We propose a fully unsupervised method to detect bias in contextualized embeddings. The method leverages the assortative information latently encoded by social networks and combines orthogonality regularization, structured sparsity learning, and graph neural networks to find the embedding subspace capturing this information. As a concrete example, we focus on the phenomenon of ideological bias: we introduce the concept of an ideological subspace, show how it can be found by applying our method to online discussion forums, and present techniques to probe it. Our experiments suggest that the ideological subspace encodes abstract evaluative semantics and reflects changes in the political left-right spectrum during the presidency of Donald Trump.

Geographic features are commonly used to improve the performance of pretrained language models (PLMs) on NLP tasks where they are intuitively beneficial (e.g., geolocation prediction, dialect feature prediction). Existing methods, however, leverage geographic information in task-specific fine-tuning and fail to integrate it into the geo-linguistic knowledge encoded by PLMs, which would make it transferable across different tasks. In this paper, we introduce an approach to task-agnostic geoadaptation of PLMs that forces them to learn associations between linguistic phenomena and geographic locations. Geoadaptation is an intermediate training step that couples language modeling and geolocation prediction in a multi-task learning setup. In our main set of experiments, we geoadapt BERTi\'{c}, a PLM for Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS), using a corpus of geotagged BCMS tweets. Evaluation on three tasks, namely fine-tuned as well as zero-shot geolocation prediction and zero-shot prediction of dialect features, shows that geoadaptation is very effective: e.g., we obtain state-of-the-art performance in supervised geolocation prediction and report massive gains over geographically uninformed PLMs on zero-shot geolocation prediction. Moreover, in follow-up experiments we successfully geoadapt two other PLMs, specifically ScandiBERT on Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish tweets and GermanBERT on Jodel posts in German from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, proving that the benefits of geoadaptation are not limited to a particular language area and PLM.

标记数据是大多数自然语言处理任务的基础。但是，标记数据很困难，并且通常对正确的数据标签应该是什么不同的有效信念。到目前为止，数据集创建者已承认注释主观性，但在注释过程中没有主动管理它。这导致部分主观的数据集未能提供明确的下游使用。要解决此问题，我们提出了两个对比的数据注释范式。描述性范式鼓励注释主观性，而规定的范式则劝阻。描述性注释允许对不同信念进行测量和建模，而规定的注释使得能够培训持续应用一个信仰的模型。我们讨论实施宗旨的福利和挑战，并争辩说，数据集创建者应该明确瞄准一个或另一个，以促进其数据集的预期使用。最后，我们设计了一个注释实验，以说明两种范例之间的对比。

The increasing polarization of online political discourse calls for computational tools that automatically detect and monitor ideological divides in social media. We introduce a minimally supervised method that leverages the network structure of online discussion forums, specifically Reddit, to detect polarized concepts. We model polarization along the dimensions of salience and framing, drawing upon insights from moral psychology. Our architecture combines graph neural networks with structured sparsity learning and results in representations for concepts and subreddits that capture temporal ideological dynamics such as right-wing and left-wing radicalization.

Three main points: 1. Data Science (DS) will be increasingly important to heliophysics; 2. Methods of heliophysics science discovery will continually evolve, requiring the use of learning technologies [e.g., machine learning (ML)] that are applied rigorously and that are capable of supporting discovery; and 3. To grow with the pace of data, technology, and workforce changes, heliophysics requires a new approach to the representation of knowledge.

Image classification with small datasets has been an active research area in the recent past. However, as research in this scope is still in its infancy, two key ingredients are missing for ensuring reliable and truthful progress: a systematic and extensive overview of the state of the art, and a common benchmark to allow for objective comparisons between published methods. This article addresses both issues. First, we systematically organize and connect past studies to consolidate a community that is currently fragmented and scattered. Second, we propose a common benchmark that allows for an objective comparison of approaches. It consists of five datasets spanning various domains (e.g., natural images, medical imagery, satellite data) and data types (RGB, grayscale, multispectral). We use this benchmark to re-evaluate the standard cross-entropy baseline and ten existing methods published between 2017 and 2021 at renowned venues. Surprisingly, we find that thorough hyper-parameter tuning on held-out validation data results in a highly competitive baseline and highlights a stunted growth of performance over the years. Indeed, only a single specialized method dating back to 2019 clearly wins our benchmark and outperforms the baseline classifier.

Dataset scaling, also known as normalization, is an essential preprocessing step in a machine learning pipeline. It is aimed at adjusting attributes scales in a way that they all vary within the same range. This transformation is known to improve the performance of classification models, but there are several scaling techniques to choose from, and this choice is not generally done carefully. In this paper, we execute a broad experiment comparing the impact of 5 scaling techniques on the performances of 20 classification algorithms among monolithic and ensemble models, applying them to 82 publicly available datasets with varying imbalance ratios. Results show that the choice of scaling technique matters for classification performance, and the performance difference between the best and the worst scaling technique is relevant and statistically significant in most cases. They also indicate that choosing an inadequate technique can be more detrimental to classification performance than not scaling the data at all. We also show how the performance variation of an ensemble model, considering different scaling techniques, tends to be dictated by that of its base model. Finally, we discuss the relationship between a model's sensitivity to the choice of scaling technique and its performance and provide insights into its applicability on different model deployment scenarios. Full results and source code for the experiments in this paper are available in a GitHub repository.\footnote{https://github.com/amorimlb/scaling\_matters}

The devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic makes it imperative to design automated techniques for a fast and accurate detection. We propose a novel non-invasive tool, using deep learning and imaging, for delineating COVID-19 infection in lungs. The Ensembling Attention-based Multi-scaled Convolution network (EAMC), employing Leave-One-Patient-Out (LOPO) training, exhibits high sensitivity and precision in outlining infected regions along with assessment of severity. The Attention module combines contextual with local information, at multiple scales, for accurate segmentation. Ensemble learning integrates heterogeneity of decision through different base classifiers. The superiority of EAMC, even with severe class imbalance, is established through comparison with existing state-of-the-art learning models over four publicly-available COVID-19 datasets. The results are suggestive of the relevance of deep learning in providing assistive intelligence to medical practitioners, when they are overburdened with patients as in pandemics. Its clinical significance lies in its unprecedented scope in providing low-cost decision-making for patients lacking specialized healthcare at remote locations.

Objective: Imbalances of the electrolyte concentration levels in the body can lead to catastrophic consequences, but accurate and accessible measurements could improve patient outcomes. While blood tests provide accurate measurements, they are invasive and the laboratory analysis can be slow or inaccessible. In contrast, an electrocardiogram (ECG) is a widely adopted tool which is quick and simple to acquire. However, the problem of estimating continuous electrolyte concentrations directly from ECGs is not well-studied. We therefore investigate if regression methods can be used for accurate ECG-based prediction of electrolyte concentrations. Methods: We explore the use of deep neural networks (DNNs) for this task. We analyze the regression performance across four electrolytes, utilizing a novel dataset containing over 290000 ECGs. For improved understanding, we also study the full spectrum from continuous predictions to binary classification of extreme concentration levels. To enhance clinical usefulness, we finally extend to a probabilistic regression approach and evaluate different uncertainty estimates. Results: We find that the performance varies significantly between different electrolytes, which is clinically justified in the interplay of electrolytes and their manifestation in the ECG. We also compare the regression accuracy with that of traditional machine learning models, demonstrating superior performance of DNNs. Conclusion: Discretization can lead to good classification performance, but does not help solve the original problem of predicting continuous concentration levels. While probabilistic regression demonstrates potential practical usefulness, the uncertainty estimates are not particularly well-calibrated. Significance: Our study is a first step towards accurate and reliable ECG-based prediction of electrolyte concentration levels.

Candidate axiom scoring is the task of assessing the acceptability of a candidate axiom against the evidence provided by known facts or data. The ability to score candidate axioms reliably is required for automated schema or ontology induction, but it can also be valuable for ontology and/or knowledge graph validation. Accurate axiom scoring heuristics are often computationally expensive, which is an issue if you wish to use them in iterative search techniques like level-wise generate-and-test or evolutionary algorithms, which require scoring a large number of candidate axioms. We address the problem of developing a predictive model as a substitute for reasoning that predicts the possibility score of candidate class axioms and is quick enough to be employed in such situations. We use a semantic similarity measure taken from an ontology's subsumption structure for this purpose. We show that the approach provided in this work can accurately learn the possibility scores of candidate OWL class axioms and that it can do so for a variety of OWL class axioms.