Digital Commons Network^™

Is A Pretrained Model The Answer To Situational Awareness Detection On Social Media?, Siaw Ling Lo, Kahhe Lee, Yuhao Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media can be valuable for extracting information about an event or incident on the ground. However, the vast amount of content shared, and the linguistic variants of languages used on social media make it challenging to identify important situational awareness content to aid in decision-making for first responders. In this study, we assess whether pretrained models can be used to address the aforementioned challenges on social media. Various pretrained models, including static word embedding (such as Word2Vec and GloVe) and contextualized word embedding (such as DistilBERT) are studied in detail. According to our findings, a vanilla DistilBERT pretrained language …

Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence In The Banking Sector, Krishnaraj Arul Obuchettiar, Alan @ Ali Madjelisi Megargel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Changes in technology have shaped how corporate and retail businesses have evolved, alongside the customers’ preferences. The advent of smart digital devices and social media has shaped how consumers interact and transact with their financial institutions over the past two decades. With the rapid evolution of new technologies and customers' growing preference for digital engagement with financial institutions, organizations need to adopt and align with emerging technologies that support speed, accuracy, efficiency, and security in a user-friendly manner. Today, consumers want hyper-personalized interactions that are more frequent and proactive. Moreover, financial institutions have a growing need to cater to consumers' …

Implementation Of Empath X Sla Predictive Tool For A Government Agency, Hui Shan Lee, Shankararaman, Venky, Eng Lieh Ouh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Service Level Agreement (SLA) plays a significant role in the relationship between citizens and the government. It stipulates the quality levels required for the meaningful interaction between the two parties. Most SLA predictive models consider end-to-end duration and frequency of failed service requests as model inputs with little research on the analysis of textual details of the service request. This is an issue for government bodies as the latter do not just want to meet SLA, but also be proactive by knowing the citizens before assisting them. Inclusion of textual data potentially answer to this requirement of knowing the citizen …

Traffic Rule Formalization For Autonomous Vehicle, Hanif Bhuiyan, Guido Governatori, Andry Rakotonirainy, Meng Weng Wong, Avishkar Mahajan

Centre for Computational Law (2022-2025)

This study devised and implemented a Defeasible Deontic Logic (DDL)-based formalization approach for translating traffic rules into a machine-computable (M/C) format and thus solving rule issues: rule vagueness (open texture expressions) and exceptions in rules. The resulting M/C format of traffic rules can be utilized for automatic traffic rule reasoning to assist the Autonomous Vehicle (AV) in making legal decisions. The method incorporates the components and behaviour of regulations based on the rule's obligation, prohibition, and permission activities.

The need for the encoding methodology is motivated by the desire for automated reasoning over Autonomous Vehicle information involving traffic rules.

A …

Assessment Design For Digital Education: An Analytics-Based Authentic Assessment Approach, Lim Ming Soon Tristan, Gottipati Swapna, Michelle L. F. Cheong, Christopher Pang, Jun Wei Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study looks to identify an assessment design construct that overcomes known issues in authentic assessment design practices in digital education. These include lack of "freedom-of-choice", lack of focus on multimodal nature of the digital process, and shortage of effective feedbacks. This study proposes an authentic assessment, that combines gamification (G) with heutagogy (H) and multimodality (M) of assessments, building upon learning analytics (A), known as GHMA. Proposed assessment design is a skills-oriented game-based assessment approach. Learners can determine their own goals and create individualized multimodal artefacts; receive cognitive challenge through cognitively complex tasks structured in gamified non-linear learning paths; …

Learning Dynamic Multimodal Implicit And Explicit Networks For Multiple Financial Tasks, Meng Kiat Gary Ang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many financial f orecasting d eep l earning w orks focus on the single task of predicting stock returns for trading with unimodal numerical inputs. Investment and risk management however involves multiple financial t asks - f orecasts o f expected returns, risks and correlations of multiple stocks in portfolios, as well as important events affecting different stocks - to support decision making. Moreover, stock returns are influenced by large volumes of non-stationary time-series information from a variety of modalities and the propagation of such information across inter-company relationship networks. Such networks could be explicit - observed co-occurrences in online …

R2f: A General Retrieval, Reading And Fusion Framework For Document-Level Natural Language Inference, Hao Wang, Yixin Cao, Yangguang Li, Zhen Huang, Kun Wang, Jing Shao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Document-level natural language inference (DocNLI) is a new challenging task in natural language processing, aiming at judging the entailment relationship between a pair of hypothesis and premise documents. Current datasets and baselines largely follow sentence-level settings, but fail to address the issues raised by longer documents. In this paper, we establish a general solution, named Retrieval, Reading and Fusion (R2F) framework, and a new setting, by analyzing the main challenges of DocNLI: interpretability, long-range dependency, and cross-sentence inference. The basic idea of the framework is to simplify document-level task into a set of sentence-level tasks, and improve both performance and …

Towards Reinterpreting Neural Topic Models Via Composite Activations, Jia Peng Lim, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most Neural Topic Models (NTM) use a variational auto-encoder framework producing K topics limited to the size of the encoder’s output. These topics are interpreted through the selection of the top activated words via the weights or reconstructed vector of the decoder that are directly connected to each neuron. In this paper, we present a model-free two-stage process to reinterpret NTM and derive further insights on the state of the trained model. Firstly, building on the original information from a trained NTM, we generate a pool of potential candidate “composite topics” by exploiting possible co-occurrences within the original set of …

Biasfinder: Metamorphic Test Generation To Uncover Bias For Sentiment Analysis Systems, Muhammad Hilmi Asyrofi, Zhou Yang, Imam Nur Bani Yusuf, Hong Jin Kang, Thung Ferdian, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Artificial intelligence systems, such as Sentiment Analysis (SA) systems, typically learn from large amounts of data that may reflect human bias. Consequently, such systems may exhibit unintended demographic bias against specific characteristics (e.g., gender, occupation, country-of-origin, etc.). Such bias manifests in an SA system when it predicts different sentiments for similar texts that differ only in the characteristic of individuals described. To automatically uncover bias in SA systems, this paper presents BiasFinder, an approach that can discover biased predictions in SA systems via metamorphic testing. A key feature of BiasFinder is the automatic curation of suitable templates from any given …

A Unified Dialogue User Simulator For Few-Shot Data Augmentation, Dazhen Wan, Zheng Zhang, Qi Zhu, Lizi Liao, Minlie Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Pre-trained language models have shown superior performance in task-oriented dialogues. However, existing datasets are on limited scales, which cannot support large-scale pre-training. Fortunately, various data augmentation methods have been developed to augment largescale task-oriented dialogue corpora. However, they heavily rely on annotated data in the target domain, which require a tremendous amount of data collection and human labeling work. In this paper, we build a unified dialogue user simulation model by pre-training on several publicly available datasets. The model can then be tuned on a target domain with fewshot data. The experiments on a target dataset across multiple domains show …

Conreader: Exploring Implicit Relations In Contracts For Contract Clause Extraction, Weiwen Xu, Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, Wenlong Zhao, Tat-Seng Chua, Wai Lam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study automatic Contract Clause Extraction (CCE) by modeling implicit relations in legal contracts. Existing CCE methods mostly treat contracts as plain text, creating a substantial barrier to understanding contracts of high complexity. In this work, we first comprehensively analyze the complexity issues of contracts and distill out three implicit relations commonly found in contracts, namely, 1) Long-range Context Relation that captures the correlations of distant clauses; 2) Term-Definition Relation that captures the relation between important terms with their corresponding definitions; and 3) Similar Clause Relation that captures the similarities between clauses of the same type. Then we propose a …

Pacific: Towards Proactive Conversational Question Answering Over Tabular And Textual Data In Finance, Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, Wenxuan Zhang, Wai Lam, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To facilitate conversational question answering (CQA) over hybrid contexts in finance, we present a new dataset, named PACIFIC. Compared with existing CQA datasets, PACIFIC exhibits three key features: (i) proactivity, (ii) numerical reasoning, and (iii) hybrid context of tables and text. A new task is defined accordingly to study Proactive Conversational Question Answering (PCQA), which combines clarification question generation and CQA. In addition, we propose a novel method, namely UniPCQA, to adapt a hybrid format of input and output content in PCQA into the Seq2Seq problem, including the reformulation of the numerical reasoning process as code generation. UniPCQA performs multi-task …

An End-To-End Pipeline From Law Text To Logical Formulas, Aarne Ranta, Inari Listenmaa, Jerrold Soh, Meng Weng Wong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

We propose a pipeline for converting natural English law texts into logical formulas via a series of structural representations. Text texts are first parsed using a formal grammar derived from light-weight annotations. An intermediate representation called assembly logic is then used for logical interpretation and supports translations to different back-end logics and visualisations. The approach, while rule-based and explainable, is also robust: it can deliver useful results from day one, but allows subsequent refinements and variations.

Man-Machine Dialogues: Computer Representations And Appropriations In The Soviet Union And The United States, Ksenia Tatarchenko

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

What brought a plurality of information societies into existence? The global process of computerizations went hand in hand with political competition between the First and Second World during the second half of the twentieth century. Non-capitalist information societies were imagined and experienced under the socialistregimes alongside and in interaction with their better-known capitalist counterparts. Both capitalism and socialism asserted the power of the new machines to depict and create a better world.

Prompting For Multimodal Hateful Meme Classification, Rui Cao, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Wen-Haw Chong, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hateful meme classification is a challenging multimodal task that requires complex reasoning and contextual background knowledge. Ideally, we could leverage an explicit external knowledge base to supplement contextual and cultural information in hateful memes. However, there is no known explicit external knowledge base that could provide such hate speech contextual information. To address this gap, we propose PromptHate, a simple yet effective prompt-based model that prompts pre-trained language models (PLMs) for hateful meme classification. Specifically, we construct simple prompts and provide a few in-context examples to exploit the implicit knowledge in the pretrained RoBERTa language model for hateful meme classification. …

Learning Generalizable Models For Vehicle Routing Problems Via Knowledge Distillation, Jieyi Bi, Yining Ma, Jiahai Wang, Zhiguang Cao, Jinbiao Chen, Yuan Sun, Yeow Meng Chee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent neural methods for vehicle routing problems always train and test the deep models on the same instance distribution (i.e., uniform). To tackle the consequent cross-distribution generalization concerns, we bring the knowledge distillation to this field and propose an Adaptive Multi-Distribution Knowledge Distillation (AMDKD) scheme for learning more generalizable deep models. Particularly, our AMDKD leverages various knowledge from multiple teachers trained on exemplar distributions to yield a light-weight yet generalist student model. Meanwhile, we equip AMDKD with an adaptive strategy that allows the student to concentrate on difficult distributions, so as to absorb hard-to-master knowledge more effectively. Extensive experimental results …

Interventional Training For Out-Of-Distribution Natural Language Understanding, Sicheng Yu, Jing Jiang, Hao Zhang, Yulei Niu, Qianru Sun, Lidong Bing

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Out-of-distribution (OOD) settings are used to measure a model’s performance when the distribution of the test data is different from that of the training data. NLU models are known to suffer in OOD settings (Utama et al., 2020b). We study this issue from the perspective of causality, which sees confounding bias as the reason for models to learn spurious correlations. While a common solution is to perform intervention, existing methods handle only known and single confounder, but in many NLU tasks the confounders can be both unknown and multifactorial. In this paper, we propose a novel interventional training method called …

Conversation Disentanglement With Bi-Level Contrastive Learning, Chengyu Huang, Zheng Zhang, Hao Fei, Lizi Liao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conversation disentanglement aims to group utterances into detached sessions, which is a fundamental task in processing multi-party conversations. Existing methods have two main drawbacks. First, they overemphasize pairwise utterance relations but pay inadequate attention to the utterance-to-context relation modeling. Second, a huge amount of human annotated data is required for training, which is expensive to obtain in practice. To address these issues, we propose a general disentangle model based on bi-level contrastive learning. It brings closer utterances in the same session while encourages each utterance to be near its clustered session prototypes in the representation space. Unlike existing approaches, our …

What Should Streamers Communicate In Livestream E-Commerce? The Effects Of Social Interactions On Live Streaming Performance, Danyang Song, Xi Chen, Zhiling Guo, Xiao Liu Liu, Ruijin. Jin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Compared with traditional e-commerce, livestreaming e-commerce is characterized by direct and intimate communication between streamers and consumers that stimulates instant social interactions. This study focuses on streamers’ three types of information exchange (i.e., product information, social conversation, and social solicitation) and examines their roles in driving both short-term and long-term livestreaming performance (i.e., sales and customer base growth). We find that the informational role of product information (nonpromotional and promotional) is beneficial not only to sales performance, but also to the growth of the customer base. We also find that social conversation has a relationship-building effect that positively impacts both …

Dialogconv: A Lightweight Fully Convolutional Network For Multi-View Response Selection, Yongkang Liu, Shi Feng, Wei Gao, Daling Wang, Yifei Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Current end-to-end retrieval-based dialogue systems are mainly based on Recurrent Neural Networks or Transformers with attention mechanisms. Although promising results have been achieved, these models often suffer from slow inference or huge number of parameters. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight fully convolutional architecture, called DialogConv, for response selection. DialogConv is exclusively built on top of convolution to extract matching features of context and response. Dialogues are modeled in 3D views, where DialogConv performs convolution operations on embedding view, word view and utterance view to capture richer semantic information from multiple contextual views. On the four benchmark datasets, …

International Commercial Mediation And Dispute Resolution Contracts, Nadja Alexander, Natasha Tunkel

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Every transaction has the potential to go wrong and international commercial contracts are not spared this plight. It is when an international commercial contract fails – irrespective of the reasons, that the impact of different legal and cultural backgrounds of the parties come to light. The obvious venue for commercial disputes to be decided is generally understood to be in court (litigation)2 or before an arbitral tribunal (arbitration)3. However, there are numerous other alternative dispute mechanisms4 available to parties that are less well known and also deserve consideration; not least because they offer parties methods of resolving the dispute between …

Vlstereoset: A Study Of Stereotypical Bias In Pre-Trained Vision-Language Models, Kankan Zhou, Yibin Lai, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we study how to measure stereotypical bias in pre-trained vision-language models. We leverage a recently released text-only dataset, StereoSet, which covers a wide range of stereotypical bias, and extend it into a vision-language probing dataset called VLStereoSet to measure stereotypical bias in vision-language models. We analyze the differences between text and image and propose a probing task that detects bias by evaluating a model’s tendency to pick stereotypical statements as captions for anti-stereotypical images. We further define several metrics to measure both a vision-language model’s overall stereotypical bias and its intra-modal and inter-modal bias. Experiments on six …

Itiger: An Automatic Issue Title Generation Tool, Ting Zhang, Ivana Clairine Irsan, Thung Ferdian, Donggyun Han, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In both commercial and open-source software, bug reports or issues are used to track bugs or feature requests. However, the quality of issues can differ a lot. Prior research has found that bug reports with good quality tend to gain more attention than the ones with poor quality. As an essential component of an issue, title quality is an important aspect of issue quality. Moreover, issues are usually presented in a list view, where only the issue title and some metadata are present. In this case, a concise and accurate title is crucial for readers to grasp the general concept …

Autonomous Vehicle Innovation And Implications On Adoption, Liability And Policy, Using Quantum Technologies And Artificial Wisdom, Chia Jie Jun Jeremy

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This paper will explore the use of two new innovations for the issues facing autonomous vehicles (AV), those of quantum technologies and artificial wisdom. The issue of delayed at-scale commercialization and adoption of autonomous vehicles due to the extensive dynamic capability required to derive an optimal process solution for any complex, dynamic and adaptive autonomous vehicle ecosystem is shown to be resolved by the use of these innovations, will be shown to be more widely applicable for other issues for AV and for any scenario where automated decision making is required.

QC might open up the door for the application …

Meta-Complementing The Semantics Of Short Texts In Neural Topic Models, Ce Zhang, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Topic models infer latent topic distributions based on observed word co-occurrences in a text corpus. While typically a corpus contains documents of variable lengths, most previous topic models treat documents of different lengths uniformly, assuming that each document is sufficiently informative. However, shorter documents may have only a few word co-occurrences, resulting in inferior topic quality. Some other previous works assume that all documents are short, and leverage external auxiliary data, e.g., pretrained word embeddings and document connectivity. Orthogonal to existing works, we remedy this problem within the corpus itself by proposing a Meta-Complement Topic Model, which improves topic quality …

Politically Speaking: Ethnic Language And Audience Opinion In Southeast Asia, Jacob I. Ricks

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Language is one of the quintessential markers of ethnicity. It allows co-ethnics to easily identify one another and underscores in-group and out-group boundaries. Recognizing this, politicians frequently employ ethnic tongues to enhance their political appeal. To what extent does this shape the opinions of their audiences? Utilizing a survey experiment, I test the impact of an ethnic tongue against that of the common political language among the Javanese in Indonesia, the Tagalog in the Philippines, and the Isan people in Thailand. The experiment demonstrates that the ethnic language has a significant impact in both Thailand and Indonesia, but there appears …

Recipegen++: An Automated Trigger Action Programs Generator, Imam Nur Bani Yusuf, Diyanah Abdul Jamal, Lingxiao Jiang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Trigger Action Programs (TAPs) are event-driven rules that allow users to automate smart-devices and internet services. Users can write TAPs by specifying triggers and actions from a set of predefined channels and functions. Despite its simplicity, composing TAPs can still be challenging for users due to the enormous search space of available triggers and actions. The growing popularity of TAPs is followed by the increasing number of supported devices and services, resulting in a huge number of possible combinations between triggers and actions. Motivated by such a fact, we improve our prior work and propose RecipeGen++, a deep-learning-based approach that …

Investigating Bloom's Cognitive Skills In Foundation And Advanced Programming Courses From Students' Discussions, Joel Jer Wei Lim, Gottipati Swapna, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Programming courses provide students with the skills to develop complex business applications. Teaching and learning programming is challenging, and collaborative learning is proposed to help with this challenge. Online discussion forums promote networking with other learners such that they can build knowledge collaboratively. It aids students open their horizons of thought processes to acquire cognitive skills. Cognitive analysis of discussion is critical to understand students' learning process. In this paper, we propose Bloom's taxonomy based cognitive model for programming discussion forums. We present machine learning (ML) based solution to extract students' cognitive skills. Our evaluations on compupting courses show that …

How To Formulate Specific How-To Questions In Software Development?, Mingwei Liu, Xin Peng, Andrian Marcus, Christoph Treude, Jiazhan Xie, Huanjun Xu, Yanjun Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers often ask how-to questions using search engines, technical Q&A communities, and interactive Q&A systems to seek help for specific programming tasks. However, they often do not formulate the questions in a specific way, making it hard for the systems to return the best answers. We propose an approach (TaskKG4Q) that interactively helps developers formulate a programming related how-to question. TaskKG4Q is using a programming task knowledge graph (task KG in short) mined from Stack Overflow questions, which provides a hierarchical conceptual structure for tasks in terms of [actions], [objects], and [constraints]. An empirical evaluation of the intrinsic quality of …

Ergo: Event Relational Graph Transformer For Document-Level Event Causality Identification, Meiqi Chen, Yixin Cao, Kunquan Deng, Mukai Li, Kun Wang, Jing Shao, Yan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI) aims to identify event-event causal relations in a document. Existing works usually build an event graph for global reasoning across multiple sentences. However, the edges between events have to be carefully designed through heuristic rules or external tools. In this paper, we propose a novel Event Relational Graph TransfOrmer (ERGO) framework1 for DECI, to ease the graph construction and improve it over the noisy edge issue. Different from conventional event graphs, we define a pair of events as a node and build a complete event relational graph without any prior knowledge or tools. This naturally …