Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have exploded onto the machine learning scene in recent years owing to their capability to model and learn from graph-structured data. Such an ability has strong implications in a wide variety of fields whose data is inherently relational, for which conventional neural networks do not perform well. Indeed, as recent reviews can attest, research in the area of GNNs has grown rapidly and has lead to the development of a variety of GNN algorithm variants as well as to the exploration of groundbreaking applications in chemistry, neurology, electronics, or communication networks, among others. At the current stage of research, however, the efficient processing of GNNs is still an open challenge for several reasons. Besides of their novelty, GNNs are hard to compute due to their dependence on the input graph, their combination of dense and very sparse operations, or the need to scale to huge graphs in some applications.

The field of machine translation (MT), the automatic translation of written text from one natural language into another, has experienced a major paradigm shift in recent years. Statistical MT, which mainly relies on various count-based models and which used to dominate MT research for decades, has largely been superseded by neural machine translation (NMT), which tackles translation with a single neural network. In this work we will trace back the origins of modern NMT architectures to word and sentence embeddings and earlier examples of the encoder-decoder network family. We will conclude with a short survey of more recent trends in the field.

An expanding field of substantive interest for the theory of the law and the practice-of-law entails Legal Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining (LSAOM), consisting of two often intertwined phenomena and actions underlying legal discussions and narratives: (1) Sentiment Analysis (SA) for the detection of expressed or implied sentiment about a legal matter within the context of a legal milieu, and (2) Opinion Mining (OM) for the identification and illumination of explicit or implicit opinion accompaniments immersed within legal discourse. Efforts to undertake LSAOM have historically been performed by human hand and cognition, and only thinly aided in more recent times by the use of computer-based approaches. Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) involving especially Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) are increasingly bolstering how automation can systematically perform either or both of Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining, all of which is being inexorably carried over into engagement within a legal context for improving LSAOM capabilities. This research paper examines the evolving infusion of AI into Legal Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining and proposes an alignment with the Levels of Autonomy (LoA) of AI Legal Reasoning (AILR), plus provides additional insights regarding AI LSAOM in its mechanizations and potential impact to the study of law and the practicing of law.

The problem of planning for a robot that operates in environments containing a large number of objects, taking actions to move itself through the world as well as to change the state of the objects, is known as task and motion planning (TAMP). TAMP problems contain elements of discrete task planning, discrete-continuous mathematical programming, and continuous motion planning, and thus cannot be effectively addressed by any of these fields directly. In this paper, we define a class of TAMP problems and survey algorithms for solving them, characterizing the solution methods in terms of their strategies for solving the continuous-space subproblems and their techniques for integrating the discrete and continuous components of the search.

The ability to predict multiple possible future positions of the ego-vehicle given the surrounding context while also estimating their probabilities is key to safe autonomous driving. Most of the current state-of-the-art Deep Learning approaches are trained on trajectory data to achieve this task. However trajectory data captured by sensor systems is highly imbalanced, since by far most of the trajectories follow straight lines with an approximately constant velocity. This poses a huge challenge for the task of predicting future positions, which is inherently a regression problem. Current state-of-the-art approaches alleviate this problem only by major preprocessing of the training data, e.g. resampling, clustering into anchors etc. In this paper we propose an approach which reformulates the prediction problem as a classification task, allowing for powerful tools, e.g. focal loss, to combat the imbalance. To this end we design a generative probabilistic model consisting of a deep neural network with a Mixture of Gaussian head. A smart choice of the latent variable allows for the reformulation of the log-likelihood function as a combination of a classification problem and a much simplified regression problem. The output of our model is an estimate of the probability density function of future positions, hence allowing for prediction of multiple possible positions while also estimating their probabilities. The proposed approach can easily incorporate context information and does not require any preprocessing of the data.

We propose a method for making black-box functions provably robust to input manipulations. By training an ensemble of classifiers on randomly flipped training labels, we can use results from randomized smoothing to certify our classifier against label-flipping attacks--the larger the margin, the larger the certified radius of robustness. Using other types of noise allows for certifying robustness to other data poisoning attacks. Adversarial examples--targeted, human-imperceptible modifications to a test input that cause a deep network to fail catastrophically--have taken the machine learning community by storm, with a large body of literature dedicated to understanding and preventing this phenomenon (see these surveys). Understanding why deep networks consistently make these mistakes and how to fix them is one way researchers hope to make progress towards more robust artificial intelligence.

Text is the most widely used means of communication today. This data is abundant but nevertheless complex to exploit within algorithms. For years, scientists have been trying to implement different techniques that enable computers to replicate some mechanisms of human reading. During the past five years, research disrupted the capacity of the algorithms to unleash the value of text data. It brings today, many opportunities for the insurance industry.Understanding those methods and, above all, knowing how to apply them is a major challenge and key to unleash the value of text data that have been stored for many years. Processing language with computer brings many new opportunities especially in the insurance sector where reports are central in the information used by insurers. SCOR's Data Analytics team has been working on the implementation of innovative tools or products that enable the use of the latest research on text analysis. Understanding text mining techniques in insurance enhances the monitoring of the underwritten risks and many processes that finally benefit policyholders.This article proposes to explain opportunities that Natural Language Processing (NLP) are providing to insurance. It details different methods used today in practice traces back the story of them. We also illustrate the implementation of certain methods using open source libraries and python codes that we have developed to facilitate the use of these techniques.After giving a general overview on the evolution of text mining during the past few years,we share about how to conduct a full study with text mining and share some examples to serve those models into insurance products or services. Finally, we explained in more details every step that composes a Natural Language Processing study to ensure the reader can have a deep understanding on the implementation.

Recent years have seen important advances in the quality of state-of-the-art models, but this has come at the expense of models becoming less interpretable. This survey presents an overview of the current state of Explainable AI (XAI), considered within the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP). We discuss the main categorization of explanations, as well as the various ways explanations can be arrived at and visualized. We detail the operations and explainability techniques currently available for generating explanations for NLP model predictions, to serve as a resource for model developers in the community. Finally, we point out the current gaps and encourage directions for future work in this important research area.

We seek to create agents that both act and communicate with other agents in pursuit of a goal. Towards this end, we extend LIGHT (Urbanek et al. 2019)---a large-scale crowd-sourced fantasy text-game---with a dataset of quests. These contain natural language motivations paired with in-game goals and human demonstrations; completing a quest might require dialogue or actions (or both). We introduce a reinforcement learning system that (1) incorporates large-scale language modeling-based and commonsense reasoning-based pre-training to imbue the agent with relevant priors; and (2) leverages a factorized action space of action commands and dialogue, balancing between the two. We conduct zero-shot evaluations using held-out human expert demonstrations, showing that our agents are able to act consistently and talk naturally with respect to their motivations.

This paper presents a systematic review of benchmarks and approaches for explainability in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC). We present how the representation and inference challenges evolved and the steps which were taken to tackle these challenges. We also present the evaluation methodologies to assess the performance of explainable systems. In addition, we identify persisting open research questions and highlight critical directions for future work.