pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Intuitionistic Fuzzy Broad Learning System: Enhancing Robustness Against Noise and Outliers
Authors: M. Sajid, A. K. Malik, M. Tanveer
Date: 2023-07-15 00:00:00

In the realm of data classification, broad learning system (BLS) has proven to be a potent tool that utilizes a layer-by-layer feed-forward neural network. However, the traditional BLS treats all samples as equally significant, which makes it less robust and less effective for real-world datasets with noises and outliers. To address this issue, we propose fuzzy broad learning system (F-BLS) and the intuitionistic fuzzy broad learning system (IF-BLS) models that confront challenges posed by the noise and outliers present in the dataset and enhance overall robustness. Employing a fuzzy membership technique, the proposed F-BLS model embeds sample neighborhood information based on the proximity of each class center within the inherent feature space of the BLS framework. Furthermore, the proposed IF-BLS model introduces intuitionistic fuzzy concepts encompassing membership, non-membership, and score value functions. IF-BLS strategically considers homogeneity and heterogeneity in sample neighborhoods in the kernel space. We evaluate the performance of proposed F-BLS and IF-BLS models on UCI benchmark datasets with and without Gaussian noise. As an application, we implement the proposed F-BLS and IF-BLS models to diagnose Alzheimer's disease (AD). Experimental findings and statistical analyses consistently highlight the superior generalization capabilities of the proposed F-BLS and IF-BLS models over baseline models across all scenarios. The proposed models offer a promising solution to enhance the BLS framework's ability to handle noise and outliers. The source code link of the proposed model is available at https://github.com/mtanveer1/IF-BLS.
Machine Learning Meets Mental Training -- A Proof of Concept Applied to Memory Sports
Authors: Emanuele Regnani
Date: 2023-07-15 00:00:00

This work aims to combine these two fields together by presenting a practical implementation of machine learning to the particular form of mental training that is the art of memory, taken in its competitive version called "Memory Sports". Such a fusion, on the one hand, strives to raise awareness about both realms, while on the other it seeks to encourage research in this mixed field as a way to, ultimately, drive forward the development of this seemingly underestimated sport.
Variational Monte Carlo on a Budget -- Fine-tuning pre-trained Neural Wavefunctions
Authors: Michael Scherbela, Leon Gerard, Philipp Grohs
Date: 2023-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Variational Monte Carlo

Obtaining accurate solutions to the Schr\"odinger equation is the key challenge in computational quantum chemistry. Deep-learning-based Variational Monte Carlo (DL-VMC) has recently outperformed conventional approaches in terms of accuracy, but only at large computational cost. Whereas in many domains models are trained once and subsequently applied for inference, accurate DL-VMC so far requires a full optimization for every new problem instance, consuming thousands of GPUhs even for small molecules. We instead propose a DL-VMC model which has been pre-trained using self-supervised wavefunction optimization on a large and chemically diverse set of molecules. Applying this model to new molecules without any optimization, yields wavefunctions and absolute energies that outperform established methods such as CCSD(T)-2Z. To obtain accurate relative energies, only few fine-tuning steps of this base model are required. We accomplish this with a fully end-to-end machine-learned model, consisting of an improved geometry embedding architecture and an existing SE(3)-equivariant model to represent molecular orbitals. Combining this architecture with continuous sampling of geometries, we improve zero-shot accuracy by two orders of magnitude compared to the state of the art. We extensively evaluate the accuracy, scalability and limitations of our base model on a wide variety of test systems.
Pseudo Outlier Exposure for Out-of-Distribution Detection using Pretrained Transformers
Authors: Jaeyoung Kim, Kyuheon Jung, Dongbin Na, Sion Jang, Eunbin Park, Sungchul Choi
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Detection, text-classification, Text Classification

For real-world language applications, detecting an out-of-distribution (OOD) sample is helpful to alert users or reject such unreliable samples. However, modern over-parameterized language models often produce overconfident predictions for both in-distribution (ID) and OOD samples. In particular, language models suffer from OOD samples with a similar semantic representation to ID samples since these OOD samples lie near the ID manifold. A rejection network can be trained with ID and diverse outlier samples to detect test OOD samples, but explicitly collecting auxiliary OOD datasets brings an additional burden for data collection. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method called Pseudo Outlier Exposure (POE) that constructs a surrogate OOD dataset by sequentially masking tokens related to ID classes. The surrogate OOD sample introduced by POE shows a similar representation to ID data, which is most effective in training a rejection network. Our method does not require any external OOD data and can be easily implemented within off-the-shelf Transformers. A comprehensive comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms demonstrates POE's competitiveness on several text classification benchmarks.
ZeQR: Zero-shot Query Reformulation for Conversational Search
Authors: Dayu Yang, Yue Zhang, Hui Fang
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Search, Information Retrieval, Machine Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension, Retrieval

As the popularity of voice assistants continues to surge, conversational search has gained increased attention in Information Retrieval. However, data sparsity issues in conversational search significantly hinder the progress of supervised conversational search methods. Consequently, researchers are focusing more on zero-shot conversational search approaches. Nevertheless, existing zero-shot methods face three primary limitations: they are not universally applicable to all retrievers, their effectiveness lacks sufficient explainability, and they struggle to resolve common conversational ambiguities caused by omission. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel Zero-shot Query Reformulation (or Query Rewriting) (ZeQR) framework that reformulates queries based on previous dialogue contexts without requiring supervision from conversational search data. Specifically, our framework utilizes language models designed for machine reading comprehension tasks to explicitly resolve two common ambiguities: coreference and omission, in raw queries. In comparison to existing zero-shot methods, our approach is universally applicable to any retriever without additional adaptation or indexing. It also provides greater explainability and effectively enhances query intent understanding because ambiguities are explicitly and proactively resolved. Through extensive experiments on four TREC conversational datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
Linearized Relative Positional Encoding
Authors: Zhen Qin, Weixuan Sun, Kaiyue Lu, Hui Deng, Dongxu Li, Xiaodong Han, Yuchao Dai, Lingpeng Kong, Yiran Zhong
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, text-classification, Text Classification

Relative positional encoding is widely used in vanilla and linear transformers to represent positional information. However, existing encoding methods of a vanilla transformer are not always directly applicable to a linear transformer, because the latter requires a decomposition of the query and key representations into separate kernel functions. Nevertheless, principles for designing encoding methods suitable for linear transformers remain understudied. In this work, we put together a variety of existing linear relative positional encoding approaches under a canonical form and further propose a family of linear relative positional encoding algorithms via unitary transformation. Our formulation leads to a principled framework that can be used to develop new relative positional encoding methods that preserve linear space-time complexity. Equipped with different models, the proposed linearized relative positional encoding (LRPE) family derives effective encoding for various applications. Experiments show that compared with existing methods, LRPE achieves state-of-the-art performance in language modeling, text classification, and image classification. Meanwhile, it emphasizes a general paradigm for designing broadly more relative positional encoding methods that are applicable to linear transformers. The code is available at https://github.com/OpenNLPLab/Lrpe.
Text vectorization via transformer-based language models and n-gram perplexities
Authors: Mihailo Škorić
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00

As the probability (and thus perplexity) of a text is calculated based on the product of the probabilities of individual tokens, it may happen that one unlikely token significantly reduces the probability (i.e., increase the perplexity) of some otherwise highly probable input, while potentially representing a simple typographical error. Also, given that perplexity is a scalar value that refers to the entire input, information about the probability distribution within it is lost in the calculation (a relatively good text that has one unlikely token and another text in which each token is equally likely they can have the same perplexity value), especially for longer texts. As an alternative to scalar perplexity this research proposes a simple algorithm used to calculate vector values based on n-gram perplexities within the input. Such representations consider the previously mentioned aspects, and instead of a unique value, the relative perplexity of each text token is calculated, and these values are combined into a single vector representing the input.
Unveiling Gender Bias in Terms of Profession Across LLMs: Analyzing and Addressing Sociological Implications
Authors: Vishesh Thakur
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Gender bias in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing has garnered significant attention due to its potential impact on societal perceptions and biases. This research paper aims to analyze gender bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) with a focus on multiple comparisons between GPT-2 and GPT-3.5, some prominent language models, to better understand its implications. Through a comprehensive literature review, the study examines existing research on gender bias in AI language models and identifies gaps in the current knowledge. The methodology involves collecting and preprocessing data from GPT-2 and GPT-3.5, and employing in-depth quantitative analysis techniques to evaluate gender bias in the generated text. The findings shed light on gendered word associations, language usage, and biased narratives present in the outputs of these Large Language Models. The discussion explores the ethical implications of gender bias and its potential consequences on social perceptions and marginalized communities. Additionally, the paper presents strategies for reducing gender bias in LLMs, including algorithmic approaches and data augmentation techniques. The research highlights the importance of interdisciplinary collaborations and the role of sociological studies in mitigating gender bias in AI models. By addressing these issues, we can pave the way for more inclusive and unbiased AI systems that have a positive impact on society.
Attention over pre-trained Sentence Embeddings for Long Document Classification
Authors: Amine Abdaoui, Sourav Dutta
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Classification, Sentence, Sentence Embeddings

Despite being the current de-facto models in most NLP tasks, transformers are often limited to short sequences due to their quadratic attention complexity on the number of tokens. Several attempts to address this issue were studied, either by reducing the cost of the self-attention computation or by modeling smaller sequences and combining them through a recurrence mechanism or using a new transformer model. In this paper, we suggest to take advantage of pre-trained sentence transformers to start from semantically meaningful embeddings of the individual sentences, and then combine them through a small attention layer that scales linearly with the document length. We report the results obtained by this simple architecture on three standard document classification datasets. When compared with the current state-of-the-art models using standard fine-tuning, the studied method obtains competitive results (even if there is no clear best model in this configuration). We also showcase that the studied architecture obtains better results when freezing the underlying transformers. A configuration that is useful when we need to avoid complete fine-tuning (e.g. when the same frozen transformer is shared by different applications). Finally, two additional experiments are provided to further evaluate the relevancy of the studied architecture over simpler baselines.
Towards a Neural Era in Dialogue Management for Collaboration: A Literature Survey
Authors: Amogh Mannekote
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Management, Management, Survey

Dialogue-based human-AI collaboration can revolutionize collaborative problem-solving, creative exploration, and social support. To realize this goal, the development of automated agents proficient in skills such as negotiating, following instructions, establishing common ground, and progressing shared tasks is essential. This survey begins by reviewing the evolution of dialogue management paradigms in collaborative dialogue systems, from traditional handcrafted and information-state based methods to AI planning-inspired approaches. It then shifts focus to contemporary data-driven dialogue management techniques, which seek to transfer deep learning successes from form-filling and open-domain settings to collaborative contexts. The paper proceeds to analyze a selected set of recent works that apply neural approaches to collaborative dialogue management, spotlighting prevailing trends in the field. This survey hopes to provide foundational background for future advancements in collaborative dialogue management, particularly as the dialogue systems community continues to embrace the potential of large language models.
On the (In)Effectiveness of Large Language Models for Chinese Text Correction
Authors: Yinghui Li, Haojing Huang, Shirong Ma, Yong Jiang, Yangning Li, Feng Zhou, Hai-Tao Zheng, Qingyu Zhou
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Grammatical Error Correction

Recently, the development and progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) have amazed the entire Artificial Intelligence community. Benefiting from their emergent abilities, LLMs have attracted more and more researchers to study their capabilities and performance on various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. While marveling at LLMs' incredible performance on all kinds of tasks, we notice that they also have excellent multilingual processing capabilities, such as Chinese. To explore the Chinese processing ability of LLMs, we focus on Chinese Text Correction, a fundamental and challenging Chinese NLP task. Specifically, we evaluate various representative LLMs on the Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) and Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) tasks, which are two main Chinese Text Correction scenarios. Additionally, we also fine-tune LLMs for Chinese Text Correction to better observe the potential capabilities of LLMs. From extensive analyses and comparisons with previous state-of-the-art small models, we empirically find that the LLMs currently have both amazing performance and unsatisfactory behavior for Chinese Text Correction. We believe our findings will promote the landing and application of LLMs in the Chinese NLP community.
Teach model to answer questions after comprehending the document
Authors: Ruiqing Sun, Ping Jian
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Machine Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension

Multi-choice Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) is a challenging extension of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that requires the ability to comprehend the semantics and logical relationships between entities in a given text. The MRC task has traditionally been viewed as a process of answering questions based on the given text. This single-stage approach has often led the network to concentrate on generating the correct answer, potentially neglecting the comprehension of the text itself. As a result, many prevalent models have faced challenges in performing well on this task when dealing with longer texts. In this paper, we propose a two-stage knowledge distillation method that teaches the model to better comprehend the document by dividing the MRC task into two separate stages. Our experimental results show that the student model, when equipped with our method, achieves significant improvements, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.
Large Language Models Perform Diagnostic Reasoning
Authors: Cheng-Kuang Wu, Wei-Lin Chen, Hsin-Hsi Chen
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Medical Diagnosis

We explore the extension of chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to medical reasoning for the task of automatic diagnosis. Motivated by doctors' underlying reasoning process, we present Diagnostic-Reasoning CoT (DR-CoT). Empirical results demonstrate that by simply prompting large language models trained only on general text corpus with two DR-CoT exemplars, the diagnostic accuracy improves by 15% comparing to standard prompting. Moreover, the gap reaches a pronounced 18% in out-domain settings. Our findings suggest expert-knowledge reasoning in large language models can be elicited through proper promptings.
How do software citation formats evolve over time? A longitudinal analysis of R programming language packages
Authors: Yuzhuo Wang, Kai Li
Date: 2023-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

Under the data-driven research paradigm, research software has come to play crucial roles in nearly every stage of scientific inquiry. Scholars are advocating for the formal citation of software in academic publications, treating it on par with traditional research outputs. However, software is hardly consistently cited: one software entity can be cited as different objects, and the citations can change over time. These issues, however, are largely overlooked in existing empirical research on software citation. To fill the above gaps, the present study compares and analyzes a longitudinal dataset of citation formats of all R packages collected in 2021 and 2022, in order to understand the citation formats of R-language packages, important members in the open-source software family, and how the citations evolve over time. In particular, we investigate the different document types underlying the citations and what metadata elements in the citation formats changed over time. Furthermore, we offer an in-depth analysis of the disciplinarity of journal articles cited as software (software papers). By undertaking this research, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of the complexities associated with software citation, shedding light on future software citation policies and infrastructure.
ivrit.ai: A Comprehensive Dataset of Hebrew Speech for AI Research and Development
Authors: Yanir Marmor, Kinneret Misgav, Yair Lifshitz
Date: 2023-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Activity Detection, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

We introduce "ivrit.ai", a comprehensive Hebrew speech dataset, addressing the distinct lack of extensive, high-quality resources for advancing Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) technology in Hebrew. With over 3,300 speech hours and a over a thousand diverse speakers, ivrit.ai offers a substantial compilation of Hebrew speech across various contexts. It is delivered in three forms to cater to varying research needs: raw unprocessed audio; data post-Voice Activity Detection, and partially transcribed data. The dataset stands out for its legal accessibility, permitting use at no cost, thereby serving as a crucial resource for researchers, developers, and commercial entities. ivrit.ai opens up numerous applications, offering vast potential to enhance AI capabilities in Hebrew. Future efforts aim to expand ivrit.ai further, thereby advancing Hebrew's standing in AI research and technology.
Cross-Lingual NER for Financial Transaction Data in Low-Resource Languages
Authors: Sunisth Kumar, Davide Liu, Alexandre Boulenger
Date: 2023-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual NER, Knowledge Distillation, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, NER

We propose an efficient modeling framework for cross-lingual named entity recognition in semi-structured text data. Our approach relies on both knowledge distillation and consistency training. The modeling framework leverages knowledge from a large language model (XLMRoBERTa) pre-trained on the source language, with a student-teacher relationship (knowledge distillation). The student model incorporates unsupervised consistency training (with KL divergence loss) on the low-resource target language. We employ two independent datasets of SMSs in English and Arabic, each carrying semi-structured banking transaction information, and focus on exhibiting the transfer of knowledge from English to Arabic. With access to only 30 labeled samples, our model can generalize the recognition of merchants, amounts, and other fields from English to Arabic. We show that our modeling approach, while efficient, performs best overall when compared to state-of-the-art approaches like DistilBERT pre-trained on the target language or a supervised model directly trained on labeled data in the target language. Our experiments show that it is enough to learn to recognize entities in English to reach reasonable performance in a low-resource language in the presence of a few labeled samples of semi-structured data. The proposed framework has implications for developing multi-lingual applications, especially in geographies where digital endeavors rely on both English and one or more low-resource language(s), sometimes mixed with English or employed singly.
Adapting an ASR Foundation Model for Spoken Language Assessment
Authors: Rao Ma, Mengjie Qian, Mark J. F. Gales, Kate M. Knill
Date: 2023-07-13 00:00:00

A crucial part of an accurate and reliable spoken language assessment system is the underlying ASR model. Recently, large-scale pre-trained ASR foundation models such as Whisper have been made available. As the output of these models is designed to be human readable, punctuation is added, numbers are presented in Arabic numeric form and abbreviations are included. Additionally, these models have a tendency to skip disfluencies and hesitations in the output. Though useful for readability, these attributes are not helpful for assessing the ability of a candidate and providing feedback. Here a precise transcription of what a candidate said is needed. In this paper, we give a detailed analysis of Whisper outputs and propose two solutions: fine-tuning and soft prompt tuning. Experiments are conducted on both public speech corpora and an English learner dataset. Results show that we can effectively alter the decoding behaviour of Whisper to generate the exact words spoken in the response.