Humour is a substantial element of human affect and cognition. Its automatic understanding can facilitate a more naturalistic human-device interaction and the humanisation of artificial intelligence. Current methods of humour detection are solely based on staged data making them inadequate for 'real-world' applications. We address this deficiency by introducing the novel Passau-Spontaneous Football Coach Humour (Passau-SFCH) dataset, comprising of about 11 hours of recordings. The Passau-SFCH dataset is annotated for the presence of humour and its dimensions (sentiment and direction) as proposed in Martin's Humor Style Questionnaire. We conduct a series of experiments, employing pretrained Transformers, convolutional neural networks, and expert-designed features. The performance of each modality (text, audio, video) for spontaneous humour recognition is analysed and their complementarity is investigated. Our findings suggest that for the automatic analysis of humour and its sentiment, facial expressions are most promising, while humour direction can be best modelled via text-based features. The results reveal considerable differences among various subjects, highlighting the individuality of humour usage and style. Further, we observe that a decision-level fusion yields the best recognition result. Finally, we make our code publicly available at //www.github.com/EIHW/passau-sfch. The Passau-SFCH dataset is available upon request.
Knowledge is considered an essential resource for organizations. For organizations to benefit from their possessed knowledge, knowledge needs to be managed effectively. Despite knowledge sharing and management being viewed as important by practitioners, organizations fail to benefit from their knowledge, leading to issues in cooperation and the loss of valuable knowledge with departing employees. This study aims to identify hindering factors that prevent individuals from effectively sharing and managing knowledge and understand how to eliminate these factors. Empirical data were collected through semi-structured group interviews from 50 individuals working in an international large IT organization. This study confirms the existence of a gap between the perceived importance of knowledge management and how little this importance is reflected in practice. Several hindering factors were identified, grouped into personal social topics, organizational social topics, technical topics, environmental topics, and interrelated social and technical topics. The presented recommendations for mitigating these hindering factors are focused on improving employees' actions, such as offering training and guidelines to follow. The findings of this study have implications for organizations in knowledge-intensive fields, as they can use this knowledge to create knowledge sharing and management strategies to improve their overall performance.
Transformers have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing, but comprehending their internal mechanisms remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel geometric perspective that elucidates the inner mechanisms of transformer operations. Our primary contribution is illustrating how layer normalization confines the latent features to a hyper-sphere, subsequently enabling attention to mold the semantic representation of words on this surface. This geometric viewpoint seamlessly connects established properties such as iterative refinement and contextual embeddings. We validate our insights by probing a pre-trained 124M parameter GPT-2 model. Our findings reveal clear query-key attention patterns in early layers and build upon prior observations regarding the subject-specific nature of attention heads at deeper layers. Harnessing these geometric insights, we present an intuitive understanding of transformers, depicting them as processes that model the trajectory of word particles along the hyper-sphere.
Functional Distributional Semantics (FDS) models the meaning of words by truth-conditional functions. This provides a natural representation for hypernymy, but no guarantee that it is learnt when FDS models are trained on a corpus. We demonstrate that FDS models learn hypernymy when a corpus strictly follows the Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis. We further introduce a training objective that allows FDS to handle simple universal quantifications, thus enabling hypernymy learning under the reverse of DIH. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data sets confirm our hypotheses and the effectiveness of our proposed objective.
Uncertainty quantification is crucial to decision-making. A prominent example is probabilistic forecasting in numerical weather prediction. The dominant approach to representing uncertainty in weather forecasting is to generate an ensemble of forecasts. This is done by running many physics-based simulations under different conditions, which is a computationally costly process. We propose to amortize the computational cost by emulating these forecasts with deep generative diffusion models learned from historical data. The learned models are highly scalable with respect to high-performance computing accelerators and can sample hundreds to tens of thousands of realistic weather forecasts at low cost. When designed to emulate operational ensemble forecasts, the generated ones are similar to physics-based ensembles in important statistical properties and predictive skill. When designed to correct biases present in the operational forecasting system, the generated ensembles show improved probabilistic forecast metrics. They are more reliable and forecast probabilities of extreme weather events more accurately. While this work demonstrates the utility of the methodology by focusing on weather forecasting, the generative artificial intelligence methodology can be extended for uncertainty quantification in climate modeling, where we believe the generation of very large ensembles of climate projections will play an increasingly important role in climate risk assessment.
Recommender systems are used to provide relevant suggestions on various matters. Although these systems are a classical research topic, knowledge is still limited regarding the public opinion about these systems. Public opinion is also important because the systems are known to cause various problems. To this end, this paper presents a qualitative analysis of the perceptions of ordinary citizens, civil society groups, businesses, and others on recommender systems in Europe. The dataset examined is based on the answers submitted to a consultation about the Digital Services Act (DSA) recently enacted in the European Union (EU). Therefore, not only does the paper contribute to the pressing question about regulating new technologies and online platforms, but it also reveals insights about the policy-making of the DSA. According to the qualitative results, Europeans have generally negative opinions about recommender systems and the quality of their recommendations. The systems are widely seen to violate privacy and other fundamental rights. According to many Europeans, these also cause various societal problems, including even threats to democracy. Furthermore, existing regulations in the EU are commonly seen to have failed due to a lack of proper enforcement. Numerous suggestions were made by the respondents to the consultation for improving the situation, but only a few of these ended up to the DSA.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its applications have sparked extraordinary interest in recent years. This achievement can be ascribed in part to advances in AI subfields including Machine Learning (ML), Computer Vision (CV), and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Deep learning, a sub-field of machine learning that employs artificial neural network concepts, has enabled the most rapid growth in these domains. The integration of vision and language has sparked a lot of attention as a result of this. The tasks have been created in such a way that they properly exemplify the concepts of deep learning. In this review paper, we provide a thorough and an extensive review of the state of the arts approaches, key models design principles and discuss existing datasets, methods, their problem formulation and evaluation measures for VQA and Visual reasoning tasks to understand vision and language representation learning. We also present some potential future paths in this field of research, with the hope that our study may generate new ideas and novel approaches to handle existing difficulties and develop new applications.
Recently, Mutual Information (MI) has attracted attention in bounding the generalization error of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, it is intractable to accurately estimate the MI in DNNs, thus most previous works have to relax the MI bound, which in turn weakens the information theoretic explanation for generalization. To address the limitation, this paper introduces a probabilistic representation of DNNs for accurately estimating the MI. Leveraging the proposed MI estimator, we validate the information theoretic explanation for generalization, and derive a tighter generalization bound than the state-of-the-art relaxations.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been studied from the lens of expressive power and generalization. However, their optimization properties are less well understood. We take the first step towards analyzing GNN training by studying the gradient dynamics of GNNs. First, we analyze linearized GNNs and prove that despite the non-convexity of training, convergence to a global minimum at a linear rate is guaranteed under mild assumptions that we validate on real-world graphs. Second, we study what may affect the GNNs' training speed. Our results show that the training of GNNs is implicitly accelerated by skip connections, more depth, and/or a good label distribution. Empirical results confirm that our theoretical results for linearized GNNs align with the training behavior of nonlinear GNNs. Our results provide the first theoretical support for the success of GNNs with skip connections in terms of optimization, and suggest that deep GNNs with skip connections would be promising in practice.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.
Many natural language processing tasks solely rely on sparse dependencies between a few tokens in a sentence. Soft attention mechanisms show promising performance in modeling local/global dependencies by soft probabilities between every two tokens, but they are not effective and efficient when applied to long sentences. By contrast, hard attention mechanisms directly select a subset of tokens but are difficult and inefficient to train due to their combinatorial nature. In this paper, we integrate both soft and hard attention into one context fusion model, "reinforced self-attention (ReSA)", for the mutual benefit of each other. In ReSA, a hard attention trims a sequence for a soft self-attention to process, while the soft attention feeds reward signals back to facilitate the training of the hard one. For this purpose, we develop a novel hard attention called "reinforced sequence sampling (RSS)", selecting tokens in parallel and trained via policy gradient. Using two RSS modules, ReSA efficiently extracts the sparse dependencies between each pair of selected tokens. We finally propose an RNN/CNN-free sentence-encoding model, "reinforced self-attention network (ReSAN)", solely based on ReSA. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on both Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) and Sentences Involving Compositional Knowledge (SICK) datasets.