pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Classifying COVID-19 vaccine narratives
Authors: Yue Li, Carolina Scarton, Xingyi Song, Kalina Bontcheva
Date: 2022-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Vaccine hesitancy is widespread, despite the government's information campaigns and the efforts of the World Health Organisation (WHO). Categorising the topics within vaccine-related narratives is crucial to understand the concerns expressed in discussions and identify the specific issues that contribute to vaccine hesitancy. This paper addresses the need for monitoring and analysing vaccine narratives online by introducing a novel vaccine narrative classification task, which categorises COVID-19 vaccine claims into one of seven categories. Following a data augmentation approach, we first construct a novel dataset for this new classification task, focusing on the minority classes. We also make use of fact-checker annotated data. The paper also presents a neural vaccine narrative classifier that achieves an accuracy of 84% under cross-validation. The classifier is publicly available for researchers and journalists.
Towards Automated Classification of Attackers' TTPs by combining NLP with ML Techniques
Authors: Clemens Sauerwein, Alexander Pfohl
Date: 2022-07-18 00:00:00

The increasingly sophisticated and growing number of threat actors along with the sheer speed at which cyber attacks unfold, make timely identification of attacks imperative to an organisations' security. Consequently, persons responsible for security employ a large variety of information sources concerning emerging attacks, attackers' course of actions or indicators of compromise. However, a vast amount of the needed security information is available in unstructured textual form, which complicates the automated and timely extraction of attackers' Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs). In order to address this problem we systematically evaluate and compare different Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques used for security information extraction in research. Based on our investigations we propose a data processing pipeline that automatically classifies unstructured text according to attackers' tactics and techniques derived from a knowledge base of adversary tactics, techniques and procedures.
Human Brains Can't Detect Fake News: A Neuro-Cognitive Study of Textual Disinformation Susceptibility
Authors: Cagri Arisoy, Anuradha Mandal, Nitesh Saxena
Date: 2022-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Human Detection

The spread of digital disinformation (aka "fake news") is arguably one of the most significant threats on the Internet which can cause individual and societal harm of large scales. The susceptibility to fake news attacks hinges on whether Internet users perceive a fake news article/snippet to be legitimate after reading it. In this paper, we attempt to garner an in-depth understanding of users' susceptibility to text-centric fake news attacks via a neuro-cognitive methodology. We investigate the neural underpinnings relevant to fake/real news through EEG. We run an experiment with human users to pursue a thorough investigation of users' perception and cognitive processing of fake/real news. We analyze the neural activity associated with the fake/real news detection task for different categories of news articles. Our results show there may be no statistically significant or automatically inferable differences in the way the human brain processes the fake vs. real news, while marked differences are observed when people are subject to (real/fake) news vs. resting state and even between some different categories of fake news. This neuro-cognitive finding may help to justify users' susceptibility to fake news attacks, as also confirmed from the behavioral analysis. In other words, the fake news articles may seem almost indistinguishable from the real news articles in both behavioral and neural domains. Our work serves to dissect the fundamental neural phenomena underlying fake news attacks and explains users' susceptibility to these attacks through the limits of human biology. We believe this could be a notable insight for the researchers and practitioners suggesting the human detection of fake news might be ineffective, which may also have an adverse impact on the design of automated detection approaches that crucially rely upon human labeling of text articles for building training models
A Spoken Drug Prescription Dataset in French for Spoken Language Understanding
Authors: Ali Can Kocabiyikoglu, François Portet, Prudence Gibert, Hervé Blanchon, Jean-Marc Babouchkine, Gaëtan Gavazzi
Date: 2022-07-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Spoken Language Understanding

Spoken medical dialogue systems are increasingly attracting interest to enhance access to healthcare services and improve quality and traceability of patient care. In this paper, we focus on medical drug prescriptions acquired on smartphones through spoken dialogue. Such systems would facilitate the traceability of care and would free clinicians' time. However, there is a lack of speech corpora to develop such systems since most of the related corpora are in text form and in English. To facilitate the research and development of spoken medical dialogue systems, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first spoken medical drug prescriptions corpus, named PxSLU. It contains 4 hours of transcribed and annotated dialogues of drug prescriptions in French acquired through an experiment with 55 participants experts and non-experts in prescriptions. We also present some experiments that demonstrate the interest of this corpus for the evaluation and development of medical dialogue systems.
An Overview of Distant Supervision for Relation Extraction with a Focus on Denoising and Pre-training Methods
Authors: William Hogan
Date: 2022-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Knowledge Graph Completion, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Question Answering, Relation Extraction, Text Summarization

Relation Extraction (RE) is a foundational task of natural language processing. RE seeks to transform raw, unstructured text into structured knowledge by identifying relational information between entity pairs found in text. RE has numerous uses, such as knowledge graph completion, text summarization, question-answering, and search querying. The history of RE methods can be roughly organized into four phases: pattern-based RE, statistical-based RE, neural-based RE, and large language model-based RE. This survey begins with an overview of a few exemplary works in the earlier phases of RE, highlighting limitations and shortcomings to contextualize progress. Next, we review popular benchmarks and critically examine metrics used to assess RE performance. We then discuss distant supervision, a paradigm that has shaped the development of modern RE methods. Lastly, we review recent RE works focusing on denoising and pre-training methods.
End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding: Performance analyses of a voice command task in a low resource setting
Authors: Thierry Desot, François Portet, Michel Vacher
Date: 2022-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Understanding, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Spoken Language Understanding

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is a core task in most human-machine interaction systems. With the emergence of smart homes, smart phones and smart speakers, SLU has become a key technology for the industry. In a classical SLU approach, an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) module transcribes the speech signal into a textual representation from which a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) module extracts semantic information. Recently End-to-End SLU (E2E SLU) based on Deep Neural Networks has gained momentum since it benefits from the joint optimization of the ASR and the NLU parts, hence limiting the cascade of error effect of the pipeline architecture. However, little is known about the actual linguistic properties used by E2E models to predict concepts and intents from speech input. In this paper, we present a study identifying the signal features and other linguistic properties used by an E2E model to perform the SLU task. The study is carried out in the application domain of a smart home that has to handle non-English (here French) voice commands. The results show that a good E2E SLU performance does not always require a perfect ASR capability. Furthermore, the results show the superior capabilities of the E2E model in handling background noise and syntactic variation compared to the pipeline model. Finally, a finer-grained analysis suggests that the E2E model uses the pitch information of the input signal to identify voice command concepts. The results and methodology outlined in this paper provide a springboard for further analyses of E2E models in speech processing.
Natural language processing for clusterization of genes according to their functions
Authors: Vladislav Dordiuk, Ekaterina Demicheva, Fernando Polanco Espino, Konstantin Ushenin
Date: 2022-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

There are hundreds of methods for analysis of data obtained in mRNA-sequencing. The most of them are focused on small number of genes. In this study, we propose an approach that reduces the analysis of several thousand genes to analysis of several clusters. The list of genes is enriched with information from open databases. Then, the descriptions are encoded as vectors using the pretrained language model (BERT) and some text processing approaches. The encoded gene function pass through the dimensionality reduction and clusterization. Aiming to find the most efficient pipeline, 180 cases of pipeline with different methods in the major pipeline steps were analyzed. The performance was evaluated with clusterization indexes and expert review of the results.
ELECTRA is a Zero-Shot Learner, Too
Authors: Shiwen Ni, Hung-Yu Kao
Date: 2022-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Prompt Learning, SST-2, Zero-Shot Learning

Recently, for few-shot or even zero-shot learning, the new paradigm "pre-train, prompt, and predict" has achieved remarkable achievements compared with the "pre-train, fine-tune" paradigm. After the success of prompt-based GPT-3, a series of masked language model (MLM)-based (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa) prompt learning methods became popular and widely used. However, another efficient pre-trained discriminative model, ELECTRA, has probably been neglected. In this paper, we attempt to accomplish several NLP tasks in the zero-shot scenario using a novel our proposed replaced token detection (RTD)-based prompt learning method. Experimental results show that ELECTRA model based on RTD-prompt learning achieves surprisingly state-of-the-art zero-shot performance. Numerically, compared to MLM-RoBERTa-large and MLM-BERT-large, our RTD-ELECTRA-large has an average of about 8.4% and 13.7% improvement on all 15 tasks. Especially on the SST-2 task, our RTD-ELECTRA-large achieves an astonishing 90.1% accuracy without any training data. Overall, compared to the pre-trained masked language models, the pre-trained replaced token detection model performs better in zero-shot learning. The source code is available at: https://github.com/nishiwen1214/RTD-ELECTRA.
United States Politicians' Tone Became More Negative with 2016 Primary Campaigns
Authors: Jonathan Külz, Andreas Spitz, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Stephan Günnemann, Robert West
Date: 2022-07-17 00:00:00

There is a widespread belief that the tone of US political language has become more negative recently, in particular when Donald Trump entered politics. At the same time, there is disagreement as to whether Trump changed or merely continued previous trends. To date, data-driven evidence regarding these questions is scarce, partly due to the difficulty of obtaining a comprehensive, longitudinal record of politicians' utterances. Here we apply psycholinguistic tools to a novel, comprehensive corpus of 24 million quotes from online news attributed to 18,627 US politicians in order to analyze how the tone of US politicians' language evolved between 2008 and 2020. We show that, whereas the frequency of negative emotion words had decreased continuously during Obama's tenure, it suddenly and lastingly increased with the 2016 primary campaigns, by 1.6 pre-campaign standard deviations, or 8% of the pre-campaign mean, in a pattern that emerges across parties. The effect size drops by 40% when omitting Trump's quotes, and by 50% when averaging over speakers rather than quotes, implying that prominent speakers, and Trump in particular, have disproportionately, though not exclusively, contributed to the rise in negative language. This work provides the first large-scale data-driven evidence of a drastic shift toward a more negative political tone following Trump's campaign start as a catalyst, with important implications for the debate about the state of US politics.
Automatic Context Pattern Generation for Entity Set Expansion
Authors: Yinghui Li, Shulin Huang, Xinwei Zhang, Qingyu Zhou, Yangning Li, Ruiyang Liu, Yunbo Cao, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ying Shen
Date: 2022-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Sentence

Entity Set Expansion (ESE) is a valuable task that aims to find entities of the target semantic class described by given seed entities. Various Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) downstream applications have benefited from ESE due to its ability to discover knowledge. Although existing corpus-based ESE methods have achieved great progress, they still rely on corpora with high-quality entity information annotated, because most of them need to obtain the context patterns through the position of the entity in a sentence. Therefore, the quality of the given corpora and their entity annotation has become the bottleneck that limits the performance of such methods. To overcome this dilemma and make the ESE models free from the dependence on entity annotation, our work aims to explore a new ESE paradigm, namely corpus-independent ESE. Specifically, we devise a context pattern generation module that utilizes autoregressive language models (e.g., GPT-2) to automatically generate high-quality context patterns for entities. In addition, we propose the GAPA, a novel ESE framework that leverages the aforementioned GenerAted PAtterns to expand target entities. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on three widely used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. All the codes of our experiments are available at https://github.com/geekjuruo/GAPA.
Towards Explainability in NLP: Analyzing and Calculating Word Saliency through Word Properties
Authors: Jialiang Dong, zhitao Guan, Longfei Wu, Zijian Zhang, Xiaojiang Du
Date: 2022-07-17 00:00:00

The wide use of black-box models in natural language processing brings great challenges to the understanding of the decision basis, the trustworthiness of the prediction results, and the improvement of the model performance. The words in text samples have properties that reflect their semantics and contextual information, such as the part of speech, the position, etc. These properties may have certain relationships with the word saliency, which is of great help for studying the explainability of the model predictions. In this paper, we explore the relationships between the word saliency and the word properties. According to the analysis results, we further establish a mapping model, Seq2Saliency, from the words in a text sample and their properties to the saliency values based on the idea of sequence tagging. In addition, we establish a new dataset called PrSalM, which contains each word in the text samples, the word properties, and the word saliency values. The experimental evaluations are conducted to analyze the saliency of words with different properties. The effectiveness of the Seq2Saliency model is verified.
Multimodal Dialog Systems with Dual Knowledge-enhanced Generative Pretrained Language Model
Authors: Xiaolin Chen, Xuemeng Song, Liqiang Jing, Shuo Li, Linmei Hu, Liqiang Nie
Date: 2022-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Response Generation

Text response generation for multimodal task-oriented dialog systems, which aims to generate the proper text response given the multimodal context, is an essential yet challenging task. Although existing efforts have achieved compelling success, they still suffer from two pivotal limitations: 1) overlook the benefit of generative pre-training, and 2) ignore the textual context related knowledge. To address these limitations, we propose a novel dual knowledge-enhanced generative pretrained language model for multimodal task-oriented dialog systems (DKMD), consisting of three key components: dual knowledge selection, dual knowledge-enhanced context learning, and knowledge-enhanced response generation. To be specific, the dual knowledge selection component aims to select the related knowledge according to both textual and visual modalities of the given context. Thereafter, the dual knowledge-enhanced context learning component targets seamlessly integrating the selected knowledge into the multimodal context learning from both global and local perspectives, where the cross-modal semantic relation is also explored. Moreover, the knowledge-enhanced response generation component comprises a revised BART decoder, where an additional dot-product knowledge-decoder attention sub-layer is introduced for explicitly utilizing the knowledge to advance the text response generation. Extensive experiments on a public dataset verify the superiority of the proposed DKMD over state-of-the-art competitors.
Sotto Voce: Federated Speech Recognition with Differential Privacy Guarantees
Authors: Michael Shoemate, Kevin Jett, Ethan Cowan, Sean Colbath, James Honaker, Prasanna Muthukumar
Date: 2022-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Speech data is expensive to collect, and incredibly sensitive to its sources. It is often the case that organizations independently collect small datasets for their own use, but often these are not performant for the demands of machine learning. Organizations could pool these datasets together and jointly build a strong ASR system; sharing data in the clear, however, comes with tremendous risk, in terms of intellectual property loss as well as loss of privacy of the individuals who exist in the dataset. In this paper, we offer a potential solution for learning an ML model across multiple organizations where we can provide mathematical guarantees limiting privacy loss. We use a Federated Learning approach built on a strong foundation of Differential Privacy techniques. We apply these to a senone classification prototype and demonstrate that the model improves with the addition of private data while still respecting privacy.
Probing Semantic Grounding in Language Models of Code with Representational Similarity Analysis
Authors: Shounak Naik, Rajaswa Patil, Swati Agarwal, Veeky Baths
Date: 2022-07-15 00:00:00

Representational Similarity Analysis is a method from cognitive neuroscience, which helps in comparing representations from two different sources of data. In this paper, we propose using Representational Similarity Analysis to probe the semantic grounding in language models of code. We probe representations from the CodeBERT model for semantic grounding by using the data from the IBM CodeNet dataset. Through our experiments, we show that current pre-training methods do not induce semantic grounding in language models of code, and instead focus on optimizing form-based patterns. We also show that even a little amount of fine-tuning on semantically relevant tasks increases the semantic grounding in CodeBERT significantly. Our ablations with the input modality to the CodeBERT model show that using bimodal inputs (code and natural language) over unimodal inputs (only code) gives better semantic grounding and sample efficiency during semantic fine-tuning. Finally, our experiments with semantic perturbations in code reveal that CodeBERT is able to robustly distinguish between semantically correct and incorrect code.
BrainCog: A Spiking Neural Network based Brain-inspired Cognitive Intelligence Engine for Brain-inspired AI and Brain Simulation
Authors: Yi Zeng, Dongcheng Zhao, Feifei Zhao, Guobin Shen, Yiting Dong, Enmeng Lu, Qian Zhang, Yinqian Sun, Qian Liang, Yuxuan Zhao, Zhuoya Zhao, Hongjian Fang, Yuwei Wang, Yang Li, Xin Liu, Chengcheng Du, Qingqun Kong, Zizhe Ruan, Weida Bi
Date: 2022-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have attracted extensive attentions in Brain-inspired Artificial Intelligence and computational neuroscience. They can be used to simulate biological information processing in the brain at multiple scales. More importantly, SNNs serve as an appropriate level of abstraction to bring inspirations from brain and cognition to Artificial Intelligence. In this paper, we present the Brain-inspired Cognitive Intelligence Engine (BrainCog) for creating brain-inspired AI and brain simulation models. BrainCog incorporates different types of spiking neuron models, learning rules, brain areas, etc., as essential modules provided by the platform. Based on these easy-to-use modules, BrainCog supports various brain-inspired cognitive functions, including Perception and Learning, Decision Making, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Motor Control, and Social Cognition. These brain-inspired AI models have been effectively validated on various supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning tasks, and they can be used to enable AI models to be with multiple brain-inspired cognitive functions. For brain simulation, BrainCog realizes the function simulation of decision-making, working memory, the structure simulation of the Neural Circuit, and whole brain structure simulation of Mouse brain, Macaque brain, and Human brain. An AI engine named BORN is developed based on BrainCog, and it demonstrates how the components of BrainCog can be integrated and used to build AI models and applications. To enable the scientific quest to decode the nature of biological intelligence and create AI, BrainCog aims to provide essential and easy-to-use building blocks, and infrastructural support to develop brain-inspired spiking neural network based AI, and to simulate the cognitive brains at multiple scales. The online repository of BrainCog can be found at https://github.com/braincog-x.
Fully trainable Gaussian derivative convolutional layer
Authors: Valentin Penaud--Polge, Santiago Velasco-Forero, Jesus Angulo
Date: 2022-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The Gaussian kernel and its derivatives have already been employed for Convolutional Neural Networks in several previous works. Most of these papers proposed to compute filters by linearly combining one or several bases of fixed or slightly trainable Gaussian kernels with or without their derivatives. In this article, we propose a high-level configurable layer based on anisotropic, oriented and shifted Gaussian derivative kernels which generalize notions encountered in previous related works while keeping their main advantage. The results show that the proposed layer has competitive performance compared to previous works and that it can be successfully included in common deep architectures such as VGG16 for image classification and U-net for image segmentation.