Biomimetic and Bioinspired design is not only a potent resource for roboticists looking to develop robust engineering systems or understand the natural world. It is also a uniquely accessible entry point into science and technology. Every person on Earth constantly interacts with nature, and most people have an intuitive sense of animal and plant behavior, even without realizing it. The Natural Robotics Contest is novel piece of science communication that takes advantage of this intuition, and creates an opportunity for anyone with an interest in nature or robotics to submit their idea and have it turned into a real engineering system. In this paper we will discuss the competition's submissions, which show how the public thinks of nature as well as the problems people see as most pressing for engineers to solve. We will then show our design process from the winning submitted concept sketch through to functioning robot, to offer a case study in biomimetic robot design. The winning design is a robotic fish which uses gill structures to filter out microplastics. This was fabricated into an open source robot with a novel 3D printed gill design. By presenting the competition and the winning entry we hope to foster further interest in nature-inspired design, and increase the interplay between nature and engineering in the minds of readers.

Recent work on question generation has largely focused on factoid questions such as who, what, where, when about basic facts. Generating open-ended why, how, what, etc. questions that require long-form answers have proven more difficult. To facilitate the generation of open-ended questions, we propose CONSISTENT, a new end-to-end system for generating open-ended questions that are answerable from and faithful to the input text. Using news articles as a trustworthy foundation for experimentation, we demonstrate our model's strength over several baselines using both automatic and human=based evaluations. We contribute an evaluation dataset of expert-generated open-ended questions.We discuss potential downstream applications for news media organizations.

Molecular property prediction is a fundamental task in the drug and material industries. Physically, the properties of a molecule are determined by its own electronic structure, which is a quantum many-body system and can be exactly described by the Schr"odinger equation. Full-range many-body interactions between electrons have been proven effective in obtaining an accurate solution of the Schr"odinger equation by classical computational chemistry methods, although modeling such interactions consumes an expensive computational cost. Meanwhile, deep learning methods have also demonstrated their competence in molecular property prediction tasks. Inspired by the classical computational chemistry methods, we design a novel method, namely GEM-2, which comprehensively considers full-range many-body interactions in molecules. Multiple tracks are utilized to model the full-range interactions between the many-bodies with different orders, and a novel axial attention mechanism is designed to approximate the full-range interaction modeling with much lower computational cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate the overwhelming superiority of GEM-2 over multiple baseline methods in quantum chemistry and drug discovery tasks. The ablation studies also verify the effectiveness of the full-range many-body interactions.

Current deep convolutional networks are fixed in their topology. We explore the possibilites of making the convolutional topology a parameter itself by combining NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and propose such a system using blocks of Residual Networks (ResNets). We then explain how our suggested system can only be built once additional optimizations have been made, as genetic algorithms are way more demanding than training per backpropagation. On the way there we explain most of those buzzwords and offer a gentle and brief introduction to the most important modern areas of machine learning.

We investigate the knowledge graph entity typing task which aims at inferring plausible entity types. In this paper, we propose a novel Transformer-based Entity Typing (TET) approach, effectively encoding the content of neighbors of an entity. More precisely, TET is composed of three different mechanisms: a local transformer allowing to infer missing types of an entity by independently encoding the information provided by each of its neighbors; a global transformer aggregating the information of all neighbors of an entity into a single long sequence to reason about more complex entity types; and a context transformer integrating neighbors content based on their contribution to the type inference through information exchange between neighbor pairs. Furthermore, TET uses information about class membership of types to semantically strengthen the representation of an entity. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of TET compared to the state-of-the-art.

Deidentification seeks to anonymize textual data prior to distribution. Automatic deidentification primarily uses supervised named entity recognition from human-labeled data points. We propose an unsupervised deidentification method that masks words that leak personally-identifying information. The approach utilizes a specially trained reidentification model to identify individuals from redacted personal documents. Motivated by K-anonymity based privacy, we generate redactions that ensure a minimum reidentification rank for the correct profile of the document. To evaluate this approach, we consider the task of deidentifying Wikipedia Biographies, and evaluate using an adversarial reidentification metric. Compared to a set of unsupervised baselines, our approach deidentifies documents more completely while removing fewer words. Qualitatively, we see that the approach eliminates many identifying aspects that would fall outside of the common named entity based approach.

Representation learning of knowledge graphs aims to embed entities and relations into low-dimensional vectors. Most existing works only consider the direct relations or paths between an entity pair. It is considered that such approaches disconnect the semantic connection of multi-relations between an entity pair, and we propose a convolutional and multi-relational representation learning model, ConvMR. The proposed ConvMR model addresses the multi-relation issue in two aspects: (1) Encoding the multi-relations between an entity pair into a unified vector that maintains the semantic connection. (2) Since not all relations are necessary while joining multi-relations, we propose an attention-based relation encoder to automatically assign weights to different relations based on semantic hierarchy. Experimental results on two popular datasets, FB15k-237 and WN18RR, achieved consistent improvements on the mean rank. We also found that ConvMR is efficient to deal with less frequent entities.

Multi-turn dialogue modeling as a challenging branch of natural language understanding (NLU), aims to build representations for machines to understand human dialogues, which provides a solid foundation for multiple downstream tasks. Recent studies of dialogue modeling commonly employ pre-trained language models (PrLMs) to encode the dialogue history as successive tokens, which is insufficient in capturing the temporal characteristics of dialogues. Therefore, we propose Bidirectional Information Decoupling Network (BiDeN) as a universal dialogue encoder, which explicitly incorporates both the past and future contexts and can be generalized to a wide range of dialogue-related tasks. Experimental results on datasets of different downstream tasks demonstrate the universality and effectiveness of our BiDeN.

Numerical reasoning over text is a challenging task of Artificial Intelligence (AI), requiring reading comprehension and numerical reasoning abilities. Previous approaches use numerical reasoning programs to represent the reasoning process. However, most works do not separate the generation of operators and operands, which are key components of a numerical reasoning program, thus limiting their ability to generate such programs for complicated tasks. In this paper, we introduce the numEricaL reASoning with adapTive symbolIc Compiler (ELASTIC) model, which is constituted of the RoBERTa as the Encoder and a Compiler with four modules: Reasoning Manager, Operator Generator, Operands Generator, and Memory Register. ELASTIC is robust when conducting complicated reasoning. Also, it is domain agnostic by supporting the expansion of diverse operators without caring about the number of operands it contains. Experiments show that ELASTIC achieves 68.96 and 65.21 of execution accuracy and program accuracy on the FinQA dataset and 83.00 program accuracy on the MathQA dataset, outperforming previous state-of-the-art models significantly.

We describe findings of the third Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI 2022). NADI aims at advancing state of the art Arabic NLP, including on Arabic dialects. It does so by affording diverse datasets and modeling opportunities in a standardized context where meaningful comparisons between models and approaches are possible. NADI 2022 targeted both dialect identification (Subtask 1) and dialectal sentiment analysis (Subtask 2) at the country level. A total of 41 unique teams registered for the shared task, of whom 21 teams have actually participated (with 105 valid submissions). Among these, 19 teams participated in Subtask 1 and 10 participated in Subtask 2. The winning team achieved 27.06 F1 on Subtask 1 and F1=75.16 on Subtask 2, reflecting that the two subtasks remain challenging and motivating future work in this area. We describe methods employed by participating teams and offer an outlook for NADI.