pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A review-based study on different Text-to-Speech technologies
Authors: Md. Jalal Uddin Chowdhury, Ashab Hussan
Date: 2023-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: text-to-speech, Text to Speech

This research paper presents a comprehensive review-based study on various Text-to-Speech (TTS) technologies. TTS technology is an important aspect of human-computer interaction, enabling machines to convert written text into audible speech. The paper examines the different TTS technologies available, including concatenative TTS, formant synthesis TTS, and statistical parametric TTS. The study focuses on comparing the advantages and limitations of these technologies in terms of their naturalness of voice, the level of complexity of the system, and their suitability for different applications. In addition, the paper explores the latest advancements in TTS technology, including neural TTS and hybrid TTS. The findings of this research will provide valuable insights for researchers, developers, and users who want to understand the different TTS technologies and their suitability for specific applications.
Android Malware Detection with Unbiased Confidence Guarantees
Authors: Harris Papadopoulos, Nestoras Georgiou, Charalambos Eliades, Andreas Konstantinidis
Date: 2023-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Android Malware Detection, Conformal Prediction, Malware Detection, valid

The impressive growth of smartphone devices in combination with the rising ubiquity of using mobile platforms for sensitive applications such as Internet banking, have triggered a rapid increase in mobile malware. In recent literature, many studies examine Machine Learning techniques, as the most promising approach for mobile malware detection, without however quantifying the uncertainty involved in their detections. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a machine learning dynamic analysis approach that provides provably valid confidence guarantees in each malware detection. Moreover the particular guarantees hold for both the malicious and benign classes independently and are unaffected by any bias in the data. The proposed approach is based on a novel machine learning framework, called Conformal Prediction, combined with a random forests classifier. We examine its performance on a large-scale dataset collected by installing 1866 malicious and 4816 benign applications on a real android device. We make this collection of dynamic analysis data available to the research community. The obtained experimental results demonstrate the empirical validity, usefulness and unbiased nature of the outputs produced by the proposed approach.
A Study on Transferability of Deep Learning Models for Network Intrusion Detection
Authors: Shreya Ghosh, Abu Shafin Mohammad Mahdee Jameel, Aly El Gamal
Date: 2023-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Intrusion Detection, Network Intrusion Detection

In this paper, we explore transferability in learning between different attack classes in a network intrusion detection setup. We evaluate transferability of attack classes by training a deep learning model with a specific attack class and testing it on a separate attack class. We observe the effects of real and synthetically generated data augmentation techniques on transferability. We investigate the nature of observed transferability relationships, which can be either symmetric or asymmetric. We also examine explainability of the transferability relationships using the recursive feature elimination algorithm. We study data preprocessing techniques to boost model performance. The code for this work can be found at https://github.com/ghosh64/transferability.
Label-Free Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection
Authors: Qihang Zhou, Shibo He, Haoyu Liu, Jiming Chen, Wenchao Meng
Date: 2023-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Density Estimation, Graph structure learning, One-Class Classification, Time Series, Time Series Anomaly Detection, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in multivariate time series (MTS) has been widely studied in one-class classification (OCC) setting. The training samples in OCC are assumed to be normal, which is difficult to guarantee in practical situations. Such a case may degrade the performance of OCC-based anomaly detection methods which fit the training distribution as the normal distribution. In this paper, we propose MTGFlow, an unsupervised anomaly detection approach for MTS anomaly detection via dynamic Graph and entity-aware normalizing Flow. MTGFlow first estimates the density of the entire training samples and then identifies anomalous instances based on the density of the test samples within the fitted distribution. This relies on a widely accepted assumption that anomalous instances exhibit more sparse densities than normal ones, with no reliance on the clean training dataset. However, it is intractable to directly estimate the density due to complex dependencies among entities and their diverse inherent characteristics. To mitigate this, we utilize the graph structure learning model to learn interdependent and evolving relations among entities, which effectively captures complex and accurate distribution patterns of MTS. In addition, our approach incorporates the unique characteristics of individual entities by employing an entity-aware normalizing flow. This enables us to represent each entity as a parameterized normal distribution. Furthermore, considering that some entities present similar characteristics, we propose a cluster strategy that capitalizes on the commonalities of entities with similar characteristics, resulting in more precise and detailed density estimation. We refer to this cluster-aware extension as MTGFlow_cluster. Extensive experiments are conducted on six widely used benchmark datasets, in which MTGFlow and MTGFlow cluster demonstrate their superior detection performance.
SpokesBiz -- an Open Corpus of Conversational Polish
Authors: Piotr Pęzik, Sylwia Karasińska, Anna Cichosz, Łukasz Jałowiecki, Konrad Kaczyński, Małgorzata Krawentek, Karolina Walkusz, Paweł Wilk, Mariusz Kleć, Krzysztof Szklanny, Szymon Marszałkowski
Date: 2023-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This paper announces the early release of SpokesBiz, a freely available corpus of conversational Polish developed within the CLARIN-BIZ project and comprising over 650 hours of recordings. The transcribed recordings have been diarized and manually annotated for punctuation and casing. We outline the general structure and content of the corpus, showcasing selected applications in linguistic research, evaluation and improvement of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems
PowMix: A Versatile Regularizer for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Efthymios Georgiou, Yannis Avrithis, Alexandros Potamianos
Date: 2023-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) leverages heterogeneous data sources to interpret the complex nature of human sentiments. Despite significant progress in multimodal architecture design, the field lacks comprehensive regularization methods. This paper introduces PowMix, a versatile embedding space regularizer that builds upon the strengths of unimodal mixing-based regularization approaches and introduces novel algorithmic components that are specifically tailored to multimodal tasks. PowMix is integrated before the fusion stage of multimodal architectures and facilitates intra-modal mixing, such as mixing text with text, to act as a regularizer. PowMix consists of five components: 1) a varying number of generated mixed examples, 2) mixing factor reweighting, 3) anisotropic mixing, 4) dynamic mixing, and 5) cross-modal label mixing. Extensive experimentation across benchmark MSA datasets and a broad spectrum of diverse architectural designs demonstrate the efficacy of PowMix, as evidenced by consistent performance improvements over baselines and existing mixing methods. An in-depth ablation study highlights the critical contribution of each PowMix component and how they synergistically enhance performance. Furthermore, algorithmic analysis demonstrates how PowMix behaves in different scenarios, particularly comparing early versus late fusion architectures. Notably, PowMix enhances overall performance without sacrificing model robustness or magnifying text dominance. It also retains its strong performance in situations of limited data. Our findings position PowMix as a promising versatile regularization strategy for MSA. Code will be made available.
Automated speech audiometry: Can it work using open-source pre-trained Kaldi-NL automatic speech recognition?
Authors: Gloria Araiza-Illan, Luke Meyer, Khiet P. Truong, Deniz Baskent
Date: 2023-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

A practical speech audiometry tool is the digits-in-noise (DIN) test for hearing screening of populations of varying ages and hearing status. The test is usually conducted by a human supervisor (e.g., clinician), who scores the responses spoken by the listener, or online, where a software scores the responses entered by the listener. The test has 24 digit-triplets presented in an adaptive staircase procedure, resulting in a speech reception threshold (SRT). We propose an alternative automated DIN test setup that can evaluate spoken responses whilst conducted without a human supervisor, using the open-source automatic speech recognition toolkit, Kaldi-NL. Thirty self-reported normal-hearing Dutch adults (19-64 years) completed one DIN+Kaldi-NL test. Their spoken responses were recorded, and used for evaluating the transcript of decoded responses by Kaldi-NL. Study 1 evaluated the Kaldi-NL performance through its word error rate (WER), percentage of summed decoding errors regarding only digits found in the transcript compared to the total number of digits present in the spoken responses. Average WER across participants was 5.0% (range 0 - 48%, SD = 8.8%), with average decoding errors in three triplets per participant. Study 2 analysed the effect that triplets with decoding errors from Kaldi-NL had on the DIN test output (SRT), using bootstrapping simulations. Previous research indicated 0.70 dB as the typical within-subject SRT variability for normal-hearing adults. Study 2 showed that up to four triplets with decoding errors produce SRT variations within this range, suggesting that our proposed setup could be feasible for clinical applications.
Geo-located Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) for Crowdsourced Evaluation of Urban Environments
Authors: Demircan Tas, Rohit Priyadarshi Sanatani
Date: 2023-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification, Term Extraction

Sentiment analysis methods are rapidly being adopted by the field of Urban Design and Planning, for the crowdsourced evaluation of urban environments. However, most models used within this domain are able to identify positive or negative sentiment associated with a textual appraisal as a whole, without inferring information about specific urban aspects contained within it, or the sentiment associated with them. While Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is becoming increasingly popular, most existing ABSA models are trained on non-urban themes such as restaurants, electronics, consumer goods and the like. This body of research develops an ABSA model capable of extracting urban aspects contained within geo-located textual urban appraisals, along with corresponding aspect sentiment classification. We annotate a dataset of 2500 crowdsourced reviews of public parks, and train a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model with Local Context Focus (LCF) on this data. Our model achieves significant improvement in prediction accuracy on urban reviews, for both Aspect Term Extraction (ATE) and Aspect Sentiment Classification (ASC) tasks. For demonstrative analysis, positive and negative urban aspects across Boston are spatially visualized. We hope that this model is useful for designers and planners for fine-grained urban sentiment evaluation.
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Methods for Pretrained Language Models: A Critical Review and Assessment
Authors: Lingling Xu, Haoran Xie, Si-Zhao Joe Qin, Xiaohui Tao, Fu Lee Wang
Date: 2023-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, parameter-efficient fine-tuning

With the continuous growth in the number of parameters of transformer-based pretrained language models (PLMs), particularly the emergence of large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters, many natural language processing (NLP) tasks have demonstrated remarkable success. However, the enormous size and computational demands of these models pose significant challenges for adapting them to specific downstream tasks, especially in environments with limited computational resources. Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) offers an effective solution by reducing the number of fine-tuning parameters and memory usage while achieving comparable performance to full fine-tuning. The demands for fine-tuning PLMs, especially LLMs, have led to a surge in the development of PEFT methods, as depicted in Fig. 1. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and systematic review of PEFT methods for PLMs. We summarize these PEFT methods, discuss their applications, and outline future directions. Furthermore, we conduct experiments using several representative PEFT methods to better understand their effectiveness in parameter efficiency and memory efficiency. By offering insights into the latest advancements and practical applications, this survey serves as an invaluable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by PEFT in the context of PLMs.
Can ChatGPT be Your Personal Medical Assistant?
Authors: Md. Rafiul Biswas, Ashhadul Islam, Zubair Shah, Wajdi Zaghouani, Samir Brahim Belhaouari
Date: 2023-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

The advanced large language model (LLM) ChatGPT has shown its potential in different domains and remains unbeaten due to its characteristics compared to other LLMs. This study aims to evaluate the potential of using a fine-tuned ChatGPT model as a personal medical assistant in the Arabic language. To do so, this study uses publicly available online questions and answering datasets in Arabic language. There are almost 430K questions and answers for 20 disease-specific categories. GPT-3.5-turbo model was fine-tuned with a portion of this dataset. The performance of this fine-tuned model was evaluated through automated and human evaluation. The automated evaluations include perplexity, coherence, similarity, and token count. Native Arabic speakers with medical knowledge evaluated the generated text by calculating relevance, accuracy, precision, logic, and originality. The overall result shows that ChatGPT has a bright future in medical assistance.
Coreference Graph Guidance for Mind-Map Generation
Authors: Zhuowei Zhang, Mengting Hu, Yinhao Bai, Zhen Zhang
Date: 2023-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Mind-map generation aims to process a document into a hierarchical structure to show its central idea and branches. Such a manner is more conducive to understanding the logic and semantics of the document than plain text. Recently, a state-of-the-art method encodes the sentences of a document sequentially and converts them to a relation graph via sequence-to-graph. Though this method is efficient to generate mind-maps in parallel, its mechanism focuses more on sequential features while hardly capturing structural information. Moreover, it's difficult to model long-range semantic relations. In this work, we propose a coreference-guided mind-map generation network (CMGN) to incorporate external structure knowledge. Specifically, we construct a coreference graph based on the coreference semantic relationship to introduce the graph structure information. Then we employ a coreference graph encoder to mine the potential governing relations between sentences. In order to exclude noise and better utilize the information of the coreference graph, we adopt a graph enhancement module in a contrastive learning manner. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms all the existing methods. The case study further proves that our model can more accurately and concisely reveal the structure and semantics of a document. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Cyno2232/CMGN.
Climate Change from Large Language Models
Authors: Hongyin Zhu, Prayag Tiwari
Date: 2023-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Engineering

Climate change poses grave challenges, demanding widespread understanding and low-carbon lifestyle awareness. Large language models (LLMs) offer a powerful tool to address this crisis, yet comprehensive evaluations of their climate-crisis knowledge are lacking. This paper proposes an automated evaluation framework to assess climate-crisis knowledge within LLMs. We adopt a hybrid approach for data acquisition, combining data synthesis and manual collection, to compile a diverse set of questions encompassing various aspects of climate change. Utilizing prompt engineering based on the compiled questions, we evaluate the model's knowledge by analyzing its generated answers. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive set of metrics to assess climate-crisis knowledge, encompassing indicators from 10 distinct perspectives. These metrics provide a multifaceted evaluation, enabling a nuanced understanding of the LLMs' climate crisis comprehension. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method. In our evaluation utilizing diverse high-performing LLMs, we discovered that while LLMs possess considerable climate-related knowledge, there are shortcomings in terms of timeliness, indicating a need for continuous updating and refinement of their climate-related content.
Emotion Rendering for Conversational Speech Synthesis with Heterogeneous Graph-Based Context Modeling
Authors: Rui Liu, Yifan Hu, Yi Ren, Xiang Yin, Haizhou Li
Date: 2023-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Speech Synthesis

Conversational Speech Synthesis (CSS) aims to accurately express an utterance with the appropriate prosody and emotional inflection within a conversational setting. While recognising the significance of CSS task, the prior studies have not thoroughly investigated the emotional expressiveness problems due to the scarcity of emotional conversational datasets and the difficulty of stateful emotion modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel emotional CSS model, termed ECSS, that includes two main components: 1) to enhance emotion understanding, we introduce a heterogeneous graph-based emotional context modeling mechanism, which takes the multi-source dialogue history as input to model the dialogue context and learn the emotion cues from the context; 2) to achieve emotion rendering, we employ a contrastive learning-based emotion renderer module to infer the accurate emotion style for the target utterance. To address the issue of data scarcity, we meticulously create emotional labels in terms of category and intensity, and annotate additional emotional information on the existing conversational dataset (DailyTalk). Both objective and subjective evaluations suggest that our model outperforms the baseline models in understanding and rendering emotions. These evaluations also underscore the importance of comprehensive emotional annotations. Code and audio samples can be found at: https://github.com/walker-hyf/ECSS.
Multi-Granularity Information Interaction Framework for Incomplete Utterance Rewriting
Authors: Haowei Du, Dinghao Zhang, Chen Li, Yang Li, Dongyan Zhao
Date: 2023-12-19 00:00:00

Recent approaches in Incomplete Utterance Rewriting (IUR) fail to capture the source of important words, which is crucial to edit the incomplete utterance, and introduce words from irrelevant utterances. We propose a novel and effective multi-task information interaction framework including context selection, edit matrix construction, and relevance merging to capture the multi-granularity of semantic information. Benefiting from fetching the relevant utterance and figuring out the important words, our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets Restoration-200K and CANAND in this field. Code will be provided on \url{https://github.com/yanmenxue/QR}.
External Knowledge Augmented Polyphone Disambiguation Using Large Language Model
Authors: Chen Li
Date: 2023-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Polyphone disambiguation, Prompt Learning, Retrieval, Sentence, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, valid

One of the key issues in Mandarin Chinese text-to-speech (TTS) systems is polyphone disambiguation when doing grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to solve the problem as a generation task. Following the trending research of large language models (LLM) and prompt learning, the proposed method consists of three modules. Retrieval module incorporates external knowledge which is a multi-level semantic dictionary of Chinese polyphonic characters to format the sentence into a prompt. Generation module adopts the decoder-only Transformer architecture to induce the target text. Postprocess module corrects the generated text into a valid result if needed. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the existing methods on a public dataset called CPP. We also empirically study the impacts of different templates of the prompt, different sizes of training data, and whether to incorporate external knowledge.
Difficulty-Focused Contrastive Learning for Knowledge Tracing with a Large Language Model-Based Difficulty Prediction
Authors: Unggi Lee, SungJun Yoon, Joon Seo Yun, KyoungSoo Park, YoungHoon Jung, Damji Stratton, Hyeoncheol Kim
Date: 2023-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Knowledge Tracing, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Model Optimization

This paper presents novel techniques for enhancing the performance of knowledge tracing (KT) models by focusing on the crucial factor of question and concept difficulty level. Despite the acknowledged significance of difficulty, previous KT research has yet to exploit its potential for model optimization and has struggled to predict difficulty from unseen data. To address these problems, we propose a difficulty-centered contrastive learning method for KT models and a Large Language Model (LLM)-based framework for difficulty prediction. These innovative methods seek to improve the performance of KT models and provide accurate difficulty estimates for unseen data. Our ablation study demonstrates the efficacy of these techniques by demonstrating enhanced KT model performance. Nonetheless, the complex relationship between language and difficulty merits further investigation.
A Revisit of Fake News Dataset with Augmented Fact-checking by ChatGPT
Authors: Zizhong Li, Haopeng Zhang, Jiawei Zhang
Date: 2023-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Fake News Detection

The proliferation of fake news has emerged as a critical issue in recent years, requiring significant efforts to detect it. However, the existing fake news detection datasets are sourced from human journalists, which are likely to have inherent bias limitations due to the highly subjective nature of this task. In this paper, we revisit the existing fake news dataset verified by human journalists with augmented fact-checking by large language models (ChatGPT), and we name the augmented fake news dataset ChatGPT-FC. We quantitatively analyze the distinctions and resemblances between human journalists and LLM in assessing news subject credibility, news creator credibility, time-sensitive, and political framing. Our findings highlight LLM's potential to serve as a preliminary screening method, offering a promising avenue to mitigate the inherent biases of human journalists and enhance fake news detection.