Media
CLSE: Corpus of Linguistically Significant Entities
Chuklin, Aleksandr, Zhao, Justin, Kale, Mihir
One of the biggest challenges of natural language generation (NLG) is the proper handling of named entities. Named entities are a common source of grammar mistakes such as wrong prepositions, wrong article handling, or incorrect entity inflection. Without factoring linguistic representation, such errors are often underrepresented when evaluating on a small set of arbitrarily picked argument values, or when translating a dataset from a linguistically simpler language, like English, to a linguistically complex language, like Russian. However, for some applications, broadly precise grammatical correctness is critical -- native speakers may find entity-related grammar errors silly, jarring, or even offensive. To enable the creation of more linguistically diverse NLG datasets, we release a Corpus of Linguistically Significant Entities (CLSE) annotated by linguist experts. The corpus includes 34 languages and covers 74 different semantic types to support various applications from airline ticketing to video games. To demonstrate one possible use of CLSE, we produce an augmented version of the Schema-Guided Dialog Dataset, SGD-CLSE. Using the CLSE's entities and a small number of human translations, we create a linguistically representative NLG evaluation benchmark in three languages: French (high-resource), Marathi (low-resource), and Russian (highly inflected language). We establish quality baselines for neural, template-based, and hybrid NLG systems and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
On the Consistency of Average Embeddings for Item Recommendation
Bendada, Walid, Salha-Galvan, Guillaume, Hennequin, Romain, Bouabça, Thomas, Cazenave, Tristan
A prevalent practice in recommender systems consists in averaging item embeddings to represent users or higher-level concepts in the same embedding space. This paper investigates the relevance of such a practice. For this purpose, we propose an expected precision score, designed to measure the consistency of an average embedding relative to the items used for its construction. We subsequently analyze the mathematical expression of this score in a theoretical setting with specific assumptions, as well as its empirical behavior on real-world data from music streaming services. Our results emphasize that real-world averages are less consistent for recommendation, which paves the way for future research to better align real-world embeddings with assumptions from our theoretical setting.
Tech expert says 'existential' fears from AI are overblown, but sees 'very disturbing' workplace threats
A bipartisan panel of voters weighed in on the future of artificial intelligence and growing concerns surrounding the potential dangers of the emerging technology. A U.K.-based tech expert said he is not losing sleep at night over the recent growth of artificial intelligence but argued he does have concerns over AI potentially becoming a hellish boss that oversees an employee's every move. Michael Wooldridge is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford who has been a leading expert on AI for at least 30 years. He spoke with The Guardian this month regarding upcoming lectures he will lead this winter to demystify artificial intelligence, while noting what concerns he does have with the tech. He told the outlet that he does not share the same worries as some AI experts who warn the powerful systems could one day lead to the downfall of humanity.
It Costs Just $400 to Build an AI Disinformation Machine
In May, Sputnik International, a state-owned Russian media outlet, posted a series of tweets lambasting US foreign policy and attacking the Biden administration. Each prompted a curt but well-crafted rebuttal from an account called CounterCloud, sometimes including a link to a relevant news or opinion article. It generated similar responses to tweets by the Russian embassy and Chinese news outlets criticizing the US. Russian criticism of the US is far from unusual, but CounterCloud's material pushing back was: The tweets, the articles, and even the journalists and news sites were crafted entirely by artificial intelligence algorithms, according to the person behind the project, who goes by the name Nea Paw and says it is designed to highlight the danger of mass-produced AI disinformation. Paw did not post the CounterCloud tweets and articles publicly but provided them to WIRED and also produced a video outlining the project.
I love AI because it will add decades to our lives
Fox News contributor Dr. Marc Siegel weighs in on how artificial intelligence can change the patient-doctor relationship on'America's Newsroom.' AI, ChatGPT and the like are coming for our jobs and will destroy our way of life, the doomsayers tell us. The mood is utterly different in health care, where cutting-edge physicians recognize the potential of AI to add decades to our lives and to fix the catastrophic "sick care" system, not just in the United States, but around the world. My life expectancy – and yours – is only going up, thanks to AI. Here's how and why. With the democratization of precision medicine, society will shift from a mentality that says, "I'm sick and I need treatment" to "I'm healthy and I want to stay that way." (iStock) We don't really have a health care system.
'Be flexible, imaginative and brave': experts give career advice for an AI world
Teenagers deciding their future this year have a lot to contend with. In England, those who sat their A-levels suffered the biggest results drop on record while the top grades in GCSEs also fell. And now they face the question: will the career I choose to pursue even exist by the time I enter the workforce? Artificial intelligence has hit the mainstream with the popularity of generative AI programmes driven by large language models such as ChatGPT. Businesses are increasingly adopting the technology.
Drone-NeRF: Efficient NeRF Based 3D Scene Reconstruction for Large-Scale Drone Survey
Jia, Zhihao, Wang, Bing, Chen, Changhao
Neural rendering has garnered substantial attention owing to its capacity for creating realistic 3D scenes. However, its applicability to extensive scenes remains challenging, with limitations in effectiveness. In this work, we propose the Drone-NeRF framework to enhance the efficient reconstruction of unbounded large-scale scenes suited for drone oblique photography using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). Our approach involves dividing the scene into uniform sub-blocks based on camera position and depth visibility. Sub-scenes are trained in parallel using NeRF, then merged for a complete scene. We refine the model by optimizing camera poses and guiding NeRF with a uniform sampler. Integrating chosen samples enhances accuracy. A hash-coded fusion MLP accelerates density representation, yielding RGB and Depth outputs. Our framework accounts for sub-scene constraints, reduces parallel-training noise, handles shadow occlusion, and merges sub-regions for a polished rendering result. This Drone-NeRF framework demonstrates promising capabilities in addressing challenges related to scene complexity, rendering efficiency, and accuracy in drone-obtained imagery.
RecXplainer: Amortized Attribute-based Personalized Explanations for Recommender Systems
Verma, Sahil, Shah, Chirag, Dickerson, John P., Beniwal, Anurag, Sadagopan, Narayanan, Seshadri, Arjun
Recommender systems influence many of our interactions in the digital world -- impacting how we shop for clothes, sorting what we see when browsing YouTube or TikTok, and determining which restaurants and hotels we are shown when using hospitality platforms. Modern recommender systems are large, opaque models trained on a mixture of proprietary and open-source datasets. Naturally, issues of trust arise on both the developer and user side: is the system working correctly, and why did a user receive (or not receive) a particular recommendation? Providing an explanation alongside a recommendation alleviates some of these concerns. The status quo for auxiliary recommender system feedback is either user-specific explanations (e.g., "users who bought item B also bought item A") or item-specific explanations (e.g., "we are recommending item A because you watched/bought item B"). However, users bring personalized context into their search experience, valuing an item as a function of that item's attributes and their own personal preferences. In this work, we propose RecXplainer, a novel method for generating fine-grained explanations based on a user's preferences over the attributes of recommended items. We evaluate RecXplainer on five real-world and large-scale recommendation datasets using five different kinds of recommender systems to demonstrate the efficacy of RecXplainer in capturing users' preferences over item attributes and using them to explain recommendations. We also compare RecXplainer to five baselines and show RecXplainer's exceptional performance on ten metrics.
NBIAS: A Natural Language Processing Framework for Bias Identification in Text
Raza, Shaina, Garg, Muskan, Reji, Deepak John, Bashir, Syed Raza, Ding, Chen
Bias in textual data can lead to skewed interpretations and outcomes when the data is used. These biases could perpetuate stereotypes, discrimination, or other forms of unfair treatment. An algorithm trained on biased data may end up making decisions that disproportionately impact a certain group of people. Therefore, it is crucial to detect and remove these biases to ensure the fair and ethical use of data. To this end, we develop a comprehensive and robust framework NBIAS that consists of four main layers: data, corpus construction, model development and an evaluation layer. The dataset is constructed by collecting diverse data from various domains, including social media, healthcare, and job hiring portals. As such, we applied a transformer-based token classification model that is able to identify bias words/ phrases through a unique named entity BIAS. In the evaluation procedure, we incorporate a blend of quantitative and qualitative measures to gauge the effectiveness of our models. We achieve accuracy improvements ranging from 1% to 8% compared to baselines. We are also able to generate a robust understanding of the model functioning. The proposed approach is applicable to a variety of biases and contributes to the fair and ethical use of textual data.
A Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Based Multi-Task Ensemble Model for Aspect and Polarity Classification in Persian Reviews
Vazan, Milad, Masoumi, Fatemeh Sadat, Majd, Sepideh Saeedi
Aspect-based sentiment analysis is of great importance and application because of its ability to identify all aspects discussed in the text. However, aspect-based sentiment analysis will be most effective when, in addition to identifying all the aspects discussed in the text, it can also identify their polarity. Most previous methods use the pipeline approach, that is, they first identify the aspects and then identify the polarities. Such methods are unsuitable for practical applications since they can lead to model errors. Therefore, in this study, we propose a multi-task learning model based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which can simultaneously detect aspect category and detect aspect category polarity. creating a model alone may not provide the best predictions and lead to errors such as bias and high variance. To reduce these errors and improve the efficiency of model predictions, combining several models known as ensemble learning may provide better results. Therefore, the main purpose of this article is to create a model based on an ensemble of multi-task deep convolutional neural networks to enhance sentiment analysis in Persian reviews. We evaluated the proposed method using a Persian language dataset in the movie domain. Jacquard index and Hamming loss measures were used to evaluate the performance of the developed models. The results indicate that this new approach increases the efficiency of the sentiment analysis model in the Persian language.