Pythia: Unsupervised generation of ambiguous textual claims from relational data

Applications such as computational fact checking and data-to-text generation exploit the relationship between relational data and natural language text. Despite promising results in these areas, state of the art solutions simply fail in managing “data-ambiguity”, i.e., the case when there are multiple interpretations of the relationship between the textual sentence and the relational data. To tackle this problem, we introduce Pythia, a system that, given a relational table D, generates textual sentences that contain factual ambiguities w.r.t. the data in D. Such sentences can then be used to train target applications in handling data-ambiguity. In this demonstration, we first show how our system generates data ambiguous sentences for a given table in an unsupervised fashion by data profiling and query generation. We then demonstrate how two existing applications benefit from Pythia’s generated sentences, improving the state-of-the-art results. The audience will interact with Pythia by changing input parameters in an interactive fashion, including the upload of their own dataset to see what data ambiguous sentences are generated for it

Transformers for Tabular Data Representation: A Survey of Models and Applications

AbstractIn the last few years, the natural language processing community has witnessed advances in neural representations of free texts with transformer-based language models (LMs). Given the importance of knowledge available in tabular data, recent research efforts extend LMs by developing neural representations for structured data. In this article, we present a survey that analyzes these efforts. We first abstract the different systems according to a traditional machine learning pipeline in terms of training data, input representation, model training, and supported downstream tasks. For each aspect, we characterize and compare the proposed solutions. Finally, we discuss future work directions

Transformers for Tabular Data Representation: A Survey of Models and Applications

International audienceIn the last few years, the natural language processing community has witnessed advances in neural representations of free texts with transformer-based language models (LMs). Given the importance of knowledge available in tabular data, recent research efforts extend LMs by developing neural representations for structured data. In this work, we present a survey that analyzes these efforts. We first abstract the different systems according to a traditional machine learning pipeline in terms of training data, input representation, model training, and supported downstream tasks. For each aspect, we characterize and compare the proposed solutions. Finally, we discuss future work directions

Transformers for Tabular Data Representation: A Survey of Models and Applications

International audienceIn the last few years, the natural language processing community has witnessed advances in neural representations of free texts with transformer-based language models (LMs). Given the importance of knowledge available in tabular data, recent research efforts extend LMs by developing neural representations for structured data. In this work, we present a survey that analyzes these efforts. We first abstract the different systems according to a traditional machine learning pipeline in terms of training data, input representation, model training, and supported downstream tasks. For each aspect, we characterize and compare the proposed solutions. Finally, we discuss future work directions

Recommender systems using harmonic analysis

Recommender systems provide recommendations on variety of personal activities or relevant items of interest. They can play a significant role for E-commerce and in daily personal decisions. However, existing recommender systems still face challenges in dealing with sparse data and still achieving high accuracy and reasonable performance. The issue with missing rating leads to inaccuracies when trying to match items or users for rating prediction. In this paper, we propose to address these challenges with the use of Harmonic Analysis. The paper extends on our previous work, and provides a comprehensive coverage of the method with additional experiments. The method provides a novel multiresolution approach to the user-item matrix and extracts the interplay between users and items at multiple resolution levels. New affinity matrices are defined to measure similarities among users, among items, and across items and users. Furthermore, the similarities are assessed at multiple levels of granularity allowing individual and group level similarities. These affinity matrices thus produce multiresolution groupings of items and users, and in turn lead to higher accuracy in matching similar context for ratings, and more accurate prediction of new ratings. The evaluation of the system shows superiority of the solution compared to state of the art solutions for user-based collaborative filtering and item-based collaborative filtering. 2014 IEEE.Qatar National Research FundScopu

A multiresolution approach to Recommender systems

Recommender systems face performance challenges when dealing with sparse data. This paper addresses these challenges and proposes the use of Harmonic Analysis. The method provides a novel approach to the user-item matrix and extracts the interplay between users and items at multiple resolution levels. New affinity matrices are defined to measure similarities among users, among items, and across items and users. Furthermore, the similarities are assessed at multiple levels of granularity allowing individual and group level similarities. These affinity matrices thus produce multiresolution groupings of items and users, and in turn lead to higher accuracy in matching similar context for ratings, and more accurate prediction of new ratings. Evaluation results show superiority of the approach compared to state of the art solutions.NPRP 6-716-1-138 grant from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation).Scopu