pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Empirical Bayesian Approaches for Robust Constraint-based Causal Discovery under Insufficient Data
Authors: Zijun Cui, Naiyu Yin, Yuru Wang, Qiang Ji
Date: 2022-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery

Causal discovery is to learn cause-effect relationships among variables given observational data and is important for many applications. Existing causal discovery methods assume data sufficiency, which may not be the case in many real world datasets. As a result, many existing causal discovery methods can fail under limited data. In this work, we propose Bayesian-augmented frequentist independence tests to improve the performance of constraint-based causal discovery methods under insufficient data: 1) We firstly introduce a Bayesian method to estimate mutual information (MI), based on which we propose a robust MI based independence test; 2) Secondly, we consider the Bayesian estimation of hypothesis likelihood and incorporate it into a well-defined statistical test, resulting in a robust statistical testing based independence test. We apply proposed independence tests to constraint-based causal discovery methods and evaluate the performance on benchmark datasets with insufficient samples. Experiments show significant performance improvement in terms of both accuracy and efficiency over SOTA methods.
Powershap: A Power-full Shapley Feature Selection Method
Authors: Jarne Verhaeghe, Jeroen Van Der Donckt, Femke Ongenae, Sofie Van Hoecke
Date: 2022-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection

Feature selection is a crucial step in developing robust and powerful machine learning models. Feature selection techniques can be divided into two categories: filter and wrapper methods. While wrapper methods commonly result in strong predictive performances, they suffer from a large computational complexity and therefore take a significant amount of time to complete, especially when dealing with high-dimensional feature sets. Alternatively, filter methods are considerably faster, but suffer from several other disadvantages, such as (i) requiring a threshold value, (ii) not taking into account intercorrelation between features, and (iii) ignoring feature interactions with the model. To this end, we present powershap, a novel wrapper feature selection method, which leverages statistical hypothesis testing and power calculations in combination with Shapley values for quick and intuitive feature selection. Powershap is built on the core assumption that an informative feature will have a larger impact on the prediction compared to a known random feature. Benchmarks and simulations show that powershap outperforms other filter methods with predictive performances on par with wrapper methods while being significantly faster, often even reaching half or a third of the execution time. As such, powershap provides a competitive and quick algorithm that can be used by various models in different domains. Furthermore, powershap is implemented as a plug-and-play and open-source sklearn component, enabling easy integration in conventional data science pipelines. User experience is even further enhanced by also providing an automatic mode that automatically tunes the hyper-parameters of the powershap algorithm, allowing to use the algorithm without any configuration needed.
Discovery of the Content and Engagement with the Content
Authors: Pushkal Agarwal, Nishanth Sastry, Edward Wood
Date: 2022-06-15 00:00:00

In the second half of the 20th century, Parliament allowed broadcasters to transmit radio and eventually television coverage of debates and meetings of select committees. More recently, in an effort to further improve transparency and citizen engagement, the UK Parliament started publishing videos of these debates and meetings itself, and tweeting details of debates as they happened. In this paper, we attempt to characterise how people engage with video data of Parliamentary debates by using more than two years of Google Analytics data around these videos. We analyse the patterns of engagement - how do they land on a particular video? How do they hear about this video, i.e., what is the (HTTP) referrer website that led to the user clicking on the video? Once a user lands on a video, how do they engage with it? For how long is the video played? What is the next destination? etc. Answering these questions is an important first step towards understanding why and how people use Parliamentary videos, and therefore, how the video delivery platform should be adapted and personalised for the needs of the citizens of the country. Taking inspiration from An, Kwak, and Jansen (2017), we employ Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) (Lee and Seung, 1999) on the video views matrix to identify different archetypes of users, and identify archetypes. A deeper examination of the archetypes we find reveals that they are primarily distinguished by how they land on the video page: Search (i.e., through a search engine), Referral (i.e., from other Parliamentary websites), Direct (i.e., through a direct link, which is embedded on another website), Social (i.e., through a social platform such as Facebook or Twitter) and Others.
niksss at HinglishEval: Language-agnostic BERT-based Contextual Embeddings with Catboost for Quality Evaluation of the Low-Resource Synthetically Generated Code-Mixed Hinglish Text
Authors: Nikhil Singh
Date: 2022-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Sentence, Text Generation, Word Embeddings

This paper describes the system description for the HinglishEval challenge at INLG 2022. The goal of this task was to investigate the factors influencing the quality of the code-mixed text generation system. The task was divided into two subtasks, quality rating prediction and annotators disagreement prediction of the synthetic Hinglish dataset. We attempted to solve these tasks using sentence-level embeddings, which are obtained from mean pooling the contextualized word embeddings for all input tokens in our text. We experimented with various classifiers on top of the embeddings produced for respective tasks. Our best-performing system ranked 1st on subtask B and 3rd on subtask A.
What can Speech and Language Tell us About the Working Alliance in Psychotherapy
Authors: Sebastian P. Bayerl, Gabriel Roccabruna, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Tommaso Ciulli, Morena Danieli, Korbinian Riedhammer, Giuseppe Riccardi
Date: 2022-06-17 00:00:00

We are interested in the problem of conversational analysis and its application to the health domain. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a structured approach in psychotherapy, allowing the therapist to help the patient to identify and modify the malicious thoughts, behavior, or actions. This cooperative effort can be evaluated using the Working Alliance Inventory Observer-rated Shortened - a 12 items inventory covering task, goal, and relationship - which has a relevant influence on therapeutic outcomes. In this work, we investigate the relation between this alliance inventory and the spoken conversations (sessions) between the patient and the psychotherapist. We have delivered eight weeks of e-therapy, collected their audio and video call sessions, and manually transcribed them. The spoken conversations have been annotated and evaluated with WAI ratings by professional therapists. We have investigated speech and language features and their association with WAI items. The feature types include turn dynamics, lexical entrainment, and conversational descriptors extracted from the speech and language signals. Our findings provide strong evidence that a subset of these features are strong indicators of working alliance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first and a novel study to exploit speech and language for characterising working alliance.
Language with Vision: a Study on Grounded Word and Sentence Embeddings
Authors: Hassan Shahmohammadi, Maria Heitmeier, Elnaz Shafaei-Bajestan, Hendrik P. A. Lensch, Harald Baayen
Date: 2022-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Sentence Embeddings, Visual Grounding, Word Embeddings, Word Similarity

Grounding language in vision is an active field of research seeking to construct cognitively plausible word and sentence representations by incorporating perceptual knowledge from vision into text-based representations. Despite many attempts at language grounding, achieving an optimal equilibrium between textual representations of the language and our embodied experiences remains an open field. Some common concerns are the following. Is visual grounding advantageous for abstract words, or is its effectiveness restricted to concrete words? What is the optimal way of bridging the gap between text and vision? To what extent is perceptual knowledge from images advantageous for acquiring high-quality embeddings? Leveraging the current advances in machine learning and natural language processing, the present study addresses these questions by proposing a simple yet very effective computational grounding model for pre-trained word embeddings. Our model effectively balances the interplay between language and vision by aligning textual embeddings with visual information while simultaneously preserving the distributional statistics that characterize word usage in text corpora. By applying a learned alignment, we are able to indirectly ground unseen words including abstract words. A series of evaluations on a range of behavioural datasets shows that visual grounding is beneficial not only for concrete words but also for abstract words, lending support to the indirect theory of abstract concepts. Moreover, our approach offers advantages for contextualized embeddings, such as those generated by BERT, but only when trained on corpora of modest, cognitively plausible sizes. Code and grounded embeddings for English are available at https://github.com/Hazel1994/Visually_Grounded_Word_Embeddings_2.
Self-supervised speech unit discovery from articulatory and acoustic features using VQ-VAE
Authors: Marc-Antoine Georges, Jean-Luc Schwartz, Thomas Hueber
Date: 2022-06-17 00:00:00

The human perception system is often assumed to recruit motor knowledge when processing auditory speech inputs. Using articulatory modeling and deep learning, this study examines how this articulatory information can be used for discovering speech units in a self-supervised setting. We used vector-quantized variational autoencoders (VQ-VAE) to learn discrete representations from articulatory and acoustic speech data. In line with the zero-resource paradigm, an ABX test was then used to investigate how the extracted representations encode phonetically relevant properties. Experiments were conducted on three different corpora in English and French. We found that articulatory information rather organises the latent representations in terms of place of articulation whereas the speech acoustics mainly structure the latent space in terms of manner of articulation. We show that an optimal fusion of the two modalities can lead to a joint representation of these phonetic dimensions more accurate than each modality considered individually. Since articulatory information is usually not available in a practical situation, we finally investigate the benefit it provides when inferred from the speech acoustics in a self-supervised manner.
The ITU Faroese Pairs Dataset
Authors: Leon Derczynski, Annika Solveig Hedegaard Isfeldt, Signhild Djurhuus
Date: 2022-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

This article documents a dataset of sentence pairs between Faroese and Danish, produced at ITU Copenhagen. The data covers tranlsation from both source languages, and is intended for use as training data for machine translation systems in this language pair.
Crowdsourcing Relative Rankings of Multi-Word Expressions: Experts versus Non-Experts
Authors: David Alfter, Therese Lindström Tiedemann, Elena Volodina
Date: 2022-06-17 00:00:00

In this study we investigate to which degree experts and non-experts agree on questions of difficulty in a crowdsourcing experiment. We ask non-experts (second language learners of Swedish) and two groups of experts (teachers of Swedish as a second/foreign language and CEFR experts) to rank multi-word expressions in a crowdsourcing experiment. We find that the resulting rankings by all the three tested groups correlate to a very high degree, which suggests that judgments produced in a comparative setting are not influenced by professional insights into Swedish as a second language.
CookDial: A dataset for task-oriented dialogs grounded in procedural documents
Authors: Yiwei Jiang, Klim Zaporojets, Johannes Deleu, Thomas Demeester, Chris Develder
Date: 2022-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Response Generation

This work presents a new dialog dataset, CookDial, that facilitates research on task-oriented dialog systems with procedural knowledge understanding. The corpus contains 260 human-to-human task-oriented dialogs in which an agent, given a recipe document, guides the user to cook a dish. Dialogs in CookDial exhibit two unique features: (i) procedural alignment between the dialog flow and supporting document; (ii) complex agent decision-making that involves segmenting long sentences, paraphrasing hard instructions and resolving coreference in the dialog context. In addition, we identify three challenging (sub)tasks in the assumed task-oriented dialog system: (1) User Question Understanding, (2) Agent Action Frame Prediction, and (3) Agent Response Generation. For each of these tasks, we develop a neural baseline model, which we evaluate on the CookDial dataset. We publicly release the CookDial dataset, comprising rich annotations of both dialogs and recipe documents, to stimulate further research on domain-specific document-grounded dialog systems.
A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Suicide Ideation Detection using Deep Learning
Authors: Siqu Long, Rina Cabral, Josiah Poon, Soyeon Caren Han
Date: 2022-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, text-classification, Text Classification

For preventing youth suicide, social media platforms have received much attention from researchers. A few researches apply machine learning, or deep learning-based text classification approaches to classify social media posts containing suicidality risk. This paper replicated competitive social media-based suicidality detection/prediction models. We evaluated the feasibility of detecting suicidal ideation using multiple datasets and different state-of-the-art deep learning models, RNN-, CNN-, and Attention-based models. Using two suicidality evaluation datasets, we evaluated 28 combinations of 7 input embeddings with 4 commonly used deep learning models and 5 pretrained language models in quantitative and qualitative ways. Our replication study confirms that deep learning works well for social media-based suicidality detection in general, but it highly depends on the dataset's quality.
A Numerical Reasoning Question Answering System with Fine-grained Retriever and the Ensemble of Multiple Generators for FinQA
Authors: Bin Wang, Jiangzhou Ju, Yunlin Mao, Xin-yu Dai, ShuJian Huang, Jiajun Chen
Date: 2022-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

The numerical reasoning in the financial domain -- performing quantitative analysis and summarizing the information from financial reports -- can greatly increase business efficiency and reduce costs of billions of dollars. Here, we propose a numerical reasoning question answering system to answer numerical reasoning questions among financial text and table data sources, consisting of a retriever module, a generator module, and an ensemble module. Specifically, in the retriever module, in addition to retrieving the whole row data, we innovatively design a cell retriever that retrieves the gold cells to avoid bringing unrelated and similar cells in the same row to the inputs of the generator module. In the generator module, we utilize multiple generators to produce programs, which are operation steps to answer the question. Finally, in the ensemble module, we integrate multiple programs to choose the best program as the output of our system. In the final private test set in FinQA Competition, our system obtains 69.79 execution accuracy.
Interpretable AMR-Based Question Decomposition for Multi-hop Question Answering
Authors: Zhenyun Deng, Yonghua Zhu, Yang Chen, Michael Witbrock, Patricia Riddle
Date: 2022-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstract Meaning Representation, AMR-to-Text Generation, Multi-hop Question Answering, Question Answering, Text Generation

Effective multi-hop question answering (QA) requires reasoning over multiple scattered paragraphs and providing explanations for answers. Most existing approaches cannot provide an interpretable reasoning process to illustrate how these models arrive at an answer. In this paper, we propose a Question Decomposition method based on Abstract Meaning Representation (QDAMR) for multi-hop QA, which achieves interpretable reasoning by decomposing a multi-hop question into simpler sub-questions and answering them in order. Since annotating the decomposition is expensive, we first delegate the complexity of understanding the multi-hop question to an AMR parser. We then achieve the decomposition of a multi-hop question via segmentation of the corresponding AMR graph based on the required reasoning type. Finally, we generate sub-questions using an AMR-to-Text generation model and answer them with an off-the-shelf QA model. Experimental results on HotpotQA demonstrate that our approach is competitive for interpretable reasoning and that the sub-questions generated by QDAMR are well-formed, outperforming existing question-decomposition-based multi-hop QA approaches.
Enriching Abusive Language Detection with Community Context
Authors: Jana Kurrek, Haji Mohammad Saleem, Derek Ruths
Date: 2022-06-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL (WOAH) 2022 7
Tasks: Abuse Detection, Abusive Language

Uses of pejorative expressions can be benign or actively empowering. When models for abuse detection misclassify these expressions as derogatory, they inadvertently censor productive conversations held by marginalized groups. One way to engage with non-dominant perspectives is to add context around conversations. Previous research has leveraged user- and thread-level features, but it often neglects the spaces within which productive conversations take place. Our paper highlights how community context can improve classification outcomes in abusive language detection. We make two main contributions to this end. First, we demonstrate that online communities cluster by the nature of their support towards victims of abuse. Second, we establish how community context improves accuracy and reduces the false positive rates of state-of-the-art abusive language classifiers. These findings suggest a promising direction for context-aware models in abusive language research.
GAAMA 2.0: An Integrated System that Answers Boolean and Extractive Questions
Authors: Scott McCarley, Mihaela Bornea, Sara Rosenthal, Anthony Ferritto, Md Arafat Sultan, Avirup Sil, Radu Florian
Date: 2022-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Machine Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension

Recent machine reading comprehension datasets include extractive and boolean questions but current approaches do not offer integrated support for answering both question types. We present a multilingual machine reading comprehension system and front-end demo that handles boolean questions by providing both a YES/NO answer and highlighting supporting evidence, and handles extractive questions by highlighting the answer in the passage. Our system, GAAMA 2.0, is ranked first on the Tydi QA leaderboard at the time of this writing. We contrast two different implementations of our approach. The first includes several independent stacks of transformers allowing easy deployment of each component. The second is a single stack of transformers utilizing adapters to reduce GPU memory footprint in a resource-constrained environment.
DialogueScript: Using Dialogue Agents to Produce a Script
Authors: Patrícia Schmidtová, Dávid Javorský, Christián Mikláš, Tomáš Musil, Rudolf Rosa, Ondřej Dušek
Date: 2022-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference

We present a novel approach to generating scripts by using agents with different personality types. To manage character interaction in the script, we employ simulated dramatic networks. Automatic and human evaluation on multiple criteria shows that our approach outperforms a vanilla-GPT2-based baseline. We further introduce a new metric to evaluate dialogue consistency based on natural language inference and demonstrate its validity.
CS-UM6P at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Transformer-based Models for Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic
Authors: Abdelkader El Mahdaouy, Abdellah El Mekki, Kabil Essefar, Abderrahman Skiredj, Ismail Berrada
Date: 2022-06-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: SemEval (NAACL) 2022 7
Tasks: Author Profiling, Opinion Mining, Sarcasm Detection, Sentence, Sentiment Analysis

Sarcasm is a form of figurative language where the intended meaning of a sentence differs from its literal meaning. This poses a serious challenge to several Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and Author Profiling. In this paper, we present our participating system to the intended sarcasm detection task in English and Arabic languages. Our system\footnote{The source code of our system is available at \url{https://github.com/AbdelkaderMH/iSarcasmEval}} consists of three deep learning-based models leveraging two existing pre-trained language models for Arabic and English. We have participated in all sub-tasks. Our official submissions achieve the best performance on sub-task A for Arabic language and rank second in sub-task B. For sub-task C, our system is ranked 7th and 11th on Arabic and English datasets, respectively.
Deep Multi-Task Models for Misogyny Identification and Categorization on Arabic Social Media
Authors: Abdelkader El Mahdaouy, Abdellah El Mekki, Ahmed Oumar, Hajar Mousannif, Ismail Berrada
Date: 2022-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Multi-Task Learning

The prevalence of toxic content on social media platforms, such as hate speech, offensive language, and misogyny, presents serious challenges to our interconnected society. These challenging issues have attracted widespread attention in Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. In this paper, we present the submitted systems to the first Arabic Misogyny Identification shared task. We investigate three multi-task learning models as well as their single-task counterparts. In order to encode the input text, our models rely on the pre-trained MARBERT language model. The overall obtained results show that all our submitted models have achieved the best performances (top three ranked submissions) in both misogyny identification and categorization tasks.
Evolution through Large Models
Authors: Joel Lehman, Jonathan Gordon, Shawn Jain, Kamal Ndousse, Cathy Yeh, Kenneth O. Stanley
Date: 2022-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

This paper pursues the insight that large language models (LLMs) trained to generate code can vastly improve the effectiveness of mutation operators applied to programs in genetic programming (GP). Because such LLMs benefit from training data that includes sequential changes and modifications, they can approximate likely changes that humans would make. To highlight the breadth of implications of such evolution through large models (ELM), in the main experiment ELM combined with MAP-Elites generates hundreds of thousands of functional examples of Python programs that output working ambulating robots in the Sodarace domain, which the original LLM had never seen in pre-training. These examples then help to bootstrap training a new conditional language model that can output the right walker for a particular terrain. The ability to bootstrap new models that can output appropriate artifacts for a given context in a domain where zero training data was previously available carries implications for open-endedness, deep learning, and reinforcement learning. These implications are explored here in depth in the hope of inspiring new directions of research now opened up by ELM.