pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Practical Skills Demand Forecasting via Representation Learning of Temporal Dynamics
Authors: Maysa M. Garcia de Macedo, Wyatt Clarke, Eli Lucherini, Tyler Baldwin, Dilermando Queiroz Neto, Rogerio de Paula, Subhro Das
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Demand Forecasting, Representation Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Rapid technological innovation threatens to leave much of the global workforce behind. Today's economy juxtaposes white-hot demand for skilled labor against stagnant employment prospects for workers unprepared to participate in a digital economy. It is a moment of peril and opportunity for every country, with outcomes measured in long-term capital allocation and the life satisfaction of billions of workers. To meet the moment, governments and markets must find ways to quicken the rate at which the supply of skills reacts to changes in demand. More fully and quickly understanding labor market intelligence is one route. In this work, we explore the utility of time series forecasts to enhance the value of skill demand data gathered from online job advertisements. This paper presents a pipeline which makes one-shot multi-step forecasts into the future using a decade of monthly skill demand observations based on a set of recurrent neural network methods. We compare the performance of a multivariate model versus a univariate one, analyze how correlation between skills can influence multivariate model results, and present predictions of demand for a selection of skills practiced by workers in the information technology industry.
Neighborhood Mixup Experience Replay: Local Convex Interpolation for Improved Sample Efficiency in Continuous Control Tasks
Authors: Ryan Sander, Wilko Schwarting, Tim Seyde, Igor Gilitschenski, Sertac Karaman, Daniela Rus
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Experience replay plays a crucial role in improving the sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning agents. Recent advances in experience replay propose using Mixup (Zhang et al., 2018) to further improve sample efficiency via synthetic sample generation. We build upon this technique with Neighborhood Mixup Experience Replay (NMER), a geometrically-grounded replay buffer that interpolates transitions with their closest neighbors in state-action space. NMER preserves a locally linear approximation of the transition manifold by only applying Mixup between transitions with vicinal state-action features. Under NMER, a given transition's set of state action neighbors is dynamic and episode agnostic, in turn encouraging greater policy generalizability via inter-episode interpolation. We combine our approach with recent off-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms and evaluate on continuous control environments. We observe that NMER improves sample efficiency by an average 94% (TD3) and 29% (SAC) over baseline replay buffers, enabling agents to effectively recombine previous experiences and learn from limited data.
AutoQML: Automated Quantum Machine Learning for Wi-Fi Integrated Sensing and Communications
Authors: Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Pu Wang, Ye Wang
Date: 2022-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, ISAC, Quantum Machine Learning

Commercial Wi-Fi devices can be used for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) to jointly exchange data and monitor indoor environment. In this paper, we investigate a proof-of-concept approach using automated quantum machine learning (AutoQML) framework called AutoAnsatz to recognize human gesture. We address how to efficiently design quantum circuits to configure quantum neural networks (QNN). The effectiveness of AutoQML is validated by an in-house experiment for human pose recognition, achieving state-of-the-art performance greater than 80% accuracy for a limited data size with a significantly small number of trainable parameters.
Mobility, Communication and Computation Aware Federated Learning for Internet of Vehicles
Authors: Md Ferdous Pervej, Jianlin Guo, Kyeong Jin Kim, Kieran Parsons, Philip Orlik, Stefano Di Cairano, Marcel Menner, Karl Berntorp, Yukimasa Nagai, Huaiyu Dai
Date: 2022-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

While privacy concerns entice connected and automated vehicles to incorporate on-board federated learning (FL) solutions, an integrated vehicle-to-everything communication with heterogeneous computation power aware learning platform is urgently necessary to make it a reality. Motivated by this, we propose a novel mobility, communication and computation aware online FL platform that uses on-road vehicles as learning agents. Thanks to the advanced features of modern vehicles, the on-board sensors can collect data as vehicles travel along their trajectories, while the on-board processors can train machine learning models using the collected data. To take the high mobility of vehicles into account, we consider the delay as a learning parameter and restrict it to be less than a tolerable threshold. To satisfy this threshold, the central server accepts partially trained models, the distributed roadside units (a) perform downlink multicast beamforming to minimize global model distribution delay and (b) allocate optimal uplink radio resources to minimize local model offloading delay, and the vehicle agents conduct heterogeneous local model training. Using real-world vehicle trace datasets, we validate our FL solutions. Simulation shows that the proposed integrated FL platform is robust and outperforms baseline models. With reasonable local training episodes, it can effectively satisfy all constraints and deliver near ground truth multi-horizon velocity and vehicle-specific power predictions.
PLAID: An Efficient Engine for Late Interaction Retrieval
Authors: Keshav Santhanam, Omar Khattab, Christopher Potts, Matei Zaharia
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU, Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Pre-trained language models are increasingly important components across multiple information retrieval (IR) paradigms. Late interaction, introduced with the ColBERT model and recently refined in ColBERTv2, is a popular paradigm that holds state-of-the-art status across many benchmarks. To dramatically speed up the search latency of late interaction, we introduce the Performance-optimized Late Interaction Driver (PLAID). Without impacting quality, PLAID swiftly eliminates low-scoring passages using a novel centroid interaction mechanism that treats every passage as a lightweight bag of centroids. PLAID uses centroid interaction as well as centroid pruning, a mechanism for sparsifying the bag of centroids, within a highly-optimized engine to reduce late interaction search latency by up to 7$\times$ on a GPU and 45$\times$ on a CPU against vanilla ColBERTv2, while continuing to deliver state-of-the-art retrieval quality. This allows the PLAID engine with ColBERTv2 to achieve latency of tens of milliseconds on a GPU and tens or just few hundreds of milliseconds on a CPU at large scale, even at the largest scales we evaluate with 140M passages.
Automated Crossword Solving
Authors: Eric Wallace, Nicholas Tomlin, Albert Xu, Kevin Yang, Eshaan Pathak, Matthew Ginsberg, Dan Klein
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Question Answering

We present the Berkeley Crossword Solver, a state-of-the-art approach for automatically solving crossword puzzles. Our system works by generating answer candidates for each crossword clue using neural question answering models and then combines loopy belief propagation with local search to find full puzzle solutions. Compared to existing approaches, our system improves exact puzzle accuracy from 71% to 82% on crosswords from The New York Times and obtains 99.9% letter accuracy on themeless puzzles. Additionally, in 2021, a hybrid of our system and the existing Dr.Fill system outperformed all human competitors for the first time at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. To facilitate research on question answering and crossword solving, we analyze our system's remaining errors and release a dataset of over six million question-answer pairs.
Self-training with Two-phase Self-augmentation for Few-shot Dialogue Generation
Authors: Wanyu Du, Hanjie Chen, Yangfeng Ji
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Language Modelling, Response Generation, Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems, Text Generation

In task-oriented dialogue systems, response generation from meaning representations (MRs) often suffers from limited training examples, due to the high cost of annotating MR-to-Text pairs. Previous works on self-training leverage fine-tuned conversational models to automatically generate pseudo-labeled MR-to-Text pairs for further fine-tuning. However, some self-augmented data may be noisy or uninformative for the model to learn from. In this work, we propose a two-phase self-augmentation procedure to generate high-quality pseudo-labeled MR-to-Text pairs: the first phase selects the most informative MRs based on model's prediction uncertainty; with the selected MRs, the second phase generates accurate responses by aggregating multiple perturbed latent representations from each MR. Empirical experiments on two benchmark datasets, FewShotWOZ and FewShotSGD, show that our method generally outperforms existing self-training methods on both automatic and human evaluations.
SNaC: Coherence Error Detection for Narrative Summarization
Authors: Tanya Goyal, Junyi Jessy Li, Greg Durrett
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Coherence Evaluation, Document Summarization

Progress in summarizing long texts is inhibited by the lack of appropriate evaluation frameworks. When a long summary must be produced to appropriately cover the facets of that text, that summary needs to present a coherent narrative to be understandable by a reader, but current automatic and human evaluation methods fail to identify gaps in coherence. In this work, we introduce SNaC, a narrative coherence evaluation framework rooted in fine-grained annotations for long summaries. We develop a taxonomy of coherence errors in generated narrative summaries and collect span-level annotations for 6.6k sentences across 150 book and movie screenplay summaries. Our work provides the first characterization of coherence errors generated by state-of-the-art summarization models and a protocol for eliciting coherence judgments from crowd annotators. Furthermore, we show that the collected annotations allow us to train a strong classifier for automatically localizing coherence errors in generated summaries as well as benchmarking past work in coherence modeling. Finally, our SNaC framework can support future work in long document summarization and coherence evaluation, including improved summarization modeling and post-hoc summary correction.
Phylogeny-Inspired Adaptation of Multilingual Models to New Languages
Authors: Fahim Faisal, Antonios Anastasopoulos
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer

Large pretrained multilingual models, trained on dozens of languages, have delivered promising results due to cross-lingual learning capabilities on variety of language tasks. Further adapting these models to specific languages, especially ones unseen during pre-training, is an important goal towards expanding the coverage of language technologies. In this study, we show how we can use language phylogenetic information to improve cross-lingual transfer leveraging closely related languages in a structured, linguistically-informed manner. We perform adapter-based training on languages from diverse language families (Germanic, Uralic, Tupian, Uto-Aztecan) and evaluate on both syntactic and semantic tasks, obtaining more than 20% relative performance improvements over strong commonly used baselines, especially on languages unseen during pre-training.
Acceptability Judgements via Examining the Topology of Attention Maps
Authors: Daniil Cherniavskii, Eduard Tulchinskii, Vladislav Mikhailov, Irina Proskurina, Laida Kushnareva, Ekaterina Artemova, Serguei Barannikov, Irina Piontkovskaya, Dmitri Piontkovski, Evgeny Burnaev
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: CoLA, Linguistic Acceptability, Sentence, Topological Data Analysis

The role of the attention mechanism in encoding linguistic knowledge has received special interest in NLP. However, the ability of the attention heads to judge the grammatical acceptability of a sentence has been underexplored. This paper approaches the paradigm of acceptability judgments with topological data analysis (TDA), showing that the geometric properties of the attention graph can be efficiently exploited for two standard practices in linguistics: binary judgments and linguistic minimal pairs. Topological features enhance the BERT-based acceptability classifier scores by $8$%-$24$% on CoLA in three languages (English, Italian, and Swedish). By revealing the topological discrepancy between attention maps of minimal pairs, we achieve the human-level performance on the BLiMP benchmark, outperforming nine statistical and Transformer LM baselines. At the same time, TDA provides the foundation for analyzing the linguistic functions of attention heads and interpreting the correspondence between the graph features and grammatical phenomena.
A machine transliteration tool between Uzbek alphabets
Authors: Ulugbek Salaev, Elmurod Kuriyozov, Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Transliteration

Machine transliteration, as defined in this paper, is a process of automatically transforming written script of words from a source alphabet into words of another target alphabet within the same language, while preserving their meaning, as well as pronunciation. The main goal of this paper is to present a machine transliteration tool between three common scripts used in low-resource Uzbek language: the old Cyrillic, currently official Latin, and newly announced New Latin alphabets. The tool has been created using a combination of rule-based and fine-tuning approaches. The created tool is available as an open-source Python package, as well as a web-based application including a public API. To our knowledge, this is the first machine transliteration tool that supports the newly announced Latin alphabet of the Uzbek language.
Approaching Reflex Predictions as a Classification Problem Using Extended Phonological Alignments
Authors: Tiago Tresoldi
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL (SIGTYP) 2022 7
Tasks: Prediction

This work describes an implementation of the "extended alignment" (or "multitiers") approach for cognate reflex prediction, submitted to "Prediction of Cognate Reflexes" shared task. Similarly to List2022d, the technique involves an automatic extension of sequence alignments with multilayered vectors that encode informational tiers on both site-specific traits, such as sound classes and distinctive features, as well as contextual and suprasegmental ones, conveyed by cross-site referrals and replication. The method allows to generalize the problem of cognate reflex prediction as a classification problem, with models trained using a parallel corpus of cognate sets. A model using random forests is trained and evaluated on the shared task for reflex prediction, and the experimental results are presented and discussed along with some differences to other implementations.
A Simple yet Effective Relation Information Guided Approach for Few-Shot Relation Extraction
Authors: Yang Liu, Jinpeng Hu, Xiang Wan, Tsung-Hui Chang
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Relation, Relation Extraction, Sentence

Few-Shot Relation Extraction aims at predicting the relation for a pair of entities in a sentence by training with a few labelled examples in each relation. Some recent works have introduced relation information (i.e., relation labels or descriptions) to assist model learning based on Prototype Network. However, most of them constrain the prototypes of each relation class implicitly with relation information, generally through designing complex network structures, like generating hybrid features, combining with contrastive learning or attention networks. We argue that relation information can be introduced more explicitly and effectively into the model. Thus, this paper proposes a direct addition approach to introduce relation information. Specifically, for each relation class, the relation representation is first generated by concatenating two views of relations (i.e., [CLS] token embedding and the mean value of embeddings of all tokens) and then directly added to the original prototype for both train and prediction. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset FewRel 1.0 show significant improvements and achieve comparable results to the state-of-the-art, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Besides, further analyses verify that the direct addition is a much more effective way to integrate the relation representations and the original prototypes.
Psychiatric Scale Guided Risky Post Screening for Early Detection of Depression
Authors: Zhiling Zhang, Siyuan Chen, Mengyue Wu, Kenny Q. Zhu
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Depression Detection, Diagnostic

Depression is a prominent health challenge to the world, and early risk detection (ERD) of depression from online posts can be a promising technique for combating the threat. Early depression detection faces the challenge of efficiently tackling streaming data, balancing the tradeoff between timeliness, accuracy and explainability. To tackle these challenges, we propose a psychiatric scale guided risky post screening method that can capture risky posts related to the dimensions defined in clinical depression scales, and providing interpretable diagnostic basis. A Hierarchical Attentional Network equipped with BERT (HAN-BERT) is proposed to further advance explainable predictions. For ERD, we propose an online algorithm based on an evolving queue of risky posts that can significantly reduce the number of model inferences to boost efficiency. Experiments show that our method outperforms the competitive feature-based and neural models under conventional depression detection settings, and achieves simultaneous improvement in both efficacy and efficiency for ERD.
Insights on Neural Representations for End-to-End Speech Recognition
Authors: Anna Ollerenshaw, Md Asif Jalal, Thomas Hain
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) models aim to learn a generalised speech representation. However, there are limited tools available to understand the internal functions and the effect of hierarchical dependencies within the model architecture. It is crucial to understand the correlations between the layer-wise representations, to derive insights on the relationship between neural representations and performance. Previous investigations of network similarities using correlation analysis techniques have not been explored for End-to-End ASR models. This paper analyses and explores the internal dynamics between layers during training with CNN, LSTM and Transformer based approaches using Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and centered kernel alignment (CKA) for the experiments. It was found that neural representations within CNN layers exhibit hierarchical correlation dependencies as layer depth increases but this is mostly limited to cases where neural representation correlates more closely. This behaviour is not observed in LSTM architecture, however there is a bottom-up pattern observed across the training process, while Transformer encoder layers exhibit irregular coefficiency correlation as neural depth increases. Altogether, these results provide new insights into the role that neural architectures have upon speech recognition performance. More specifically, these techniques can be used as indicators to build better performing speech recognition models.
A Weakly-Supervised Iterative Graph-Based Approach to Retrieve COVID-19 Misinformation Topics
Authors: Harry Wang, Sharath Chandra Guntuku
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Misconceptions, Misinformation

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an `infodemic' -- of accurate and inaccurate health information across social media. Detecting misinformation amidst dynamically changing information landscape is challenging; identifying relevant keywords and posts is arduous due to the large amount of human effort required to inspect the content and sources of posts. We aim to reduce the resource cost of this process by introducing a weakly-supervised iterative graph-based approach to detect keywords, topics, and themes related to misinformation, with a focus on COVID-19. Our approach can successfully detect specific topics from general misinformation-related seed words in a few seed texts. Our approach utilizes the BERT-based Word Graph Search (BWGS) algorithm that builds on context-based neural network embeddings for retrieving misinformation-related posts. We utilize Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling for obtaining misinformation-related themes from the texts returned by BWGS. Furthermore, we propose the BERT-based Multi-directional Word Graph Search (BMDWGS) algorithm that utilizes greater starting context information for misinformation extraction. In addition to a qualitative analysis of our approach, our quantitative analyses show that BWGS and BMDWGS are effective in extracting misinformation-related content compared to common baselines in low data resource settings. Extracting such content is useful for uncovering prevalent misconceptions and concerns and for facilitating precision public health messaging campaigns to improve health behaviors.
Two-Step Question Retrieval for Open-Domain QA
Authors: Yeon Seonwoo, Juhee Son, Jiho Jin, Sang-Woo Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim, Jung-Woo Ha, Alice Oh
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Retrieval, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

The retriever-reader pipeline has shown promising performance in open-domain QA but suffers from a very slow inference speed. Recently proposed question retrieval models tackle this problem by indexing question-answer pairs and searching for similar questions. These models have shown a significant increase in inference speed, but at the cost of lower QA performance compared to the retriever-reader models. This paper proposes a two-step question retrieval model, SQuID (Sequential Question-Indexed Dense retrieval) and distant supervision for training. SQuID uses two bi-encoders for question retrieval. The first-step retriever selects top-k similar questions, and the second-step retriever finds the most similar question from the top-k questions. We evaluate the performance and the computational efficiency of SQuID. The results show that SQuID significantly increases the performance of existing question retrieval models with a negligible loss on inference speed.