Social media has increasingly played a key role in emergency response: first responders can use public posts to better react to ongoing crisis events and deploy the necessary resources where they are most needed. Timeline extraction and abstractive summarization are critical technical tasks to leverage large numbers of social media posts about events. Unfortunately, there are few datasets for benchmarking technical approaches for those tasks. This paper presents CrisisLTLSum, the largest dataset of local crisis event timelines available to date. CrisisLTLSum contains 1,000 crisis event timelines across four domains: wildfires, local fires, traffic, and storms. We built CrisisLTLSum using a semi-automated cluster-then-refine approach to collect data from the public Twitter stream. Our initial experiments indicate a significant gap between the performance of strong baselines compared to the human performance on both tasks. Our dataset, code, and models are publicly available.

This work explores speech as a biomarker and investigates the detection of respiratory insufficiency (RI) by analyzing speech samples. Previous work [Casanova et al. 2021] constructed a dataset of respiratory insufficiency COVID-19 patient utterances and analyzed it by means of a convolutional neural network achieving an accuracy of 87.04%, validating the hypothesis that one can detect RI through speech. Here, we study how Transformer neural network architectures can improve the performance on RI detection. This approach enables construction of an acoustic model. By choosing the correct pretraining technique, we generate a self-supervised acoustic model, leading to improved performance (96.53%) of Transformers for RI detection.

We introduce a new open information extraction (OIE) benchmark for pre-trained language models (LM). Recent studies have demonstrated that pre-trained LMs, such as BERT and GPT, may store linguistic and relational knowledge. In particular, LMs are able to answer ``fill-in-the-blank'' questions when given a pre-defined relation category. Instead of focusing on pre-defined relations, we create an OIE benchmark aiming to fully examine the open relational information present in the pre-trained LMs. We accomplish this by turning pre-trained LMs into zero-shot OIE systems. Surprisingly, pre-trained LMs are able to obtain competitive performance on both standard OIE datasets (CaRB and Re-OIE2016) and two new large-scale factual OIE datasets (TAC KBP-OIE and Wikidata-OIE) that we establish via distant supervision. For instance, the zero-shot pre-trained LMs outperform the F1 score of the state-of-the-art supervised OIE methods on our factual OIE datasets without needing to use any training sets. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/cgraywang/IELM

Crowd anomaly detection is one of the most popular topics in computer vision in the context of smart cities. A plethora of deep learning methods have been proposed that generally outperform other machine learning solutions. Our review primarily discusses algorithms that were published in mainstream conferences and journals between 2020 and 2022. We present datasets that are typically used for benchmarking, produce a taxonomy of the developed algorithms, and discuss and compare their performances. Our main findings are that the heterogeneities of pre-trained convolutional models have a negligible impact on crowd video anomaly detection performance. We conclude our discussion with fruitful directions for future research.

In this work, we study the problem of privately maximizing a submodular function in the streaming setting. Extensive work has been done on privately maximizing submodular functions in the general case when the function depends upon the private data of individuals. However, when the size of the data stream drawn from the domain of the objective function is large or arrives very fast, one must privately optimize the objective within the constraints of the streaming setting. We establish fundamental differentially private baselines for this problem and then derive better trade-offs between privacy and utility for the special case of decomposable submodular functions. A submodular function is decomposable when it can be written as a sum of submodular functions; this structure arises naturally when each summand function models the utility of an individual and the goal is to study the total utility of the whole population as in the well-known Combinatorial Public Projects Problem. Finally, we complement our theoretical analysis with experimental corroboration.

Even with recent advances in speech synthesis models, the evaluation of such models is based purely on human judgement as a single naturalness score, such as the Mean Opinion Score (MOS). The score-based metric does not give any further information about which parts of speech are unnatural or why human judges believe they are unnatural. We present a novel speech dataset, RedPen, with human annotations on unnatural speech regions and their corresponding reasons. RedPen consists of 180 synthesized speeches with unnatural regions annotated by crowd workers; These regions are then reasoned and categorized by error types, such as voice trembling and background noise. We find that our dataset shows a better explanation for unnatural speech regions than the model-driven unnaturalness prediction. Our analysis also shows that each model includes different types of error types. Summing up, our dataset successfully shows the possibility that various error regions and types lie under the single naturalness score. We believe that our dataset will shed light on the evaluation and development of more interpretable speech models in the future. Our dataset will be publicly available upon acceptance.

We propose an explainable approach for relation extraction that mitigates the tension between generalization and explainability by jointly training for the two goals. Our approach uses a multi-task learning architecture, which jointly trains a classifier for relation extraction, and a sequence model that labels words in the context of the relation that explain the decisions of the relation classifier. We also convert the model outputs to rules to bring global explanations to this approach. This sequence model is trained using a hybrid strategy: supervised, when supervision from pre-existing patterns is available, and semi-supervised otherwise. In the latter situation, we treat the sequence model's labels as latent variables, and learn the best assignment that maximizes the performance of the relation classifier. We evaluate the proposed approach on the two datasets and show that the sequence model provides labels that serve as accurate explanations for the relation classifier's decisions, and, importantly, that the joint training generally improves the performance of the relation classifier. We also evaluate the performance of the generated rules and show that the new rules are great add-on to the manual rules and bring the rule-based system much closer to the neural models.

Is it possible to build a general and automatic natural language generation (NLG) evaluation metric? Existing learned metrics either perform unsatisfactorily or are restricted to tasks where large human rating data is already available. We introduce SESCORE, a model-based metric that is highly correlated with human judgements without requiring human annotation, by utilizing a novel, iterative error synthesis and severity scoring pipeline. This pipeline applies a series of plausible errors to raw text and assigns severity labels by simulating human judgements with entailment. We evaluate SESCORE against existing metrics by comparing how their scores correlate with human ratings. SESCORE outperforms all prior unsupervised metrics on multiple diverse NLG tasks including machine translation, image captioning, and WebNLG text generation. For WMT 20/21 En-De and Zh-En, SESCORE improve the average Kendall correlation with human judgement from 0.154 to 0.195. SESCORE even achieves comparable performance to the best supervised metric COMET, despite receiving no human-annotated training data.

Billions of interconnected Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices collect tremendous amounts of data from real-world scenarios. Big data is generating increasing interest in a wide range of industries. Once data is analyzed through compute-intensive Machine Learning (ML) methods, it can derive critical business value for organizations. Powerfulplatforms are essential to handle and process such massive collections of information cost-effectively and conveniently. This work introduces a distributed and scalable platform architecture that can be deployed for efficient real-world big data collection and analytics. The proposed system was tested with a case study for Predictive Maintenance of Home Appliances, where current and vibration sensors with high acquisition frequency were connected to washing machines and refrigerators. The introduced platform was used to collect, store, and analyze the data. The experimental results demonstrated that the presented system could be advantageous for tackling real-world IoT scenarios in a cost-effective and local approach.

Planning an optimal route in a complex environment requires efficient reasoning about the surrounding scene. While human drivers prioritize important objects and ignore details not relevant to the decision, learning-based planners typically extract features from dense, high-dimensional grid representations containing all vehicle and road context information. In this paper, we propose PlanT, a novel approach for planning in the context of self-driving that uses a standard transformer architecture. PlanT is based on imitation learning with a compact object-level input representation. On the Longest6 benchmark for CARLA, PlanT outperforms all prior methods (matching the driving score of the expert) while being 5.3x faster than equivalent pixel-based planning baselines during inference. Combining PlanT with an off-the-shelf perception module provides a sensor-based driving system that is more than 10 points better in terms of driving score than the existing state of the art. Furthermore, we propose an evaluation protocol to quantify the ability of planners to identify relevant objects, providing insights regarding their decision-making. Our results indicate that PlanT can focus on the most relevant object in the scene, even when this object is geometrically distant.