Causal knowledge extraction is the task of extracting relevant causes and effects from text by detecting the causal relation. Although this task is important for language understanding and knowledge discovery, recent works in this domain have largely focused on binary classification of a text segment as causal or non-causal. In this regard, we perform a thorough analysis of three sequence tagging models for causal knowledge extraction and compare it with a span based approach to causality extraction. Our experiments show that embeddings from pre-trained language models (e.g. BERT) provide a significant performance boost on this task compared to previous state-of-the-art models with complex architectures. We observe that span based models perform better than simple sequence tagging models based on BERT across all 4 data sets from diverse domains with different types of cause-effect phrases.
Exact computation of the partition function is known to be intractable, necessitating approximate inference techniques. Existing methods for approximate inference are slow to converge for many benchmarks. The control of accuracy-complexity trade-off is also non-trivial in many of these methods. We propose a novel incremental build-infer-approximate (IBIA) framework for approximate inference that addresses these issues. In this framework, the probabilistic graphical model is converted into a sequence of clique tree forests (SCTF) with bounded clique sizes. We show that the SCTF can be used to efficiently compute the partition function. We propose two new algorithms which are used to construct the SCTF and prove the correctness of both. The first is an algorithm for incremental construction of CTFs that is guaranteed to give a valid CTF with bounded clique sizes and the second is an approximation algorithm that takes a calibrated CTF as input and yields a valid and calibrated CTF with reduced clique sizes as the output. We have evaluated our method using several benchmark sets from recent UAI competitions and our results show good accuracies with competitive runtimes.
Video background subtraction is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision that aims to segment all moving objects. Robust principal component analysis has been identified as a promising unsupervised paradigm for background subtraction tasks in the last decade thanks to its competitive performance in a number of benchmark datasets. Tensor robust principal component analysis variations have improved background subtraction performance further. However, because moving object pixels in the sparse component are treated independently and do not have to adhere to spatial-temporal structured-sparsity constraints, performance is reduced for sequences with dynamic backgrounds, camouflaged, and camera jitter problems. In this work, we present a spatial-temporal regularized tensor sparse RPCA algorithm for precise background subtraction. Within the sparse component, we impose spatial-temporal regularizations in the form of normalized graph-Laplacian matrices. To do this, we build two graphs, one across the input tensor spatial locations and the other across its frontal slices in the time domain. While maximizing the objective function, we compel the tensor sparse component to serve as the spatiotemporal eigenvectors of the graph-Laplacian matrices. The disconnected moving object pixels in the sparse component are preserved by the proposed graph-based regularizations since they both comprise of spatiotemporal subspace-based structure. Additionally, we propose a unique objective function that employs batch and online-based optimization methods to jointly maximize the background-foreground and spatial-temporal regularization components. Experiments are performed on six publicly available background subtraction datasets that demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm compared to several existing methods. Our source code will be available very soon.
We describe a proof-of-concept for annotating real estate images using simple iterative rule-based semi-supervised learning. In this study, we have gained important insights into the content characteristics and uniqueness of individual image classes as well as essential requirements for a practical implementation.
Human-in-the-loop aims to train an accurate prediction model with minimum cost by integrating human knowledge and experience. Humans can provide training data for machine learning applications and directly accomplish some tasks that are hard for computers in the pipeline with the help of machine-based approaches. In this paper, we survey existing works on human-in-the-loop from a data perspective and classify them into three categories with a progressive relationship: (1) the work of improving model performance from data processing, (2) the work of improving model performance through interventional model training, and (3) the design of the system independent human-in-the-loop. Using the above categorization, we summarize major approaches in the field, along with their technical strengths/ weaknesses, we have simple classification and discussion in natural language processing, computer vision, and others. Besides, we provide some open challenges and opportunities. This survey intends to provide a high-level summarization for human-in-the-loop and motivates interested readers to consider approaches for designing effective human-in-the-loop solutions.
Traffic forecasting is an important factor for the success of intelligent transportation systems. Deep learning models including convolution neural networks and recurrent neural networks have been applied in traffic forecasting problems to model the spatial and temporal dependencies. In recent years, to model the graph structures in the transportation systems as well as the contextual information, graph neural networks (GNNs) are introduced as new tools and have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in a series of traffic forecasting problems. In this survey, we review the rapidly growing body of recent research using different GNNs, e.g., graph convolutional and graph attention networks, in various traffic forecasting problems, e.g., road traffic flow and speed forecasting, passenger flow forecasting in urban rail transit systems, demand forecasting in ride-hailing platforms, etc. We also present a collection of open data and source resources for each problem, as well as future research directions. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first comprehensive survey that explores the application of graph neural networks for traffic forecasting problems. We have also created a public Github repository to update the latest papers, open data and source resources.
Translational distance-based knowledge graph embedding has shown progressive improvements on the link prediction task, from TransE to the latest state-of-the-art RotatE. However, N-1, 1-N and N-N predictions still remain challenging. In this work, we propose a novel translational distance-based approach for knowledge graph link prediction. The proposed method includes two-folds, first we extend the RotatE from 2D complex domain to high dimension space with orthogonal transforms to model relations for better modeling capacity. Second, the graph context is explicitly modeled via two directed context representations. These context representations are used as part of the distance scoring function to measure the plausibility of the triples during training and inference. The proposed approach effectively improves prediction accuracy on the difficult N-1, 1-N and N-N cases for knowledge graph link prediction task. The experimental results show that it achieves better performance on two benchmark data sets compared to the baseline RotatE, especially on data set (FB15k-237) with many high in-degree connection nodes.
External knowledge is often useful for natural language understanding tasks. We introduce a contextual text representation model called Conceptual-Contextual (CC) embeddings, which incorporates structured knowledge into text representations. Unlike entity embedding methods, our approach encodes a knowledge graph into a context model. CC embeddings can be easily reused for a wide range of tasks just like pre-trained language models. Our model effectively encodes the huge UMLS database by leveraging semantic generalizability. Experiments on electronic health records (EHRs) and medical text processing benchmarks showed our model gives a major boost to the performance of supervised medical NLP tasks.
Knowledge graph completion aims to predict missing relations between entities in a knowledge graph. While many different methods have been proposed, there is a lack of a unifying framework that would lead to state-of-the-art results. Here we develop PathCon, a knowledge graph completion method that harnesses four novel insights to outperform existing methods. PathCon predicts relations between a pair of entities by: (1) Considering the Relational Context of each entity by capturing the relation types adjacent to the entity and modeled through a novel edge-based message passing scheme; (2) Considering the Relational Paths capturing all paths between the two entities; And, (3) adaptively integrating the Relational Context and Relational Path through a learnable attention mechanism. Importantly, (4) in contrast to conventional node-based representations, PathCon represents context and path only using the relation types, which makes it applicable in an inductive setting. Experimental results on knowledge graph benchmarks as well as our newly proposed dataset show that PathCon outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge graph completion methods by a large margin. Finally, PathCon is able to provide interpretable explanations by identifying relations that provide the context and paths that are important for a given predicted relation.
Aspect level sentiment classification aims to identify the sentiment expressed towards an aspect given a context sentence. Previous neural network based methods largely ignore the syntax structure in one sentence. In this paper, we propose a novel target-dependent graph attention network (TD-GAT) for aspect level sentiment classification, which explicitly utilizes the dependency relationship among words. Using the dependency graph, it propagates sentiment features directly from the syntactic context of an aspect target. In our experiments, we show our method outperforms multiple baselines with GloVe embeddings. We also demonstrate that using BERT representations further substantially boosts the performance.
External knowledge is often useful for natural language understanding tasks. We introduce a contextual text representation model called Conceptual-Contextual (CC) embeddings, which incorporates structured knowledge into text representations. Unlike entity embedding methods, our approach encodes a knowledge graph into a context model. CC embeddings can be easily reused for a wide range of tasks just like pre-trained language models. Our model effectively encodes the huge UMLS database by leveraging semantic generalizability. Experiments on electronic health records (EHRs) and medical text processing benchmarks showed our model gives a major boost to the performance of supervised medical NLP tasks.