Extracting Entities of Interest from Comparative Product Reviews

This paper presents a deep learning based approach to extract product comparison information out of user reviews on various e-commerce websites. Any comparative product review has three major entities of information: the names of the products being compared, the user opinion (predicate) and the feature or aspect under comparison. All these informing entities are dependent on each other and bound by the rules of the language, in the review. We observe that their inter-dependencies can be captured well using LSTMs. We evaluate our system on existing manually labeled datasets and observe out-performance over the existing Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) framework popular for this task.

CONTRASTE: Supervised Contrastive Pre-training With Aspect-based Prompts For Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

Existing works on Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) explicitly focus on developing more efficient fine-tuning techniques for the task. Instead, our motivation is to come up with a generic approach that can improve the downstream performances of multiple ABSA tasks simultaneously. Towards this, we present CONTRASTE, a novel pre-training strategy using CONTRastive learning to enhance the ASTE performance. While we primarily focus on ASTE, we also demonstrate the advantage of our proposed technique on other ABSA tasks such as ACOS, TASD, and AESC. Given a sentence and its associated (aspect, opinion, sentiment) triplets, first, we design aspect-based prompts with corresponding sentiments masked. We then (pre)train an encoder-decoder model by applying contrastive learning on the decoder-generated aspect-aware sentiment representations of the masked terms. For fine-tuning the model weights thus obtained, we then propose a novel multi-task approach where the base encoder-decoder model is combined with two complementary modules, a tagging-based Opinion Term Detector, and a regression-based Triplet Count Estimator. Exhaustive experiments on four benchmark datasets and a detailed ablation study establish the importance of each of our proposed components as we achieve new state-of-the-art ASTE results.

CLMSM: A Multi-Task Learning Framework for Pre-training on Procedural Text

In this paper, we propose CLMSM, a domain-specific, continual pre-training framework, that learns from a large set of procedural recipes. CLMSM uses a Multi-Task Learning Framework to optimize two objectives - a) Contrastive Learning using hard triplets to learn fine-grained differences across entities in the procedures, and b) a novel Mask-Step Modelling objective to learn step-wise context of a procedure. We test the performance of CLMSM on the downstream tasks of tracking entities and aligning actions between two procedures on three datasets, one of which is an open-domain dataset not conforming with the pre-training dataset. We show that CLMSM not only outperforms baselines on recipes (in-domain) but is also able to generalize to open-domain procedural NLP tasks.

DepNeCTI: Dependency-based Nested Compound Type Identification for Sanskrit

Multi-component compounding is a prevalent phenomenon in Sanskrit, and understanding the implicit structure of a compound's components is crucial for deciphering its meaning. Earlier approaches in Sanskrit have focused on binary compounds and neglected the multi-component compound setting. This work introduces the novel task of nested compound type identification (NeCTI), which aims to identify nested spans of a multi-component compound and decode the implicit semantic relations between them. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt in the field of lexical semantics to propose this task. We present 2 newly annotated datasets including an out-of-domain dataset for this task. We also benchmark these datasets by exploring the efficacy of the standard problem formulations such as nested named entity recognition, constituency parsing and seq2seq, etc. We present a novel framework named DepNeCTI: Dependency-based Nested Compound Type Identifier that surpasses the performance of the best baseline with an average absolute improvement of 13.1 points F1-score in terms of Labeled Span Score (LSS) and a 5-fold enhancement in inference efficiency. In line with the previous findings in the binary Sanskrit compound identification task, context provides benefits for the NeCTI task. The codebase and datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/yaswanth-iitkgp/DepNeCTI

Modeling interdisciplinary interactions among Physics, Mathematics & Computer Science

Interdisciplinarity has over the recent years have gained tremendous importance and has become one of the key ways of doing cutting edge research. In this paper we attempt to model the citation flow across three different fields -- Physics (PHY), Mathematics (MA) and Computer Science (CS). For instance, is there a specific pattern in which these fields cite one another? We carry out experiments on a dataset comprising more than 1.2 million articles taken from these three fields. We quantify the citation interactions among these three fields through temporal bucket signatures. We present numerical models based on variants of the recently proposed relay-linking framework to explain the citation dynamics across the three disciplines. These models make a modest attempt to unfold the underlying principles of how citation links could have been formed across the three fields over time.

A Robust SINDy Approach by Combining Neural Networks and an Integral Form

The discovery of governing equations from data has been an active field of research for decades. One widely used methodology for this purpose is sparse regression for nonlinear dynamics, known as SINDy. Despite several attempts, noisy and scarce data still pose a severe challenge to the success of the SINDy approach. In this work, we discuss a robust method to discover nonlinear governing equations from noisy and scarce data. To do this, we make use of neural networks to learn an implicit representation based on measurement data so that not only it produces the output in the vicinity of the measurements but also the time-evolution of output can be described by a dynamical system. Additionally, we learn such a dynamic system in the spirit of the SINDy framework. Leveraging the implicit representation using neural networks, we obtain the derivative information -- required for SINDy -- using an automatic differentiation tool. To enhance the robustness of our methodology, we further incorporate an integral condition on the output of the implicit networks. Furthermore, we extend our methodology to handle data collected from multiple initial conditions. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methodology to discover governing equations under noisy and scarce data regimes by means of several examples and compare its performance with existing methods.

Deep Learning for Structure-Preserving Universal Stable Koopman-Inspired Embeddings for Nonlinear Canonical Hamiltonian Dynamics

Discovering a suitable coordinate transformation for nonlinear systems enables the construction of simpler models, facilitating prediction, control, and optimization for complex nonlinear systems. To that end, Koopman operator theory offers a framework for global linearization for nonlinear systems, thereby allowing the usage of linear tools for design studies. In this work, we focus on the identification of global linearized embeddings for canonical nonlinear Hamiltonian systems through a symplectic transformation. While this task is often challenging, we leverage the power of deep learning to discover the desired embeddings. Furthermore, to overcome the shortcomings of Koopman operators for systems with continuous spectra, we apply the lifting principle and learn global cubicized embeddings. Additionally, a key emphasis is paid to enforce the bounded stability for the dynamics of the discovered embeddings. We demonstrate the capabilities of deep learning in acquiring compact symplectic coordinate transformation and the corresponding simple dynamical models, fostering data-driven learning of nonlinear canonical Hamiltonian systems, even those with continuous spectra.

Guaranteed Stable Quadratic Models and their applications in SINDy and Operator Inference

Scientific machine learning for learning dynamical systems is a powerful tool that combines data-driven modeling models, physics-based modeling, and empirical knowledge. It plays an essential role in an engineering design cycle and digital twinning. In this work, we primarily focus on an operator inference methodology that builds dynamical models, preferably in low-dimension, with a prior hypothesis on the model structure, often determined by known physics or given by experts. Then, for inference, we aim to learn the operators of a model by setting up an appropriate optimization problem. One of the critical properties of dynamical systems is{stability. However, such a property is not guaranteed by the inferred models. In this work, we propose inference formulations to learn quadratic models, which are stable by design. Precisely, we discuss the parameterization of quadratic systems that are locally and globally stable. Moreover, for quadratic systems with no stable point yet bounded (e.g., Chaotic Lorenz model), we discuss an attractive trapping region philosophy and a parameterization of such systems. Using those parameterizations, we set up inference problems, which are then solved using a gradient-based optimization method. Furthermore, to avoid numerical derivatives and still learn continuous systems, we make use of an integration form of differential equations. We present several numerical examples, illustrating the preservation of stability and discussing its comparison with the existing state-of-the-art approach to infer operators. By means of numerical examples, we also demonstrate how proposed methods are employed to discover governing equations and energy-preserving models.

Aesthetics of Sanskrit Poetry from the Perspective of Computational Linguistics: A Case Study Analysis on Siksastaka

Sanskrit poetry has played a significant role in shaping the literary and cultural landscape of the Indian subcontinent for centuries. However, not much attention has been devoted to uncovering the hidden beauty of Sanskrit poetry in computational linguistics. This article explores the intersection of Sanskrit poetry and computational linguistics by proposing a roadmap of an interpretable framework to analyze and classify the qualities and characteristics of fine Sanskrit poetry. We discuss the rich tradition of Sanskrit poetry and the significance of computational linguistics in automatically identifying the characteristics of fine poetry. The proposed framework involves a human-in-the-loop approach that combines deterministic aspects delegated to machines and deep semantics left to human experts. We provide a deep analysis of Siksastaka, a Sanskrit poem, from the perspective of 6 prominent kavyashastra schools, to illustrate the proposed framework. Additionally, we provide compound, dependency, anvaya (prose order linearised form), meter, rasa (mood), alankar (figure of speech), and riti (writing style) annotations for Siksastaka and a web application to illustrate the poem's analysis and annotations. Our key contributions include the proposed framework, the analysis of Siksastaka, the annotations and the web application for future research. Link for interactive analysis: https://sanskritshala.github.io/shikshastakam/

Data-Driven Identification of Quadratic Symplectic Representations of Nonlinear Hamiltonian Systems

We present a framework for learning Hamiltonian systems using data. This work is based on the lifting hypothesis, which posits that nonlinear Hamiltonian systems can be written as nonlinear systems with cubic Hamiltonians. By leveraging this, we obtain quadratic dynamics that are Hamiltonian in a transformed coordinate system. To that end, for given generalized position and momentum data, we propose a methodology to learn quadratic dynamical systems, enforcing the Hamiltonian structure in combination with a symplectic auto-encoder. The enforced Hamiltonian structure exhibits long-term stability of the system, while the cubic Hamiltonian function provides relatively low model complexity. For low-dimensional data, we determine a higher-order transformed coordinate system, whereas, for high-dimensional data, we find a lower-order coordinate system with the desired properties. We demonstrate the proposed methodology by means of both low-dimensional and high-dimensional nonlinear Hamiltonian systems.