Evaluating the Underlying Gender Bias in Contextualized Word Embeddings

Gender bias is highly impacting natural language processing applications. Word embeddings have clearly been proven both to keep and amplify gender biases that are present in current data sources. Recently, contextualized word embeddings have enhanced previous word embedding techniques by computing word vector representations dependent on the sentence they appear in. In this paper, we study the impact of this conceptual change in the word embedding computation in relation with gender bias. Our analysis includes different measures previously applied in the literature to standard word embeddings. Our findings suggest that contextualized word embeddings are less biased than standard ones even when the latter are debiased

Aplicación del tracking basado en puntos característicos a la cinemometría del tráfico

El hecho de que el exceso de velocidad sea una de las principales causas de accidentes en carretera hace que la medición y control de la velocidad del tráfico rodado cobre cada día mayor importancia. El objetivo del presente trabajo es el desarrollo de un cinemómetro de tráfico que haga uso únicamente de técnicas de visión artificial, es decir, implementar un software que tome como entrada una secuencia de vídeo tomada de una cámara de tráfico y sea capaz de generar como salida la misma información que un cinemómetro basado en el efecto Doppler, es decir, la velocidad del vehículo que en ese momento circula dentro de su campo de acción

English-Catalan Neural Machine Translation in the Biomedical Domain through the cascade approach

This paper describes the methodology followed to build a neural machine translation system in the biomedical domain for the English-Catalan language pair. This task can be considered a low-resourced task from the point of view of the domain and the language pair. To face this task, this paper reports experiments on a cascade pivot strategy through Spanish for the neural machine translation using the English-Spanish SCIELO and Spanish-Catalan El Peri\'odico database. To test the final performance of the system, we have created a new test data set for English-Catalan in the biomedical domain which is freely available on request.Comment: Full workshop proceedings can be found at https://multilingualbio.bsc.es/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/LREC-2018-PROCEEDINGS-MultilingualBIO.pd

Syntax-driven Iterative Expansion Language Models for Controllable Text Generation

The dominant language modeling paradigm handles text as a sequence of discrete tokens. While that approach can capture the latent structure of the text, it is inherently constrained to sequential dynamics for text generation. We propose a new paradigm for introducing a syntactic inductive bias into neural text generation, where the dependency parse tree is used to drive the Transformer model to generate sentences iteratively. Our experiments show that this paradigm is effective at text generation, with quality between LSTMs and Transformers, and comparable diversity, requiring less than half their decoding steps, and its generation process allows direct control over the syntactic constructions of the generated text, enabling the induction of stylistic variations.Comment: Accepted at the EMNLP 2020 Workshop on Structured Prediction for NL

CIUDAD INTELIGENTE: UNA APROXIMACIÓN EPISTEMOLÓGICA

Suelen denominarse ciudades inteligentes a las urbes que adoptan modelos de planificación y acción basados en la implementación de infraestructuras relacionadas al uso de las TIC (Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicación), para obtener información auxiliar en la toma de decisiones, frente a los problemas de las regiones urbanas, que constituyen amenazas a la sustentabilidad de las ciudades. Existen diversas aproximaciones conceptuales respecto a lo que se considera ciudad inteligente, todas ellas confluyen en el necesario uso de las TIC y se tiende a promover su adquisición como la base de inteligencia para estos tipos de modelos, otorgando frecuentemente cualidades progresivas y favorables hacia una ciudad con enfoque sustentable, mientras se omiten efectos adversos que pueden presentarse. El presente trabajo analiza las connotaciones de inteligencia de la ciudad inteligente; considerando que éstas acepciones influyen en la tendencia a la adopción de modelos de ciudad que basarán su inteligencia, ya sea en la mera adquisición de infraestructura tecnológica o, por otro lado, en la transformación de las relaciones sociales con un enfoque hacia la sustentabilidad a través del uso de las TIC. Para tal fin, se realiza una revisión de diferentes propuestas teóricas sobre el tema de ciudades inteligentes bajo la consideración de que la inteligencia de una ciudad radique solamente en los procesos y procedimientos automatizados, con la instalación de sensores tecnológicos y TIC para resolver problemas de manera automática. Al final, se concluye que la inteligencia suele ser un término atractivo en los conceptos de ciudad inteligente, para establecer una diferencia significativa respecto a ciudades tradicionales y convencionales, planteando como una necesidad la adquisición de dispositivos y sensores tecnológicos como requisito para ser denominadas inteligentes

A qualitative study on the social representations of populism and democracy in Peru

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the social representations of democracy, populism and the relationship between both concepts in a sample of citizens from different regions of Peru (n = 76). To this end, a qualitative research design was proposed, using in-depth interviews, which were analyzed from a discursive approach. The results show that democracy and populism are two closely related concepts in tension. On the one hand, the social representation of democracy is semantically poor, closely related to electoral behavior and is seen as a political system that, ideally, is positively valued. Populism, on the other hand, is seen as a political strategy based on the manipulation of citizens' needs in order to reach power using the democratic process of elections. The representation of populism in general is negative, and it is mentioned that it appears and acquires strength in the face of citizen dissatisfaction with democracy, when it cannot solve problems of poverty, corruption or exclusion. The representations of populism take up the constitutive components proposed by different authors on the topic (people, elites and democracy as a product of popular will), but the participants do not necessarily structure the relationships between these components as proposed in the academic literature. Finally, the results shows that respondents' experiences with democracy and populism in Peru act as important socializing forces that will frame how citizens relate to politics and the public