Oceania
JamPatoisNLI: A Jamaican Patois Natural Language Inference Dataset
Armstrong, Ruth-Ann, Hewitt, John, Manning, Christopher
JamPatoisNLI provides the first dataset for natural language inference in a creole language, Jamaican Patois. Many of the most-spoken low-resource languages are creoles. These languages commonly have a lexicon derived from a major world language and a distinctive grammar reflecting the languages of the original speakers and the process of language birth by creolization. This gives them a distinctive place in exploring the effectiveness of transfer from large monolingual or multilingual pretrained models. While our work, along with previous work, shows that transfer from these models to low-resource languages that are unrelated to languages in their training set is not very effective, we would expect stronger results from transfer to creoles. Indeed, our experiments show considerably better results from few-shot learning of JamPatoisNLI than for such unrelated languages, and help us begin to understand how the unique relationship between creoles and their high-resource base languages affect cross-lingual transfer. JamPatoisNLI, which consists of naturally-occurring premises and expert-written hypotheses, is a step towards steering research into a traditionally underserved language and a useful benchmark for understanding cross-lingual NLP.
Trajectory Flow Map: Graph-based Approach to Analysing Temporal Evolution of Aggregated Traffic Flows in Large-scale Urban Networks
Kim, Jiwon, Zheng, Kai, Corcoran, Jonathan, Ahn, Sanghyung, Papamanolis, Marty
ABSTRACT This paper proposes a graph-based approach to representing spatio-temporal trajectory data that allows an effective visualization and characterization of city-wide traffic dynamics. With the advance of sensor, mobile, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, vehicle and passenger trajectories are being increasingly collected on a massive scale and are becoming a critical source of insight into traffic pattern and traveller behaviour. To leverage such trajectory data to better understand traffic dynamics in a large-scale urban network, this study develops a trajectory-based network traffic analysis method that converts individual trajectory data into a sequence of graphs that evolve over time (known as dynamic graphs or time-evolving graphs) and analyses network-wide traffic patterns in terms of a compact and informative graph-representation of aggregated traffic flows. First, we partition the entire network into a set of cells based on the spatial distribution of data points in individual trajectories, where the cells represent spatial regions between which aggregated traffic flows can be measured. Next, dynamic flows of moving objects are represented as a time-evolving graph, where regions are graph vertices and flows between them are treated as weighted directed edges. Given a fixed set of vertices, edges can be inserted or removed at every time step depending on the presence of traffic flows between two regions at a given time window. Once a dynamic graph is built, we apply graph mining algorithms to detect change-points in time, which represent time points where the graph exhibits significant changes in its overall structure and, thus, correspond to change-points in city-wide mobility pattern throughout the day (e.g., global transition points between peak and off-peak periods). INTRODUCTION Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in an aggregated modelling of traffic networks, i.e., modelling and analysis approaches that investigate aggregated properties of network-wide traffic dynamics, aiming at describing collective phenomena of the underlying systems and predicting their behaviours in a more robust manner.
KATSum: Knowledge-aware Abstractive Text Summarization
Wang, Guan, Li, Weihua, Lai, Edmund, Jiang, Jianhua
Text Summarization is recognised as one of the NLP downstream tasks and it has been extensively investigated in recent years. It can assist people with perceiving the information rapidly from the Internet, including news articles, social posts, videos, etc. Most existing research works attempt to develop summarization models to produce a better output. However, advent limitations of most existing models emerge, including unfaithfulness and factual errors. In this paper, we propose a novel model, named as Knowledge-aware Abstractive Text Summarization, which leverages the advantages offered by Knowledge Graph to enhance the standard Seq2Seq model. On top of that, the Knowledge Graph triplets are extracted from the source text and utilised to provide keywords with relational information, producing coherent and factually errorless summaries. We conduct extensive experiments by using real-world data sets. The results reveal that the proposed framework can effectively utilise the information from Knowledge Graph and significantly reduce the factual errors in the summary.
Generation and Prediction of Difficult Model Counting Instances
Escamocher, Guillaume, O'Sullivan, Barry
We present a way to create small yet difficult model counting instances. Our generator is highly parameterizable: the number of variables of the instances it produces, as well as their number of clauses and the number of literals in each clause, can all be set to any value. Our instances have been tested on state of the art model counters, against other difficult model counting instances, in the Model Counting Competition. The smallest unsolved instances of the competition, both in terms of number of variables and number of clauses, were ours. We also observe a peak of difficulty when fixing the number of variables and varying the number of clauses, in both random instances and instances built by our generator. Using these results, we predict the parameter values for which the hardest to count instances will occur.
Transformer Grammars: Augmenting Transformer Language Models with Syntactic Inductive Biases at Scale
Sartran, Laurent, Barrett, Samuel, Kuncoro, Adhiguna, Stanojeviฤ, Miloลก, Blunsom, Phil, Dyer, Chris
We introduce Transformer Grammars (TGs), a novel class of Transformer language models that combine (i) the expressive power, scalability, and strong performance of Transformers and (ii) recursive syntactic compositions, which here are implemented through a special attention mask and deterministic transformation of the linearized tree. We find that TGs outperform various strong baselines on sentence-level language modeling perplexity, as well as on multiple syntax-sensitive language modeling evaluation metrics. Additionally, we find that the recursive syntactic composition bottleneck which represents each sentence as a single vector harms perplexity on document-level language modeling, providing evidence that a different kind of memory mechanism -- one that is independent of composed syntactic representations -- plays an important role in current successful models of long text.
Annual GWP at Australia's agencies passes $7 billion๏ฟฝ - Insurtech - Insurance News - insuranceNEWS.com.au
The Underwriting Agencies Council (UAC) says annual gross written premium at Australian agencies is now around $7.5 billion, and technology-enabled firms are leading the way as the sector expands dramatically. Sydney-based GM William Legge says UAC now has more than 120 agency members, even as mergers and acquisitions created fewer, larger agencies and a build-up of "cluster groups" owning multiple specialist agency brands. As major carriers relinquish capacity in some lines, the agency market is filling gaps in coverage, Mr Legge says, and brokers have found agencies to be a trusted, reliable market that can provide responsive service, quick turn-around times, and bespoke, tailored products for hard-to-place risks. Insurance consulting firm Xceedance offers its MGA Agility Suite tailored platform to agencies, encompassing policy administration, underwriting, distribution, a broker portal and reporting functionality. Xceedance works with agencies and insurers to facilitate and support end-to-end insurance processes across claims, finance and accounting, insurance operations, catastrophe modelling, underwriting, actuarial and analytical services, policy services and data management.
Checking blood pressure in a heartbeat, using artificial intelligence and a camera
Australian and Iraqi engineers have designed a system to remotely measure blood pressure by filming a person's forehead and extracting cardiac signals using artificial intelligence algorithms. Using the same remote-health technology they pioneered to monitor vital health signs from a distance, engineers from the University of South Australia and Baghdad's Middle Technical University have designed a non-contact system to accurately measure systolic and diastolic pressure. It could replace the existing uncomfortable and cumbersome method of strapping an inflatable cuff to a patient's arm or wrist, the researchers claim. In a new paper published in Inventions, the researchers describe the technique, which involves filming a person from a short distance for 10 seconds and extracting cardiac signals from two regions in the forehead, using artificial intelligence algorithms. The systolic and diastolic readings were around 90 per cent accurate, compared to the existing instrument (a digital sphygmomanometer) used to measure blood pressure, that is itself subject to errors.
FedUKD: Federated UNet Model with Knowledge Distillation for Land Use Classification from Satellite and Street Views
Kanagavelu, Renuga, Dua, Kinshuk, Garai, Pratik, Elias, Susan, Thomas, Neha, Elias, Simon, Wei, Qingsong, Rick, Goh Siow Mong, Yong, Liu
Federated Deep Learning frameworks can be used strategically to monitor Land Use locally and infer environmental impacts globally. Distributed data from across the world would be needed to build a global model for Land Use classification. The need for a Federated approach in this application domain would be to avoid transfer of data from distributed locations and save network bandwidth to reduce communication cost. We use a Federated UNet model for Semantic Segmentation of satellite and street view images. The novelty of the proposed architecture is the integration of Knowledge Distillation to reduce communication cost and response time. The accuracy obtained was above 95% and we also brought in a significant model compression to over 17 times and 62 times for street View and satellite images respectively. Our proposed framework has the potential to be a game-changer in real-time tracking of climate change across the planet.
Feature Extraction for Machine Learning-based Intrusion Detection in IoT Networks
Sarhan, Mohanad, Layeghy, Siamak, Moustafa, Nour, Gallagher, Marcus, Portmann, Marius
A large number of network security breaches in IoT networks have demonstrated the unreliability of current Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs). Consequently, network interruptions and loss of sensitive data have occurred, which led to an active research area for improving NIDS technologies. In an analysis of related works, it was observed that most researchers aim to obtain better classification results by using a set of untried combinations of Feature Reduction (FR) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques on NIDS datasets. However, these datasets are different in feature sets, attack types, and network design. Therefore, this paper aims to discover whether these techniques can be generalised across various datasets. Six ML models are utilised: a Deep Feed Forward (DFF), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Decision Tree (DT), Logistic Regression (LR), and Naive Bayes (NB). The accuracy of three Feature Extraction (FE) algorithms; Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Auto-encoder (AE), and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), are evaluated using three benchmark datasets: UNSW-NB15, ToN-IoT and CSE-CIC-IDS2018. Although PCA and AE algorithms have been widely used, the determination of their optimal number of extracted dimensions has been overlooked. The results indicate that no clear FE method or ML model can achieve the best scores for all datasets. The optimal number of extracted dimensions has been identified for each dataset, and LDA degrades the performance of the ML models on two datasets. The variance is used to analyse the extracted dimensions of LDA and PCA. Finally, this paper concludes that the choice of datasets significantly alters the performance of the applied techniques. We believe that a universal (benchmark) feature set is needed to facilitate further advancement and progress of research in this field.
A Transformer-Based User Satisfaction Prediction for Proactive Interaction Mechanism in DuerOS
Shen, Wei, He, Xiaonan, Zhang, Chuheng, Zhang, Xuyun, XIe, Jian
Recently, spoken dialogue systems have been widely deployed in a variety of applications, serving a huge number of end-users. A common issue is that the errors resulting from noisy utterances, semantic misunderstandings, or lack of knowledge make it hard for a real system to respond properly, possibly leading to an unsatisfactory user experience. To avoid such a case, we consider a proactive interaction mechanism where the system predicts the user satisfaction with the candidate response before giving it to the user. If the user is not likely to be satisfied according to the prediction, the system will ask the user a suitable question to determine the real intent of the user instead of providing the response directly. With such an interaction with the user, the system can give a better response to the user. Previous models that predict the user satisfaction are not applicable to DuerOS which is a large-scale commercial dialogue system. They are based on hand-crafted features and thus can hardly learn the complex patterns lying behind millions of conversations and temporal dependency in multiple turns of the conversation. Moreover, they are trained and evaluated on the benchmark datasets with adequate labels, which are expensive to obtain in a commercial dialogue system. To face these challenges, we propose a pipeline to predict the user satisfaction to help DuerOS decide whether to ask for clarification in each turn. Specifically, we propose to first generate a large number of weak labels and then train a transformer-based model to predict the user satisfaction with these weak labels. Empirically, we deploy and evaluate our model on DuerOS, and observe a 19% relative improvement on the accuracy of user satisfaction prediction and 2.3% relative improvement on user experience.