Automatic crash bucketing is a crucial phase in the software development process for efficiently triaging bug reports. It generally consists in grouping similar reports through clustering techniques. However, with real-time streaming bug collection, systems are needed to quickly answer the question: What are the most similar bugs to a new one?, that is, efficiently find near-duplicates. It is thus natural to consider nearest neighbors search to tackle this problem and especially the well-known locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) to deal with large datasets due to its sublinear performance and theoretical guarantees on the similarity search accuracy. Surprisingly, LSH has not been considered in the crash bucketing literature. It is indeed not trivial to derive hash functions that satisfy the so-called locality-sensitive property for the most advanced crash bucketing metrics. Consequently, we study in this paper how to leverage LSH for this task. To be able to consider the most relevant metrics used in the literature, we introduce DeepLSH, a Siamese DNN architecture with an original loss function, that perfectly approximates the locality-sensitivity property even for Jaccard and Cosine metrics for which exact LSH solutions exist. We support this claim with a series of experiments on an original dataset, which we make available.

Multimodal information extraction is attracting research attention nowadays, which requires aggregating representations from different modalities. In this paper, we present the Intra- and Inter-Sample Relationship Modeling (I2SRM) method for this task, which contains two modules. Firstly, the intra-sample relationship modeling module operates on a single sample and aims to learn effective representations. Embeddings from textual and visual modalities are shifted to bridge the modality gap caused by distinct pre-trained language and image models. Secondly, the inter-sample relationship modeling module considers relationships among multiple samples and focuses on capturing the interactions. An AttnMixup strategy is proposed, which not only enables collaboration among samples but also augments data to improve generalization. We conduct extensive experiments on the multimodal named entity recognition datasets Twitter-2015 and Twitter-2017, and the multimodal relation extraction dataset MNRE. Our proposed method I2SRM achieves competitive results, 77.12% F1-score on Twitter-2015, 88.40% F1-score on Twitter-2017, and 84.12% F1-score on MNRE.

In many NLP applications that involve interpreting sentences within a rich context -- for instance, information retrieval systems or dialogue systems -- it is desirable to be able to preserve the sentence in a form that can be readily understood without context, for later reuse -- a process known as ``decontextualization''. While previous work demonstrated that generative Seq2Seq models could effectively perform decontextualization after being fine-tuned on a specific dataset, this approach requires expensive human annotations and may not transfer to other domains. We propose a few-shot method of decontextualization using a large language model, and present preliminary results showing that this method achieves viable performance on multiple domains using only a small set of examples.

Human trafficking (HT) is a pervasive global issue affecting vulnerable individuals, violating their fundamental human rights. Investigations reveal that a significant number of HT cases are associated with online advertisements (ads), particularly in escort markets. Consequently, identifying and connecting HT vendors has become increasingly challenging for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs). To address this issue, we introduce IDTraffickers, an extensive dataset consisting of 87,595 text ads and 5,244 vendor labels to enable the verification and identification of potential HT vendors on online escort markets. To establish a benchmark for authorship identification, we train a DeCLUTR-small model, achieving a macro-F1 score of 0.8656 in a closed-set classification environment. Next, we leverage the style representations extracted from the trained classifier to conduct authorship verification, resulting in a mean r-precision score of 0.8852 in an open-set ranking environment. Finally, to encourage further research and ensure responsible data sharing, we plan to release IDTraffickers for the authorship attribution task to researchers under specific conditions, considering the sensitive nature of the data. We believe that the availability of our dataset and benchmarks will empower future researchers to utilize our findings, thereby facilitating the effective linkage of escort ads and the development of more robust approaches for identifying HT indicators.

Efficiently finding doctors and locations is an important search problem for patients in the healthcare domain, for which traditional information retrieval methods tend not to work optimally. In the last ten years, knowledge graphs (KGs) have emerged as a powerful way to combine the benefits of gleaning insights from semi-structured data using semantic modeling, natural language processing techniques like information extraction, and robust querying using structured query languages like SPARQL and Cypher. In this short paper, we present a KG-based search engine architecture for robustly finding doctors and locations in the healthcare domain. Early results demonstrate that our approach can lead to significantly higher coverage for complex queries without degrading quality.

We analyze the number of queries that a whitebox adversary needs to make to a private learner in order to reconstruct its training data. For (ϵ, δ) DP learners with training data drawn from any arbitrary compact metric space, we provide the first known lower bounds on the adversary's query complexity as a function of the learner's privacy parameters. Our results are minimax optimal for every ϵ 0, δ [0, 1], covering both ϵ-DP and (0, δ) DP as corollaries. Beyond this, we obtain query complexity lower bounds for (α, ϵ) Rényi DP learners that are valid for any α > 1, ϵ 0. Finally, we analyze data reconstruction attacks on locally compact metric spaces via the framework of Metric DP, a generalization of DP that accounts for the underlying metric structure of the data. In this setting, we provide the first known analysis of data reconstruction in unbounded, high dimensional spaces and obtain query complexity lower bounds that are nearly tight modulo logarithmic factors.

Recently, although pre-trained language models have achieved great success on multilingual NLP (Natural Language Processing) tasks, the lack of training data on many tasks in low-resource languages still limits their performance. One effective way of solving that problem is to transfer knowledge from rich-resource languages to low-resource languages. However, many previous works on cross-lingual transfer rely heavily on the parallel corpus or translation models, which are often difficult to obtain. We propose a novel approach to conduct zero-shot cross-lingual transfer with a pre-trained model. It consists of a Bilingual Task Fitting module that applies task-related bilingual information alignment; a self-training module generates pseudo soft and hard labels for unlabeled data and utilizes them to conduct self-training. We got the new SOTA on different tasks without any dependencies on the parallel corpus or translation models.

A Content-based Time Series Retrieval (CTSR) system is an information retrieval system for users to interact with time series emerged from multiple domains, such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. For example, users seeking to learn more about the source of a time series can submit the time series as a query to the CTSR system and retrieve a list of relevant time series with associated metadata. By analyzing the retrieved metadata, users can gather more information about the source of the time series. Because the CTSR system is required to work with time series data from diverse domains, it needs a high-capacity model to effectively measure the similarity between different time series. On top of that, the model within the CTSR system has to compute the similarity scores in an efficient manner as the users interact with the system in real-time. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient CTSR model that outperforms alternative models, while still providing reasonable inference runtimes. To demonstrate the capability of the proposed method in solving business problems, we compare it against alternative models using our in-house transaction data. Our findings reveal that the proposed model is the most suitable solution compared to others for our transaction data problem.

Information retrieval (IR) is essential in biomedical knowledge acquisition and clinical decision support. While recent progress has shown that language model encoders perform better semantic retrieval, training such models requires abundant query-article annotations that are difficult to obtain in biomedicine. As a result, most biomedical IR systems only conduct lexical matching. In response, we introduce MedCPT, a first-of-its-kind Contrastively Pre-trained Transformer model for zero-shot semantic IR in biomedicine. To train MedCPT, we collected an unprecedented scale of 255 million user click logs from PubMed. With such data, we use contrastive learning to train a pair of closely-integrated retriever and re-ranker. Experimental results show that MedCPT sets new state-of-the-art performance on six biomedical IR tasks, outperforming various baselines including much larger models such as GPT-3-sized cpt-text-XL. In addition, MedCPT also generates better biomedical article and sentence representations for semantic evaluations. As such, MedCPT can be readily applied to various real-world biomedical IR tasks.

Wikipedia is the world's largest online encyclopedia, but maintaining article quality through collaboration is challenging. Wikipedia designed a quality scale, but with such a manual assessment process, many articles remain unassessed. We review existing methods for automatically measuring the quality of Wikipedia articles, identifying and comparing machine learning algorithms, article features, quality metrics, and used datasets, examining 149 distinct studies, and exploring commonalities and gaps in them. The literature is extensive, and the approaches follow past technological trends. However, machine learning is still not widely used by Wikipedia, and we hope that our analysis helps future researchers change that reality.