pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Exploiting Social Media Content for Self-Supervised Style Transfer
Authors: Dana Ruiter, Thomas Kleinbauer, Cristina España-Bonet, Josef van Genabith, Dietrich Klakow
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL (SocialNLP) 2022 7
Tasks: Attribute, Denoising, Machine Translation, NMT, Style Transfer, Translation

Recent research on style transfer takes inspiration from unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT), learning from large amounts of non-parallel data by exploiting cycle consistency loss, back-translation, and denoising autoencoders. By contrast, the use of self-supervised NMT (SSNMT), which leverages (near) parallel instances hidden in non-parallel data more efficiently than UNMT, has not yet been explored for style transfer. In this paper we present a novel Self-Supervised Style Transfer (3ST) model, which augments SSNMT with UNMT methods in order to identify and efficiently exploit supervisory signals in non-parallel social media posts. We compare 3ST with state-of-the-art (SOTA) style transfer models across civil rephrasing, formality and polarity tasks. We show that 3ST is able to balance the three major objectives (fluency, content preservation, attribute transfer accuracy) the best, outperforming SOTA models on averaged performance across their tested tasks in automatic and human evaluation.
Regex in a Time of Deep Learning: The Role of an Old Technology in Age Discrimination Detection in Job Advertisements
Authors: Anna Pillar, Kyrill Poelmans, Martha Larson
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: LTEDI (ACL) 2022 5

Deep learning holds great promise for detecting discriminatory language in the public sphere. However, for the detection of illegal age discrimination in job advertisements, regex approaches are still strong performers. In this paper, we investigate job advertisements in the Netherlands. We present a qualitative analysis of the benefits of the 'old' approach based on regexes and investigate how neural embeddings could address its limitations.
LogiGAN: Learning Logical Reasoning via Adversarial Pre-training
Authors: Xinyu Pi, Wanjun Zhong, Yan Gao, Nan Duan, Jian-Guang Lou
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning, Sentence

We present LogiGAN, an unsupervised adversarial pre-training framework for improving logical reasoning abilities of language models. Upon automatic identifying logical reasoning phenomena in massive text corpus via detection heuristics, we train language models to predict the masked-out logical statements. Inspired by the facilitation effect of reflective thinking in human learning, we analogically simulate the learning-thinking process with an adversarial Generator-Verifier architecture to assist logic learning. LogiGAN implements a novel sequential GAN approach that (a) circumvents the non-differentiable challenge of the sequential GAN by leveraging the Generator as a sentence-level generative likelihood scorer with a learning objective of reaching scoring consensus with the Verifier; (b) is computationally feasible for large-scale pre-training with arbitrary target length. Both base and large size language models pre-trained with LogiGAN demonstrate obvious performance improvement on 12 datasets requiring general reasoning abilities, revealing the fundamental role of logic in broad reasoning, as well as the effectiveness of LogiGAN. Ablation studies on LogiGAN components reveal the relative orthogonality between linguistic and logic abilities and suggest that reflective thinking's facilitation effect might also generalize to machine learning.
Relation Extraction with Weighted Contrastive Pre-training on Distant Supervision
Authors: Zhen Wan, Fei Cheng, Qianying Liu, Zhuoyuan Mao, Haiyue Song, Sadao Kurohashi
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Relation, Relation Extraction

Contrastive pre-training on distant supervision has shown remarkable effectiveness in improving supervised relation extraction tasks. However, the existing methods ignore the intrinsic noise of distant supervision during the pre-training stage. In this paper, we propose a weighted contrastive learning method by leveraging the supervised data to estimate the reliability of pre-training instances and explicitly reduce the effect of noise. Experimental results on three supervised datasets demonstrate the advantages of our proposed weighted contrastive learning approach compared to two state-of-the-art non-weighted baselines.Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/YukinoWan/WCL
Persian Natural Language Inference: A Meta-learning approach
Authors: Heydar Soudani, Mohammad Hassan Mojab, Hamid Beigy
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Meta-Learning, Multi-Task Learning, Natural Language Inference, Transfer Learning

Incorporating information from other languages can improve the results of tasks in low-resource languages. A powerful method of building functional natural language processing systems for low-resource languages is to combine multilingual pre-trained representations with cross-lingual transfer learning. In general, however, shared representations are learned separately, either across tasks or across languages. This paper proposes a meta-learning approach for inferring natural language in Persian. Alternately, meta-learning uses different task information (such as QA in Persian) or other language information (such as natural language inference in English). Also, we investigate the role of task augmentation strategy for forming additional high-quality tasks. We evaluate the proposed method using four languages and an auxiliary task. Compared to the baseline approach, the proposed model consistently outperforms it, improving accuracy by roughly six percent. We also examine the effect of finding appropriate initial parameters using zero-shot evaluation and CCA similarity.
Data Augmentation to Address Out-of-Vocabulary Problem in Low-Resource Sinhala-English Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Aloka Fernando, Surangika Ranathunga
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Machine Translation, NMT

Out-of-Vocabulary (OOV) is a problem for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). OOV refers to words with a low occurrence in the training data, or to those that are absent from the training data. To alleviate this, word or phrase-based Data Augmentation (DA) techniques have been used. However, existing DA techniques have addressed only one of these OOV types and limit to considering either syntactic constraints or semantic constraints. We present a word and phrase replacement-based DA technique that consider both types of OOV, by augmenting (1) rare words in the existing parallel corpus, and (2) new words from a bilingual dictionary. During augmentation, we consider both syntactic and semantic properties of the words to guarantee fluency in the synthetic sentences. This technique was experimented with low resource Sinhala-English language pair. We observe with only semantic constraints in the DA, the results are comparable with the scores obtained considering syntactic constraints, and is favourable for low-resourced languages that lacks linguistic tool support. Additionally, results can be further improved by considering both syntactic and semantic constraints.
Deploying self-supervised learning in the wild for hybrid automatic speech recognition
Authors: Mostafa Karimi, Changliang Liu, Kenichi Kumatani, Yao Qian, Tianyu Wu, Jian Wu
Date: 2022-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Event Detection, Scheduling, Self-Supervised Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have proven to be very successful in automatic speech recognition (ASR). These great improvements have been reported mostly based on highly curated datasets such as LibriSpeech for non-streaming End-to-End ASR models. However, the pivotal characteristics of SSL is to be utilized for any untranscribed audio data. In this paper, we provide a full exploration on how to utilize uncurated audio data in SSL from data pre-processing to deploying an streaming hybrid ASR model. More specifically, we present (1) the effect of Audio Event Detection (AED) model in data pre-processing pipeline (2) analysis on choosing optimizer and learning rate scheduling (3) comparison of recently developed contrastive losses, (4) comparison of various pre-training strategies such as utilization of in-domain versus out-domain pre-training data, monolingual versus multilingual pre-training data, multi-head multilingual SSL versus single-head multilingual SSL and supervised pre-training versus SSL. The experimental results show that SSL pre-training with in-domain uncurated data can achieve better performance in comparison to all the alternative out-domain pre-training strategies.
Dependent Latent Class Models
Authors: Jesse Bowers, Steve Culpepper
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Latent Class Models (LCMs) are used to cluster multivariate categorical data (e.g. group participants based on survey responses). Traditional LCMs assume a property called conditional independence. This assumption can be restrictive, leading to model misspecification and overparameterization. To combat this problem, we developed a novel Bayesian model called a Dependent Latent Class Model (DLCM), which permits conditional dependence. We verify identifiability of DLCMs. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of DLCMs in both simulations and real-world applications. Compared to traditional LCMs, DLCMs are effective in applications with time series, overlapping items, and structural zeroes.
Bayesian Discrete Conditional Transformation Models
Authors: Manuel Carlan, Thomas Kneib
Date: 2022-05-17 00:00:00

We propose a novel Bayesian model framework for discrete ordinal and count data based on conditional transformations of the responses. The conditional transformation function is estimated from the data in conjunction with an a priori chosen reference distribution. For count responses, the resulting transformation model is novel in the sense that it is a Bayesian fully parametric yet distribution-free approach that can additionally account for excess zeros with additive transformation function specifications. For ordinal categoric responses, our cumulative link transformation model allows the inclusion of linear and nonlinear covariate effects that can additionally be made category-specific, resulting in (non-)proportional odds or hazards models and more, depending on the choice of the reference distribution. Inference is conducted by a generic modular Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm where multivariate Gaussian priors enforce specific properties such as smoothness on the functional effects. To illustrate the versatility of Bayesian discrete conditional transformation models, applications to counts of patent citations in the presence of excess zeros and on treating forest health categories in a discrete partial proportional odds model are presented.
A Birds Eye View on Knowledge Graph Embeddings, Software Libraries, Applications and Challenges
Authors: Satvik Garg, Dwaipayan Roy
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graph Embeddings, Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction, Question Answering, Relation Prediction, Retrieval

In recent years, Knowledge Graph (KG) development has attracted significant researches considering the applications in web search, relation prediction, natural language processing, information retrieval, question answering to name a few. However, often KGs are incomplete due to which Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) has emerged as a sub-domain of research to automatically track down the missing connections in a KG. Numerous strategies have been suggested to work out the KGC dependent on different representation procedures intended to embed triples into a low-dimensional vector space. Given the difficulties related to KGC, researchers around the world are attempting to comprehend the attributes of the problem statement. This study intends to provide an overview of knowledge bases combined with different challenges and their impacts. We discuss existing KGC approaches, including the state-of-the-art Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGE), not only on static graphs but also for the latest trends such as multimodal, temporal, and uncertain knowledge graphs. In addition, reinforcement learning techniques are reviewed to model complex queries as a link prediction problem. Subsequently, we explored popular software packages for model training and examine open research challenges that can guide future research.
Health Information Retrieval -- State of the art report
Authors: Carla Teixeira Lopes
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

This report provides an overview of the field of Information Retrieval (IR) in healthcare. It does not aim to introduce general concepts and theories of IR but to present and describe specific aspects of Health Information Retrieval (HIR). After a brief introduction to the more broader field of IR, the significance of HIR at current times is discussed. Specific characteristics of Health Information, its classification and the main existing representations for health concepts are described together with the main products and services in the area (e.g.: databases of health bibliographic content, health specific search engines and others). Recent research work is discussed and the most active researchers, projects and research groups are also presented. Main organizations and journals are also identified.
Attention-based Multimodal Feature Representation Model for Micro-video Recommendation
Authors: Mohan Hasama, Jing Li
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

In recommender systems, models mostly use a combination of embedding layers and multilayer feedforward neural networks. The high-dimensional sparse original features are downscaled in the embedding layer and then fed into the fully connected network to obtain prediction results. However, the above methods have a rather obvious problem, that is, the features directly input are treated as independent individuals, and in fact there are internal correlations between features and features, and even different features have different importance in the recommendation. In this regard, this paper adopts a self-attentive mechanism to mine the internal correlations between features as well as their relative importance. In recent years, as a special form of attention mechanism, self-attention mechanism is favored by many researchers. The self-attentive mechanism captures the internal correlation of data or features by learning itself, thus reducing the dependence on external sources. Therefore, this paper adopts a multi-headed self-attentive mechanism to mine the internal correlations between features and thus learn the internal representation of features. At the same time, considering the rich information often hidden between features, the new feature representation obtained by crossover between the two is likely to imply the new description of the user likes the item. However, not all crossover features are meaningful, i.e., there is a problem of limited expression of feature combinations. Therefore, this paper adopts an attention-based approach to learn the external cross-representation of features.
AdaMCT: Adaptive Mixture of CNN-Transformer for Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Juyong Jiang, Peiyan Zhang, Yingtao Luo, Chaozhuo Li, Jae Boum Kim, Kai Zhang, Senzhang Wang, Xing Xie, Sunghun Kim
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation (SR) aims to model users dynamic preferences from a series of interactions. A pivotal challenge in user modeling for SR lies in the inherent variability of user preferences. An effective SR model is expected to capture both the long-term and short-term preferences exhibited by users, wherein the former can offer a comprehensive understanding of stable interests that impact the latter. To more effectively capture such information, we incorporate locality inductive bias into the Transformer by amalgamating its global attention mechanism with a local convolutional filter, and adaptively ascertain the mixing importance on a personalized basis through layer-aware adaptive mixture units, termed as AdaMCT. Moreover, as users may repeatedly browse potential purchases, it is expected to consider multiple relevant items concurrently in long-/short-term preferences modeling. Given that softmax-based attention may promote unimodal activation, we propose the Squeeze-Excitation Attention (with sigmoid activation) into SR models to capture multiple pertinent items (keys) simultaneously. Extensive experiments on three widely employed benchmarks substantiate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach. Source code is available at https://github.com/juyongjiang/AdaMCT.
Effectiveness of a time to fixate for fitness to drive evaluation in neurological patients
Authors: Nadica Miljković, Jaka Sodnik
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing, STS

We present a method to automatically calculate time to fixate (TTF) from the eye-tracker data in subjects with neurological impairment using a driving simulator. TTF presents the time interval for a person to notice the stimulus from its first occurrence. Precisely, we measured the time since the children started to cross the street until the drivers directed their look to the children. From 108 neurological patients recruited for the study, the analysis of TTF was performed in 56 patients to assess fit-, unfit-, and conditionally-fit-to-drive patients. The results showed that the proposed method based on the YOLO (you only look once) object detector is efficient for computing TTFs from the eye-tracker data. We obtained discriminative results for fit-to-drive patients by application of Tukey's honest significant difference post hoc test (p < 0.01), while no difference was observed between conditionally-fit and unfit-to-drive groups (p = 0.542). Moreover, we show that time-to-collision (TTC), initial gaze distance (IGD) from pedestrians, and speed at the hazard onset did not influence the result, while the only significant interaction is among fitness, IGD, and TTC on TTF. Obtained TTFs are also compared with the perception response times (PRT) calculated independently from eye-tracker data and YOLO. Although we reached statistically significant results that speak in favor of possible method application for assessment of fitness to drive, we provide detailed directions for future driving simulation-based evaluation and propose processing workflow to secure reliable TTF calculation and its possible application in for example psychology and neuroscience.
Upper Bounds for Continuous-Time End-to-End Risks in Stochastic Robot Navigation
Authors: Apurva Patil, Takashi Tanaka
Date: 2022-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Robot Navigation

We present an analytical method to estimate the continuous-time collision probability of motion plans for autonomous agents with linear controlled Ito dynamics. Motion plans generated by planning algorithms cannot be perfectly executed by autonomous agents in reality due to the inherent uncertainties in the real world. Estimating end-to-end risk is crucial to characterize the safety of trajectories and plan risk optimal trajectories. In this paper, we derive upper bounds for the continuous-time risk in stochastic robot navigation using the properties of Brownian motion as well as Boole and Hunter's inequalities from probability theory. Using a ground robot navigation example, we numerically demonstrate that our method is considerably faster than the naive Monte Carlo sampling method and the proposed bounds perform better than the discrete-time risk bounds.
Dictionary-Based Fusion of Contact and Acoustic Microphones for Wind Noise Reduction
Authors: Marvin Tammen, XiLin Li, Simon Doclo, Lalin Theverapperuma
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

In mobile speech communication applications, wind noise can lead to a severe reduction of speech quality and intelligibility. Since the performance of speech enhancement algorithms using acoustic microphones tends to substantially degrade in extremely challenging scenarios, auxiliary sensors such as contact microphones can be used. Although contact microphones offer a much lower recorded wind noise level, they come at the cost of speech distortion and additional noise components. Aiming at exploiting the advantages of acoustic and contact microphones for wind noise reduction, in this paper we propose to extend conventional single-microphone dictionary-based speech enhancement approaches by simultaneously modeling the acoustic and contact microphone signals. We propose to train a single speech dictionary and two noise dictionaries and use a relative transfer function to model the relationship between the speech components at the microphones. Simulation results show that the proposed approach yields improvements in both speech quality and intelligibility compared to several baseline approaches, most notably approaches using only the contact microphones or only the acoustic microphone.
Deep Multi-Frame MVDR Filtering for Binaural Noise Reduction
Authors: Marvin Tammen, Simon Doclo
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00

To improve speech intelligibility and speech quality in noisy environments, binaural noise reduction algorithms for head-mounted assistive listening devices are of crucial importance. Several binaural noise reduction algorithms such as the well-known binaural minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer have been proposed, which exploit spatial correlations of both the target speech and the noise components. Furthermore, for single-microphone scenarios, multi-frame algorithms such as the multi-frame MVDR (MFMVDR) filter have been proposed, which exploit temporal instead of spatial correlations. In this contribution, we propose a binaural extension of the MFMVDR filter, which exploits both spatial and temporal correlations. The binaural MFMVDR filters are embedded in an end-to-end deep learning framework, where the required parameters, i.e., the speech spatio-temporal correlation vectors as well as the (inverse) noise spatio-temporal covariance matrix, are estimated by temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) that are trained by minimizing the mean spectral absolute error loss function. Simulation results comprising measured binaural room impulses and diverse noise sources at signal-to-noise ratios from -5 dB to 20 dB demonstrate the advantage of utilizing the binaural MFMVDR filter structure over directly estimating the binaural multi-frame filter coefficients with TCNs.
Streaming Noise Context Aware Enhancement For Automatic Speech Recognition in Multi-Talker Environments
Authors: Joe Caroselli, Arun Narayanan, Yiteng Huang
Date: 2022-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speech Enhancement, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

One of the most challenging scenarios for smart speakers is multi-talker, when target speech from the desired speaker is mixed with interfering speech from one or more speakers. A smart assistant needs to determine which voice to recognize and which to ignore and it needs to do so in a streaming, low-latency manner. This work presents two multi-microphone speech enhancement algorithms targeted at this scenario. Targeting on-device use-cases, we assume that the algorithm has access to the signal before the hotword, which is referred to as the noise context. First is the Context Aware Beamformer which uses the noise context and detected hotword to determine how to target the desired speaker. The second is an adaptive noise cancellation algorithm called Speech Cleaner which trains a filter using the noise context. It is demonstrated that the two algorithms are complementary in the signal-to-noise ratio conditions under which they work well. We also propose an algorithm to select which one to use based on estimated SNR. When using 3 microphone channels, the final system achieves a relative word error rate reduction of 55% at -12dB, and 43\% at 12dB.