Causal Learning for Socially Responsible AI

There have been increasing concerns about Artificial Intelligence (AI) due to its unfathomable potential power. To make AI address ethical challenges and shun undesirable outcomes, researchers proposed to develop socially responsible AI (SRAI). One of these approaches is causal learning (CL). We survey state-of-the-art methods of CL for SRAI. We begin by examining the seven CL tools to enhance the social responsibility of AI, then review how existing works have succeeded using these tools to tackle issues in developing SRAI such as fairness. The goal of this survey is to bring forefront the potentials and promises of CL for SRAI.

Lets Eat Grandma: When Punctuation Matters in Sentence Representation for Sentiment Analysis

Neural network-based embeddings have been the mainstream approach for creating a vector representation of the text to capture lexical and semantic similarities and dissimilarities. In general, existing encoding methods dismiss the punctuation as insignificant information; consequently, they are routinely eliminated in the pre-processing phase as they are shown to improve task performance. In this paper, we hypothesize that punctuation could play a significant role in sentiment analysis and propose a novel representation model to improve syntactic and contextual performance. We corroborate our findings by conducting experiments on publicly available datasets and verify that our model can identify the sentiments more accurately over other state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Privacy-Aware Recommendation with Private-Attribute Protection using Adversarial Learning

Recommendation is one of the critical applications that helps users find information relevant to their interests. However, a malicious attacker can infer users private information via recommendations. Prior work obfuscates user-item data before sharing it with recommendation system. This approach does not explicitly address the quality of recommendation while performing data obfuscation. Moreover, it cannot protect users against private-attribute inference attacks based on recommendations. This work is the first attempt to build a Recommendation with Attribute Protection (RAP) model which simultaneously recommends relevant items and counters private-attribute inference attacks. The key idea of our approach is to formulate this problem as an adversarial learning problem with two main components: the private attribute inference attacker, and the Bayesian personalized recommender. The attacker seeks to infer users private-attribute information according to their items list and recommendations. The recommender aims to extract users interests while employing the attacker to regularize the recommendation process. Experiments show that the proposed model both preserves the quality of recommendation service and protects users against private-attribute inference attacks.