pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
From Zero to Production: Baltic-Ukrainian Machine Translation Systems to Aid Refugees
Authors: Toms Bergmanis, Mārcis Pinnis
Date: 2022-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

In this paper, we examine the development and usage of six low-resource machine translation systems translating between the Ukrainian language and each of the official languages of the Baltic states. We developed these systems in reaction to the escalating Ukrainian refugee crisis caused by the Russian military aggression in Ukraine in the hope that they might be helpful for refugees and public administrations. Now, two months after MT systems were made public, we analyze their usage patterns and statistics. Our findings show that the Latvian-Ukrainian and Lithuanian-Ukrainian systems are integrated into the public services of Baltic states, leading to more than 127 million translated sentences for the Lithuanian-Ukrainian system. Motivated by these findings, we further enhance our MT systems by better Ukrainian toponym translation and publish an improved version of the Lithuanian-Ukrainian system.
Effective General-Domain Data Inclusion for the Machine Translation Task by Vanilla Transformers
Authors: Hassan Soliman
Date: 2022-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

One of the vital breakthroughs in the history of machine translation is the development of the Transformer model. Not only it is revolutionary for various translation tasks, but also for a majority of other NLP tasks. In this paper, we aim at a Transformer-based system that is able to translate a source sentence in German to its counterpart target sentence in English. We perform the experiments on the news commentary German-English parallel sentences from the WMT'13 dataset. In addition, we investigate the effect of the inclusion of additional general-domain data in training from the IWSLT'16 dataset to improve the Transformer model performance. We find that including the IWSLT'16 dataset in training helps achieve a gain of 2 BLEU score points on the test set of the WMT'13 dataset. Qualitative analysis is introduced to analyze how the usage of general-domain data helps improve the quality of the produced translation sentences.
Monitoring ROS2: from Requirements to Autonomous Robots
Authors: Ivan Perez, Anastasia Mavridou, Tom Pressburger, Alexander Will, Patrick J. Martin
Date: 2022-09-28 00:00:00

Runtime verification (RV) has the potential to enable the safe operation of safety-critical systems that are too complex to formally verify, such as Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2) applications. Writing correct monitors can itself be complex, and errors in the monitoring subsystem threaten the mission as a whole. This paper provides an overview of a formal approach to generating runtime monitors for autonomous robots from requirements written in a structured natural language. Our approach integrates the Formal Requirement Elicitation Tool (FRET) with Copilot, a runtime verification framework, through the Ogma integration tool. FRET is used to specify requirements with unambiguous semantics, which are then automatically translated into temporal logic formulae. Ogma generates monitor specifications from the FRET output, which are compiled into hard-real time C99. To facilitate integration of the monitors in ROS2, we have extended Ogma to generate ROS2 packages defining monitoring nodes, which run the monitors when new data becomes available, and publish the results of any violations. The goal of our approach is to treat the generated ROS2 packages as black boxes and integrate them into larger ROS2 systems with minimal effort.
Keyword Extraction from Short Texts with a Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer
Authors: Piotr Pęzik, Agnieszka Mikołajczyk-Bareła, Adam Wawrzyński, Bartłomiej Nitoń, Maciej Ogrodniczuk
Date: 2022-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Keyword Extraction, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

The paper explores the relevance of the Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer language model (T5) for Polish (plT5) to the task of intrinsic and extrinsic keyword extraction from short text passages. The evaluation is carried out on the new Polish Open Science Metadata Corpus (POSMAC), which is released with this paper: a collection of 216,214 abstracts of scientific publications compiled in the CURLICAT project. We compare the results obtained by four different methods, i.e. plT5kw, extremeText, TermoPL, KeyBERT and conclude that the plT5kw model yields particularly promising results for both frequent and sparsely represented keywords. Furthermore, a plT5kw keyword generation model trained on the POSMAC also seems to produce highly useful results in cross-domain text labelling scenarios. We discuss the performance of the model on news stories and phone-based dialog transcripts which represent text genres and domains extrinsic to the dataset of scientific abstracts. Finally, we also attempt to characterize the challenges of evaluating a text-to-text model on both intrinsic and extrinsic keyword extraction.
CEFER: A Four Facets Framework based on Context and Emotion embedded features for Implicit and Explicit Emotion Recognition
Authors: Fereshteh Khoshnam, Ahmad Baraani-Dastjerdi, M. J. Liaghatdar
Date: 2022-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Sentence

People's conduct and reactions are driven by their emotions. Online social media is becoming a great instrument for expressing emotions in written form. Paying attention to the context and the entire sentence help us to detect emotion from texts. However, this perspective inhibits us from noticing some emotional words or phrases in the text, particularly when the words express an emotion implicitly rather than explicitly. On the other hand, focusing only on the words and ignoring the context results in a distorted understanding of the sentence meaning and feeling. In this paper, we propose a framework that analyses text at both the sentence and word levels. We name it CEFER (Context and Emotion embedded Framework for Emotion Recognition). Our four approach facets are to extracting data by considering the entire sentence and each individual word simultaneously, as well as implicit and explicit emotions. The knowledge gained from these data not only mitigates the impact of flaws in the preceding approaches but also it strengthens the feature vector. We evaluate several feature spaces using BERT family and design the CEFER based on them. CEFER combines the emotional vector of each word, including explicit and implicit emotions, with the feature vector of each word based on context. CEFER performs better than the BERT family. The experimental results demonstrate that identifying implicit emotions are more challenging than detecting explicit emotions. CEFER, improves the accuracy of implicit emotion recognition. According to the results, CEFER perform 5% better than the BERT family in recognizing explicit emotions and 3% in implicit.
Towards Explaining Autonomy with Verbalised Decision Tree States
Authors: Konstantinos Gavriilidis, Andrea Munafo, Helen Hastie, Conlan Cesar, Michael DeFilippo, Michael R. Benjamin
Date: 2022-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

The development of new AUV technology increased the range of tasks that AUVs can tackle and the length of their operations. As a result, AUVs are capable of handling highly complex operations. However, these missions do not fit easily into the traditional method of defining a mission as a series of pre-planned waypoints because it is not possible to know, in advance, everything that might occur during the mission. This results in a gap between the operator's expectations and actual operational performance. Consequently, this can create a diminished level of trust between the operators and AUVs, resulting in unnecessary mission interruptions. To bridge this gap between in-mission robotic behaviours and operators' expectations, this work aims to provide a framework to explain decisions and actions taken by an autonomous vehicle during the mission, in an easy-to-understand manner. Additionally, the objective is to have an autonomy-agnostic system that can be added as an additional layer on top of any autonomy architecture. To make the approach applicable across different autonomous systems equipped with different autonomies, this work decouples the inner workings of the autonomy from the decision points and the resulting executed actions applying Knowledge Distillation. Finally, to present the explanations to the operators in a more natural way, the output of the distilled decision tree is combined with natural language explanations and reported to the operators as sentences. For this reason, an additional step known as Concept2Text Generation is added at the end of the explanation pipeline.
Revamping Multilingual Agreement Bidirectionally via Switched Back-translation for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Hongyuan Lu, Haoyang Huang, Shuming Ma, Dongdong Zhang, Furu Wei, Wai Lam
Date: 2022-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Level Machine Translation, Document Translation, Machine Translation, Translation

Despite the fact that multilingual agreement (MA) has shown its importance for multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT), current methodologies in the field have two shortages: (i) require parallel data between multiple language pairs, which is not always realistic and (ii) optimize the agreement in an ambiguous direction, which hampers the translation performance. We present \textbf{B}idirectional \textbf{M}ultilingual \textbf{A}greement via \textbf{S}witched \textbf{B}ack-\textbf{t}ranslation (\textbf{BMA-SBT}), a novel and universal multilingual agreement framework for fine-tuning pre-trained MNMT models, which (i) exempts the need for aforementioned parallel data by using a novel method called switched BT that creates synthetic text written in another source language using the translation target and (ii) optimizes the agreement bidirectionally with the Kullback-Leibler Divergence loss. Experiments indicate that BMA-SBT clearly improves the strong baselines on the task of MNMT with three benchmarks: TED Talks, News, and Europarl. In-depth analyzes indicate that BMA-SBT brings additive improvements to the conventional BT method.
YATO: Yet Another deep learning based Text analysis Open toolkit
Authors: Zeqiang Wang, Yile Wang, Jiageng Wu, Zhiyang Teng, Jie Yang
Date: 2022-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

We introduce YATO, an open-source, easy-to-use toolkit for text analysis with deep learning. Different from existing heavily engineered toolkits and platforms, YATO is lightweight and user-friendly for researchers from cross-disciplinary areas. Designed in a hierarchical structure, YATO supports free combinations of three types of widely used features including 1) traditional neural networks (CNN, RNN, etc.); 2) pre-trained language models (BERT, RoBERTa, ELECTRA, etc.); and 3) user-customized neural features via a simple configurable file. Benefiting from the advantages of flexibility and ease of use, YATO can facilitate fast reproduction and refinement of state-of-the-art NLP models, and promote the cross-disciplinary applications of NLP techniques. The code, examples, and documentation are publicly available at https://github.com/jiesutd/YATO. A demo video is also available at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ0mhzMcRuDUlTkzBfAftOqiJRxYTTjXH.
Data-driven Parsing Evaluation for Child-Parent Interactions
Authors: Zoey Liu, Emily Prud'hommeaux
Date: 2022-09-28 00:00:00

We present a syntactic dependency treebank for naturalistic child and child-directed speech in English (MacWhinney, 2000). Our annotations largely followed the guidelines of the Universal Dependencies project (UD (Zeman et al., 2022)), with detailed extensions to lexical/syntactic structures unique to conversational speech (in opposition to written texts). Compared to existing UD-style spoken treebanks as well as other dependency corpora of child-parent interactions specifically, our dataset is of (much) larger size (N of utterances = 44,744; N of words = 233, 907) and contains speech from a total of 10 children covering a wide age range (18-66 months). With this dataset, we ask: (1) How well would state-of-the-art dependency parsers, tailored for the written domain, perform for speech of different interlocutors in spontaneous conversations? (2) What is the relationship between parser performance and the developmental stage of the child? To address these questions, in ongoing work, we are conducting thorough dependency parser evaluations using both graph-based and transition-based parsers with different hyperparameterization, trained from three different types of out-of-domain written texts: news, tweets, and learner data.
METS-CoV: A Dataset of Medical Entity and Targeted Sentiment on COVID-19 Related Tweets
Authors: Peilin Zhou, Zeqiang Wang, Dading Chong, Zhijiang Guo, Yining Hua, Zichang Su, Zhiyang Teng, Jiageng Wu, Jie Yang
Date: 2022-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Epidemiology, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Sentiment Analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to bring up various topics discussed or debated on social media. In order to explore the impact of pandemics on people's lives, it is crucial to understand the public's concerns and attitudes towards pandemic-related entities (e.g., drugs, vaccines) on social media. However, models trained on existing named entity recognition (NER) or targeted sentiment analysis (TSA) datasets have limited ability to understand COVID-19-related social media texts because these datasets are not designed or annotated from a medical perspective. This paper releases METS-CoV, a dataset containing medical entities and targeted sentiments from COVID-19-related tweets. METS-CoV contains 10,000 tweets with 7 types of entities, including 4 medical entity types (Disease, Drug, Symptom, and Vaccine) and 3 general entity types (Person, Location, and Organization). To further investigate tweet users' attitudes toward specific entities, 4 types of entities (Person, Organization, Drug, and Vaccine) are selected and annotated with user sentiments, resulting in a targeted sentiment dataset with 9,101 entities (in 5,278 tweets). To the best of our knowledge, METS-CoV is the first dataset to collect medical entities and corresponding sentiments of COVID-19-related tweets. We benchmark the performance of classical machine learning models and state-of-the-art deep learning models on NER and TSA tasks with extensive experiments. Results show that the dataset has vast room for improvement for both NER and TSA tasks. METS-CoV is an important resource for developing better medical social media tools and facilitating computational social science research, especially in epidemiology. Our data, annotation guidelines, benchmark models, and source code are publicly available (https://github.com/YLab-Open/METS-CoV) to ensure reproducibility.
Structured Summarization: Unified Text Segmentation and Segment Labeling as a Generation Task
Authors: Hakan Inan, Rashi Rungta, Yashar Mehdad
Date: 2022-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Segmentation, Text Segmentation

Text segmentation aims to divide text into contiguous, semantically coherent segments, while segment labeling deals with producing labels for each segment. Past work has shown success in tackling segmentation and labeling for documents and conversations. This has been possible with a combination of task-specific pipelines, supervised and unsupervised learning objectives. In this work, we propose a single encoder-decoder neural network that can handle long documents and conversations, trained simultaneously for both segmentation and segment labeling using only standard supervision. We successfully show a way to solve the combined task as a pure generation task, which we refer to as structured summarization. We apply the same technique to both document and conversational data, and we show state of the art performance across datasets for both segmentation and labeling, under both high- and low-resource settings. Our results establish a strong case for considering text segmentation and segment labeling as a whole, and moving towards general-purpose techniques that don't depend on domain expertise or task-specific components.
RuDSI: graph-based word sense induction dataset for Russian
Authors: Anna Aksenova, Ekaterina Gavrishina, Elisey Rykov, Andrey Kutuzov
Date: 2022-09-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING (TextGraphs) 2022 10
Tasks: Clustering, Graph Clustering, Word Sense Induction

We present RuDSI, a new benchmark for word sense induction (WSI) in Russian. The dataset was created using manual annotation and semi-automatic clustering of Word Usage Graphs (WUGs). Unlike prior WSI datasets for Russian, RuDSI is completely data-driven (based on texts from Russian National Corpus), with no external word senses imposed on annotators. Depending on the parameters of graph clustering, different derivative datasets can be produced from raw annotation. We report the performance that several baseline WSI methods obtain on RuDSI and discuss possibilities for improving these scores.
An Effective, Performant Named Entity Recognition System for Noisy Business Telephone Conversation Transcripts
Authors: Xue-Yong Fu, Cheng Chen, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Shashi Bhushan TN, Simon Corston-Oliver
Date: 2022-09-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING (WNUT) 2022 10
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

We present a simple yet effective method to train a named entity recognition (NER) model that operates on business telephone conversation transcripts that contain noise due to the nature of spoken conversation and artifacts of automatic speech recognition. We first fine-tune LUKE, a state-of-the-art Named Entity Recognition (NER) model, on a limited amount of transcripts, then use it as the teacher model to teach a smaller DistilBERT-based student model using a large amount of weakly labeled data and a small amount of human-annotated data. The model achieves high accuracy while also satisfying the practical constraints for inclusion in a commercial telephony product: realtime performance when deployed on cost-effective CPUs rather than GPUs.
Embarrassingly Easy Document-Level MT Metrics: How to Convert Any Pretrained Metric Into a Document-Level Metric
Authors: Giorgos Vernikos, Brian Thompson, Prashant Mathur, Marcello Federico
Date: 2022-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence

We hypothesize that existing sentence-level machine translation (MT) metrics become less effective when the human reference contains ambiguities. To verify this hypothesis, we present a very simple method for extending pretrained metrics to incorporate context at the document level. We apply our method to three popular metrics, BERTScore, Prism, and COMET, and to the reference free metric COMET-QE. We evaluate the extended metrics on the WMT 2021 metrics shared task using the provided MQM annotations. Our results show that the extended metrics outperform their sentence-level counterparts in about 85% of the tested conditions, when excluding results on low-quality human references. Additionally, we show that our document-level extension of COMET-QE dramatically improves its accuracy on discourse phenomena tasks, outperforming a dedicated baseline by up to 6.1%. Our experimental results support our initial hypothesis and show that a simple extension of the metrics permits them to take advantage of context to resolve ambiguities in the reference.
Local Grammar-Based Coding Revisited
Authors: Łukasz Dębowski
Date: 2022-09-27 00:00:00

In the setting of minimal local grammar-based coding, the input string is represented as a grammar with the minimal output length defined via simple symbol-by-symbol encoding. This paper discusses four contributions to this field. First, we invoke a simple harmonic bound on ranked probabilities, which reminds Zipf's law and simplifies universality proofs for minimal local grammar-based codes. Second, we refine known bounds on the vocabulary size, showing its partial power-law equivalence with mutual information and redundancy. These bounds are relevant for linking Zipf's law with the neural scaling law for large language models. Third, we develop a framework for universal codes with fixed infinite vocabularies, recasting universal coding as matching ranked patterns that are independent of empirical data. Finally, we analyze grammar-based codes with finite vocabularies being empirical rank lists, proving that that such codes are also universal. These results extend foundations of universal grammar-based coding and reaffirm previously stated connections to power laws for human language and language models.
What Are You Anxious About? Examining Subjects of Anxiety during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Authors: Lucia L. Chen, Steven R. Wilson, Sophie Lohmann, Daniela V. Negraia
Date: 2022-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Epidemiology

COVID-19 poses disproportionate mental health consequences to the public during different phases of the pandemic. We use a computational approach to capture the specific aspects that trigger an online community's anxiety about the pandemic and investigate how these aspects change over time. First, we identified nine subjects of anxiety (SOAs) in a sample of Reddit posts ($N$=86) from r/COVID19\_support using thematic analysis. Then, we quantified Reddit users' anxiety by training algorithms on a manually annotated sample ($N$=793) to automatically label the SOAs in a larger chronological sample ($N$=6,535). The nine SOAs align with items in various recently developed pandemic anxiety measurement scales. We observed that Reddit users' concerns about health risks remained high in the first eight months of the pandemic. These concerns diminished dramatically despite the surge of cases occurring later. In general, users' language disclosing the SOAs became less intense as the pandemic progressed. However, worries about mental health and the future increased steadily throughout the period covered in this study. People also tended to use more intense language to describe mental health concerns than health risks or death concerns. Our results suggest that this online group's mental health condition does not necessarily improve despite COVID-19 gradually weakening as a health threat due to appropriate countermeasures. Our system lays the groundwork for population health and epidemiology scholars to examine aspects that provoke pandemic anxiety in a timely fashion.
On the visual analytic intelligence of neural networks
Authors: Stanisław Woźniak, Hlynur Jónsson, Giovanni Cherubini, Angeliki Pantazi, Evangelos Eleftheriou
Date: 2022-09-28 00:00:00

Visual oddity task was conceived as a universal ethnic-independent analytic intelligence test for humans. Advancements in artificial intelligence led to important breakthroughs, yet competing with humans on such analytic intelligence tasks remains challenging and typically resorts to non-biologically-plausible architectures. We present a biologically realistic system that receives inputs from synthetic eye movements - saccades, and processes them with neurons incorporating dynamics of neocortical neurons. We introduce a procedurally generated visual oddity dataset to train an architecture extending conventional relational networks and our proposed system. Both approaches surpass the human accuracy, and we uncover that both share the same essential underlying mechanism of reasoning. Finally, we show that the biologically inspired network achieves superior accuracy, learns faster and requires fewer parameters than the conventional network.