pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Predicting Future Mosquito Larval Habitats Using Time Series Climate Forecasting and Deep Learning
Authors: Christopher Sun, Jay Nimbalkar, Ravnoor Bedi
Date: 2022-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

Mosquito habitat ranges are projected to expand due to climate change. This investigation aims to identify future mosquito habitats by analyzing preferred ecological conditions of mosquito larvae. After assembling a data set with atmospheric records and larvae observations, a neural network is trained to predict larvae counts from ecological inputs. Time series forecasting is conducted on these variables and climate projections are passed into the initial deep learning model to generate location-specific larvae abundance predictions. The results support the notion of regional ecosystem-driven changes in mosquito spread, with high-elevation regions in particular experiencing an increase in susceptibility to mosquito infestation.
ASTA: Learning Analytical Semantics over Tables for Intelligent Data Analysis and Visualization
Authors: Lingbo Li, Tianle Li, Xinyi He, Mengyu Zhou, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
Date: 2022-08-01 00:00:00

Intelligent analysis and visualization of tables use techniques to automatically recommend useful knowledge from data, thus freeing users from tedious multi-dimension data mining. While many studies have succeeded in automating recommendations through rules or machine learning, it is difficult to generalize expert knowledge and provide explainable recommendations. In this paper, we present the recommendation of conditional formatting for the first time, together with chart recommendation, to exemplify intelligent table analysis. We propose analytical semantics over tables to uncover common analysis pattern behind user-created analyses. Here, we design analytical semantics by separating data focus from user intent, which extract the user motivation from data and human perspective respectively. Furthermore, the ASTA framework is designed by us to apply analytical semantics to multiple automated recommendations. ASTA framework extracts data features by designing signatures based on expert knowledge, and enables data referencing at field- (chart) or cell-level (conditional formatting) with pre-trained models. Experiments show that our framework achieves recall at top 1 of 62.86% on public chart corpora, outperforming the best baseline about 14%, and achieves 72.31% on the collected corpus ConFormT, validating that ASTA framework is effective in providing accurate and explainable recommendations.
Unsupervised machine learning framework for discriminating major variants of concern during COVID-19
Authors: Rohitash Chandra, Chaarvi Bansal, Mingyue Kang, Tom Blau, Vinti Agarwal, Pranjal Singh, Laurence O. W. Wilson, Seshadri Vasan
Date: 2022-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Clustering, Dimensionality Reduction

Due to the high mutation rate of the virus, the COVID-19 pandemic evolved rapidly. Certain variants of the virus, such as Delta and Omicron, emerged with altered viral properties leading to severe transmission and death rates. These variants burdened the medical systems worldwide with a major impact to travel, productivity, and the world economy. Unsupervised machine learning methods have the ability to compress, characterize, and visualize unlabelled data. This paper presents a framework that utilizes unsupervised machine learning methods to discriminate and visualize the associations between major COVID-19 variants based on their genome sequences. These methods comprise a combination of selected dimensionality reduction and clustering techniques. The framework processes the RNA sequences by performing a k-mer analysis on the data and further visualises and compares the results using selected dimensionality reduction methods that include principal component analysis (PCA), t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding (t-SNE), and uniform manifold approximation projection (UMAP). Our framework also employs agglomerative hierarchical clustering to visualize the mutational differences among major variants of concern and country-wise mutational differences for selected variants (Delta and Omicron) using dendrograms. We also provide country-wise mutational differences for selected variants via dendrograms. We find that the proposed framework can effectively distinguish between the major variants and has the potential to identify emerging variants in the future.
Biologically Plausible Training of Deep Neural Networks Using a Top-down Credit Assignment Network
Authors: Jian-Hui Chen, Cheng-Lin Liu, Zuoren Wang
Date: 2022-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Biologically-plausible Training, reinforcement-learning

Despite the widespread adoption of Backpropagation algorithm-based Deep Neural Networks, the biological infeasibility of the BP algorithm could potentially limit the evolution of new DNN models. To find a biologically plausible algorithm to replace BP, we focus on the top-down mechanism inherent in the biological brain. Although top-down connections in the biological brain play crucial roles in high-level cognitive functions, their application to neural network learning remains unclear. This study proposes a two-level training framework designed to train a bottom-up network using a Top-Down Credit Assignment Network (TDCA-network). The TDCA-network serves as a substitute for the conventional loss function and the back-propagation algorithm, widely used in neural network training. We further introduce a brain-inspired credit diffusion mechanism, significantly reducing the TDCA-network's parameter complexity, thereby greatly accelerating training without compromising the network's performance.Our experiments involving non-convex function optimization, supervised learning, and reinforcement learning reveal that a well-trained TDCA-network outperforms back-propagation across various settings. The visualization of the update trajectories in the loss landscape indicates the TDCA-network's ability to bypass local minima where BP-based trajectories typically become trapped. The TDCA-network also excels in multi-task optimization, demonstrating robust generalizability across different datasets in supervised learning and unseen task settings in reinforcement learning. Moreover, the results indicate that the TDCA-network holds promising potential to train neural networks across diverse architectures.
A Deep Generative Model for Feasible and Diverse Population Synthesis
Authors: Eui-Jin Kim, Prateek Bansal
Date: 2022-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Diversity, Generative Adversarial Network

An ideal synthetic population, a key input to activity-based models, mimics the distribution of the individual- and household-level attributes in the actual population. Since the entire population's attributes are generally unavailable, household travel survey (HTS) samples are used for population synthesis. Synthesizing population by directly sampling from HTS ignores the attribute combinations that are unobserved in the HTS samples but exist in the population, called 'sampling zeros'. A deep generative model (DGM) can potentially synthesize the sampling zeros but at the expense of generating 'structural zeros' (i.e., the infeasible attribute combinations that do not exist in the population). This study proposes a novel method to minimize structural zeros while preserving sampling zeros. Two regularizations are devised to customize the training of the DGM and applied to a generative adversarial network (GAN) and a variational autoencoder (VAE). The adopted metrics for feasibility and diversity of the synthetic population indicate the capability of generating sampling and structural zeros -- lower structural zeros and lower sampling zeros indicate the higher feasibility and the lower diversity, respectively. Results show that the proposed regularizations achieve considerable performance improvement in feasibility and diversity of the synthesized population over traditional models. The proposed VAE additionally generated 23.5% of the population ignored by the sample with 79.2% precision (i.e., 20.8% structural zeros rates), while the proposed GAN generated 18.3% of the ignored population with 89.0% precision. The proposed improvement in DGM generates a more feasible and diverse synthetic population, which is critical for the accuracy of an activity-based model.
Voice Analysis for Stress Detection and Application in Virtual Reality to Improve Public Speaking in Real-time: A Review
Authors: Arushi, Roberto Dillon, Ai Ni Teoh, Denise Dillon
Date: 2022-08-01 00:00:00

Stress during public speaking is common and adversely affects performance and self-confidence. Extensive research has been carried out to develop various models to recognize emotional states. However, minimal research has been conducted to detect stress during public speaking in real time using voice analysis. In this context, the current review showed that the application of algorithms was not properly explored and helped identify the main obstacles in creating a suitable testing environment while accounting for current complexities and limitations. In this paper, we present our main idea and propose a stress detection computational algorithmic model that could be integrated into a Virtual Reality (VR) application to create an intelligent virtual audience for improving public speaking skills. The developed model, when integrated with VR, will be able to detect excessive stress in real time by analysing voice features correlated to physiological parameters indicative of stress and help users gradually control excessive stress and improve public speaking performance
CircuitNet: An Open-Source Dataset for Machine Learning Applications in Electronic Design Automation (EDA)
Authors: Zhuomin Chai, Yuxiang Zhao, Yibo Lin, Wei Liu, Runsheng Wang, Ru Huang
Date: 2022-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

The electronic design automation (EDA) community has been actively exploring machine learning (ML) for very large-scale integrated computer-aided design (VLSI CAD). Many studies explored learning-based techniques for cross-stage prediction tasks in the design flow to achieve faster design convergence. Although building ML models usually requires a large amount of data, most studies can only generate small internal datasets for validation because of the lack of large public datasets. In this essay, we present the first open-source dataset called CircuitNet for ML tasks in VLSI CAD.
ferret: a Framework for Benchmarking Explainers on Transformers
Authors: Giuseppe Attanasio, Eliana Pastor, Chiara Di Bonaventura, Debora Nozza
Date: 2022-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Hate Speech Detection, Sentiment Analysis

As Transformers are increasingly relied upon to solve complex NLP problems, there is an increased need for their decisions to be humanly interpretable. While several explainable AI (XAI) techniques for interpreting the outputs of transformer-based models have been proposed, there is still a lack of easy access to using and comparing them. We introduce ferret, a Python library to simplify the use and comparisons of XAI methods on transformer-based classifiers. With ferret, users can visualize and compare transformers-based models output explanations using state-of-the-art XAI methods on any free-text or existing XAI corpora. Moreover, users can also evaluate ad-hoc XAI metrics to select the most faithful and plausible explanations. To align with the recently consolidated process of sharing and using transformers-based models from Hugging Face, ferret interfaces directly with its Python library. In this paper, we showcase ferret to benchmark XAI methods used on transformers for sentiment analysis and hate speech detection. We show how specific methods provide consistently better explanations and are preferable in the context of transformer models.
Lost in Space Marking
Authors: Cassandra L. Jacobs, Yuval Pinter
Date: 2022-08-02 00:00:00

We look at a decision taken early in training a subword tokenizer, namely whether it should be the word-initial token that carries a special mark, or the word-final one. Based on surface-level considerations of efficiency and cohesion, as well as morphological coverage, we find that a Unigram LM tokenizer trained on pre-tokenized English text is better off marking the word-initial token, while one trained on raw text benefits from marking word ends. Our findings generalize across domains.
MBSE analysis for energy sustainability improvement in manufacturing industry
Authors: Romain Delabeye, Olivia Penas, Martin Ghienne, Arkadiusz Kosecki, Jean-Luc Dion
Date: 2022-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: energy management, Management

With the ever increasing complexity of Industry 4.0 systems, plant energy management systems developed to improve energy sustainability become equally complex. Based on a Model-Based Systems Engineering analysis, this paper aims to provide a general approach to perform holistic development of an autonomous energy management system for manufacturing industries. This Energy Management System (EMS) will be capable of continuously improving its ability to assess, predict, and act, in order to improve by monitoring and controlling the energy sustainability of manufacturing systems. The approach was implemented with the System Modeling Language (SysML).
Label Sleuth: From Unlabeled Text to a Classifier in a Few Hours
Authors: Eyal Shnarch, Alon Halfon, Ariel Gera, Marina Danilevsky, Yannis Katsis, Leshem Choshen, Martin Santillan Cooper, Dina Epelboim, Zheng Zhang, Dakuo Wang, Lucy Yip, Liat Ein-Dor, Lena Dankin, Ilya Shnayderman, Ranit Aharonov, Yunyao Li, Naftali Liberman, Philip Levin Slesarev, Gwilym Newton, Shila Ofek-Koifman, Noam Slonim, Yoav Katz
Date: 2022-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Classification

Text classification can be useful in many real-world scenarios, saving a lot of time for end users. However, building a custom classifier typically requires coding skills and ML knowledge, which poses a significant barrier for many potential users. To lift this barrier, we introduce Label Sleuth, a free open source system for labeling and creating text classifiers. This system is unique for (a) being a no-code system, making NLP accessible to non-experts, (b) guiding users through the entire labeling process until they obtain a custom classifier, making the process efficient -- from cold start to classifier in a few hours, and (c) being open for configuration and extension by developers. By open sourcing Label Sleuth we hope to build a community of users and developers that will broaden the utilization of NLP models.
Multi-Module G2P Converter for Persian Focusing on Relations between Words
Authors: Mahdi Rezaei, Negar Nayeri, Saeed Farzi, Hossein Sameti
Date: 2022-08-02 00:00:00

In this paper, we investigate the application of end-to-end and multi-module frameworks for G2P conversion for the Persian language. The results demonstrate that our proposed multi-module G2P system outperforms our end-to-end systems in terms of accuracy and speed. The system consists of a pronunciation dictionary as our look-up table, along with separate models to handle homographs, OOVs and ezafe in Persian created using GRU and Transformer architectures. The system is sequence-level rather than word-level, which allows it to effectively capture the unwritten relations between words (cross-word information) necessary for homograph disambiguation and ezafe recognition without the need for any pre-processing. After evaluation, our system achieved a 94.48% word-level accuracy, outperforming the previous G2P systems for Persian.
PyABSA: A Modularized Framework for Reproducible Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Heng Yang, Chen Zhang, Ke Li
Date: 2022-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), Data Augmentation, General Classification, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification, Term Extraction, Text Classification

The advancement of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has urged the lack of a user-friendly framework that can largely lower the difficulty of reproducing state-of-the-art ABSA performance, especially for beginners. To meet the demand, we present \our, a modularized framework built on PyTorch for reproducible ABSA. To facilitate ABSA research, PyABSA supports several ABSA subtasks, including aspect term extraction, aspect sentiment classification, and end-to-end aspect-based sentiment analysis. Concretely, PyABSA integrates 29 models and 26 datasets. With just a few lines of code, the result of a model on a specific dataset can be reproduced. With a modularized design, PyABSA can also be flexibly extended to considered models, datasets, and other related tasks. Besides, PyABSA highlights its data augmentation and annotation features, which significantly address data scarcity. All are welcome to have a try at \url{https://github.com/yangheng95/PyABSA}.
Gender bias in (non)-contextual clinical word embeddings for stereotypical medical categories
Authors: Gizem Sogancioglu, Fabian Mijsters, Amar van Uden, Jelle Peperzak
Date: 2022-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings

Clinical word embeddings are extensively used in various Bio-NLP problems as a state-of-the-art feature vector representation. Although they are quite successful at the semantic representation of words, due to the dataset - which potentially carries statistical and societal bias - on which they are trained, they might exhibit gender stereotypes. This study analyses gender bias of clinical embeddings on three medical categories: mental disorders, sexually transmitted diseases, and personality traits. To this extent, we analyze two different pre-trained embeddings namely (contextualized) clinical-BERT and (non-contextualized) BioWordVec. We show that both embeddings are biased towards sensitive gender groups but BioWordVec exhibits a higher bias than clinical-BERT for all three categories. Moreover, our analyses show that clinical embeddings carry a high degree of bias for some medical terms and diseases which is conflicting with medical literature. Having such an ill-founded relationship might cause harm in downstream applications that use clinical embeddings.
BEIKE NLP at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Prompt-Based Paragraph Classification for Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection
Authors: Yong Deng, Chenxiao Dou, Liangyu Chen, Deqiang Miao, Xianghui Sun, Baochang Ma, Xiangang Li
Date: 2022-08-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: SemEval (NAACL) 2022 7
Tasks: Binary Condescension Detection, Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Multi-label Condescension Detection

PCL detection task is aimed at identifying and categorizing language that is patronizing or condescending towards vulnerable communities in the general media.Compared to other NLP tasks of paragraph classification, the negative language presented in the PCL detection task is usually more implicit and subtle to be recognized, making the performance of common text-classification approaches disappointed. Targeting the PCL detection problem in SemEval-2022 Task 4, in this paper, we give an introduction to our team's solution, which exploits the power of prompt-based learning on paragraph classification. We reformulate the task as an appropriate cloze prompt and use pre-trained Masked Language Models to fill the cloze slot. For the two subtasks, binary classification and multi-label classification, DeBERTa model is adopted and fine-tuned to predict masked label words of task-specific prompts. On the evaluation dataset, for binary classification, our approach achieves an F1-score of 0.6406; for multi-label classification, our approach achieves an macro-F1-score of 0.4689 and ranks first in the leaderboard.
To Answer or Not to Answer? Improving Machine Reading Comprehension Model with Span-based Contrastive Learning
Authors: Yunjie Ji, Liangyu Chen, Chenxiao Dou, Baochang Ma, Xiangang Li
Date: 2022-08-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (NAACL) 2022 7
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Machine Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension

Machine Reading Comprehension with Unanswerable Questions is a difficult NLP task, challenged by the questions which can not be answered from passages. It is observed that subtle literal changes often make an answerable question unanswerable, however, most MRC models fail to recognize such changes. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a span-based method of Contrastive Learning (spanCL) which explicitly contrast answerable questions with their answerable and unanswerable counterparts at the answer span level. With spanCL, MRC models are forced to perceive crucial semantic changes from slight literal differences. Experiments on SQuAD 2.0 dataset show that spanCL can improve baselines significantly, yielding 0.86-2.14 absolute EM improvements. Additional experiments also show that spanCL is an effective way to utilize generated questions.
Silo NLP's Participation at WAT2022
Authors: Shantipriya Parida, Subhadarshi Panda, Stig-Arne Grönroos, Mark Granroth-Wilding, Mika Koistinen
Date: 2022-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

This paper provides the system description of "Silo NLP's" submission to the Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT2022). We have participated in the Indic Multimodal tasks (English->Hindi, English->Malayalam, and English->Bengali Multimodal Translation). For text-only translation, we trained Transformers from scratch and fine-tuned mBART-50 models. For multimodal translation, we used the same mBART architecture and extracted object tags from the images to use as visual features concatenated with the text sequence. Our submission tops many tasks including English->Hindi multimodal translation (evaluation test), English->Malayalam text-only and multimodal translation (evaluation test), English->Bengali multimodal translation (challenge test), and English->Bengali text-only translation (evaluation test).
Global Performance Disparities Between English-Language Accents in Automatic Speech Recognition
Authors: Alex DiChristofano, Henry Shuster, Shefali Chandra, Neal Patwari
Date: 2022-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Past research has identified discriminatory automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance as a function of the racial group and nationality of the speaker. In this paper, we expand the discussion beyond bias as a function of the individual national origin of the speaker to look for bias as a function of the geopolitical orientation of their nation of origin. We audit some of the most popular English language ASR services using a large and global data set of speech from The Speech Accent Archive, which includes over 2,700 speakers of English born in 171 different countries. We show that, even when controlling for multiple linguistic covariates, ASR service performance has a statistically significant relationship to the political alignment of the speaker's birth country with respect to the United States' geopolitical power. This holds for all ASR services tested. We discuss this bias in the context of the historical use of language to maintain global and political power.