Abstract

In this paper, we extend the task of semantic textual similarity to include sentences which contain emojis. Emojis are ubiquitous on social media today, but are often removed in the pre-processing stage of curating datasets for NLP tasks. In this paper, we qualitatively ascertain the amount of semantic information lost by discounting emojis, as well as show a mechanism of accounting for emojis in a semantic task. We create a sentence similarity dataset of 4000 pairs of tweets with emojis, which have been annotated for relatedness. The corpus contains tweets curated based on common topic as well as by replacement of emojis. The latter was done to analyze the difference in semantics associated with different emojis. We aim to provide an understanding of the information lost by removing emojis by providing a qualitative analysis of the dataset. We also aim to present a method of using both emojis and words for downstream NLP tasks beyond sentiment analysis.

Abstract

Medical concept normalization aims to map a variable length message such as, ‘unable to sleep’ to an entry in a target medical lexicon, such as ‘Insomnia’. Current approaches formulate medical concept normalization as a supervised text classification problem. This formulation has several drawbacks. First, creating training data requires manually mapping medical concept mentions to their corresponding entries in a target lexicon. Second, these models fail to map a mention to the target concepts which were not encountered during the training phase. Lastly, these models have to be retrained from scratch whenever new concepts are added to the target lexicon. In this work we propose a method which overcomes these limitations. We first use various text and graph embedding methods to encode medical concepts into an embedding space. We then train a model which transforms concept mentions into vectors in this target embedding space. Finally, we use cosine similarity to find the nearest medical concept to a given input medical concept mention. Our model scales to millions of target concepts and trivially accommodates growing target lexicon size without incurring significant computational cost. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by 4.2% and 6.3% classification accuracy across two benchmark datasets. We also present a variety of studies to evaluate the robustness of our model under different training conditions.

Abstract

We present GAZED– eye GAZ-guided EDiting for videos captured by a solitary, static, wide-angle and high-resolution camera. Eye-gaze has been effectively employed in computational applications as a cue to capture interesting scene content; we employ gaze as a proxy to select shots for inclusion in the edited video. Given the original video, scene content and user eye-gaze tracks are combined to generate an edited video comprising of cinematically valid actor shots and shot transitions to generate an aesthetic and vivid representation of the original narrative. We model cinematic video editing as an energy minimization problem over shot selection, whose constraints capture cinematographic editing conventions. Gazed scene locations primarily determine the shots constituting the edited video. Effectiveness of GAZED against multiple competing methods is demonstrated via a psychophysical study involving 12 users and twelve performance videos. Professional video recordings of stage performances are typically created by employing skilled camera operators, who record the performance from multiple viewpoints. These multi-camera feeds, termed rushes, are then edited together to portray an eloquent story intended to maximize viewer engagement. Generating professional edits of stage performances is both difficult and challenging. Firstly, maneuvering cameras during a live performance is difficult even for experts as there is no option of retake upon error, and camera viewpoints are limited as the use of large supporting equipment (trolley, crane .) is infeasible. Secondly, manual video editing is an extremely slow and tedious process and leverages the experience of skilled editors. Overall, the need for (i) a professional camera crew, (ii) multiple cameras and supporting equipment, and (iii) expert editors escalates the process complexity and costs. Consequently, most production houses employ a large field-of-view static camera, placed far enough to capture the entire stage. This approach is widespread as it is simple to implement, and also captures the entire scene. Such static visualizations are apt for archival purposes; however, they are often unsuccessful at captivating attention when presented to the target audience. While conveying the overall context, the distant camera feed fails to bring out vivid scene details like close-up faces, character emotions and actions, and ensuing interactions which are critical for cinematic storytelling. GAZED denotes an end-to-end pipeline to generate an aesthetically edited video from a single static, wide-angle stage recording. This is inspired by prior work [GRG14], which describes how a plural camera crew can be replaced by a single highresolution static camera, and multiple virtual camera shots or rushes generated by simulating several virtual pan/tilt/zoom cameras to focus on actors and actions within the original recording. In this work, we demonstrate that the multiple rushes can be automatically edited by leveraging user eye gaze information, by modeling (virtual) shot selection as a discrete optimization problem. Eye-gaze represents an inherent guiding factor for video editing, as eyes are sensitive to interesting scene events [RKH∗ 09, SSSM14] that need to be vividly presented in the edited video. The objective critical for video editing and the key contribution of our work is to decide which shot (or rush) needs to be selected to describe each frame of the edited video. The shot selection problem is modeled as an optimization, which incorporates gaze information along with other cost terms that model cinematic editing principles. Gazed scene locations are utilized to define gaze potentials, which measure the importance of the different shots to choose from. Gaze potentials are then combined with other terms that model cinematic principles like avoiding jump cuts (which produce jarring shot transitions), rhythm (pace of shot transitioning), avoiding transient shots . The optimization is solved using dynamic programming. [MKSG20] refers to the detailed full article.

Abstract

Multi-object tracking has seen a lot of progress recently, albeit with substantial annotation costs for developing better and larger labeled datasets. In this work, we remove the need for annotated datasets by proposing an unsupervised re-identification network, thus sidestepping the labeling costs entirely, required for training. Given unlabeled videos, our proposed method (SimpleReID) first generates tracking labels using SORT [ 3] and trains a ReID network to predict the generated labels using crossentropy loss. We demonstrate that SimpleReID performs substantially better than simpler alternatives, and we recover the full performance of its supervised counterpart consistently across diverse tracking frameworks. The observations are unusual because unsupervised ReID is not expected to excel in crowded scenarios with occlusions, and drastic viewpoint changes. By incorporating our unsupervised SimpleReID with CenterTrack trained on augmented still images, we establish a new state-of-the-art performance on popular datasets like MOT16/17 without using tracking supervision, beating current best (CenterTrack) by 0.2-0.3 MOTA and 4.4-4.8 IDF1 scores. We further provide evidence for limited scope for improvement in IDF1 scores beyond our unsupervised ReID in the studied settings. Our investigation suggests reconsideration towards more sophisticated, supervised, end-to-end trackers [56 , 5] by showing promise in simpler unsupervised alternatives.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose the use of Message Sequence Charts (MSC) as a representation for visualizing narrative text in Hindi. An MSC is a formal representation allowing the depiction of actors and interactions among these actors in a scenario, apart from supporting a rich framework for formal inference. We propose an approach to extract MSC actors and interactions from a Hindi narrative. As a part of the approach, we enrich an existing event annotation scheme where we provide guidelines for annotation of the mood of events (realis vs irrealis) and guidelines for annotation of event arguments. We report performance on multiple evaluation criteria by experimenting with Hindi narratives from Indian History. Though Hindi is the fourth most-spoken first language in the world, from the NLP perspective it has comparatively lesser resources than English. Moreover, there is relatively less work in the context of event processing in Hindi. Hence, we believe that this work is among the initial works for Hindi event processing.

Abstract

Given the recent progress in language modeling using Transformer-based neural models and an active interest in generating stylized text, we present an approach to leverage the generalization capabilities of a language model to rewrite an input text in a target author’s style. Our proposed approach adapts a pre-trained language model to generate author-stylized text by fine-tuning on the author-specific corpus using a denoising autoencoder (DAE) loss in a cascaded encoder-decoder framework. Optimizing over DAE loss allows our model to learn the nuances of an author’s style without relying on parallel data, which has been a severe limitation of the previous related works in this space. To evaluate the efficacy of our approach, we propose a linguistically motivated framework to quantify stylistic alignment of the generated text to the target author at lexical, syntactic and surface levels. The evaluation framework is both interpretable as it leads to several insights about the model, and self-contained as it does not rely on external classifiers, e.g. sentiment or formality classifiers. Qualitative and quantitative assessment indicates that the proposed approach rewrites the input text with better alignment to the target style while preserving the original content better than state-of-the-art baselines.

Abstract

Software Requirement Specification documents provide natural language descriptions of the core functional requirements as a set of use-cases. Essentially, each use-case contains a set of actors and sequences of steps describing the interactions among them. Goals of use-case reviews and analyses include their correctness, completeness, detection of ambiguities, prototyping, verification, test case generation and traceability. Message Sequence Chart (MSC) have been proposed as a expressive, rigorous yet intuitive visual representation of use-cases. In this paper, we describe a linguistic knowledge-based approach to extract MSCs from use-cases. Compared to existing techniques, we extract richer constructs of the MSC notation such as timers, conditions and alt-boxes. We apply this tool to extract MSCs from several real-life software use-case descriptions and show that it performs better than the existing techniques. We also discuss the benefits and limitations of the extracted MSCs to meet the above goals.

Abstract

Integrating components of vehicular network with the Internet has emerged recently for fulfilling the ever-growing demand for a safe and comfortable driving experience. Road Side Unit (RSU) clouds help in serving requests arriving from vehicles but are limited by available resources. It is also required to reduce the overhead cost corresponding to Virtual Machine (VM) migrations caused by high mobility of vehicles. Also, requests need to be served within their stipulated delay constraint. In this work, we propose a novel algorithm to schedule requests at RSU clouds. Our algorithm efficiently schedules service requests from vehicles while taking care of their delay constraints and VM migrations. The simulation results confirm that our proposed scheduling technique helps in serving more number of requests within their stipulated delay constraint with lesser VM migrations.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach designed to answer questions on a reading comprehension passage. It is an end-to-end system which first focuses on comprehending the given passage wherein it converts unstructured passage into a structured data and later proceeds to answer the questions related to the passage using solely the aforementioned structured data. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed design is first of its kind which accounts for entire process of comprehending the passage and then answering the questions associated with the passage. The comprehension stage converts the passage into a Discourse Collection that comprises of the relation shared amongst logical sentences in given passage along with the key characteristics of each sentence. This design has its applications in academic domain , query comprehension in speech systems among others.

Abstract

Energy consumption has dramatically increased in the residential building sector over the past few years. Many researchers today are interested not only in designing energy-efficient buildings but also in evaluating the actual building performance and managing operations for delivering the design intent. Monitoring building performance using currently available sensors and mobile applications poses challenges in terms of cost and standardization. This paper presents a new approach to make sensors affordable and inter-operable by designing open-source hardware and using well-established standards for data communication and storage, thereby making energy monitoring ubiquitous and affordable in the residential sector. The proposed solution uses low-power loggers, Bluetooth Low Energy wireless communication version 4 for data transfer from loggers to mobile phones for further transfer to cloud, oneM2M standard to ensure interoperability, and NGSI-LD for data management.