The system is interpretable and user friendly and does not require labeled training data, hence can be rapidly and cost-effectively used across different domains in applied setups. The system flow includes three stages: First, it generates domain-specific aspect and opinion lexicons based on an unlabeled dataset; second, it enables the user to view and edit those lexicons (weak supervision); and finally, it enables the user to select an unlabeled target dataset from the same domain, classify it, and generate an aspect-based sentiment report. ABSApp has been successfully used in a number of real-life use cases, among them movie review analysis and convention impact analysis.

A major bottleneck in training end-to-end task-oriented dialog system is the lack of data. To utilize limited training data more efficiently, we propose Modular Supervision Network (MOSS), an encoder-decoder training framework that could incorporate supervision from various intermediate dialog system modules including natural language understanding, dialog state tracking, dialog policy learning, and natural language generation. With only 60% of the training data, MOSS-all (i.e., MOSS with supervision from all four dialog modules) outperforms state-of-the-art models on CamRest676. Moreover, introducing modular supervision has even bigger benefits when the dialog task has a more complex dialog state and action space. With only 40% of the training data, MOSS-all outperforms the state-of-the-art model on a complex laptop network troubleshooting dataset, LaptopNetwork, that we introduced. LaptopNetwork consists of conversations between real customers and customer service agents in Chinese. Moreover, MOSS framework can accommodate dialogs that have supervision from different dialog modules at both the framework level and model level. Therefore, MOSS is extremely flexible to update in a real-world deployment.

While most approaches to the problem of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) focus on estimating a reward function that best explains an expert agent's policy or demonstrated behavior on a control task, it is often the case that such behavior is more succinctly described by a simple reward combined with a set of hard constraints. In this setting, the agent is attempting to maximize cumulative rewards subject to these given constraints on their behavior. We reformulate the problem of IRL on Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) such that, given a nominal model of the environment and a nominal reward function, we seek to estimate state, action, and feature constraints in the environment that motivate an agent's behavior. Our approach is based on the Maximum Entropy IRL framework, which allows us to reason about the likelihood of an expert agent's demonstrations given our knowledge of an MDP. Using our method, we can infer which constraints can be added to the MDP to most increase the likelihood of observing these demonstrations. We present an algorithm which iteratively infers the Maximum Likelihood Constraint to best explain observed behavior, and we evaluate its efficacy using both simulated behavior and recorded data of humans navigating around an obstacle.

In this paper, we introduce a new optimization approach to Entity Resolution. Traditional approaches tackle entity resolution with hierarchical clustering, which does not benefit from a formal optimization formulation. In contrast, we model entity resolution as correlation-clustering, which we treat as a weighted set-packing problem and write as an integer linear program (ILP). In this case sources in the input data correspond to elements and entities in output data correspond to sets/clusters. We tackle optimization of weighted set packing by relaxing integrality in our ILP formulation. The set of potential sets/clusters can not be explicitly enumerated, thus motivating optimization via column generation. In addition to the novel formulation, we also introduce new dual optimal inequalities (DOI), that we call flexible dual optimal inequalities, which tightly lower-bound dual variables during optimization and accelerate column generation. We apply our formulation to entity resolution (also called de-duplication of records), and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on two popular benchmark datasets.

Spatial and time-dependent data is of interest in many applications. This task is difficult due to its complex spatial dependency, long-range temporal dependency, data non-stationarity, and data heterogeneity. To address these challenges, we propose Forecaster, a graph Transformer architecture. Specifically, we start by learning the structure of the graph that parsimoniously represents the spatial dependency between the data at different locations. Based on the topology of the graph, we sparsify the Transformer to account for the strength of spatial dependency, long-range temporal dependency, data non-stationarity, and data heterogeneity. We evaluate Forecaster in the problem of forecasting taxi ride-hailing demand and show that our proposed architecture significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.

OpenSpiel is a collection of environments and algorithms for research in general reinforcement learning and search/planning in games. OpenSpiel supports n-player (single- and multi- agent) zero-sum, cooperative and general-sum, one-shot and sequential, strictly turn-taking and simultaneous-move, perfect and imperfect information games, as well as traditional multiagent environments such as (partially- and fully- observable) grid worlds and social dilemmas. OpenSpiel also includes tools to analyze learning dynamics and other common evaluation metrics. This document serves both as an overview of the code base and an introduction to the terminology, core concepts, and algorithms across the fields of reinforcement learning, computational game theory, and search.

Strong intelligent machines powered by deep neural networks are increasingly deployed as black boxes to make decisions in risk-sensitive domains, such as finance and medical. To reduce potential risk and build trust with users, it is critical to interpret how such machines make their decisions. Existing works interpret a pre-trained neural network by analyzing hidden neurons, mimicking pre-trained models or approximating local predictions. However, these methods do not provide a guarantee on the exactness and consistency of their interpretation. In this paper, we propose an elegant closed form solution named $OpenBox$ to compute exact and consistent interpretations for the family of Piecewise Linear Neural Networks (PLNN). The major idea is to first transform a PLNN into a mathematically equivalent set of linear classifiers, then interpret each linear classifier by the features that dominate its prediction. We further apply $OpenBox$ to demonstrate the effectiveness of non-negative and sparse constraints on improving the interpretability of PLNNs. The extensive experiments on both synthetic and real world data sets clearly demonstrate the exactness and consistency of our interpretation.

'View' co-host Joy Behar didn't hold back when commenting on President Trump's heavy criticism of freshmen Democratic congresswomen, Reps. Behar said Trump is'running very scared right now,' and that'he is like a cornered rat.' Her comments came as Trump stood by his original criticism of the group known as'The Squad.' "View" co-host Joy Behar invoked George Orwell's iconic novel "1984" while discussing the Trump presidency with author Stephen King. While promoting his new novel, "The Institute," on Wednesday, King began by explaining the plot, which involves "defenseless children" with supernatural abilities who are "locked up" by a mysterious organization. He talked about how his story connects to current events. "When I started writing this book, I just wanted to write a story about defenseless children who were locked up and had to kind of band together in order to fight these cruel adults that are performing tests on them," King said.

Attention readers: We invite you to access the corresponding Python code and iPython notebooks for this article on GitHub. Given all of the higher level tools that you can use with TensorFlow, such as tf.contrib.learn But often with these higher level applications, you cannot access the little inbetween bits of the code, and some of the understanding of what's happening under the surface is lost. In this tutorial, I'll walk you through how to build a convolutional neural network from scratch, using just the low-level TensorFlow and visualizing our graph and network performance using TensorBoard. If you don't understand some of the basics of a fully connected neural network, I highly recommend you first check out Not another MNIST tutorial with TensorFlow.

A strong submission to the workshop typically presents a new learning method that yields new biological insights, or applies an existing learning method to a new biological problem. However, submissions that improve upon existing methods for solving previously studied problems will also be considered. Examples of research presented in previous years can be found online at http://raetschlab.org:10080/nipscompbio/previous. We specially encourage submissions describing work in progress and early results, for generating discussions helpful in shaping the presented work.