Overview
Towards personalised music-therapy; a neurocomputational modelling perspective
Lai, Nicole, Philiastides, Marios, Kawsar, Fahim, Deligianni, Fani
Music therapy has emerged recently as a successful intervention that improves patient's outcome in a large range of neurological and mood disorders without adverse effects. Brain networks are entrained to music in ways that can be explained both via top-down and bottom-up processes. In particular, the direct interaction of auditory with the motor and the reward system via a predictive framework explains the efficacy of music-based interventions in motor rehabilitation. In this manuscript, we provide a brief overview of current theories of music perception and processing. Subsequently, we summarise evidence of music-based interventions primarily in motor, emotional and cardiovascular regulation. We highlight opportunities to improve quality of life and reduce stress beyond the clinic environment and in healthy individuals. This relatively unexplored area requires an understanding of how we can personalise and automate music selection processes to fit individuals needs and tasks via feedback loops mediated by measurements of neuro-physiological responses.
It Takes Two to Tango: Navigating Conceptualizations of NLP Tasks and Measurements of Performance
Subramonian, Arjun, Yuan, Xingdi, Daumé, Hal III, Blodgett, Su Lin
Progress in NLP is increasingly measured through benchmarks; hence, contextualizing progress requires understanding when and why practitioners may disagree about the validity of benchmarks. We develop a taxonomy of disagreement, drawing on tools from measurement modeling, and distinguish between two types of disagreement: 1) how tasks are conceptualized and 2) how measurements of model performance are operationalized. To provide evidence for our taxonomy, we conduct a meta-analysis of relevant literature to understand how NLP tasks are conceptualized, as well as a survey of practitioners about their impressions of different factors that affect benchmark validity. Our meta-analysis and survey across eight tasks, ranging from coreference resolution to question answering, uncover that tasks are generally not clearly and consistently conceptualized and benchmarks suffer from operationalization disagreements. These findings support our proposed taxonomy of disagreement. Finally, based on our taxonomy, we present a framework for constructing benchmarks and documenting their limitations.
Retentive or Forgetful? Diving into the Knowledge Memorizing Mechanism of Language Models
Cao, Boxi, Tang, Qiaoyu, Lin, Hongyu, Han, Xianpei, Chen, Jiawei, Wang, Tianshu, Sun, Le
Memory is one of the most essential cognitive functions serving as a repository of world knowledge and episodes of activities. In recent years, large-scale pre-trained language models have shown remarkable memorizing ability. On the contrary, vanilla neural networks without pre-training have been long observed suffering from the catastrophic forgetting problem. To investigate such a retentive-forgetful contradiction and understand the memory mechanism of language models, we conduct thorough experiments by controlling the target knowledge types, the learning strategies and the learning schedules. We find that: 1) Vanilla language models are forgetful; 2) Pre-training leads to retentive language models; 3) Knowledge relevance and diversification significantly influence the memory formation. These conclusions are useful for understanding the abilities of pre-trained language models and shed light on designing and evaluating new learning and inference algorithms of language models.
Legal Extractive Summarization of U.S. Court Opinions
Bauer, Emmanuel, Stammbach, Dominik, Gu, Nianlong, Ash, Elliott
This paper tackles the task of legal extractive summarization using a dataset of 430K U.S. court opinions with key passages annotated. According to automated summary quality metrics, the reinforcement-learning-based MemSum model is best and even out-performs transformer-based models. In turn, expert human evaluation shows that MemSum summaries effectively capture the key points of lengthy court opinions. Motivated by these results, we open-source our models to the general public. This represents progress towards democratizing law and making U.S. court opinions more accessible to the general public.
New methods for new data? An overview and illustration of quantitative inductive methods for HRM research
"Data is the new oil", in short, data would be the essential source of the ongoing fourth industrial revolution, which has led some commentators to assimilate too quickly the quantity of data to a source of wealth in itself, and consider the development of big data as an quasi direct cause of profit. Human resources management is not escaping this trend, and the accumulation of large amounts of data on employees is perceived by some entrepreneurs as a necessary and sufficient condition for the construction of predictive models of complex work behaviors such as absenteeism or job performance. In fact, the analogy is somewhat misleading: unlike oil, there are no major issues here concerning the production of data (whose flows are generated continuously and at low cost by various information systems), but rather their ''refining'', i.e. the operations necessary to transform this data into a useful product, namely into knowledge. This transformation is where the methodological challenges of data valuation lie, both for practitioners and for academic researchers. Considerations on the methods applicable to take advantage of the possibilities offered by these massive data are relatively recent, and often highlight the disruptive aspect of the current ''data deluge'' to point out that this evolution would be the source of a revival of empiricism in a ''fourth paradigm'' based on the intensive and ''agnostic'' exploitation of massive amounts of data in order to bring out new knowledge, following a purely inductive logic. Although we do not adopt this speculative point of view, it is clear that data-driven approaches are scarce in quantitative HRM studies. However, there are well-established methods, particularly in the field of data mining, which are based on inductive approaches. This area of quantitative analysis with an inductive aim is still relatively unexplored in HRM ( apart from typological analyses). The objective of this paper is first to give an overview of data driven methods that can be used for HRM research, before proposing an empirical illustration which consists in an exploratory research combining a latent profile analysis and an exploration by Gaussian graphical models.
Beqi: Revitalize the Senegalese Wolof Language with a Robust Spelling Corrector
Mbaye, Derguene, Diallo, Moussa
The progress of Natural Language Processing (NLP), although fast in recent years, is not at the same pace for all languages. African languages in particular are still behind and lack automatic processing tools. Some of these tools are very important for the development of these languages but also have an important role in many NLP applications. This is particularly the case for automatic spell checkers. Several approaches have been studied to address this task and the one modeling spelling correction as a translation task from misspelled (noisy) text to well-spelled (correct) text shows promising results. However, this approach requires a parallel corpus of noisy data on the one hand and correct data on the other hand, whereas Wolof is a low-resource language and does not have such a corpus. In this paper, we present a way to address the constraint related to the lack of data by generating synthetic data and we present sequence-to-sequence models using Deep Learning for spelling correction in Wolof. We evaluated these models in three different scenarios depending on the subwording method applied to the data and showed that the latter had a significant impact on the performance of the models, which opens the way for future research in Wolof spelling correction.
Spatial-temporal recurrent reinforcement learning for autonomous ships
This paper proposes a spatial-temporal recurrent neural network architecture for deep $Q$-networks that can be used to steer an autonomous ship. The network design makes it possible to handle an arbitrary number of surrounding target ships while offering robustness to partial observability. Furthermore, a state-of-the-art collision risk metric is proposed to enable an easier assessment of different situations by the agent. The COLREG rules of maritime traffic are explicitly considered in the design of the reward function. The final policy is validated on a custom set of newly created single-ship encounters called `Around the Clock' problems and the commonly used Imazu (1987) problems, which include 18 multi-ship scenarios. Performance comparisons with artificial potential field and velocity obstacle methods demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach for maritime path planning. Furthermore, the new architecture exhibits robustness when it is deployed in multi-agent scenarios and it is compatible with other deep reinforcement learning algorithms, including actor-critic frameworks.
WeLM: A Well-Read Pre-trained Language Model for Chinese
Su, Hui, Zhou, Xiao, Yu, Houjin, Shen, Xiaoyu, Chen, Yuwen, Zhu, Zilin, Yu, Yang, Zhou, Jie
Large Language Models pre-trained with self-supervised learning have demonstrated impressive zero-shot generalization capabilities on a wide spectrum of tasks. In this work, we present WeLM: a well-read pre-trained language model for Chinese that is able to seamlessly perform different types of tasks with zero or few-shot demonstrations. WeLM is trained with 10B parameters by "reading" a curated high-quality corpus covering a wide range of topics. We show that WeLM is equipped with broad knowledge on various domains and languages. On 18 monolingual (Chinese) tasks, WeLM can significantly outperform existing pre-trained models with similar sizes and match the performance of models up to 25 times larger. WeLM also exhibits strong capabilities in multi-lingual and code-switching understanding, outperforming existing multilingual language models pre-trained on 30 languages. Furthermore, We collected human-written prompts for a large set of supervised datasets in Chinese and fine-tuned WeLM with multi-prompted training. The resulting model can attain strong generalization on unseen types of tasks and outperform the unsupervised WeLM in zero-shot learning. Finally, we demonstrate that WeLM has basic skills at explaining and calibrating the decisions from itself, which can be promising directions for future research. Our models can be applied from https://welm.weixin.qq.com/docs/api/.
Fairness in Forecasting of Observations of Linear Dynamical Systems
Zhou, Quan, Marecek, Jakub, Shorten, Robert N.
In machine learning, training data often capture the behaviour of multiple subgroups of some underlying human population. This behaviour can often be modelled as observations of an unknown dynamical system with an unobserved state. When the training data for the subgroups are not controlled carefully, however, under-representation bias arises. To counter under-representation bias, we introduce two natural notions of fairness in time-series forecasting problems: subgroup fairness and instantaneous fairness. These notions extend predictive parity to the learning of dynamical systems. We also show globally convergent methods for the fairness-constrained learning problems using hierarchies of convexifications of non-commutative polynomial optimisation problems. We also show that by exploiting sparsity in the convexifications, we can reduce the run time of our methods considerably. Our empirical results on a biased data set motivated by insurance applications and the well-known COMPAS data set demonstrate the efficacy of our methods.
A Review of Data-driven Approaches for Malicious Website Detection
The detection of malicious websites has become a critical issue in cybersecurity. Therefore, this paper offers a comprehensive review of data-driven methods for detecting malicious websites. Traditional approaches and their limitations are discussed, followed by an overview of data-driven approaches. The paper establishes the data-feature-model-extension pipeline and the latest research developments of data-driven approaches, including data preprocessing, feature extraction, model construction and technology extension. Specifically, this paper compares methods using deep learning models proposed in recent years. Furthermore, the paper follows the data-feature-model-extension pipeline to discuss the challenges together with some future directions of data-driven methods in malicious website detection.