Product attribute value extraction is an important task in e-Commerce which can help several downstream applications such as product search and recommendation. Most previous models handle this task using sequence labeling or question answering method which rely on the sequential position information of values in the product text and are vulnerable to data discrepancy between training and testing. This limits their generalization ability to real-world scenario in which each product can have multiple descriptions across various shopping platforms with different composition of text and style. They also have limited zero-shot ability to new values. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning model with value generation/classification and attribute prediction called JPAVE to predict values without the necessity of position information of values in the text. Furthermore, the copy mechanism in value generator and the value attention module in value classifier help our model address the data discrepancy issue by only focusing on the relevant part of input text and ignoring other information which causes the discrepancy issue such as sentence structure in the text. Besides, two variants of our model are designed for open-world and closed-world scenarios. In addition, copy mechanism introduced in the first variant based on value generation can improve its zero-shot ability for identifying unseen values. Experimental results on a public dataset demonstrate the superiority of our model compared with strong baselines and its generalization ability of predicting new values.

Aspect-based meeting transcript summarization aims to produce multiple summaries, each focusing on one aspect of content in a meeting transcript. It is challenging as sentences related to different aspects can mingle together, and those relevant to a specific aspect can be scattered throughout the long transcript of a meeting. The traditional summarization methods produce one summary mixing information of all aspects, which cannot deal with the above challenges of aspect-based meeting transcript summarization. In this paper, we propose a two-stage method for aspect-based meeting transcript summarization. To select the input content related to specific aspects, we train a sentence classifier on a dataset constructed from the AMI corpus with pseudo-labeling. Then we merge the sentences selected for a specific aspect as the input for the summarizer to produce the aspect-based summary. Experimental results on the AMI corpus outperform many strong baselines, which verifies the effectiveness of our proposed method.

While Chain-of-Thought prompting is popular in reasoning tasks, its application to Large Language Models (LLMs) in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is under-explored.Motivated by multi-step reasoning of LLMs, we propose Coarse-to-Fine Chain-of-Thought (CoF-CoT) approach that breaks down NLU tasks into multiple reasoning steps where LLMs can learn to acquire and leverage essential concepts to solve tasks from different granularities.Moreover, we propose leveraging semanticbased Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) structured knowledge as an intermediate step to capture the nuances and diverse structures of utterances, and to understand connections between their varying levels of granularity.Our proposed approach is demonstrated effective in assisting the LLMs adapt to the multi-grained NLU tasks under both zero-shot and few-shot multi-domain settings 1 .

Abstract Machine learning is widely deployed in society, unleashing its power in a wide range of applications owing to the advent of big data. One emerging problem faced by machine learning is the discrimination from data, and such discrimination is reflected in the eventual decisions made by the algorithms. Recent study has proved that increasing the size of training (labeled) data will promote the fairness criteria with model performance being maintained. In this work, we aim to explore a more general case where quantities of unlabeled data are provided, indeed leading to a new form of learning paradigm, namely fair semi-supervised learning. Taking the popularity of graph-based approaches in semi-supervised learning, we study this problem both on conventional label propagation method and graph neural networks, where various fairness criteria can be flexibly integrated. Our developed algorithms are proved to be non-trivial extensions to the existing supervised models with fairness constraints. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets exhibit that our methods achieve a better trade-off between classification accuracy and fairness than the compared baselines.

Considering the expensive annotation in Named Entity Recognition (NER ), Cross-domain NER enables NER in low-resource target domains with few or without labeled data, by transferring the knowledge of high-resource domains. However, the discrepancy between different domains causes the domain shift problem and hampers the performance of cross-domain NER in low-resource scenarios. In this article, we first propose an adversarial adaptive augmentation, where we integrate the adversarial strategy into a multi-task learner to augment and qualify domain adaptive data. We extract domain-invariant features of the adaptive data to bridge the cross-domain gap and alleviate the label-sparsity problem simultaneously. Therefore, another important component in this article is the progressive domain-invariant feature distillation framework. A multi-grained MMD (Maximum Mean Discrepancy) approach in the framework to extract the multi-level domain invariant features and enable knowledge transfer across domains through the adversarial adaptive data. Advanced Knowledge Distillation (KD) schema processes progressively domain adaptation through the powerful pre-trained language models and multi-level domain invariant features. Extensive comparative experiments over four English and two Chinese benchmarks show the importance of adversarial augmentation and effective adaptation from high-resource domains to low-resource target domains. Comparison with two vanilla and four latest baselines indicates the state-of-the-art performance and superiority confronted with both zero-resource and minimal-resource scenarios.

As deep learning models mature, one of the most prescient questions we face is: what is the ideal tradeoff between accuracy, fairness, and privacy (AFP)? Unfortunately, both the privacy and the fairness of a model come at the cost of its accuracy. Hence, an efficient and effective means of fine-tuning the balance between this trinity of needs is critical. Motivated by some curious observations in privacy-accuracy tradeoffs with differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD), where fair models sometimes result, we conjecture that fairness might be better managed as an indirect byproduct of this process. Hence, we conduct a series of analyses, both theoretical and empirical, on the impacts of implementing DP-SGD in deep neural network models through gradient clipping and noise addition. The results show that, in deep learning, the number of training epochs is central to striking a balance between AFP because DP-SGD makes the training less stable, providing the possibility of model updates at a low discrimination level without much loss in accuracy. Based on this observation, we designed two different early stopping criteria to help analysts choose the optimal epoch at which to stop training a model so as to achieve their ideal tradeoff. Extensive experiments show that our methods can achieve an ideal balance between AFP.

Summary Differential privacy is a rigorous mathematical framework for evaluating and protecting data privacy. In most existing studies, there is a vulnerable assumption that records in a dataset are independent when differential privacy is applied. However, in real‐world datasets, records are likely to be correlated, which may lead to unexpected data leakage. In this survey, we investigate the issue of privacy loss due to data correlation under differential privacy models. Roughly, we classify existing literature into three lines: (1) using parameters to describe data correlation in differential privacy, (2) using models to describe data correlation in differential privacy, and (3) describing data correlation based on the framework of Pufferfish. First, a detailed example is given to illustrate the issue of privacy leakage on correlated data in real scenes. Then our main work is to analyze and compare these methods, and evaluate situations that these diverse studies are applied. Finally, we propose some future challenges on correlated differential privacy.

A growing specter in the rise of machine learning is whether the decisions made by machine learning models are fair. While research is already underway to formalize a machine-learning concept of fairness and to design frameworks for building fair models with sacrifice in accuracy, most are geared toward either supervised or unsupervised learning. Yet two observations inspired us to wonder whether semi-supervised learning might be useful to solve discrimination problems. First, previous study showed that increasing the size of the training set may lead to a better trade-off between fairness and accuracy. Second, the most powerful models today require an enormous of data to train which, in practical terms, is likely possible from a combination of labeled and unlabeled data. Hence, in this paper, we present a framework of fair semi-supervised learning in the pre-processing phase, including pseudo labeling to predict labels for unlabeled data, a re-sampling method to obtain multiple fair datasets and lastly, ensemble learning to improve accuracy and decrease discrimination. A theoretical decomposition analysis of bias, variance and noise highlights the different sources of discrimination and the impact they have on fairness in semi-supervised learning. A set of experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets show that our method is able to use unlabeled data to achieve a better trade-off between accuracy and discrimination.

Cross-domain Named Entity Recognition (NER) transfers the NER knowledge from high-resource domains to the low-resource target domain.Due to limited labeled resources and domain shift, cross-domain NER is a challenging task.To address these challenges, we propose a progressive domain adaptation Knowledge Distillation (KD) approach -PDALN.It achieves superior domain adaptability by employing three components: (1) Adaptive data augmentation techniques, which alleviate cross-domain gap and label sparsity simultaneously; (2) Multi-level Domain invariant features, derived from a multigrained MMD (Maximum Mean Discrepancy) approach, to enable knowledge transfer across domains; (3) Advanced KD schema, which progressively enables powerful pre-trained language models to perform domain adaptation.Extensive experiments on four benchmarks show that PDALN can effectively adapt highresource domains to low-resource target domains, even if they are diverse in terms and writing styles.Comparison with other baselines indicates the state-of-the-art performance of PDALN.

Named entity typing (NET) is a classification task of assigning an entity mention in the context with given semantic types.However, with the growing size and granularity of the entity types, few previous researches concern with newly emerged entity types.In this paper, we propose MZET, a novel memory augmented FNET (Fine-grained NET) model, to tackle the unseen types in a zero-shot manner.MZET incorporates character-level, word-level, and contextural-level information to learn the entity mention representation.Besides, MZET considers the semantic meaning and the hierarchical structure into the entity type representation.Finally, through the memory component which models the relationship between the entity mention and the entity type, MZET transfers the knowledge from seen entity types to the zero-shot ones.Extensive experiments on three public datasets show the superior performance obtained by MZET, which surpasses the state-of-the-art FNET neural network models with up to 8% gain in Micro-F1 and Macro-F1 score.

Privacy preserving in machine learning is a crucial issue in industry informatics since data used for training in industries usually contain sensitive information. Existing differentially private machine learning algorithms have not considered the impact of data correlation, which may lead to more privacy leakage than expected in industrial applications. For example, data collected for traffic monitoring may contain some correlated records due to temporal correlation or user correlation. To fill this gap, in this article, we propose a correlation reduction scheme with differentially private feature selection considering the issue of privacy loss when data have correlation in machine learning tasks. The proposed scheme involves five steps with the goal of managing the extent of data correlation, preserving the privacy, and supporting accuracy in the prediction results. In this way, the impact of data correlation is relieved with the proposed feature selection scheme, and moreover the privacy issue of data correlation in learning is guaranteed. The proposed method can be widely used in machine learning algorithms, which provide services in industrial areas. Experiments show that the proposed scheme can produce better prediction results with machine learning tasks and fewer mean square errors for data queries compared to existing schemes.