Sentence completion (SC) questions present a sentence with one or more blanks that need to be filled in, three to five possible words or phrases as options. SC questions are widely used for students learning English as a Second Language (ESL) and building computational approaches to automatically solve such questions is beneficial to language learners. In this work, we propose a neural framework to solve SC questions in English examinations by utilizing pre-trained language models. We conduct extensive experiments on a real-world K-12 ESL SC question dataset and the results demonstrate the superiority of our model in terms of prediction accuracy. Furthermore, we run precision-recall trade-off analysis to discuss the practical issues when deploying it in real-life scenarios. To encourage reproducible results, we make our code publicly available at \url{https://github.com/AIED2021/ESL-SentenceCompletion}.

The pervasiveness of abusive content on the internet can lead to severe psychological and physical harm. Significant effort in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has been devoted to addressing this problem through abusive content detection and related sub-areas, such as the detection of hate speech, toxicity, cyberbullying, etc. Although current technologies achieve high classification performance in research studies, it has been observed that the real-life application of this technology can cause unintended harms, such as the silencing of under-represented groups. We review a large body of NLP research on automatic abuse detection with a new focus on ethical challenges, organized around eight established ethical principles: privacy, accountability, safety and security, transparency and explainability, fairness and non-discrimination, human control of technology, professional responsibility, and promotion of human values. In many cases, these principles relate not only to situational ethical codes, which may be context-dependent, but are in fact connected to universal human rights, such as the right to privacy, freedom from discrimination, and freedom of expression. We highlight the need to examine the broad social impacts of this technology, and to bring ethical and human rights considerations to every stage of the application life-cycle, from task formulation and dataset design, to model training and evaluation, to application deployment. Guided by these principles, we identify several opportunities for rights-respecting, socio-technical solutions to detect and confront online abuse, including ‘nudging’, ‘quarantining’, value sensitive design, counter-narratives, style transfer, and AI-driven public education applications.evaluation, to application deployment. Guided by these principles, we identify several opportunities for rights-respecting, socio-technical solutions to detect and confront online abuse, including 'nudging', 'quarantining', value sensitive design, counter-narratives, style transfer, and AI-driven public education applications.

Recent years pre-trained language models hit a success on modeling natural language sentences and (semi-)structured tables. However, existing table pre-training techniques always suffer from low data quality and low pre-training efficiency. In this paper, we show that table pre-training can be realized by learning a neural SQL executor over a synthetic corpus, which is obtained by automatically synthesizing executable SQL queries. By pre-training on the synthetic corpus, our approach TAPEX dramatically improves the performance on downstream tasks, boosting existing language models by at most 19.5%. Meanwhile, TAPEX has remarkably high pre-training efficiency and yields strong results when using a small pre-trained corpus. Experimental results demonstrate that TAPEX outperforms previous table pre-training approaches by a large margin, and our model achieves new state-of-the-art results on four well-known datasets, including improving the WikiSQL denotation accuracy to 89.6% (+4.9%), the WikiTableQuestions denotation accuracy to 57.5% (+4.8%), the SQA denotation accuracy to 74.5% (+3.5%), and the TabFact accuracy to 84.6% (+3.6%). Our work opens the way to reason over structured data by pre-training on synthetic executable programs.

Since 2019, most ad exchanges and sell-side platforms (SSPs), in the online advertising industry, shifted from second to first price auctions. Due to the fundamental difference between these auctions, demand-side platforms (DSPs) have had to update their bidding strategies to avoid bidding unnecessarily high and hence overpaying. Bid shading was proposed to adjust the bid price intended for second-price auctions, in order to balance cost and winning probability in a first-price auction setup. In this study, we introduce a novel deep distribution network for optimal bidding in both open (non-censored) and closed (censored) online first-price auctions. Offline and online A/B testing results show that our algorithm outperforms previous state-of-art algorithms in terms of both surplus and effective cost per action (eCPX) metrics. Furthermore, the algorithm is optimized in run-time and has been deployed into VerizonMedia DSP as production algorithm, serving hundreds of billions of bid requests per day. Online A/B test shows that advertiser's ROI are improved by +2.4%, +2.4%, and +8.6% for impression based (CPM), click based (CPC), and conversion based (CPA) campaigns respectively.

The study of fairness in multiwinner elections focuses on settings where candidates have attributes. However, voters may also be divided into predefined populations under one or more attributes (e.g., "California" and "Illinois" populations under the "state" attribute), which may be same or different from candidate attributes. The models that focus on candidate attributes alone may systematically under-represent smaller voter populations. Hence, we develop a model, DiRe Committee Winner Determination (DRCWD), which delineates candidate and voter attributes to select a committee by specifying diversity and representation constraints and a voting rule. We show the generalizability of our model, and analyze its computational complexity, inapproximability, and parameterized complexity. We develop a heuristic-based algorithm, which finds the winning DiRe committee in under two minutes on 63% of the instances of synthetic datasets and on 100% of instances of real-world datasets. We present an empirical analysis of the running time, feasibility, and utility traded-off. Overall, DRCWD motivates that a study of multiwinner elections should consider both its actors, namely candidates and voters, as candidate-specific "fair" models can unknowingly harm voter populations, and vice versa. Additionally, even when the attributes of candidates and voters coincide, it is important to treat them separately as having a female candidate on the committee, for example, is different from having a candidate on the committee who is preferred by the female voters, and who themselves may or may not be female.

Automatic image matting (AIM) refers to estimating the soft foreground from an arbitrary natural image without any auxiliary input like trimap, which is useful for image editing. Prior methods try to learn semantic features to aid the matting process while being limited to images with salient opaque foregrounds such as humans and animals. In this paper, we investigate the difficulties when extending them to natural images with salient transparent/meticulous foregrounds or non-salient foregrounds. To address the problem, a novel end-to-end matting network is proposed, which can predict a generalized trimap for any image of the above types as a unified semantic representation. Simultaneously, the learned semantic features guide the matting network to focus on the transition areas via an attention mechanism. We also construct a test set AIM-500 that contains 500 diverse natural images covering all types along with manually labeled alpha mattes, making it feasible to benchmark the generalization ability of AIM models. Results of the experiments demonstrate that our network trained on available composite matting datasets outperforms existing methods both objectively and subjectively. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/JizhiziLi/AIM.

The recent state-of-the-art natural language understanding (NLU) systems often behave unpredictably, failing on simpler reasoning examples. Despite this, there has been limited focus on quantifying progress towards systems with more predictable behavior. We think that reasoning capability-wise behavioral summary is a step towards bridging this gap. We create a CheckList test-suite (184K examples) for the Natural Language Inference (NLI) task, a representative NLU task. We benchmark state-of-the-art NLI systems on this test-suite, which reveals fine-grained insights into the reasoning abilities of BERT and RoBERTa. Our analysis further reveals inconsistencies of the models on examples derived from the same template or distinct templates but pertaining to same reasoning capability, indicating that generalizing the models' behavior through observations made on a CheckList is non-trivial. Through an user-study, we find that users were able to utilize behavioral information to generalize much better for examples predicted from RoBERTa, compared to that of BERT.

In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective solution to build practical teacher recommender systems for online one-on-one classes. Our system consists of (1) a pseudo matching score module that provides reliable training labels; (2) a ranking model that scores every candidate teacher; (3) a novelty boosting module that gives additional opportunities to new teachers; and (4) a diversity metric that guardrails the recommended results to reduce the chance of collision. Offline experimental results show that our approach outperforms a wide range of baselines. Furthermore, we show that our approach is able to reduce the number of student-teacher matching attempts from 7.22 to 3.09 in a five-month observation on a third-party online education platform.

The Software Report is pleased to announce The Top 100 Software Companies of 2021. This year's awardee list is comprised of a wide range of companies from the most well-known such as Microsoft, Adobe, and Salesforce to the relatively newer but rapidly growing - Qualtrics, Atlassian, and Asana. A good number of awardees may be new names to some but that should be no surprise given software has always been an industry of startups that seemingly came out of nowhere to create and dominate a new space. Software has become the backbone of our economy. From large enterprises to small businesses, most all rely on software whether for accounting, marketing, sales, supply chain, or a myriad of other functions. Software has become the dominant industry of our time and as such, we place a significance on highlighting the best companies leading the industry forward. The following awardees were nominated and selected based on a thorough evaluation process. Among the key criteria considered were ...

Whether it's using QR codes to pull up menus at restaurants or ordering groceries for pickup or delivery online, people have gotten used to navigating the world at their own pace and in their own space during the pandemic. Now they're expecting the same types of experiences at theme parks, according to a newly released survey by Oracle and Merlin Entertainments, which operates various theme parks and attractions across the globe, including Legoland parks and Madame Tussauds. "COVID impacted how people interact," said Simon de Montfort Walker, General Manager of Oracle Food and Beverage. Oracle's point of sale software is used at concession and retail operations across Merlin theme parks and other major businesses like Marriott and Outback Steakhouse. Disney World holidays:Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party being replaced with new Very Merriest event "We've all spent a lot less time waiting in lines," he said.