Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

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 …

Mitigating Popularity Bias In Recommendation With Unbalanced Interactions: A Gradient Perspective, Weijieying Ren, Lei Wang, Kunpeng Liu, Ruocheng Guo, Ee-Peng Lim, Yanjie Fu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recommender systems learn from historical user-item interactions to identify preferred items for target users. These observed interactions are usually unbalanced following a long-tailed distribution. Such long-tailed data lead to popularity bias to recommend popular but not personalized items to users. We present a gradient perspective to understand two negative impacts of popularity bias in recommendation model optimization: (i) the gradient direction of popular item embeddings is closer to that of positive interactions, and (ii) the magnitude of positive gradient for popular items are much greater than that of unpopular items. To address these issues, we propose a simple yet efficient …

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 …

Innovative And Effective Spreadsheet Tool For Learning Sentiment Analysis And Prediction, Michelle L. F. Cheong, Jean Yun-Chen Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we describe a spreadsheet tool which was developed and implemented to teach sentiment analysis and prediction to university students who are less technically inclined. We adopted the “Use-Modify-Create” cycle to ensure that the students learn the computing concepts and practices in a progressive and active learning manner, and we evaluated the effectiveness of the tool using the Learning Object Evaluation Scale for Students (LOES-S). The evaluation shows that our tool performed well in terms of quality, learn and engagement constructs, and our paired T-test shows strong evidence that, on average, the course module with the tool does …

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, …

Curiosity-Driven And Victim-Aware Adversarial Policies, Chen Gong, Zhou Yang, Yunpeng Bai, Jieke Shi, Arunesh Sinha, Bowen Xu, David Lo, Xinwen Hou, Guoliang Fan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent years have witnessed great potential in applying Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in various challenging applications, such as autonomous driving, nuclear fusion control, complex game playing, etc. However, recently researchers have revealed that deep reinforcement learning models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks: malicious attackers can train adversarial policies to tamper with the observations of a well-trained victim agent, the latter of which fails dramatically when faced with such an attack. Understanding and improving the adversarial robustness of deep reinforcement learning is of great importance in enhancing the quality and reliability of a wide range of DRL-enabled systems. In this paper, …

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 …

End-To-End Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning With Integrated Subgoal Discovery, Shubham Pateria, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chai Quek

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) is a promising approach to perform long-horizon goal-reaching tasks by decomposing the goals into subgoals. In a holistic HRL paradigm, an agent must autonomously discover such subgoals and also learn a hierarchy of policies that uses them to reach the goals. Recently introduced end-to-end HRL methods accomplish this by using the higher-level policy in the hierarchy to directly search the useful subgoals in a continuous subgoal space. However, learning such a policy may be challenging when the subgoal space is large. We propose integrated discovery of salient subgoals (LIDOSS), an end-to-end HRL method with an integrated …

Coresets For Vertical Federated Learning: Regularized Linear Regression And K-Means Clustering, Lingxiao Huang, Zhize Li, Jialin Sun, Haoyu Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Vertical federated learning (VFL), where data features are stored in multiple parties distributively, is an important area in machine learning. However, the communication complexity for VFL is typically very high. In this paper, we propose a unified framework by constructing coresets in a distributed fashion for communication-efficient VFL. We study two important learning tasks in the VFL setting: regularized linear regression and $k$-means clustering, and apply our coreset framework to both problems. We theoretically show that using coresets can drastically alleviate the communication complexity, while nearly maintain the solution quality. Numerical experiments are conducted to corroborate our theoretical findings.

Beer: Fast O(1/T) Rate For Decentralized Nonconvex Optimization With Communication Compression, Haoyu Zhao, Boyue Li, Zhize Li, Peter Richtarik, Yuejie Chi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Communication efficiency has been widely recognized as the bottleneck for large-scale decentralized machine learning applications in multi-agent or federated environments. To tackle the communication bottleneck, there have been many efforts to design communication-compressed algorithms for decentralized nonconvex optimization, where the clients are only allowed to communicate a small amount of quantized information (aka bits) with their neighbors over a predefined graph topology. Despite significant efforts, the state-of-the-art algorithm in the nonconvex setting still suffers from a slower rate of convergence $O((G/T)^{2/3})$ compared with their uncompressed counterpart, where $G$ measures the data heterogeneity across different clients, and $T$ is the number …

Soteriafl: A Unified Framework For Private Federated Learning With Communication Compression, Zhize Li, Haoyu Zhao, Boyue Li, Yuejie Chi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To enable large-scale machine learning in bandwidth-hungry environments such as wireless networks, significant progress has been made recently in designing communication-efficient federated learning algorithms with the aid of communication compression. On the other end, privacy-preserving, especially at the client level, is another important desideratum that has not been addressed simultaneously in the presence of advanced communication compression techniques yet. In this paper, we propose a unified framework that enhances the communication efficiency of private federated learning with communication compression. Exploiting both general compression operators and local differential privacy, we first examine a simple algorithm that applies compression directly to differentially-private …

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 …

Enhancing Literacy Education With Narrative Richness In The Metaverse, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Daniel Jiandong Shen, Umawathy Techanamurthy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Through an education-centric metaverse learning application, this research aims to assess the use of narrative richness to deliver media, language, and sustainability literacy education. The 21st-century learning needs require teaching and learning resources to be shared and managed more effectively across institutions. The use of metaverse features can help to manage varying narrative richness to boost learning reflection and attitude. Despite its potential, it is unclear how narrative richness in the metaverse can enhance teaching and learning. The study proposed in this research, which includes institutions from four Asian countries, is driven by this knowledge and evidence gap. Module leaders …

Rural America Is Still Technologically Behind: Why It Matters Now More Than Ever, Paul Force-Emery Mackie

Social Work Department Publications

No abstract provided.

Farmer Adoption Of Advanced Technology In Agribusiness, Justin W. Belcher

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Normally, family-owned farms are slow to adopt advanced technologies though these technologies can provide several benefits to the farm and have the potential to increase farm production volumes to help meet future population growth. The goal of this study was to document the factors that influence the adoption decision of advanced technologies by family-owned farms and what strategies can be used to motivate adoption. Case study research was conducted to gather data in a more structured way from family-owned farms typically excluded from past research for the purpose of comparing similarities across similar and dissimilar farms. For generalizing similarities, a …

Designing A Messaging Strategy To Improve Information Security Policy Compliance, Federico Giovannetti

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Lack of employee compliance with information security policies is a key factor driving security incidents. Information security practitioners struggle to enforce policy compliance while employees try to curtail safeguards in favor of expediency and other perceived business goals. Several studies have shown individual and organizational factors influencing this type of employee behavior. However, few have recommended management-level interventions that can be used as a solution framework by information security practitioners.

This research utilized the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology to develop a management-level intervention based on a messaging strategy that aims to help information security practitioners improve the information security …

Redefining Research In Nanotechnology Simulations: A New Approach To Data Caching And Analysis, Darin Tsai, Alan Zhang, Aloysius Rebeiro

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

Mining Product Textual Data For Recommendation Explanations, Le Trung Hoang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Recommendation explanations help to make sense of recommendations, increasing the likelihood of adoption. Here, we are interested in mining product textual data, an unstructured data type, coming from manufacturers, sellers, or consumers, appearing in many places including title, summary, description, review, question and answers, etc., can be a rich source of information to explain the recommendation. As the explanation task could be decoupled from that of recommendation objective, we can categorize recommendation explanation into integrated approach, that uses a single interpretable model to produce both recommendation and explanation, or pipeline approach, that uses a post-hoc explanation model to produce explanation …

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 …