Bipol: A Novel Multi-Axes Bias Evaluation Metric with Explainability for NLP

We introduce bipol, a new metric with explainability, for estimating social bias in text data. Harmful bias is prevalent in many online sources of data that are used for training machine learning (ML) models. In a step to address this challenge we create a novel metric that involves a two-step process: corpus-level evaluation based on model classification and sentence-level evaluation based on (sensitive) term frequency (TF). After creating new models to detect bias along multiple axes using SotA architectures, we evaluate two popular NLP datasets (COPA and SQUAD). As additional contribution, we created a large dataset (with almost 2 million labelled samples) for training models in bias detection and make it publicly available. We also make public our codes.Comment: 12 pages, 4 image

Low power glove for hand functioning analysis in children with cerebral palsy

In this paper, a low-cost glove has been manufactured to monitor and analyse the hand motion for the children who suffer from the cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy (CP) is a combination of continual disorders affect the movement’s evolution due to a non-gradual disturbance in developing fetal or infant cerebrum. An Arduino Nano microcontroller with flex and force sensors are attached to soft cloth glove to form the analysis glove. The data of this study is collected from children who have cerebral palsy, non-cerebral palsy, and children who are treating by physiotherapy and then compared with each other. The results show that the analysis glove helps the physiotherapist to assess the hand functioning problem such as difficulty in hand grip and inability to fully bend the hand figures in general and thumb figure in particular. These remarks can help physiotherapists to define the required program to improve these functions and indications

The road to the blockchain technology: Concept and types

As the Bitcoin keeps increasing in value compared to other cryptocurrencies, more attention has been given to Blockchain Technology (BT) which is the infrastructure behind the Bitcoin, especially on its role in addressing the problems of the classical centralized system. As a digital currency, Bitcoin is dependent on the decentralized cryptographic tools and peer-to-peer system. The digital currency implements a distributed ledger using Blockchain when verifying any type of transaction. In this paper, the aim is to describe how digital currency networks such as Bitcoin provides a “trust-less” platform for users to embark on money transfers without necessarily depending on any central trusted establishments such as payment services or financial institutions. Furthermore, this work comprehensively overviewed the basic principle that underly BT, such as transaction, consensus algorithms, and hashing. This study also provided a novel classification for blockchain types according to their system architecture and consensus strategy. For each type, our contribution was provided with an example which clearly describes the blockchain features and the transaction steps. Our classification intended to help researchers understand and choose the blockchain for their application. The paper ends with the discussion of the differences between each typ

Toward Hand Functions Rehabilitation Using the Virtual World for Pre-school Children with Cerebral Palsy

Cerebral Palsy (CP)is a collection of permanent, non-progressive disorders that impact the individual’s motor ability. The rehabilitation of patients with CP is very important to improve their motor abilities and to minimize the need for third parties. In this paper, a low-cost hand rehabilitation glove based on finger bend/pressure analysis is presented. The data glove is used to improve hand functioning for pre-school children with cerebral palsy through virtual reality games. The system consists of two parts: the data glove and several virtual games. The data glove consists of a microcontrol-ler, flex sensors, force sensors and radiofrequency transmission units. The use of the newly developed system will assist psychotherapist to follow the CP child daily, weekly or monthly. The rehabilitation model and the predicted physiotherapy results can be extracted from the patient’s record after using the data. Experimental results have shown that the regular usage for the data glove improved 75 % of the participants’ fingers bending angel and the child’s grip ability

Bipol: A novel multi-axes bias evaluation metric with explainability for NLP

We introduce bipol, a new metric with explainability, for estimating social bias in text data. Harmful bias is prevalent in many online sources of data that are used for training machine learning (ML) models. In a step to address this challenge we create a novel metric that involves a two-step process: corpus-level evaluation based on model classification and sentence-level evaluation based on (sensitive) term frequency (TF). After creating new models to classify bias using SotA architectures, we evaluate two popular NLP datasets (COPA and SQuADv2) and the WinoBias dataset. As additional contribution, we created a large English dataset (with almost 2 million labeled samples) for training models in bias classification and make it publicly available. We also make public our codes.Godkänd;2023;Nivå 0;2023-11-13 (joosat);CC BY 4.0 License</p

Leveraging Sentiment Data for the Detection of Homophobic/Transphobic Content in a Multi-Task, Multi-Lingual Setting Using Transformers

Hateful content is published and spread on social media at an increasing rate, harming the user experience.In addition, hateful content targeting particular, marginalized/vulnerable groups (e.g. homophobic/trans-phobic content) can cause even more harm to members of said groups. Hence, detecting hateful contentis crucial, regardless of its origin, or the language used. The large variety of (often underresourced)languages used, however, makes this task daunting, especially as many users use code-mixing in theirmessages. To help overcome these difficulties, the approach we present here uses a multi-languageframework. And to further mitigate the scarcity of labelled data, it also leverages data from the relatedtask of sentiment-analysis to improve the detection of homophobic/transphobic content. We evaluatedour system by participating in a sentiment analysis and hate speech detection challenge. Results showthat our multi-task model outperforms its single-task counterpart (on average, by 24%) on the detection ofhomophobic/transphobic content. Moreover, the results achieved in detecting homophobic/transphobiccontent put our system in 1st or 2nd place for three out of four languages examined.Licens fulltext: CC BY License</p

Leveraging Sentiment Data for the Detection of Homophobic/Transphobic Content in a Multi-Task, Multi-Lingual Setting Using Transformers

Hateful content is published and spread on social media at an increasing rate, harming the user experience.In addition, hateful content targeting particular, marginalized/vulnerable groups (e.g. homophobic/trans-phobic content) can cause even more harm to members of said groups. Hence, detecting hateful contentis crucial, regardless of its origin, or the language used. The large variety of (often underresourced)languages used, however, makes this task daunting, especially as many users use code-mixing in theirmessages. To help overcome these difficulties, the approach we present here uses a multi-languageframework. And to further mitigate the scarcity of labelled data, it also leverages data from the relatedtask of sentiment-analysis to improve the detection of homophobic/transphobic content. We evaluatedour system by participating in a sentiment analysis and hate speech detection challenge. Results showthat our multi-task model outperforms its single-task counterpart (on average, by 24%) on the detection ofhomophobic/transphobic content. Moreover, the results achieved in detecting homophobic/transphobiccontent put our system in 1st or 2nd place for three out of four languages examined.Licens fulltext: CC BY License</p

T5 for Hate Speech, Augmented Data, and Ensemble

We conduct relatively extensive investigations of automatic hate speech (HS) detection using different State-of-The-Art (SoTA) baselines across 11 subtasks spanning six different datasets. Our motivation is to determine which of the recent SoTA models is best for automatic hate speech detection and what advantage methods, such as data augmentation and ensemble, may have on the best model, if any. We carry out six cross-task investigations. We achieve new SoTA results on two subtasks—macro F1 scores of 91.73% and 53.21% for subtasks A and B of the HASOC 2020 dataset, surpassing previous SoTA scores of 51.52% and 26.52%, respectively. We achieve near-SoTA results on two others—macro F1 scores of 81.66% for subtask A of the OLID 2019 and 82.54% for subtask A of the HASOC 2021, in comparison to SoTA results of 82.9% and 83.05%, respectively. We perform error analysis and use two eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) algorithms (Integrated Gradient (IG) and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP)) to reveal how two of the models (Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory Network (Bi-LSTM) and Text-to-Text-Transfer Transformer (T5)) make the predictions they do by using examples. Other contributions of this work are: (1) the introduction of a simple, novel mechanism for correcting Out-of-Class (OoC) predictions in T5, (2) a detailed description of the data augmentation methods, and (3) the revelation of the poor data annotations in the HASOC 2021 dataset by using several examples and XAI (buttressing the need for better quality control). We publicly release our model checkpoints and codes to foster transparency.Godkänd;2023;Nivå 0;2023-11-13 (joosat);Part of special issue: Computational Linguistics and Artificial IntelligenceCC BY 4.0 License</p

Innovative Education Approach Toward Active Distance Education: a Case Study in the Introduction to AI course

In this paper, we first describe various synchronous and asynchronous methods for enhancing student engagement in big online courses. We showcase the implementation of these methods in the “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI)” course at Luleå University of Technology, which has attracted around 500 students in each of its iterations (twice yearly, since 2019). We also show that these methods can be applied efficiently, in terms of the teaching hours required. With the increase in digitization and student mobility, the demand for improved and personalized content delivery for distance education has also increased. This applies not only in the context of traditional undergraduate education, but also in the context of adult education and lifelong learning. This higher level of demand, however, introduces a challenge, especially as it is typically combined with a shortage of staff and needs for efficient education. This challenge is further amplified by the current pandemic situation, which led to an even bigger risk of student-dropout. To mitigate this risk, as well as to meet the increased demand, we applied various methods for creating engaging interaction in our pedagogy based on Moor’s framework: learner-to-learner, learner-to-instructor, and learner-to-content engagement strategies. The main methods of this pedagogy are as follows: short, and interactive videos, active discussions in topic-based forums, regular live sessions with group discussions, and the introduction of optional content at many points in the course, to address different target groups. In this paper, we show how we originally designed and continuously improved the course, without requiring more than 500 teaching hours per iteration (one hour per enrolled student), while we also managed to increase the successful completion rate of the participants by 10%, and improved student engagement and feedback for the course by 50%. We intend to share a set of best-practices applicable to many other e-learning courses in ICT.ISSN for host publication: 2384-9509</p

Innovative Education Approach Toward Active Distance Education: a Case Study in the Introduction to AI course

In this paper, we first describe various synchronous and asynchronous methods for enhancing student engagement in big online courses. We showcase the implementation of these methods in the “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI)” course at Luleå University of Technology, which has attracted around 500 students in each of its iterations (twice yearly, since 2019). We also show that these methods can be applied efficiently, in terms of the teaching hours required. With the increase in digitization and student mobility, the demand for improved and personalized content delivery for distance education has also increased. This applies not only in the context of traditional undergraduate education, but also in the context of adult education and lifelong learning. This higher level of demand, however, introduces a challenge, especially as it is typically combined with a shortage of staff and needs for efficient education. This challenge is further amplified by the current pandemic situation, which led to an even bigger risk of student-dropout. To mitigate this risk, as well as to meet the increased demand, we applied various methods for creating engaging interaction in our pedagogy based on Moor’s framework: learner-to-learner, learner-to-instructor, and learner-to-content engagement strategies. The main methods of this pedagogy are as follows: short, and interactive videos, active discussions in topic-based forums, regular live sessions with group discussions, and the introduction of optional content at many points in the course, to address different target groups. In this paper, we show how we originally designed and continuously improved the course, without requiring more than 500 teaching hours per iteration (one hour per enrolled student), while we also managed to increase the successful completion rate of the participants by 10%, and improved student engagement and feedback for the course by 50%. We intend to share a set of best-practices applicable to many other e-learning courses in ICT.ISSN for host publication: 2384-9509</p