Africa
Multimodal E-Commerce Product Classification Using Hierarchical Fusion
Tashu, Tsegaye Misikir, Fattouh, Sara, Kiss, Peter, Horvath, Tomas
In this work, we present a multi-modal model for commercial product classification, that combines features extracted by multiple neural network models from textual (CamemBERT and FlauBERT) and visual data (SE-ResNeXt-50), using simple fusion techniques. The proposed method significantly outperformed the unimodal models' performance and the reported performance of similar models on our specific task. We did experiments with multiple fusing techniques and found, that the best performing technique to combine the individual embedding of the unimodal network is based on combining concatenation and averaging the feature vectors. Each modality complemented the shortcomings of the other modalities, demonstrating that increasing the number of modalities can be an effective method for improving the performance of multi-label and multimodal classification problems.
Towards Knowledge-based Mining of Mental Disorder Patterns from Textual Data
Mental health disorders may cause severe consequences on all the countries' economies and health. For example, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as isolation and travel ban, can make us feel depressed. Identifying early signs of mental health disorders is vital. For example, depression may increase an individual's risk of suicide. The state-of-the-art research in identifying mental disorder patterns from textual data, uses hand-labelled training sets, especially when a domain expert's knowledge is required to analyse various symptoms. This task could be time-consuming and expensive. To address this challenge, in this paper, we study and analyse the various clinical and non-clinical approaches to identifying mental health disorders. We leverage the domain knowledge and expertise in cognitive science to build a domain-specific Knowledge Base (KB) for the mental health disorder concepts and patterns. We present a weaker form of supervision by facilitating the generating of training data from a domain-specific Knowledge Base (KB). We adopt a typical scenario for analysing social media to identify major depressive disorder symptoms from the textual content generated by social users. We use this scenario to evaluate how our knowledge-based approach significantly improves the quality of results.
Multimodal Feature Extraction for Memes Sentiment Classification
Ouaari, Sofiane, Tashu, Tsegaye Misikir, Horvath, Tomas
In this study, we propose feature extraction for multimodal meme classification using Deep Learning approaches. A meme is usually a photo or video with text shared by the young generation on social media platforms that expresses a culturally relevant idea. Since they are an efficient way to express emotions and feelings, a good classifier that can classify the sentiment behind the meme is important. To make the learning process more efficient, reduce the likelihood of overfitting, and improve the generalizability of the model, one needs a good approach for joint feature extraction from all modalities. In this work, we proposed to use different multimodal neural network approaches for multimodal feature extraction and use the extracted features to train a classifier to identify the sentiment in a meme.
A Comprehensive Framework for Learning Declarative Action Models
Aineto, Diego | Jimรฉnez, Sergio (Universitat Politรจcnica de Valรจncia) | Onaindia, Eva (Universitat Politรจcnica de Valรจncia)
A declarative action model is a compact representation of the state transitions of dynamic systems that generalizes over world objects. The specification of declarative action models is often a complex hand-crafted task. In this paper we formulate declarative action models via state constraints, and present the learning of such models as a combinatorial search. The comprehensive framework presented here allows us to connect the learning of declarative action models to well-known problem solving tasks. In addition, our framework allows us to characterize the existing work in the literature according to four dimensions: (1) the target action models, in terms of the state transitions they define; (2) the available learning examples; (3) the functions used to guide the learning process, and to evaluate the quality of the learned action models; (4) the learning algorithm. Last, the paper lists relevant successful applications of the learning of declarative actions models and discusses some open challenges with the aim of encouraging future research work.
Heat maps show cities became 'urban heat islands' as temperatures in parts of Europe soared in June
The smallest mention of a heatwave in the UK leads to ice creams selling out, barbecues heating up and shorts being dusted off as the nation celebrates. In June this year, air temperatures in parts of the country soared to over 90 F (33 C), while sharp increases were also felt across Europe, the US and Asia. Air temperatures were recorded in excess of 18 F (10 C) above the average for the time of year in many cities, according to the World Meteorological Organisation. But new heat maps released by the European Space Agency (ESA) show that this might not be such a cause for celebration. They reveal that heat dissipated more slowly in urban areas creating'heat islands' and make life more of a struggle. Experts are worried that this effect will only be exacerbated as climate change continues to take hold.
Meta's latest AI can translate 200 languages in real time
More than 7,000 languages are currently spoken on this planet and Meta seemingly wants to understand them all. Six months ago, the company launched its ambitious No Language Left Behind (NLLB) project, training AI to translate seamlessly between numerous languages without having to go through English first. On Wednesday, the company announced its first big success, dubbed NLLB-200. It's an AI model that can speak in 200 tongues, including a number of less-widely spoken languages from across Asia and Africa, like Lao and Kamba. According to a Wednesday blog post from the company, NLLB-200 can translate 55 African languages with "high-quality results."
Monkeypox Skin Lesion Detection Using Deep Learning Models: A Feasibility Study
Ali, Shams Nafisa, Ahmed, Md. Tazuddin, Paul, Joydip, Jahan, Tasnim, Sani, S. M. Sakeef, Noor, Nawsabah, Hasan, Taufiq
The recent monkeypox outbreak has become a public health concern due to its rapid spread in more than 40 countries outside Africa. Clinical diagnosis of monkeypox in an early stage is challenging due to its similarity with chickenpox and measles. In cases where the confirmatory Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests are not readily available, computer-assisted detection of monkeypox lesions could be beneficial for surveillance and rapid identification of suspected cases. Deep learning methods have been found effective in the automated detection of skin lesions, provided that sufficient training examples are available. However, as of now, such datasets are not available for the monkeypox disease. In the current study, we first develop the ``Monkeypox Skin Lesion Dataset (MSLD)" consisting skin lesion images of monkeypox, chickenpox, and measles. The images are mainly collected from websites, news portals, and publicly accessible case reports. Data augmentation is used to increase the sample size, and a 3-fold cross-validation experiment is set up. In the next step, several pre-trained deep learning models, namely, VGG-16, ResNet50, and InceptionV3 are employed to classify monkeypox and other diseases. An ensemble of the three models is also developed. ResNet50 achieves the best overall accuracy of $82.96(\pm4.57\%)$, while VGG16 and the ensemble system achieved accuracies of $81.48(\pm6.87\%)$ and $79.26(\pm1.05\%)$, respectively. A prototype web-application is also developed as an online monkeypox screening tool. While the initial results on this limited dataset are promising, a larger demographically diverse dataset is required to further enhance the generalizability of these models.
Variational Flow Graphical Model
Ren, Shaogang, Karimi, Belhal, Li, Dingcheng, Li, Ping
This paper introduces a novel approach to embed flow-based models with hierarchical structures. The proposed framework is named Variational Flow Graphical (VFG) Model. VFGs learn the representation of high dimensional data via a message-passing scheme by integrating flow-based functions through variational inference. By leveraging the expressive power of neural networks, VFGs produce a representation of the data using a lower dimension, thus overcoming the drawbacks of many flow-based models, usually requiring a high dimensional latent space involving many trivial variables. Aggregation nodes are introduced in the VFG models to integrate forward-backward hierarchical information via a message passing scheme. Maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO) of data likelihood aligns the forward and backward messages in each aggregation node achieving a consistency node state. Algorithms have been developed to learn model parameters through gradient updating regarding the ELBO objective. The consistency of aggregation nodes enable VFGs to be applicable in tractable inference on graphical structures. Besides representation learning and numerical inference, VFGs provide a new approach for distribution modeling on datasets with graphical latent structures. Additionally, theoretical study shows that VFGs are universal approximators by leveraging the implicitly invertible flow-based structures. With flexible graphical structures and superior excessive power, VFGs could potentially be used to improve probabilistic inference. In the experiments, VFGs achieves improved evidence lower bound (ELBO) and likelihood values on multiple datasets.
A Survey on Hyperlink Prediction
As a natural extension of link prediction on graphs, hyperlink prediction aims for the inference of missing hyperlinks in hypergraphs, where a hyperlink can connect more than two nodes. Hyperlink prediction has applications in a wide range of systems, from chemical reaction networks, social communication networks, to protein-protein interaction networks. In this paper, we provide a systematic and comprehensive survey on hyperlink prediction. We propose a new taxonomy to classify existing hyperlink prediction methods into four categories: similarity-based, probability-based, matrix optimization-based, and deep learning-based methods. To compare the performance of methods from different categories, we perform a benchmark study on various hypergraph applications using representative methods from each category. Notably, deep learning-based methods prevail over other methods in hyperlink prediction.
A Mutually Exciting Latent Space Hawkes Process Model for Continuous-time Networks
Huang, Zhipeng, Soliman, Hadeel, Paul, Subhadeep, Xu, Kevin S.
Networks and temporal point processes serve as fundamental building blocks for modeling complex dynamic relational data in various domains. We propose the latent space Hawkes (LSH) model, a novel generative model for continuous-time networks of relational events, using a latent space representation for nodes. We model relational events between nodes using mutually exciting Hawkes processes with baseline intensities dependent upon the distances between the nodes in the latent space and sender and receiver specific effects. We demonstrate that our proposed LSH model can replicate many features observed in real temporal networks including reciprocity and transitivity, while also achieving superior prediction accuracy and providing more interpretable fits than existing models.