidence for predicting users' symptom severity. For that, we explore different aggregation methods to answer one of four Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) options per symptom. We evaluate our methods on two Reddit-based benchmarks, achieving 30\% improvement over state of the art in terms of measuring depression severity.
UGIF: UI Grounded Instruction Following
Authors: Sagar Gubbi Venkatesh, Partha Talukdar, Srini Narayanan
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Navigate, Retrieval

Smartphone users often find it difficult to navigate myriad menus to perform common tasks such as "How to block calls from unknown numbers?". Currently, help documents with step-by-step instructions are manually written to aid the user. The user experience can be further enhanced by grounding the instructions in the help document to the UI and overlaying a tutorial on the phone UI. To build such tutorials, several natural language processing components including retrieval, parsing, and grounding are necessary, but there isn't any relevant dataset for such a task. Thus, we introduce UGIF-DataSet, a multi-lingual, multi-modal UI grounded dataset for step-by-step task completion on the smartphone containing 4,184 tasks across 8 languages. As an initial approach to this problem, we propose retrieving the relevant instruction steps based on the user's query and parsing the steps using Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate macros that can be executed on-device. The instruction steps are often available only in English, so the challenge includes cross-modal, cross-lingual retrieval of English how-to pages from user queries in many languages and mapping English instruction steps to UI in a potentially different language. We compare the performance of different LLMs including PaLM and GPT-3 and find that the end-to-end task completion rate is 48% for English UI but the performance drops to 32% for other languages. We analyze the common failure modes of existing models on this task and point out areas for improvement.
Imagination is All You Need! Curved Contrastive Learning for Abstract Sequence Modeling Utilized on Long Short-Term Dialogue Planning
Authors: Justus-Jonas Erker, Stefan Schaffer, Gerasimos Spanakis
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning, Sentence Embeddings

Inspired by the curvature of space-time (Einstein, 1921), we introduce Curved Contrastive Learning (CCL), a novel representation learning technique for learning the relative turn distance between utterance pairs in multi-turn dialogues. The resulting bi-encoder models can guide transformers as a response ranking model towards a goal in a zero-shot fashion by projecting the goal utterance and the corresponding reply candidates into a latent space. Here the cosine similarity indicates the distance/reachability of a candidate utterance toward the corresponding goal. Furthermore, we explore how these forward-entailing language representations can be utilized for assessing the likelihood of sequences by the entailment strength i.e. through the cosine similarity of its individual members (encoded separately) as an emergent property in the curved space. These non-local properties allow us to imagine the likelihood of future patterns in dialogues, specifically by ordering/identifying future goal utterances that are multiple turns away, given a dialogue context. As part of our analysis, we investigate characteristics that make conversations (un)plannable and find strong evidence of planning capability over multiple turns (in 61.56% over 3 turns) in conversations from the DailyDialog (Li et al., 2017) dataset. Finally, we show how we achieve higher efficiency in sequence modeling tasks compared to previous work thanks to our relativistic approach, where only the last utterance needs to be encoded and computed during inference.
High-Resource Methodological Bias in Low-Resource Investigations
Authors: Maartje ter Hoeve, David Grangier, Natalie Schluter
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, POS, POS Tagging, Translation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

The central bottleneck for low-resource NLP is typically regarded to be the quantity of accessible data, overlooking the contribution of data quality. This is particularly seen in the development and evaluation of low-resource systems via down sampling of high-resource language data. In this work we investigate the validity of this approach, and we specifically focus on two well-known NLP tasks for our empirical investigations: POS-tagging and machine translation. We show that down sampling from a high-resource language results in datasets with different properties than the low-resource datasets, impacting the model performance for both POS-tagging and machine translation. Based on these results we conclude that naive down sampling of datasets results in a biased view of how well these systems work in a low-resource scenario.
Learning to Answer Multilingual and Code-Mixed Questions
Authors: Deepak Gupta
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent, Question Answering, Question Generation, Question-Generation, Text Generation, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Question-answering (QA) that comes naturally to humans is a critical component in seamless human-computer interaction. It has emerged as one of the most convenient and natural methods to interact with the web and is especially desirable in voice-controlled environments. Despite being one of the oldest research areas, the current QA system faces the critical challenge of handling multilingual queries. To build an Artificial Intelligent (AI) agent that can serve multilingual end users, a QA system is required to be language versatile and tailored to suit the multilingual environment. Recent advances in QA models have enabled surpassing human performance primarily due to the availability of a sizable amount of high-quality datasets. However, the majority of such annotated datasets are expensive to create and are only confined to the English language, making it challenging to acknowledge progress in foreign languages. Therefore, to measure a similar improvement in the multilingual QA system, it is necessary to invest in high-quality multilingual evaluation benchmarks. In this dissertation, we focus on advancing QA techniques for handling end-user queries in multilingual environments. This dissertation consists of two parts. In the first part, we explore multilingualism and a new dimension of multilingualism referred to as code-mixing. Second, we propose a technique to solve the task of multi-hop question generation by exploiting multiple documents. Experiments show our models achieve state-of-the-art performance on answer extraction, ranking, and generation tasks on multiple domains of MQA, VQA, and language generation. The proposed techniques are generic and can be widely used in various domains and languages to advance QA systems.
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? Rephrasing and Analyzing Ambiguous Questions in VQA
Authors: Elias Stengel-Eskin, Jimena Guallar-Blasco, Yi Zhou, Benjamin Van Durme
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Generation, Question-Generation, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Natural language is ambiguous. Resolving ambiguous questions is key to successfully answering them. Focusing on questions about images, we create a dataset of ambiguous examples. We annotate these, grouping answers by the underlying question they address and rephrasing the question for each group to reduce ambiguity. Our analysis reveals a linguistically-aligned ontology of reasons for ambiguity in visual questions. We then develop an English question-generation model which we demonstrate via automatic and human evaluation produces less ambiguous questions. We further show that the question generation objective we use allows the model to integrate answer group information without any direct supervision.
CST5: Data Augmentation for Code-Switched Semantic Parsing
Authors: Anmol Agarwal, Jigar Gupta, Rahul Goel, Shyam Upadhyay, Pankaj Joshi, Rengarajan Aravamudhan
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Semantic Parsing

Extending semantic parsers to code-switched input has been a challenging problem, primarily due to a lack of supervised training data. In this work, we introduce CST5, a new data augmentation technique that finetunes a T5 model using a small seed set ($\approx$100 utterances) to generate code-switched utterances from English utterances. We show that CST5 generates high quality code-switched data, both intrinsically (per human evaluation) and extrinsically by comparing baseline models which are trained without data augmentation to models which are trained with augmented data. Empirically we observe that using CST5, one can achieve the same semantic parsing performance by using up to 20x less labeled data. To aid further research in this area, we are also releasing (a) Hinglish-TOP, the largest human annotated code-switched semantic parsing dataset to date, containing 10k human annotated Hindi-English (Hinglish) code-switched utterances, and (b) Over 170K CST5 generated code-switched utterances from the TOPv2 dataset. Human evaluation shows that both the human annotated data as well as the CST5 generated data is of good quality.
Cracking Double-Blind Review: Authorship Attribution with Deep Learning
Authors: Leonard Bauersfeld, Angel Romero, Manasi Muglikar, Davide Scaramuzza
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Authorship Attribution, Deep Learning

Double-blind peer review is considered a pillar of academic research because it is perceived to ensure a fair, unbiased, and fact-centered scientific discussion. Yet, experienced researchers can often correctly guess from which research group an anonymous submission originates, biasing the peer-review process. In this work, we present a transformer-based, neural-network architecture that only uses the text content and the author names in the bibliography to attribute an anonymous manuscript to an author. To train and evaluate our method, we created the largest authorship identification dataset to date. It leverages all research papers publicly available on arXiv amounting to over 2 million manuscripts. In arXiv-subsets with up to 2,000 different authors, our method achieves an unprecedented authorship attribution accuracy, where up to 73% of papers are attributed correctly. We present a scaling analysis to highlight the applicability of the proposed method to even larger datasets when sufficient compute capabilities are more widely available to the academic community. Furthermore, we analyze the attribution accuracy in settings where the goal is to identify all authors of an anonymous manuscript. Thanks to our method, we are not only able to predict the author of an anonymous work, but we also provide empirical evidence of the key aspects that make a paper attributable. We have open-sourced the necessary tools to reproduce our experiments.
Findings of the Covid-19 MLIA Machine Translation Task
Authors: Francisco Casacuberta, Alexandru Ceausu, Khalid Choukri, Miltos Deligiannis, Miguel Domingo, Mercedes García-Martínez, Manuel Herranz, Guillaume Jacquet, Vassilis Papavassiliou, Stelios Piperidis, Prokopis Prokopidis, Dimitris Roussis, Marwa Hadj Salah
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Transfer Learning, Translation

This work presents the results of the machine translation (MT) task from the Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval initiative, a community effort to improve the generation of MT systems focused on the current Covid-19 crisis. Nine teams took part in this event, which was divided in two rounds and involved seven different language pairs. Two different scenarios were considered: one in which only the provided data was allowed, and a second one in which the use of external resources was allowed. Overall, best approaches were based on multilingual models and transfer learning, with an emphasis on the importance of applying a cleaning process to the training data.
Towards Robust Numerical Question Answering: Diagnosing Numerical Capabilities of NLP Systems
Authors: Jialiang Xu, Mengyu Zhou, Xinyi He, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Open-Ended Question Answering, Question Answering

Numerical Question Answering is the task of answering questions that require numerical capabilities. Previous works introduce general adversarial attacks to Numerical Question Answering, while not systematically exploring numerical capabilities specific to the topic. In this paper, we propose to conduct numerical capability diagnosis on a series of Numerical Question Answering systems and datasets. A series of numerical capabilities are highlighted, and corresponding dataset perturbations are designed. Empirical results indicate that existing systems are severely challenged by these perturbations. E.g., Graph2Tree experienced a 53.83% absolute accuracy drop against the ``Extra'' perturbation on ASDiv-a, and BART experienced 13.80% accuracy drop against the ``Language'' perturbation on the numerical subset of DROP. As a counteracting approach, we also investigate the effectiveness of applying perturbations as data augmentation to relieve systems' lack of robust numerical capabilities. With experiment analysis and empirical studies, it is demonstrated that Numerical Question Answering with robust numerical capabilities is still to a large extent an open question. We discuss future directions of Numerical Question Answering and summarize guidelines on future dataset collection and system design.
Calibrated Interpretation: Confidence Estimation in Semantic Parsing
Authors: Elias Stengel-Eskin, Benjamin Van Durme
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Parsing

Sequence generation models are increasingly being used to translate natural language into programs, i.e. to perform executable semantic parsing. The fact that semantic parsing aims to predict programs that can lead to executed actions in the real world motivates developing safe systems. This in turn makes measuring calibration -- a central component to safety -- particularly important. We investigate the calibration of popular generation models across four popular semantic parsing datasets, finding that it varies across models and datasets. We then analyze factors associated with calibration error and release new confidence-based challenge splits of two parsing datasets. To facilitate the inclusion of calibration in semantic parsing evaluations, we release a library for computing calibration metrics.
Does Debiasing Inevitably Degrade the Model Performance
Authors: Yiran Liu, Xiao Liu, Haotian Chen, Yang Yu
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Gender bias in language models has attracted sufficient attention because it threatens social justice. However, most of the current debiasing methods degraded the model's performance on other tasks while the degradation mechanism is still mysterious. We propose a theoretical framework explaining the three candidate mechanisms of the language model's gender bias. We use our theoretical framework to explain why the current debiasing methods cause performance degradation. We also discover a pathway through which debiasing will not degrade the model performance. We further develop a causality-detection fine-tuning approach to correct gender bias. The numerical experiment demonstrates that our method is able to lead to double dividends: partially mitigating gender bias while avoiding performance degradation.