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We present Pix2Prof, a deep learning model that can eliminate any manual steps taken when extracting galaxy profiles. We argue that a galaxy profile of any sort is conceptually similar to a natural language image caption. This idea allows us to leverage image captioning methods from the field of natural language processing, and so we design Pix2Prof as a float sequence captioning model suitable for galaxy profile inference. We demonstrate the technique by approximating a galaxy surface brightness (SB) profile fitting method that contains several manual steps. Pix2Prof processes $sim$1 image per second on an Intel Xeon E5 2650 v3 CPU, improving on the speed of the manual interactive method by more than two orders of magnitude. Crucially, Pix2Prof requires no manual interaction, and since galaxy profile estimation is an embarrassingly parallel problem, we can further increase the throughput by running many Pix2Prof instances simultaneously. In perspective, Pix2Prof would take under an hour to infer profiles for $10^5$ galaxies on a single NVIDIA DGX-2 system. A single human expert would take approximately two years to complete the same task. Automated methodology such as this will accelerate the analysis of the next generation of large area sky surveys expected to yield hundreds of millions of targets. In such instances, all manual approaches -- even those involving a large number of experts -- will be impractical.
Recent advancements in the area of Computer Vision with state-of-art Neural Networks has given a boost to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) accuracies. However, extracting characters/text alone is often insufficient for relevant information extraction as documents also have a visual structure that is not captured by OCR. Extracting information from tables, charts, footnotes, boxes, headings and retrieving the corresponding structured representation for the document remains a challenge and finds application in a large number of real-world use cases. In this paper, we propose a novel enterprise based end-to-end framework called DeepReader which facilitates information extraction from document images via identification of visual entities and populating a meta relational model across different entities in the document image. The model schema allows for an easy to understand abstraction of the entities detected by the deep vision models and the relationships between them. DeepReader has a suite of state-of-the-art vision algorithms which are applied to recognize handwritten and printed text, eliminate noisy effects, identify the type of documents and detect visual entities like tables, lines and boxes. Deep Reader maps the extracted entities into a rich relational schema so as to capture all the relevant relationships between entities (words, textboxes, lines etc) detected in the document. Relevant information and fields can then be extracted from the document by writing SQL queries on top of the relationship tables. A natural language based interface is added on top of the relationship schema so that a non-technical user, specifying the queries in natural language, can fetch the information with minimal effort. In this paper, we also demonstrate many different capabilities of Deep Reader and report results on a real-world use case.
We present a neural network model - based on CNNs, RNNs and a novel attention mechanism - which achieves 84.2% accuracy on the challenging French Street Name Signs (FSNS) dataset, significantly outperforming the previous state of the art (Smith16), which achieved 72.46%. Furthermore, our new method is much simpler and more general than the previous approach. To demonstrate the generality of our model, we show that it also performs well on an even more challenging dataset derived from Google Street View, in which the goal is to extract business names from store fronts. Finally, we study the speed/accuracy tradeoff that results from using CNN feature extractors of different depths. Surprisingly, we find that deeper is not always better (in terms of accuracy, as well as speed). Our resulting model is simple, accurate and fast, allowing it to be used at scale on a variety of challenging real-world text extraction problems.
As an essential component of human cognition, cause-effect relations appear frequently in text, and curating cause-effect relations from text helps in building causal networks for predictive tasks. Existing causality extraction techniques include knowledge-based, statistical machine learning(ML)-based, and deep learning-based approaches. Each method has its advantages and weaknesses. For example, knowledge-based methods are understandable but require extensive manual domain knowledge and have poor cross-domain applicability. Statistical machine learning methods are more automated because of natural language processing (NLP) toolkits. However, feature engineering is labor-intensive, and toolkits may lead to error propagation. In the past few years, deep learning techniques attract substantial attention from NLP researchers because of its powerful representation learning ability and the rapid increase in computational resources. Their limitations include high computational costs and a lack of adequate annotated training data. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of causality extraction. We initially introduce primary forms existing in the causality extraction: explicit intra-sentential causality, implicit causality, and inter-sentential causality. Next, we list benchmark datasets and modeling assessment methods for causal relation extraction. Then, we present a structured overview of the three techniques with their representative systems. Lastly, we highlight existing open challenges with their potential directions.
Respiratory ailments afflict a wide range of people and manifests itself through conditions like asthma and sleep apnea. Continuous monitoring of chronic respiratory ailments is seldom used outside the intensive care ward due to the large size and cost of the monitoring system. While Electrocardiogram (ECG) based respiration extraction is a validated approach, its adoption is limited by access to a suitable continuous ECG monitor. Recently, due to the widespread adoption of wearable smartwatches with in-built Photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor, it is being considered as a viable candidate for continuous and unobtrusive respiration monitoring. Research in this domain, however, has been predominantly focussed on estimating respiration rate from PPG. In this work, a novel end-to-end deep learning network called RespNet is proposed to perform the task of extracting the respiration signal from a given input PPG as opposed to extracting respiration rate. The proposed network was trained and tested on two different datasets utilizing different modalities of reference respiration signal recordings. Also, the similarity and performance of the proposed network against two conventional signal processing approaches for extracting respiration signal were studied. The proposed method was tested on two independent datasets with a Mean Squared Error of 0.262 and 0.145. The Cross-Correlation coefficient of the respective datasets were found to be 0.933 and 0.931. The reported errors and similarity was found to be better than conventional approaches. The proposed approach would aid clinicians to provide comprehensive evaluation of sleep-related respiratory conditions and chronic respiratory ailments while being comfortable and inexpensive for the patient.
Recently, large pre-trained neural language models have attained remarkable performance on many downstream natural language processing (NLP) applications via fine-tuning. In this paper, we target at how to further improve the token representations on the language models. We, therefore, propose a simple yet effective plug-and-play module, Sequential Attention Module (SAM), on the token embeddings learned from a pre-trained language model. Our proposed SAM consists of two main attention modules deployed sequentially: Feature-wise Attention Module (FAM) and Token-wise Attention Module (TAM). More specifically, FAM can effectively identify the importance of features at each dimension and promote the effect via dot-product on the original token embeddings for downstream NLP applications. Meanwhile, TAM can further re-weight the features at the token-wise level. Moreover, we propose an adaptive filter on FAM to prevent noise impact and increase information absorption. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the advantages and properties of our proposed SAM. We first show how SAM plays a primary role in the champion solution of two subtasks of SemEval21 Task 7. After that, we apply SAM on sentiment analysis and three popular NLP tasks and demonstrate that SAM consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.