pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
cs-net: structural approach to time-series forecasting for high-dimensional feature space data with limited observations
Authors: Weiyu Zong, Mingqian Feng, Griffin Heyrich, Peter Chin
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Multivariate Time Series Forecasting, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

In recent years, deep-learning-based approaches have been introduced to solving time-series forecasting-related problems. These novel methods have demonstrated impressive performance in univariate and low-dimensional multivariate time-series forecasting tasks. However, when these novel methods are used to handle high-dimensional multivariate forecasting problems, their performance is highly restricted by a practical training time and a reasonable GPU memory configuration. In this paper, inspired by a change of basis in the Hilbert space, we propose a flexible data feature extraction technique that excels in high-dimensional multivariate forecasting tasks. Our approach was originally developed for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Algorithms for Threat Detection (ATD) 2022 Challenge. Implemented using the attention mechanism and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) architecture, our method demonstrates great performance and compatibility. Our models trained on the GDELT Dataset finished 1st and 2nd places in the ATD sprint series and hold promise for other datasets for time series forecasting.
Distributed Bayesian Learning of Dynamic States
Authors: Mert Kayaalp, Virginia Bordignon, Stefan Vlaski, Vincenzo Matta, Ali H. Sayed
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: State Estimation

This work studies networked agents cooperating to track a dynamical state of nature under partial information. The proposed algorithm is a distributed Bayesian filtering algorithm for finite-state hidden Markov models (HMMs). It can be used for sequential state estimation tasks, as well as for modeling opinion formation over social networks under dynamic environments. We show that the disagreement with the optimal centralized solution is asymptotically bounded for the class of geometrically ergodic state transition models, which includes rapidly changing models. We also derive recursions for calculating the probability of error and establish convergence under Gaussian observation models. Simulations are provided to illustrate the theory and to compare against alternative approaches.
Which products activate a product? An explainable machine learning approach
Authors: Massimiliano Fessina, Giambattista Albora, Andrea Tacchella, Andrea Zaccaria
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance

Tree-based machine learning algorithms provide the most precise assessment of the feasibility for a country to export a target product given its export basket. However, the high number of parameters involved prevents a straightforward interpretation of the results and, in turn, the explainability of policy indications. In this paper, we propose a procedure to statistically validate the importance of the products used in the feasibility assessment. In this way, we are able to identify which products, called explainers, significantly increase the probability to export a target product in the near future. The explainers naturally identify a low dimensional representation, the Feature Importance Product Space, that enhances the interpretability of the recommendations and provides out-of-sample forecasts of the export baskets of countries. Interestingly, we detect a positive correlation between the complexity of a product and the complexity of its explainers.
LawngNLI: A Long-Premise Benchmark for In-Domain Generalization from Short to Long Contexts and for Implication-Based Retrieval
Authors: William Bruno, Dan Roth
Date: 2022-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Natural Language Inference, Re-Ranking, Retrieval, Sentence

Natural language inference has trended toward studying contexts beyond the sentence level. An important application area is law: past cases often do not foretell how they apply to new situations and implications must be inferred. This paper introduces LawngNLI, constructed from U.S. legal opinions with automatic labels with high human-validated accuracy. Premises are long and multigranular. Experiments show two use cases. First, LawngNLI can benchmark for in-domain generalization from short to long contexts. It has remained unclear if large-scale long-premise NLI datasets actually need to be constructed: near-top performance on long premises could be achievable by fine-tuning using short premises. Without multigranularity, benchmarks cannot distinguish lack of fine-tuning on long premises versus domain shift between short and long datasets. In contrast, our long and short premises share the same examples and domain. Models fine-tuned using several past NLI datasets and/or our short premises fall short of top performance on our long premises. So for at least certain domains (such as ours), large-scale long-premise datasets are needed. Second, LawngNLI can benchmark for implication-based retrieval. Queries are entailed or contradicted by target documents, allowing users to move between arguments and evidence. Leading retrieval models perform reasonably zero shot on a LawngNLI-derived retrieval task. We compare different systems for re-ranking, including lexical overlap and cross-encoders fine-tuned using a modified LawngNLI or past NLI datasets. LawngNLI can train and test systems for implication-based case retrieval and argumentation.
ZeroKBC: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Zero-Shot Knowledge Base Completion
Authors: Pei Chen, Wenlin Yao, Hongming Zhang, Xiaoman Pan, Dian Yu, Dong Yu, Jianshu Chen
Date: 2022-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Base Completion, Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge base completion (KBC) aims to predict the missing links in knowledge graphs. Previous KBC tasks and approaches mainly focus on the setting where all test entities and relations have appeared in the training set. However, there has been limited research on the zero-shot KBC settings, where we need to deal with unseen entities and relations that emerge in a constantly growing knowledge base. In this work, we systematically examine different possible scenarios of zero-shot KBC and develop a comprehensive benchmark, ZeroKBC, that covers these scenarios with diverse types of knowledge sources. Our systematic analysis reveals several missing yet important zero-shot KBC settings. Experimental results show that canonical and state-of-the-art KBC systems cannot achieve satisfactory performance on this challenging benchmark. By analyzing the strength and weaknesses of these systems on solving ZeroKBC, we further present several important observations and promising future directions.
Document-Level Abstractive Summarization
Authors: Gonçalo Raposo, Afonso Raposo, Ana Sofia Carmo
Date: 2022-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Retrieval, Text Summarization

The task of automatic text summarization produces a concise and fluent text summary while preserving key information and overall meaning. Recent approaches to document-level summarization have seen significant improvements in recent years by using models based on the Transformer architecture. However, the quadratic memory and time complexities with respect to the sequence length make them very expensive to use, especially with long sequences, as required by document-level summarization. Our work addresses the problem of document-level summarization by studying how efficient Transformer techniques can be used to improve the automatic summarization of very long texts. In particular, we will use the arXiv dataset, consisting of several scientific papers and the corresponding abstracts, as baselines for this work. Then, we propose a novel retrieval-enhanced approach based on the architecture which reduces the cost of generating a summary of the entire document by processing smaller chunks. The results were below the baselines but suggest a more efficient memory a consumption and truthfulness.
Knowledge-Bridged Causal Interaction Network for Causal Emotion Entailment
Authors: Weixiang Zhao, Yanyan Zhao, Zhuojun Li, Bing Qin
Date: 2022-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Emotion Entailment, Graph Attention

Causal Emotion Entailment aims to identify causal utterances that are responsible for the target utterance with a non-neutral emotion in conversations. Previous works are limited in thorough understanding of the conversational context and accurate reasoning of the emotion cause. To this end, we propose Knowledge-Bridged Causal Interaction Network (KBCIN) with commonsense knowledge (CSK) leveraged as three bridges. Specifically, we construct a conversational graph for each conversation and leverage the event-centered CSK as the semantics-level bridge (S-bridge) to capture the deep inter-utterance dependencies in the conversational context via the CSK-Enhanced Graph Attention module. Moreover, social-interaction CSK serves as emotion-level bridge (E-bridge) and action-level bridge (A-bridge) to connect candidate utterances with the target one, which provides explicit causal clues for the Emotional Interaction module and Actional Interaction module to reason the target emotion. Experimental results show that our model achieves better performance over most baseline models. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/circle-hit/KBCIN.
CySecBERT: A Domain-Adapted Language Model for the Cybersecurity Domain
Authors: Markus Bayer, Philipp Kuehn, Ramin Shanehsaz, Christian Reuter
Date: 2022-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

The field of cybersecurity is evolving fast. Experts need to be informed about past, current and - in the best case - upcoming threats, because attacks are becoming more advanced, targets bigger and systems more complex. As this cannot be addressed manually, cybersecurity experts need to rely on machine learning techniques. In the texutual domain, pre-trained language models like BERT have shown to be helpful, by providing a good baseline for further fine-tuning. However, due to the domain-knowledge and many technical terms in cybersecurity general language models might miss the gist of textual information, hence doing more harm than good. For this reason, we create a high-quality dataset and present a language model specifically tailored to the cybersecurity domain, which can serve as a basic building block for cybersecurity systems that deal with natural language. The model is compared with other models based on 15 different domain-dependent extrinsic and intrinsic tasks as well as general tasks from the SuperGLUE benchmark. On the one hand, the results of the intrinsic tasks show that our model improves the internal representation space of words compared to the other models. On the other hand, the extrinsic, domain-dependent tasks, consisting of sequence tagging and classification, show that the model is best in specific application scenarios, in contrast to the others. Furthermore, we show that our approach against catastrophic forgetting works, as the model is able to retrieve the previously trained domain-independent knowledge. The used dataset and trained model are made publicly available
Modern French Poetry Generation with RoBERTa and GPT-2
Authors: Mika Hämäläinen, Khalid Alnajjar, Thierry Poibeau
Date: 2022-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Natural Language Understanding, Text Generation

We present a novel neural model for modern poetry generation in French. The model consists of two pretrained neural models that are fine-tuned for the poem generation task. The encoder of the model is a RoBERTa based one while the decoder is based on GPT-2. This way the model can benefit from the superior natural language understanding performance of RoBERTa and the good natural language generation performance of GPT-2. Our evaluation shows that the model can create French poetry successfully. On a 5 point scale, the lowest score of 3.57 was given by human judges to typicality and emotionality of the output poetry while the best score of 3.79 was given to understandability.
Emotion Conditioned Creative Dialog Generation
Authors: Khalid Alnajjar, Mika Hämäläinen
Date: 2022-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

We present a DialGPT based model for generating creative dialog responses that are conditioned based on one of the following emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, pain, sadness and surprise. Our model is capable of producing a contextually apt response given an input sentence and a desired emotion label. Our model is capable of expressing the desired emotion with an accuracy of 0.6. The best performing emotions are neutral, fear and disgust. When measuring the strength of the expressed emotion, we find that anger, fear and disgust are expressed in the most strong fashion by the model.
Template-based Recruitment Email Generation For Job Recommendation
Authors: Qiuchi Li, Christina Lioma
Date: 2022-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Text generation has long been a popular research topic in NLP. However, the task of generating recruitment emails from recruiters to candidates in the job recommendation scenario has received little attention by the research community. This work aims at defining the topic of automatic email generation for job recommendation, identifying the challenges, and providing a baseline template-based solution for Danish jobs. Evaluation by human experts shows that our method is effective. We wrap up by discussing the future research directions for better solving this task.
DiSTRICT: Dialogue State Tracking with Retriever Driven In-Context Tuning
Authors: Praveen Venkateswaran, Evelyn Duesterwald, Vatche Isahagian
Date: 2022-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue State Tracking

Dialogue State Tracking (DST), a key component of task-oriented conversation systems, represents user intentions by determining the values of pre-defined slots in an ongoing dialogue. Existing approaches use hand-crafted templates and additional slot information to fine-tune and prompt large pre-trained language models and elicit slot values from the dialogue context. Significant manual effort and domain knowledge is required to design effective prompts, limiting the generalizability of these approaches to new domains and tasks. In this work, we propose DiSTRICT, a generalizable in-context tuning approach for DST that retrieves highly relevant training examples for a given dialogue to fine-tune the model without any hand-crafted templates. Experiments with the MultiWOZ benchmark datasets show that DiSTRICT outperforms existing approaches in various zero-shot and few-shot settings using a much smaller model, thereby providing an important advantage for real-world deployments that often have limited resource availability.
Life-long Learning for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Yang Zhao, Junnan Zhu, Lu Xiang, Jiajun Zhang, Yu Zhou, FeiFei Zhai, Chengqing Zong
Date: 2022-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Machine Translation, Translation

A common scenario of Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) is that each translation task arrives in a sequential manner, and the training data of previous tasks is unavailable. In this scenario, the current methods suffer heavily from catastrophic forgetting (CF). To alleviate the CF, we investigate knowledge distillation based life-long learning methods. Specifically, in one-tomany scenario, we propose a multilingual distillation method to make the new model (student) jointly learn multilingual output from old model (teacher) and new task. In many-to one scenario, we find that direct distillation faces the extreme partial distillation problem, and we propose two different methods to address it: pseudo input distillation and reverse teacher distillation. The experimental results on twelve translation tasks show that the proposed methods can better consolidate the previous knowledge and sharply alleviate the CF.
Automated Identification of Eviction Status from Electronic Health Record Notes
Authors: Zonghai Yao, Jack Tsai, Weisong Liu, David A. Levy, Emily Druhl, Joel I Reisman, Hong Yu
Date: 2022-12-06 00:00:00

Objective: Evictions are important social and behavioral determinants of health. Evictions are associated with a cascade of negative events that can lead to unemployment, housing insecurity/homelessness, long-term poverty, and mental health problems. In this study, we developed a natural language processing system to automatically detect eviction status from electronic health record (EHR) notes. Materials and Methods: We first defined eviction status (eviction presence and eviction period) and then annotated eviction status in 5000 EHR notes from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). We developed a novel model, KIRESH, that has shown to substantially outperform other state-of-the-art models such as fine-tuning pre-trained language models like BioBERT and BioClinicalBERT. Moreover, we designed a novel prompt to further improve the model performance by using the intrinsic connection between the two sub-tasks of eviction presence and period prediction. Finally, we used the Temperature Scaling-based Calibration on our KIRESH-Prompt method to avoid over-confidence issues arising from the imbalance dataset. Results: KIRESH-Prompt substantially outperformed strong baseline models including fine-tuning the BioClinicalBERT model to achieve 0.74672 MCC, 0.71153 Macro-F1, and 0.83396 Micro-F1 in predicting eviction period and 0.66827 MCC, 0.62734 Macro-F1, and 0.7863 Micro-F1 in predicting eviction presence. We also conducted additional experiments on a benchmark social determinants of health (SBDH) dataset to demonstrate the generalizability of our methods. Conclusion and Future Work: KIRESH-Prompt has substantially improved eviction status classification. We plan to deploy KIRESH-Prompt to the VHA EHRs as an eviction surveillance system to help address the US Veterans' housing insecurity.
Sources of Noise in Dialogue and How to Deal with Them
Authors: Derek Chen, Zhou Yu
Date: 2022-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Training dialogue systems often entails dealing with noisy training examples and unexpected user inputs. Despite their prevalence, there currently lacks an accurate survey of dialogue noise, nor is there a clear sense of the impact of each noise type on task performance. This paper addresses this gap by first constructing a taxonomy of noise encountered by dialogue systems. In addition, we run a series of experiments to show how different models behave when subjected to varying levels of noise and types of noise. Our results reveal that models are quite robust to label errors commonly tackled by existing denoising algorithms, but that performance suffers from dialogue-specific noise. Driven by these observations, we design a data cleaning algorithm specialized for conversational settings and apply it as a proof-of-concept for targeted dialogue denoising.
LUNA: Language Understanding with Number Augmentations on Transformers via Number Plugins and Pre-training
Authors: Hongwei Han, Jialiang Xu, Mengyu Zhou, Yijia Shao, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
Date: 2022-12-06 00:00:00

Transformers are widely used in NLP tasks. However, current approaches to leveraging transformers to understand language expose one weak spot: Number understanding. In some scenarios, numbers frequently occur, especially in semi-structured data like tables. But current approaches to rich-number tasks with transformer-based language models abandon or lose some of the numeracy information - e.g., breaking numbers into sub-word tokens - which leads to many number-related errors. In this paper, we propose the LUNA framework which improves the numerical reasoning and calculation capabilities of transformer-based language models. With the number plugin of NumTok and NumBed, LUNA represents each number as a whole to model input. With number pre-training, including regression loss and model distillation, LUNA bridges the gap between number and vocabulary embeddings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that explicitly injects numeracy capability into language models using Number Plugins. Besides evaluating toy models on toy tasks, we evaluate LUNA on three large-scale transformer models (RoBERTa, BERT, TabBERT) over three different downstream tasks (TATQA, TabFact, CrediTrans), and observe the performances of language models are constantly improved by LUNA. The augmented models also improve the official baseline of TAT-QA (EM: 50.15 -> 59.58) and achieve SOTA performance on CrediTrans (F1 = 86.17).
POQue: Asking Participant-specific Outcome Questions for a Deeper Understanding of Complex Events
Authors: Sai Vallurupalli, Sayontan Ghosh, Katrin Erk, Niranjan Balasubramanian, Francis Ferraro
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: 8k

Knowledge about outcomes is critical for complex event understanding but is hard to acquire. We show that by pre-identifying a participant in a complex event, crowd workers are able to (1) infer the collective impact of salient events that make up the situation, (2) annotate the volitional engagement of participants in causing the situation, and (3) ground the outcome of the situation in state changes of the participants. By creating a multi-step interface and a careful quality control strategy, we collect a high quality annotated dataset of 8K short newswire narratives and ROCStories with high inter-annotator agreement (0.74-0.96 weighted Fleiss Kappa). Our dataset, POQue (Participant Outcome Questions), enables the exploration and development of models that address multiple aspects of semantic understanding. Experimentally, we show that current language models lag behind human performance in subtle ways through our task formulations that target abstract and specific comprehension of a complex event, its outcome, and a participant's influence over the event culmination.
INCLUSIFY: A benchmark and a model for gender-inclusive German
Authors: David Pomerenke
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Gender-inclusive language is important for achieving gender equality in languages with gender inflections, such as German. While stirring some controversy, it is increasingly adopted by companies and political institutions. A handful of tools have been developed to help people use gender-inclusive language by identifying instances of the generic masculine and providing suggestions for more inclusive reformulations. In this report, we define the underlying tasks in terms of natural language processing, and present a dataset and measures for benchmarking them. We also present a model that implements these tasks, by combining an inclusive language database with an elaborate sequence of processing steps via standard pre-trained models. Our model achieves a recall of 0.89 and a precision of 0.82 in our benchmark for identifying exclusive language; and one of its top five suggestions is chosen in real-world texts in 44% of cases. We sketch how the area could be further advanced by training end-to-end models and using large language models; and we urge the community to include more gender-inclusive texts in their training data in order to not present an obstacle to the adoption of gender-inclusive language. Through these efforts, we hope to contribute to restoring justice in language and, to a small extent, in reality.