This paper presents WanJuan-CC, a safe and high-quality open-sourced English webtext dataset derived from Common Crawl data. The study addresses the challenges of constructing large-scale pre-training datasets for language models, which require vast amounts of high-quality data. A comprehensive process was designed to handle Common Crawl data, including extraction, heuristic rule filtering, fuzzy deduplication, content safety filtering, and data quality filtering. From approximately 68 billion original English documents, we obtained 2.22T Tokens of safe data and selected 1.0T Tokens of high-quality data as part of WanJuan-CC. We have open-sourced 100B Tokens from this dataset. The paper also provides statistical information related to data quality, enabling users to select appropriate data according to their needs. To evaluate the quality and utility of the dataset, we trained 1B-parameter and 3B-parameter models using WanJuan-CC and another dataset, RefinedWeb. Results show that WanJuan-CC performs better on validation datasets and downstream tasks.

Transformer language models are neural networks used for a wide variety of tasks concerning natural language, including some that also require logical reasoning. However, a transformer model may easily learn spurious patterns in the data, short-circuiting actual reasoning. In this paper we investigate to what extent transformers can be trained to a) approximate reasoning in propositional logic while b) avoiding known reasoning shortcuts via spurious correlations in the training data. To do so, we use a dataset with known spurious correlation between truth and e.g. the number of rules in the problem. We augment the data with proofs, and train two models: a generative transformer, WP-BART, trained on problems and their whole proofs, and a neuro-symbolic model, SIP-BART, trained on individual proof steps and combining the generative transformer model BART with a symbolic proof checker. We find that SIP-BART succeeds in avoiding reasoning shortcuts, while WP-BART does not. For SIP-BART, we then identify a few remaining reasoning errors, not previously described in the literature, arising from using a pre-trained language model. These are qualitatively analysed to create a taxonomy of four different types of additional pitfalls.

Explaining outliers occurrence and mechanism of their occurrence can be extremely important in a variety of domains. Malfunctions, frauds, threats, in addition to being correctly identified, oftentimes need a valid explanation in order to effectively perform actionable counteracts. The ever more widespread use of sophisticated Machine Learning approach to identify anomalies make such explanations more challenging. We present the Decision Tree Outlier Regressor (DTOR), a technique for producing rule-based explanations for individual data points by estimating anomaly scores generated by an anomaly detection model. This is accomplished by first applying a Decision Tree Regressor, which computes the estimation score, and then extracting the relative path associated with the data point score. Our results demonstrate the robustness of DTOR even in datasets with a large number of features. Additionally, in contrast to other rule-based approaches, the generated rules are consistently satisfied by the points to be explained. Furthermore, our evaluation metrics indicate comparable performance to Anchors in outlier explanation tasks, with reduced execution time.

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia in the United States. Sleep is one of the lifestyle-related factors that has been shown critical for optimal cognitive function in old age. However, there is a lack of research studying the association between sleep and AD incidence. A major bottleneck for conducting such research is that the traditional way to acquire sleep information is time-consuming, inefficient, non-scalable, and limited to patients' subjective experience. A gold standard dataset is created from manual annotation of 570 randomly sampled clinical note documents from the adSLEEP, a corpus of 192,000 de-identified clinical notes of 7,266 AD patients retrieved from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). We developed a rule-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithm, machine learning models, and Large Language Model(LLM)-based NLP algorithms to automate the extraction of sleep-related concepts, including snoring, napping, sleep problem, bad sleep quality, daytime sleepiness, night wakings, and sleep duration, from the gold standard dataset. Rule-based NLP algorithm achieved the best performance of F1 across all sleep-related concepts. In terms of Positive Predictive Value (PPV), rule-based NLP algorithm achieved 1.00 for daytime sleepiness and sleep duration, machine learning models: 0.95 and for napping, 0.86 for bad sleep quality and 0.90 for snoring; and LLAMA2 with finetuning achieved PPV of 0.93 for Night Wakings, 0.89 for sleep problem, and 1.00 for sleep duration. The results show that the rule-based NLP algorithm consistently achieved the best performance for all sleep concepts. This study focused on the clinical notes of patients with AD, but could be extended to general sleep information extraction for other diseases.

Electronic health records include information on patients' status and medical history, which could cover the history of diseases and disorders that could be hereditary. One important use of family history information is in precision health, where the goal is to keep the population healthy with preventative measures. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques can assist with identifying information that could assist health professionals in identifying health risks before a condition is developed in their later years, saving lives and reducing healthcare costs. We survey the literature on the techniques from the NLP field that have been developed to utilise digital health records to identify risks of familial diseases. We highlight that rule-based methods are heavily investigated and are still actively used for family history extraction. Still, more recent efforts have been put into building neural models based on large-scale pre-trained language models. In addition to the areas where NLP has successfully been utilised, we also identify the areas where more research is needed to unlock the value of patients' records regarding data collection, task formulation and downstream applications.

At a Fresno County elementary school, a masked man with a fake gun carried out an active-shooter drill without most of the teachers and parents being informed ahead of time. At San Marino High School, police officers planned to fire blanks to mimic the sound of gunfire, but the drill was ultimately canceled over concerns of traumatizing students. More recently, a principal at a San Gabriel elementary school was placed on a leave of absence after allegedly using her fingers to mime holding a gun and pretending to shoot kids, telling them, "Boom. The rise in active-shooter drills at American schools has coincided with the growing phenomenon of mass shootings in the U.S., as well as media coverage focused on school massacres including Columbine, Sandy Hook and Uvalde. These drills have taken place at 95% of U.S. public schools as of the 2015-16 school year, according to the Education Department's National Center for Education statistics.

Knowledge graph embeddings (KGEs) were originally developed to infer true but missing facts in incomplete knowledge repositories. In this paper, we link knowledge graph completion and counterfactual reasoning via our new task CFKGR. We model the original world state as a knowledge graph, hypothetical scenarios as edges added to the graph, and plausible changes to the graph as inferences from logical rules. We create corresponding benchmark datasets, which contain diverse hypothetical scenarios with plausible changes to the original knowledge graph and facts that should be retained. We develop COULDD, a general method for adapting existing knowledge graph embeddings given a hypothetical premise, and evaluate it on our benchmark. Our results indicate that KGEs learn patterns in the graph without explicit training. We further observe that KGEs adapted with COULDD solidly detect plausible counterfactual changes to the graph that follow these patterns. An evaluation on human-annotated data reveals that KGEs adapted with COULDD are mostly unable to recognize changes to the graph that do not follow learned inference rules. In contrast, ChatGPT mostly outperforms KGEs in detecting plausible changes to the graph but has poor knowledge retention. In summary, CFKGR connects two previously distinct areas, namely KG completion and counterfactual reasoning.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has increasingly become a preferred method over traditional rule-based systems in diverse human-in-the-loop (HITL) applications due to its adaptability to the dynamic nature of human interactions. However, integrating RL in such settings raises significant privacy concerns, as it might inadvertently expose sensitive user information. Addressing this, our paper focuses on developing PAPER-HILT, an innovative, adaptive RL strategy through exploiting an early-exit approach designed explicitly for privacy preservation in HITL environments. This approach dynamically adjusts the tradeoff between privacy protection and system utility, tailoring its operation to individual behavioral patterns and preferences. We mainly highlight the challenge of dealing with the variable and evolving nature of human behavior, which renders static privacy models ineffective. PAPER-HILT's effectiveness is evaluated through its application in two distinct contexts: Smart Home environments and Virtual Reality (VR) Smart Classrooms. The empirical results demonstrate PAPER-HILT's capability to provide a personalized equilibrium between user privacy and application utility, adapting effectively to individual user needs and preferences. On average for both experiments, utility (performance) drops by 24%, and privacy (state prediction) improves by 31%.

With good explanatory power and controllability, rule-based methods play an important role in many tasks such as knowledge reasoning and decision support. However, existing studies primarily focused on learning chain-like rules, which limit their semantic expressions and accurate prediction abilities. As a result, chain-like rules usually fire on the incorrect grounding values, producing inaccurate or even erroneous reasoning results. In this paper, we propose the concept of tree-like rules on knowledge graphs to expand the application scope and improve the reasoning ability of rule-based methods. Meanwhile, we propose an effective framework for refining chain-like rules into tree-like rules. Experimental comparisons on four public datasets show that the proposed framework can easily adapt to other chain-like rule induction methods and the refined tree-like rules consistently achieve better performances than chain-like rules on link prediction. The data and code of this paper can be available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/tree-rule-E3CD/.

Interpretability is the next frontier in machine learning research. In the search for white box models - as opposed to black box models, like random forests or neural networks - rule induction algorithms are a logical and promising option, since the rules can easily be understood by humans. Fuzzy and rough set theory have been successfully applied to this archetype, almost always separately. As both approaches to rule induction involve granular computing based on the concept of equivalence classes, it is natural to combine them. The QuickRules\cite{JensenCornelis2009} algorithm was a first attempt at using fuzzy rough set theory for rule induction. It is based on QuickReduct, a greedy algorithm for building decision reducts. QuickRules already showed an improvement over other rule induction methods. However, to evaluate the full potential of a fuzzy rough rule induction algorithm, one needs to start from the foundations. In this paper, we introduce a novel rule induction algorithm called Fuzzy Rough Rule Induction (FRRI). We provide background and explain the workings of our algorithm. Furthermore, we perform a computational experiment to evaluate the performance of our algorithm and compare it to other state-of-the-art rule induction approaches. We find that our algorithm is more accurate while creating small rulesets consisting of relatively short rules. We end the paper by outlining some directions for future work.