pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Global Warming In Ghana's Major Cities Based on Statistical Analysis of NASA's POWER Over 3-Decades
Authors: Joshua Attih
Date: 2023-08-20 00:00:00

Global warming's impact on high temperatures in various parts of the world has raised concerns. This study investigates long-term temperature trends in four major Ghanaian cities representing distinct climatic zones. Using NASA's Prediction of Worldwide Energy Resource (POWER) data, statistical analyses assess local climate warming and its implications. Linear regression trend analysis and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) machine learning predict temperature variations. Land Surface Temperature (LST) profile maps generated from the RSLab platform enhance accuracy. Results reveal local warming trends, particularly in industrialized Accra. Demographic factors aren't significant. XGBoost model's low Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) scores demonstrate effectiveness in capturing temperature patterns. Wa unexpectedly has the highest mean temperature. Estimated mean temperatures for mid-2023 are: Accra 27.86{\deg}C, Kumasi 27.15{\deg}C, Kete-Krachi 29.39{\deg}C, and Wa 30.76{\deg}C. These findings improve understanding of local climate warming for policymakers and communities, aiding climate change strategies.
MLOps: A Review
Authors: Samar Wazir, Gautam Siddharth Kashyap, Parag Saxena
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00

Recently, Machine Learning (ML) has become a widely accepted method for significant progress that is rapidly evolving. Since it employs computational methods to teach machines and produce acceptable answers. The significance of the Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) methods, which can provide acceptable answers for such problems, is examined in this study. To assist in the creation of software that is simple to use, the authors research MLOps methods. To choose the best tool structure for certain projects, the authors also assess the features and operability of various MLOps methods. A total of 22 papers were assessed that attempted to apply the MLOps idea. Finally, the authors admit the scarcity of fully effective MLOps methods based on which advancements can self-regulate by limiting human engagement.
Using ChatGPT as a CAT tool in Easy Language translation
Authors: Silvana Deilen, Sergio Hernández Garrido, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Christiane Maaß
Date: 2023-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

This study sets out to investigate the feasibility of using ChatGPT to translate citizen-oriented administrative texts into German Easy Language, a simplified, controlled language variety that is adapted to the needs of people with reading impairments. We use ChatGPT to translate selected texts from websites of German public authorities using two strategies, i.e. linguistic and holistic. We analyse the quality of the generated texts based on different criteria, such as correctness, readability, and syntactic complexity. The results indicated that the generated texts are easier than the standard texts, but that they still do not fully meet the established Easy Language standards. Additionally, the content is not always rendered correctly.
BELB: a Biomedical Entity Linking Benchmark
Authors: Samuele Garda, Leon Weber-Genzel, Robert Martin, Ulf Leser
Date: 2023-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Linking

Biomedical entity linking (BEL) is the task of grounding entity mentions to a knowledge base. It plays a vital role in information extraction pipelines for the life sciences literature. We review recent work in the field and find that, as the task is absent from existing benchmarks for biomedical text mining, different studies adopt different experimental setups making comparisons based on published numbers problematic. Furthermore, neural systems are tested primarily on instances linked to the broad coverage knowledge base UMLS, leaving their performance to more specialized ones, e.g. genes or variants, understudied. We therefore developed BELB, a Biomedical Entity Linking Benchmark, providing access in a unified format to 11 corpora linked to 7 knowledge bases and spanning six entity types: gene, disease, chemical, species, cell line and variant. BELB greatly reduces preprocessing overhead in testing BEL systems on multiple corpora offering a standardized testbed for reproducible experiments. Using BELB we perform an extensive evaluation of six rule-based entity-specific systems and three recent neural approaches leveraging pre-trained language models. Our results reveal a mixed picture showing that neural approaches fail to perform consistently across entity types, highlighting the need of further studies towards entity-agnostic models.
Empowering Refugee Claimants and their Lawyers: Using Machine Learning to Examine Decision-Making in Refugee Law
Authors: Claire Barale
Date: 2023-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Our project aims at helping and supporting stakeholders in refugee status adjudications, such as lawyers, judges, governing bodies, and claimants, in order to make better decisions through data-driven intelligence and increase the understanding and transparency of the refugee application process for all involved parties. This PhD project has two primary objectives: (1) to retrieve past cases, and (2) to analyze legal decision-making processes on a dataset of Canadian cases. In this paper, we present the current state of our work, which includes a completed experiment on part (1) and ongoing efforts related to part (2). We believe that NLP-based solutions are well-suited to address these challenges, and we investigate the feasibility of automating all steps involved. In addition, we introduce a novel benchmark for future NLP research in refugee law. Our methodology aims to be inclusive to all end-users and stakeholders, with expected benefits including reduced time-to-decision, fairer and more transparent outcomes, and improved decision quality.
SONAR: Sentence-Level Multimodal and Language-Agnostic Representations
Authors: Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Holger Schwenk, Benoît Sagot
Date: 2023-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Machine Translation, Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding, Sentence Embeddings, Speech-to-Text, Speech-to-Text Translation, Translation

We introduce SONAR, a new multilingual and multimodal fixed-size sentence embedding space. Our single text encoder, covering 200 languages, substantially outperforms existing sentence embeddings such as LASER3 and LabSE on the xsim and xsim++ multilingual similarity search tasks. Speech segments can be embedded in the same SONAR embedding space using language-specific speech encoders trained in a teacher-student setting on speech transcription data. Our encoders outperform existing speech encoders on similarity search tasks. We also provide a text decoder for 200 languages, which allows us to perform text-to-text and speech-to-text machine translation, including for zero-shot language and modality combinations. Our text-to-text results are competitive compared to the state-of-the-art NLLB~1B model, despite the fixed-size bottleneck representation. Our zero-shot speech-to-text translation results compare favorably with strong supervised baselines such as Whisper.
Extracting Relational Triples Based on Graph Recursive Neural Network via Dynamic Feedback Forest Algorithm
Authors: Hongyin Zhu
Date: 2023-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Dependency Parsing, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Relation Extraction

Extracting relational triples (subject, predicate, object) from text enables the transformation of unstructured text data into structured knowledge. The named entity recognition (NER) and the relation extraction (RE) are two foundational subtasks in this knowledge generation pipeline. The integration of subtasks poses a considerable challenge due to their disparate nature. This paper presents a novel approach that converts the triple extraction task into a graph labeling problem, capitalizing on the structural information of dependency parsing and graph recursive neural networks (GRNNs). To integrate subtasks, this paper proposes a dynamic feedback forest algorithm that connects the representations of subtasks by inference operations during model training. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Convoifilter: A case study of doing cocktail party speech recognition
Authors: Thai-Binh Nguyen, Alexander Waibel
Date: 2023-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speech Enhancement, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This paper presents an end-to-end model designed to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) for a particular speaker in a crowded, noisy environment. The model utilizes a single-channel speech enhancement module that isolates the speaker's voice from background noise (ConVoiFilter) and an ASR module. The model can decrease ASR's word error rate (WER) from 80% to 26.4% through this approach. Typically, these two components are adjusted independently due to variations in data requirements. However, speech enhancement can create anomalies that decrease ASR efficiency. By implementing a joint fine-tuning strategy, the model can reduce the WER from 26.4% in separate tuning to 14.5% in joint tuning. We openly share our pre-trained model to foster further research hf.co/nguyenvulebinh/voice-filter.
MMAPS: End-to-End Multi-Grained Multi-Modal Attribute-Aware Product Summarization
Authors: Tao Chen, Ze Lin, Hui Li, Jiayi Ji, Yiyi Zhou, Guanbin Li, Rongrong Ji
Date: 2023-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Given the long textual product information and the product image, Multi-modal Product Summarization (MPS) aims to increase customers' desire to purchase by highlighting product characteristics with a short textual summary. Existing MPS methods can produce promising results. Nevertheless, they still 1) lack end-to-end product summarization, 2) lack multi-grained multi-modal modeling, and 3) lack multi-modal attribute modeling. To improve MPS, we propose an end-to-end multi-grained multi-modal attribute-aware product summarization method (MMAPS) for generating high-quality product summaries in e-commerce. MMAPS jointly models product attributes and generates product summaries. We design several multi-grained multi-modal tasks to better guide the multi-modal learning of MMAPS. Furthermore, we model product attributes based on both text and image modalities so that multi-modal product characteristics can be manifested in the generated summaries. Extensive experiments on a real large-scale Chinese e-commence dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art product summarization methods w.r.t. several summarization metrics. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/KDEGroup/MMAPS.
LEAP: Efficient and Automated Test Method for NLP Software
Authors: Mingxuan Xiao, Yan Xiao, Hai Dong, Shunhui Ji, Pengcheng Zhang
Date: 2023-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: global-optimization

The widespread adoption of DNNs in NLP software has highlighted the need for robustness. Researchers proposed various automatic testing techniques for adversarial test cases. However, existing methods suffer from two limitations: weak error-discovering capabilities, with success rates ranging from 0% to 24.6% for BERT-based NLP software, and time inefficiency, taking 177.8s to 205.28s per test case, making them challenging for time-constrained scenarios. To address these issues, this paper proposes LEAP, an automated test method that uses LEvy flight-based Adaptive Particle swarm optimization integrated with textual features to generate adversarial test cases. Specifically, we adopt Levy flight for population initialization to increase the diversity of generated test cases. We also design an inertial weight adaptive update operator to improve the efficiency of LEAP's global optimization of high-dimensional text examples and a mutation operator based on the greedy strategy to reduce the search time. We conducted a series of experiments to validate LEAP's ability to test NLP software and found that the average success rate of LEAP in generating adversarial test cases is 79.1%, which is 6.1% higher than the next best approach (PSOattack). While ensuring high success rates, LEAP significantly reduces time overhead by up to 147.6s compared to other heuristic-based methods. Additionally, the experimental results demonstrate that LEAP can generate more transferable test cases and significantly enhance the robustness of DNN-based systems.
HopPG: Self-Iterative Program Generation for Multi-Hop Question Answering over Heterogeneous Knowledge
Authors: Yingyao Wang, Yongwei Zhou, Chaoqun Duan, Junwei Bao, Tiejun Zhao
Date: 2023-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-hop Question Answering, Question Answering, Semantic Parsing

The semantic parsing-based method is an important research branch for knowledge-based question answering. It usually generates executable programs lean upon the question and then conduct them to reason answers over a knowledge base. Benefit from this inherent mechanism, it has advantages in the performance and the interpretability. However, traditional semantic parsing methods usually generate a complete program before executing it, which struggles with multi-hop question answering over heterogeneous knowledge. On one hand, generating a complete multi-hop program relies on multiple heterogeneous supporting facts, and it is difficult for generators to understand these facts simultaneously. On the other hand, this way ignores the semantic information of the intermediate answers at each hop, which is beneficial for subsequent generation. To alleviate these challenges, we propose a self-iterative framework for multi-hop program generation (HopPG) over heterogeneous knowledge, which leverages the previous execution results to retrieve supporting facts and generate subsequent programs hop by hop. We evaluate our model on MMQA-T^2, and the experimental results show that HopPG outperforms existing semantic-parsing-based baselines, especially on the multi-hop questions.
NLP-based detection of systematic anomalies among the narratives of consumer complaints
Authors: Peiheng Gao, Ning Sun, Xuefeng Wang, Chen Yang, Ričardas Zitikis
Date: 2023-08-22 00:00:00

We develop an NLP-based procedure for detecting systematic nonmeritorious consumer complaints, simply called systematic anomalies, among complaint narratives. While classification algorithms are used to detect pronounced anomalies, in the case of smaller and frequent systematic anomalies, the algorithms may falter due to a variety of reasons, including technical ones as well as natural limitations of human analysts. Therefore, as the next step after classification, we convert the complaint narratives into quantitative data, which are then analyzed using an algorithm for detecting systematic anomalies. We illustrate the entire procedure using complaint narratives from the Consumer Complaint Database of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Towards Objective Evaluation of Socially-Situated Conversational Robots: Assessing Human-Likeness through Multimodal User Behaviors
Authors: Koji Inoue, Divesh Lala, Keiko Ochi, Tatsuya Kawahara, Gabriel Skantze
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00

This paper tackles the challenging task of evaluating socially situated conversational robots and presents a novel objective evaluation approach that relies on multimodal user behaviors. In this study, our main focus is on assessing the human-likeness of the robot as the primary evaluation metric. While previous research often relied on subjective evaluations from users, our approach aims to evaluate the robot's human-likeness based on observable user behaviors indirectly, thus enhancing objectivity and reproducibility. To begin, we created an annotated dataset of human-likeness scores, utilizing user behaviors found in an attentive listening dialogue corpus. We then conducted an analysis to determine the correlation between multimodal user behaviors and human-likeness scores, demonstrating the feasibility of our proposed behavior-based evaluation method.
Indonesian Automatic Speech Recognition with XLSR-53
Authors: Panji Arisaputra, Amalia Zahra
Date: 2023-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Language Modeling, Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This study focuses on the development of Indonesian Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) using the XLSR-53 pre-trained model, the XLSR stands for cross-lingual speech representations. The use of this XLSR-53 pre-trained model is to significantly reduce the amount of training data in non-English languages required to achieve a competitive Word Error Rate (WER). The total amount of data used in this study is 24 hours, 18 minutes, and 1 second: (1) TITML-IDN 14 hours and 31 minutes; (2) Magic Data 3 hours and 33 minutes; and (3) Common Voice 6 hours, 14 minutes, and 1 second. With a WER of 20%, the model built in this study can compete with similar models using the Common Voice dataset split test. WER can be decreased by around 8% using a language model, resulted in WER from 20% to 12%. Thus, the results of this study have succeeded in perfecting previous research in contributing to the creation of a better Indonesian ASR with a smaller amount of data.
Self-Deception: Reverse Penetrating the Semantic Firewall of Large Language Models
Authors: Zhenhua Wang, Wei Xie, Kai Chen, Baosheng Wang, Zhiwen Gui, Enze Wang
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: LLM Jailbreak

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have emerged with astonishing capabilities approaching artificial general intelligence. While providing convenience for various societal needs, LLMs have also lowered the cost of generating harmful content. Consequently, LLM developers have deployed semantic-level defenses to recognize and reject prompts that may lead to inappropriate content. Unfortunately, these defenses are not foolproof, and some attackers have crafted "jailbreak" prompts that temporarily hypnotize the LLM into forgetting content defense rules and answering any improper questions. To date, there is no clear explanation of the principles behind these semantic-level attacks and defenses in both industry and academia. This paper investigates the LLM jailbreak problem and proposes an automatic jailbreak method for the first time. We propose the concept of a semantic firewall and provide three technical implementation approaches. Inspired by the attack that penetrates traditional firewalls through reverse tunnels, we introduce a "self-deception" attack that can bypass the semantic firewall by inducing LLM to generate prompts that facilitate jailbreak. We generated a total of 2,520 attack payloads in six languages (English, Russian, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic) across seven virtual scenarios, targeting the three most common types of violations: violence, hate, and pornography. The experiment was conducted on two models, namely the GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4. The success rates on the two models were 86.2% and 67%, while the failure rates were 4.7% and 2.2%, respectively. This highlighted the effectiveness of the proposed attack method. All experimental code and raw data will be released as open-source to inspire future research. We believe that manipulating AI behavior through carefully crafted prompts will become an important research direction in the future.
Leveraging Explainable AI to Analyze Researchers' Aspect-Based Sentiment about ChatGPT
Authors: Shilpa Lakhanpal, Ajay Gupta, Rajeev Agrawal
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, Ethics, Sentiment Analysis

The groundbreaking invention of ChatGPT has triggered enormous discussion among users across all fields and domains. Among celebration around its various advantages, questions have been raised with regards to its correctness and ethics of its use. Efforts are already underway towards capturing user sentiments around it. But it begs the question as to how the research community is analyzing ChatGPT with regards to various aspects of its usage. It is this sentiment of the researchers that we analyze in our work. Since Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis has usually only been applied on a few datasets, it gives limited success and that too only on short text data. We propose a methodology that uses Explainable AI to facilitate such analysis on research data. Our technique presents valuable insights into extending the state of the art of Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis on newer datasets, where such analysis is not hampered by the length of the text data.
Neuromorphic Hebbian learning with magnetic tunnel junction synapses
Authors: Peng Zhou, Alexander J. Edwards, Frederick B. Mancoff, Sanjeev Aggarwal, Stephen K. Heinrich-Barna, Joseph S. Friedman
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Handwritten Digit Recognition

Neuromorphic computing aims to mimic both the function and structure of biological neural networks to provide artificial intelligence with extreme efficiency. Conventional approaches store synaptic weights in non-volatile memory devices with analog resistance states, permitting in-memory computation of neural network operations while avoiding the costs associated with transferring synaptic weights from a memory array. However, the use of analog resistance states for storing weights in neuromorphic systems is impeded by stochastic writing, weights drifting over time through stochastic processes, and limited endurance that reduces the precision of synapse weights. Here we propose and experimentally demonstrate neuromorphic networks that provide high-accuracy inference thanks to the binary resistance states of magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs), while leveraging the analog nature of their stochastic spin-transfer torque (STT) switching for unsupervised Hebbian learning. We performed the first experimental demonstration of a neuromorphic network directly implemented with MTJ synapses, for both inference and spike-timing-dependent plasticity learning. We also demonstrated through simulation that the proposed system for unsupervised Hebbian learning with stochastic STT-MTJ synapses can achieve competitive accuracies for MNIST handwritten digit recognition. By appropriately applying neuromorphic principles through hardware-aware design, the proposed STT-MTJ neuromorphic learning networks provide a pathway toward artificial intelligence hardware that learns autonomously with extreme efficiency.
Forecasting inflation using disaggregates and machine learning
Authors: Gilberto Boaretto, Marcelo C. Medeiros
Date: 2023-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

This paper examines the effectiveness of several forecasting methods for predicting inflation, focusing on aggregating disaggregated forecasts - also known in the literature as the bottom-up approach. Taking the Brazilian case as an application, we consider different disaggregation levels for inflation and employ a range of traditional time series techniques as well as linear and nonlinear machine learning (ML) models to deal with a larger number of predictors. For many forecast horizons, the aggregation of disaggregated forecasts performs just as well survey-based expectations and models that generate forecasts using the aggregate directly. Overall, ML methods outperform traditional time series models in predictive accuracy, with outstanding performance in forecasting disaggregates. Our results reinforce the benefits of using models in a data-rich environment for inflation forecasting, including aggregating disaggregated forecasts from ML techniques, mainly during volatile periods. Starting from the COVID-19 pandemic, the random forest model based on both aggregate and disaggregated inflation achieves remarkable predictive performance at intermediate and longer horizons.