Media
Cross-lingual Transfer Learning for Check-worthy Claim Identification over Twitter
Hasanain, Maram, Elsayed, Tamer
Misinformation spread over social media has become an undeniable infodemic. However, not all spreading claims are made equal. If propagated, some claims can be destructive, not only on the individual level, but to organizations and even countries. Detecting claims that should be prioritized for fact-checking is considered the first step to fight against spread of fake news. With training data limited to a handful of languages, developing supervised models to tackle the problem over lower-resource languages is currently infeasible. Therefore, our work aims to investigate whether we can use existing datasets to train models for predicting worthiness of verification of claims in tweets in other languages. We present a systematic comparative study of six approaches for cross-lingual check-worthiness estimation across pairs of five diverse languages with the help of Multilingual BERT (mBERT) model. We run our experiments using a state-of-the-art multilingual Twitter dataset. Our results show that for some language pairs, zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is possible and can perform as good as monolingual models that are trained on the target language. We also show that in some languages, this approach outperforms (or at least is comparable to) state-of-the-art models.
Visual Named Entity Linking: A New Dataset and A Baseline
Sun, Wenxiang, Fan, Yixing, Guo, Jiafeng, Zhang, Ruqing, Cheng, Xueqi
Visual Entity Linking (VEL) is a task to link regions of images with their corresponding entities in Knowledge Bases (KBs), which is beneficial for many computer vision tasks such as image retrieval, image caption, and visual question answering. While existing tasks in VEL either rely on textual data to complement a multi-modal linking or only link objects with general entities, which fails to perform named entity linking on large amounts of image data. In this paper, we consider a purely Visual-based Named Entity Linking (VNEL) task, where the input only consists of an image. The task is to identify objects of interest (i.e., visual entity mentions) in images and link them to corresponding named entities in KBs. Since each entity often contains rich visual and textual information in KBs, we thus propose three different sub-tasks, i.e., visual to visual entity linking (V2VEL), visual to textual entity linking (V2TEL), and visual to visual-textual entity linking (V2VTEL). In addition, we present a high-quality human-annotated visual person linking dataset, named WIKIPerson. Based on WIKIPerson, we establish a series of baseline algorithms for the solution of each sub-task, and conduct experiments to verify the quality of proposed datasets and the effectiveness of baseline methods. We envision this work to be helpful for soliciting more works regarding VNEL in the future. The codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/ict-bigdatalab/VNEL.
Few-Shot Character Understanding in Movies as an Assessment to Meta-Learning of Theory-of-Mind
Yu, Mo, Sang, Yisi, Pu, Kangsheng, Wei, Zekai, Wang, Han, Li, Jing, Yu, Yue, Zhou, Jie
When reading a story, humans can rapidly understand new fictional characters with a few observations, mainly by drawing analogy to fictional and real people they met before in their lives. This reflects the few-shot and meta-learning essence of humans' inference of characters' mental states, i.e., humans' theory-of-mind (ToM), which is largely ignored in existing research. We fill this gap with a novel NLP benchmark, TOM-IN-AMC, the first assessment of models' ability of meta-learning of ToM in a realistic narrative understanding scenario. Our benchmark consists of $\sim$1,000 parsed movie scripts for this purpose, each corresponding to a few-shot character understanding task; and requires models to mimic humans' ability of fast digesting characters with a few starting scenes in a new movie. Our human study verified that humans can solve our problem by inferring characters' mental states based on their previously seen movies; while the state-of-the-art metric-learning and meta-learning approaches adapted to our task lags 30% behind.
Exhibition made up entirely of AI-generated artwork launches in San Francisco
Artificial intelligence is feared to one day take over humanity, but as for now people are using it to create stunning pieces of artwork that are now hanging in the first gallery inspired by Dalle-E - an AI-powered system that generates digital images through text inputs. The artwork, which is physically on display in San Francisco, was created by the'artist' inputting specific terms or selecting recommendations from the AI - all the pieces are for sale, with one for $5,000. However, one of the sculptures was created by reading the creators brainwaves and body signals to choose an initial AI-generated image that led to the finish piece. The gallery has been met with controversy as traditional artists do not accept the digital images as true art, noting it does not have the same hallmark of human creativity. Human engineers, however, note that there is more that goes into creating the AI-generated pieces, such as tweaking and refining specific options and features to create a perfect picture.
Why an algorithm manager is the newest form of a horrible boss
The 1999 cult classic film Office Space depicts Peter's dreary life as a cubicle-dwelling software engineer. Every Friday, Peter tries to avoid his boss and the dreaded words: "I'm going to need you to go ahead and come in tomorrow." This scene is still popular on the internet nearly 25 years later because it captures troubling aspects of the employment relationship -- the helplessness Peter feels, the fake sympathy his boss intones when issuing this directive, the never-ending demand for greater productivity. There is no shortage of pop culture depictions of horrible bosses. There is even a film with that title.
New in Peach: Send ads to Netflix
Peach, the global market leader in video advertising workflow and delivery has announced support of Netflix's new ad-supported service Basic with Ads. To coincide with the launch of the service, Peach has launched new destinations enabling clients to deliver ads to Netflix across multiple territories including UK, Australia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Brazil with more to follow. Peach provides a connected advertising workflow, enabling clients to get their ads delivered to Netflix straight from the edit suite, while ensuring the highest possible quality, formatting and accuracy. Doug Conely, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Peach, said: "This is a pivotal moment for TV advertising. As leaders in global creative ad delivery for over 25 years, we've seen ad spend in Connected TV grow rapidly in the UK* and the rest of the world, and we expect to see further acceleration of growth driven by ad-supported tiers such as Netflix. AI and ML News: An Investment Into Artificial Intelligence as Daktela Buys Coworkers.ai "Netflix's Basic with Ads will bring our clients new audiences in a premium environment, creating opportunities for more addressable and premium content.
Can AI-Generated Art Replace Creative Humans?
The artist takes the results and refines them himself, adding text for the movie titles and credits, a feature that is currently out of the AI systems' capabilities. The results lean into the ways the titles and plots of the films can be misinterpreted rather than provide accurate representations, said Vincenzi. For example, one of Robmojo's versions of the poster for the movie The Human Centipede features a perturbing image of a man with centipedes appearing to grow out of his body. Its take on Dirty Dancing, on the other hand, shows two pigs standing on their hind legs, dancing.
Voting-system firms battle right-wing rage against the machines
Former U.S. President Donald Trump's stolen-election falsehoods have thrust America's voting machine suppliers into a national struggle to protect their businesses. Industry leaders Dominion Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software are waging a political and public relations ground war to beat back threats to their state and local government contracts, rooted in bogus conspiracy theories about vote manipulation. Dominion has also turned to the courts, filing eight defamation lawsuits against Trump allies and media outlets including Fox News. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.
PyNet-V2 Mobile: Efficient On-Device Photo Processing With Neural Networks
Ignatov, Andrey, Malivenko, Grigory, Timofte, Radu, Tseng, Yu, Xu, Yu-Syuan, Yu, Po-Hsiang, Chiang, Cheng-Ming, Kuo, Hsien-Kai, Chen, Min-Hung, Cheng, Chia-Ming, Van Gool, Luc
The increased importance of mobile photography created a need for fast and performant RAW image processing pipelines capable of producing good visual results in spite of the mobile camera sensor limitations. While deep learning-based approaches can efficiently solve this problem, their computational requirements usually remain too large for high-resolution on-device image processing. To address this limitation, we propose a novel PyNET-V2 Mobile CNN architecture designed specifically for edge devices, being able to process RAW 12MP photos directly on mobile phones under 1.5 second and producing high perceptual photo quality. To train and to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution, we use the real-world Fujifilm UltraISP dataset consisting on thousands of RAW-RGB image pairs captured with a professional medium-format 102MP Fujifilm camera and a popular Sony mobile camera sensor. The results demonstrate that the PyNET-V2 Mobile model can substantially surpass the quality of tradition ISP pipelines, while outperforming the previously introduced neural network-based solutions designed for fast image processing. Furthermore, we show that the proposed architecture is also compatible with the latest mobile AI accelerators such as NPUs or APUs that can be used to further reduce the latency of the model to as little as 0.5 second. The dataset, code and pre-trained models used in this paper are available on the project website: https://github.com/gmalivenko/PyNET-v2
Minimalist Data Wrangling with Python
Minimalist Data Wrangling with Python is envisaged as a student's first introduction to data science, providing a high-level overview as well as discussing key concepts in detail. We explore methods for cleaning data gathered from different sources, transforming, selecting, and extracting features, performing exploratory data analysis and dimensionality reduction, identifying naturally occurring data clusters, modelling patterns in data, comparing data between groups, and reporting the results. This textbook is a non-profit project. Its online and PDF versions are freely available at https://datawranglingpy.gagolewski.com/.