2,640 research outputs found
Personality Dysfunction Manifest in Words : Understanding Personality Pathology Using Computational Language Analysis
Personality disorders (PDs) are some of the most prevalent and high-risk mental health conditions, and yet remain poorly understood. Today, the development of new technologies means that there are advanced tools that can be used to improve our understanding and treatment of PD. One promising tool – indeed, the focus of this thesis – is computational language analysis. By looking at patterns in how people with personality pathology use words, it is possible to gain access into their constellation of thinking, feelings, and behaviours. To date, however, there has been little research at the intersection of verbal behaviour and personality pathology. Accordingly, the central goal of this thesis is to demonstrate how PD can be better understood through the analysis of natural language. This thesis presents three research articles, comprising four empirical studies, that each leverage computational language analysis to better understand personality pathology. Each paper focuses on a distinct core feature of PD, while incorporating language analysis methods: Paper 1 (Study 1) focuses on interpersonal dysfunction; Paper 2 (Studies 2 and 3) focuses on emotion dysregulation; and Paper 3 (Study 4) focuses on behavioural dysregulation (i.e., engagement in suicidality and deliberate self-harm). Findings from this research have generated better understanding of fundamental features of PD, including insight into characterising dimensions of social dysfunction (Paper 1), maladaptive emotion processes that may contribute to emotion dysregulation (Paper 2), and psychosocial dynamics relating to suicidality and deliberate self-harm (Paper 3) in PD. Such theoretical knowledge subsequently has important implications for clinical practice, particularly regarding the potential to inform psychological therapy. More broadly, this research highlights how language can provide implicit and unobtrusive insight into the personality and psychological processes that underlie personality pathology at a large-scale, using an individualised, naturalistic approach
Self-supervised learning for transferable representations
Machine learning has undeniably achieved remarkable advances thanks to large labelled datasets and supervised learning. However, this progress is constrained by the labour-intensive annotation process. It is not feasible to generate extensive labelled datasets for every problem we aim to address. Consequently, there has been a notable shift in recent times toward approaches that solely leverage raw data. Among these, self-supervised learning has emerged as a particularly powerful approach, offering scalability to massive datasets and showcasing considerable potential for effective knowledge transfer. This thesis investigates self-supervised representation learning with a strong focus on computer vision applications. We provide a comprehensive survey of self-supervised methods across various modalities, introducing a taxonomy that categorises them into four distinct families while also highlighting practical considerations for real-world implementation. Our focus thenceforth is on the computer vision modality, where we perform a comprehensive benchmark evaluation of state-of-the-art self supervised models against many diverse downstream transfer tasks. Our findings reveal that self-supervised models often outperform supervised learning across a spectrum of tasks, albeit with correlations weakening as tasks transition beyond classification, particularly for datasets with distribution shifts. Digging deeper, we investigate the influence of data augmentation on the transferability of contrastive learners, uncovering a trade-off between spatial and appearance-based invariances that generalise to real-world transformations. This begins to explain the differing empirical performances achieved by self-supervised learners on different downstream tasks, and it showcases the advantages of specialised representations produced with tailored augmentation. Finally, we introduce a novel self-supervised pre-training algorithm for object detection, aligning pre-training with downstream architecture and objectives, leading to reduced localisation errors and improved label efficiency. In conclusion, this thesis contributes a comprehensive understanding of self-supervised representation learning and its role in enabling effective transfer across computer vision tasks
Multidisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the law
This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Sound Event Detection by Exploring Audio Sequence Modelling
Everyday sounds in real-world environments are a powerful source of information by which humans can interact with their environments. Humans can infer what is happening around them by listening to everyday sounds. At the same time, it is a challenging task for a computer algorithm in a smart device to automatically recognise, understand, and interpret everyday sounds. Sound event detection (SED) is the process of transcribing an audio recording into sound event tags with onset and offset time values. This involves classification and segmentation of sound events in the given audio recording. SED has numerous applications in everyday life which include security and surveillance, automation, healthcare monitoring, multimedia information retrieval, and assisted living technologies. SED is to everyday sounds what automatic speech recognition (ASR) is to speech and automatic music transcription (AMT) is to music. The fundamental questions in designing a sound recognition system are, which portion of a sound event should the system analyse, and what proportion of a sound event should the system process in order to claim a confident detection of that particular sound event. While the classification of sound events has improved a lot in recent years, it is considered that the temporal-segmentation of sound events has not improved in the same extent. The aim of this thesis is to propose and develop methods to improve the segmentation and classification of everyday sound events in SED models. In particular, this thesis explores the segmentation of sound events by investigating audio sequence encoding-based and audio sequence modelling-based methods, in an effort to improve the overall sound event detection performance. In the first phase of this thesis, efforts are put towards improving sound event detection by explicitly conditioning the audio sequence representations of an SED model using sound activity detection (SAD) and onset detection. To achieve this, we propose multi-task learning-based SED models in which SAD and onset detection are used as auxiliary tasks for the SED task. The next part of this thesis explores self-attention-based audio sequence modelling, which aggregates audio representations based on temporal relations within and between sound events, scored on the basis of the similarity of sound event portions in audio event sequences. We propose SED models that include memory-controlled, adaptive, dynamic, and source separation-induced self-attention variants, with the aim to improve overall sound recognition
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