pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Domain Adaptation of Machine Translation with Crowdworkers
Authors: Makoto Morishita, Jun Suzuki, Masaaki Nagata
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Machine Translation, Translation

Although a machine translation model trained with a large in-domain parallel corpus achieves remarkable results, it still works poorly when no in-domain data are available. This situation restricts the applicability of machine translation when the target domain's data are limited. However, there is great demand for high-quality domain-specific machine translation models for many domains. We propose a framework that efficiently and effectively collects parallel sentences in a target domain from the web with the help of crowdworkers. With the collected parallel data, we can quickly adapt a machine translation model to the target domain. Our experiments show that the proposed method can collect target-domain parallel data over a few days at a reasonable cost. We tested it with five domains, and the domain-adapted model improved the BLEU scores to +19.7 by an average of +7.8 points compared to a general-purpose translation model.
Improving Zero-Shot Multilingual Translation with Universal Representations and Cross-Mappings
Authors: Shuhao Gu, Yang Feng
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

The many-to-many multilingual neural machine translation can translate between language pairs unseen during training, i.e., zero-shot translation. Improving zero-shot translation requires the model to learn universal representations and cross-mapping relationships to transfer the knowledge learned on the supervised directions to the zero-shot directions. In this work, we propose the state mover's distance based on the optimal theory to model the difference of the representations output by the encoder. Then, we bridge the gap between the semantic-equivalent representations of different languages at the token level by minimizing the proposed distance to learn universal representations. Besides, we propose an agreement-based training scheme, which can help the model make consistent predictions based on the semantic-equivalent sentences to learn universal cross-mapping relationships for all translation directions. The experimental results on diverse multilingual datasets show that our method can improve consistently compared with the baseline system and other contrast methods. The analysis proves that our method can better align the semantic space and improve the prediction consistency.
Bi-Directional Iterative Prompt-Tuning for Event Argument Extraction
Authors: Lu Dai, Bang Wang, Wei Xiang, Yijun Mo
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Argument Extraction

Recently, prompt-tuning has attracted growing interests in event argument extraction (EAE). However, the existing prompt-tuning methods have not achieved satisfactory performance due to the lack of consideration of entity information. In this paper, we propose a bi-directional iterative prompt-tuning method for EAE, where the EAE task is treated as a cloze-style task to take full advantage of entity information and pre-trained language models (PLMs). Furthermore, our method explores event argument interactions by introducing the argument roles of contextual entities into prompt construction. Since template and verbalizer are two crucial components in a cloze-style prompt, we propose to utilize the role label semantic knowledge to construct a semantic verbalizer and design three kinds of templates for the EAE task. Experiments on the ACE 2005 English dataset with standard and low-resource settings show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the peer state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/HustMinsLab/BIP.
A Compact End-to-End Model with Local and Global Context for Spoken Language Identification
Authors: Fei Jia, Nithin Rao Koluguri, Jagadeesh Balam, Boris Ginsburg
Date: 2022-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Identification, Spoken language identification

We introduce TitaNet-LID, a compact end-to-end neural network for Spoken Language Identification (LID) that is based on the ContextNet architecture. TitaNet-LID employs 1D depth-wise separable convolutions and Squeeze-and-Excitation layers to effectively capture local and global context within an utterance. Despite its small size, TitaNet-LID achieves performance similar to state-of-the-art models on the VoxLingua107 dataset while being 10 times smaller. Furthermore, it can be easily adapted to new acoustic conditions and unseen languages through simple fine-tuning, achieving a state-of-the-art accuracy of 88.2% on the FLEURS benchmark. Our model is scalable and can achieve a better trade-off between accuracy and speed. TitaNet-LID performs well even on short utterances less than 5s in length, indicating its robustness to input length.
Reinforced Question Rewriting for Conversational Question Answering
Authors: Zhiyu Chen, Jie Zhao, Anjie Fang, Besnik Fetahu, Oleg Rokhlenko, Shervin Malmasi
Date: 2022-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Question Answering, Question Answering, Question Rewriting, Retrieval

Conversational Question Answering (CQA) aims to answer questions contained within dialogues, which are not easily interpretable without context. Developing a model to rewrite conversational questions into self-contained ones is an emerging solution in industry settings as it allows using existing single-turn QA systems to avoid training a CQA model from scratch. Previous work trains rewriting models using human rewrites as supervision. However, such objectives are disconnected with QA models and therefore more human-like rewrites do not guarantee better QA performance. In this paper we propose using QA feedback to supervise the rewriting model with reinforcement learning. Experiments show that our approach can effectively improve QA performance over baselines for both extractive and retrieval QA. Furthermore, human evaluation shows that our method can generate more accurate and detailed rewrites when compared to human annotations.
Evaluating context-invariance in unsupervised speech representations
Authors: Mark Hallap, Emmanuel Dupoux, Ewan Dunbar
Date: 2022-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis

Unsupervised speech representations have taken off, with benchmarks (SUPERB, ZeroSpeech) demonstrating major progress on semi-supervised speech recognition, speech synthesis, and speech-only language modelling. Inspiration comes from the promise of ``discovering the phonemes'' of a language or a similar low-bitrate encoding. However, one of the critical properties of phoneme transcriptions is context-invariance: the phonetic context of a speech sound can have massive influence on the way it is pronounced, while the text remains stable. This is what allows tokens of the same word to have the same transcriptions -- key to language understanding. Current benchmarks do not measure context-invariance. We develop a new version of the ZeroSpeech ABX benchmark that measures context-invariance, and apply it to recent self-supervised representations. We demonstrate that the context-independence of representations is predictive of the stability of word-level representations. We suggest research concentrate on improving context-independence of self-supervised and unsupervised representations.
Nearest Neighbor Language Models for Stylistic Controllable Generation
Authors: Severino Trotta, Lucie Flek, Charles Welch
Date: 2022-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Recent language modeling performance has been greatly improved by the use of external memory. This memory encodes the context so that similar contexts can be recalled during decoding. This similarity depends on how the model learns to encode context, which can be altered to include other attributes, such as style. We construct and evaluate an architecture for this purpose, using corpora annotated for politeness, formality, and toxicity. Through extensive experiments and human evaluation we demonstrate the potential of our method to generate text while controlling style. We find that style-specific datastores improve generation performance, though results vary greatly across styles, and the effect of pretraining data and specific styles should be explored in future work.
Self-supervised language learning from raw audio: Lessons from the Zero Resource Speech Challenge
Authors: Ewan Dunbar, Nicolas Hamilakis, Emmanuel Dupoux
Date: 2022-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Acoustic Unit Discovery, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Resynthesis

Recent progress in self-supervised or unsupervised machine learning has opened the possibility of building a full speech processing system from raw audio without using any textual representations or expert labels such as phonemes, dictionaries or parse trees. The contribution of the Zero Resource Speech Challenge series since 2015 has been to break down this long-term objective into four well-defined tasks -- Acoustic Unit Discovery, Spoken Term Discovery, Discrete Resynthesis, and Spoken Language Modeling -- and introduce associated metrics and benchmarks enabling model comparison and cumulative progress. We present an overview of the six editions of this challenge series since 2015, discuss the lessons learned, and outline the areas which need more work or give puzzling results.
Token-level Sequence Labeling for Spoken Language Understanding using Compositional End-to-End Models
Authors: Siddhant Arora, Siddharth Dalmia, Brian Yan, Florian Metze, Alan W Black, Shinji Watanabe
Date: 2022-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Spoken Language Understanding

End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are gaining popularity over cascaded approaches due to their simplicity and ability to avoid error propagation. However, these systems model sequence labeling as a sequence prediction task causing a divergence from its well-established token-level tagging formulation. We build compositional end-to-end SLU systems that explicitly separate the added complexity of recognizing spoken mentions in SLU from the NLU task of sequence labeling. By relying on intermediate decoders trained for ASR, our end-to-end systems transform the input modality from speech to token-level representations that can be used in the traditional sequence labeling framework. This composition of ASR and NLU formulations in our end-to-end SLU system offers direct compatibility with pre-trained ASR and NLU systems, allows performance monitoring of individual components and enables the use of globally normalized losses like CRF, making them attractive in practical scenarios. Our models outperform both cascaded and direct end-to-end models on a labeling task of named entity recognition across SLU benchmarks.
QUILL: Query Intent with Large Language Models using Retrieval Augmentation and Multi-stage Distillation
Authors: Krishna Srinivasan, Karthik Raman, Anupam Samanta, Lingrui Liao, Luca Bertelli, Mike Bendersky
Date: 2022-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, Knowledge Distillation, Retrieval

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive results on a variety of text understanding tasks. Search queries though pose a unique challenge, given their short-length and lack of nuance or context. Complicated feature engineering efforts do not always lead to downstream improvements as their performance benefits may be offset by increased complexity of knowledge distillation. Thus, in this paper we make the following contributions: (1) We demonstrate that Retrieval Augmentation of queries provides LLMs with valuable additional context enabling improved understanding. While Retrieval Augmentation typically increases latency of LMs (thus hurting distillation efficacy), (2) we provide a practical and effective way of distilling Retrieval Augmentation LLMs. Specifically, we use a novel two-stage distillation approach that allows us to carry over the gains of retrieval augmentation, without suffering the increased compute typically associated with it. (3) We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach (QUILL) on a billion-scale, real-world query understanding system resulting in huge gains. Via extensive experiments, including on public benchmarks, we believe this work offers a recipe for practical use of retrieval-augmented query understanding.
Simulating realistic speech overlaps improves multi-talker ASR
Authors: Muqiao Yang, Naoyuki Kanda, Xiaofei Wang, Jian Wu, Sunit Sivasankaran, Zhuo Chen, Jinyu Li, Takuya Yoshioka
Date: 2022-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Language Modeling, Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Multi-talker automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been studied to generate transcriptions of natural conversation including overlapping speech of multiple speakers. Due to the difficulty in acquiring real conversation data with high-quality human transcriptions, a na\"ive simulation of multi-talker speech by randomly mixing multiple utterances was conventionally used for model training. In this work, we propose an improved technique to simulate multi-talker overlapping speech with realistic speech overlaps, where an arbitrary pattern of speech overlaps is represented by a sequence of discrete tokens. With this representation, speech overlapping patterns can be learned from real conversations based on a statistical language model, such as N-gram, which can be then used to generate multi-talker speech for training. In our experiments, multi-talker ASR models trained with the proposed method show consistent improvement on the word error rates across multiple datasets.
COMET-QE and Active Learning for Low-Resource Machine Translation
Authors: Everlyn Asiko Chimoto, Bruce A. Bassett
Date: 2022-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Low Resource Neural Machine Translation, Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation, Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

Active learning aims to deliver maximum benefit when resources are scarce. We use COMET-QE, a reference-free evaluation metric, to select sentences for low-resource neural machine translation. Using Swahili, Kinyarwanda and Spanish for our experiments, we show that COMET-QE significantly outperforms two variants of Round Trip Translation Likelihood (RTTL) and random sentence selection by up to 5 BLEU points for 20k sentences selected by Active Learning on a 30k baseline. This suggests that COMET-QE is a powerful tool for sentence selection in the very low-resource limit.
Solving the Schrodinger equation with genetic algorithms: a practical approach
Authors: Rafael Lahoz-Beltra
Date: 2022-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Stochastic Optimization

The Schrodinger equation is one of the most important equations in physics and chemistry and can be solved in the simplest cases by computer numerical methods. Since the beginning of the 70s of the last century the computer began to be used to solve this equation in elementary quantum systems, e.g. and in the most complex case a hydrogen-like system. Obtaining the solution means finding the wave function, which allows predicting the physical and chemical properties of the quantum system. However, when a quantum system is more complex than a hydrogen-like system then we must be satisfied with an approximate solution of the equation. During the last decade the application of algorithms and principles of quantum computation in disciplines other than physics and chemistry, such as biology and artificial intelligence, has led to the search for alternative techniques with which to obtain approximate solutions of the Schrodinger equation. In this paper, we review and illustrate the application of genetic algorithms, i.e. stochastic optimization procedures inspired by Darwinian evolution, in elementary quantum systems and in quantum models of artificial intelligence. In this last field, we illustrate with two toy models how to solve the Schrodinger equation in an elementary model of a quantum neuron and in the synthesis of quantum circuits controlling the behavior of a Braitenberg vehicle.
Towards solving model bias in cosmic shear forward modeling
Authors: Benjamin Remy, Francois Lanusse, Jean-Luc Starck
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00

As the volume and quality of modern galaxy surveys increase, so does the difficulty of measuring the cosmological signal imprinted in galaxy shapes. Weak gravitational lensing sourced by the most massive structures in the Universe generates a slight shearing of galaxy morphologies called cosmic shear, key probe for cosmological models. Modern techniques of shear estimation based on statistics of ellipticity measurements suffer from the fact that the ellipticity is not a well-defined quantity for arbitrary galaxy light profiles, biasing the shear estimation. We show that a hybrid physical and deep learning Hierarchical Bayesian Model, where a generative model captures the galaxy morphology, enables us to recover an unbiased estimate of the shear on realistic galaxies, thus solving the model bias.
On the Exactness of Dantzig-Wolfe Relaxation for Rank Constrained Optimization Problems
Authors: Yongchun Li, Weijun Xie
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00

In the rank-constrained optimization problem (RCOP), it minimizes a linear objective function over a prespecified closed rank-constrained domain set and $m$ generic two-sided linear matrix inequalities. Motivated by the Dantzig-Wolfe (DW) decomposition, a popular approach of solving many nonconvex optimization problems, we investigate the strength of DW relaxation (DWR) of the RCOP, which admits the same formulation as RCOP except replacing the domain set by its closed convex hull. Notably, our goal is to characterize conditions under which the DWR matches RCOP for any m two-sided linear matrix inequalities. From the primal perspective, we develop the first-known simultaneously necessary and sufficient conditions that achieve: (i) extreme point exactness -- all the extreme points of the DWR feasible set belong to that of the RCOP; (ii) convex hull exactness -- the DWR feasible set is identical to the closed convex hull of RCOP feasible set; and (iii) objective exactness -- the optimal values of the DWR and RCOP coincide. The proposed conditions unify, refine, and extend the existing exactness results in the quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP) and fair unsupervised learning. These conditions can be very useful to identify new results, including the extreme point exactness for a QCQP problem that admits an inhomogeneous objective function with two homogeneous two-sided quadratic constraints and the convex hull exactness for fair SVD.
MiCRO: Multi-interest Candidate Retrieval Online
Authors: Frank Portman, Stephen Ragain, Ahmed El-Kishky
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Providing personalized recommendations in an environment where items exhibit ephemerality and temporal relevancy (e.g. in social media) presents a few unique challenges: (1) inductively understanding ephemeral appeal for items in a setting where new items are created frequently, (2) adapting to trends within engagement patterns where items may undergo temporal shifts in relevance, (3) accurately modeling user preferences over this item space where users may express multiple interests. In this work we introduce MiCRO, a generative statistical framework that models multi-interest user preferences and temporal multi-interest item representations. Our framework is specifically formulated to adapt to both new items and temporal patterns of engagement. MiCRO demonstrates strong empirical performance on candidate retrieval experiments performed on two large scale user-item datasets: (1) an open-source temporal dataset of (User, User) follow interactions and (2) a temporal dataset of (User, Tweet) favorite interactions which we will open-source as an additional contribution to the community.
Discovery Dynamics: Leveraging Repeated Exposure for User and Music Characterization
Authors: Bruno Sguerra, Viet-Anh Tran, Romain Hennequin
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Repetition in music consumption is a common phenomenon. It is notably more frequent when compared to the consumption of other media, such as books and movies. In this paper, we show that one particularly interesting repetitive behavior arises when users are consuming new items. Users' interest tends to rise with the first repetitions and attains a peak after which interest will decrease with subsequent exposures, resulting in an inverted-U shape. This behavior, which has been extensively studied in psychology, is called the mere exposure effect. In this paper, we show how a number of factors, both content and user-based, well documented in the literature on the mere exposure effect, modulate the magnitude of the effect. Due to the vast availability of data of users discovering new songs everyday in music streaming platforms, these findings enable new ways to characterize both the music, users and their relationships. Ultimately, it opens up the possibility of developing new recommender systems paradigms based on these characterizations.
Decontamination of the scientific literature
Authors: Guillaume Cabanac
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Manipulation

Research misconduct and frauds pollute the scientific literature. Honest errors and malevolent data fabrication, image manipulation, journal hijacking, and plagiarism passed peer review unnoticed. Problematic papers deceive readers, authors citing them, and AI-powered literature-based discovery. Flagship publishers accepted hundreds flawed papers despite claiming to enforce peer review. This application ambitions to decontaminate the scientific literature using curative and preventive actions.
Supply Chain Characteristics as Predictors of Cyber Risk: A Machine-Learning Assessment
Authors: Kevin Hu, Retsef Levi, Raphael Yahalom, El Ghali Zerhouni
Date: 2022-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

This paper provides the first large-scale data-driven analysis to evaluate the predictive power of different attributes for assessing risk of cyberattack data breaches. Furthermore, motivated by rapid increase in third party enabled cyberattacks, the paper provides the first quantitative empirical evidence that digital supply-chain attributes are significant predictors of enterprise cyber risk. The paper leverages outside-in cyber risk scores that aim to capture the quality of the enterprise internal cybersecurity management, but augment these with supply chain features that are inspired by observed third party cyberattack scenarios, as well as concepts from network science research. The main quantitative result of the paper is to show that supply chain network features add significant detection power to predicting enterprise cyber risk, relative to merely using enterprise-only attributes. Particularly, compared to a base model that relies only on internal enterprise features, the supply chain network features improve the out-of-sample AUC by 2.3\%. Given that each cyber data breach is a low probability high impact risk event, these improvements in the prediction power have significant value. Additionally, the model highlights several cybersecurity risk drivers related to third party cyberattack and breach mechanisms and provides important insights as to what interventions might be effective to mitigate these risks.