pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
On Accelerated Perceptrons and Beyond
Authors: Guanghui Wang, Rafael Hanashiro, Etash Guha, Jacob Abernethy
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00

The classical Perceptron algorithm of Rosenblatt can be used to find a linear threshold function to correctly classify $n$ linearly separable data points, assuming the classes are separated by some margin $\gamma > 0$. A foundational result is that Perceptron converges after $\Omega(1/\gamma^{2})$ iterations. There have been several recent works that managed to improve this rate by a quadratic factor, to $\Omega(\sqrt{\log n}/\gamma)$, with more sophisticated algorithms. In this paper, we unify these existing results under one framework by showing that they can all be described through the lens of solving min-max problems using modern acceleration techniques, mainly through optimistic online learning. We then show that the proposed framework also lead to improved results for a series of problems beyond the standard Perceptron setting. Specifically, a) For the margin maximization problem, we improve the state-of-the-art result from $O(\log t/t^2)$ to $O(1/t^2)$, where $t$ is the number of iterations; b) We provide the first result on identifying the implicit bias property of the classical Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent (NAG) algorithm, and show NAG can maximize the margin with an $O(1/t^2)$ rate; c) For the classical $p$-norm Perceptron problem, we provide an algorithm with $\Omega(\sqrt{(p-1)\log n}/\gamma)$ convergence rate, while existing algorithms suffer the $\Omega({(p-1)}/\gamma^2)$ convergence rate.
Probabilistic Categorical Adversarial Attack & Adversarial Training
Authors: Han Xu, Pengfei He, Jie Ren, Yuxuan Wan, Zitao Liu, Hui Liu, Jiliang Tang
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

The existence of adversarial examples brings huge concern for people to apply Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in safety-critical tasks. However, how to generate adversarial examples with categorical data is an important problem but lack of extensive exploration. Previously established methods leverage greedy search method, which can be very time-consuming to conduct successful attack. This also limits the development of adversarial training and potential defenses for categorical data. To tackle this problem, we propose Probabilistic Categorical Adversarial Attack (PCAA), which transfers the discrete optimization problem to a continuous problem that can be solved efficiently by Projected Gradient Descent. In our paper, we theoretically analyze its optimality and time complexity to demonstrate its significant advantage over current greedy based attacks. Moreover, based on our attack, we propose an efficient adversarial training framework. Through a comprehensive empirical study, we justify the effectiveness of our proposed attack and defense algorithms.
TorchDIVA: An Extensible Computational Model of Speech Production built on an Open-Source Machine Learning Library
Authors: Sean Kinahan, Julie Liss, Visar Berisha
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00

The DIVA model is a computational model of speech motor control that combines a simulation of the brain regions responsible for speech production with a model of the human vocal tract. The model is currently implemented in Matlab Simulink; however, this is less than ideal as most of the development in speech technology research is done in Python. This means there is a wealth of machine learning tools which are freely available in the Python ecosystem that cannot be easily integrated with DIVA. We present TorchDIVA, a full rebuild of DIVA in Python using PyTorch tensors. DIVA source code was directly translated from Matlab to Python, and built-in Simulink signal blocks were implemented from scratch. After implementation, the accuracy of each module was evaluated via systematic block-by-block validation. The TorchDIVA model is shown to produce outputs that closely match those of the original DIVA model, with a negligible difference between the two. We additionally present an example of the extensibility of TorchDIVA as a research platform. Speech quality enhancement in TorchDIVA is achieved through an integration with an existing PyTorch generative vocoder called DiffWave. A modified DiffWave mel-spectrum upsampler was trained on human speech waveforms and conditioned on the TorchDIVA speech production. The results indicate improved speech quality metrics in the DiffWave-enhanced output as compared to the baseline. This enhancement would have been difficult or impossible to accomplish in the original Matlab implementation. This proof-of-concept demonstrates the value TorchDIVA will bring to the research community. Researchers can download the new implementation at: https://github.com/skinahan/DIVA_PyTorch
Maestro-U: Leveraging joint speech-text representation learning for zero supervised speech ASR
Authors: Zhehuai Chen, Ankur Bapna, Andrew Rosenberg, Yu Zhang, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Pedro Moreno, Nanxin Chen
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Transfer Learning

Training state-of-the-art Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) models typically requires a substantial amount of transcribed speech. In this work, we demonstrate that a modality-matched joint speech and text model can be leveraged to train a massively multilingual ASR model without any supervised (manually transcribed) speech for some languages. This paper explores the use of jointly learnt speech and text representations in a massively multilingual, zero supervised speech, real-world setting to expand the set of languages covered by ASR with only unlabeled speech and text in the target languages. Using the FLEURS dataset, we define the task to cover $102$ languages, where transcribed speech is available in $52$ of these languages and can be used to improve end-to-end ASR quality on the remaining $50$. First, we show that by combining speech representations with byte-level text representations and use of language embeddings, we can dramatically reduce the Character Error Rate (CER) on languages with no supervised speech from 64.8\% to 30.8\%, a relative reduction of 53\%. Second, using a subset of South Asian languages we show that Maestro-U can promote knowledge transfer from languages with supervised speech even when there is limited to no graphemic overlap. Overall, Maestro-U closes the gap to oracle performance by 68.5\% relative and reduces the CER of 19 languages below 15\%.
Post-hoc analysis of Arabic transformer models
Authors: Ahmed Abdelali, Nadir Durrani, Fahim Dalvi, Hassan Sajjad
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Morphological Tagging

Arabic is a Semitic language which is widely spoken with many dialects. Given the success of pre-trained language models, many transformer models trained on Arabic and its dialects have surfaced. While there have been an extrinsic evaluation of these models with respect to downstream NLP tasks, no work has been carried out to analyze and compare their internal representations. We probe how linguistic information is encoded in the transformer models, trained on different Arabic dialects. We perform a layer and neuron analysis on the models using morphological tagging tasks for different dialects of Arabic and a dialectal identification task. Our analysis enlightens interesting findings such as: i) word morphology is learned at the lower and middle layers, ii) while syntactic dependencies are predominantly captured at the higher layers, iii) despite a large overlap in their vocabulary, the MSA-based models fail to capture the nuances of Arabic dialects, iv) we found that neurons in embedding layers are polysemous in nature, while the neurons in middle layers are exclusive to specific properties
Making a MIRACL: Multilingual Information Retrieval Across a Continuum of Languages
Authors: Xinyu Zhang, Nandan Thakur, Odunayo Ogundepo, Ehsan Kamalloo, David Alfonso-Hermelo, Xiaoguang Li, Qun Liu, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Jimmy Lin
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

MIRACL (Multilingual Information Retrieval Across a Continuum of Languages) is a multilingual dataset we have built for the WSDM 2023 Cup challenge that focuses on ad hoc retrieval across 18 different languages, which collectively encompass over three billion native speakers around the world. These languages have diverse typologies, originate from many different language families, and are associated with varying amounts of available resources -- including what researchers typically characterize as high-resource as well as low-resource languages. Our dataset is designed to support the creation and evaluation of models for monolingual retrieval, where the queries and the corpora are in the same language. In total, we have gathered over 700k high-quality relevance judgments for around 77k queries over Wikipedia in these 18 languages, where all assessments have been performed by native speakers hired by our team. Our goal is to spur research that will improve retrieval across a continuum of languages, thus enhancing information access capabilities for diverse populations around the world, particularly those that have been traditionally underserved. This overview paper describes the dataset and baselines that we share with the community. The MIRACL website is live at http://miracl.ai/.
A Simple and Effective Method to Improve Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning
Authors: Kunbo Ding, Weijie Liu, Yuejian Fang, Weiquan Mao, Zhe Zhao, Tao Zhu, Haoyan Liu, Rong Tian, Yiren Chen
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, text-classification, Text Classification, Transfer Learning, XLM-R, Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer

Existing zero-shot cross-lingual transfer methods rely on parallel corpora or bilingual dictionaries, which are expensive and impractical for low-resource languages. To disengage from these dependencies, researchers have explored training multilingual models on English-only resources and transferring them to low-resource languages. However, its effect is limited by the gap between embedding clusters of different languages. To address this issue, we propose Embedding-Push, Attention-Pull, and Robust targets to transfer English embeddings to virtual multilingual embeddings without semantic loss, thereby improving cross-lingual transferability. Experimental results on mBERT and XLM-R demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous works on the zero-shot cross-lingual text classification task and can obtain a better multilingual alignment.
Making Science Simple: Corpora for the Lay Summarisation of Scientific Literature
Authors: Tomas Goldsack, Zhihao Zhang, Chenghua Lin, Carolina Scarton
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Lay Summarization, Scientific Document Summarization

Lay summarisation aims to jointly summarise and simplify a given text, thus making its content more comprehensible to non-experts. Automatic approaches for lay summarisation can provide significant value in broadening access to scientific literature, enabling a greater degree of both interdisciplinary knowledge sharing and public understanding when it comes to research findings. However, current corpora for this task are limited in their size and scope, hindering the development of broadly applicable data-driven approaches. Aiming to rectify these issues, we present two novel lay summarisation datasets, PLOS (large-scale) and eLife (medium-scale), each of which contains biomedical journal articles alongside expert-written lay summaries. We provide a thorough characterisation of our lay summaries, highlighting differing levels of readability and abstractiveness between datasets that can be leveraged to support the needs of different applications. Finally, we benchmark our datasets using mainstream summarisation approaches and perform a manual evaluation with domain experts, demonstrating their utility and casting light on the key challenges of this task.
Taxonomy of Abstractive Dialogue Summarization: Scenarios, Approaches and Future Directions
Authors: Qi Jia, Yizhu Liu, Siyu Ren, Kenny Q. Zhu
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Dialogue Summarization, Articles, Document Summarization

Abstractive dialogue summarization is to generate a concise and fluent summary covering the salient information in a dialogue among two or more interlocutors. It has attracted great attention in recent years based on the massive emergence of social communication platforms and an urgent requirement for efficient dialogue information understanding and digestion. Different from news or articles in traditional document summarization, dialogues bring unique characteristics and additional challenges, including different language styles and formats, scattered information, flexible discourse structures and unclear topic boundaries. This survey provides a comprehensive investigation on existing work for abstractive dialogue summarization from scenarios, approaches to evaluations. It categorizes the task into two broad categories according to the type of input dialogues, i.e., open-domain and task-oriented, and presents a taxonomy of existing techniques in three directions, namely, injecting dialogue features, designing auxiliary training tasks and using additional data.A list of datasets under different scenarios and widely-accepted evaluation metrics are summarized for completeness. After that, the trends of scenarios and techniques are summarized, together with deep insights on correlations between extensively exploited features and different scenarios. Based on these analyses, we recommend future directions including more controlled and complicated scenarios, technical innovations and comparisons, publicly available datasets in special domains, etc.
Graph-Based Multilingual Label Propagation for Low-Resource Part-of-Speech Tagging
Authors: Ayyoob Imani, Silvia Severini, Masoud Jalili Sabet, François Yvon, Hinrich Schütze
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, POS, POS Tagging, Sentence, TAG

Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is an important component of the NLP pipeline, but many low-resource languages lack labeled data for training. An established method for training a POS tagger in such a scenario is to create a labeled training set by transferring from high-resource languages. In this paper, we propose a novel method for transferring labels from multiple high-resource source to low-resource target languages. We formalize POS tag projection as graph-based label propagation. Given translations of a sentence in multiple languages, we create a graph with words as nodes and alignment links as edges by aligning words for all language pairs. We then propagate node labels from source to target using a Graph Neural Network augmented with transformer layers. We show that our propagation creates training sets that allow us to train POS taggers for a diverse set of languages. When combined with enhanced contextualized embeddings, our method achieves a new state-of-the-art for unsupervised POS tagging of low-resource languages.
Domain Specific Sub-network for Multi-Domain Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Amr Hendy, Mohamed Abdelghaffar, Mohamed Afify, Ahmed Y. Tawfik
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

This paper presents Domain-Specific Sub-network (DoSS). It uses a set of masks obtained through pruning to define a sub-network for each domain and finetunes the sub-network parameters on domain data. This performs very closely and drastically reduces the number of parameters compared to finetuning the whole network on each domain. Also a method to make masks unique per domain is proposed and shown to greatly improve the generalization to unseen domains. In our experiments on German to English machine translation the proposed method outperforms the strong baseline of continue training on multi-domain (medical, tech and religion) data by 1.47 BLEU points. Also continue training DoSS on new domain (legal) outperforms the multi-domain (medical, tech, religion, legal) baseline by 1.52 BLEU points.
Sentiment-Aware Word and Sentence Level Pre-training for Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Shuai Fan, Chen Lin, Haonan Li, Zhenghao Lin, Jinsong Su, Hang Zhang, Yeyun Gong, Jian Guo, Nan Duan
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Sentence, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

Most existing pre-trained language representation models (PLMs) are sub-optimal in sentiment analysis tasks, as they capture the sentiment information from word-level while under-considering sentence-level information. In this paper, we propose SentiWSP, a novel Sentiment-aware pre-trained language model with combined Word-level and Sentence-level Pre-training tasks. The word level pre-training task detects replaced sentiment words, via a generator-discriminator framework, to enhance the PLM's knowledge about sentiment words. The sentence level pre-training task further strengthens the discriminator via a contrastive learning framework, with similar sentences as negative samples, to encode sentiments in a sentence. Extensive experimental results show that SentiWSP achieves new state-of-the-art performance on various sentence-level and aspect-level sentiment classification benchmarks. We have made our code and model publicly available at https://github.com/XMUDM/SentiWSP.
EventGraph at CASE 2021 Task 1: A General Graph-based Approach to Protest Event Extraction
Authors: Huiling You, David Samuel, Samia Touileb, Lilja Øvrelid
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Extraction

This paper presents our submission to the 2022 edition of the CASE 2021 shared task 1, subtask 4. The EventGraph system adapts an end-to-end, graph-based semantic parser to the task of Protest Event Extraction and more specifically subtask 4 on event trigger and argument extraction. We experiment with various graphs, encoding the events as either "labeled-edge" or "node-centric" graphs. We show that the "node-centric" approach yields best results overall, performing well across the three languages of the task, namely English, Spanish, and Portuguese. EventGraph is ranked 3rd for English and Portuguese, and 4th for Spanish. Our code is available at: https://github.com/huiling-y/eventgraph_at_case
Simultaneous Translation for Unsegmented Input: A Sliding Window Approach
Authors: Sukanta Sen, Ondřej Bojar, Barry Haddow
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Translation

In the cascaded approach to spoken language translation (SLT), the ASR output is typically punctuated and segmented into sentences before being passed to MT, since the latter is typically trained on written text. However, erroneous segmentation, due to poor sentence-final punctuation by the ASR system, leads to degradation in translation quality, especially in the simultaneous (online) setting where the input is continuously updated. To reduce the influence of automatic segmentation, we present a sliding window approach to translate raw ASR outputs (online or offline) without needing to rely on an automatic segmenter. We train translation models using parallel windows (instead of parallel sentences) extracted from the original training data. At test time, we translate at the window level and join the translated windows using a simple approach to generate the final translation. Experiments on English-to-German and English-to-Czech show that our approach improves 1.3--2.0 BLEU points over the usual ASR-segmenter pipeline, and the fixed-length window considerably reduces flicker compared to a baseline retranslation-based online SLT system.
A Comprehensive Analysis of Acknowledgement Texts in Web of Science: a case study on four scientific domains
Authors: Nina Smirnova, Philipp Mayr
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Miscellaneous, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

Analysis of acknowledgments is particularly interesting as acknowledgments may give information not only about funding, but they are also able to reveal hidden contributions to authorship and the researcher's collaboration patterns, context in which research was conducted, and specific aspects of the academic work. The focus of the present research is the analysis of a large sample of acknowledgement texts indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection. Record types 'article' and 'review' from four different scientific domains, namely social sciences, economics, oceanography and computer science, published from 2014 to 2019 in a scientific journal in English were considered. Six types of acknowledged entities, i.e., funding agency, grant number, individuals, university, corporation and miscellaneous, were extracted from the acknowledgement texts using a Named Entity Recognition (NER) tagger and subsequently examined. A general analysis of the acknowledgement texts showed that indexing of funding information in WoS is incomplete. The analysis of the automatically extracted entities revealed differences and distinct patterns in the distribution of acknowledged entities of different types between different scientific domains. A strong association was found between acknowledged entity and scientific domain and acknowledged entity and entity type. Only negligible correlation was found between the number of citations and the number of acknowledged entities. Generally, the number of words in the acknowledgement texts positively correlates with the number of acknowledged funding organizations, universities, individuals and miscellaneous entities. At the same time, acknowledgement texts with the larger number of sentences have more acknowledged individuals and miscellaneous categories.
Alibaba-Translate China's Submission for WMT 2022 Metrics Shared Task
Authors: Yu Wan, Keqin Bao, Dayiheng Liu, Baosong Yang, Derek F. Wong, Lidia S. Chao, Wenqiang Lei, Jun Xie
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Translation

In this report, we present our submission to the WMT 2022 Metrics Shared Task. We build our system based on the core idea of UNITE (Unified Translation Evaluation), which unifies source-only, reference-only, and source-reference-combined evaluation scenarios into one single model. Specifically, during the model pre-training phase, we first apply the pseudo-labeled data examples to continuously pre-train UNITE. Notably, to reduce the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, we use data cropping and a ranking-based score normalization strategy. During the fine-tuning phase, we use both Direct Assessment (DA) and Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) data from past years' WMT competitions. Specially, we collect the results from models with different pre-trained language model backbones, and use different ensembling strategies for involved translation directions.