Deep learning is often criticized by two serious issues which rarely exist in natural nervous systems: overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. It can even memorize randomly labelled data, which has little knowledge behind the instance-label pairs… When a deep network continually learns over time by accommodating new tasks, it usually quickly overwrites the knowledge learned from previous tasks. Referred to as the neural variability, it is well-known in neuroscience that human brain reactions exhibit substantial variability even in response to the […]

In this work, we systematically investigate how well current models of coherence can capture aspects of text implicated in discourse organisation. We devise two datasets of various linguistic alterations that undermine coherence and test model sensitivity to changes in syntax and semantics… We furthermore probe discourse embedding space and examine the knowledge that is encoded in representations of coherence. We hope this study shall provide further insight into how to frame the task and improve models of coherence assessment further. […]

Complying with the EU Regulation on multimodal transportation services requires sharing data on the National Access Points in one of the standards (e.g., NeTEx and SIRI) indicated by the European Commission. These standards are complex and of limited practical adoption… This means that datasets are natively expressed in other formats and require a data translation process for full compliance. This paper describes the solution to turn the authoritative data of three different transport stakeholders from Italy and Spain into a […]

This paper explores the possibility of improving the performance of specialized parsers for pre-modern Slavic by training them on data from different related varieties. Because of their linguistic heterogeneity, pre-modern Slavic varieties are treated as low-resource historical languages, whereby cross-dialectal treebank data may be exploited to overcome data scarcity and attempt the training of a variety-agnostic parser… Previous experiments on early Slavic dependency parsing are discussed, particularly with regard to their ability to tackle different orthographic, regional and stylistic features. […]

We describe a Common Lisp package suitable for the high-level design, specification, simulation, and instrumentation of real-time distributed algorithms and hardware on which to run them. We discuss various design decisions around the package structure, and we explore their consequences with small examples… PDF Abstract  

Discovering precise and specific rules from knowledge graphs is regarded as an essential challenge, which can improve the performances of many downstream tasks and even provide new ways to approach some Natural Language Processing research topics. In this paper, we provide a fundamental theory for knowledge graph reasoning based on ending anchored rules… Our theory provides precise reasons answering why or why not a triple is correct. Then, we implement our theory by what we called the EARDict model. Results […]

Context: Tangled commits are changes to software that address multiple concerns at once. For researchers interested in bugs, tangled commits mean that they actually study not only bugs, but also other concerns irrelevant for the study of bugs… Objective: We want to improve our understanding of the prevalence of tangling and the types of changes that are tangled within bug fixing commits. Methods: We use a crowd sourcing approach for manual labeling to validate which changes contribute to bug fixes […]

The vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup-delivery and time windows (VRPSPDTW) has attracted much attention in the last decade, due to its wide application in modern logistics involving bi-directional flow of goods. In this paper, we propose a memetic algorithm with efficient local search and extended neighborhood, dubbed MATE, for solving this problem… The novelty of MATE lies in three aspects: 1) an initialization procedure which integrates an existing heuristic into the population-based search framework, in an intelligent way; 2) […]

Biological brains are inherently limited in their capacity to process and store information, but are nevertheless capable of solving complex tasks with apparent ease. Intelligent behavior is related to these limitations, since resource constraints drive the need to generalize and assign importance differentially to features in the environment or memories of past experiences… Recently, there have been parallel efforts in reinforcement learning and neuroscience to understand strategies adopted by artificial and biological agents to circumvent limitations in information storage. However, […]

Prosody modeling is an essential component in modern text-to-speech (TTS) frameworks. By explicitly providing prosody features to the TTS model, the style of synthesized utterances can thus be controlled… However, predicting natural and reasonable prosody at inference time is challenging. In this work, we analyzed the behavior of non-autoregressive TTS models under different prosody-modeling settings and proposed a hierarchical architecture, in which the prediction of phoneme-level prosody features are conditioned on the word-level prosody features. The proposed method outperforms other […]