The advancements in machine learning techniques have encouraged researchers to apply these techniques to a myriad of software engineering tasks that use source code analysis, such as testing and vulnerability detection. Such a large number of studies hinders the community from understanding the current research landscape. This paper aims to summarize the current knowledge in applied machine learning for source code analysis. We review studies belonging to twelve categories of software engineering tasks and corresponding machine learning techniques, tools, and datasets that have been applied to solve them. To do so, we conducted an extensive literature search and identified 479 primary studies published between 2011 and 2021. We summarize our observations and findings with the help of the identified studies. Our findings suggest that the use of machine learning techniques for source code analysis tasks is consistently increasing. We synthesize commonly used steps and the overall workflow for each task and summarize machine learning techniques employed. We identify a comprehensive list of available datasets and tools useable in this context. Finally, the paper discusses perceived challenges in this area, including the availability of standard datasets, reproducibility and replicability, and hardware resources.

Model explainability has become an important problem in machine learning (ML) due to the increased effect that algorithmic predictions have on humans. Explanations can help users understand not only why ML models make certain predictions, but also how these predictions can be changed. In this thesis, we examine the explainability of ML models from three vantage points: algorithms, users, and pedagogy, and contribute several novel solutions to the explainability problem.

Irony is a ubiquitous figurative language in daily communication. Previously, many researchers have approached irony from linguistic, cognitive science, and computational aspects. Recently, some progress have been witnessed in automatic irony processing due to the rapid development in deep neural models in natural language processing (NLP). In this paper, we will provide a comprehensive overview of computational irony, insights from linguistic theory and cognitive science, as well as its interactions with downstream NLP tasks and newly proposed multi-X irony processing perspectives.

Machine learning models are nowadays ubiquitous in space missions, performing a wide variety of tasks ranging from the prediction of multivariate time series through the detection of specific patterns in the input data. Adopted models are usually deep neural networks or other complex machine learning algorithms providing predictions that are opaque, i.e., human users are not allowed to understand the rationale behind the provided predictions. Several techniques exist in the literature to combine the impressive predictive performance of opaque machine learning models with human-intelligible prediction explanations, as for instance the application of symbolic knowledge extraction procedures. In this paper are reported the results of different knowledge extractors applied to an ensemble predictor capable of reproducing cosmic-ray data gathered on board the LISA Pathfinder space mission. A discussion about the readability/fidelity trade-off of the extracted knowledge is also presented.

In this paper, we present a manually annotated corpus of 10,000 tweets containing public reports of five COVID-19 events, including positive and negative tests, deaths, denied access to testing, claimed cures and preventions. We designed slot-filling questions for each event type and annotated a total of 31 fine-grained slots, such as the location of events, recent travel, and close contacts. We show that our corpus can support fine-tuning BERT-based classifiers to automatically extract publicly reported events and help track the spread of a new disease. We also demonstrate that, by aggregating events extracted from millions of tweets, we achieve surprisingly high precision when answering complex queries, such as "Which organizations have employees that tested positive in Philadelphia?" We will release our corpus (with user-information removed), automatic extraction models, and the corresponding knowledge base to the research community.

In recent years, the Neurosymbolic framework has attracted a lot of attention in various applications, from recommender systems and information retrieval to healthcare and finance. This success is due to its stellar performance combined with attractive properties, such as learning and reasoning. The new emerging Neurosymbolic field is currently experiencing a renaissance, as novel frameworks and algorithms motivated by various practical applications are being introduced, building on top of the classical neural and reasoning problem setting. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of significant recent developments in real-world applications of Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence. Specifically, we introduce a taxonomy of common Neurosymbolic applications and summarize the state-of-the-art for each of those domains. Furthermore, we identify important current trends and provide new perspectives pertaining to the future of this burgeoning field.

Organizational knowledge bases are moving from passive archives to active entities in the flow of people's work. We are seeing machine learning used to enable systems that both collect and surface information as people are working, making it possible to bring out connections between people and content that were previously much less visible in order to automatically identify and highlight experts on a given topic. When these knowledge bases begin to actively bring attention to people and the content they work on, especially as that work is still ongoing, we run into important challenges at the intersection of work and the social. While such systems have the potential to make certain parts of people's work more productive or enjoyable, they may also introduce new workloads, for instance by putting people in the role of experts for others to reach out to. And these knowledge bases can also have profound social consequences by changing what parts of work are visible and, therefore, acknowledged. We pose a number of open questions that warrant attention and engagement across industry and academia. Addressing these questions is an essential step in ensuring that the future of work becomes a good future for those doing the work. With this position paper, we wish to enter into the cross-disciplinary discussion we believe is required to tackle the challenge of developing recommender systems that respect social values.

Can we drive effectiveness and efficiency of AI at the same time? If we want our systems to be more intelligent, do they have to become more expensive? Our goal should be to significantly increase the capabilities and improve the results of AI technologies while minimizing power and system cost, not by increasing it. Achieving this could be possible if we follow the architectural design observed time and again in natural control systems, that is, a hierarchy of specialized levels. This article challenges the single neural network's current large language model (LLM) approach, which attempts to encompass all world knowledge.

Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering(KBQA) aims to find the answer entity in a knowledge base which is several hops from the topic entity mentioned in the question. Existing Retrieval-based approaches first generate instructions from the question and then use them to guide the multi-hop reasoning on the knowledge graph. As the instructions are fixed during the whole reasoning procedure and the knowledge graph is not considered in instruction generation, the model cannot revise its mistake once it predicts an intermediate entity incorrectly. To handle this, we propose KBIGER(Knowledge Base Iterative Instruction GEnerating and Reasoning), a novel and efficient approach to generate the instructions dynamically with the help of reasoning graph. Instead of generating all the instructions before reasoning, we take the (k 1)-th reasoning graph into consideration to build the k-th instruction. In this way, the model could check the prediction from the graph and generate new instructions to revise the incorrect prediction of intermediate entities. We do experiments on two multi-hop KBQA benchmarks and outperform the existing approaches, becoming the new-state-of-the-art. Further experiments show our method does detect the incorrect prediction of intermediate entities and has the ability to revise such errors.

Neural networks (NNs) and decision trees (DTs) are both popular models of machine learning, yet coming with mutually exclusive advantages and limitations. To bring the best of the two worlds, a variety of approaches are proposed to integrate NNs and DTs explicitly or implicitly. In this survey, these approaches are organized in a school which we term as neural trees (NTs). This survey aims to present a comprehensive review of NTs and attempts to identify how they enhance the model interpretability. We first propose a thorough taxonomy of NTs that expresses the gradual integration and co-evolution of NNs and DTs. Afterward, we analyze NTs in terms of their interpretability and performance, and suggest possible solutions to the remaining challenges. Finally, this survey concludes with a discussion about other considerations like conditional computation and promising directions towards this field. A list of papers reviewed in this survey, along with their corresponding codes, is available at: https://github.com/zju-vipa/awesome-neural-trees