pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SkillNet-X: A Multilingual Multitask Model with Sparsely Activated Skills
Authors: Zhangyin Feng, Yong Dai, Fan Zhang, Duyu Tang, Xiaocheng Feng, Shuangzhi Wu, Bing Qin, Yunbo Cao, Shuming Shi
Date: 2023-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts, Natural Language Understanding

Traditional multitask learning methods basically can only exploit common knowledge in task- or language-wise, which lose either cross-language or cross-task knowledge. This paper proposes a general multilingual multitask model, named SkillNet-X, which enables a single model to tackle many different tasks from different languages. To this end, we define several language-specific skills and task-specific skills, each of which corresponds to a skill module. SkillNet-X sparsely activates parts of the skill modules which are relevant either to the target task or the target language. Acting as knowledge transit hubs, skill modules are capable of absorbing task-related knowledge and language-related knowledge consecutively. Based on Transformer, we modify the multi-head attention layer and the feed forward network layer to accommodate skill modules. We evaluate SkillNet-X on eleven natural language understanding datasets in four languages. Results show that SkillNet-X performs better than task-specific baselines and two multitask learning baselines (i.e., dense joint model and Mixture-of-Experts model). Furthermore, skill pre-training further improves the performance of SkillNet-X on almost all datasets. To investigate the generalization of our model, we conduct experiments on two new tasks and find that SkillNet-X significantly outperforms baselines.
Generative User-Experience Research for Developing Domain-specific Natural Language Processing Applications
Authors: Anastasia Zhukova, Lukas von Sperl, Christian E. Matt, Bela Gipp
Date: 2023-06-28 00:00:00

User experience (UX) is a part of human-computer interaction (HCI) research and focuses on increasing intuitiveness, transparency, simplicity, and trust for the system users. Most UX research for machine learning (ML) or natural language processing (NLP) focuses on a data-driven methodology. It engages domain users mainly for usability evaluation. Moreover, more typical UX methods tailor the systems towards user usability, unlike learning about the user needs first. This paper proposes a new methodology for integrating generative UX research into developing domain NLP applications. Generative UX research employs domain users at the initial stages of prototype development, i.e., ideation and concept evaluation, and the last stage for evaluating system usefulness and user utility. The methodology emerged from and is evaluated on a case study about the full-cycle prototype development of a domain-specific semantic search for daily operations in the process industry. A key finding of our case study is that involving domain experts increases their interest and trust in the final NLP application. The combined UX+NLP research of the proposed method efficiently considers data- and user-driven opportunities and constraints, which can be crucial for developing NLP applications.
Is ChatGPT a Biomedical Expert? -- Exploring the Zero-Shot Performance of Current GPT Models in Biomedical Tasks
Authors: Samy Ateia, Udo Kruschwitz
Date: 2023-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Answer Generation, Retrieval, Zero-Shot Learning

We assessed the performance of commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 on tasks from the 2023 BioASQ challenge. In Task 11b Phase B, which is focused on answer generation, both models demonstrated competitive abilities with leading systems. Remarkably, they achieved this with simple zero-shot learning, grounded with relevant snippets. Even without relevant snippets, their performance was decent, though not on par with the best systems. Interestingly, the older and cheaper GPT-3.5-Turbo system was able to compete with GPT-4 in the grounded Q&A setting on factoid and list answers. In Task 11b Phase A, focusing on retrieval, query expansion through zero-shot learning improved performance, but the models fell short compared to other systems. The code needed to rerun these experiments is available through GitHub.
Chatlaw: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Legal Assistant with Knowledge Graph Enhanced Mixture-of-Experts Large Language Model
Authors: Jiaxi Cui, Munan Ning, Zongjian Li, Bohua Chen, Yang Yan, Hao Li, Bin Ling, Yonghong Tian, Li Yuan
Date: 2023-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Knowledge Graphs, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Mixture-of-Experts, Retrieval

AI legal assistants based on Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide accessible legal consulting services, but the hallucination problem poses potential legal risks. This paper presents Chatlaw, an innovative legal assistant utilizing a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model and a multi-agent system to enhance the reliability and accuracy of AI-driven legal services. By integrating knowledge graphs with artificial screening, we construct a high-quality legal dataset to train the MoE model. This model utilizes different experts to address various legal issues, optimizing the accuracy of legal responses. Additionally, Standardized Operating Procedures (SOP), modeled after real law firm workflows, significantly reduce errors and hallucinations in legal services. Our MoE model outperforms GPT-4 in the Lawbench and Unified Qualification Exam for Legal Professionals by 7.73% in accuracy and 11 points, respectively, and also surpasses other models in multiple dimensions during real-case consultations, demonstrating our robust capability for legal consultation.
Long-term Conversation Analysis: Exploring Utility and Privacy
Authors: Francesco Nespoli, Jule Pohlhausen, Patrick A. Naylor, Joerg Bitzer
Date: 2023-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Activity Detection, Dimensionality Reduction, Privacy Preserving, Speaker anonymization, speaker-diarization, Speaker Diarization, Speaker Verification, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

The analysis of conversations recorded in everyday life requires privacy protection. In this contribution, we explore a privacy-preserving feature extraction method based on input feature dimension reduction, spectral smoothing and the low-cost speaker anonymization technique based on McAdams coefficient. We assess the utility of the feature extraction methods with a voice activity detection and a speaker diarization system, while privacy protection is determined with a speech recognition and a speaker verification model. We show that the combination of McAdams coefficient and spectral smoothing maintains the utility while improving privacy.
What Sentiment and Fun Facts We Learnt Before FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Using Twitter and AI
Authors: James She, Kamilla Swart-Arries, Mohammad Belal, Simon Wong
Date: 2023-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Opinion Mining, Sentiment Analysis

Twitter is a social media platform bridging most countries and allows real-time news discovery. Since the tweets on Twitter are usually short and express public feelings, thus provide a source for opinion mining and sentiment analysis for global events. This paper proposed an effective solution, in providing a sentiment on tweets related to the FIFA World Cup. At least 130k tweets, as the first in the community, are collected and implemented as a dataset to evaluate the performance of the proposed machine learning solution. These tweets are collected with the related hashtags and keywords of the Qatar World Cup 2022. The Vader algorithm is used in this paper for sentiment analysis. Through the machine learning method and collected Twitter tweets, we discovered the sentiments and fun facts of several aspects important to the period before the World Cup. The result shows people are positive to the opening of the World Cup.
Exploring Spatial-Temporal Variations of Public Discourse on Social Media: A Case Study on the First Wave of the Coronavirus Pandemic in Italy
Authors: Anslow Michael, Galletti Martina
Date: 2023-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

This paper proposes a methodology for exploring how linguistic behaviour on social media can be used to explore societal reactions to important events such as those that transpired during the SARS CoV2 pandemic. In particular, where spatial and temporal aspects of events are important features. Our methodology consists of grounding spatial-temporal categories in tweet usage trends using time-series analysis and clustering. Salient terms in each category were then identified through qualitative comparative analysis based on scaled f-scores aggregated into hand-coded categories. To exemplify this approach, we conducted a case study on the first wave of the coronavirus in Italy. We used our proposed methodology to explore existing psychological observations which claimed that physical distance from events affects what is communicated about them. We confirmed these findings by showing that the epicentre of the disease and peripheral regions correspond to clear time-series clusters and that those living in the epicentre of the SARS CoV2 outbreak were more focused on solidarity and policy than those from more peripheral regions. Furthermore, we also found that temporal categories corresponded closely to policy changes during the handling of the pandemic.
Accelerating Transducers through Adjacent Token Merging
Authors: Yuang Li, Yu Wu, Jinyu Li, Shujie Liu
Date: 2023-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), GPU, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Recent end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often utilize a Transformer-based acoustic encoder that generates embedding at a high frame rate. However, this design is inefficient, particularly for long speech signals due to the quadratic computation of self-attention. To address this, we propose a new method, Adjacent Token Merging (A-ToMe), which gradually combines adjacent tokens with high similarity scores between their key values. In this way, the total time step could be reduced, and the inference of both the encoder and joint network is accelerated. Experiments on LibriSpeech show that our method can reduce 57% of tokens and improve the inference speed on GPU by 70% without any notable loss of accuracy. Additionally, we demonstrate that A-ToMe is also an effective solution to reduce tokens in long-form ASR, where the input speech consists of multiple utterances.
Prompting Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Domain Adaptation in Speech Recognition
Authors: Yuang Li, Yu Wu, Jinyu Li, Shujie Liu
Date: 2023-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Domain Adaptation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Reranking, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

The integration of Language Models (LMs) has proven to be an effective way to address domain shifts in speech recognition. However, these approaches usually require a significant amount of target domain text data for the training of LMs. Different from these methods, in this work, with only a domain-specific text prompt, we propose two zero-shot ASR domain adaptation methods using LLaMA, a 7-billion-parameter large language model (LLM). LLM is used in two ways: 1) second-pass rescoring: reranking N-best hypotheses of a given ASR system with LLaMA; 2) deep LLM-fusion: incorporating LLM into the decoder of an encoder-decoder based ASR system. Experiments show that, with only one domain prompt, both methods can effectively reduce word error rates (WER) on out-of-domain TedLium-2 and SPGISpeech datasets. Especially, the deep LLM-fusion has the advantage of better recall of entity and out-of-vocabulary words.
Sentence-to-Label Generation Framework for Multi-task Learning of Japanese Sentence Classification and Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Chengguang Gan, Qinghao Zhang, Tatsunori Mori
Date: 2023-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Sentence, Sentence Classification

Information extraction(IE) is a crucial subfield within natural language processing. In this study, we introduce a Sentence Classification and Named Entity Recognition Multi-task (SCNM) approach that combines Sentence Classification (SC) and Named Entity Recognition (NER). We develop a Sentence-to-Label Generation (SLG) framework for SCNM and construct a Wikipedia dataset containing both SC and NER. Using a format converter, we unify input formats and employ a generative model to generate SC-labels, NER-labels, and associated text segments. We propose a Constraint Mechanism (CM) to improve generated format accuracy. Our results show SC accuracy increased by 1.13 points and NER by 1.06 points in SCNM compared to standalone tasks, with CM raising format accuracy from 63.61 to 100. The findings indicate mutual reinforcement effects between SC and NER, and integration enhances both tasks' performance.
Confidence-Calibrated Ensemble Dense Phrase Retrieval
Authors: William Yang, Noah Bergam, Arnav Jain, Nima Sheikhoslami
Date: 2023-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Passage Retrieval, Retrieval, Sentence

In this paper, we consider the extent to which the transformer-based Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) algorithm, developed by (Karpukhin et. al. 2020), can be optimized without further pre-training. Our method involves two particular insights: we apply the DPR context encoder at various phrase lengths (e.g. one-sentence versus five-sentence segments), and we take a confidence-calibrated ensemble prediction over all of these different segmentations. This somewhat exhaustive approach achieves start-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets such as Google NQ and SQuAD. We also apply our method to domain-specific datasets, and the results suggest how different granularities are optimal for different domains
Identity Construction in a Misogynist Incels Forum
Authors: Michael Miller Yoder, Chloe Perry, David West Brown, Kathleen M. Carley, Meredith L. Pruden
Date: 2023-06-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Hate Speech Detection

Online communities of involuntary celibates (incels) are a prominent source of misogynist hate speech. In this paper, we use quantitative text and network analysis approaches to examine how identity groups are discussed on incels-dot-is, the largest black-pilled incels forum. We find that this community produces a wide range of novel identity terms and, while terms for women are most common, mentions of other minoritized identities are increasing. An analysis of the associations made with identity groups suggests an essentialist ideology where physical appearance, as well as gender and racial hierarchies, determine human value. We discuss implications for research into automated misogynist hate speech detection.
DMNER: Biomedical Entity Recognition by Detection and Matching
Authors: Junyi Bian, Rongze Jiang, Weiqi Zhai, Tianyang Huang, Hong Zhou, Shanfeng Zhu
Date: 2023-06-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Boundary Detection, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, NER

Biomedical named entity recognition (BNER) serves as the foundation for numerous biomedical text mining tasks. Unlike general NER, BNER require a comprehensive grasp of the domain, and incorporating external knowledge beyond training data poses a significant challenge. In this study, we propose a novel BNER framework called DMNER. By leveraging existing entity representation models SAPBERT, we tackle BNER as a two-step process: entity boundary detection and biomedical entity matching. DMNER exhibits applicability across multiple NER scenarios: 1) In supervised NER, we observe that DMNER effectively rectifies the output of baseline NER models, thereby further enhancing performance. 2) In distantly supervised NER, combining MRC and AutoNER as span boundary detectors enables DMNER to achieve satisfactory results. 3) For training NER by merging multiple datasets, we adopt a framework similar to DS-NER but additionally leverage ChatGPT to obtain high-quality phrases in the training. Through extensive experiments conducted on 10 benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of DMNER.
A Weakly Supervised Classifier and Dataset of White Supremacist Language
Authors: Michael Miller Yoder, Ahmad Diab, David West Brown, Kathleen M. Carley
Date: 2023-06-27 00:00:00

We present a dataset and classifier for detecting the language of white supremacist extremism, a growing issue in online hate speech. Our weakly supervised classifier is trained on large datasets of text from explicitly white supremacist domains paired with neutral and anti-racist data from similar domains. We demonstrate that this approach improves generalization performance to new domains. Incorporating anti-racist texts as counterexamples to white supremacist language mitigates bias.
Efficient and Multiply Robust Risk Estimation under General Forms of Dataset Shift
Authors: Hongxiang Qiu, Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen, Edgar Dobriban
Date: 2023-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Transfer Learning

Statistical machine learning methods often face the challenge of limited data available from the population of interest. One remedy is to leverage data from auxiliary source populations, which share some conditional distributions or are linked in other ways with the target domain. Techniques leveraging such \emph{dataset shift} conditions are known as \emph{domain adaptation} or \emph{transfer learning}. Despite extensive literature on dataset shift, limited works address how to efficiently use the auxiliary populations to improve the accuracy of risk evaluation for a given machine learning task in the target population. In this paper, we study the general problem of efficiently estimating target population risk under various dataset shift conditions, leveraging semiparametric efficiency theory. We consider a general class of dataset shift conditions, which includes three popular conditions -- covariate, label and concept shift -- as special cases. We allow for partially non-overlapping support between the source and target populations. We develop efficient and multiply robust estimators along with a straightforward specification test of these dataset shift conditions. We also derive efficiency bounds for two other dataset shift conditions, posterior drift and location-scale shift. Simulation studies support the efficiency gains due to leveraging plausible dataset shift conditions.
Spatiotemporal Besov Priors for Bayesian Inverse Problems
Authors: Shiwei Lan, Mirjeta Pasha, Shuyi Li, Weining Shen
Date: 2023-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: CT Reconstruction, Dynamic Reconstruction, Gaussian Processes, Uncertainty Quantification

Fast development in science and technology has driven the need for proper statistical tools to capture special data features such as abrupt changes or sharp contrast. Many inverse problems in data science require spatiotemporal solutions derived from a sequence of time-dependent objects with these spatial features, e.g., dynamic reconstruction of computerized tomography (CT) images with edges. Conventional methods based on Gaussian processes (GP) often fall short in providing satisfactory solutions since they tend to offer over-smooth priors. Recently, the Besov process (BP), defined by wavelet expansions with random coefficients, has emerged as a more suitable prior for Bayesian inverse problems of this nature. While BP excels in handling spatial inhomogeneity, it does not automatically incorporate temporal correlation inherited in the dynamically changing objects. In this paper, we generalize BP to a novel spatiotemporal Besov process (STBP) by replacing the random coefficients in the series expansion with stochastic time functions as Q-exponential process (Q-EP) which governs the temporal correlation structure. We thoroughly investigate the mathematical and statistical properties of STBP. A white-noise representation of STBP is also proposed to facilitate the inference. Simulations, two limited-angle CT reconstruction examples and a highly non-linear inverse problem involving Navier-Stokes equation are used to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed STBP in preserving spatial features while accounting for temporal changes compared with the classic STGP and a time-uncorrelated approach.
A Meta-Learning Method for Estimation of Causal Excursion Effects to Assess Time-Varying Moderation
Authors: Jieru Shi, Walter Dempsey
Date: 2023-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning

Advances in wearable technologies and health interventions delivered by smartphones have greatly increased the accessibility of mobile health (mHealth) interventions. Micro-randomized trials (MRTs) are designed to assess the effectiveness of the mHealth intervention and introduce a novel class of causal estimands called "causal excursion effects." These estimands enable the evaluation of how intervention effects change over time and are influenced by individual characteristics or context. Existing methods for analyzing causal excursion effects assume known randomization probabilities, complete observations, and a linear nuisance function with prespecified features of the high dimensional observed history. However, in complex mobile systems, these assumptions often fall short: randomization probabilities can be uncertain, observations may be incomplete, and the granularity of mHealth data makes linear modeling difficult. To address this issue, we propose a flexible and doubly robust inferential procedure, called "DR-WCLS," for estimating causal excursion effects from a meta-learner perspective. We present the bidirectional asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators and compare them with existing methods both theoretically and through extensive simulations. The results show a consistent and more efficient estimate, even with missing observations or uncertain treatment randomization probabilities. Finally, the practical utility of the proposed methods is demonstrated by analyzing data from a multiinstitution cohort of first-year medical residents in the United States (NeCamp et al., 2020).
Non-parametric online market regime detection and regime clustering for multidimensional and path-dependent data structures
Authors: Zacharia Issa, Blanka Horvath
Date: 2023-06-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Outlier Detection

In this work we present a non-parametric online market regime detection method for multidimensional data structures using a path-wise two-sample test derived from a maximum mean discrepancy-based similarity metric on path space that uses rough path signatures as a feature map. The latter similarity metric has been developed and applied as a discriminator in recent generative models for small data environments, and has been optimised here to the setting where the size of new incoming data is particularly small, for faster reactivity. On the same principles, we also present a path-wise method for regime clustering which extends our previous work. The presented regime clustering techniques were designed as ex-ante market analysis tools that can identify periods of approximatively similar market activity, but the new results also apply to path-wise, high dimensional-, and to non-Markovian settings as well as to data structures that exhibit autocorrelation. We demonstrate our clustering tools on easily verifiable synthetic datasets of increasing complexity, and also show how the outlined regime detection techniques can be used as fast on-line automatic regime change detectors or as outlier detection tools, including a fully automated pipeline. Finally, we apply the fine-tuned algorithms to real-world historical data including high-dimensional baskets of equities and the recent price evolution of crypto assets, and we show that our methodology swiftly and accurately indicated historical periods of market turmoil.