ConVEx: Data-Efficient and Few-Shot Slot Labeling

We propose ConVEx (Conversational Value Extractor), an efficient pretraining and fine-tuning neural approach for slot-labeling dialog tasks. Instead of relying on more general pretraining objectives from prior work (e.g., language modeling, response selection), ConVEx's pretraining objective, a novel pairwise cloze task using Reddit data, is well aligned with its intended usage on sequence labeling tasks. This enables learning domain-specific slot labelers by simply fine-tuning decoding layers of the pretrained general-purpose sequence labeling model, while the majority of the pretrained model's parameters are kept frozen. We report state-of-the-art performance of ConVEx across a range of diverse domains and data sets for dialog slot-labeling, with the largest gains in the most challenging, few-shot setups. We believe that ConVEx's reduced pretraining times (i.e., only 18 hours on 12 GPUs) and cost, along with its efficient fine-tuning and strong performance, promise wider portability and scalability for data-efficient sequence-labeling tasks in general.

Tectonic Evolution of The Western Edge of The Palmyride Chain (Annabk Anticline, Syria) From Paleostress Data: Geodynamical Implications

Annabk anticline lies in the westernmost side of the Palmyride chain, which is located in the northern Arabian Plate. It is a 70 km long, NE-SW oriented asymmetrical anticline, belonging to the southern part of the Palmyrides. The stratigraphical column cropping out in the domain of this anticline consists of Cretaceous and Paleogene strata of marine facies, together with Neogene and Quaternary continental deposits. The aim of this study is to investigate the tectonic evolution of this area, by reconstructing its paleostress history, through analysing the brittle deformations, which were recorded in the outcropping rocks.

Paleostress Evolution in the Mrah Anticline «Northern Palmyride fold belt. (Syria)»

The study was made in the region of the NNE-SSW trending Mrah anticline. This anticline is one of the main anticlines belonging to the Northern part of the Palmyride fold belt, lying amid Syria, in the northern Arabian plate. The lithostratigraphic column of the study area consists of the marine sediments of upper Cretaceous and lower Paleogene age. The field study involved the description and measurement of the brittle deformations in ٢٥ sites, which are distributed stratigraphically and geographically in the different parts of the Mrah anticline. Data processing and field observations led to a reconstruction of the principal stresses, which affected the region, and their evolution relative to the main folding phase (Neogene-Quaternary).