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A Multimodal Alerting System for Online Class Quality Assurance

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Online 1 on 1 class is created for more personalized learning experience. It demands a large number of teaching resources, which are scarce in China. To alleviate this problem, we build a platform (marketplace), i.e., \emph{Dahai} to allow college students from top Chinese universities to register as part-time instructors for the online 1 on 1 classes. To warn the unqualified instructors and ensure the overall education quality, we build a monitoring and alerting system by utilizing multimodal information from the online environment. Our system mainly consists of two key components: banned word detector and class quality predictor. The system performance is demonstrated both offline and online. By conducting experimental evaluation of real-world online courses, we are able to achieve 74.3\% alerting accuracy in our production environment.


Flexible Auto-weighted Local-coordinate Concept Factorization: A Robust Framework for Unsupervised Clustering

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Concept Factorization (CF) and its variants may produce inaccurate representation and clustering results due to the sensitivity to noise, hard constraint on the reconstruction error and pre-obtained approximate similarities. To improve the representation ability, a novel unsupervised Robust Flexible Auto-weighted Local-coordinate Concept Factorization (RFA-LCF) framework is proposed for clustering high-dimensional data. Specifically, RFA-LCF integrates the robust flexible CF by clean data space recovery, robust sparse local-coordinate coding and adaptive weighting into a unified model. RFA-LCF improves the representations by enhancing the robustness of CF to noise and errors, providing a flexible constraint on the reconstruction error and optimizing the locality jointly. For robust learning, RFA-LCF clearly learns a sparse projection to recover the underlying clean data space, and then the flexible CF is performed in the projected feature space. RFA-LCF also uses a L2,1-norm based flexible residue to encode the mismatch between the recovered data and its reconstruction, and uses the robust sparse local-coordinate coding to represent data using a few nearby basis concepts. For auto-weighting, RFA-LCF jointly preserves the manifold structures in the basis concept space and new coordinate space in an adaptive manner by minimizing the reconstruction errors on clean data, anchor points and coordinates. By updating the local-coordinate preserving data, basis concepts and new coordinates alternately, the representation abilities can be potentially improved. Extensive results on public databases show that RFA-LCF delivers the state-of-the-art clustering results compared with other related methods.


Leveraging Just a Few Keywords for Fine-Grained Aspect Detection Through Weakly Supervised Co-Training

arXiv.org Machine Learning

User-generated reviews can be decomposed into fine-grained segments (e.g., sentences, clauses), each evaluating a different aspect of the principal entity (e.g., price, quality, appearance). Automatically detecting these aspects can be useful for both users and downstream opinion mining applications. Current supervised approaches for learning aspect classifiers require many fine-grained aspect labels, which are labor-intensive to obtain. And, unfortunately, unsupervised topic models often fail to capture the aspects of interest. In this work, we consider weakly supervised approaches for training aspect classifiers that only require the user to provide a small set of seed words (i.e., weakly positive indicators) for the aspects of interest. First, we show that current weakly supervised approaches do not effectively leverage the predictive power of seed words for aspect detection. Next, we propose a student-teacher approach that effectively leverages seed words in a bag-of-words classifier (teacher); in turn, we use the teacher to train a second model (student) that is potentially more powerful (e.g., a neural network that uses pre-trained word embeddings). Finally, we show that iterative co-training can be used to cope with noisy seed words, leading to both improved teacher and student models. Our proposed approach consistently outperforms previous weakly supervised approaches (by 14.1 absolute F1 points on average) in six different domains of product reviews and six multilingual datasets of restaurant reviews.


A Dataset of General-Purpose Rebuttal

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In Natural Language Understanding, the task of response generation is usually focused on responses to short texts, such as tweets or a turn in a dialog. Here we present a novel task of producing a critical response to a long argumentative text, and suggest a method based on general rebuttal arguments to address it. We do this in the context of the recently-suggested task of listening comprehension over argumentative content: given a speech on some specified topic, and a list of relevant arguments, the goal is to determine which of the arguments appear in the speech. The general rebuttals we describe here (written in English) overcome the need for topic-specific arguments to be provided, by proving to be applicable for a large set of topics. This allows creating responses beyond the scope of topics for which specific arguments are available. All data collected during this work is freely available for research.


Deep Knowledge Tracing with Side Information

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Monitoring student knowledge states or skill acquisition levels known as knowledge tracing, is a fundamental part of intelligent tutoring systems. Despite its inherent challenges, recent deep neural networks based knowledge tracing models have achieved great success, which is largely from models' ability to learn sequential dependencies of questions in student exercise data. However, in addition to sequential information, questions inherently exhibit side relations, which can enrich our understandings about student knowledge states and has great potentials to advance knowledge tracing. Thus, in this paper, we exploit side relations to improve knowledge tracing and design a novel framework DTKS. The experimental results on real education data validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and demonstrate the importance of side information in knowledge tracing. 1 Introduction Knowledge tracing - where machine monitors students' knowledge states and their skill acquisition levels - is essential for personalized education and a fundamental part of intelligent tutoring systems [15,7,1,12]. However, tracing student knowledge states is inherently challenging because of the complexity of human learning process, which involves a variety of factors from diverse domains such as neural science [3,4], psychology [10], and education [8].


Data science is different now ยท Vicki Boykis

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How do you prepare to solve these problems and be ready for the workforce? Learn these three skills, which all are foundational, and build on each other, from easiest, to hardest. The really key thing about all of these skills is that they are also fundamental and critical to software development outside of data science, meaning that, in case you can't find a data science job, you can transition quickly to software development, or devops. I consider this flexibility just as important as training for a specific data-related gig. From HN: "Is there some kind of small and easy JS and/or PHP program allowing some easy work on a database?"


CSC 411 Winter 2019

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Machine learning is a set of techniques that allow machines to learn from data and experience, rather than requiring humans to specify the desired behavior by hand. Over the past two decades, machine learning techniques have become increasingly central both in AI as an academic field, and in the technology industry. This course provides a broad introduction to some of the most commonly used ML algorithms. It also serves to introduce key algorithmic principles which will serve as a foundation for more advanced courses, such as CSC412/2506 (Probabilistic Learning and Reasoning) and CSC421/2516 (Neural Networks and Deep Learning).


Can IoT solve SA's electricity woes? - Africa.com

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SqwidNet, in partnership with Sigfox, has concluded the second round of its Internet of Things (IoT) SA University Challenge with ten university teams competing in the final pitch presentation day this week. The programme is designed to challenge students to develop and create innovative projects focused on building solutions that support the UN Sustainable Development Goals using SqwidNet / Sigfox technology. "We were astounded by the creative thinking displayed by the ten teams that presented their solutions to the judges this week," says Phathizwe Malinga, managing director of SqwidNet. "The solutions presented ranged from agricultural solutions for early pest detection to avoid crop losses, to generating electricity from plants by collecting electrons from roots in an anode and converting that into electricity. We also saw an IoT water monitoring solution, an early fire detection for rural communities and a two-way learning solution using artificial intelligence."


On Education Deep Learning and NLP A-Z : How to create a ChatBot - all courses

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Why this is important Types of Natural Language Processing Classical vs. Deep Learning Models End to End Deep Learning Models Seq2Seq Architecture & Training Beam Search Decoding Requirements Just some high school mathematics level Basic Python programming knowledge We've talked about, speculated and often seen different applications for Artificial Intelligence - But what about one piece of technology that will not only gather relevant information, better customer service and could even differentiate your business from the crowd? ChatBots are here, and they came change and shape-shift how we've been conducting online business. Fortunately technology has advanced enough to make this a valuable tool something accessible that almost anybody can learn how to implement. If you want to learn one of the most attractive, customizable and cutting edge pieces of technology available, then this course is just for you! Why this is important Types of Natural Language Processing Classical vs. Deep Learning Models End to End Deep Learning Models Seq2Seq Architecture & Training Beam Search Decoding


Object-oriented programming for data scientists: Build your ML estimator

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UPDATE: You will always find the latest Python script (with the linear regression class definition and methods) HERE. Use it to build further or experiment. Data scientists often come from a background which is quite far removed from traditional computer science/software engineering -- physics, biology, statistics, economics, electrical engineering, etc. But ultimately, they are expected to pick up a sufficient amount of programming/software engineering to be truly impactful for their organization and business. Being a Data Scientist does not make you a Software Engineer! And, what is at the heart of most modern programming languages and software engineering paradigms?