Schema Graph-Guided Prompt for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking

Tracking dialogue states is an essential topic in task-oriented dialogue systems, which involve filling in the necessary information in pre-defined slots corresponding to a schema. While general pre-trained language models have been shown effective in slot-filling, their performance is limited when applied to specific domains. We propose a graph-based framework that learns domain-specific prompts by incorporating the dialogue schema. Specifically, we embed domain-specific schema encoded by a graph neural network into the pre-trained language model, which allows for relations in the schema to guide the model for better adaptation to the specific domain. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed graph-based method outperforms other multi-domain DST approaches while using similar or fewer trainable parameters. We also conduct a comprehensive study of schema graph architectures, parameter usage, and module ablation that demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on multi-domain dialogue state tracking

Act-Aware Slot-Value Predicting in Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking

As an essential component in task-oriented dialogue systems, dialogue state tracking (DST) aims to track human-machine interactions and generate state representations for managing the dialogue. Representations of dialogue states are dependent on the domain ontology and the user's goals. In several task-oriented dialogues with a limited scope of objectives, dialogue states can be represented as a set of slot-value pairs. As the capabilities of dialogue systems expand to support increasing naturalness in communication, incorporating dialogue act processing into dialogue model design becomes essential. The lack of such consideration limits the scalability of dialogue state tracking models for dialogues having specific objectives and ontology. To address this issue, we formulate and incorporate dialogue acts, and leverage recent advances in machine reading comprehension to predict both categorical and non-categorical types of slots for multi-domain dialogue state tracking. Experimental results show that our models can improve the overall accuracy of dialogue state tracking on the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset, and demonstrate that incorporating dialogue acts can guide dialogue state design for future task-oriented dialogue systems.Comment: Published in Spoken Dialogue Systems I, Interspeech 2021. Code is now publicly available on Github: https://github.com/youlandasu/ACT-AWARE-DS

Quantification of hypsarrhythmia in infantile spasmatic EEG:a large cohort study

Infantile spasms (IS) is a neurological disorder causing mental and/or developmental retardation in many infants. Hypsarrhythmia is a typical symptom in the electroencephalography (EEG) signals with IS. Long-Term EEG/video monitoring is most frequently employed in clinical practice for IS diagnosis, from which manual screening of hypsarrhythmia is time consuming and lack of sufficient reliability. This study aims to identify potential biomarkers for automatic IS diagnosis by quantitative analysis of the EEG signals. A large cohort of 101 IS patients and 155 healthy controls (HC) were involved. Typical hypsarrhythmia and non-hypsarrhythmia EEG signals were annotated, and normal EEG were randomly picked from the HC. Root mean square (RMS), teager energy (TE), mean frequency, sample entropy (SamEn), multi-channel SamEn, multi-scale SamEn, and nonlinear correlation coefficient were computed in each sub-band of the three EEG signals, and then compared using either a one-way ANOVA or a Kruskal-Wallis test (based on their distribution) and the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. The effects of infant age on these features were also investigated. For most of the employed features, significant ({p} &lt; {0}.{05} ) differences were observed between hypsarrhythmia EEG and non-hypsarrhythmia EEG or HC, which seem to increase with increased infant age. RMS and TE produce the best classification in the delta and theta bands, while entropy features yields the best performance in the gamma band. Our study suggests RMS and TE (delta and theta bands) and entropy features (gamma band) to be promising biomarkers for automatic detection of hypsarrhythmia in long-Term EEG monitoring. The findings of our study indicate the feasibility of automated IS diagnosis using artificial intelligence.</p

Characterization and Comparison of the Tissue-Related Modules in Human and Mouse

BACKGROUND: Due to the advances of high throughput technology and data-collection approaches, we are now in an unprecedented position to understand the evolution of organisms. Great efforts have characterized many individual genes responsible for the interspecies divergence, yet little is known about the genome-wide divergence at a higher level. Modules, serving as the building blocks and operational units of biological systems, provide more information than individual genes. Hence, the comparative analysis between species at the module level would shed more light on the mechanisms underlying the evolution of organisms than the traditional comparative genomics approaches. RESULTS: We systematically identified the tissue-related modules using the iterative signature algorithm (ISA), and we detected 52 and 65 modules in the human and mouse genomes, respectively. The gene expression patterns indicate that all of these predicted modules have a high possibility of serving as real biological modules. In addition, we defined a novel quantity, "total constraint intensity," a proxy of multiple constraints (of co-regulated genes and tissues where the co-regulation occurs) on the evolution of genes in module context. We demonstrate that the evolutionary rate of a gene is negatively correlated with its total constraint intensity. Furthermore, there are modules coding the same essential biological processes, while their gene contents have diverged extensively between human and mouse. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that unlike the composition of module, which exhibits a great difference between human and mouse, the functional organization of the corresponding modules may evolve in a more conservative manner. Most importantly, our findings imply that similar biological processes can be carried out by different sets of genes from human and mouse, therefore, the functional data of individual genes from mouse may not apply to human in certain occasions

Violence At Home Or Abroad: Understanding How Rebel Leaders Respond To Domestic Unrest

Existing studies suggest that leaders with previous rebellion participation have a higher level of international conflict propensity than leaders with no such experience. This dissertation examines whether prior rebel experience will induce leaders to initiate an international conflict in response to domestic strife. I propose a preference modification approach and argue that rebel leaders’ policy choice during domestic unrest is a product of their pre-existing preferences and contextual factors: contextual factors not only constrain leaders’ ability to pursue a certain policy but more importantly reshape their policy preference. Specifically, I claim that rebel leaders’ willingness to use force abroad during domestic unrest is contingent on the severity level of domestic problems. When rebel leaders face severe internal unrest, they are unwilling to engage in international conflicts because severe domestic strife will reshape leaders’ perceptions and neutralize their policy preference toward international conflict through two mechanisms. First, high intensity level of domestic strife changes the deliberative cost-benefit calculation about available policy options. Specifically, serious domestic problems call for a direct, speedy, and “to-the-point” policy response, which enables domestic measures (i.e. co-optation and repression) to be more efficacious because domestic measures aim to directly and effectively address the problem that gives rise to the strife. Second, severe domestic unrest affects rebel leaders’ intuitive behaviors by activating some certain predispositions of leaders endowed by rebellion experience, which induces them to use other policy responses rather than initiating an international dispute. Statistical analyses of the international militarized dispute initiation of leaders under domestic strife from 1875 to 2000 reveal strong support for these arguments. Two case studies of Mao Zedong and Suharto further confirm the causal mechanisms

Violence at Home or Abroad: Understanding How Rebel Leaders Respond to Domestic Unrest

Existing studies suggest that leaders with previous rebellion participation have a higher level of international conflict propensity than leaders with no such experience. This dissertation examines whether prior rebel experience will induce leaders to initiate an international conflict in response to domestic strife. I propose a preference modification approach and argue that rebel leaders\u27 policy choice during domestic unrest is a product of their pre-existing preferences and contextual factors: contextual factors not only constrain leaders’ ability to pursue a certain policy but more importantly reshape their policy preference. Specifically, I claim that rebel leaders’ willingness to use force abroad during domestic unrest is contingent on the severity level of domestic problems. When rebel leaders face severe internal unrest, they are unwilling to engage in international conflicts because severe domestic strife will reshape leaders\u27 perceptions and neutralize their policy preference toward international conflict through two mechanisms. First, high intensity level of domestic strife changes the deliberative cost-benefit calculation about available policy options. Specifically, serious domestic problems call for a direct, speedy, and to-the-point policy response, which enables domestic measures (i.e. co-optation and repression) to be more efficacious because domestic measures aim to directly and effectively address the problem that gives rise to the strife. Second, severe domestic unrest affects rebel leaders\u27 intuitive behaviors by activating some certain predispositions of leaders endowed by rebellion experience, which induces them to use other policy responses rather than initiating an international dispute. Statistical analyses of the international militarized dispute initiation of leaders under domestic strife from 1875 to 2000 reveal strong support for these arguments. Two case studies of Mao Zedong and Suharto further confirm the causal mechanisms

Violence At Home Or Abroad: Understanding How Rebel Leaders Respond To Domestic Unrest

Existing studies suggest that leaders with previous rebellion participation have a higher level of international conflict propensity than leaders with no such experience. This dissertation examines whether prior rebel experience will induce leaders to initiate an international conflict in response to domestic strife. I propose a preference modification approach and argue that rebel leaders’ policy choice during domestic unrest is a product of their pre-existing preferences and contextual factors: contextual factors not only constrain leaders’ ability to pursue a certain policy but more importantly reshape their policy preference. Specifically, I claim that rebel leaders’ willingness to use force abroad during domestic unrest is contingent on the severity level of domestic problems. When rebel leaders face severe internal unrest, they are unwilling to engage in international conflicts because severe domestic strife will reshape leaders’ perceptions and neutralize their policy preference toward international conflict through two mechanisms. First, high intensity level of domestic strife changes the deliberative cost-benefit calculation about available policy options. Specifically, serious domestic problems call for a direct, speedy, and “to-the-point” policy response, which enables domestic measures (i.e. co-optation and repression) to be more efficacious because domestic measures aim to directly and effectively address the problem that gives rise to the strife. Second, severe domestic unrest affects rebel leaders’ intuitive behaviors by activating some certain predispositions of leaders endowed by rebellion experience, which induces them to use other policy responses rather than initiating an international dispute. Statistical analyses of the international militarized dispute initiation of leaders under domestic strife from 1875 to 2000 reveal strong support for these arguments. Two case studies of Mao Zedong and Suharto further confirm the causal mechanisms