No Arabic abstract
Theano is a linear algebra compiler that optimizes a users symbolically-specified mathematical computations to produce efficient low-level implementations. In this paper, we present new features and efficiency improvements to Theano, and benchmarks demonstrating Theanos performance relative to Torch7, a recently introduced machine learning library, and to RNNLM, a C++ library targeted at recurrent neural networks.
Theano is a Python library that allows to define, optimize, and evaluate mathematical expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays efficiently. Since its introduction, it has been one of the most used CPU and GPU mathematical compilers - especially in the machine learning community - and has shown steady performance improvements. Theano is being actively and continuously developed since 2008, multiple frameworks have been built on top of it and it has been used to produce many state-of-the-art machine learning models. The present article is structured as follows. Section I provides an overview of the Theano software and its community. Section II presents the principal features of Theano and how to use them, and compares them with other similar projects. Section III focuses on recently-introduced functionalities and improvements. Section IV compares the performance of Theano against Torch7 and TensorFlow on several machine learning models. Section V discusses current limitations of Theano and potential ways of improving it.
The ergm package supports the statistical analysis and simulation of network data. It anchors the statnet suite of packages for network analysis in R introduced in a special issue in Journal of Statistical Software in 2008. This article provides an overview of the functionality and performance improvements in the 2021 ergm 4.0 release. These include more flexible handling of nodal covariates, operator terms that extend and simplify model specification, new models for networks with valued edges, improved handling of constraints on the sample space of networks, performance enhancements to the Markov chain Monte Carlo and maximum likelihood estimation algorithms, broader and faster searching for networks with certain target statistics using simulated annealing, and estimation with missing edge data. We also identify the new packages in the statnet suite that extend ergms functionality to other network data types and structural features, and the robust set of online resources that support the statnet development process and applications.
This paper describes the recent development of ESPnet (https://github.com/espnet/espnet), an end-to-end speech processing toolkit. This project was initiated in December 2017 to mainly deal with end-to-end speech recognition experiments based on sequence-to-sequence modeling. The project has grown rapidly and now covers a wide range of speech processing applications. Now ESPnet also includes text to speech (TTS), voice conversation (VC), speech translation (ST), and speech enhancement (SE) with support for beamforming, speech separation, denoising, and dereverberation. All applications are trained in an end-to-end manner, thanks to the generic sequence to sequence modeling properties, and they can be further integrated and jointly optimized. Also, ESPnet provides reproducible all-in-one recipes for these applications with state-of-the-art performance in various benchmarks by incorporating transformer, advanced data augmentation, and conformer. This project aims to provide up-to-date speech processing experience to the community so that researchers in academia and various industry scales can develop their technologies collaboratively.
Metaphors are ubiquitous in human language. The metaphor detection task (MD) aims at detecting and interpreting metaphors from written language, which is crucial in natural language understanding (NLU) research. In this paper, we introduce a pre-trained Transformer-based model into MD. Our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models by large margins in our evaluations, with relative improvements on the F-1 score from 5.33% to 28.39%. Second, we extend MD to a classification task about the metaphoricity of an entire piece of text to make MD applicable in more general NLU scenes. Finally, we clean up the improper or outdated annotations in one of the MD benchmark datasets and re-benchmark it with our Transformer-based model. This approach could be applied to other existing MD datasets as well, since the metaphoricity annotations in these benchmark datasets may be outdated. Future research efforts are also necessary to build an up-to-date and well-annotated dataset consisting of longer and more complex texts.
Ritt-Wus algorithm of characteristic sets is the most representative for triangularizing sets of multivariate polynomials. Pseudo-division is the main operation used in this algorithm. In this paper we present a new algorithmic scheme for computing generalized characteristic sets by introducing other admissible reductions than pseudo-division. A concrete subalgorithm is designed to triangularize polynomial sets using selected admissible reductions and several effective elimination strategies and to replace the algorithm of basic sets (used in Ritt-Wus algorithm). The proposed algorithm has been implemented and experimental results show that it performs better than Ritt-Wus algorithm in terms of computing time and simplicity of output for a number of non-trivial test examples.