Event Extraction: A Survey

Extracting the reported events from text is one of the key research themes in natural language processing. This process includes several tasks such as event detection, argument extraction, role labeling. As one of the most important topics in natural language processing and natural language understanding, the applications of event extraction spans across a wide range of domains such as newswire, biomedical domain, history and humanity, and cyber security. This report presents a comprehensive survey for event detection from textual documents. In this report, we provide the task definition, the evaluation method, as well as the benchmark datasets and a taxonomy of methodologies for event extraction. We also present our vision of future research direction in event detection.Comment: 20 page

Intelligent performance inference: A graph neural network approach to modeling maximum achievable throughput in optical networks

One of the key performance metrics for optical networks is the maximum achievable throughput for a given network. Determining it, however, is a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP) hard optimization problem, often solved via computationally expensive integer linear programming (ILP) formulations. These are infeasible to implement as objectives, even on very small node scales of a few tens of nodes. Alternatively, heuristics are used although these, too, require considerable computation time for a large number of networks. There is, thus, a need for an ultra-fast and accurate performance evaluation of optical networks. For the first time, we propose the use of a geometric deep learning model, message passing neural networks (MPNNs), to learn the relationship between node and edge features, the network structure, and the maximum achievable network throughput. We demonstrate that MPNNs can accurately predict the maximum achievable throughput while reducing the computational time by up to five-orders of magnitude compared to the ILP for small networks (10–15 nodes) and compared to a heuristic for large networks (25–100 nodes)—proving their suitability for the design and optimization of optical networks on different time- and distance-scales

Natural Language Processing: Emerging Neural Approaches and Applications

This Special Issue highlights the most recent research being carried out in the NLP field to discuss relative open issues, with a particular focus on both emerging approaches for language learning, understanding, production, and grounding interactively or autonomously from data in cognitive and neural systems, as well as on their potential or real applications in different domains

Adapting Computer Vision Models To Limitations On Input Dimensionality And Model Complexity

When considering instances of distributed systems where visual sensors communicate with remote predictive models, data traffic is limited to the capacity of communication channels, and hardware limits the processing of collected data prior to transmission. We study novel methods of adapting visual inference to limitations on complexity and data availability at test time, wherever the aforementioned limitations exist. Our contributions detailed in this thesis consider both task-specific and task-generic approaches to reducing the data requirement for inference, and evaluate our proposed methods on a wide range of computer vision tasks. This thesis makes four distinct contributions: (i) We investigate multi-class action classification via two-stream convolutional neural networks that directly ingest information extracted from compressed video bitstreams. We show that selective access to macroblock motion vector information provides a good low-dimensional approximation of the underlying optical flow in visual sequences. (ii) We devise a bitstream cropping method by which AVC/H.264 and H.265 bitstreams are reduced to the minimum amount of necessary elements for optical flow extraction, while maintaining compliance with codec standards. We additionally study the effect of codec rate-quality control on the sparsity and noise incurred on optical flow derived from resulting bitstreams, and do so for multiple coding standards. (iii) We demonstrate degrees of variability in the amount of data required for action classification, and leverage this to reduce the dimensionality of input volumes by inferring the required temporal extent for accurate classification prior to processing via learnable machines. (iv) We extend the Mixtures-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm to adapt the data cost of inference for any set of constituent experts. We postulate that the minimum acceptable data cost of inference varies for different input space partitions, and consider mixtures where each expert is designed to meet a different set of constraints on input dimensionality. To take advantage of the flexibility of such mixtures in processing different input representations and modalities, we train biased gating functions such that experts requiring less information to make their inferences are favoured to others. We finally note that, our proposed data utility optimization solutions include a learnable component which considers specified priorities on the amount of information to be used prior to inference, and can be realized for any combination of tasks, modalities, and constraints on available data

Graph Deep Learning: Methods and Applications

The past few years have seen the growing prevalence of deep neural networks on various application domains including image processing, computer vision, speech recognition, machine translation, self-driving cars, game playing, social networks, bioinformatics, and healthcare etc. Due to the broad applications and strong performance, deep learning, a subfield of machine learning and artificial intelligence, is changing everyone\u27s life.Graph learning has been another hot field among the machine learning and data mining communities, which learns knowledge from graph-structured data. Examples of graph learning range from social network analysis such as community detection and link prediction, to relational machine learning such as knowledge graph completion and recommender systems, to mutli-graph tasks such as graph classification and graph generation etc.An emerging new field, graph deep learning, aims at applying deep learning to graphs. To deal with graph-structured data, graph neural networks (GNNs) are invented in recent years which directly take graphs as input and output graph/node representations. Although GNNs have shown superior performance than traditional methods in tasks such as semi-supervised node classification, there still exist a wide range of other important graph learning problems where either GNNs\u27 applicabilities have not been explored or GNNs only have less satisfying performance.In this dissertation, we dive deeper into the field of graph deep learning. By developing new algorithms, architectures and theories, we push graph neural networks\u27 boundaries to a much wider range of graph learning problems. The problems we have explored include: 1) graph classification; 2) medical ontology embedding; 3) link prediction; 4) recommender systems; 5) graph generation; and 6) graph structure optimization.We first focus on two graph representation learning problems: graph classification and medical ontology embedding.For graph classification, we develop a novel deep GNN architecture which aggregates node features through a novel SortPooling layer that replaces the simple summing used in previous works. We demonstrate its state-of-the-art graph classification performance on benchmark datasets. For medical ontology embedding, we propose a novel hierarchical attention propagation model, which uses attention mechanism to learn embeddings of medical concepts from hierarchically-structured medical ontologies such as ICD-9 and CCS. We validate the learned embeddings on sequential procedure/diagnosis prediction tasks with real patient data.Then we investigate GNNs\u27 potential for predicting relations, specifically link prediction and recommender systems. For link prediction, we first develop a theory unifying various traditional link prediction heuristics, and then design a framework to automatically learn suitable heuristics from a given network based on GNNs. Our model shows unprecedented strong link prediction performance, significantly outperforming all traditional methods. For recommender systems, we propose a novel graph-based matrix completion model, which uses a GNN to learn graph structure features from the bipartite graph formed by user and item interactions. Our model not only outperforms various matrix completion baselines, but also demonstrates excellent transfer learning ability -- a model trained on MovieLens can be directly used to predict Douban movie ratings with high performance.Finally, we explore GNNs\u27 applicability to graph generation and graph structure optimization. We focus on a specific type of graphs which usually carry computations on them, namely directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). We develop a variational autoencoder (VAE) for DAGs and prove that it can injectively map computations into a latent space. This injectivity allows us to perform optimization in the continuous latent space instead of the original discrete structure space. We then apply our VAE to two types of DAGs, neural network architectures and Bayesian networks. Experiments show that our model not only generates novel and valid DAGs, but also finds high-quality neural architectures and Bayesian networks through performing Bayesian optimization in its latent space

Large-scale Multi-Modal Pre-trained Models: A Comprehensive Survey

With the urgent demand for generalized deep models, many pre-trained big models are proposed, such as BERT, ViT, GPT, etc. Inspired by the success of these models in single domains (like computer vision and natural language processing), the multi-modal pre-trained big models have also drawn more and more attention in recent years. In this work, we give a comprehensive survey of these models and hope this paper could provide new insights and helps fresh researchers to track the most cutting-edge works. Specifically, we firstly introduce the background of multi-modal pre-training by reviewing the conventional deep learning, pre-training works in natural language process, computer vision, and speech. Then, we introduce the task definition, key challenges, and advantages of multi-modal pre-training models (MM-PTMs), and discuss the MM-PTMs with a focus on data, objectives, network architectures, and knowledge enhanced pre-training. After that, we introduce the downstream tasks used for the validation of large-scale MM-PTMs, including generative, classification, and regression tasks. We also give visualization and analysis of the model parameters and results on representative downstream tasks. Finally, we point out possible research directions for this topic that may benefit future works. In addition, we maintain a continuously updated paper list for large-scale pre-trained multi-modal big models: https://github.com/wangxiao5791509/MultiModal_BigModels_SurveyComment: Accepted by Machine Intelligence Researc

An empirical study on leveraging position embeddings for target-oriented opinion words extraction

Target-oriented opinion words extraction (TOWE) (Fan et al., 2019b) is a new subtask of target-oriented sentiment analysis that aims to extract opinion words for a given aspect in text. Current state-of-the-art methods leverage position embeddings to capture the relative position of a word to the target. However, the performance of these methods depends on the ability to incorporate this information into word representations. In this paper, we explore a variety of text encoders based on pretrained word embeddings or language models that leverage part-of-speech and position embeddings, aiming to examine the actual contribution of each component in TOWE. We also adapt a graph convolutional network (GCN) to enhance word representations by incorporating syntactic information. Our experimental results demonstrate that BiLSTM-based models can effectively encode position information into word representations while using a GCN only achieves marginal gains. Interestingly, our simple methods outperform several state-of-the-art complex neural structures

A Semantic Information Management Approach for Improving Bridge Maintenance based on Advanced Constraint Management

Bridge rehabilitation projects are important for transportation infrastructures. This research proposes a novel information management approach based on state-of-the-art deep learning models and ontologies. The approach can automatically extract, integrate, complete, and search for project knowledge buried in unstructured text documents. The approach on the one hand facilitates implementation of modern management approaches, i.e., advanced working packaging to delivery success bridge rehabilitation projects, on the other hand improves information management practices in the construction industry

A Survey of Natural Language Generation

This paper offers a comprehensive review of the research on Natural Language Generation (NLG) over the past two decades, especially in relation to data-to-text generation and text-to-text generation deep learning methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey aims to (a) give the latest synthesis of deep learning research on the NLG core tasks, as well as the architectures adopted in the field; (b) detail meticulously and comprehensively various NLG tasks and datasets, and draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, focusing on different evaluation methods and their relationships; (c) highlight some future emphasis and relatively recent research issues that arise due to the increasing synergy between NLG and other artificial intelligence areas, such as computer vision, text and computational creativity.Comment: Accepted by ACM Computing Survey (CSUR) 202