Text provides a compelling example of unstructured data that can be used to motivate and explore classification problems. Challenges arise regarding the representation of features of text and student linkage between text representations as character strings and identification of features that embed connections with underlying phenomena. In order to observe how students reason with text data in scenarios designed to elicit certain aspects of the domain, we employed a task-based interview method using a structured protocol with six pairs of undergraduate students. Our goal was to shed light on students' understanding of text as data using a motivating task to classify headlines as "clickbait" or "news". Three types of features (function, content, and form) surfaced, the majority from the first scenario. Our analysis of the interviews indicates that this sequence of activities engaged the participants in thinking at both the human-perception level and the computer-extraction level and conceptualizing connections between them.

Neural text-to-SQL models have achieved remarkable performance in translating natural language questions into SQL queries. However, recent studies reveal that text-to-SQL models are vulnerable to task-specific perturbations. Previous curated robustness test sets usually focus on individual phenomena. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive robustness benchmark based on Spider, a cross-domain text-to-SQL benchmark, to diagnose the model robustness. We design 17 perturbations on databases, natural language questions, and SQL queries to measure the robustness from different angles. In order to collect more diversified natural question perturbations, we utilize large pretrained language models (PLMs) to simulate human behaviors in creating natural questions. We conduct a diagnostic study of the state-of-the-art models on the robustness set. Experimental results reveal that even the most robust model suffers from a 14.0% performance drop overall and a 50.7% performance drop on the most challenging perturbation. We also present a breakdown analysis regarding text-to-SQL model designs and provide insights for improving model robustness.

Multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) have shown their effectiveness in multilingual word alignment induction. However, these methods usually start from mBERT or XLM-R. In this paper, we investigate whether multilingual sentence Transformer LaBSE is a strong multilingual word aligner. This idea is non-trivial as LaBSE is trained to learn language-agnostic sentence-level embeddings, while the alignment extraction task requires the more fine-grained word-level embeddings to be language-agnostic. We demonstrate that the vanilla LaBSE outperforms other mPLMs currently used in the alignment task, and then propose to finetune LaBSE on parallel corpus for further improvement. Experiment results on seven language pairs show that our best aligner outperforms previous state-of-the-art models of all varieties. In addition, our aligner supports different language pairs in a single model, and even achieves new state-of-the-art on zero-shot language pairs that does not appear in the finetuning process.

In this paper, we are interested in developing semantic parsers which understand natural language questions embedded in a conversation with a user and ground them to formal queries over definitions in a general purpose knowledge graph (KG) with very large vocabularies (covering thousands of concept names and relations, and millions of entities). To this end, we develop a dataset where user questions are annotated with Sparql parses and system answers correspond to execution results thereof. We present two different semantic parsing approaches and highlight the challenges of the task: dealing with large vocabularies, modelling conversation context, predicting queries with multiple entities, and generalising to new questions at test time. We hope our dataset will serve as useful testbed for the development of conversational semantic parsers. Our dataset and models are released at https://github.com/EdinburghNLP/SPICE.

DatalogMTL is an extension of Datalog with metric temporal operators that has recently found applications in stream reasoning and temporal ontology-based data access. In contrast to plain Datalog, where materialisation (a.k.a. forward chaining) naturally terminates in finitely many steps, reaching a fixpoint in DatalogMTL may require infinitely many rounds of rule applications. As a result, existing reasoning systems resort to other approaches, such as constructing large Büchi automata, whose implementations turn out to be highly inefficient in practice. In this paper, we propose and study finitely materialisable DatalogMTL programs, for which forward chaining reasoning is guaranteed to terminate. We consider a data-dependent notion of finite materialisability of a program, where termination is guaranteed for a given dataset, as well as a data-independent notion, where termination is guaranteed regardless of the dataset. We show that, for bounded programs (a natural DatalogMTL fragment for which reasoning is as hard as in the full language), checking data-dependent finite materialisability is ExpSpace-complete in combined complexity and PSpace-complete in data complexity; furthermore, we propose a practical materialisation-based decision procedure that works in doubly exponential time. We show that checking data-independent finite materialisability for bounded progams is computationally easier, namely ExpTime-complete; moreover, we propose sufficient conditions for data-indenpendent finite materialisability that can be efficiently checked. We provide also the complexity landscape of fact entailment for different classes of finitely materialisable programs; surprisingly, we could identify a large class of finitely materialisable programs, called MTL-acyclic programs, for which fact entailment has exactly the same data and combined complexity as in plain Datalog, which makes this fragment especially well suited for big-scale applications.

Much hope for finding new physics phenomena at microscopic scale relies on the observations obtained from High Energy Physics experiments, like the ones performed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). However, current experiments do not indicate clear signs of new physics that could guide the development of additional Beyond Standard Model (BSM) theories. Identifying signatures of new physics out of the enormous amount of data produced at the LHC falls into the class of anomaly detection and constitutes one of the greatest computational challenges. In this article, we propose a novel strategy to perform anomaly detection in a supervised learning setting, based on the artificial creation of anomalies through a random process. For the resulting supervised learning problem, we successfully apply classical and quantum Support Vector Classifiers (CSVC and QSVC respectively) to identify the artificial anomalies among the SM events. Even more promising, we find that employing an SVC trained to identify the artificial anomalies, it is possible to identify realistic BSM events with high accuracy. In parallel, we also explore the potential of quantum algorithms for improving the classification accuracy and provide plausible conditions for the best exploitation of this novel computational paradigm.

Social media is a modern person's digital voice to project and engage with new ideas and mobilise communities $\unicode{x2013}$ a power shared with extremists. Given the societal risks of unvetted content-moderating algorithms for Extremism, Radicalisation, and Hate speech (ERH) detection, responsible software engineering must understand the who, what, when, where, and why such models are necessary to protect user safety and free expression. Hence, we propose and examine the unique research field of ERH context mining to unify disjoint studies. Specifically, we evaluate the start-to-finish design process from socio-technical definition-building and dataset collection strategies to technical algorithm design and performance. Our 2015-2021 51-study Systematic Literature Review (SLR) provides the first cross-examination of textual, network, and visual approaches to detecting extremist affiliation, hateful content, and radicalisation towards groups and movements. We identify consensus-driven ERH definitions and propose solutions to existing ideological and geographic biases, particularly due to the lack of research in Oceania/Australasia. Our hybridised investigation on Natural Language Processing, Community Detection, and visual-text models demonstrates the dominating performance of textual transformer-based algorithms. We conclude with vital recommendations for ERH context mining researchers and propose an uptake roadmap with guidelines for researchers, industries, and governments to enable a safer cyberspace.

Face recognition is known to be vulnerable to adversarial face images. Existing works craft face adversarial images by indiscriminately changing a single attribute without being aware of the intrinsic attributes of the images. To this end, we propose a new Semantic Adversarial Attack called SAA-StarGAN that tampers with the significant facial attributes for each image. We predict the most significant attributes by applying the cosine similarity or probability score. The probability score method is based on training a Face Verification model for an attribute prediction task to obtain a class probability score for each attribute. The prediction process will help craft adversarial face images more easily and efficiently, as well as improve the adversarial transferability. Then, we change the most significant facial attributes, with either one or more of the facial attributes for impersonation and dodging attacks in white-box and black-box settings. Experimental results show that our method could generate diverse and realistic adversarial face images meanwhile avoid affecting human perception of the face recognition. SAA-StarGAN achieves an 80.5% attack success rate against black-box models, outperforming existing methods by 35.5% under the impersonation attack. Concerning the black-box setting, SAA-StarGAN achieves high attack success rates on various models. The experiments confirm that predicting the most important attributes significantly affects the success of adversarial attacks in both white-box and black-box settings and could enhance the transferability of the crafted adversarial examples.

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 or the COVID-19 pandemic has swept almost all parts of the world since the first case was found in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. With the increasing number of COVID-19 cases in the world, SARS-CoV-2 has mutated into various variants. Given the increasingly dangerous conditions of the pandemic, it is crucial to know when the pandemic will stop by predicting confirmed cases of COVID-19. Therefore, many studies have raised COVID-19 as a case study to overcome the ongoing pandemic using the Deep Learning method, namely LSTM, with reasonably accurate results and small error values. LSTM training is used to predict confirmed cases of COVID-19 based on variants that have been identified using ECDC's COVID-19 dataset containing confirmed cases of COVID-19 that have been identified from 30 countries in Europe. Tests were conducted using the LSTM and BiLSTM models with the addition of RNN as comparisons on hidden size and layer size. The obtained result showed that in testing hidden sizes 25, 50, 75 to 100, the RNN model provided better results, with the minimum MSE value of 0.01 and the RMSE value of 0.012 for B.1.427/B.1.429 variant with hidden size 100. In further testing of layer sizes 2, 3, 4, and 5, the result shows that the BiLSTM model provided better results, with minimum MSE value of 0.01 and the RMSE of 0.01 for the B.1.427/B.1.429 variant with hidden size 100 and layer size 2.

Review summarization is a non-trivial task that aims to summarize the main idea of the product review in the E-commerce website. Different from the document summary which only needs to focus on the main facts described in the document, review summarization should not only summarize the main aspects mentioned in the review but also reflect the personal style of the review author. Although existing review summarization methods have incorporated the historical reviews of both customer and product, they usually simply concatenate and indiscriminately model this two heterogeneous information into a long sequence. Moreover, the rating information can also provide a high-level abstraction of customer preference, it has not been used by the majority of methods. In this paper, we propose the Heterogeneous Historical Review aware Review Summarization Model (HHRRS) which separately models the two types of historical reviews with the rating information by a graph reasoning module with a contrastive loss. We employ a multi-task framework that conducts the review sentiment classification and summarization jointly. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of HHRRS on both tasks.