Methods and Tools to Advance the Retrieval of Mathematical Knowledge from Digital Libraries for Search-, Recommendation-, and Assistance-Systems

This project investigated new approaches and technologies to enhance the accessibility of mathematical content and its semantic information for a broad range of information retrieval applications. To achieve this goal, the project addressed three main research challenges: (1) syntactic analysis of mathematical expressions, (2) semantic enrichment of mathematical expressions, and (3) evaluation using quality metrics and demonstrators. To make our research useful for the research community, we published tools that enable researchers to process mathematical expressions more effectively and efficiently.

MoviePuzzle: Visual Narrative Reasoning through Multimodal Order Learning

We introduce MoviePuzzle, a novel challenge that targets visual narrative reasoning and holistic movie understanding. Despite the notable progress that has been witnessed in the realm of video understanding, most prior works fail to present tasks and models to address holistic video understanding and the innate visual narrative structures existing in long-form videos. To tackle this quandary, we put forth MoviePuzzle task that amplifies the temporal feature learning and structure learning of video models by reshuffling the shot, frame, and clip layers of movie segments in the presence of video-dialogue information. We start by establishing a carefully refined dataset based on MovieNet by dissecting movies into hierarchical layers and randomly permuting the orders. Besides benchmarking the MoviePuzzle with prior arts on movie understanding, we devise a Hierarchical Contrastive Movie Clustering (HCMC) model that considers the underlying structure and visual semantic orders for movie reordering. Specifically, through a pairwise and contrastive learning approach, we train models to predict the correct order of each layer. This equips them with the knack for deciphering the visual narrative structure of movies and handling the disorder lurking in video data. Experiments show that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the \MoviePuzzle benchmark, underscoring its efficacy.

Fuzzy Temporal Protoforms for the Quantitative Description of Processes in Natural Language

In this paper, we propose a series of fuzzy temporal protoforms in the framework of the automatic generation of quantitative and qualitative natural language descriptions of processes. The model includes temporal and causal information from processes and attributes, quantifies attributes in time during the process life-span and recalls causal relations and temporal distances between events, among other features. Through integrating process mining techniques and fuzzy sets within the usual Data-to-Text architecture, our framework is able to extract relevant quantitative temporal as well as structural information from a process and describe it in natural language involving uncertain terms. A real use-case in the cardiology domain is presented, showing the potential of our model for providing natural language explanations addressed to domain experts.

DEK-Forecaster: A Novel Deep Learning Model Integrated with EMD-KNN for Traffic Prediction

Internet traffic volume estimation has a significant impact on the business policies of the ISP (Internet Service Provider) industry and business successions. Forecasting the internet traffic demand helps to shed light on the future traffic trend, which is often helpful for ISPs decision-making in network planning activities and investments. Besides, the capability to understand future trend contributes to managing regular and long-term operations. This study aims to predict the network traffic volume demand using deep sequence methods that incorporate Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) based noise reduction, Empirical rule based outlier detection, and $K$-Nearest Neighbour (KNN) based outlier mitigation. In contrast to the former studies, the proposed model does not rely on a particular EMD decomposed component called Intrinsic Mode Function (IMF) for signal denoising. In our proposed traffic prediction model, we used an average of all IMFs components for signal denoising. Moreover, the abnormal data points are replaced by $K$ nearest data points average, and the value for $K$ has been optimized based on the KNN regressor prediction error measured in Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE). Finally, we selected the best time-lagged feature subset for our prediction model based on AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) value. Our experiments are conducted on real-world internet traffic datasets from industry, and the proposed method is compared with various traditional deep sequence baseline models. Our results show that the proposed EMD-KNN integrated prediction models outperform comparative models.

Multi-Label ECG Classification using Temporal Convolutional Neural Network

Automated analysis of 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) plays a crucial role in the early screening and management of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). In practice, it is common to see multiple co-occurring cardiac disorders, i.e., multi-label or multimorbidity in patients with CVDs, which increases the risk for mortality. Most current research focuses on the single-label ECG classification, i.e., each ECG record corresponds to one cardiac disorder, ignoring ECG records with multi-label phenomenon. In this paper, we propose an ensemble of attention-based temporal convolutional neural network (ATCNN) models for the multi-label classification of 12-lead ECG records. Specifically, a set of ATCNN-based single-lead binary classifiers are trained one for each cardiac disorder, and the predictions from these classifiers with simple thresholding generate the final multi-label decisions. The ATCNN contains a stack of TCNN layers followed by temporal and spatial attention layers. The TCNN layers operate at different dilation rates to represent the multi-scaled pathological ECG features dynamics, and attention layers emphasize/reduce the diagnostically relevant/redundant 12-lead ECG information. The proposed framework is evaluated on the PTBXL-2020 dataset and achieved an average F1-score of 76.51%. Moreover, the spatial and temporal attention weights visualization provides the optimal ECG-lead subset selection for each disease and model interpretability results, respectively. The improved performance and interpretability of the proposed approach demonstrate its ability to screen multimorbidity patients and help clinicians initiate timely treatment.

Form Follows Function: A Different Approach to Neuron Connectivity

It may be possible to discover much of the organization of synaptic connections in nervous systems by designing simple logic circuits that can perform a single, biologically advantageous function. This method has led to neuronal networks that can generate neural correlates of phenomena central to color vision, olfaction, short-term memory, and brain waves. One of the network designs is a family of general information processors that exhibit major features of cerebral cortex physiology and anatomy. A similar logic circuit approach applied to two primitive ganglia that have been studied extensively led to discoveries of how the ganglia can produce lobster peristaltic action and lamprey locomotion. For each network design, all neurons, connections, and types of connections are shown explicitly. The neurons' operation depends only on explicitly stated, minimal properties of excitement and inhibition. This operation is dynamic in the sense that the level of neuron activity is the only cellular change, making the networks' operation consistent with the speed of most brain functions. Conclusions that the networks can generate neural correlates of known phenomena are not claims; they are theorems that follow from the models' explicit architectures and minimal neuron capabilities. The logic circuit designs can be implemented with electronic components. A few of the designs are apparently new to engineering, filling gaps and providing improvements in well-known families of logic circuits. A novel transformation can convert certain electronic logic circuit designs to neuronal network designs, and vice versa.

Computational Technologies for Fashion Recommendation: A Survey

Fashion recommendation is a key research field in computational fashion research and has attracted considerable interest in the computer vision, multimedia, and information retrieval communities in recent years. Due to the great demand for applications, various fashion recommendation tasks, such as personalized fashion product recommendation, complementary (mix-and-match) recommendation, and outfit recommendation, have been posed and explored in the literature. The continuing research attention and advances impel us to look back and in-depth into the field for a better understanding. In this paper, we comprehensively review recent research efforts on fashion recommendation from a technological perspective. We first introduce fashion recommendation at a macro level and analyse its characteristics and differences with general recommendation tasks. We then clearly categorize different fashion recommendation efforts into several sub-tasks and focus on each sub-task in terms of its problem formulation, research focus, state-of-the-art methods, and limitations. We also summarize the datasets proposed in the literature for use in fashion recommendation studies to give readers a brief illustration. Finally, we discuss several promising directions for future research in this field. Overall, this survey systematically reviews the development of fashion recommendation research. It also discusses the current limitations and gaps between academic research and the real needs of the fashion industry. In the process, we offer a deep insight into how the fashion industry could benefit from fashion recommendation technologies. the computational technologies of fashion recommendation.

Explanation Regeneration via Information Bottleneck

Explaining the black-box predictions of NLP models naturally and accurately is an important open problem in natural language generation. These free-text explanations are expected to contain sufficient and carefully-selected evidence to form supportive arguments for predictions. Due to the superior generative capacity of large pretrained language models, recent work built on prompt engineering enables explanation generation without specific training. However, explanation generated through single-pass prompting often lacks sufficiency and conciseness. To address this problem, we develop an information bottleneck method EIB to produce refined explanations that are sufficient and concise. Our approach regenerates the free-text explanation by polishing the single-pass output from the pretrained language model but retaining the information that supports the contents being explained. Experiments on two out-of-domain tasks verify the effectiveness of EIB through automatic evaluation and thoroughly-conducted human evaluation.

Divided spectro-temporal attention for sound event localization and detection in real scenes for DCASE2023 challenge

Localizing sounds and detecting events in different room environments is a difficult task, mainly due to the wide range of reflections and reverberations. When training neural network models with sounds recorded in only a few room environments, there is a tendency for the models to become overly specialized to those specific environments, resulting in overfitting. To address this overfitting issue, we propose divided spectro-temporal attention. In comparison to the baseline method, which utilizes a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) followed by a temporal multi-head self-attention layer (MHSA), we introduce a separate spectral attention layer that aggregates spectral features prior to the temporal MHSA. To achieve efficient spectral attention, we reduce the frequency pooling size in the convolutional encoder of the baseline to obtain a 3D tensor that incorporates information about frequency, time, and channel. As a result, we can implement spectral attention with channel embeddings, which is not possible in the baseline method dealing with only temporal context in the RNN and MHSA layers. We demonstrate that the proposed divided spectro-temporal attention significantly improves the performance of sound event detection and localization scores for real test data from the STARSS23 development dataset. Additionally, we show that various data augmentations, such as frameshift, time masking, channel swapping, and moderate mix-up, along with the use of external data, contribute to the overall improvement in SELD performance.

Learning from Noisy Labels Generated by Extremely Point Annotations for OCT Fluid Segmentation

Automatic segmentation of fluid in OCT (Optical Coherence Tomography) images is beneficial for ophthalmologists to make an accurate diagnosis. Currently, data-driven convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved great success in OCT fluid segmentation. However, obtaining pixel-level masks of OCT images is time-consuming and requires expertise. The popular weakly-supervised strategy is to generate noisy pseudo-labels from weak annotations, but the noise information introduced may mislead the model training. To address this issue, (i) we propose a superpixel-guided method for generating noisy labels from weak point annotations, called Point to Noisy by Superpixel (PNS), which limits the network from over-fitting noise by assigning low confidence to suspiciously noisy label pixels, and (ii) we propose a Two-Stage Mean-Teacher-assisted Confident Learning (2SMTCL) method based on MTCL for multi-category OCT fluid segmentation, which alleviates the uncertainty and computing power consumption introduced by the real-time characterization noise of MTCL. For evaluation, we have constructed a 2D OCT fluid segmentation dataset. Compared with other state-of-art label-denoising methods, comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve excellent performance in OCT fluid segmentation as well as label denoising. Our study provides an efficient, accurate, and practical solution for fluid segmentation of OCT images, which is expected to have a positive impact on the diagnosis and treatment of patients in the field of ophthalmology.