United States

BERT has set a new state-of-the-art performance on entity resolution (ER) task, largely owed to fine-tuning pre-trained language models and the deep pair-wise interaction. Albeit being remarkably effective, it comes with a steep increase in computational cost, as the deep-interaction requires to exhaustively compute every tuple pair to search for co-references. For ER task, it is often prohibitively expensive due to the large cardinality to be matched. To tackle this, we introduce a siamese network structure that independently encodes tuples using BERT but delays the pair-wise interaction via an enhanced alignment network. This siamese structure enables a dedicated blocking module to quickly filter out obviously dissimilar tuple pairs, and thus drastically reduces the cardinality of fine-grained matching. Further, the blocking and entity matching are integrated into a multi-task learning framework for facilitating both tasks. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models (including BERT) in both efficiency and effectiveness.

AAAI 2021

Improving the Efficiency and Effectiveness for Bert-Based Entity Resolution

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Dialogue policy learning based on reinforcement learning is difficult to be applied to real users to train dialogue agents from scratch because of the high cost. User simulators, which choose random user goals for the dialogue agent to train on, have been considered as an affordable substitute for real users. However, this random sampling method ignores the law of human learning, making the learned dialogue policy inefficient and unstable. We propose a novel framework, Automatic Curriculum Learning-based Deep Q-Network (ACL-DQN), which replaces the traditional random sampling method with a teacher policy model to realize the dialogue policy for automatic curriculum learning. The teacher model arranges a meaningful ordered curriculum and automatically adjusts it by monitoring the learning progress of the dialogue agent and the over-repetition penalty without any requirement of prior knowledge. The learning progress of the dialogue agent reflects the relationship between the dialogue agent's ability and the sampled goals' difficulty for sample efficiency. The over-repetition penalty guarantees the sampled diversity. Experiments show that the ACL-DQN significantly improves the effectiveness and stability of dialogue tasks with a statistically significant margin. Furthermore, the framework can be further improved by equipping with different curriculum schedules, which demonstrates that the framework has strong generalizability.

Automatic Curriculum Learning with Over-Repetition Penalty for Dialogue Policy Learning

Contextual bandits algorithms have become essential in real-world user interaction problems in recent years. However, these algorithms represent context as attribute value representation, which makes them infeasible for real world domains like social networks, which are inherently relational. We propose Relational Boosted Bandits 
(RB2), a contextual bandits algorithm for relational domains based on (relational) boosted trees. RB2 enables us to learn interpretable and explainable models due to the more descriptive nature of the relational representation. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness and interpretability of RB2 on tasks such as link prediction, relational classification, and recommendation.

Relational Boosted Bandits

Are existing object detection methods adequate for detecting text and visual elements in scientific plots which are arguably different than the objects found in natural images? To answer this question, we train and compare the accuracy of Fast/Faster R-CNN, SSD, YOLO and RetinaNet on the PlotQA dataset with over 220,000 scientific plots. At the standard IOU setting of 0.5, most networks perform well with mAP scores greater than 80% in detecting the relatively simple objects in plots. However, the performance drops drastically when evaluated at a stricter IOU of 0.9 with the best model giving a mAP of 35.70%. Note that such a stricter evaluation is essential when dealing with scientific plots where even minor localisation errors can lead to large errors in downstream numerical inferences. Given this poor performance, we propose minor modifications to existing models by combining ideas from different object detection networks. While this significantly improves the performance, there are still two main issues: (i) performance on text objects which are essential for reasoning is very poor, and (ii) inference time is unacceptably large considering the simplicity of plots. To solve this open problem, we make a series of contributions: (a) an efficient region proposal method based on Laplacian edge detectors, (b) a feature representation of region proposals that includes neighbouring information, (c) a linking component to join multiple region proposals for detecting longer textual objects, and (d) a custom loss function that combines a smooth L1-loss with an IOU-based loss. Combining these ideas, our final model is very accurate at extreme IOU values achieving a mAP of 93.44%@0.9 IOU. Simultaneously, our model is very efficient with an inference time 16x lesser than the current models, including one-stage detectors. Our model also achieves a high accuracy on an extrinsic plot-to-table conversion task with an F1 score of 0.77. With these contributions, we make a definitive progress in object detection for plots and enable further exploration on automated reasoning of plots.

A Systematic Evaluation of Object Detection Networks for Scientific Plots

With the growing number of published functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, meta-analysis databases and models have become an integral part of brain mapping research. Coordinate-based meta-analysis (CBMA) databases are built by extracting both coordinates of reported peak activations and term associations using natural language processing techniques from neuroimaging studies. Solving term-based queries on these databases makes it possible to obtain statistical maps of the brain related to specific cognitive processes. However, existing tools for analysing CBMA data are limited in their expressivity to propositional logic, restricting the variety of their queries. Moreover, with tools like Neurosynth, term-based queries on multiple terms often lead to power failure, because too few studies from the database contribute to the statistical estimations. We design a probabilistic domain-specific language (DSL) standing on Datalog and one of its probabilistic extensions, CP-Logic, for expressing and solving complex logic-based queries. We show how CBMA databases can be encoded as probabilistic programs. Using the joint distribution of their Bayesian network translation, we show that solutions of queries on these programs compute the right probability distributions of voxel activations. We explain how recent lifted query processing algorithms make it possible to scale to the size of large neuroimaging data, where knowledge compilation techniques fail to solve queries fast enough for practical applications. Finally, we introduce a method for relating studies to terms probabilistically, leading to better solutions for two-term conjunctive queries (CQs) on smaller databases. We demonstrate results for two-term CQs, both on simulated meta-analysis databases and on the widely used Neurosynth database.

Complex Coordinate-Based Meta-Analysis with Probabilistic Programming

Despite recent progress on computer vision and natural language processing, developing a machine that can understand video story is still hard to achieve due to the intrinsic difficulty of video story. Moreover, researches on how to evaluate the degree of video understanding based on human cognitive process have not progressed as yet. In this paper, we propose a novel video question answering (Video QA) task, DramaQA, for a comprehensive understanding of the video story. The DramaQA focuses on two perspectives: 1) Hierarchical QAs as an evaluation metric based on the cognitive developmental stages of human intelligence. 2) Character-centered video annotations to model local coherence of the story. Our dataset is built upon the TV drama "Another Miss Oh" and it contains 17,983 QA pairs from 23,928 various length video clips, with each QA pair belonging to one of four difficulty levels. We provide 217,308 annotated images with rich character-centered annotations, including visual bounding boxes, behaviors and emotions of main characters, and coreference resolved scripts. Additionally, we suggest Multi-level Context Matching model which hierarchically understands character-centered representations of video to answer questions. We release our dataset and model publicly for research purposes, and we expect our work to provide a new perspective on video story understanding research.

DramaQA: Character-Centered Video Story Understanding with Hierarchical QA

Existing methods of adversarial attacks successfully generate adversarial examples to confuse Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) of image classification and object detection, resulting in wrong predictions. However, these methods are difficult to attack models of video object tracking, because the tracking algorithms could handle sequential information across video frames and the categories of targets tracked are normally unknown in advance. In this paper, we propose a Unified and Effective Network, named UEN, to attack visual object tracking models. 
There are several appealing characteristics of UEN:
(1) UEN could produce various invisible adversarial  perturbations according to different attack settings by using only one simple end-to-end network with three ingenious loss function;
(2) UEN could generate general visible adversarial patch patterns to attack the advanced trackers in the real-world;
(3) Extensive experiments show that UEN is able to attack many state-of-the-art trackers effectively (e.g. SiamRPN-based networks and DiMP) on popular tracking datasets including OTB100, UAV123, and GOT10K, making online real-time attacks possible. The attack results outperform the introduced baseline in terms of attacking ability and attacking efficiency.

A Unified Multi-Scenario Attacking Network for Visual Object Tracking

Understanding real-world networks is a core research endeavor within the last two decades. Network Creation Games are a promising approach for this from a game-theoretic perspective. In these games, selfish agents corresponding to nodes in a network strategically decide which links to form to optimize their centrality. Many versions have been introduced and analyzed, but none of them fits to modeling the evolution of social networks. In real-world social networks connections are often established by recommendations from common acquaintances or by a chain of such recommendations. Thus establishing and maintaining a contact with a friend of a friend is easier than connecting to complete strangers. This explains the high clustering, i.e., the abundance of triangles, in real-world social networks. 

We propose and analyze a network creation model inspired by real-world social networks. In our model edges are formed via bilateral consent of both endpoints and the cost for establishing and maintaining an edge is proportional to the distance of the endpoints before establishing the connection. We provide results for generic cost functions which essentially only must be convex functions in the distance of the endpoints without the respective edge. For this broad class of cost functions we provide many structural properties of equilibrium networks and prove (almost) tight bounds on the diameter, the Price of Anarchy and the Price of Stability. Moreover, as a proof-of-concept we show via experiments that the created equilibrium networks of our model indeed closely mimic real-world social networks. We observe degree distributions that seem to follow a power-law, high clustering, and low diameters. This can be seen as a promising first step towards game-theoretic network creation models that predict networks featuring all core real-world properties.

Selfish Creation of Social Networks

Many real-world applications require the prediction of long sequence time-series, such as electricity consumption planning. Long sequence time-series forecasting (LSTF) demands a high prediction capacity of the model, which is the ability to capture precise long-range dependency coupling between output and input efficiently. Recent studies have shown the potential of Transformer to increase the prediction capacity. However, there are several severe issues with Transformer that prevent it from being directly applicable to LSTF, including quadratic time complexity, high memory usage, and inherent limitation of the encoder-decoder architecture. To address these issues, we design an efficient transformer-based model for LSTF, named Informer, with three distinctive characteristics: (i) a ProbSparse self-attention mechanism, which achieves O(L log L) in time complexity and memory usage, and has comparable performance on sequences' dependency alignment. (ii) the self-attention distilling highlights dominating attention by halving cascading layer input, and efficiently handles extreme long input sequences. (iii) the generative style decoder, while conceptually simple, predicts the long time-series sequences at one forward operation rather than a step-by-step way, which drastically improves the inference speed of long-sequence predictions. Extensive experiments on four large-scale datasets demonstrate that Informer significantly outperforms existing methods and provides a new solution to the LSTF problem.

Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting

We expand the literature on the price of anarchy (PoA) of simultaneous item auctions by considering settings with correlated values; we do this via the fundamental economic model of interdependent values (IDV).
	It is well-known that in multi-item settings with private values, correlated values can lead to bad PoA, which can be polynomially large in the number of agents~n.
	In the more general model of IDV, we show that the PoA can be polynomially large even in single-item settings.
	On the positive side, we identify a natural condition on information dispersion in the market, which enables good PoA guarantees. 
	Under this condition, we show that for single-item settings, the PoA of standard mechanisms degrades gracefully.
	For settings with multiple items we show a separation between two domains: 
	If there are more buyers, we devise a new simultaneous item auction with good PoA, under limited information asymmetry.
	To the best of our knowledge, this is the first positive PoA result for correlated values in multi-item settings.
	The main technical difficulty in establishing this result is that the standard tool for establishing PoA results --- the smoothness framework --- is unsuitable for IDV settings, and so we must introduce new techniques to address the unique challenges imposed by such settings.
	In the domain of more items, we establish impossibility results even for surprisingly simple scenarios.

PoA of Simple Auctions with Interdependent Values

Understanding model performance on unlabeled data is a fundamental challenge of developing, deploying, and maintaining AI systems. Model performance is typically evaluated using test sets or periodic manual quality assessments, both of which require laborious manual data labeling. Automated performance prediction techniques aim to mitigate this burden, but potential inaccuracy and a lack of trust in their predictions has prevented their widespread adoption. We address this core problem of performance prediction uncertainty with a method to compute prediction intervals for model performance. Our methodology uses transfer learning to train an uncertainty model to estimate the uncertainty of model performance predictions. We evaluate our approach across a wide range of drift conditions and show substantial improvement over competitive baselines. We believe this result makes prediction intervals, and performance prediction in general, significantly more practical for real-world use.

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