Simply put, the reason is that classifiers are Quantification can in principle be solved by classifying all the unlabelled typically trained to minimize classification error, which is by and items and counting how many of them have been attributed large proportional to (FP FN), while a good quantifier should to each class. However, this "classify and count" approach has been be trained to minimise quantification error, which is by and large shown to yield suboptimal quantification accuracy; this has established proportional to FP FN (where TP, FP, FN, T N denote the usual quantification as a task of its own, and given rise to a number counts from a binary contingency table). of methods specifically devised for it. We propose a recurrent neural In this paper we tackle quantification in a binary setting, and propose network architecture for quantification (that we call QuaNet) that a recurrent neural network architecture (that we call QuaNet) observes the classification predictions to learn higher-order "quantification that observes the classification predictions to learn higher-order embeddings", which are then refined by incorporating "quantification embeddings", which are then refined by incorporating quantification predictions of simple classify-and-count-like methods.

In this paper, we propose a new kernel-based co-occurrence measure that can be applied to sparse linguistic expressions (e.g., sentences) with a very short learning time, as an alternative to pointwise mutual information (PMI). As well as deriving PMI from mutual information, we derive this new measure from the Hilbert--Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC); thus, we call the new measure the pointwise HSIC (PHSIC). PHSIC can be interpreted as a smoothed variant of PMI that allows various similarity metrics (e.g., sentence embeddings) to be plugged in as kernels. Moreover, PHSIC can be estimated by simple and fast (linear in the size of the data) matrix calculations regardless of whether we use linear or nonlinear kernels. Empirically, in a dialogue response selection task, PHSIC is learned thousands of times faster than an RNN-based PMI while outperforming PMI in accuracy. In addition, we also demonstrate that PHSIC is beneficial as a criterion of a data selection task for machine translation owing to its ability to give high (low) scores to a consistent (inconsistent) pair with other pairs.

We aim to predict whether a primary school student will perform in the `below standard' band of a national standardized test. We exploit a data set containing test performance on the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN); a test given annually to all Australian school students in grades 3, 5, 7, and 9. We separate the analysis into students in grade 5 and above, for which previous achievement may be used as a predictor; and students in grade 3, which must rely on family- and school-level predictors only. We train and compare a set of classifiers for reading and numeracy learning areas respectively. The classifiers achieve good predictive power in terms of area under the ROC curve, suggesting that it is feasible for schools to more accurately screen a large number of students for academic risk.

Nowadays, machine learning based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technique has widely spread in smartphones, home devices, and public facilities. As convenient as this technology can be, a considerable security issue also raises -- the users' speech content might be exposed to malicious ASR monitoring and cause severe privacy leakage. In this work, we propose HASP -- a high-performance security enhancement approach to solve this security issue on mobile devices. Leveraging ASR systems' vulnerability to the adversarial examples, HASP is designed to cast human imperceptible adversarial noises to real-time speech and effectively perturb malicious ASR monitoring by increasing the Word Error Rate (WER). To enhance the practical performance on mobile devices, HASP is also optimized for effective adaptation to the human speech characteristics, environmental noises, and mobile computation scenarios. The experiments show that HASP can achieve optimal real-time security enhancement: it can lead an average WER of 84.55% for perturbing the malicious ASR monitoring, and the data processing speed is 15x to 40x faster compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, HASP can effectively perturb various ASR systems, demonstrating a strong transferability.

Bayesian Inference (BI) uses the Bayes' posterior whereas Logical Bayesian Inference (LBI) uses the truth function or membership function as the inference tool. LBI was proposed because BI was not compatible with the classical Bayes' prediction and didn't use logical probability and hence couldn't express semantic meaning. In LBI, statistical probability and logical probability are strictly distinguished, used at the same time, and linked by the third kind of Bayes' Theorem. The Shannon channel consists of a set of transition probability functions whereas the semantic channel consists of a set of truth functions. When a sample is large enough, we can directly derive the semantic channel from Shannon's channel. Otherwise, we can use parameters to construct truth functions and use the Maximum Semantic Information (MSI) criterion to optimize the truth functions. The MSI criterion is equivalent to the Maximum Likelihood (ML) criterion, and compatible with the Regularized Least Square (RLS) criterion. By matching the two channels one with another, we can obtain the Channels' Matching (CM) algorithm. This algorithm can improve multi-label classifications, maximum likelihood estimations (including unseen instance classifications), and mixture models. In comparison with BI, LBI 1) uses the prior P(X) of X instead of that of Y or {\theta} and fits cases where the source P(X) changes, 2) can be used to solve the denotations of labels, and 3) is more compatible with the classical Bayes' prediction and likelihood method. LBI also provides a confirmation measure between -1 and 1 for induction.

The Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) shared task was launched to support the development of systems able to verify claims by extracting supporting or refuting facts from raw text. The shared task organizers provide a large-scale dataset for the consecutive steps involved in claim verification, in particular, document retrieval, fact extraction, and claim classification. In this paper, we present our claim verification pipeline approach, which, according to the preliminary results, scored third in the shared task, out of 23 competing systems. For the document retrieval, we implemented a new entity linking approach. In order to be able to rank candidate facts and classify a claim on the basis of several selected facts, we introduce two extensions to the Enhanced LSTM (ESIM).

Tracing knowledge acquisition and linking learning events to interaction between peers is a major challenge of our times. We have conceived, designed and evaluated a new paradigm for constructing and using collective knowledge by Web interactions that we called ViewpointS. By exploiting the similarity with Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS), we conjecture that it may be metaphorically considered a Collective Brain, especially effective in the case of trans-disciplinary representations. Far from being without doubts, in the paper we present the reasons (and the limits) of our proposal that aims to become a useful integrating tool for future quantitative explorations of individual as well as collective learning at different degrees of granu-larity. We are therefore challenging each of the current approaches: the logical one in the semantic Web, the statistical one in mining and deep learning, the social one in recommender systems based on authority and trust; not in each of their own preferred field of operation, rather in their integration weaknesses far from the holistic and dynamic behavior of the human brain.

Speaker verification performance in neutral talking environment is usually high, while it is sharply decreased in emotional talking environments. This performance degradation in emotional environments is due to the problem of mismatch between training in neutral environment while testing in emotional environments. In this work, a three-stage speaker verification architecture has been proposed to enhance speaker verification performance in emotional environments. This architecture is comprised of three cascaded stages: gender identification stage followed by an emotion identification stage followed by a speaker verification stage. The proposed framework has been evaluated on two distinct and independent emotional speech datasets: in-house dataset and Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts dataset. Our results show that speaker verification based on both gender information and emotion information is superior to each of speaker verification based on gender information only, emotion information only, and neither gender information nor emotion information. The attained average speaker verification performance based on the proposed framework is very alike to that attained in subjective assessment by human listeners.

We study dynamic changes of agents' observational power in logics of knowledge and time. We consider CTL*K, the extension of CTL* with knowledge operators, and enrich it with a new operator that models a change in an agent's way of observing the system. We extend the classic semantics of knowledge for perfect-recall agents to account for changes of observation, and we show that this new operator strictly increases the expressivity of CTL*K. We reduce the model-checking problem for our logic to that for CTL*K, which is known to be decidable. This provides a solution to the model-checking problem for our logic, but its complexity is not optimal. Indeed we provide a direct decision procedure with better complexity.

We introduce PathGAN, a deep neural network for visual scanpath prediction trained on adversarial examples. A visual scanpath is defined as the sequence of fixation points over an image defined by a human observer with its gaze. PathGAN is composed of two parts, the generator and the discriminator. Both parts extract features from images using off-the-shelf networks, and train recurrent layers to generate or discriminate scanpaths accordingly. In scanpath prediction, the stochastic nature of the data makes it very difficult to generate realistic predictions using supervised learning strategies, but we adopt adversarial training as a suitable alternative. Our experiments prove how PathGAN improves the state of the art of visual scanpath prediction on the iSUN and Salient360! datasets.