106 research outputs found
Relation between working memory capacity and auditory stream segregation in children with auditory processing disorder
Background: This study assessed the relationship between working memory capacity and auditory stream segregation by using the concurrent minimum audible angle in children with a diagnosed auditory processing disorder (APD). Methods: The participants in this cross-sectional, comparative study were 20 typically developing children and 15 children with a diagnosed APD (age, 9-11years) according to the subtests of multiple-processing auditory assessment. Auditory stream segregation was investigated using the concurrent minimum audible angle. Working memory capacity was evaluated using the non-word repetition and forward and backward digit span tasks. Nonparametric statistics were utilized to compare the between- group differences. The Pearson correlation was employed to measure the degree of association between working memory capacity and the localization tests between the 2 groups. Results: The group with APD had significantly lower scores than did the typically developing subjects in auditory stream segregation and working memory capacity. There were significant negative correlations between working memory capacity and the concurrent minimum audible angle in the most frontal reference location (0° azimuth) and lower negative correlations in the most lateral reference location (60° azimuth) in the children with APD. Conclusion: The study revealed a relationship between working memory capacity and auditory stream segregation in children with APD. The research suggests that lower working memory capacity in children with APD may be the possible cause of the inability to segregate and group incoming information. © 2016, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences. All rights reserved
How Does BERT Answer Questions? A Layer-Wise Analysis of Transformer Representations
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) reach
state-of-the-art results in a variety of Natural Language Processing tasks.
However, understanding of their internal functioning is still insufficient and
unsatisfactory. In order to better understand BERT and other Transformer-based
models, we present a layer-wise analysis of BERT's hidden states. Unlike
previous research, which mainly focuses on explaining Transformer models by
their attention weights, we argue that hidden states contain equally valuable
information. Specifically, our analysis focuses on models fine-tuned on the
task of Question Answering (QA) as an example of a complex downstream task. We
inspect how QA models transform token vectors in order to find the correct
answer. To this end, we apply a set of general and QA-specific probing tasks
that reveal the information stored in each representation layer. Our
qualitative analysis of hidden state visualizations provides additional
insights into BERT's reasoning process. Our results show that the
transformations within BERT go through phases that are related to traditional
pipeline tasks. The system can therefore implicitly incorporate task-specific
information into its token representations. Furthermore, our analysis reveals
that fine-tuning has little impact on the models' semantic abilities and that
prediction errors can be recognized in the vector representations of even early
layers.Comment: Accepted at CIKM 201
Science and Ideology in Economic, Political, and Social Thought
This paper has two sources: One is my own research in three broad areas: business cycles, economic measurement and social choice. In all of these fields I attempted to apply the basic precepts of the scientific method as it is understood in the natural sciences. I found that my effort at using natural science methods in economics was met with little understanding and often considerable hostility. I found economics to be driven less by common sense and empirical evidence, then by various ideologies that exhibited either a political or a methodological bias, or both. This brings me to the second source: Several books have appeared recently that describe in historical terms the ideological forces that have shaped either the direct areas in which I worked, or a broader background. These books taught me that the ideological forces in the social sciences are even stronger than I imagined on the basis of my own experiences.
The scientific method is the antipode to ideology. I feel that the scientific work that I have done on specific, long standing and fundamental problems in economics and political science have given me additional insights into the destructive role of ideology beyond the history of thought orientation of the works I will be discussing
The role of fuzzy logic in modeling, identification and control
In the nearly four decades which have passed since the launching of the Sputnik, great progress has been achieved in our understanding of how to model, identify and control complex systems. However, to be able to design systems having high MIQ (Machine Intelligence Quotient), a profound change in the orientation of control theory may be required. More specifically, what may be needed is the employment of soft computing - rather than hard computing - in systems analysis and design. Soft computing - unlike hard computing - is tolerant of imprecision, uncertainty and partial truth
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