pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Early Discovery of Disappearing Entities in Microblogs
Authors: Satoshi Akasaki, Naoki Yoshinaga, Masashi Toyoda
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Word Embeddings

We make decisions by reacting to changes in the real world, in particular, the emergence and disappearance of impermanent entities such as events, restaurants, and services. Because we want to avoid missing out on opportunities or making fruitless actions after they have disappeared, it is important to know when entities disappear as early as possible. We thus tackle the task of detecting disappearing entities from microblogs, whose posts mention various entities, in a timely manner. The major challenge is detecting uncertain contexts of disappearing entities from noisy microblog posts. To collect these disappearing contexts, we design time-sensitive distant supervision, which utilizes entities from the knowledge base and time-series posts, for this task to build large-scale Twitter datasets\footnote{We will release the datasets (tweet IDs) used in the experiments to promote reproducibility.} for English and Japanese. To ensure robust detection in noisy environments, we refine pretrained word embeddings of the detection model on microblog streams of the target day. Experimental results on the Twitter datasets confirmed the effectiveness of the collected labeled data and refined word embeddings; more than 70\% of the detected disappearing entities in Wikipedia are discovered earlier than the update on Wikipedia, and the average lead-time is over one month.
Frustratingly Easy Sentiment Analysis of Text Streams: Generating High-Quality Emotion Arcs Using Emotion Lexicons
Authors: Daniela Teodorescu, Saif M. Mohammad
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC, Sentiment Analysis

Automatically generated emotion arcs -- that capture how an individual or a population feels over time -- are widely used in industry and research. However, there is little work on evaluating the generated arcs. This is in part due to the difficulty of establishing the true (gold) emotion arc. Our work, for the first time, systematically and quantitatively evaluates automatically generated emotion arcs. We also compare two common ways of generating emotion arcs: Machine-Learning (ML) models and Lexicon-Only (LexO) methods. Using a number of diverse datasets, we systematically study the relationship between the quality of an emotion lexicon and the quality of the emotion arc that can be generated with it. We also study the relationship between the quality of an instance-level emotion detection system (say from an ML model) and the quality of emotion arcs that can be generated with it. We show that despite being markedly poor at instance level, LexO methods are highly accurate at generating emotion arcs by aggregating information from hundreds of instances. This has wide-spread implications for commercial development, as well as research in psychology, public health, digital humanities, etc. that values simple interpretable methods and disprefers the need for domain-specific training data, programming expertise, and high-carbon-footprint models.
Mind the Labels: Describing Relations in Knowledge Graphs With Pretrained Models
Authors: Zdeněk Kasner, Ioannis Konstas, Ondřej Dušek
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Relation

Pretrained language models (PLMs) for data-to-text (D2T) generation can use human-readable data labels such as column headings, keys, or relation names to generalize to out-of-domain examples. However, the models are well-known in producing semantically inaccurate outputs if these labels are ambiguous or incomplete, which is often the case in D2T datasets. In this paper, we expose this issue on the task of descibing a relation between two entities. For our experiments, we collect a novel dataset for verbalizing a diverse set of 1,522 unique relations from three large-scale knowledge graphs (Wikidata, DBPedia, YAGO). We find that although PLMs for D2T generation expectedly fail on unclear cases, models trained with a large variety of relation labels are surprisingly robust in verbalizing novel, unseen relations. We argue that using data with a diverse set of clear and meaningful labels is key to training D2T generation systems capable of generalizing to novel domains.
M2D2: A Massively Multi-domain Language Modeling Dataset
Authors: Machel Reid, Victor Zhong, Suchin Gururangan, Luke Zettlemoyer
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Domain Generalization, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

We present M2D2, a fine-grained, massively multi-domain corpus for studying domain adaptation in language models (LMs). M2D2 consists of 8.5B tokens and spans 145 domains extracted from Wikipedia and Semantic Scholar. Using ontologies derived from Wikipedia and ArXiv categories, we organize the domains in each data source into 22 groups. This two-level hierarchy enables the study of relationships between domains and their effects on in- and out-of-domain performance after adaptation. We also present a number of insights into the nature of effective domain adaptation in LMs, as examples of the new types of studies M2D2 enables. To improve in-domain performance, we show the benefits of adapting the LM along a domain hierarchy; adapting to smaller amounts of fine-grained domain-specific data can lead to larger in-domain performance gains than larger amounts of weakly relevant data. We further demonstrate a trade-off between in-domain specialization and out-of-domain generalization within and across ontologies, as well as a strong correlation between out-of-domain performance and lexical overlap between domains.
Is It Worth the (Environmental) Cost? Limited Evidence for Temporal Adaptation via Continuous Training
Authors: Giuseppe Attanasio, Debora Nozza, Federico Bianchi, Dirk Hovy
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00

Language is constantly changing and evolving, leaving language models to become quickly outdated. Consequently, we should continuously update our models with new data to expose them to new events and facts. However, that requires additional computing, which means new carbon emissions. Do any measurable benefits justify this cost? This paper looks for empirical evidence to support continuous training. We reproduce existing benchmarks and extend them to include additional time periods, models, and tasks. Our results show that the downstream task performance of temporally adapted English models for social media data do not improve over time. Pretrained models without temporal adaptation are actually significantly more effective and efficient. However, we also note a lack of suitable temporal benchmarks. Our findings invite a critical reflection on when and how to temporally adapt language models, accounting for sustainability.
Can Demographic Factors Improve Text Classification? Revisiting Demographic Adaptation in the Age of Transformers
Authors: Chia-Chien Hung, Anne Lauscher, Dirk Hovy, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, Goran Glavaš
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Multi-Task Learning, text-classification, Text Classification

Demographic factors (e.g., gender or age) shape our language. Previous work showed that incorporating demographic factors can consistently improve performance for various NLP tasks with traditional NLP models. In this work, we investigate whether these previous findings still hold with state-of-the-art pretrained Transformer-based language models (PLMs). We use three common specialization methods proven effective for incorporating external knowledge into pretrained Transformers (e.g., domain-specific or geographic knowledge). We adapt the language representations for the demographic dimensions of gender and age, using continuous language modeling and dynamic multi-task learning for adaptation, where we couple language modeling objectives with the prediction of demographic classes. Our results, when employing a multilingual PLM, show substantial gains in task performance across four languages (English, German, French, and Danish), which is consistent with the results of previous work. However, controlling for confounding factors - primarily domain and language proficiency of Transformer-based PLMs - shows that downstream performance gains from our demographic adaptation do not actually stem from demographic knowledge. Our results indicate that demographic specialization of PLMs, while holding promise for positive societal impact, still represents an unsolved problem for (modern) NLP.
JOIST: A Joint Speech and Text Streaming Model For ASR
Authors: Tara N. Sainath, Rohit Prabhavalkar, Ankur Bapna, Yu Zhang, Zhouyuan Huo, Zhehuai Chen, Bo Li, Weiran Wang, Trevor Strohman
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00

We present JOIST, an algorithm to train a streaming, cascaded, encoder end-to-end (E2E) model with both speech-text paired inputs, and text-only unpaired inputs. Unlike previous works, we explore joint training with both modalities, rather than pre-training and fine-tuning. In addition, we explore JOIST using a streaming E2E model with an order of magnitude more data, which are also novelties compared to previous works. Through a series of ablation studies, we explore different types of text modeling, including how to model the length of the text sequence and the appropriate text sub-word unit representation. We find that best text representation for JOIST improves WER across a variety of search and rare-word test sets by 4-14% relative, compared to a model not trained with text. In addition, we quantitatively show that JOIST maintains streaming capabilities, which is important for good user-level experience.
Multi-Task Learning for Joint Semantic Role and Proto-Role Labeling
Authors: Aashish Arora, Harshitha Malireddi, Daniel Bauer, Asad Sayeed, Yuval Marton
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Sentence, Transfer Learning

We put forward an end-to-end multi-step machine learning model which jointly labels semantic roles and the proto-roles of Dowty (1991), given a sentence and the predicates therein. Our best architecture first learns argument spans followed by learning the argument's syntactic heads. This information is shared with the next steps for predicting the semantic roles and proto-roles. We also experiment with transfer learning from argument and head prediction to role and proto-role labeling. We compare using static and contextual embeddings for words, arguments, and sentences. Unlike previous work, our model does not require pre-training or fine-tuning on additional tasks, beyond using off-the-shelf (static or contextual) embeddings and supervision. It also does not require argument spans, their semantic roles, and/or their gold syntactic heads as additional input, because it learns to predict all these during training. Our multi-task learning model raises the state-of-the-art predictions for most proto-roles.
SODAPOP: Open-Ended Discovery of Social Biases in Social Commonsense Reasoning Models
Authors: Haozhe An, Zongxia Li, Jieyu Zhao, Rachel Rudinger
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering

A common limitation of diagnostic tests for detecting social biases in NLP models is that they may only detect stereotypic associations that are pre-specified by the designer of the test. Since enumerating all possible problematic associations is infeasible, it is likely these tests fail to detect biases that are present in a model but not pre-specified by the designer. To address this limitation, we propose SODAPOP (SOcial bias Discovery from Answers about PeOPle) in social commonsense question-answering. Our pipeline generates modified instances from the Social IQa dataset (Sap et al., 2019) by (1) substituting names associated with different demographic groups, and (2) generating many distractor answers from a masked language model. By using a social commonsense model to score the generated distractors, we are able to uncover the model's stereotypic associations between demographic groups and an open set of words. We also test SODAPOP on debiased models and show the limitations of multiple state-of-the-art debiasing algorithms.
Uncertainty Quantification and Sensitivity analysis for Digital Twin Enabling Technology: Application for BISON Fuel Performance Code
Authors: Kazuma Kobayashi, Dinesh Kumar, Matthew Bonney, Souvik Chakraborty, Kyle Paaren, Syed Alam
Date: 2022-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Sensitivity, Uncertainty Quantification

To understand the potential of intelligent confirmatory tools, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Committee (NRC) initiated a future-focused research project to assess the regulatory viability of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven Digital Twins (DTs) for nuclear power applications. Advanced accident tolerant fuel (ATF) is one of the priority focus areas of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). A DT framework can offer game-changing yet practical and informed solutions to the complex problem of qualifying advanced ATFs. Considering the regulatory standpoint of the modeling and simulation (M&S) aspect of DT, uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis are paramount to the DT framework's success in terms of multi-criteria and risk-informed decision-making. This chapter introduces the ML-based uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis methods while exhibiting actual applications to the finite element-based nuclear fuel performance code BISON.
Estimation of High-Dimensional Markov-Switching VAR Models with an Approximate EM Algorithm
Authors: Xiudi Li, Abolfazl Safikhani, Ali Shojaie
Date: 2022-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, parameter estimation, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Regime shifts in high-dimensional time series arise naturally in many applications, from neuroimaging to finance. This problem has received considerable attention in low-dimensional settings, with both Bayesian and frequentist methods used extensively for parameter estimation. The EM algorithm is a particularly popular strategy for parameter estimation in low-dimensional settings, although the statistical properties of the resulting estimates have not been well understood. Furthermore, its extension to high-dimensional time series has proved challenging. To overcome these challenges, in this paper we propose an approximate EM algorithm for Markov-switching VAR models that leads to efficient computation and also facilitates the investigation of asymptotic properties of the resulting parameter estimates. We establish the consistency of the proposed EM algorithm in high dimensions and investigate its performance via simulation studies. We also demonstrate the algorithm by analyzing a brain electroencephalography (EEG) dataset recorded on a patient experiencing epileptic seizure.
Anomaly detection in dynamic networks
Authors: Sevvandi Kandanaarachchi, Rob J Hyndman
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Detecting anomalies from a series of temporal networks has many applications, including road accidents in transport networks and suspicious events in social networks. While there are many methods for network anomaly detection, statistical methods are under utilised in this space even though they have a long history and proven capability in handling temporal dependencies. In this paper, we introduce \textit{oddnet}, a feature-based network anomaly detection method that uses time series methods to model temporal dependencies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of oddnet on synthetic and real-world datasets. The R package oddnet implements this algorithm.
Marginalized particle Gibbs for multiple state-space models coupled through shared parameters
Authors: Anna Wigren, Fredrik Lindsten
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, State Space Models, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

We consider Bayesian inference from multiple time series described by a common state-space model (SSM) structure, but where different subsets of parameters are shared between different submodels. An important example is disease-dynamics, where parameters can be either disease or location specific. Parameter inference in these models can be improved by systematically aggregating information from the different time series, most notably for short series. Particle Gibbs (PG) samplers are an efficient class of algorithms for inference in SSMs, in particular when conjugacy can be exploited to marginalize out model parameters from the state update. We present two different PG samplers that marginalize static model parameters on-the-fly: one that updates one model at a time conditioned on the datasets for the other models, and one that concurrently updates all models by stacking them into a high-dimensional SSM. The distinctive features of each sampler make them suitable for different modelling contexts. We provide insights on when each sampler should be used and show that they can be combined to form an efficient PG sampler for a model with strong dependencies between states and parameters. The performance is illustrated on two linear-Gaussian examples and on a real-world example on the spread of mosquito-borne diseases.
Optimal AdaBoost Converges
Authors: Conor Snedeker
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

The following work is a preprint collection of formal proofs regarding the convergence properties of the AdaBoost machine learning algorithm's classifier and margins. Various math and computer science papers have been written regarding conjectures and special cases of these convergence properties. Furthermore, the margins of AdaBoost feature prominently in the research surrounding the algorithm. At the zenith of this paper we present how AdaBoost's classifier and margins converge on a value that agrees with decades of research. After this, we show how various quantities associated with the combined classifier converge.
MV-HAN: A Hybrid Attentive Networks based Multi-View Learning Model for Large-scale Contents Recommendation
Authors: Ge Fan, Chaoyun Zhang, Kai Wang, Junyang Chen
Date: 2022-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: MULTI-VIEW LEARNING, Recommendation Systems, Retrieval

Industrial recommender systems usually employ multi-source data to improve the recommendation quality, while effectively sharing information between different data sources remain a challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel Multi-View Approach with Hybrid Attentive Networks (MV-HAN) for contents retrieval at the matching stage of recommender systems. The proposed model enables high-order feature interaction from various input features while effectively transferring knowledge between different types. By employing a well-placed parameters sharing strategy, the MV-HAN substantially improves the retrieval performance in sparse types. The designed MV-HAN inherits the efficiency advantages in the online service from the two-tower model, by mapping users and contents of different types into the same features space. This enables fast retrieval of similar contents with an approximate nearest neighbor algorithm. We conduct offline experiments on several industrial datasets, demonstrating that the proposed MV-HAN significantly outperforms baselines on the content retrieval tasks. Importantly, the MV-HAN is deployed in a real-world matching system. Online A/B test results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the quality of recommendations.
MEGCF: Multimodal Entity Graph Collaborative Filtering for Personalized Recommendation
Authors: Kang Liu, Feng Xue, Dan Guo, Le Wu, Shujie Li, Richang Hong
Date: 2022-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, image-classification, Image Classification

In most E-commerce platforms, whether the displayed items trigger the user's interest largely depends on their most eye-catching multimodal content. Consequently, increasing efforts focus on modeling multimodal user preference, and the pressing paradigm is to incorporate complete multimodal deep features of the items into the recommendation module. However, the existing studies ignore the mismatch problem between multimodal feature extraction (MFE) and user interest modeling (UIM). That is, MFE and UIM have different emphases. Specifically, MFE is migrated from and adapted to upstream tasks such as image classification. In addition, it is mainly a content-oriented and non-personalized process, while UIM, with its greater focus on understanding user interaction, is essentially a user-oriented and personalized process. Therefore, the direct incorporation of MFE into UIM for purely user-oriented tasks, tends to introduce a large number of preference-independent multimodal noise and contaminate the embedding representations in UIM. This paper aims at solving the mismatch problem between MFE and UIM, so as to generate high-quality embedding representations and better model multimodal user preferences. Towards this end, we develop a novel model, MEGCF. The UIM of the proposed model captures the semantic correlation between interactions and the features obtained from MFE, thus making a better match between MFE and UIM. More precisely, semantic-rich entities are first extracted from the multimodal data, since they are more relevant to user preferences than other multimodal information. These entities are then integrated into the user-item interaction graph. Afterwards, a symmetric linear Graph Convolution Network (GCN) module is constructed to perform message propagation over the graph, in order to capture both high-order semantic correlation and collaborative filtering signals.
A Conversationalist Approach to Information Quality in Information Interaction and Retrieval
Authors: Frans van der Sluis
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Rather than using (proxies of) end user or expert judgment to decide on the ranking of information, this paper asks whether conversations about information quality might offer a feasible and valuable addition for ranking information. We introduce a theoretical framework for information quality, outlining how information interaction should be perceived as a conversation and quality be evaluated as a conversational contribution. Next, an overview is given of different systems of social alignment and their value for assessing quality and ranking information. We propose that a collaborative approach to quality assessment is preferable and raise key questions about the feasibility and value of such an approach for ranking information. We conclude that information quality is an inherently interactive concept, which involves an interaction between users of different backgrounds and in different situations as well as of quality signals on users' search behavior and experience.