pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Machine Learning Approach to Classifying Construction Cost Documents into the International Construction Measurement Standard
Authors: J. Ignacio Deza, Hisham Ihshaish, Lamine Mahdjoubi
Date: 2022-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Multi Class Text Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

We introduce the first automated models for classifying natural language descriptions provided in cost documents called "Bills of Quantities" (BoQs) popular in the infrastructure construction industry, into the International Construction Measurement Standard (ICMS). The models we deployed and systematically evaluated for multi-class text classification are learnt from a dataset of more than 50 thousand descriptions of items retrieved from 24 large infrastructure construction projects across the United Kingdom. We describe our approach to language representation and subsequent modelling to examine the strength of contextual semantics and temporal dependency of language used in construction project documentation. To do that we evaluate two experimental pipelines to inferring ICMS codes from text, on the basis of two different language representation models and a range of state-of-the-art sequence-based classification methods, including recurrent and convolutional neural network architectures. The findings indicate a highly effective and accurate ICMS automation model is within reach, with reported accuracy results above 90% F1 score on average, on 32 ICMS categories. Furthermore, due to the specific nature of language use in the BoQs text; short, largely descriptive and technical, we find that simpler models compare favourably to achieving higher accuracy results. Our analysis suggest that information is more likely embedded in local key features in the descriptive text, which explains why a simpler generic temporal convolutional network (TCN) exhibits comparable memory to recurrent architectures with the same capacity, and subsequently outperforms these at this task.
Incongruity Detection between Bangla News Headline and Body Content through Graph Neural Network
Authors: Md Aminul Haque Palash, Akib Khan, Kawsarul Islam, MD Abdullah Al Nasim, Ryan Mohammad Bin Shahjahan
Date: 2022-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, incongruity detection, Stance Detection

Incongruity between news headlines and the body content is a common method of deception used to attract readers. Profitable headlines pique readers' interest and encourage them to visit a specific website. This is usually done by adding an element of dishonesty, using enticements that do not precisely reflect the content being delivered. As a result, automatic detection of incongruent news between headline and body content using language analysis has gained the research community's attention. However, various solutions are primarily being developed for English to address this problem, leaving low-resource languages out of the picture. Bangla is ranked 7th among the top 100 most widely spoken languages, which motivates us to pay special attention to the Bangla language. Furthermore, Bangla has a more complex syntactic structure and fewer natural language processing resources, so it becomes challenging to perform NLP tasks like incongruity detection and stance detection. To tackle this problem, for the Bangla language, we offer a graph-based hierarchical dual encoder (BGHDE) model that learns the content similarity and contradiction between Bangla news headlines and content paragraphs effectively. The experimental results show that the proposed Bangla graph-based neural network model achieves above 90% accuracy on various Bangla news datasets.
Multilevel Transformer For Multimodal Emotion Recognition
Authors: Junyi He, Meimei Wu, Meng Li, Xiaobo Zhu, Feng Ye
Date: 2022-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Multimodal emotion recognition has attracted much attention recently. Fusing multiple modalities effectively with limited labeled data is a challenging task. Considering the success of pre-trained model and fine-grained nature of emotion expression, it is reasonable to take these two aspects into consideration. Unlike previous methods that mainly focus on one aspect, we introduce a novel multi-granularity framework, which combines fine-grained representation with pre-trained utterance-level representation. Inspired by Transformer TTS, we propose a multilevel transformer model to perform fine-grained multimodal emotion recognition. Specifically, we explore different methods to incorporate phoneme-level embedding with word-level embedding. To perform multi-granularity learning, we simply combine multilevel transformer model with Albert. Extensive experimental results show that both our multilevel transformer model and multi-granularity model outperform previous state-of-the-art approaches on IEMOCAP dataset with text transcripts and speech signal.
Cloning Ideology and Style using Deep Learning
Authors: Dr. Omer Beg, Muhammad Nasir Zafar, Waleed Anjum
Date: 2022-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Language Modelling, Text Generation

Text generation tasks have gotten the attention of researchers in the last few years because of their applications on a large scale.In the past, many researchers focused on task-based text generations.Our research focuses on text generation based on the ideology and style of a specific author, and text generation on a topic that was not written by the same author in the past.Our trained model requires an input prompt containing initial few words of text to produce a few paragraphs of text based on the ideology and style of the author on which the model is trained.Our methodology to accomplish this task is based on Bi-LSTM.The Bi-LSTM model is used to make predictions at the character level, during the training corpus of a specific author is used along with the ground truth corpus.A pre-trained model is used to identify the sentences of ground truth having contradiction with the author's corpus to make our language model inclined.During training, we have achieved a perplexity score of 2.23 at the character level. The experiments show a perplexity score of around 3 over the test dataset.
Revisiting Attention Weights as Explanations from an Information Theoretic Perspective
Authors: Bingyang Wen, K. P. Subbalakshmi, Fan Yang
Date: 2022-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Attention

Attention mechanisms have recently demonstrated impressive performance on a range of NLP tasks, and attention scores are often used as a proxy for model explainability. However, there is a debate on whether attention weights can, in fact, be used to identify the most important inputs to a model. We approach this question from an information theoretic perspective by measuring the mutual information between the model output and the hidden states. From extensive experiments, we draw the following conclusions: (i) Additive and Deep attention mechanisms are likely to be better at preserving the information between the hidden states and the model output (compared to Scaled Dot-product); (ii) ablation studies indicate that Additive attention can actively learn to explain the importance of its input hidden representations; (iii) when attention values are nearly the same, the rank order of attention values is not consistent with the rank order of the mutual information(iv) Using Gumbel-Softmax with a temperature lower than one, tends to produce a more skewed attention score distribution compared to softmax and hence is a better choice for explainable design; (v) some building blocks are better at preserving the correlation between the ordered list of mutual information and attention weights order (for e.g., the combination of BiLSTM encoder and Additive attention). Our findings indicate that attention mechanisms do have the potential to function as a shortcut to model explanations when they are carefully combined with other model elements.
Fast DistilBERT on CPUs
Authors: Haihao Shen, Ofir Zafrir, Bo Dong, Hengyu Meng, Xinyu Ye, Zhe Wang, Yi Ding, Hanwen Chang, Guy Boudoukh, Moshe Wasserblat
Date: 2022-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression, Quantization, Question Answering

Transformer-based language models have become the standard approach to solving natural language processing tasks. However, industry adoption usually requires the maximum throughput to comply with certain latency constraints that prevents Transformer models from being used in production. To address this gap, model compression techniques such as quantization and pruning may be used to improve inference efficiency. However, these compression techniques require specialized software to apply and deploy at scale. In this work, we propose a new pipeline for creating and running Fast Transformer models on CPUs, utilizing hardware-aware pruning, knowledge distillation, quantization, and our own Transformer inference runtime engine with optimized kernels for sparse and quantized operators. We demonstrate the efficiency of our pipeline by creating a Fast DistilBERT model showing minimal accuracy loss on the question-answering SQuADv1.1 benchmark, and throughput results under typical production constraints and environments. Our results outperform existing state-of-the-art Neural Magic's DeepSparse runtime performance by up to 50% and up to 4.1x performance speedup over ONNX Runtime. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-transformers.
Zero-Shot Text Matching for Automated Auditing using Sentence Transformers
Authors: David Biesner, Maren Pielka, Rajkumar Ramamurthy, Tim Dilmaghani, Bernd Kliem, Rüdiger Loitz, Rafet Sifa
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Question Answering, Retrieval, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentence, Text Matching

Natural language processing methods have several applications in automated auditing, including document or passage classification, information retrieval, and question answering. However, training such models requires a large amount of annotated data which is scarce in industrial settings. At the same time, techniques like zero-shot and unsupervised learning allow for application of models pre-trained using general domain data to unseen domains. In this work, we study the efficiency of unsupervised text matching using Sentence-Bert, a transformer-based model, by applying it to the semantic similarity of financial passages. Experimental results show that this model is robust to documents from in- and out-of-domain data.
Deep Temporal Modelling of Clinical Depression through Social Media Text
Authors: Nawshad Farruque, Randy Goebel, Sudhakar Sivapalan, Osmar R. Zaïane
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Depression Detection

We describe the development of a model to detect user-level clinical depression based on a user's temporal social media posts. Our model uses a Depression Symptoms Detection (DSD) classifier, which is trained on the largest existing samples of clinician annotated tweets for clinical depression symptoms. We subsequently use our DSD model to extract clinically relevant features, e.g., depression scores and their consequent temporal patterns, as well as user posting activity patterns, e.g., quantifying their ``no activity'' or ``silence.'' Furthermore, to evaluate the efficacy of these extracted features, we create three kinds of datasets including a test dataset, from two existing well-known benchmark datasets for user-level depression detection. We then provide accuracy measures based on single features, baseline features and feature ablation tests, at several different levels of temporal granularity. The relevant data distributions and clinical depression detection related settings can be exploited to draw a complete picture of the impact of different features across our created datasets. Finally, we show that, in general, only semantic oriented representation models perform well. However, clinical features may enhance overall performance provided that the training and testing distribution is similar, and there is more data in a user's timeline. The consequence is that the predictive capability of depression scores increase significantly while used in a more sensitive clinical depression detection settings.
Alzheimer's Diagnosis and Generation-Based Chatbot Using Hierarchical Attention and Transformer
Authors: Park Jun Yeong, Shin Su Jong, Choi Chang Hwan, Lee Jung Jae, Choi Sang-il
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Decoder

In this paper, we propose a natural language processing architecture that can handle tasks that previously required two models as one model. With a single model, we analyze the language patterns and conversational context of Alzheimer's patients and derive answers from two results: patient classification and chatbot. If the patient's language characteristics are identified by chatbots in daily life, doctors can plan more precise diagnosis and treatment for early diagnosis. The proposed model is used to develop chatbots that replace questionnaires that required experts. There are two natural language processing tasks performed by the model. The first is a 'natural language classification' that indicates with probability whether the patient has an illness, and the second is to generate the next 'answer' of the chatbot to the patient's answer. In the first half, a context vector, which is a characteristic of patient utterance, is extracted through a self-attention neural network. This context vector and chatbot (expert, moderator) questions are entered together into the encoder to obtain a matrix containing the characteristics of the interaction between the questioner and the patient. The vectorized matrix becomes a probability value for classification of patients. Enter the matrix into the decoder with the next answer from the chatbot (the moderator) to generate the next utterance. As a result of learning this structure with DmentiaBank's cookie theft description corpus, it was confirmed that the value of the loss function of the encoder and decoder was significantly reduced and converged. This shows that capturing the speech language pattern of Alzheimer's disease patients can contribute to early diagnosis and longitudinal studies of the disease in the future.
How Long Is Enough? Exploring the Optimal Intervals of Long-Range Clinical Note Language Modeling
Authors: Samuel Cahyawijaya, Bryan Wilie, Holy Lovenia, Huan Zhong, MingQian Zhong, Yuk-Yu Nancy Ip, Pascale Fung
Date: 2022-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Large pre-trained language models (LMs) have been widely adopted in biomedical and clinical domains, introducing many powerful LMs such as bio-lm and BioELECTRA. However, the applicability of these methods to real clinical use cases is hindered, due to the limitation of pre-trained LMs in processing long textual data with thousands of words, which is a common length for a clinical note. In this work, we explore long-range adaptation from such LMs with Longformer, allowing the LMs to capture longer clinical notes context. We conduct experiments on three n2c2 challenges datasets and a longitudinal clinical dataset from Hong Kong Hospital Authority electronic health record (EHR) system to show the effectiveness and generalizability of this concept, achieving 10\% F1-score improvement. Based on our experiments, we conclude that capturing a longer clinical note interval is beneficial to the model performance, but there are different cut-off intervals to achieve the optimal performance for different target variables. Our code is available at https://github.com/HLTCHKUST/long-biomedical-model.
Semantic Representations of Mathematical Expressions in a Continuous Vector Space
Authors: Neeraj Gangwar, Nickvash Kani
Date: 2022-10-08 00:00:00

Mathematical notation makes up a large portion of STEM literature, yet finding semantic representations for formulae remains a challenging problem. Because mathematical notation is precise, and its meaning changes significantly with small character shifts, the methods that work for natural text do not necessarily work well for mathematical expressions. This work describes an approach for representing mathematical expressions in a continuous vector space. We use the encoder of a sequence-to-sequence architecture, trained on visually different but mathematically equivalent expressions, to generate vector representations (or embeddings). We compare this approach with a structural approach that considers visual layout to embed an expression and show that our proposed approach is better at capturing mathematical semantics. Finally, to expedite future research, we publish a corpus of equivalent transcendental and algebraic expression pairs.
Multilingual Speech Emotion Recognition With Multi-Gating Mechanism and Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Zihan Wang, Qi Meng, HaiFeng Lan, Xinrui Zhang, Kehao Guo, Akshat Gupta
Date: 2022-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Neural Architecture Search, Speech Emotion Recognition, Speech-to-Text

Speech emotion recognition (SER) classifies audio into emotion categories such as Happy, Angry, Fear, Disgust and Neutral. While Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is a common application for popular languages, it continues to be a problem for low-resourced languages, i.e., languages with no pretrained speech-to-text recognition models. This paper firstly proposes a language-specific model that extract emotional information from multiple pre-trained speech models, and then designs a multi-domain model that simultaneously performs SER for various languages. Our multidomain model employs a multi-gating mechanism to generate unique weighted feature combination for each language, and also searches for specific neural network structure for each language through a neural architecture search module. In addition, we introduce a contrastive auxiliary loss to build more separable representations for audio data. Our experiments show that our model raises the state-of-the-art accuracy by 3% for German and 14.3% for French.
Correlation of viral loads in disease transmission chains could bias early estimates of the reproduction number
Authors: Thomas Harris, Nicholas Geard, Cameron Zachreson
Date: 2022-11-16 00:00:00

Early estimates of the transmission properties of a newly emerged pathogen are critical to an effective public health response, and are often based on limited outbreak data. Here, we use simulations to investigate a potential source of bias in such estimates, arising from correlations between the viral load of cases in transmission chains. We show that this mechanism can affect estimates of fundamental transmission properties characterising the spread of a virus. Our computational model simulates a disease transmission mechanism in which the viral load of the infector at the time of transmission influences the infectiousness of the infectee. These correlations in transmission pairs produce a population-level decoherence process during which the distributions of initial viral loads in each subsequent generation converge to a steady state. We find that outbreaks arising from index cases with low initial viral loads give rise to early estimates of transmission properties that are subject to large biases. These findings demonstrate the potential for bias arising from transmission mechanics to affect estimates of the transmission properties of newly emerged viruses.
Learning Dense and Continuous Optical Flow from an Event Camera
Authors: Zhexiong Wan, Yuchao Dai, Yuxin Mao
Date: 2022-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation

Event cameras such as DAVIS can simultaneously output high temporal resolution events and low frame-rate intensity images, which own great potential in capturing scene motion, such as optical flow estimation. Most of the existing optical flow estimation methods are based on two consecutive image frames and can only estimate discrete flow at a fixed time interval. Previous work has shown that continuous flow estimation can be achieved by changing the quantities or time intervals of events. However, they are difficult to estimate reliable dense flow , especially in the regions without any triggered events. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based dense and continuous optical flow estimation framework from a single image with event streams, which facilitates the accurate perception of high-speed motion. Specifically, we first propose an event-image fusion and correlation module to effectively exploit the internal motion from two different modalities of data. Then we propose an iterative update network structure with bidirectional training for optical flow prediction. Therefore, our model can estimate reliable dense flow as two-frame-based methods, as well as estimate temporal continuous flow as event-based methods. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real captured datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms existing event-based state-of-the-art methods and our designed baselines for accurate dense and continuous optical flow estimation.
AlignVE: Visual Entailment Recognition Based on Alignment Relations
Authors: Biwei Cao, Jiuxin Cao, Jie Gui, Jiayun Shen, Bo Liu, Lei He, Yuan Yan Tang, James Tin-Yau Kwok
Date: 2022-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Relation, Visual Entailment, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Visual entailment (VE) is to recognize whether the semantics of a hypothesis text can be inferred from the given premise image, which is one special task among recent emerged vision and language understanding tasks. Currently, most of the existing VE approaches are derived from the methods of visual question answering. They recognize visual entailment by quantifying the similarity between the hypothesis and premise in the content semantic features from multi modalities. Such approaches, however, ignore the VE's unique nature of relation inference between the premise and hypothesis. Therefore, in this paper, a new architecture called AlignVE is proposed to solve the visual entailment problem with a relation interaction method. It models the relation between the premise and hypothesis as an alignment matrix. Then it introduces a pooling operation to get feature vectors with a fixed size. Finally, it goes through the fully-connected layer and normalization layer to complete the classification. Experiments show that our alignment-based architecture reaches 72.45\% accuracy on SNLI-VE dataset, outperforming previous content-based models under the same settings.
A Simple Transformer-Based Model for Ego4D Natural Language Queries Challenge
Authors: Sicheng Mo, Fangzhou Mu, Yin Li
Date: 2022-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Localization, Natural Language Queries, Temporal Action Localization, Video Grounding

This report describes Badgers@UW-Madison, our submission to the Ego4D Natural Language Queries (NLQ) Challenge. Our solution inherits the point-based event representation from our prior work on temporal action localization, and develops a Transformer-based model for video grounding. Further, our solution integrates several strong video features including SlowFast, Omnivore and EgoVLP. Without bells and whistles, our submission based on a single model achieves 12.64% Mean R@1 and is ranked 2nd on the public leaderboard. Meanwhile, our method garners 28.45% (18.03%) R@5 at tIoU=0.3 (0.5), surpassing the top-ranked solution by up to 5.5 absolute percentage points.