pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Fast Bayesian Inference with Batch Bayesian Quadrature via Kernel Recombination
Authors: Masaki Adachi, Satoshi Hayakawa, Martin Jørgensen, Harald Oberhauser, Michael A. Osborne
Date: 2022-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Numerical Integration

Calculation of Bayesian posteriors and model evidences typically requires numerical integration. Bayesian quadrature (BQ), a surrogate-model-based approach to numerical integration, is capable of superb sample efficiency, but its lack of parallelisation has hindered its practical applications. In this work, we propose a parallelised (batch) BQ method, employing techniques from kernel quadrature, that possesses an empirically exponential convergence rate. Additionally, just as with Nested Sampling, our method permits simultaneous inference of both posteriors and model evidence. Samples from our BQ surrogate model are re-selected to give a sparse set of samples, via a kernel recombination algorithm, requiring negligible additional time to increase the batch size. Empirically, we find that our approach significantly outperforms the sampling efficiency of both state-of-the-art BQ techniques and Nested Sampling in various real-world datasets, including lithium-ion battery analytics.
STNDT: Modeling Neural Population Activity with a Spatiotemporal Transformer
Authors: Trung Le, Eli Shlizerman
Date: 2022-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Modeling neural population dynamics underlying noisy single-trial spiking activities is essential for relating neural observation and behavior. A recent non-recurrent method - Neural Data Transformers (NDT) - has shown great success in capturing neural dynamics with low inference latency without an explicit dynamical model. However, NDT focuses on modeling the temporal evolution of the population activity while neglecting the rich covariation between individual neurons. In this paper we introduce SpatioTemporal Neural Data Transformer (STNDT), an NDT-based architecture that explicitly models responses of individual neurons in the population across time and space to uncover their underlying firing rates. In addition, we propose a contrastive learning loss that works in accordance with mask modeling objective to further improve the predictive performance. We show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on ensemble level in estimating neural activities across four neural datasets, demonstrating its capability to capture autonomous and non-autonomous dynamics spanning different cortical regions while being completely agnostic to the specific behaviors at hand. Furthermore, STNDT spatial attention mechanism reveals consistently important subsets of neurons that play a vital role in driving the response of the entire population, providing interpretability and key insights into how the population of neurons performs computation.
On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Federated Averaging with Heterogeneous Data
Authors: Jianyu Wang, Rudrajit Das, Gauri Joshi, Satyen Kale, Zheng Xu, Tong Zhang
Date: 2022-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Existing theory predicts that data heterogeneity will degrade the performance of the Federated Averaging (FedAvg) algorithm in federated learning. However, in practice, the simple FedAvg algorithm converges very well. This paper explains the seemingly unreasonable effectiveness of FedAvg that contradicts the previous theoretical predictions. We find that the key assumption of bounded gradient dissimilarity in previous theoretical analyses is too pessimistic to characterize data heterogeneity in practical applications. For a simple quadratic problem, we demonstrate there exist regimes where large gradient dissimilarity does not have any negative impact on the convergence of FedAvg. Motivated by this observation, we propose a new quantity, average drift at optimum, to measure the effects of data heterogeneity, and explicitly use it to present a new theoretical analysis of FedAvg. We show that the average drift at optimum is nearly zero across many real-world federated training tasks, whereas the gradient dissimilarity can be large. And our new analysis suggests FedAvg can have identical convergence rates in homogeneous and heterogeneous data settings, and hence, leads to better understanding of its empirical success.
A Resilient Distributed Boosting Algorithm
Authors: Yuval Filmus, Idan Mehalel, Shay Moran
Date: 2022-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: LEMMA

Given a learning task where the data is distributed among several parties, communication is one of the fundamental resources which the parties would like to minimize. We present a distributed boosting algorithm which is resilient to a limited amount of noise. Our algorithm is similar to classical boosting algorithms, although it is equipped with a new component, inspired by Impagliazzo's hard-core lemma [Impagliazzo95], adding a robustness quality to the algorithm. We also complement this result by showing that resilience to any asymptotically larger noise is not achievable by a communication-efficient algorithm.
A New Frontier of AI: On-Device AI Training and Personalization
Authors: Ji Joong Moon, Hyun Suk Lee, Jiho Chu, Donghak Park, Seungbaek Hong, Hyungjun Seo, Donghyeon Jeong, Sungsik Kong, MyungJoo Ham
Date: 2022-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Efficient Neural Network, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Modern consumer electronic devices have started executing deep learning-based intelligence services on devices, not cloud servers, to keep personal data on devices and to reduce network and cloud costs. We find such a trend as the opportunity to personalize intelligence services by updating neural networks with user data without exposing the data out of devices: on-device training. However, the limited resources of devices incurs significant difficulties. We propose a light-weight on-device training framework, NNTrainer, which provides highly memory-efficient neural network training techniques and proactive swapping based on fine-grained execution order analysis for neural networks. Moreover, its optimizations do not sacrifice accuracy and are transparent to training algorithms; thus, prior algorithmic studies may be implemented on top of NNTrainer. The evaluations show that NNTrainer can reduce memory consumption down to 1/20 (saving 95%!) and effectively personalizes intelligence services on devices. NNTrainer is cross-platform and practical open-source software, which is being deployed to millions of mobile devices.
Coswara: A website application enabling COVID-19 screening by analysing respiratory sound samples and health symptoms
Authors: Debarpan Bhattacharya, Debottam Dutta, Neeraj Kumar Sharma, Srikanth Raj Chetupalli, Pravin Mote, Sriram Ganapathy, Chandrakiran C, Sahiti Nori, Suhail K K, Sadhana Gonuguntla, Murali Alagesan
Date: 2022-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: COVID-19 Diagnosis

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated research on design of alternative, quick and effective COVID-19 diagnosis approaches. In this paper, we describe the Coswara tool, a website application designed to enable COVID-19 detection by analysing respiratory sound samples and health symptoms. A user using this service can log into a website using any device connected to the internet, provide there current health symptom information and record few sound sampled corresponding to breathing, cough, and speech. Within a minute of analysis of this information on a cloud server the website tool will output a COVID-19 probability score to the user. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to demand massive and scalable population level testing, we hypothesize that the proposed tool provides a potential solution towards this.
Unsupervised Deep Discriminant Analysis Based Clustering
Authors: Jinyu Cai, Wenzhong Guo, Jicong Fan
Date: 2022-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

This work presents an unsupervised deep discriminant analysis for clustering. The method is based on deep neural networks and aims to minimize the intra-cluster discrepancy and maximize the inter-cluster discrepancy in an unsupervised manner. The method is able to project the data into a nonlinear low-dimensional latent space with compact and distinct distribution patterns such that the data clusters can be effectively identified. We further provide an extension of the method such that available graph information can be effectively exploited to improve the clustering performance. Extensive numerical results on image and non-image data with or without graph information demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
Predictive Exit: Prediction of Fine-Grained Early Exits for Computation- and Energy-Efficient Inference
Authors: Xiangjie Li, Chenfei Lou, Zhengping Zhu, Yuchi Chen, Yingtao Shen, Yehan Ma, An Zou
Date: 2022-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Learning

By adding exiting layers to the deep learning networks, early exit can terminate the inference earlier with accurate results. The passive decision-making of whether to exit or continue the next layer has to go through every pre-placed exiting layer until it exits. In addition, it is also hard to adjust the configurations of the computing platforms alongside the inference proceeds. By incorporating a low-cost prediction engine, we propose a Predictive Exit framework for computation- and energy-efficient deep learning applications. Predictive Exit can forecast where the network will exit (i.e., establish the number of remaining layers to finish the inference), which effectively reduces the network computation cost by exiting on time without running every pre-placed exiting layer. Moreover, according to the number of remaining layers, proper computing configurations (i.e., frequency and voltage) are selected to execute the network to further save energy. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Predictive Exit achieves up to 96.2% computation reduction and 72.9% energy-saving compared with classic deep learning networks; and 12.8% computation reduction and 37.6% energy-saving compared with the early exit under state-of-the-art exiting strategies, given the same inference accuracy and latency.
Improved Approximation for Fair Correlation Clustering
Authors: Sara Ahmadian, Maryam Negahbani
Date: 2022-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Fairness

Correlation clustering is a ubiquitous paradigm in unsupervised machine learning where addressing unfairness is a major challenge. Motivated by this, we study Fair Correlation Clustering where the data points may belong to different protected groups and the goal is to ensure fair representation of all groups across clusters. Our paper significantly generalizes and improves on the quality guarantees of previous work of Ahmadi et al. and Ahmadian et al. as follows. - We allow the user to specify an arbitrary upper bound on the representation of each group in a cluster. - Our algorithm allows individuals to have multiple protected features and ensure fairness simultaneously across them all. - We prove guarantees for clustering quality and fairness in this general setting. Furthermore, this improves on the results for the special cases studied in previous work. Our experiments on real-world data demonstrate that our clustering quality compared to the optimal solution is much better than what our theoretical result suggests.
Motif Mining and Unsupervised Representation Learning for BirdCLEF 2022
Authors: Anthony Miyaguchi, Jiangyue Yu, Bryan Cheungvivatpant, Dakota Dudley, Aniketh Swain
Date: 2022-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Triplet

We build a classification model for the BirdCLEF 2022 challenge using unsupervised methods. We implement an unsupervised representation of the training dataset using a triplet loss on spectrogram representation of audio motifs. Our best model performs with a score of 0.48 on the public leaderboard.
Dimensional Modeling of Emotions in Text with Appraisal Theories: Corpus Creation, Annotation Reliability, and Prediction
Authors: Enrica Troiano, Laura Oberländer, Roman Klinger
Date: 2022-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, text-classification, Text Classification

The most prominent tasks in emotion analysis are to assign emotions to texts and to understand how emotions manifest in language. An observation for NLP is that emotions can be communicated implicitly by referring to events, appealing to an empathetic, intersubjective understanding of events, even without explicitly mentioning an emotion name. In psychology, the class of emotion theories known as appraisal theories aims at explaining the link between events and emotions. Appraisals can be formalized as variables that measure a cognitive evaluation by people living through an event that they consider relevant. They include the assessment if an event is novel, if the person considers themselves to be responsible, if it is in line with the own goals, and many others. Such appraisals explain which emotions are developed based on an event, e.g., that a novel situation can induce surprise or one with uncertain consequences could evoke fear. We analyze the suitability of appraisal theories for emotion analysis in text with the goal of understanding if appraisal concepts can reliably be reconstructed by annotators, if they can be predicted by text classifiers, and if appraisal concepts help to identify emotion categories. To achieve that, we compile a corpus by asking people to textually describe events that triggered particular emotions and to disclose their appraisals. Then, we ask readers to reconstruct emotions and appraisals from the text. This setup allows us to measure if emotions and appraisals can be recovered purely from text and provides a human baseline. Our comparison of text classification methods to human annotators shows that both can reliably detect emotions and appraisals with similar performance. Therefore, appraisals constitute an alternative computational emotion analysis paradigm and further improve the categorization of emotions in text with joint models.
Nominal Metaphor Generation with Multitask Learning
Authors: Yucheng Li, Chenghua Lin, Frank Geurin
Date: 2022-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Story Generation

Metaphor generation is a challenging task which can impact many downstream tasks such as improving user satisfaction with dialogue systems and story generation. This paper tackles the problem of Chinese nominal metaphor generation by introducing a multitask metaphor generation framework with self-training and metaphor identification mechanisms. Self-training addresses the data scarcity issue of metaphor datasets. That is, instead of solely relying on labelled metaphor datasets which are usually small in size, self-training helps identify potential metaphors from a large-scale unlabelled corpus for metaphor generation. The metaphor weighting mechanism enables our model to focus on the metaphor-related parts of the input (e.g., the comparison of the metaphor and comparator) during model learning and thus improves the metaphoricity of the generated metaphors. Our model is trained on an annotated corpus consisting of 6.3k sentences that contain diverse metaphorical expressions. Experimental results show that our model is able to generate metaphors with better readability and creativity compared to the baseline models, even in the situation where training data is insufficient.
Teacher Perception of Automatically Extracted Grammar Concepts for L2 Language Learning
Authors: Aditi Chaudhary, Arun Sampath, Ashwin Sheshadri, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Graham Neubig
Date: 2022-06-10 00:00:00

One of the challenges of language teaching is how to organize the rules regarding syntax, semantics, or phonology of the language in a meaningful manner. This not only requires pedagogical skills, but also requires a deep understanding of that language. While comprehensive materials to develop such curricula are available in English and some broadly spoken languages, for many other languages, teachers need to manually create them in response to their students' needs. This process is challenging because i) it requires that such experts be accessible and have the necessary resources, and ii) even if there are such experts, describing all the intricacies of a language is time-consuming and prone to omission. In this article, we present an automatic framework that aims to facilitate this process by automatically discovering and visualizing descriptions of different aspects of grammar. Specifically, we extract descriptions from a natural text corpus that answer questions about morphosyntax (learning of word order, agreement, case marking, or word formation) and semantics (learning of vocabulary) and show illustrative examples. We apply this method for teaching the Indian languages, Kannada and Marathi, which, unlike English, do not have well-developed pedagogical resources and, therefore, are likely to benefit from this exercise. To assess the perceived utility of the extracted material, we enlist the help of language educators from schools in North America who teach these languages to perform a manual evaluation. Overall, teachers find the materials to be interesting as a reference material for their own lesson preparation or even for learner evaluation.
Sentiment analysis on electricity twitter posts
Authors: Pardeep Kaur, Maryam Edalati
Date: 2022-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

In today's world, everyone is expressive in some way, and the focus of this project is on people's opinions about rising electricity prices in United Kingdom and India using data from Twitter, a micro-blogging platform on which people post messages, known as tweets. Because many people's incomes are not good and they have to pay so many taxes and bills, maintaining a home has become a disputed issue these days. Despite the fact that Government offered subsidy schemes to compensate people electricity bills but it is not welcomed by people. In this project, the aim is to perform sentiment analysis on people's expressions and opinions expressed on Twitter. In order to grasp the electricity prices opinion, it is necessary to carry out sentiment analysis for the government and consumers in energy market. Furthermore, text present on these medias are unstructured in nature, so to process them we firstly need to pre-process the data. There are so many feature extraction techniques such as Bag of Words, TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency), word embedding, NLP based features like word count. In this project, we analysed the impact of feature TF-IDF word level on electricity bills dataset of sentiment analysis. We found that by using TF-IDF word level performance of sentiment analysis is 3-4 higher than using N-gram features. Analysis is done using four classification algorithms including Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression and considering F-Score, Accuracy, Precision, and Recall performance parameters.
Going Beyond the Cookie Theft Picture Test: Detecting Cognitive Impairments using Acoustic Features
Authors: Franziska Braun, Andreas Erzigkeit, Hartmut Lehfeld, Thomas Hillemacher, Korbinian Riedhammer, Sebastian P. Bayerl
Date: 2022-06-10 00:00:00

Standardized tests play a crucial role in the detection of cognitive impairment. Previous work demonstrated that automatic detection of cognitive impairment is possible using audio data from a standardized picture description task. The presented study goes beyond that, evaluating our methods on data taken from two standardized neuropsychological tests, namely the German SKT and a German version of the CERAD-NB, and a semi-structured clinical interview between a patient and a psychologist. For the tests, we focus on speech recordings of three sub-tests: reading numbers (SKT 3), interference (SKT 7), and verbal fluency (CERAD-NB 1). We show that acoustic features from standardized tests can be used to reliably discriminate cognitively impaired individuals from non-impaired ones. Furthermore, we provide evidence that even features extracted from random speech samples of the interview can be a discriminator of cognitive impairment. In our baseline experiments, we use OpenSMILE features and Support Vector Machine classifiers. In an improved setup, we show that using wav2vec 2.0 features instead, we can achieve an accuracy of up to 85%.
Building an Icelandic Entity Linking Corpus
Authors: Steinunn Rut Friðriksdóttir, Valdimar Ágúst Eggertsson, Benedikt Geir Jóhannesson, Hjalti Daníelsson, Hrafn Loftsson, Hafsteinn Einarsson
Date: 2022-06-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: DCLRL (LREC) 2022 6
Tasks: Entity Linking

In this paper, we present the first Entity Linking corpus for Icelandic. We describe our approach of using a multilingual entity linking model (mGENRE) in combination with Wikipedia API Search (WAPIS) to label our data and compare it to an approach using WAPIS only. We find that our combined method reaches 53.9% coverage on our corpus, compared to 30.9% using only WAPIS. We analyze our results and explain the value of using a multilingual system when working with Icelandic. Additionally, we analyze the data that remain unlabeled, identify patterns and discuss why they may be more difficult to annotate.
Unsupervised and Few-shot Parsing from Pretrained Language Models
Authors: Zhiyuan Zeng, Deyi Xiong
Date: 2022-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling

Pretrained language models are generally acknowledged to be able to encode syntax [Tenney et al., 2019, Jawahar et al., 2019, Hewitt and Manning, 2019]. In this article, we propose UPOA, an Unsupervised constituent Parsing model that calculates an Out Association score solely based on the self-attention weight matrix learned in a pretrained language model as the syntactic distance for span segmentation. We further propose an enhanced version, UPIO, which exploits both inside association and outside association scores for estimating the likelihood of a span. Experiments with UPOA and UPIO disclose that the linear projection matrices for the query and key in the self-attention mechanism play an important role in parsing. We therefore extend the unsupervised models to few-shot parsing models (FPOA, FPIO) that use a few annotated trees to learn better linear projection matrices for parsing. Experiments on the Penn Treebank demonstrate that our unsupervised parsing model UPIO achieves results comparable to the state of the art on short sentences (length <= 10). Our few-shot parsing model FPIO trained with only 20 annotated trees outperforms a previous few-shot parsing method trained with 50 annotated trees. Experiments on cross-lingual parsing show that both unsupervised and few-shot parsing methods are better than previous methods on most languages of SPMRL [Seddah et al., 2013].
Borrowing or Codeswitching? Annotating for Finer-Grained Distinctions in Language Mixing
Authors: Elena Alvarez Mellado, Constantine Lignos
Date: 2022-06-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

We present a new corpus of Twitter data annotated for codeswitching and borrowing between Spanish and English. The corpus contains 9,500 tweets annotated at the token level with codeswitches, borrowings, and named entities. This corpus differs from prior corpora of codeswitching in that we attempt to clearly define and annotate the boundary between codeswitching and borrowing and do not treat common "internet-speak" ('lol', etc.) as codeswitching when used in an otherwise monolingual context. The result is a corpus that enables the study and modeling of Spanish-English borrowing and codeswitching on Twitter in one dataset. We present baseline scores for modeling the labels of this corpus using Transformer-based language models. The annotation itself is released with a CC BY 4.0 license, while the text it applies to is distributed in compliance with the Twitter terms of service.