Online behaviors of consumers and marketers generate massive marketing data, which ever more sophisticated models attempt to turn into insights and aid decisions by marketers. Yet, in making decisions human managers bring to bear marketing knowledge which reside outside of data and models. Thus, it behooves creation of an automated marketing knowledge base that can interact with data and models. Currently, marketing knowledge is dispersed in large corpora, but no definitive knowledge base for marketing exists. Out of the two broad aspects of marketing knowledge - representation and reasoning - this treatise focuses on the former. Specifically, we focus on creation of marketing knowledge graph from corpora, which requires identification of entities and relations. The relation identification task is particularly challenging in marketing, because of the non-factoid nature of much marketing knowledge, and the difficulty of forming rules that govern relations. Specifically, we define a set of relations to capture marketing knowledge, propose a pipeline for creating the knowledge graph from text and propose a rule-guided semi-supervised relation prediction algorithm to extract relations between marketing entities from sentences.

We present srlearn, a Python library for boosted statistical relational models. We adapt the scikit-learn interface to this setting and provide examples for how this can be used to express learning and inference problems.

This article discusses how the language of causality can shed new light on the major challenges in machine learning for medical imaging: 1) data scarcity, which is the limited availability of high-quality annotations, and 2) data mismatch, whereby a trained algorithm may fail to generalize in clinical practice. Looking at these challenges through the lens of causality allows decisions about data collection, annotation procedures, and learning strategies to be made (and scrutinized) more transparently. We discuss how causal relationships between images and annotations can not only have profound effects on the performance of predictive models, but may even dictate which learning strategies should be considered in the first place. For example, we conclude that semi-supervision may be unsuitable for image segmentation---one of the possibly surprising insights from our causal analysis, which is illustrated with representative real-world examples of computer-aided diagnosis (skin lesion classification in dermatology) and radiotherapy (automated contouring of tumours). We highlight that being aware of and accounting for the causal relationships in medical imaging data is important for the safe development of machine learning and essential for regulation and responsible reporting. To facilitate this we provide step-by-step recommendations for future studies.

The goal of eXtreme Multi-label Learning (XML) is to design and learn a model that can automatically annotate a given data point with the most relevant subset of labels from an extremely large label set. Recently, many techniques have been proposed for XML that achieve reasonable performance on benchmark datasets. Motivated by the complexities of these methods and their subsequent training requirements, in this paper we propose a simple baseline technique for this task. Precisely, we present a global feature embedding technique for XML that can easily scale to very large datasets containing millions of data points in very high-dimensional feature space, irrespective of number of samples and labels. Next we show how an ensemble of such global embeddings can be used to achieve further boost in prediction accuracies with only linear increase in training and prediction time. During testing, we assign the labels using a weighted k-nearest neighbour classifier in the embedding space. Experiments reveal that though conceptually simple, this technique achieves quite competitive results, and has training time of less than one minute using a single CPU core with 15.6 GB RAM even for large-scale datasets such as Amazon-3M.

Ridesharing is a coordination problem in its core. Traditionally it has been solved in a centralized manner by ridesharing platforms. Yet, to truly allow for scalable solutions, we needs to shift from traditional approaches, to multi-agent systems, ideally run on-device. In this paper, we show that a recently proposed heuristic (ALMA), which exhibits such properties, offers an efficient, end-to-end solution for the ridesharing problem. Moreover, by utilizing simple relocation schemes we significantly improve QoS metrics, by up to 50%. To demonstrate the latter, we perform a systematic evaluation of a diverse set of algorithms for the ridesharing problem, which is, to the best of our knowledge, one of the largest and most comprehensive to date. Our evaluation setting is specifically designed to resemble reality as closely as possible. In particular, we evaluate 12 different algorithms over 12 metrics related to global efficiency, complexity, passenger, driver, and platform incentives.

In the community question answering (CQA) system, the answer selection task aims to identify the best answer for a specific question, and thus is playing a key role in enhancing the service quality through recommending appropriate answers for new questions. Recent advances in CQA answer selection focus on enhancing the performance by incorporating the community information, particularly the expertise (previous answers) and authority (position in the social network) of an answerer. However, existing approaches for incorporating such information are limited in (a) only considering either the expertise or the authority, but not both; (b) ignoring the domain knowledge to differentiate topics of previous answers; and (c) simply using the authority information to adjust the similarity score, instead of fully utilizing it in the process of measuring the similarity between segments of the question and the answer. We propose the Knowledge-enhanced Attentive Answer Selection (KAAS) model, which enhances the performance through (a) considering both the expertise and the authority of the answerer; (b) utilizing the human-labeled tags, the taxonomy of the tags, and the votes as the domain knowledge to infer the expertise of the answer; (c) using matrix decomposition of the social network (formed by following-relationship) to infer the authority of the answerer and incorporating such information in the process of evaluating the similarity between segments. Besides, for vertical community, we incorporate an external knowledge graph to capture more professional information for vertical CQA systems. Then we adopt the attention mechanism to integrate the analysis of the text of questions and answers and the aforementioned community information. Experiments with both vertical and general CQA sites demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed KAAS model.

Recent work has exhibited the surprising cross-lingual abi lities of multilingual BERT ( M-BERT) - surprising since it is trained without any cross-lingual objective and with no aligned data. In this work, we provide a compr ehensive study of the contribution of different components in M-BERT to its cross-lingual ability. The experimental study is done in the context of three typologically different languages - Spani sh, Hindi, and Russian - and using two conceptually different NLP tasks, textual en tailment and named entity recognition. Among our key conclusions is the fact th at the lexical overlap between languages plays a negligible role in the cross-ling ual success, while the depth of the network is an integral part of it. Embeddings of natural language text via unsupervised learn ing, coupled with sufficient supervised training data, have been ubiquitous in NLP in recent years an d have shown success in a wide range of monolingual NLP tasks, mostly in English. Training models f or other languages have been shown more difficult, and recent approaches relied on bilingual em beddings that allowed the transfer of supervision in high resource languages like English to mode ls in lower resource languages; however, inducing these bilingual embeddings required some level of supervision (Upadhyay et al., 2016). Not only the model is contextual, but its training also requires no supervisio n - no alignment between the languages is done. Nevertheless, and despite being trained with no exp licit cross-lingual objective, M-BERT produces a representation that seems to generalize well acr oss languages for a variety of downstream tasks (Wu & Dredze, 2019). In this work, we attempt to develop an understanding of the su ccess of M-BERT.

Planning is a critical component of any artificial intelligence system that concerns the realization of strategies or action sequences typically for intelligent agents and autonomous robots. Given predefined parameterized actions, a planning service should accept a query with the goal and initial state to give a solution with a sequence of actions applied to environmental objects. This paper addresses the problem by providing a repository of actions generically applicable to various environmental objects based on Semantic Web technologies. Ontologies are used for asserting constraints in common sense as well as for resolving compatibilities between actions and states. Constraints are defined using Web standards such as SPARQL and SHACL to allow conditional predicates. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed planning domain description language with our robotics applications.

Several examples for the explanation of Betti numbers, demonstrating their ability to capture structural information even in the presence of local deformations. Betti numbers are a way to describe the connectivity within a topological space. In simplest terms, the k -th Betti number β k counts the the number of k -dimensional holes in a topological space, for example, - β 0 is the number of connected components; - β 1 is the number of planar holes (1-dimensional holes); - β 2 is the number of two-dimensional voids (2-dimensional holes); - ... Betti numbers are topological invariants. If two Betti numbers are the same for two different spaces then the spaces are homotopy equivalent [1]. To demonstrate Betti numbers more 6 vividly, some examples are shown in Figure 1.

Artificial intelligence is becoming the fastest disruptor and generator of wealth in history. It will have a major impact on everything. Over the next decade, more than half of the jobs today will disappear and be replaced by AI and the next generation of robotics. AI has the potential to cure diseases, enable smarter cities, tackle many of our environmental challenges, and potentially redefine poverty. There are still many questions to ask about AI and what can go wrong.