pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Synthesizing Human Gaze Feedback for Improved NLP Performance
Authors: Varun Khurana, Yaman Kumar Singla, Nora Hollenstein, Rajesh Kumar, Balaji Krishnamurthy
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00

Integrating human feedback in models can improve the performance of natural language processing (NLP) models. Feedback can be either explicit (e.g. ranking used in training language models) or implicit (e.g. using human cognitive signals in the form of eyetracking). Prior eye tracking and NLP research reveal that cognitive processes, such as human scanpaths, gleaned from human gaze patterns aid in the understanding and performance of NLP models. However, the collection of real eyetracking data for NLP tasks is challenging due to the requirement of expensive and precise equipment coupled with privacy invasion issues. To address this challenge, we propose ScanTextGAN, a novel model for generating human scanpaths over text. We show that ScanTextGAN-generated scanpaths can approximate meaningful cognitive signals in human gaze patterns. We include synthetically generated scanpaths in four popular NLP tasks spanning six different datasets as proof of concept and show that the models augmented with generated scanpaths improve the performance of all downstream NLP tasks.
MTTM: Metamorphic Testing for Textual Content Moderation Software
Authors: Wenxuan Wang, Jen-tse Huang, Weibin Wu, Jianping Zhang, Yizhan Huang, Shuqing Li, Pinjia He, Michael Lyu
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

The exponential growth of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook has revolutionized textual communication and textual content publication in human society. However, they have been increasingly exploited to propagate toxic content, such as hate speech, malicious advertisement, and pornography, which can lead to highly negative impacts (e.g., harmful effects on teen mental health). Researchers and practitioners have been enthusiastically developing and extensively deploying textual content moderation software to address this problem. However, we find that malicious users can evade moderation by changing only a few words in the toxic content. Moreover, modern content moderation software performance against malicious inputs remains underexplored. To this end, we propose MTTM, a Metamorphic Testing framework for Textual content Moderation software. Specifically, we conduct a pilot study on 2,000 text messages collected from real users and summarize eleven metamorphic relations across three perturbation levels: character, word, and sentence. MTTM employs these metamorphic relations on toxic textual contents to generate test cases, which are still toxic yet likely to evade moderation. In our evaluation, we employ MTTM to test three commercial textual content moderation software and two state-of-the-art moderation algorithms against three kinds of toxic content. The results show that MTTM achieves up to 83.9%, 51%, and 82.5% error finding rates (EFR) when testing commercial moderation software provided by Google, Baidu, and Huawei, respectively, and it obtains up to 91.2% EFR when testing the state-of-the-art algorithms from the academy. In addition, we leverage the test cases generated by MTTM to retrain the model we explored, which largely improves model robustness (0% to 5.9% EFR) while maintaining the accuracy on the original test set.
Dialectograms: Machine Learning Differences between Discursive Communities
Authors: Thyge Enggaard, August Lohse, Morten Axel Pedersen, Sune Lehmann
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings

Word embeddings provide an unsupervised way to understand differences in word usage between discursive communities. A number of recent papers have focused on identifying words that are used differently by two or more communities. But word embeddings are complex, high-dimensional spaces and a focus on identifying differences only captures a fraction of their richness. Here, we take a step towards leveraging the richness of the full embedding space, by using word embeddings to map out how words are used differently. Specifically, we describe the construction of dialectograms, an unsupervised way to visually explore the characteristic ways in which each community use a focal word. Based on these dialectograms, we provide a new measure of the degree to which words are used differently that overcomes the tendency for existing measures to pick out low frequent or polysemous words. We apply our methods to explore the discourses of two US political subreddits and show how our methods identify stark affective polarisation of politicians and political entities, differences in the assessment of proper political action as well as disagreement about whether certain issues require political intervention at all.
Metaphor Detection with Effective Context Denoising
Authors: Shun Wang, Yucheng Li, Chenghua Lin, Loïc Barrault, Frank Guerin
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

We propose a novel RoBERTa-based model, RoPPT, which introduces a target-oriented parse tree structure in metaphor detection. Compared to existing models, RoPPT focuses on semantically relevant information and achieves the state-of-the-art on several main metaphor datasets. We also compare our approach against several popular denoising and pruning methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in context denoising. Our code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/MajiBear000/RoPPT
ASDF: A Differential Testing Framework for Automatic Speech Recognition Systems
Authors: Daniel Hao Xian Yuen, Andrew Yong Chen Pang, Zhou Yang, Chun Yong Chong, Mei Kuan Lim, David Lo
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Recent years have witnessed wider adoption of Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) techniques in various domains. Consequently, evaluating and enhancing the quality of ASR systems is of great importance. This paper proposes ASDF, an Automated Speech Recognition Differential Testing Framework for testing ASR systems. ASDF extends an existing ASR testing tool, the CrossASR++, which synthesizes test cases from a text corpus. However, CrossASR++ fails to make use of the text corpus efficiently and provides limited information on how the failed test cases can improve ASR systems. To address these limitations, our tool incorporates two novel features: (1) a text transformation module to boost the number of generated test cases and uncover more errors in ASR systems and (2) a phonetic analysis module to identify on which phonemes the ASR system tend to produce errors. ASDF generates more high-quality test cases by applying various text transformation methods (e.g., change tense) to the texts in failed test cases. By doing so, ASDF can utilize a small text corpus to generate a large number of audio test cases, something which CrossASR++ is not capable of. In addition, ASDF implements more metrics to evaluate the performance of ASR systems from multiple perspectives. ASDF performs phonetic analysis on the identified failed test cases to identify the phonemes that ASR systems tend to transcribe incorrectly, providing useful information for developers to improve ASR systems. The demonstration video of our tool is made online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzVwfc3h9As. The implementation is available at https://github.com/danielyuenhx/asdf-differential-testing.
NapSS: Paragraph-level Medical Text Simplification via Narrative Prompting and Sentence-matching Summarization
Authors: Junru Lu, Jiazheng Li, Byron C. Wallace, Yulan He, Gabriele Pergola
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentence, Text Simplification

Accessing medical literature is difficult for laypeople as the content is written for specialists and contains medical jargon. Automated text simplification methods offer a potential means to address this issue. In this work, we propose a summarize-then-simplify two-stage strategy, which we call NapSS, identifying the relevant content to simplify while ensuring that the original narrative flow is preserved. In this approach, we first generate reference summaries via sentence matching between the original and the simplified abstracts. These summaries are then used to train an extractive summarizer, learning the most relevant content to be simplified. Then, to ensure the narrative consistency of the simplified text, we synthesize auxiliary narrative prompts combining key phrases derived from the syntactical analyses of the original text. Our model achieves results significantly better than the seq2seq baseline on an English medical corpus, yielding 3%~4% absolute improvements in terms of lexical similarity, and providing a further 1.1% improvement of SARI score when combined with the baseline. We also highlight shortcomings of existing evaluation methods, and introduce new metrics that take into account both lexical and high-level semantic similarity. A human evaluation conducted on a random sample of the test set further establishes the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Codes and models are released here: https://github.com/LuJunru/NapSS.
Distillation of encoder-decoder transformers for sequence labelling
Authors: Marco Farina, Duccio Pappadopulo, Anant Gupta, Leslie Huang, Ozan İrsoy, Thamar Solorio
Date: 2023-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Few-Shot Learning, Hallucination

Driven by encouraging results on a wide range of tasks, the field of NLP is experiencing an accelerated race to develop bigger language models. This race for bigger models has also underscored the need to continue the pursuit of practical distillation approaches that can leverage the knowledge acquired by these big models in a compute-efficient manner. Having this goal in mind, we build on recent work to propose a hallucination-free framework for sequence tagging that is especially suited for distillation. We show empirical results of new state-of-the-art performance across multiple sequence labelling datasets and validate the usefulness of this framework for distilling a large model in a few-shot learning scenario.
POSGen: Personalized Opening Sentence Generation for Online Insurance Sales
Authors: Yu Li, Yi Zhang, Weijia Wu, Zimu Zhou, Qiang Li
Date: 2023-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Management, Sentence, Text Generation

The insurance industry is shifting their sales mode from offline to online, in expectation to reach massive potential customers in the digitization era. Due to the complexity and the nature of insurance products, a cost-effective online sales solution is to exploit chatbot AI to raise customers' attention and pass those with interests to human agents for further sales. For high response and conversion rates of customers, it is crucial for the chatbot to initiate a conversation with personalized opening sentences, which are generated with user-specific topic selection and ordering. Such personalized opening sentence generation is challenging because (i) there are limited historical samples for conversation topic recommendation in online insurance sales and (ii) existing text generation schemes often fail to support customized topic ordering based on user preferences. We design POSGen, a personalized opening sentence generation scheme dedicated for online insurance sales. It transfers user embeddings learned from auxiliary online user behaviours to enhance conversation topic recommendation, and exploits a context management unit to arrange the recommended topics in user-specific ordering for opening sentence generation. POSGen is deployed on a real-world online insurance platform. It achieves 2.33x total insurance premium improvement through a two-month global test.
Ordered Memory Baselines
Authors: Daniel Borisov, Matthew D'Iorio, Jeffrey Hyacinthe
Date: 2023-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Sentiment Analysis

Natural language semantics can be modeled using the phrase-structured model, which can be represented using a tree-type architecture. As a result, recent advances in natural language processing have been made utilising recursive neural networks using memory models that allow them to infer tree-type representations of the input sentence sequence. These new tree models have allowed for improvements in sentiment analysis and semantic recognition. Here we review the Ordered Memory model proposed by Shen et al. (2019) at the NeurIPS 2019 conference, and try to either create baselines that can perform better or create simpler models that can perform equally as well. We found that the Ordered Memory model performs on par with the state-of-the-art models used in tree-type modelling, and performs better than simplified baselines that require fewer parameters.
Applying BERT and ChatGPT for Sentiment Analysis of Lyme Disease in Scientific Literature
Authors: Teo Susnjak
Date: 2023-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Interpretable Machine Learning, Sentiment Analysis

This chapter presents a practical guide for conducting Sentiment Analysis using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques in the domain of tick-borne disease text. The aim is to demonstrate the process of how the presence of bias in the discourse surrounding chronic manifestations of the disease can be evaluated. The goal is to use a dataset of 5643 abstracts collected from scientific journals on the topic of chronic Lyme disease to demonstrate using Python, the steps for conducting sentiment analysis using pre-trained language models and the process of validating the preliminary results using both interpretable machine learning tools, as well as a novel methodology of using emerging state-of-the-art large language models like ChatGPT. This serves as a useful resource for researchers and practitioners interested in using NLP techniques for sentiment analysis in the medical domain.
ELEA -- Build your own Evolutionary Algorithm in your Browser
Authors: Markus Wagner, Erik Kohlros, Gerome Quantmeyer, Timo Kötzing
Date: 2023-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

We provide an open source framework to experiment with evolutionary algorithms which we call "Experimenting and Learning toolkit for Evolutionary Algorithms (ELEA)". ELEA is browser-based and allows to assemble evolutionary algorithms using drag-and-drop, starting from a number of simple pre-designed examples, making the startup costs for employing the toolkit minimal. The designed examples can be executed and collected data can be displayed graphically. Further features include export of algorithm designs and experimental results as well as multi-threading. With the very intuitive user interface and the short time to get initial experiments going, this tool is especially suitable for explorative analyses of algorithms as well as for the use in classrooms.
Digging Deeper: Operator Analysis for Optimizing Nonlinearity of Boolean Functions
Authors: Marko Djurasevic, Domagoj Jakobovic, Luca Mariot, Stjepan Picek
Date: 2023-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

Boolean functions are mathematical objects with numerous applications in domains like coding theory, cryptography, and telecommunications. Finding Boolean functions with specific properties is a complex combinatorial optimization problem where the search space grows super-exponentially with the number of input variables. One common property of interest is the nonlinearity of Boolean functions. Constructing highly nonlinear Boolean functions is difficult as it is not always known what nonlinearity values can be reached in practice. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the genetic operators for bit-string encoding in optimizing nonlinearity. While several mutation and crossover operators have commonly been used, the link between the genotype they operate on and the resulting phenotype changes is mostly obscure. By observing the range of possible changes an operator can provide, as well as relative probabilities of specific transitions in the objective space, one can use this information to design a more effective combination of genetic operators. The analysis reveals interesting insights into operator effectiveness and indicates how algorithm design may improve convergence compared to an operator-agnostic genetic algorithm.
Multi objective Fitness Dependent Optimizer Algorithm
Authors: Jaza M. Abdullah, Tarik A. Rashid, Bestan B. Maaroof, Seyedali Mirjalili
Date: 2023-01-26 00:00:00

This paper proposes the multi objective variant of the recently introduced fitness dependent optimizer (FDO). The algorithm is called a Multi objective Fitness Dependent Optimizer (MOFDO) and is equipped with all five types of knowledge (situational, normative, topographical, domain, and historical knowledge) as in FDO. MOFDO is tested on two standard benchmarks for the performance-proof purpose; classical ZDT test functions, which is a widespread test suite that takes its name from its authors Zitzler, Deb, and Thiele, and on IEEE Congress of Evolutionary Computation benchmark (CEC 2019) multi modal multi objective functions. MOFDO results are compared to the latest variant of multi objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO), non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm third improvement (NSGA-III), and multi objective dragonfly algorithm (MODA). The comparative study shows the superiority of MOFDO in most cases and comparative results in other cases. Moreover, MOFDO is used for optimizing real-world engineering problems (e.g., welded beam design problems). It is observed that the proposed algorithm successfully provides a wide variety of well-distributed feasible solutions, which enable the decision-makers to have more applicable-comfort choices to consider.
Analog, In-memory Compute Architectures for Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Patrick Bowen, Guy Regev, Nir Regev, Bruno Pedroni, Edward Hanson, Yiran Chen
Date: 2023-01-13 00:00:00

This paper presents an analysis of the fundamental limits on energy efficiency in both digital and analog in-memory computing architectures, and compares their performance to single instruction, single data (scalar) machines specifically in the context of machine inference. The focus of the analysis is on how efficiency scales with the size, arithmetic intensity, and bit precision of the computation to be performed. It is shown that analog, in-memory computing architectures can approach arbitrarily high energy efficiency as both the problem size and processor size scales.
One-Shot Federated Conformal Prediction
Authors: Pierre Humbert, Batiste Le Bars, Aurélien Bellet, Sylvain Arlot
Date: 2023-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Federated Learning, Prediction

In this paper, we introduce a conformal prediction method to construct prediction sets in a oneshot federated learning setting. More specifically, we define a quantile-of-quantiles estimator and prove that for any distribution, it is possible to output prediction sets with desired coverage in only one round of communication. To mitigate privacy issues, we also describe a locally differentially private version of our estimator. Finally, over a wide range of experiments, we show that our method returns prediction sets with coverage and length very similar to those obtained in a centralized setting. Overall, these results demonstrate that our method is particularly well-suited to perform conformal predictions in a one-shot federated learning setting.
Mean Field Optimization Problem Regularized by Fisher Information
Authors: Julien Claisse, Giovanni Conforti, Zhenjie Ren, SongBo Wang
Date: 2023-02-12 00:00:00

Recently there is a rising interest in the research of mean field optimization, in particular because of its role in analyzing the training of neural networks. In this paper by adding the Fisher Information as the regularizer, we relate the regularized mean field optimization problem to a so-called mean field Schrodinger dynamics. We develop an energy-dissipation method to show that the marginal distributions of the mean field Schrodinger dynamics converge exponentially quickly towards the unique minimizer of the regularized optimization problem. Remarkably, the mean field Schrodinger dynamics is proved to be a gradient flow on the probability measure space with respect to the relative entropy. Finally we propose a Monte Carlo method to sample the marginal distributions of the mean field Schrodinger dynamics.
Deep Neural Networks for Nonparametric Interaction Models with Diverging Dimension
Authors: Sohom Bhattacharya, Jianqing Fan, Debarghya Mukherjee
Date: 2023-02-12 00:00:00

Deep neural networks have achieved tremendous success due to their representation power and adaptation to low-dimensional structures. Their potential for estimating structured regression functions has been recently established in the literature. However, most of the studies require the input dimension to be fixed and consequently ignore the effect of dimension on the rate of convergence and hamper their applications to modern big data with high dimensionality. In this paper, we bridge this gap by analyzing a $k^{th}$ order nonparametric interaction model in both growing dimension scenarios ($d$ grows with $n$ but at a slower rate) and in high dimension ($d \gtrsim n$). In the latter case, sparsity assumptions and associated regularization are required in order to obtain optimal rates of convergence. A new challenge in diverging dimension setting is in calculation mean-square error, the covariance terms among estimated additive components are an order of magnitude larger than those of the variances and they can deteriorate statistical properties without proper care. We introduce a critical debiasing technique to amend the problem. We show that under certain standard assumptions, debiased deep neural networks achieve a minimax optimal rate both in terms of $(n, d)$. Our proof techniques rely crucially on a novel debiasing technique that makes the covariances of additive components negligible in the mean-square error calculation. In addition, we establish the matching lower bounds.
Optimizing Orthogonalized Tensor Deflation via Random Tensor Theory
Authors: Mohamed El Amine Seddik, Mohammed Mahfoud, Merouane Debbah
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00

This paper tackles the problem of recovering a low-rank signal tensor with possibly correlated components from a random noisy tensor, or so-called spiked tensor model. When the underlying components are orthogonal, they can be recovered efficiently using tensor deflation which consists of successive rank-one approximations, while non-orthogonal components may alter the tensor deflation mechanism, thereby preventing efficient recovery. Relying on recently developed random tensor tools, this paper deals precisely with the non-orthogonal case by deriving an asymptotic analysis of a parameterized deflation procedure performed on an order-three and rank-two spiked tensor. Based on this analysis, an efficient tensor deflation algorithm is proposed by optimizing the parameter introduced in the deflation mechanism, which in turn is proven to be optimal by construction for the studied tensor model. The same ideas could be extended to more general low-rank tensor models, e.g., higher ranks and orders, leading to more efficient tensor methods with a broader impact on machine learning and beyond.