Many users turn to document retrieval systems (e.g. search engines) to seek answers to controversial questions. Answering such user queries usually require identifying responses within web documents, and aggregating the responses based on their different perspectives. Classical document retrieval systems fall short at delivering a set of direct and diverse responses to the users. Naturally, identifying such responses within a document is a natural language understanding task. In this paper, we examine the challenges of synthesizing such language understanding objectives with document retrieval, and study a new perspective-oriented document retrieval paradigm. We discuss and assess the inherent natural language understanding challenges in order to achieve the goal. Following the design challenges and principles, we demonstrate and evaluate a practical prototype pipeline system. We use the prototype system to conduct a user survey in order to assess the utility of our paradigm, as well as understanding the user information needs for controversial queries.
This paper studies an instance of the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, specifically where several causal MABs operate chronologically in the same dynamical system. Practically the reward distribution of each bandit is governed by the same non-trivial dependence structure, which is a dynamic causal model. Dynamic because we allow for each causal MAB to depend on the preceding MAB and in doing so are able to transfer information between agents. Our contribution, the Chronological Causal Bandit (CCB), is useful in discrete decision-making settings where the causal effects are changing across time and can be informed by earlier interventions in the same system. In this paper, we present some early findings of the CCB as demonstrated on a toy problem.
The construction cost index is an important indicator in the construction industry. Predicting CCI has great practical significance. This paper combines information fusion with machine learning, and proposes a Multi-feature Fusion framework for time series forecasting. MFF uses a sliding window algorithm and proposes a function sequence to convert the time sequence into a feature sequence for information fusion. MFF replaces the traditional information method with machine learning to achieve information fusion, which greatly improves the CCI prediction effect. MFF is of great significance to CCI and time series forecasting.
Hierarchical multi-granularity classification (HMC) assigns hierarchical multi-granularity labels to each object and focuses on encoding the label hierarchy, e.g., ["Albatross", "Laysan Albatross"] from coarse-to-fine levels. However, the definition of what is fine-grained is subjective, and the image quality may affect the identification. Thus, samples could be observed at any level of the hierarchy, e.g., ["Albatross"] or ["Albatross", "Laysan Albatross"], and examples discerned at coarse categories are often neglected in the conventional setting of HMC. In this paper, we study the HMC problem in which objects are labeled at any level of the hierarchy. The essential designs of the proposed method are derived from two motivations: (1) learning with objects labeled at various levels should transfer hierarchical knowledge between levels; (2) lower-level classes should inherit attributes related to upper-level superclasses. The proposed combinatorial loss maximizes the marginal probability of the observed ground truth label by aggregating information from related labels defined in the tree hierarchy. If the observed label is at the leaf level, the combinatorial loss further imposes the multi-class cross-entropy loss to increase the weight of fine-grained classification loss. Considering the hierarchical feature interaction, we propose a hierarchical residual network (HRN), in which granularity-specific features from parent levels acting as residual connections are added to features of children levels. Experiments on three commonly used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to the state-of-the-art HMC approaches and fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) methods exploiting the label hierarchy.
Deep learning (DL)-based models have demonstrated good performance in medical image segmentation. However, the models trained on a known dataset often fail when performed on an unseen dataset collected from different centers, vendors and disease populations. In this work, we present a random style transfer network to tackle the domain generalization problem for multi-vendor and center cardiac image segmentation. Style transfer is used to generate training data with a wider distribution/ heterogeneity, namely domain augmentation. As the target domain could be unknown, we randomly generate a modality vector for the target modality in the style transfer stage, to simulate the domain shift for unknown domains. The model can be trained in a semi-supervised manner by simultaneously optimizing a supervised segmentation and an unsupervised style translation objective. Besides, the framework incorporates the spatial information and shape prior of the target by introducing two regularization terms. We evaluated the proposed framework on 40 subjects from the M\&Ms challenge2020, and obtained promising performance in the segmentation for data from unknown vendors and centers.
Rule-based classifier, that extract a subset of induced rules to efficiently learn/mine while preserving the discernibility information, plays a crucial role in human-explainable artificial intelligence. However, in this era of big data, rule induction on the whole datasets is computationally intensive. So far, to the best of our knowledge, no known method focusing on accelerating rule induction has been reported. This is first study to consider the acceleration technique to reduce the scale of computation in rule induction. We propose an accelerator for rule induction based on fuzzy rough theory; the accelerator can avoid redundant computation and accelerate the building of a rule classifier. First, a rule induction method based on consistence degree, called Consistence-based Value Reduction (CVR), is proposed and used as basis to accelerate. Second, we introduce a compacted search space termed Key Set, which only contains the key instances required to update the induced rule, to conduct value reduction. The monotonicity of Key Set ensures the feasibility of our accelerator. Third, a rule-induction accelerator is designed based on Key Set, and it is theoretically guaranteed to display the same results as the unaccelerated version. Specifically, the rank preservation property of Key Set ensures consistency between the rule induction achieved by the accelerator and the unaccelerated method. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed accelerator can perform remarkably faster than the unaccelerated rule-based classifier methods, especially on datasets with numerous instances.
Current orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithms calculate the correlation between two vectors using the inner product operation and minimize the mean square error, which are both suboptimal when there are non-Gaussian noises or outliers in the observation data. To overcome these problems, a new OMP algorithm is developed based on the information theoretic learning (ITL), which is built on the following new techniques: (1) an ITL-based correlation (ITL-Correlation) is developed as a new similarity measure which can better exploit higher-order statistics of the data, and is robust against many different types of noise and outliers in a sparse representation framework; (2) a non-second order statistic measurement and minimization method is developed to improve the robustness of OMP by overcoming the limitation of Gaussianity inherent in cost function based on second-order moments. The experimental results on both simulated and real-world data consistently demonstrate the superiority of the proposed OMP algorithm in data recovery, image reconstruction, and classification.
Sentiment analysis attempts to identify, extract and quantify affective states and subjective information from various types of data such as text, audio, and video. Many approaches have been proposed to extract the sentiment of individuals from documents written in natural languages in recent years. The majority of these approaches have focused on English, while resource-lean languages such as Persian suffer from the lack of research work and language resources. Due to this gap in Persian, the current work is accomplished to introduce new methods for sentiment analysis which have been applied on Persian. The proposed approach in this paper is two-fold: The first one is based on classifier combination, and the second one is based on deep neural networks which benefits from word embedding vectors. Both approaches takes advantage of local discourse information and external knowledge bases, and also cover several language issues such as negation and intensification, andaddresses different granularity levels, namely word, aspect, sentence, phrase and document-levels. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, a Persian dataset is collected from Persian hotel reviews referred as hotel reviews. The proposed approach has been compared to counterpart methods based on the benchmark dataset. The experimental results approve the effectiveness of the proposed approach when compared to related works.
Unifying acoustic and linguistic representation learning has become increasingly crucial to transfer the knowledge learned on the abundance of high-resource language data for low-resource speech recognition. Existing approaches simply cascade pre-trained acoustic and language models to learn the transfer from speech to text. However, how to solve the representation discrepancy of speech and text is unexplored, which hinders the utilization of acoustic and linguistic information. Moreover, previous works simply replace the embedding layer of the pre-trained language model with the acoustic features, which may cause the catastrophic forgetting problem. In this work, we introduce Wav-BERT, a cooperative acoustic and linguistic representation learning method to fuse and utilize the contextual information of speech and text. Specifically, we unify a pre-trained acoustic model (wav2vec 2.0) and a language model (BERT) into an end-to-end trainable framework. A Representation Aggregation Module is designed to aggregate acoustic and linguistic representation, and an Embedding Attention Module is introduced to incorporate acoustic information into BERT, which can effectively facilitate the cooperation of two pre-trained models and thus boost the representation learning. Extensive experiments show that our Wav-BERT significantly outperforms the existing approaches and achieves state-of-the-art performance on low-resource speech recognition.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and their variants have been successfully applied to the electroencephalogram (EEG) based motor imagery (MI) decoding task. However, these CNN-based algorithms generally have limitations in perceiving global temporal dependencies of EEG signals. Besides, they also ignore the diverse contributions of different EEG channels to the classification task. To address such issues, a novel channel attention based MLP-Mixer network (CAMLP-Net) is proposed for EEG-based MI decoding. Specifically, the MLP-based architecture is applied in this network to capture the temporal and spatial information. The attention mechanism is further embedded into MLP-Mixer to adaptively exploit the importance of different EEG channels. Therefore, the proposed CAMLP-Net can effectively learn more global temporal and spatial information. The experimental results on the newly built MI-2 dataset indicate that our proposed CAMLP-Net achieves superior classification performance over all the compared algorithms.