Food Computing is currently a fast-growing field of research. Natural language processing (NLP) is also increasingly essential in this field, especially for recognising food entities. However, there are still only a few well-defined tasks that serve as benchmarks for solutions in this area. We introduce a new dataset -- called \textit{TASTEset} -- to bridge this gap. In this dataset, Named Entity Recognition (NER) models are expected to find or infer various types of entities helpful in processing recipes, e.g.~food products, quantities and their units, names of cooking processes, physical quality of ingredients, their purpose, taste. The dataset consists of 700 recipes with more than 13,000 entities to extract. We provide a few state-of-the-art baselines of named entity recognition models, which show that our dataset poses a solid challenge to existing models. The best model achieved, on average, 0.95 $F_1$ score, depending on the entity type -- from 0.781 to 0.982. We share the dataset and the task to encourage progress on more in-depth and complex information extraction from recipes.
Blind Face Restoration (BFR) aims to construct a high-quality (HQ) face image from its corresponding low-quality (LQ) input. Recently, many BFR methods have been proposed and they have achieved remarkable success. However, these methods are trained or evaluated on privately synthesized datasets, which makes it infeasible for the subsequent approaches to fairly compare with them. To address this problem, we first synthesize two blind face restoration benchmark datasets called EDFace-Celeb-1M (BFR128) and EDFace-Celeb-150K (BFR512). State-of-the-art methods are benchmarked on them under five settings including blur, noise, low resolution, JPEG compression artifacts, and the combination of them (full degradation). To make the comparison more comprehensive, five widely-used quantitative metrics and two task-driven metrics including Average Face Landmark Distance (AFLD) and Average Face ID Cosine Similarity (AFICS) are applied. Furthermore, we develop an effective baseline model called Swin Transformer U-Net (STUNet). The STUNet with U-net architecture applies an attention mechanism and a shifted windowing scheme to capture long-range pixel interactions and focus more on significant features while still being trained efficiently. Experimental results show that the proposed baseline method performs favourably against the SOTA methods on various BFR tasks.
Image classifiers often rely overly on peripheral attributes that have a strong correlation with the target class (i.e., dataset bias) when making predictions. Recently, a myriad of studies focus on mitigating such dataset bias, the task of which is referred to as debiasing. However, these debiasing methods often have inconsistent experimental settings (e.g., datasets and neural network architectures). Additionally, most of the previous studies in debiasing do not specify how they select their model parameters which involve early stopping and hyper-parameter tuning. The goal of this paper is to standardize the inconsistent experimental settings and propose a consistent model parameter selection criterion for debiasing. Based on such unified experimental settings and model parameter selection criterion, we build a benchmark named DebiasBench which includes five datasets and seven debiasing methods. We carefully conduct extensive experiments in various aspects and show that different state-of-the-art methods work best in different datasets, respectively. Even, the vanilla method, the method with no debiasing module, also shows competitive results in datasets with low bias severity. We publicly release the implementation of existing debiasing methods in DebiasBench to encourage future researchers in debiasing to conduct fair comparisons and further push the state-of-the-art performances.
Humans are naturally endowed with the ability to write in a particular style. They can, for instance, re-phrase a formal letter in an informal way, convey a literal message with the use of figures of speech or edit a novel mimicking the style of some well-known authors. Automating this form of creativity constitutes the goal of style transfer. As a natural language generation task, style transfer aims at rewriting existing texts, and specifically, it creates paraphrases that exhibit some desired stylistic attributes. From a practical perspective, it envisions beneficial applications, like chat-bots that modulate their communicative style to appear empathetic, or systems that automatically simplify technical articles for a non-expert audience. Several style-aware paraphrasing methods have attempted to tackle style transfer. A handful of surveys give a methodological overview of the field, but they do not support researchers to focus on specific styles. With this paper, we aim at providing a comprehensive discussion of the styles that have received attention in the transfer task. We organize them in a hierarchy, highlighting the challenges for the definition of each of them, and pointing out gaps in the current research landscape. The hierarchy comprises two main groups. One encompasses styles that people modulate arbitrarily, along the lines of registers and genres. The other group corresponds to unintentionally expressed styles, due to an author's personal characteristics. Hence, our review shows how these groups relate to one another, and where specific styles, including some that have not yet been explored, belong in the hierarchy. Moreover, we summarize the methods employed for different stylistic families, hinting researchers towards those that would be the most fitting for future research.
While large-scale neural language models, such as GPT2 and BART, have achieved impressive results on various text generation tasks, they tend to get stuck in undesirable sentence-level loops with maximization-based decoding algorithms (\textit{e.g.}, greedy search). This phenomenon is counter-intuitive since there are few consecutive sentence-level repetitions in human corpora (e.g., 0.02\% in Wikitext-103). To investigate the underlying reasons for generating consecutive sentence-level repetitions, we study the relationship between the probabilities of the repetitive tokens and their previous repetitions in the context. Through our quantitative experiments, we find that 1) Language models have a preference to repeat the previous sentence; 2) The sentence-level repetitions have a \textit{self-reinforcement effect}: the more times a sentence is repeated in the context, the higher the probability of continuing to generate that sentence; 3) The sentences with higher initial probabilities usually have a stronger self-reinforcement effect. Motivated by our findings, we propose a simple and effective training method \textbf{DITTO} (Pseu\underline{D}o-Repet\underline{IT}ion Penaliza\underline{T}i\underline{O}n), where the model learns to penalize probabilities of sentence-level repetitions from pseudo repetitive data. Although our method is motivated by mitigating repetitions, experiments show that DITTO not only mitigates the repetition issue without sacrificing perplexity, but also achieves better generation quality. Extensive experiments on open-ended text generation (Wikitext-103) and text summarization (CNN/DailyMail) demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of our method.
The Linked Data Benchmark Council's Social Network Benchmark (LDBC SNB) is an effort intended to test various functionalities of systems used for graph-like data management. For this, LDBC SNB uses the recognizable scenario of operating a social network, characterized by its graph-shaped data. LDBC SNB consists of two workloads that focus on different functionalities: the Interactive workload (interactive transactional queries) and the Business Intelligence workload (analytical queries). This document contains the definition of the Interactive Workload and the first draft of the Business Intelligence Workload. This includes a detailed explanation of the data used in the LDBC SNB benchmark, a detailed description for all queries, and instructions on how to generate the data and run the benchmark with the provided software.
We address the task of automatically scoring the competency of candidates based on textual features, from the automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcriptions in the asynchronous video job interview (AVI). The key challenge is how to construct the dependency relation between questions and answers, and conduct the semantic level interaction for each question-answer (QA) pair. However, most of the recent studies in AVI focus on how to represent questions and answers better, but ignore the dependency information and interaction between them, which is critical for QA evaluation. In this work, we propose a Hierarchical Reasoning Graph Neural Network (HRGNN) for the automatic assessment of question-answer pairs. Specifically, we construct a sentence-level relational graph neural network to capture the dependency information of sentences in or between the question and the answer. Based on these graphs, we employ a semantic-level reasoning graph attention network to model the interaction states of the current QA session. Finally, we propose a gated recurrent unit encoder to represent the temporal question-answer pairs for the final prediction. Empirical results conducted on CHNAT (a real-world dataset) validate that our proposed model significantly outperforms text-matching based benchmark models. Ablation studies and experimental results with 10 random seeds also show the effectiveness and stability of our models.
Since real-world objects and their interactions are often multi-modal and multi-typed, heterogeneous networks have been widely used as a more powerful, realistic, and generic superclass of traditional homogeneous networks (graphs). Meanwhile, representation learning (\aka~embedding) has recently been intensively studied and shown effective for various network mining and analytical tasks. In this work, we aim to provide a unified framework to deeply summarize and evaluate existing research on heterogeneous network embedding (HNE), which includes but goes beyond a normal survey. Since there has already been a broad body of HNE algorithms, as the first contribution of this work, we provide a generic paradigm for the systematic categorization and analysis over the merits of various existing HNE algorithms. Moreover, existing HNE algorithms, though mostly claimed generic, are often evaluated on different datasets. Understandable due to the application favor of HNE, such indirect comparisons largely hinder the proper attribution of improved task performance towards effective data preprocessing and novel technical design, especially considering the various ways possible to construct a heterogeneous network from real-world application data. Therefore, as the second contribution, we create four benchmark datasets with various properties regarding scale, structure, attribute/label availability, and \etc.~from different sources, towards handy and fair evaluations of HNE algorithms. As the third contribution, we carefully refactor and amend the implementations and create friendly interfaces for 13 popular HNE algorithms, and provide all-around comparisons among them over multiple tasks and experimental settings.
Since hardware resources are limited, the objective of training deep learning models is typically to maximize accuracy subject to the time and memory constraints of training and inference. We study the impact of model size in this setting, focusing on Transformer models for NLP tasks that are limited by compute: self-supervised pretraining and high-resource machine translation. We first show that even though smaller Transformer models execute faster per iteration, wider and deeper models converge in significantly fewer steps. Moreover, this acceleration in convergence typically outpaces the additional computational overhead of using larger models. Therefore, the most compute-efficient training strategy is to counterintuitively train extremely large models but stop after a small number of iterations. This leads to an apparent trade-off between the training efficiency of large Transformer models and the inference efficiency of small Transformer models. However, we show that large models are more robust to compression techniques such as quantization and pruning than small models. Consequently, one can get the best of both worlds: heavily compressed, large models achieve higher accuracy than lightly compressed, small models.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.
Reasoning with knowledge expressed in natural language and Knowledge Bases (KBs) is a major challenge for Artificial Intelligence, with applications in machine reading, dialogue, and question answering. General neural architectures that jointly learn representations and transformations of text are very data-inefficient, and it is hard to analyse their reasoning process. These issues are addressed by end-to-end differentiable reasoning systems such as Neural Theorem Provers (NTPs), although they can only be used with small-scale symbolic KBs. In this paper we first propose Greedy NTPs (GNTPs), an extension to NTPs addressing their complexity and scalability limitations, thus making them applicable to real-world datasets. This result is achieved by dynamically constructing the computation graph of NTPs and including only the most promising proof paths during inference, thus obtaining orders of magnitude more efficient models. Then, we propose a novel approach for jointly reasoning over KBs and textual mentions, by embedding logic facts and natural language sentences in a shared embedding space. We show that GNTPs perform on par with NTPs at a fraction of their cost while achieving competitive link prediction results on large datasets, providing explanations for predictions, and inducing interpretable models. Source code, datasets, and supplementary material are available online at //github.com/uclnlp/gntp.