The increasing volume of online reviews has made possible the development of sentiment analysis models for determining the opinion of customers regarding different products and services. Until now, sentiment analysis has proven to be an effective tool for determining the overall polarity of reviews. To improve the granularity at the aspect level for a better understanding of the service or product, the task of aspect-based sentiment analysis aims to first identify aspects and then determine the user's opinion about them. The complexity of this task lies in the fact that the same review can present multiple aspects, each with its own polarity. Current solutions have poor performance on such data. We address this problem by proposing ATESA-B{\AE}RT, a heterogeneous ensemble learning model for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. Firstly, we divide our problem into two sub-tasks, i.e., Aspect Term Extraction and Aspect Term Sentiment Analysis. Secondly, we use the \textit{argmax} multi-class classification on six transformers-based learners for each sub-task. Initial experiments on two datasets prove that ATESA-B{\AE}RT outperforms current state-of-the-art solutions while solving the many aspects problem.

We propose a novel cascaded cross-modal transformer (CCMT) that combines speech and text transcripts to detect customer requests and complaints in phone conversations. Our approach leverages a multimodal paradigm by transcribing the speech using automatic speech recognition (ASR) models and translating the transcripts into different languages. Subsequently, we combine language-specific BERT-based models with Wav2Vec2.0 audio features in a novel cascaded cross-attention transformer model. We apply our system to the Requests Sub-Challenge of the ACM Multimedia 2023 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge, reaching unweighted average recalls (UAR) of 65.41% and 85.87% for the complaint and request classes, respectively.

The task of multi-author writing style detection aims at finding any positions of writing style change in a given text document. We formulate the task as a natural language inference problem where two consecutive paragraphs are paired. Our approach focuses on transitions between paragraphs while truncating input tokens for the task. As backbone models, we employ different Transformer-based encoders with warmup phase during training. We submit the model version that outperforms baselines and other proposed model versions in our experiments. For the easy and medium setups, we submit transition-focused natural language inference based on DeBERTa with warmup training, and the same model without transition for the hard setup.

This paper describes the second-placed approach developed by the Fraunhofer SIT team in the CLEF-2023 CheckThat! lab Task 1B for English. Given a text snippet from a political debate, the aim of this task is to determine whether it should be assessed for check-worthiness. Detecting check-worthy statements aims to facilitate manual fact-checking efforts by prioritizing the claims that fact-checkers should consider first. It can also be considered as primary step of a fact-checking system. Our best-performing method took advantage of an ensemble classification scheme centered on Model Souping. When applied to the English data set, our submitted model achieved an overall F1 score of 0.878 and was ranked as the second-best model in the competition.

The option of sharing images, videos and audio files on social media opens up new possibilities for distinguishing between false information and fake news on the Internet. Due to the vast amount of data shared every second on social media, not all data can be verified by a computer or a human expert. Here, a check-worthiness analysis can be used as a first step in the fact-checking pipeline and as a filtering mechanism to improve efficiency. This paper proposes a novel way of detecting the check-worthiness in multi-modal tweets. It takes advantage of two classifiers, each trained on a single modality. For image data, extracting the embedded text with an OCR analysis has shown to perform best. By combining the two classifiers, the proposed solution was able to place first in the CheckThat!

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems often struggle with transcribing child speech due to the lack of large child speech datasets required to accurately train child-friendly ASR models. However, there are huge amounts of annotated adult speech datasets which were used to create multilingual ASR models, such as Whisper. Our work aims to explore whether such models can be adapted to child speech to improve ASR for children. In addition, we compare Whisper child-adaptations with finetuned self-supervised models, such as wav2vec2. We demonstrate that finetuning Whisper on child speech yields significant improvements in ASR performance on child speech, compared to non finetuned Whisper models. Additionally, utilizing self-supervised Wav2vec2 models that have been finetuned on child speech outperforms Whisper finetuning.

Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) has been widely applied to hardware systems in the electronics and non-electronics domains but has not been explored for software. While software does not decay over time, it can degrade over release cycles. Software health management is confined to diagnostic assessments that identify problems, whereas prognostic assessment potentially indicates when in the future a problem will become detrimental. Relevant research areas such as software defect prediction, software reliability prediction, predictive maintenance of software, software degradation, and software performance prediction, exist, but all of these represent diagnostic models built upon historical data, none of which can predict an RUL for software. This paper addresses the application of PHM concepts to software systems for fault predictions and RUL estimation. Specifically, this paper addresses how PHM can be used to make decisions for software systems such as version update and upgrade, module changes, system reengineering, rejuvenation, maintenance scheduling, budgeting, and total abandonment. This paper presents a method to prognostically and continuously predict the RUL of a software system based on usage parameters (e.g., the numbers and categories of releases) and performance parameters (e.g., response time). The model developed has been validated by comparing actual data, with the results that were generated by predictive models. Statistical validation (regression validation, and k-fold cross validation) has also been carried out. A case study, based on publicly available data for the Bugzilla application is presented. This case study demonstrates that PHM concepts can be applied to software systems and RUL can be calculated to make system management decisions.

To contribute to automating the medical vision-language model, we propose a novel Chest-Xray Difference Visual Question Answering (VQA) task. Given a pair of main and reference images, this task attempts to answer several questions on both diseases and, more importantly, the differences between them. This is consistent with the radiologist's diagnosis practice that compares the current image with the reference before concluding the report. We collect a new dataset, namely MIMIC-Diff-VQA, including 700,703 QA pairs from 164,324 pairs of main and reference images. Compared to existing medical VQA datasets, our questions are tailored to the Assessment-Diagnosis-Intervention-Evaluation treatment procedure used by clinical professionals. Meanwhile, we also propose a novel expert knowledge-aware graph representation learning model to address this task. The proposed baseline model leverages expert knowledge such as anatomical structure prior, semantic, and spatial knowledge to construct a multi-relationship graph, representing the image differences between two images for the image difference VQA task. The dataset and code can be found at https://github.com/Holipori/MIMIC-Diff-VQA. We believe this work would further push forward the medical vision language model.

Minimal trap spaces (MTSs) capture subspaces in which the Boolean dynamics is trapped, whatever the update mode. They correspond to the attractors of the most permissive mode. Due to their versatility, the computation of MTSs has recently gained traction, essentially by focusing on their enumeration. In this paper, we address the logical reasoning on universal properties of MTSs in the scope of two problems: the reprogramming of Boolean networks for identifying the permanent freeze of Boolean variables that enforce a given property on all the MTSs, and the synthesis of Boolean networks from universal properties on their MTSs. Both problems reduce to solving the satisfiability of quantified propositional logic formula with 3 levels of quantifiers ($\exists\forall\exists$). In this paper, we introduce a Counter-Example Guided Refinement Abstraction (CEGAR) to efficiently solve these problems by coupling the resolution of two simpler formulas. We provide a prototype relying on Answer-Set Programming for each formula and show its tractability on a wide range of Boolean models of biological networks.

The ability to anticipate technical expertise and capability evolution trends globally is essential for national and global security, especially in safety-critical domains like nuclear nonproliferation (NN) and rapidly emerging fields like artificial intelligence (AI). In this work, we extend traditional statistical relational learning approaches (e.g., link prediction in collaboration networks) and formulate a problem of anticipating technical expertise and capability evolution using dynamic heterogeneous graph representations. We develop novel capabilities to forecast collaboration patterns, authorship behavior, and technical capability evolution at different granularities (e.g., scientist and institution levels) in two distinct research fields. We implement a dynamic graph transformer (DGT) neural architecture, which pushes the state-of-the-art graph neural network models by (a) forecasting heterogeneous (rather than homogeneous) nodes and edges, and (b) relying on both discrete -- and continuous -- time inputs. We demonstrate that our DGT models predict collaboration, partnership, and expertise patterns with 0.26, 0.73, and 0.53 mean reciprocal rank values for AI and 0.48, 0.93, and 0.22 for NN domains. DGT model performance exceeds the best-performing static graph baseline models by 30-80% across AI and NN domains. Our findings demonstrate that DGT models boost inductive task performance, when previously unseen nodes appear in the test data, for the domains with emerging collaboration patterns (e.g., AI). Specifically, models accurately predict which established scientists will collaborate with early career scientists and vice-versa in the AI domain.