Oceania
Explainable Product Classification for Customs
Lee, Eunji, Kim, Sihyeon, Kim, Sundong, Jung, Soyeon, Kim, Heeja, Cha, Meeyoung
The task of assigning internationally accepted commodity codes (aka HS codes) to traded goods is a critical function of customs offices. Like court decisions made by judges, this task follows the doctrine of precedent and can be nontrivial even for experienced officers. Together with the Korea Customs Service (KCS), we propose a first-ever explainable decision supporting model that suggests the most likely subheadings (i.e., the first six digits) of the HS code. The model also provides reasoning for its suggestion in the form of a document that is interpretable by customs officers. We evaluated the model using 5,000 cases that recently received a classification request. The results showed that the top-3 suggestions made by our model had an accuracy of 93.9\% when classifying 925 challenging subheadings. A user study with 32 customs experts further confirmed that our algorithmic suggestions accompanied by explainable reasonings, can substantially reduce the time and effort taken by customs officers for classification reviews.
Equivariant Neural Operator Learning with Graphon Convolution
We propose a general architecture that combines the coefficient learning scheme with a residual operator layer for learning mappings between continuous functions in the 3D Euclidean space. Our proposed model is guaranteed to achieve SE(3)-equivariance by design. From the graph spectrum view, our method can be interpreted as convolution on graphons (dense graphs with infinitely many nodes), which we term InfGCN. By leveraging both the continuous graphon structure and the discrete graph structure of the input data, our model can effectively capture the geometric information while preserving equivariance. Through extensive experiments on large-scale electron density datasets, we observed that our model significantly outperformed the current state-of-the-art architectures. Multiple ablation studies were also carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.
Hashing it Out: Predicting Unhealthy Conversations on Twitter
Leung, Steven, Papapolyzos, Filippos
Personal attacks in the context of social media conversations often lead to fast-paced derailment, leading to even more harmful exchanges being made. State-of-the-art systems for the detection of such conversational derailment often make use of Deep Learning approaches for prediction purposes. In this paper, we show that an Attention-based BERT architecture, pre-trained on a large Twitter corpus and fine-tuned on our task, is efficient and effective in making such predictions. This model shows clear advantages in performance to the existing LSTM model we use as a baseline. Additionally, we show that this impressive performance can be attained through fine-tuning on a relatively small, novel dataset, particularly after mitigating overfitting issues through synthetic oversampling techniques. By introducing the first transformer based model for forecasting conversational events on Twitter, this work lays the foundation for a practical tool to encourage better interactions on one of the world's most ubiquitous social media platforms.
Countering Misinformation via Emotional Response Generation
Russo, Daniel, Kaszefski-Yaschuk, Shane Peter, Staiano, Jacopo, Guerini, Marco
The proliferation of misinformation on social media platforms (SMPs) poses a significant danger to public health, social cohesion and ultimately democracy. Previous research has shown how social correction can be an effective way to curb misinformation, by engaging directly in a constructive dialogue with users who spread -- often in good faith -- misleading messages. Although professional fact-checkers are crucial to debunking viral claims, they usually do not engage in conversations on social media. Thereby, significant effort has been made to automate the use of fact-checker material in social correction; however, no previous work has tried to integrate it with the style and pragmatics that are commonly employed in social media communication. To fill this gap, we present VerMouth, the first large-scale dataset comprising roughly 12 thousand claim-response pairs (linked to debunking articles), accounting for both SMP-style and basic emotions, two factors which have a significant role in misinformation credibility and spreading. To collect this dataset we used a technique based on an author-reviewer pipeline, which efficiently combines LLMs and human annotators to obtain high-quality data. We also provide comprehensive experiments showing how models trained on our proposed dataset have significant improvements in terms of output quality and generalization capabilities.
Detection of Offensive and Threatening Online Content in a Low Resource Language
Adam, Fatima Muhammad, Zandam, Abubakar Yakubu, Inuwa-Dutse, Isa
Hausa is a major Chadic language, spoken by over 100 million people in Africa. However, from a computational linguistic perspective, it is considered a low-resource language, with limited resources to support Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Online platforms often facilitate social interactions that can lead to the use of offensive and threatening language, which can go undetected due to the lack of detection systems designed for Hausa. This study aimed to address this issue by (1) conducting two user studies (n=308) to investigate cyberbullying-related issues, (2) collecting and annotating the first set of offensive and threatening datasets to support relevant downstream tasks in Hausa, (3) developing a detection system to flag offensive and threatening content, and (4) evaluating the detection system and the efficacy of the Google-based translation engine in detecting offensive and threatening terms in Hausa. We found that offensive and threatening content is quite common, particularly when discussing religion and politics. Our detection system was able to detect more than 70% of offensive and threatening content, although many of these were mistranslated by Google's translation engine. We attribute this to the subtle relationship between offensive and threatening content and idiomatic expressions in the Hausa language. We recommend that diverse stakeholders participate in understanding local conventions and demographics in order to develop a more effective detection system. These insights are essential for implementing targeted moderation strategies to create a safe and inclusive online environment.
Regions are Who Walk Them: a Large Pre-trained Spatiotemporal Model Based on Human Mobility for Ubiquitous Urban Sensing
Zhang, Ruixing, Han, Liangzhe, Sun, Leilei, Liu, Yunqi, Wang, Jibin, Lv, Weifeng
User profiling and region analysis are two tasks of significant commercial value. However, in practical applications, modeling different features typically involves four main steps: data preparation, data processing, model establishment, evaluation, and optimization. This process is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Repeating this workflow for each feature results in abundant development time for tasks and a reduced overall volume of task development. Indeed, human mobility data contains a wealth of information. Several successful cases suggest that conducting in-depth analysis of population movement data could potentially yield meaningful profiles about users and areas. Nonetheless, most related works have not thoroughly utilized the semantic information within human mobility data and trained on a fixed number of the regions. To tap into the rich information within population movement, based on the perspective that Regions Are Who walk them, we propose a large spatiotemporal model based on trajectories (RAW). It possesses the following characteristics: 1) Tailored for trajectory data, introducing a GPT-like structure with a parameter count of up to 1B; 2) Introducing a spatiotemporal fine-tuning module, interpreting trajectories as collection of users to derive arbitrary region embedding. This framework allows rapid task development based on the large spatiotemporal model. We conducted extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our proposed large spatiotemporal model. It's evident that our proposed method, relying solely on human mobility data without additional features, exhibits a certain level of relevance in user profiling and region analysis. Moreover, our model showcases promising predictive capabilities in trajectory generation tasks based on the current state, offering the potential for further innovative work utilizing this large spatiotemporal model.
FOAL: Fine-grained Contrastive Learning for Cross-domain Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction
Xu, Ting, Wu, Zhen, Yang, Huiyun, Dai, Xinyu
Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) has achieved promising results while relying on sufficient annotation data in a specific domain. However, it is infeasible to annotate data for each individual domain. We propose to explore ASTE in the cross-domain setting, which transfers knowledge from a resource-rich source domain to a resource-poor target domain, thereby alleviating the reliance on labeled data in the target domain. To effectively transfer the knowledge across domains and extract the sentiment triplets accurately, we propose a method named Fine-grained cOntrAstive Learning (FOAL) to reduce the domain discrepancy and preserve the discriminability of each category. Experiments on six transfer pairs show that FOAL achieves 6% performance gains and reduces the domain discrepancy significantly compared with strong baselines. Our code will be publicly available once accepted.
DocGen: Generating Detailed Parameter Docstrings in Python
Venkatkrishna, Vatsal, Nagabushanam, Durga Shree, Simon, Emmanuel Iko-Ojo, Vidoni, Melina
Documentation debt hinders the effective utilization of open-source software. Although code summarization tools have been helpful for developers, most would prefer a detailed account of each parameter in a function rather than a high-level summary. However, generating such a summary is too intricate for a single generative model to produce reliably due to the lack of high-quality training data. Thus, we propose a multi-step approach that combines multiple task-specific models, each adept at producing a specific section of a docstring. The combination of these models ensures the inclusion of each section in the final docstring. We compared the results from our approach with existing generative models using both automatic metrics and a human-centred evaluation with 17 participating developers, which proves the superiority of our approach over existing methods.
Efficient Graphics Representation with Differentiable Indirection
Datta, Sayantan, Marshall, Carl, Nowrouzezahrai, Derek, Dong, Zhao, Li, Zhengqin
We introduce differentiable indirection -- a novel learned primitive that employs differentiable multi-scale lookup tables as an effective substitute for traditional compute and data operations across the graphics pipeline. We demonstrate its flexibility on a number of graphics tasks, i.e., geometric and image representation, texture mapping, shading, and radiance field representation. In all cases, differentiable indirection seamlessly integrates into existing architectures, trains rapidly, and yields both versatile and efficient results.
How Does Fine-Tuning Impact Out-of-Distribution Detection for Vision-Language Models?
Recent large vision-language models such as CLIP have shown remarkable out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and generalization performance. However, their zero-shot in-distribution (ID) accuracy is often limited for downstream datasets. Recent CLIP-based fine-tuning methods such as prompt learning have demonstrated significant improvements in ID classification and OOD generalization where OOD labels are available. Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether the model is reliable to semantic shifts without OOD labels. In this paper, we aim to bridge the gap and present a comprehensive study to understand how fine-tuning impact OOD detection for few-shot downstream tasks. By framing OOD detection as multi-modal concept matching, we establish a connection between fine-tuning methods and various OOD scores. Our results suggest that a proper choice of OOD scores is essential for CLIP-based fine-tuning. In particular, the maximum concept matching (MCM) score provides a promising solution consistently. We also show that prompt learning demonstrates the state-of-the-art OOD detection performance over the zero-shot counterpart.