No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we present a novel method for measurably adjusting the semantics of text while preserving its sentiment and fluency, a task we call semantic text exchange. This is useful for text data augmentation and the semantic correction of text generated by chatbots and virtual assistants. We introduce a pipeline called SMERTI that combines entity replacement, similarity masking, and text infilling. We measure our pipelines success by its Semantic Text Exchange Score (STES): the ability to preserve the original texts sentiment and fluency while adjusting semantic content. We propose to use masking (replacement) rate threshold as an adjustable parameter to control the amount of semantic change in the text. Our experiments demonstrate that SMERTI can outperform baseline models on Yelp reviews, Amazon reviews, and news headlines.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to adversarial images, while their robustness in text classification is rarely studied. Several lines of text attack methods have been proposed in the literature, including character-level, word-level, and sentence-level attacks. However, it is still a challenge to minimize the number of word changes necessary to induce misclassification, while simultaneously ensuring lexical correctness, syntactic soundness, and semantic similarity. In this paper, we propose a Bigram and Unigram based adaptive Semantic Preservation Optimization (BU-SPO) method to examine the vulnerability of deep models. Our method has four major merits. Firstly, we propose to attack text documents not only at the unigram word level but also at the bigram level which better keeps semantics and avoids producing meaningless outputs. Secondly, we propose a hybrid method to replace the input words with options among both their synonyms candidates and sememe candidates, which greatly enriches the potential substitutions compared to only using synonyms. Thirdly, we design an optimization algorithm, i.e., Semantic Preservation Optimization (SPO), to determine the priority of word replacements, aiming to reduce the modification cost. Finally, we further improve the SPO with a semantic Filter (named SPOF) to find the adversarial example with the highest semantic similarity. We evaluate the effectiveness of our BU-SPO and BU-SPOF on IMDB, AGs News, and Yahoo! Answers text datasets by attacking four popular DNNs models. Results show that our methods achieve the highest attack success rates and semantics rates by changing the smallest number of words compared with existing methods.
The class activation mapping, or CAM, has been the cornerstone of feature attribution methods for multiple vision tasks. Its simplicity and effectiveness have led to wide applications in the explanation of visual predictions and weakly-supervised localization tasks. However, CAM has its own shortcomings. The computation of attribution maps relies on ad-hoc calibration steps that are not part of the training computational graph, making it difficult for us to understand the real meaning of the attribution values. In this paper, we improve CAM by explicitly incorporating a latent variable encoding the location of the cue for recognition in the formulation, thereby subsuming the attribution map into the training computational graph. The resulting model, class activation latent mapping, or CALM, is trained with the expectation-maximization algorithm. Our experiments show that CALM identifies discriminative attributes for image classifiers more accurately than CAM and other visual attribution baselines. CALM also shows performance improvements over prior arts on the weakly-supervised object localization benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/calm.
In recent years, emotion detection in text has become more popular due to its vast potential applications in marketing, political science, psychology, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, etc. In this work, we argue that current methods which are based on conventional machine learning models cannot grasp the intricacy of emotional language by ignoring the sequential nature of the text, and the context. These methods, therefore, are not sufficient to create an applicable and generalizable emotion detection methodology. Understanding these limitations, we present a new network based on a bidirectional GRU model to show that capturing more meaningful information from text can significantly improve the performance of these models. The results show significant improvement with an average of 26.8 point increase in F-measure on our test data and 38.6 increase on the totally new dataset.
We use over 350,000 Yelp reviews on 5,000 restaurants to perform an ablation study on text preprocessing techniques. We also compare the effectiveness of several machine learning and deep learning models on predicting user sentiment (negative, neutral, or positive). For machine learning models, we find that using binary bag-of-word representation, adding bi-grams, imposing minimum frequency constraints and normalizing texts have positive effects on model performance. For deep learning models, we find that using pre-trained word embeddings and capping maximum length often boost model performance. Finally, using macro F1 score as our comparison metric, we find simpler models such as Logistic Regression and Support Vector Machine to be more effective at predicting sentiments than more complex models such as Gradient Boosting, LSTM and BERT.
Mining a set of meaningful topics organized into a hierarchy is intuitively appealing since topic correlations are ubiquitous in massive text corpora. To account for potential hierarchical topic structures, hierarchical topic models generalize flat topic models by incorporating latent topic hierarchies into their generative modeling process. However, due to their purely unsupervised nature, the learned topic hierarchy often deviates from users particular needs or interests. To guide the hierarchical topic discovery process with minimal user supervision, we propose a new task, Hierarchical Topic Mining, which takes a category tree described by category names only, and aims to mine a set of representative terms for each category from a text corpus to help a user comprehend his/her interested topics. We develop a novel joint tree and text embedding method along with a principled optimization procedure that allows simultaneous modeling of the category tree structure and the corpus generative process in the spherical space for effective category-representative term discovery. Our comprehensive experiments show that our model, named JoSH, mines a high-quality set of hierarchical topics with high efficiency and benefits weakly-supervised hierarchical text classification tasks.