pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Biologically Inspired Design Concept Generation Using Generative Pre-Trained Transformers
Authors: Qihao Zhu, Xinyu Zhang, Jianxi Luo
Date: 2022-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling

Biological systems in nature have evolved for millions of years to adapt and survive the environment. Many features they developed can be inspirational and beneficial for solving technical problems in modern industries. This leads to a specific form of design-by-analogy called bio-inspired design (BID). Although BID as a design method has been proven beneficial, the gap between biology and engineering continuously hinders designers from effectively applying the method. Therefore, we explore the recent advance of artificial intelligence (AI) for a data-driven approach to bridge the gap. This paper proposes a generative design approach based on the generative pre-trained language model (PLM) to automatically retrieve and map biological analogy and generate BID in the form of natural language. The latest generative pre-trained transformer, namely GPT-3, is used as the base PLM. Three types of design concept generators are identified and fine-tuned from the PLM according to the looseness of the problem space representation. Machine evaluators are also fine-tuned to assess the mapping relevancy between the domains within the generated BID concepts. The approach is evaluated and then employed in a real-world project of designing light-weighted flying cars during its conceptual design phase The results show our approach can generate BID concepts with good performance.
Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge
Authors: Karan Singhal, Shekoofeh Azizi, Tao Tu, S. Sara Mahdavi, Jason Wei, Hyung Won Chung, Nathan Scales, Ajay Tanwani, Heather Cole-Lewis, Stephen Pfohl, Perry Payne, Martin Seneviratne, Paul Gamble, Chris Kelly, Nathaneal Scharli, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Philip Mansfield, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Dale Webster, Greg S. Corrado, Yossi Matias, Katherine Chou, Juraj Gottweis, Nenad Tomasev, Yun Liu, Alvin Rajkomar, Joelle Barral, Christopher Semturs, Alan Karthikesalingam, Vivek Natarajan
Date: 2022-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Clinical Knowledge, MedQA, MMLU, Multiple-choice, Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA), Natural Language Understanding, Open-Ended Question Answering, Question Answering

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but the quality bar for medical and clinical applications is high. Today, attempts to assess models' clinical knowledge typically rely on automated evaluations on limited benchmarks. There is no standard to evaluate model predictions and reasoning across a breadth of tasks. To address this, we present MultiMedQA, a benchmark combining six existing open question answering datasets spanning professional medical exams, research, and consumer queries; and HealthSearchQA, a new free-response dataset of medical questions searched online. We propose a framework for human evaluation of model answers along multiple axes including factuality, precision, possible harm, and bias. In addition, we evaluate PaLM (a 540-billion parameter LLM) and its instruction-tuned variant, Flan-PaLM, on MultiMedQA. Using a combination of prompting strategies, Flan-PaLM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on every MultiMedQA multiple-choice dataset (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, MMLU clinical topics), including 67.6% accuracy on MedQA (US Medical License Exam questions), surpassing prior state-of-the-art by over 17%. However, human evaluation reveals key gaps in Flan-PaLM responses. To resolve this we introduce instruction prompt tuning, a parameter-efficient approach for aligning LLMs to new domains using a few exemplars. The resulting model, Med-PaLM, performs encouragingly, but remains inferior to clinicians. We show that comprehension, recall of knowledge, and medical reasoning improve with model scale and instruction prompt tuning, suggesting the potential utility of LLMs in medicine. Our human evaluations reveal important limitations of today's models, reinforcing the importance of both evaluation frameworks and method development in creating safe, helpful LLM models for clinical applications.
TextBox 2.0: A Text Generation Library with Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Tianyi Tang, Junyi Li, Zhipeng Chen, Yiwen Hu, Zhuohao Yu, Wenxun Dai, Zican Dong, Xiaoxue Cheng, Yuhao Wang, Wayne Xin Zhao, Jian-Yun Nie, Ji-Rong Wen
Date: 2022-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Data-to-Text Generation, Dialogue, Machine Translation, Question Answering, Question Generation, Story Generation, Style Transfer, Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems, Text Generation, Text Simplification

To facilitate research on text generation, this paper presents a comprehensive and unified library, TextBox 2.0, focusing on the use of pre-trained language models (PLMs). To be comprehensive, our library covers $13$ common text generation tasks and their corresponding $83$ datasets and further incorporates $45$ PLMs covering general, translation, Chinese, dialogue, controllable, distilled, prompting, and lightweight PLMs. We also implement $4$ efficient training strategies and provide $4$ generation objectives for pre-training new PLMs from scratch. To be unified, we design the interfaces to support the entire research pipeline (from data loading to training and evaluation), ensuring that each step can be fulfilled in a unified way. Despite the rich functionality, it is easy to use our library, either through the friendly Python API or command line. To validate the effectiveness of our library, we conduct extensive experiments and exemplify four types of research scenarios. The project is released at the link: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/TextBox.
Search, Structure, and Sentiment: A Comparative Analysis of Network Opinion in Different Query Types on Twitter
Authors: Joshua Midha
Date: 2022-12-25 00:00:00

Understanding the relationship between structure and sentiment is essential in highlighting future operations with online social networks. More specifically, within popular conversation on Twitter. This paper provides a development on the relationship between the two variables: structure, defined as the composition of a directed network, and sentiment, a quantified value of the positive/negative connotations of a conversation. We highlight thread sentiment to be inversely proportional to the strength and connectivity of a network. The second portion of this paper highlights differences in query types, specifically how the aforementioned behavior differs within four key query types. This paper focuses on topical, event-based, geographic, and individual queries as orientations which have differing behavior. Using cross-query analysis, we see that the relationship between structure and sentiment, though still inversely proportional, differs greatly across query types. We find this relationship to be the most clear within the individual queries and the least prevalent within the event-based queries. This paper provides a sociological progression in our understanding of opinion and networks, while providing a methodological advancement for future studies on similar subjects.
Linguistic Elements of Engaging Customer Service Discourse on Social Media
Authors: Sonam Singh, Anthony Rios
Date: 2022-12-24 00:00:00

Customers are rapidly turning to social media for customer support. While brand agents on these platforms are motivated and well-intentioned to help and engage with customers, their efforts are often ignored if their initial response to the customer does not match a specific tone, style, or topic the customer is aiming to receive. The length of a conversation can reflect the effort and quality of the initial response made by a brand toward collaborating and helping consumers, even when the overall sentiment of the conversation might not be very positive. Thus, through this study, we aim to bridge this critical gap in the existing literature by analyzing language's content and stylistic aspects such as expressed empathy, psycho-linguistic features, dialogue tags, and metrics for quantifying personalization of the utterances that can influence the engagement of an interaction. This paper demonstrates that we can predict engagement using initial customer and brand posts.
A Marker-based Neural Network System for Extracting Social Determinants of Health
Authors: Xingmeng Zhao, Anthony Rios
Date: 2022-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Relation Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Objective. The impact of social determinants of health (SDoH) on patients' healthcare quality and the disparity is well-known. Many SDoH items are not coded in structured forms in electronic health records. These items are often captured in free-text clinical notes, but there are limited methods for automatically extracting them. We explore a multi-stage pipeline involving named entity recognition (NER), relation classification (RC), and text classification methods to extract SDoH information from clinical notes automatically. Materials and Methods. The study uses the N2C2 Shared Task data, which was collected from two sources of clinical notes: MIMIC-III and University of Washington Harborview Medical Centers. It contains 4480 social history sections with full annotation for twelve SDoHs. In order to handle the issue of overlapping entities, we developed a novel marker-based NER model. We used it in a multi-stage pipeline to extract SDoH information from clinical notes. Results. Our marker-based system outperformed the state-of-the-art span-based models at handling overlapping entities based on the overall Micro-F1 score performance. It also achieved state-of-the-art performance compared to the shared task methods. Conclusion. The major finding of this study is that the multi-stage pipeline effectively extracts SDoH information from clinical notes. This approach can potentially improve the understanding and tracking of SDoHs in clinical settings. However, error propagation may be an issue, and further research is needed to improve the extraction of entities with complex semantic meanings and low-resource entities using external knowledge.
A Comprehensive Study of Gender Bias in Chemical Named Entity Recognition Models
Authors: Xingmeng Zhao, Ali Niazi, Anthony Rios
Date: 2022-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

Chemical named entity recognition (NER) models are used in many downstream tasks, from adverse drug reaction identification to pharmacoepidemiology. However, it is unknown whether these models work the same for everyone. Performance disparities can potentially cause harm rather than the intended good. This paper assesses gender-related performance disparities in chemical NER systems. We develop a framework for measuring gender bias in chemical NER models using synthetic data and a newly annotated corpus of over 92,405 words with self-identified gender information from Reddit. Our evaluation of multiple biomedical NER models reveals evident biases. For instance, synthetic data suggests female-related names are frequently misclassified as chemicals, especially for brand name mentions. Additionally, we observe performance disparities between female- and male-associated data in both datasets. Many systems fail to detect contraceptives such as birth control. Our findings emphasize the biases in chemical NER models, urging practitioners to account for these biases in downstream applications.
Development of a Thermodynamics of Human Cognition and Human Culture
Authors: Diederik Aerts, Jonito Aerts Arguëlles, Lester Beltran, Sandro Sozzo
Date: 2022-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction, Information Retrieval, Quantization, Retrieval, valid

Inspired by foundational studies in classical and quantum physics, and by information retrieval studies in quantum information theory, we prove that the notions of 'energy' and 'entropy' can be consistently introduced in human language and, more generally, in human culture. More explicitly, if energy is attributed to words according to their frequency of appearance in a text, then the ensuing energy levels are distributed non-classically, namely, they obey Bose-Einstein, rather than Maxwell-Boltzmann, statistics, as a consequence of the genuinely 'quantum indistinguishability' of the words that appear in the text. Secondly, the 'quantum entanglement' due to the way meaning is carried by a text reduces the (von Neumann) entropy of the words that appear in the text, a behaviour which cannot be explained within classical (thermodynamic or information) entropy. We claim here that this 'quantum-type behaviour is valid in general in human language', namely, any text is conceptually more concrete than the words composing it, which entails that the entropy of the overall text decreases. In addition, we provide examples taken from cognition, where quantization of energy appears in categorical perception, and from culture, where entities collaborate, thus 'entangle', to decrease overall entropy. We use these findings to propose the development of a new 'non-classical thermodynamic theory' for human cognition, which also covers broad parts of human culture and its artefacts and bridges concepts with quantum physics entities.
Optimizing Deep Transformers for Chinese-Thai Low-Resource Translation
Authors: Wenjie Hao, Hongfei Xu, Lingling Mu, Hongying Zan
Date: 2022-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

In this paper, we study the use of deep Transformer translation model for the CCMT 2022 Chinese-Thai low-resource machine translation task. We first explore the experiment settings (including the number of BPE merge operations, dropout probability, embedding size, etc.) for the low-resource scenario with the 6-layer Transformer. Considering that increasing the number of layers also increases the regularization on new model parameters (dropout modules are also introduced when using more layers), we adopt the highest performance setting but increase the depth of the Transformer to 24 layers to obtain improved translation quality. Our work obtains the SOTA performance in the Chinese-to-Thai translation in the constrained evaluation.
STRUDEL: Structured Dialogue Summarization for Dialogue Comprehension
Authors: Borui Wang, Chengcheng Feng, Arjun Nair, Madelyn Mao, Jai Desai, Asli Celikyilmaz, Haoran Li, Yashar Mehdad, Dragomir Radev
Date: 2022-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Dialogue Summarization, Graph Neural Network, Question Answering

Abstractive dialogue summarization has long been viewed as an important standalone task in natural language processing, but no previous work has explored the possibility of whether abstractive dialogue summarization can also be used as a means to boost an NLP system's performance on other important dialogue comprehension tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel type of dialogue summarization task - STRUctured DiaLoguE Summarization - that can help pre-trained language models to better understand dialogues and improve their performance on important dialogue comprehension tasks. We further collect human annotations of STRUDEL summaries over 400 dialogues and introduce a new STRUDEL dialogue comprehension modeling framework that integrates STRUDEL into a graph-neural-network-based dialogue reasoning module over transformer encoder language models to improve their dialogue comprehension abilities. In our empirical experiments on two important downstream dialogue comprehension tasks - dialogue question answering and dialogue response prediction - we show that our STRUDEL dialogue comprehension model can significantly improve the dialogue comprehension performance of transformer encoder language models.
Neural Transition-based Parsing of Library Deprecations
Authors: Petr Babkin, Nacho Navarro, Salwa Alamir, Sameena Shah
Date: 2022-12-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation

This paper tackles the challenging problem of automating code updates to fix deprecated API usages of open source libraries by analyzing their release notes. Our system employs a three-tier architecture: first, a web crawler service retrieves deprecation documentation from the web; then a specially built parser processes those text documents into tree-structured representations; finally, a client IDE plugin locates and fixes identified deprecated usages of libraries in a given codebase. The focus of this paper in particular is the parsing component. We introduce a novel transition-based parser in two variants: based on a classical feature engineered classifier and a neural tree encoder. To confirm the effectiveness of our method, we gathered and labeled a set of 426 API deprecations from 7 well-known Python data science libraries, and demonstrated our approach decisively outperforms a non-trivial neural machine translation baseline.
The URW-KG: a Resource for Tackling the Underrepresentation of non-Western Writers
Authors: Marco Antonio Stranisci, Giuseppe Spillo, Cataldo Musto, Viviana Patti, Rossana Damiano
Date: 2022-12-21 00:00:00

Digital media have enabled the access to unprecedented literary knowledge. Authors, readers, and scholars are now able to discover and share an increasing amount of information about books and their authors. Notwithstanding, digital archives are still unbalanced: writers from non-Western countries are less represented, and such a condition leads to the perpetration of old forms of discrimination. In this paper, we present the Under-Represented Writers Knowledge Graph (URW-KG), a resource designed to explore and possibly amend this lack of representation by gathering and mapping information about works and authors from Wikidata and three other sources: Open Library, Goodreads, and Google Books. The experiments based on KG embeddings showed that the integrated information encoded in the graph allows scholars and users to be more easily exposed to non-Western literary works and authors with respect to Wikidata alone. This opens to the development of fairer and effective tools for author discovery and exploration.
Orthogonal Series Estimation for the Ratio of Conditional Expectation Functions
Authors: Kazuhiko Shinoda, Takahiro Hoshino
Date: 2022-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference

In various fields of data science, researchers are often interested in estimating the ratio of conditional expectation functions (CEFR). Specifically in causal inference problems, it is sometimes natural to consider ratio-based treatment effects, such as odds ratios and hazard ratios, and even difference-based treatment effects are identified as CEFR in some empirically relevant settings. This chapter develops the general framework for estimation and inference on CEFR, which allows the use of flexible machine learning for infinite-dimensional nuisance parameters. In the first stage of the framework, the orthogonal signals are constructed using debiased machine learning techniques to mitigate the negative impacts of the regularization bias in the nuisance estimates on the target estimates. The signals are then combined with a novel series estimator tailored for CEFR. We derive the pointwise and uniform asymptotic results for estimation and inference on CEFR, including the validity of the Gaussian bootstrap, and provide low-level sufficient conditions to apply the proposed framework to some specific examples. We demonstrate the finite-sample performance of the series estimator constructed under the proposed framework by numerical simulations. Finally, we apply the proposed method to estimate the causal effect of the 401(k) program on household assets.
Tensor PCA for Factor Models
Authors: Andrii Babii, Eric Ghysels, Junsu Pan
Date: 2022-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Missing Values

Modern empirical analysis often relies on high-dimensional panel datasets with non-negligible cross-sectional and time-series correlations. Factor models are natural for capturing such dependencies. A tensor factor model describes the $d$-dimensional panel as a sum of a reduced rank component and an idiosyncratic noise, generalizing traditional factor models for two-dimensional panels. We consider a tensor factor model corresponding to the notion of a reduced multilinear rank of a tensor. We show that for a strong factor model, a simple tensor principal component analysis algorithm is optimal for estimating factors and loadings. When the factors are weak, the convergence rate of simple TPCA can be improved with alternating least-squares iterations. We also provide inferential results for factors and loadings and propose the first test to select the number of factors. The new tools are applied to the problem of imputing missing values in a multidimensional panel of firm characteristics.
Exact Selective Inference with Randomization
Authors: Snigdha Panigrahi, Kevin Fry, Jonathan Taylor
Date: 2022-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

We introduce a pivot for exact selective inference with randomization. Not only does our pivot lead to exact inference in Gaussian regression models, but it is also available in closed form. We reduce the problem of exact selective inference to a bivariate truncated Gaussian distribution. By doing so, we give up some power that is achieved with approximate maximum likelihood estimation in Panigrahi and Taylor (2022). Yet our pivot always produces narrower confidence intervals than a closely related data splitting procedure. We investigate the trade-off between power and exact selective inference on simulated datasets and an HIV drug resistance dataset.
Cache-Aided Multi-User Private Information Retrieval using PDAs
Authors: Kanishak Vaidya, B Sundar Rajan
Date: 2022-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

We consider the problem of cache-aided multi-user private information retrieval (MuPIR). In this problem, $N$ independent files are replicated across $S \geq 2$ non-colluding servers. There are $K$ users, each equipped with cache memory which can store $M$ files. Each user wants to retrieve a file from the servers, but the users don't want any of the servers to get any information about their demand. The user caches are filled with some arbitrary function of the files before the users decide their demands, known as the placement phase. After deciding their demands, users cooperatively send queries to the servers to retrieve their desired files privately. Upon receiving the queries, servers broadcast coded transmissions which are a function of the queries they received and the files, known as the delivery phase. Conveying queries to the servers incurs an upload cost for the users, and downloading the answers broadcasted by the servers incurs a download cost. To implement cache-aided MuPIR schemes, each file has to be split into $F$ packets. In this paper, we propose MuPIR schemes that utilize placement delivery arrays (PDAs) to characterize placement and delivery. Proposed MuPIR schemes significantly reduce subpacketization levels while slightly increasing the download cost. The proposed scheme also substantially reduces the upload cost for the users. For PDAs based on {\it Ali-Niesen} scheme for centralized coded caching, we show that our scheme is order optimal in terms of download cost. We recover the optimal single-user PIR scheme presented by {\it Tian et al.} as a special case. Our scheme also achieves optimal rate for single-user cache-aided PIR setup reported by R. Tondon.