pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Text Revealer: Private Text Reconstruction via Model Inversion Attacks against Transformers
Authors: Ruisi Zhang, Seira Hidano, Farinaz Koushanfar
Date: 2022-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis, text-classification, Text Classification

Text classification has become widely used in various natural language processing applications like sentiment analysis. Current applications often use large transformer-based language models to classify input texts. However, there is a lack of systematic study on how much private information can be inverted when publishing models. In this paper, we formulate \emph{Text Revealer} -- the first model inversion attack for text reconstruction against text classification with transformers. Our attacks faithfully reconstruct private texts included in training data with access to the target model. We leverage an external dataset and GPT-2 to generate the target domain-like fluent text, and then perturb its hidden state optimally with the feedback from the target model. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our attacks are effective for datasets with different text lengths and can reconstruct private texts with accuracy.
SMTCE: A Social Media Text Classification Evaluation Benchmark and BERTology Models for Vietnamese
Authors: Luan Thanh Nguyen, Kiet Van Nguyen, Ngan Luu-Thuy Nguyen
Date: 2022-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, text-classification, Text Classification, XLM-R

Text classification is a typical natural language processing or computational linguistics task with various interesting applications. As the number of users on social media platforms increases, data acceleration promotes emerging studies on Social Media Text Classification (SMTC) or social media text mining on these valuable resources. In contrast to English, Vietnamese, one of the low-resource languages, is still not concentrated on and exploited thoroughly. Inspired by the success of the GLUE, we introduce the Social Media Text Classification Evaluation (SMTCE) benchmark, as a collection of datasets and models across a diverse set of SMTC tasks. With the proposed benchmark, we implement and analyze the effectiveness of a variety of multilingual BERT-based models (mBERT, XLM-R, and DistilmBERT) and monolingual BERT-based models (PhoBERT, viBERT, vELECTRA, and viBERT4news) for tasks in the SMTCE benchmark. Monolingual models outperform multilingual models and achieve state-of-the-art results on all text classification tasks. It provides an objective assessment of multilingual and monolingual BERT-based models on the benchmark, which will benefit future studies about BERTology in the Vietnamese language.
Transition to Adulthood for Young People with Intellectual or Developmental Disabilities: Emotion Detection and Topic Modeling
Authors: Yan Liu, Maria Laricheva, Chiyu Zhang, Patrick Boutet, GuanYu Chen, Terence Tracey, Giuseppe Carenini, Richard Young
Date: 2022-09-21 00:00:00

Transition to Adulthood is an essential life stage for many families. The prior research has shown that young people with intellectual or development disabil-ities (IDD) have more challenges than their peers. This study is to explore how to use natural language processing (NLP) methods, especially unsupervised machine learning, to assist psychologists to analyze emotions and sentiments and to use topic modeling to identify common issues and challenges that young people with IDD and their families have. Additionally, the results were compared to those obtained from young people without IDD who were in tran-sition to adulthood. The findings showed that NLP methods can be very useful for psychologists to analyze emotions, conduct cross-case analysis, and sum-marize key topics from conversational data. Our Python code is available at https://github.com/mlaricheva/emotion_topic_modeling.
Bias at a Second Glance: A Deep Dive into Bias for German Educational Peer-Review Data Modeling
Authors: Thiemo Wambsganss, Vinitra Swamy, Roman Rietsche, Tanja Käser
Date: 2022-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has become increasingly utilized to provide adaptivity in educational applications. However, recent research has highlighted a variety of biases in pre-trained language models. While existing studies investigate bias in different domains, they are limited in addressing fine-grained analysis on educational and multilingual corpora. In this work, we analyze bias across text and through multiple architectures on a corpus of 9,165 German peer-reviews collected from university students over five years. Notably, our corpus includes labels such as helpfulness, quality, and critical aspect ratings from the peer-review recipient as well as demographic attributes. We conduct a Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) analysis on (1) our collected corpus in connection with the clustered labels, (2) the most common pre-trained German language models (T5, BERT, and GPT-2) and GloVe embeddings, and (3) the language models after fine-tuning on our collected data-set. In contrast to our initial expectations, we found that our collected corpus does not reveal many biases in the co-occurrence analysis or in the GloVe embeddings. However, the pre-trained German language models find substantial conceptual, racial, and gender bias and have significant changes in bias across conceptual and racial axes during fine-tuning on the peer-review data. With our research, we aim to contribute to the fourth UN sustainability goal (quality education) with a novel dataset, an understanding of biases in natural language education data, and the potential harms of not counteracting biases in language models for educational tasks.
Seeking Diverse Reasoning Logic: Controlled Equation Expression Generation for Solving Math Word Problems
Authors: Yibin Shen, Qianying Liu, Zhuoyuan Mao, Zhen Wan, Fei Cheng, Sadao Kurohashi
Date: 2022-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

To solve Math Word Problems, human students leverage diverse reasoning logic that reaches different possible equation solutions. However, the mainstream sequence-to-sequence approach of automatic solvers aims to decode a fixed solution equation supervised by human annotation. In this paper, we propose a controlled equation generation solver by leveraging a set of control codes to guide the model to consider certain reasoning logic and decode the corresponding equations expressions transformed from the human reference. The empirical results suggest that our method universally improves the performance on single-unknown (Math23K) and multiple-unknown (DRAW1K, HMWP) benchmarks, with substantial improvements up to 13.2% accuracy on the challenging multiple-unknown datasets.
Is More Data Better? Re-thinking the Importance of Efficiency in Abusive Language Detection with Transformers-Based Active Learning
Authors: Hannah Rose Kirk, Bertie Vidgen, Scott A. Hale
Date: 2022-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: TRAC (COLING) 2022 10
Tasks: Abusive Language, Active Learning

Annotating abusive language is expensive, logistically complex and creates a risk of psychological harm. However, most machine learning research has prioritized maximizing effectiveness (i.e., F1 or accuracy score) rather than data efficiency (i.e., minimizing the amount of data that is annotated). In this paper, we use simulated experiments over two datasets at varying percentages of abuse to demonstrate that transformers-based active learning is a promising approach to substantially raise efficiency whilst still maintaining high effectiveness, especially when abusive content is a smaller percentage of the dataset. This approach requires a fraction of labeled data to reach performance equivalent to training over the full dataset.
Chatbots for Mental Health Support: Exploring the Impact of Emohaa on Reducing Mental Distress in China
Authors: Sahand Sabour, Wen Zhang, Xiyao Xiao, Yuwei Zhang, Yinhe Zheng, Jiaxin Wen, Jialu Zhao, Minlie Huang
Date: 2022-09-21 00:00:00

The growing demand for mental health support has highlighted the importance of conversational agents as human supporters worldwide and in China. These agents could increase availability and reduce the relative costs of mental health support. The provided support can be divided into two main types: cognitive and emotional support. Existing work on this topic mainly focuses on constructing agents that adopt Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) principles. Such agents operate based on pre-defined templates and exercises to provide cognitive support. However, research on emotional support using such agents is limited. In addition, most of the constructed agents operate in English, highlighting the importance of conducting such studies in China. In this study, we analyze the effectiveness of Emohaa in reducing symptoms of mental distress. Emohaa is a conversational agent that provides cognitive support through CBT-based exercises and guided conversations. It also emotionally supports users by enabling them to vent their desired emotional problems. The study included 134 participants, split into three groups: Emohaa (CBT-based), Emohaa (Full), and control. Experimental results demonstrated that compared to the control group, participants who used Emohaa experienced considerably more significant improvements in symptoms of mental distress. We also found that adding the emotional support agent had a complementary effect on such improvements, mainly depression and insomnia. Based on the obtained results and participants' satisfaction with the platform, we concluded that Emohaa is a practical and effective tool for reducing mental distress.
Adapting Pretrained Text-to-Text Models for Long Text Sequences
Authors: Wenhan Xiong, Anchit Gupta, Shubham Toshniwal, Yashar Mehdad, Wen-tau Yih
Date: 2022-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Long-range modeling, Question Answering, Text Summarization

We present an empirical study of adapting an existing pretrained text-to-text model for long-sequence inputs. Through a comprehensive study along three axes of the pretraining pipeline -- model architecture, optimization objective, and pretraining corpus, we propose an effective recipe to build long-context models from existing short-context models. Specifically, we replace the full attention in transformers with pooling-augmented blockwise attention, and pretrain the model with a masked-span prediction task with spans of varying length. In terms of the pretraining corpus, we find that using randomly concatenated short-documents from a large open-domain corpus results in better performance than using existing long document corpora which are typically limited in their domain coverage. With these findings, we build a long-context model that achieves competitive performance on long-text QA tasks and establishes the new state of the art on five long-text summarization datasets, often outperforming previous methods with larger model sizes. Our code has been released at https://github.com/facebookresearch/bart_ls.
Exploring Optimal Granularity for Extractive Summarization of Unstructured Health Records: Analysis of the Largest Multi-Institutional Archive of Health Records in Japan
Authors: Kenichiro Ando, Takashi Okumura, Mamoru Komachi, Hiromasa Horiguchi, Yuji Matsumoto
Date: 2022-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Extractive Summarization, Sentence

Automated summarization of clinical texts can reduce the burden of medical professionals. "Discharge summaries" are one promising application of the summarization, because they can be generated from daily inpatient records. Our preliminary experiment suggests that 20-31% of the descriptions in discharge summaries overlap with the content of the inpatient records. However, it remains unclear how the summaries should be generated from the unstructured source. To decompose the physician's summarization process, this study aimed to identify the optimal granularity in summarization. We first defined three types of summarization units with different granularities to compare the performance of the discharge summary generation: whole sentences, clinical segments, and clauses. We defined clinical segments in this study, aiming to express the smallest medically meaningful concepts. To obtain the clinical segments, it was necessary to automatically split the texts in the first stage of the pipeline. Accordingly, we compared rule-based methods and a machine learning method, and the latter outperformed the formers with an F1 score of 0.846 in the splitting task. Next, we experimentally measured the accuracy of extractive summarization using the three types of units, based on the ROUGE-1 metric, on a multi-institutional national archive of health records in Japan. The measured accuracies of extractive summarization using whole sentences, clinical segments, and clauses were 31.91, 36.15, and 25.18, respectively. We found that the clinical segments yielded higher accuracy than sentences and clauses. This result indicates that summarization of inpatient records demands finer granularity than sentence-oriented processing. Although we used only Japanese health records, it can be interpreted as follows: physicians extract "concepts of medical significance" from patient records and recombine them ...
Dynamic Relevance Graph Network for Knowledge-Aware Question Answering
Authors: Chen Zheng, Parisa Kordjamshidi
Date: 2022-09-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Question Answering

This work investigates the challenge of learning and reasoning for Commonsense Question Answering given an external source of knowledge in the form of a knowledge graph (KG). We propose a novel graph neural network architecture, called Dynamic Relevance Graph Network (DRGN). DRGN operates on a given KG subgraph based on the question and answers entities and uses the relevance scores between the nodes to establish new edges dynamically for learning node representations in the graph network. This explicit usage of relevance as graph edges has the following advantages, a) the model can exploit the existing relationships, re-scale the node weights, and influence the way the neighborhood nodes' representations are aggregated in the KG subgraph, b) It potentially recovers the missing edges in KG that are needed for reasoning. Moreover, as a byproduct, our model improves handling the negative questions due to considering the relevance between the question node and the graph entities. Our proposed approach shows competitive performance on two QA benchmarks, CommonsenseQA and OpenbookQA, compared to the state-of-the-art published results.
Large-Sample Properties of Non-Stationary Source Separation for Gaussian Signals
Authors: François Bachoc, Christoph Muehlmann, Klaus Nordhausen, Joni Virta
Date: 2022-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: blind source separation

Non-stationary source separation is a well-established branch of blind source separation with many different methods. However, for none of these methods large-sample results are available. To bridge this gap, we develop large-sample theory for NSS-JD, a popular method of non-stationary source separation based on the joint diagonalization of block-wise covariance matrices. We work under an instantaneous linear mixing model for independent Gaussian non-stationary source signals together with a very general set of assumptions: besides boundedness conditions, the only assumptions we make are that the sources exhibit finite dependency and that their variance functions differ sufficiently to be asymptotically separable. The consistency of the unmixing estimator and its convergence to a limiting Gaussian distribution at the standard square root rate are shown to hold under the previous conditions. Simulation experiments are used to verify the theoretical results and to study the impact of block length on the separation.
Instance-dependent uniform tail bounds for empirical processes
Authors: Sohail Bahmani
Date: 2022-09-21 00:00:00

We formulate a uniform tail bound for empirical processes indexed by a class of functions, in terms of the individual deviations of the functions rather than the worst-case deviation in the considered class. The tail bound is established by introducing an initial ``deflation'' step to the standard generic chaining argument. The resulting tail bound is the sum of the complexity of the ``deflated function class'' in terms of a generalization of Talagrand's $\gamma$ functional, and the deviation of the function instance, both of which are formulated based on the natural seminorm induced by the corresponding Cram\'{e}r functions. Leveraging another less demanding natural seminorm, we also show similar bounds, though with implicit dependence on the sample size, in the more general case where finite exponential moments cannot be assumed. We also provide approximations of the tail bounds in terms of the more prevalent Orlicz norms or their ``incomplete'' versions under suitable moment conditions.
Clustering Without Knowing How To: Application and Evaluation
Authors: Daniil Likhobaba, Daniil Fedulov, Dmitry Ustalov
Date: 2022-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Image Clustering

Crowdsourcing allows running simple human intelligence tasks on a large crowd of workers, enabling solving problems for which it is difficult to formulate an algorithm or train a machine learning model in reasonable time. One of such problems is data clustering by an under-specified criterion that is simple for humans, but difficult for machines. In this demonstration paper, we build a crowdsourced system for image clustering and release its code under a free license at https://github.com/Toloka/crowdclustering. Our experiments on two different image datasets, dresses from Zalando's FEIDEGGER and shoes from the Toloka Shoes Dataset, confirm that one can yield meaningful clusters with no machine learning algorithms purely with crowdsourcing.
octopusfs:a distributed file system with tiered storage management
Authors: Elena Kakoulli Nikolaos D. Karmiris Herodotos Herodotou
Date: 2017-05-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: SIGMOD '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Management of DataMay 2017 5
Tasks: Management, Retrieval

The continuous improvements in memory, storage devices, and network technologies of commodity hardware introduce
new challenges and opportunities in tiered storage management. Whereas past work is exploiting storage tiers in pairs
or for specific applications, OctopusFS—a novel distributed file system that is aware of the underlying storage media—
offers a comprehensive solution to managing multiple storage tiers in a distributed setting. OctopusFS contains automated data-driven policies for managing the placement and retrieval of data across the nodes and storage tiers of the cluster. It also exposes the network locations and storage tiers of the data in order to allow higher-level systems to make locality-aware and tier-aware decisions. This demonstration will showcase the web interface of OctopusFS, which enables users to (i) view detailed utilization information for the various storage tiers and nodes, (ii) browse the directory namespace and perform file-related actions, and (iii) execute caching-related operations while observing their performance impact on MapReduce and Spark workloads.
An Efficient Edge Detection Approach to Provide Better Edge Connectivity for Image Analysis
Authors: Mamta Mittal; Amit Verma; Iqbaldeep Kaur; Bhavneet Kaur; Meenakshi Sharma; Lalit Mohan Goyal; Sudipta Roy; TAI-HOON KIM
Date: 2019-03-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE 2019 3
Tasks: Edge Detection, Face Detection, Object Recognition, Pedestrian Detection

An edge detection is important for its reliability and security which delivers a better understanding of object recognition in the applications of computer vision, such as pedestrian detection, face detection, and video surveillance. This paper introduced two fundamental limitations encountered in edge detection: edge connectivity and edge thickness, those have been used by various developments in the state-of-the-art. An optimal selection of the threshold for effectual edge detection has constantly been a key challenge in computer vision. Therefore, a robust edge detection algorithm using multiple threshold approaches (B-Edge) is proposed to cover both the limitations. The majorly used canny edge operator focuses on two thresholds selections and still witnesses a few gaps for optimal results. To handle the loopholes of the canny edge operator, our method selects the simulated triple thresholds that target to the prime issues of the edge detection: image contrast, effective edge pixels selection, errors handling, and similarity to the ground truth. The qualitative and quantitative experimental evaluations demonstrate that our edge detection method outperforms competing algorithms for mentioned issues. The proposed approach endeavors an improvement for both grayscale and colored images.
Variable-fidelity expected improvement method for efficient global optimization of expensive functions
Authors: Yu Zhang, Zhong-Hua Han, Ke-Shi Zhang
Date: 2018-05-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization 2018 5
Tasks: global-optimization

The efficient global optimization method (EGO) based on kriging surrogate model and expected improvement (EI) has received much attention for optimization of high-fidelity, expensive functions. However, when the standard EI method is directly applied to a variable-fidelity optimization (VFO) introducing assistance from cheap, low-fidelity functions via hierarchical kriging (HK) or cokriging, only high-fidelity samples can be chosen to update the variable-fidelity surrogate model. The theory of infilling lowfidelity samples towards the improvement of high-fidelity function is still a blank area. This article proposes a variable-fidelity EI (VF-EI)method that can adaptively select new samples of both low and high fidelity. Based on the theory of HKmodel, the EI of the high-fidelity function associated with adding low- and high-fidelity sample points are analytically derived, and the resulting VF-EI is a function of both the design variables x and the fidelity level l. Through maximizing the VF-EI, both the sample location and fidelity level of next numerical evaluation are determined,which in turn drives the optimization converging to the global optimum of high-fidelity function. The proposed VF-EI is verified by six analytical test cases and demonstrated by two engineering problems, including aerodynamic shape optimizations of RAE 2822 airfoil and ONERA M6 wing. The results show that it can remarkably improve the optimization efficiency and compares favorably to the existing methods.