Judging the readability of text has many important applications, for instance when performing text simplification or when sourcing reading material for language learners. In this paper, we present a 518 participant study which investigates how scrolling behaviour relates to the readability of a text. We make our dataset publicly available and show that (1) there are statistically significant differences in the way readers interact with text depending on the text level, (2) such measures can be used to predict the readability of text, and (3) the background of a reader impacts their reading interactions and the factors contributing to text difficulty.
Language has a profound impact on our thoughts, perceptions, and conceptions of gender roles. Gender-inclusive language is, therefore, a key tool to promote social inclusion and contribute to achieving gender equality. Consequently, detecting and mitigating gender bias in texts is instrumental in halting its propagation and societal implications. However, there is a lack of gender bias datasets and lexicons for automating the detection of gender bias using supervised and unsupervised machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Therefore, the main contribution of this work is to publicly provide labeled datasets and exhaustive lexicons by collecting, annotating, and augmenting relevant sentences to facilitate the detection of gender bias in English text. Towards this end, we present an updated version of our previously proposed taxonomy by re-formalizing its structure, adding a new bias type, and mapping each bias subtype to an appropriate detection methodology. The released datasets and lexicons span multiple bias subtypes including: Generic He, Generic She, Explicit Marking of Sex, and Gendered Neologisms. We leveraged the use of word embedding models to further augment the collected lexicons. The underlying motivation of our work is to enable the technical community to combat gender bias in text and halt its propagation using ML and NLP techniques.
This paper describes a novel dataset consisting of sentences with semantic similarity annotations. The data originate from the journalistic domain in the Czech language. We describe the process of collecting and annotating the data in detail. The dataset contains 138,556 human annotations divided into train and test sets. In total, 485 journalism students participated in the creation process. To increase the reliability of the test set, we compute the annotation as an average of 9 individual annotations. We evaluate the quality of the dataset by measuring inter and intra annotation annotators' agreements. Beside agreement numbers, we provide detailed statistics of the collected dataset. We conclude our paper with a baseline experiment of building a system for predicting the semantic similarity of sentences. Due to the massive number of training annotations (116 956), the model can perform significantly better than an average annotator (0,92 versus 0,86 of Person's correlation coefficients).
Imitation learning enables agents to reuse and adapt the hard-won expertise of others, offering a solution to several key challenges in learning behavior. Although it is easy to observe behavior in the real-world, the underlying actions may not be accessible. We present a new method for imitation solely from observations that achieves comparable performance to experts on challenging continuous control tasks while also exhibiting robustness in the presence of observations unrelated to the task. Our method, which we call FORM (for "Future Observation Reward Model") is derived from an inverse RL objective and imitates using a model of expert behavior learned by generative modelling of the expert's observations, without needing ground truth actions. We show that FORM performs comparably to a strong baseline IRL method (GAIL) on the DeepMind Control Suite benchmark, while outperforming GAIL in the presence of task-irrelevant features.
In many applications, such as recommender systems, online advertising, and product search, click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task, because its accuracy has a direct impact on both platform revenue and user experience. In recent years, with the prevalence of deep learning, CTR prediction has been widely studied in both academia and industry, resulting in an abundance of deep CTR models. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of a standardized benchmark and uniform evaluation protocols for CTR prediction. This leads to the non-reproducible and even inconsistent experimental results among these studies. In this paper, we present an open benchmark (namely FuxiCTR) for reproducible research and provide a rigorous comparison of different models for CTR prediction. Specifically, we ran over 4,600 experiments for a total of more than 12,000 GPU hours in a uniform framework to re-evaluate 24 existing models on two widely-used datasets, Criteo and Avazu. Surprisingly, our experiments show that many models have smaller differences than expected and sometimes are even inconsistent with what reported in the literature. We believe that our benchmark could not only allow researchers to gauge the effectiveness of new models conveniently, but also share some good practices to fairly compare with the state of the arts. We will release all the code and benchmark settings.
Knowledge graph embedding aims to learn distributed representations for entities and relations, and is proven to be effective in many applications. Crossover interactions --- bi-directional effects between entities and relations --- help select related information when predicting a new triple, but haven't been formally discussed before. In this paper, we propose CrossE, a novel knowledge graph embedding which explicitly simulates crossover interactions. It not only learns one general embedding for each entity and relation as most previous methods do, but also generates multiple triple specific embeddings for both of them, named interaction embeddings. We evaluate embeddings on typical link prediction tasks and find that CrossE achieves state-of-the-art results on complex and more challenging datasets. Furthermore, we evaluate embeddings from a new perspective --- giving explanations for predicted triples, which is important for real applications. In this work, an explanation for a triple is regarded as a reliable closed-path between the head and the tail entity. Compared to other baselines, we show experimentally that CrossE, benefiting from interaction embeddings, is more capable of generating reliable explanations to support its predictions.
Learning to construct text representations in end-to-end systems can be difficult, as natural languages are highly compositional and task-specific annotated datasets are often limited in size. Methods for directly supervising language composition can allow us to guide the models based on existing knowledge, regularizing them towards more robust and interpretable representations. In this paper, we investigate how objectives at different granularities can be used to learn better language representations and we propose an architecture for jointly learning to label sentences and tokens. The predictions at each level are combined together using an attention mechanism, with token-level labels also acting as explicit supervision for composing sentence-level representations. Our experiments show that by learning to perform these tasks jointly on multiple levels, the model achieves substantial improvements for both sentence classification and sequence labeling.
Combinatorial features are essential for the success of many commercial models. Manually crafting these features usually comes with high cost due to the variety, volume and velocity of raw data in web-scale systems. Factorization based models, which measure interactions in terms of vector product, can learn patterns of combinatorial features automatically and generalize to unseen features as well. With the great success of deep neural networks (DNNs) in various fields, recently researchers have proposed several DNN-based factorization model to learn both low- and high-order feature interactions. Despite the powerful ability of learning an arbitrary function from data, plain DNNs generate feature interactions implicitly and at the bit-wise level. In this paper, we propose a novel Compressed Interaction Network (CIN), which aims to generate feature interactions in an explicit fashion and at the vector-wise level. We show that the CIN share some functionalities with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs). We further combine a CIN and a classical DNN into one unified model, and named this new model eXtreme Deep Factorization Machine (xDeepFM). On one hand, the xDeepFM is able to learn certain bounded-degree feature interactions explicitly; on the other hand, it can learn arbitrary low- and high-order feature interactions implicitly. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets. Our results demonstrate that xDeepFM outperforms state-of-the-art models. We have released the source code of xDeepFM at \url{//github.com/Leavingseason/xDeepFM}.
Existing methods for interactive image retrieval have demonstrated the merit of integrating user feedback, improving retrieval results. However, most current systems rely on restricted forms of user feedback, such as binary relevance responses, or feedback based on a fixed set of relative attributes, which limits their impact. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to interactive image search that enables users to provide feedback via natural language, allowing for more natural and effective interaction. We formulate the task of dialog-based interactive image retrieval as a reinforcement learning problem, and reward the dialog system for improving the rank of the target image during each dialog turn. To avoid the cumbersome and costly process of collecting human-machine conversations as the dialog system learns, we train our system with a user simulator, which is itself trained to describe the differences between target and candidate images. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated in a footwear retrieval application. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world data show that 1) our proposed learning framework achieves better accuracy than other supervised and reinforcement learning baselines and 2) user feedback based on natural language rather than pre-specified attributes leads to more effective retrieval results, and a more natural and expressive communication interface.
The first stage of every knowledge base question answering approach is to link entities in the input question. We investigate entity linking in the context of a question answering task and present a jointly optimized neural architecture for entity mention detection and entity disambiguation that models the surrounding context on different levels of granularity. We use the Wikidata knowledge base and available question answering datasets to create benchmarks for entity linking on question answering data. Our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art system on this data, resulting in an average 8% improvement of the final score. We further demonstrate that our model delivers a strong performance across different entity categories.
We report an evaluation of the effectiveness of the existing knowledge base embedding models for relation prediction and for relation extraction on a wide range of benchmarks. We also describe a new benchmark, which is much larger and complex than previous ones, which we introduce to help validate the effectiveness of both tasks. The results demonstrate that knowledge base embedding models are generally effective for relation prediction but unable to give improvements for the state-of-art neural relation extraction model with the existing strategies, while pointing limitations of existing methods.