Automated Generation of Multiple-Choice Cloze Questions for Assessing English Vocabulary Using GPT-turbo 3.5

A common way of assessing language learners' mastery of vocabulary is via multiple-choice cloze (i.e., fill-in-the-blank) questions. But the creation of test items can be laborious for individual teachers or in large-scale language programs. In this paper, we evaluate a new method for automatically generating these types of questions using large language models (LLM). The VocaTT (vocabulary teaching and training) engine is written in Python and comprises three basic steps: pre-processing target word lists, generating sentences and candidate word options using GPT, and finally selecting suitable word options. To test the efficiency of this system, 60 questions were generated targeting academic words. The generated items were reviewed by expert reviewers who judged the well-formedness of the sentences and word options, adding comments to items judged not well-formed. Results showed a 75% rate of well-formedness for sentences and 66.85% rate for suitable word options. This is a marked improvement over the generator used earlier in our research which did not take advantage of GPT's capabilities. Post-hoc qualitative analysis reveals several points for improvement in future work including cross-referencing part-of-speech tagging, better sentence validation, and improving GPT prompts.

Assessing the Efficacy of Grammar Error Correction: A Human Evaluation Approach in the Japanese Context

In this study, we evaluated the performance of the state-of-the-art sequence tagging grammar error detection and correction model (SeqTagger) using Japanese university students' writing samples. With an automatic annotation toolkit, ERRANT, we first evaluated SeqTagger's performance on error correction with human expert correction as the benchmark. Then a human-annotated approach was adopted to evaluate Seqtagger's performance in error detection using a subset of the writing dataset. Results indicated a precision of 63.66% and a recall of 20.19% for error correction in the full dataset. For the subset, after manual exclusion of irrelevant errors such as semantic and mechanical ones, the model shows an adjusted precision of 97.98% and an adjusted recall of 42.98% for error detection, indicating the model's high accuracy but also its conservativeness. Thematic analysis on errors undetected by the model revealed that determiners and articles, especially the latter, were predominant. Specifically, in terms of context-independent errors, the model occasionally overlooked basic ones and faced challenges with overly erroneous or complex structures. Meanwhile, context-dependent errors, notably those related to tense and noun number, as well as those possibly influenced by the students' first language (L1), remained particularly challenging.

A Unified Framework for Fair Spectral Clustering With Effective Graph Learning

We consider the problem of spectral clustering under group fairness constraints, where samples from each sensitive group are approximately proportionally represented in each cluster. Traditional fair spectral clustering (FSC) methods consist of two consecutive stages, i.e., performing fair spectral embedding on a given graph and conducting $k$means to obtain discrete cluster labels. However, in practice, the graph is usually unknown, and we need to construct the underlying graph from potentially noisy data, the quality of which inevitably affects subsequent fair clustering performance. Furthermore, performing FSC through separate steps breaks the connections among these steps, leading to suboptimal results. To this end, we first theoretically analyze the effect of the constructed graph on FSC. Motivated by the analysis, we propose a novel graph construction method with a node-adaptive graph filter to learn graphs from noisy data. Then, all independent stages of conventional FSC are integrated into a single objective function, forming an end-to-end framework that inputs raw data and outputs discrete cluster labels. An algorithm is developed to jointly and alternately update the variables in each stage. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on synthetic, benchmark, and real data, which show that our model is superior to state-of-the-art fair clustering methods.

Yuille-Poggio's Flow and Global Minimizer of polynomials through convexification by Heat Evolution

In this paper, we investigate the possibility of the backward-differential-flow-like algorithm which starts from the minimum of convexification version of the polynomial. We apply the heat evolution convexification approach through Gaussian filtering, which is actually an accumulation version of Steklov's regularization. We generalize the fingerprint theory which was proposed in the theory of computer vision by A.L. Yuille and T. Poggio in 1980s, in particular their fingerprint trajectory equation, to characterize the evolution of minimizers across the scale. On the other hand, we propose the "seesaw" polynomials $p(x|s)$ and we find a seesaw differential equation $\frac{\partial p(x|s)}{\,ds}=-\frac{1}{p''(x)}$ to characterize the evolution of global minimizer $x^*(s)$ of $p(x|s)$ while varying $s$. Essentially, both the fingerprints $\mathcal{FP}_2$ and $\mathcal{FP}_3$ of $p(x)$, consisting of the zeros of $\frac{\partial^2 p(x,t)}{\partial x^2}$ and $\frac{\partial^3 p(x,t)}{\partial x^3}$, respectively, are independent of seesaw coefficient $s$, upon which we define the Confinement Zone and Escape Zone. Meanwhile, varying $s$ will monotonically condition the location of global minimizer of $p(x|s)$, and all these location form the Attainable Zone. Based on these concepts, we prove that the global minimizer $x^*$ of $p(x)$ can be inversely evolved from the global minimizer of its convexification polynomial $p(x,t_0)$ if and only if $x^*$ is included in the Escape Zone. In particular, we give detailed analysis for quartic and six degree polynomials.

Time-varying Graph Learning Under Structured Temporal Priors

This paper endeavors to learn time-varying graphs by using structured temporal priors that assume underlying relations between arbitrary two graphs in the graph sequence. Different from many existing chain structure based methods in which the priors like temporal homogeneity can only describe the variations of two consecutive graphs, we propose a structure named \emph{temporal graph} to characterize the underlying real temporal relations. Under this framework, the chain structure is actually a special case of our temporal graph. We further proposed Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), a distributed algorithm, to solve the induced optimization problem. Numerical experiments demonstrate the superiorities of our method.

A Semantic Indexing Structure for Image Retrieval

In large-scale image retrieval, many indexing methods have been proposed to narrow down the searching scope of retrieval. The features extracted from images usually are of high dimensions or unfixed sizes due to the existence of key points. Most of existing index structures suffer from the dimension curse, the unfixed feature size and/or the loss of semantic similarity. In this paper a new classification-based indexing structure, called Semantic Indexing Structure (SIS), is proposed, in which we utilize the semantic categories rather than clustering centers to create database partitions, such that the proposed index SIS can be combined with feature extractors without the restriction of dimensions. Besides, it is observed that the size of each semantic partition is positively correlated with the semantic distribution of database. Along this way, we found that when the partition number is normalized to five, the proposed algorithm performed very well in all the tests. Compared with state-of-the-art models, SIS achieves outstanding performance.

Robust Graph Learning Under Wasserstein Uncertainty

Graphs are playing a crucial role in different fields since they are powerful tools to unveil intrinsic relationships among signals. In many scenarios, an accurate graph structure representing signals is not available at all and that motivates people to learn a reliable graph structure directly from observed signals. However, in real life, it is inevitable that there exists uncertainty in the observed signals due to noise measurements or limited observability, which causes a reduction in reliability of the learned graph. To this end, we propose a graph learning framework using Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (WDRO) which handles uncertainty in data by defining an uncertainty set on distributions of the observed data. Specifically, two models are developed, one of which assumes all distributions in uncertainty set are Gaussian distributions and the other one has no prior distributional assumption. Instead of using interior point method directly, we propose two algorithms to solve the corresponding models and show that our algorithms are more time-saving. In addition, we also reformulate both two models into Semi-Definite Programming (SDP), and illustrate that they are intractable in the scenario of large-scale graph. Experiments on both synthetic and real world data are carried out to validate the proposed framework, which show that our scheme can learn a reliable graph in the context of uncertainty.

Learning Geo-Contextual Embeddings for Commuting Flow Prediction

Predicting commuting flows based on infrastructure and land-use information is critical for urban planning and public policy development. However, it is a challenging task given the complex patterns of commuting flows. Conventional models, such as gravity model, are mainly derived from physics principles and limited by their predictive power in real-world scenarios where many factors need to be considered. Meanwhile, most existing machine learning-based methods ignore the spatial correlations and fail to model the influence of nearby regions. To address these issues, we propose Geo-contextual Multitask Embedding Learner (GMEL), a model that captures the spatial correlations from geographic contextual information for commuting flow prediction. Specifically, we first construct a geo-adjacency network containing the geographic contextual information. Then, an attention mechanism is proposed based on the framework of graph attention network (GAT) to capture the spatial correlations and encode geographic contextual information to embedding space. Two separate GATs are used to model supply and demand characteristics. A multitask learning framework is used to introduce stronger restrictions and enhance the effectiveness of the embedding representation. Finally, a gradient boosting machine is trained based on the learned embeddings to predict commuting flows. We evaluate our model using real-world datasets from New York City and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal against the state of the art.

Zero-shot Feature Selection via Exploiting Semantic Knowledge

Feature selection plays an important role in pattern recognition and machine learning systems. Supervised knowledge can significantly improve the performance. However, confronted with the rapid growth of newly-emerging concepts, existing supervised methods may easily suffer from the scarcity of labeled data for training. Therefore, this paper studies the problem of Zero-Shot Feature Selection, i.e., building a feature selection model that generalizes well to "unseen" concepts with limited training data of "seen" concepts. To address this, inspired by zero-shot learning, we use class-semantic descriptions (i.e., attributes) which provide additional semantic information about unseen concepts as supervision. In addition, to seek for more reliable discriminative features, we further propose a novel loss function (named center-characteristic loss) which encourages the selected features to capture the central characteristics of seen concepts. Experimental results on three benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.