United States

The cost of developing new drugs is estimated at billions of dollars per year. Identification of new molecules for drugs involves scanning existing bio-medical literature for relevant information. As the potential drug molecule is novel, retrieval of relevant information using a simple direct search is less likely to be productive. Identifying relevant papers is therefore a more complex and challenging task, which requires searching for information on molecules with similar characteristics to the novel drug. In this paper, we present the novel task of ranking documents based on novel molecule queries. Given a chemical molecular structure, we wish to rank medical papers that will contribute to a researcher&#39;s understanding of the novel molecule drug potential.
We present a set of ranking algorithms and molecular embeddings to address the task. An extensive evaluation of the algorithms is performed over the molecular embeddings, studying their performance on a benchmark retrieval corpus, which we share with the community.
Additionally, we introduce a heterogeneous edge-labeled graph embedding approach to address the molecule ranking task. Our evaluation shows that the proposed embedding model can significantly improve molecule ranking methods. The system is currently deployed in a targeted drug delivery and personalized medicine research laboratory.

AAAI 2022

Learning to Rank Articles for Molecular Queries

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*





<br>

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

The cost of developing new drugs is estimated at billions of dollars per year. Identification of new molecules for drugs involves scanning existing bio-medical literature for relevant information. As the potential drug molecule is novel, retrieval of relevant information using a simple direct search is less likely to be productive. Identifying relevant papers is therefore a more complex and challenging task, which requires searching for information on molecules with similar characteristics to the novel drug. In this paper, we present the novel task of ranking documents based on novel molecule queries. Given a chemical molecular structure, we wish to rank medical papers that will contribute to a researcher's understanding of the novel molecule drug potential.
We present a set of ranking algorithms and molecular embeddings to address the task. An extensive evaluation of the algorithms is performed over the molecular embeddings, studying their performance on a benchmark retrieval corpus, which we share with the community.
Additionally, we introduce a heterogeneous edge-labeled graph embedding approach to address the molecule ranking task. Our evaluation shows that the proposed embedding model can significantly improve molecule ranking methods. The system is currently deployed in a targeted drug delivery and personalized medicine research laboratory.

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. 

Product allocation in retail is the process of placing products throughout a store to connect consumers with relevant products. Discovering a good allocation strategy is challenging due to the scarcity of data and the high cost of experimentation in the physical world. Some work explores Reinforcement learning (RL) as a solution, but these approaches are often limited because of the sim2real problem. Learning policies from logged trajectories of a system is a key step forward for RL in physical systems. Recent work has shown that model-based offline RL can improve the effectiveness of offline policy estimation through uncertainty-penalized exploration. However, existing work assumes a continuous state space and access to a covariance matrix of the environment dynamics, which is not possible in the discrete case. To solve this problem, we propose a Bayesian model-based technique that naturally produces probabilistic estimates of the environment dynamics via the posterior predictive distribution, which we use for uncertainty-penalized exploration. We call our approach Posterior Penalized Offline Policy Optimization (PPOPO). We show that our world model better fits historical data due to informative priors, and that PPOPO outperforms other offline techniques in simulation and against real-world data.

Bayesian Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning for Product Allocation

Fuzzing is a widely-used testing technique to assure software robustness. However, automatic generation of high-quality test suites is challenging, especially for software that takes in highly-structured inputs, such as the compilers. Compiler fuzzing remains difficult as generating tons of syntactically and semantically valid programs is not trivial. Most previous methods either depend on human-crafted grammars or heuristics to learn partial language patterns. They both suffer from the completeness issue that is a classic puzzle in software testing. To mitigate the problem, we propose a knowledge-guided reinforcement learning-based approach to generating valid programs for compiler fuzzing. We first design a naive learning model which evolves with the sequential mutation rewards provided by a target compiler we test. By iterating the training cycle, the model learns to generate valid programs that can improve the testing efficacy as well. We implement the proposed method into a tool called ALPHAPROG. We analyze the framework with four different reward functions and our study reveal the effectiveness of  ALPHAPROG for compiler testing. We also reported two important bugs for a compiler production that were confirmed and addressed by the project owner, which further demonstrates ALPHAPROG's applied value in practice.

ALPHAPROG: Reinforcement Generation of Valid Programs for Compiler Fuzzing

African smallholder farmers have struggled with low agricultural productivity for decades, partly due to their inability to proactively assess irrigation needs in their farms in the face of long-term climate change. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by employing data-driven techniques to develop forecasting tools for three widely used crop-productivity related variables (i.e., actual evapotranspiration, reference evapotranspiration, and net primary production), which can then be used by farmers to take corrective actions on their farms. Prior work in this domain, despite using data-driven methods, suffers from two major limitations: (i) they mainly focus on estimating variable values (as opposed to forecasting the future); and (ii) they mostly use classical Machine Learning (ML) prediction models, despite the abundance of data sufficient to train sophisticated deep learning models. To fill this research gap, we collaborate with PlantVillage, the world's leading non-profit agricultural knowledge delivery platform for African farmers, to identify âˆ¼2,200 smallholder farm locations, and gather remote-sensed data of these farms over a period of five years. Next, we propose CLIMATES, a meta-algorithm leveraging structural insights about temporal patterns of this time-series data to accurately forecast their future values. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate its performance in this domain. Our experimental results show that CLIMATES outperforms several state-of-the-art time-series forecasting models. We also provide insights about the poor performance of some competing models. Our work is being evaluated by officials at PlantVillage for potential future deployment as an early warning system in East Africa. We release the code at https://github.com/maryam-tabar/CLIMATES.

Mitigating Low Agricultural Productivity of Smallholder Farms in Africa: Time-Series Forecasting for Environmental Stressors

Micronutrient deficiency (MND), which is a form of malnutrition that can have serious health consequences, is difficult to diagnose in early stages without blood draws, which are expensive and time-consuming to collect and process. It is even more difficult at a public health scale seeking to identify regions at higher risk of MND. To provide data more widely and frequently, we propose an accurate, scalable, low-cost, and interpretable regional-level MND prediction system. Specifically, our work is the first to use satellite data, such as forest cover, weather, and presence of water, to predict deficiency of micronutrients such as iron, Vitamin B12, and Vitamin A, directly from their biomarkers. We use real-world, ground truth biomarker data collected from four different regions across Madagascar for training, and demonstrate that satellite data are viable for predicting regional-level MND, surprisingly exceeding the performance of baseline predictions based only on survey responses. Our method could be broadly applied to other countries where satellite data are available, and potentially create high societal impact if these predictions are used by policy makers, public health officials, or healthcare providers.

Micronutrient Deficiency Prediction via Publicly Available Satellite Data

We propose PaintTeR, our Paintings TextRank algorithm for extracting art-related text spans from passages on paintings. PaintTeR combines a lexicon of painting words curated automatically through distant supervision with random walks on a large-scale word co-occurrence graph for ranking passage spans for artistic characteristics. The spans extracted with PaintTeR are used in state-of-the-art Question Generation and Reading Comprehension models for designing an interactive aid that enables gallery and museum visitors focus on the artistic elements of paintings. We provide experiments on two datasets of expert-written passages on paintings to showcase the effectiveness of PaintTeR. Evaluations by both gallery experts as well as crowdworkers indicate that our proposed algorithm can be used to
select relevant and interesting art-centered questions. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work to effectively fine-tune question generation models using minimal supervision for a low-resource, specialized context such as gallery visits.

PaintTeR: Automatic Extraction of Text Spans for Generating Art-Centered Questions

As climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of climate and weather hazards, improving detection and monitoring of flood events is a priority. Being weather independent and high resolution, Sentinel 1 (S1) radar satellite imagery data has become the go to data source to detect flood events accurately. However, current methods are either based on fixed thresholds to differentiate water from land or train Artificial Intelligence (AI) models based on only S1 data, despite the availability of many other relevant data sources publicly. These models also lack comprehensive validations on out-of-sample data and deployment at scale.  In this study, we investigated whether adding extra input layers could increase the performance of AI models in detecting floods from S1 data. We also provide performance across a range of 11 historical events, with results ranging between 0.93 and 0.97 accuracy, 0.53 and 0.81 IoU, and 0.68 and 0.89 F1 scores. Finally, we show the infrastructure we developed to deploy our AI models at scale to satisfy a range of use cases and user requests.

Deploying an Artificial Intelligence Application to Detect Flood from Sentinel 1 Data

In recent years, companies in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry have started exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) can reduce time-consuming and repetitive tasks. One use case that can benefit from the adoption of AI is the determination of quantities in floor plans. This information is required for several planning and construction steps. Currently, the task requires companies to invest a significant amount of manual effort. Either digital floor plans are not available for existing buildings, or the formats cannot be processed due to lack of standardization. In this paper, we therefore propose a human-in-the-loop approach for the detection and classification of symbols in floor plans. The developed system calculates a measure of uncertainty for each detected symbol which is used to acquire the knowledge of human experts for those symbols that are difficult to classify. We evaluate our approach with a real-world dataset provided by an industry partner and find that the selective acquisition of human expert knowledge enhances the model's performance by up to 10.5%â€”resulting in an overall prediction accuracy of 92.1% on average. We further design a pipeline for the generation of synthetic training data that allows the systems to be adapted to new construction projects with minimal manual effort. Overall, our work supports professionals in the AEC industry on their journey to the data-driven generation of business value.

Designing a Human-in-the-Loop System for Object Detection in Floor Plans

We consider the car key localization task using ultra-wideband (UWB) signal measurements. Given labeled data for a certain car, we train a deep classifier to make the prediction about the new points. However, due to the differences in car models and possible environmental effects that might alter the signal propagation, data collection requires considerable effort for each car. In particular, we consider a situation where the data for the new car is collected only in one environment, so we have to utilize the measurements in other environments from a different car. We propose a framework based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate missing parts of the data and train the classifier on it, mitigating the necessity to collect the real data. We show that the model trained on the synthetic data performs better than the baseline trained on the collected measurements only. Furthermore, our model closes the gap to the level of performance achieved when we would have the information about the new car in multiple environments by 35%.

Domain Reconstruction for UWB Car Key Localization Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Improving health equity is an urgent task for our society. The advent of mobile clinics plays an important role in enhancing health equity, as they can provide easier access to preventive healthcare for patients from disadvantaged populations. For effective functioning of mobile clinics, accurate prediction of demand (expected number of individuals visiting mobile clinic) is the key to their daily operations and staff/resource allocation. Despite its importance, there have been very limited studies on predicting demand of mobile clinics. To the best of our knowledge, we are among the first to explore this area, using AI-based techniques. A crucial challenge in this task is that there are no known existing data sources from which we can extract useful information to account for the exogenous factors that may affect the demand, while considering protection of client privacy. We propose a novel methodology that completely uses public data sources to extract the features, with several new components that are designed to improve the prediction. Empirical evaluation on a real-world dataset from the mobile clinic The Family Van shows that, by leveraging publicly available data (which introduces no extra monetary cost to the mobile clinics), our AI-based method achieves 26.4% - 51.8% lower Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) than the historical average-based estimation (which is presently employed by mobile clinics like The Family Van). Our algorithm makes it possible for mobile clinics to plan proactively, rather than reactively, as what has been doing.

Using Public Data to Predict Demand for Mobile Health Clinics

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) play a key role in identifying the cause of an issue and preforming remediation steps to resolve it. After an issue is reported, SREs come together in a virtual room (collaboration platform) to triage the issue. While doing so, they leave behind a wealth of information, in the form of conversations, which can be used later for triaging similar issues. However, usability of these conversations offer challenges due to them being and scarcity of conversation utterance label. This paper presents a novel approach for issue artefact extraction from noisy conversations with minimal labelled data. We propose a combination of unsupervised and supervised models with minimal human intervention that leverages domain knowledge to predict artefacts for a small amount of conversation data and use that for fine-tuning an already pre-trained language model for artefact prediction on a large amount of conversation data. Experimental results on our dataset show that the proposed ensemble of the unsupervised and supervised models is better than using either one of them individually. We also present a deployment case study of the proposed artefact prediction.

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