Large pre-trained language models help to achieve state of the art on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, nevertheless, they still suffer from forgetting when incrementally learning a sequence of tasks. To alleviate this problem, recent works enhance existing models by sparse experience replay and local adaption, which yield satisfactory performance. However, in this paper we find that pre-trained language models like BERT have a potential ability to learn sequentially, even without any sparse memory replay. To verify the ability of BERT to maintain old knowledge, we adopt and re-finetune single-layer probe networks with the parameters of BERT fixed. We investigate the models on two types of NLP tasks, text classification and extractive question answering. Our experiments reveal that BERT can actually generate high quality representations for previously learned tasks in a long term, under extremely sparse replay or even no replay. Continual Learning aims to obtain knowledge from a stream of data across time (Ring, 1994; Thrun, 1998; Chen & Liu, 2018). As a booming area in continual learning, task-incremental learning requires a model to learn a sequence of tasks, without forgetting previously learned knowledge. It is a practical scene to train models on a stream of tasks sequentially, avoiding to re-train on all existing data exhaustively once a new task arrives. In natural language processing, although many large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) have ceaselessly achieved on new records on various benchmarks, they cannot be directly deployed in a task-incremental setting. These models tend to perform poorly on previously seen tasks when learning new ones.

Mitigating algorithmic bias is a critical task in the development and deployment of machine learning models. While several toolkits exist to aid machine learning practitioners in addressing fairness issues, little is known about the strategies practitioners employ to evaluate model fairness and what factors influence their assessment, particularly in the context of text classification. Two common approaches of evaluating the fairness of a model are group fairness and individual fairness. We run a study with Machine Learning practitioners (n=24) to understand the strategies used to evaluate models. Metrics presented to practitioners (group vs. individual fairness) impact which models they consider fair. Participants focused on risks associated with underpredicting/overpredicting and model sensitivity relative to identity token manipulations. We discover fairness assessment strategies involving personal experiences or how users form groups of identity tokens to test model fairness. We provide recommendations for interactive tools for evaluating fairness in text classification.

Marketing data are complex and have dimensions that make analysis difficult. Large unstructured datasets are often too big to extract qualitative insights. Marketing datasets also often involve relational and connected and involve networks. This specialization tackles advanced advertising and marketing analytics through three advanced methods aimed at solving these problems: text classification, text topic modeling, and semantic network analysis. Each key area involves a deep dive into the leading computer science methods aimed at solving these methods using Python.

Recent years have seen impressive progress in AI-assisted writing, yet the developments in AI-assisted reading are lacking. We propose inline commentary as a natural vehicle for AI-based reading assistance, and present CARE: the first open integrated platform for the study of inline commentary and reading. CARE facilitates data collection for inline commentaries in a commonplace collaborative reading environment, and provides a framework for enhancing reading with NLP-based assistance, such as text classification, generation or question answering. The extensible behavioral logging allows unique insights into the reading and commenting behavior, and flexible configuration makes the platform easy to deploy in new scenarios. To evaluate CARE in action, we apply the platform in a user study dedicated to scholarly peer review. CARE facilitates the data collection and study of inline commentary in NLP, extrinsic evaluation of NLP assistance, and application prototyping. We invite the community to explore and build upon the open source implementation of CARE.

Text classification is an interesting application of natural language processing. It is a supervised learning methodology that predicts if a piece of text belongs to one category or the other. As a machine learning engineer, you start with a labeled data set that has vast amounts of text that have already been categorized. These algorithms can perform sentiment analysis, create spam filters, and other applications. This tutorial will teach you how to train your binary text classifiers using Keras.

In-context learning (ICL) suffers from oversensitivity to the prompt, making it unreliable in real-world scenarios. We study the sensitivity of ICL with respect to multiple perturbation types. First, we find that label bias obscures the true sensitivity, and therefore prior work may have significantly underestimated ICL sensitivity. Second, we observe a strong negative correlation between ICL sensitivity and accuracy: predictions sensitive to perturbations are less likely to be correct. Motivated by these findings, we propose \textsc{SenSel}, a few-shot selective prediction method that abstains from sensitive predictions. Experiments on ten classification datasets show that \textsc{SenSel} consistently outperforms two commonly used confidence-based and entropy-based baselines on abstention decisions.

Keyphrase extraction aims at automatically extracting a list of "important" phrases representing the key concepts in a document. Prior approaches for unsupervised keyphrase extraction resorted to heuristic notions of phrase importance via embedding clustering or graph centrality, requiring extensive domain expertise. Our work presents a simple alternative approach which defines keyphrases as document phrases that are salient for predicting the topic of the document. To this end, we propose INSPECT -- an approach that uses self-explaining models for identifying influential keyphrases in a document by measuring the predictive impact of input phrases on the downstream task of the document topic classification. We show that this novel method not only alleviates the need for ad-hoc heuristics but also achieves state-of-the-art results in unsupervised keyphrase extraction in four datasets across two domains: scientific publications and news articles.

A large number of unidentified sources found by astronomical surveys and other observations necessitate the use of an automated classification technique based on machine learning methods. The aim of this paper is to find a suitable automated classifier to identify the point X-ray sources in the Chandra Source Catalogue (CSC) 2.0 in the categories of active galactic nuclei (AGN), X-ray emitting stars, young stellar objects (YSOs), high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs), low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs), ultra luminous X-ray sources (ULXs), cataclysmic variables (CVs), and pulsars. The catalogue consists of 3, 17, 000 sources, out of which we select 2,77,069 point sources based on the quality flags available in CSC 2.0. In order to identify unknown sources of CSC 2.0, we use multi-wavelength features, such as magnitudes in optical/UV bands from Gaia-EDR3, SDSS and GALEX, and magnitudes in IR bands from 2MASS, WISE and MIPS-Spitzer, in addition to X-ray features (flux and variability) from CSC 2.0. We find the Light Gradient Boosted Machine, an advanced decision tree-based machine learning classification algorithm, suitable for our purpose and achieve 93% precision, 93% recall score and 0.91 Mathew's Correlation coefficient score.

By focusing on one such two "how to share" categories into task, the model ignores knowledge from the training five categories, including feature learning approach, signals of related tasks (Ruder, 2017). There low-rank approach, task clustering approach, task are a great number of tasks in NLP, from syntax relation learning approach, and decomposition approach; parsing to information extraction, from machine Crawshaw (2020) presented more recent translation to question answering: each requires models in both single-domain and multi-modal architectures, a model dedicated to learning from data. Biologically, as well as an overview of optimization humans learn natural languages, from basic methods in MTL. Nevertheless, it is still not clearly grammar to complex semantics in a single brain understood how to design and train a single model (Hashimoto et al., 2017). In the field of machine to handle a variety of NLP tasks according to task learning, multi-task learning (MTL) aims to leverage relatedness. Especially when faced with a set of useful information shared across multiple related tasks that are seldom simultaneously trained previously, tasks to improve the generalization performance it is of crucial importance that researchers on all tasks (Caruana, 1997). In deep neural find proper auxiliary tasks and assess the feasibility networks, it is generally achieved by sharing part of of such multi-task learning attempt.

In this paper, we investigate the effect of addressing difficult samples from a given text dataset on the downstream text classification task. We define difficult samples as being non-obvious cases for text classification by analysing them in the semantic embedding space; specifically - (i) semantically similar samples that belong to different classes and (ii) semantically dissimilar samples that belong to the same class. We propose a penalty function to measure the overall difficulty score of every sample in the dataset. We conduct exhaustive experiments on 13 standard datasets to show a consistent improvement of up to 9% and discuss qualitative results to show effectiveness of our approach in identifying difficult samples for a text classification model.