Nowadays, regulatory compliance has become a cornerstone of corporate governance, ensuring adherence to systematic legal frameworks. At its core, financial regulations often comprise highly intricate provisions, layered logical structures, and numerous exceptions, which inevitably result in labor-intensive or comprehension challenges. To mitigate this, recent Regulatory Technology (RegTech) and Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant attention in automating the conversion of regulatory text into executable compliance logic. However, their performance remains suboptimal particularly when applied to Chinese-language financial regulations, due to three key limitations: (1) incomplete domain-specific knowledge representation, (2) insufficient hierarchical reasoning capabilities, and (3) failure to maintain temporal and logical coherence. One promising solution is to develop a domain specific and code-oriented dataset for model training. Existing datasets such as LexGLUE, LegalBench, and CODE-ACCORD are often English-focused, domain-mismatched, or lack fine-grained granularity for compliance code generation. To fill these gaps, we present Compliance-to-Code, the first large-scale Chinese dataset dedicated to financial regulatory compliance. Covering 1,159 annotated clauses from 361 regulations across ten categories, each clause is modularly structured with four logical elements-subject, condition, constraint, and contextual information-along with regulation relations. We provide deterministic Python code mappings, detailed code reasoning, and code explanations to facilitate automated auditing. To demonstrate utility, we present FinCheck: a pipeline for regulation structuring, code generation, and report generation. Compliance-to-Code establishes a new benchmark for LLM-based compliance automation. Experimental evaluation shows that GLM-4-9B-0414 achieves the best performance on key task in regulation structuring and DeepSeek-R1-0528 performs the best in compliance code generation tasks.

Multimodal recommendation enhances accuracy by leveraging visual and textual signals, and its success largely depends on learning high-quality cross-modal representations. Recent advances in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) offer unified multimodal representation learning, making them a promising backbone. However, applying LVLMs to recommendation remains challenging due to ( i ) representation misalignment, where gaps between specific domain data and general pre-training lead to unaligned embedding spaces, and ( ii ) gradient conflicts during fine-tuning, where shared adapters cause interference and a lack of discriminative power. To address this, we propose SDA, a lightweight framework for Structural and Disentangled Adaptation, which integrates two components: Cross-Modal Structural Alignment (CMSA) and Modality-Disentangled Adaptation (MoDA). CMSA aligns embeddings using intra-modal structures as a soft teacher, while MoDA mitigates gradient conflicts via expertized, gated low-rank paths to disentangle gradient flows. Experiments on three public Amazon datasets show SDA integrates seamlessly with existing multimodal and sequential recommenders, yielding average gains of 6.15% in Hit@10 and 8.64% in NDCG@10. It also achieves up to 12.83% and 18.70% gains on long-tail items. Our code and full experimental results are available at https://github.com/RaoZhongtao/SDA.

Inspired by advances in LLMs, reasoning-enhanced sequential recommendation performs multi-step deliberation before making final predictions, unlocking greater potential for capturing user preferences. However, current methods are constrained by static reasoning trajectories that are ill-suited for the diverse complexity of user behaviors. They suffer from two key limitations: (1) a static reasoning direction, which uses flat supervision signals misaligned with human-like hierarchical reasoning, and (2) a fixed reasoning depth, which inefficiently applies the same computational effort to all users, regardless of pattern complexity. These rigidity lead to suboptimal performance and significant computational waste. To overcome these challenges, we propose DTRec, a novel and effective framework that explores the Dynamic reasoning Trajectory for Sequential Recommendation along both direction and depth. To guide the direction, we develop Hierarchical Process Supervision (HPS), which provides coarse-to-fine supervisory signals to emulate the natural, progressive refinement of human cognitive processes. To optimize the depth, we introduce the Adaptive Reasoning Halting (ARH) mechanism that dynamically adjusts the number of reasoning steps by jointly monitoring three indicators. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach, achieving up to a 24.5% performance improvement over strong baselines while simultaneously reducing computational cost by up to 41.6%.

Content recommender systems (RSs), which recommend content (e.g., news, videos) to users, can inadvertently facilitate the spread of misinformation (e.g., fake news, inaccurate content) due to their ignorance of content credibility. The widespread misinformation can lead to serious consequences, including public confusion and social unrest. Despite the pressing need to mitigate misinformation in content RSs, only a few studies have attempted to tackle this. Moreover, they generally require retraining the entire model from scratch, which is time-consuming and impractical for real-world applications. To this end, we propose MisEraser , a novel misinformation unlearning framework that effectively mitigates misinformation in content RSs without retraining. Specifically, MisEraser consists of three key components: (1) A misinformation disentanglement network , which effectively separates misinformation-specific information from item content while preserving misinformation-free information to maintain recommendation accuracy; (2) A misinformation fusion network , which fuses misinformation-specific signals from both users’ interaction sequences and the entire misinformation item set to enhance the comprehensiveness of misinformation unlearning; and (3) A misinformation erasing network , which effectively removes the fused misinformation-specific signals from trained recommendation models, enabling them to generate misinformation-suppressed and more responsible recommendations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MisEraser in mitigating misinformation while maintaining high recommendation accuracy and efficiency.

Meteorological heatmaps play a vital role in deciphering extreme weather phenomena, yet their inherent complexities-marked by irregular contours, unstructured patterns, and complex color variations-present unique analytical hurdles for state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Current state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o, Qwen-VL, and LLaVA 1.6 struggle with tasks such as precise color identification and spatial localization, resulting in inaccurate or incomplete interpretations. To address these challenges, we introduce Sparse Position and Outline Tracking (SPOT), a novel algorithm specifically designed to process irregularly shaped colored regions in visual data. SPOT identifies and localizes these regions by extracting their spatial coordinates, enabling structured representations of irregular shapes. Building on SPOT, we construct ClimateIQA, a novel meteorological visual question answering (VQA) dataset, comprising 26,280 high-resolution heatmaps and 762,120 instruction samples for wind gust, total precipitation, wind chill index and heat index analysis. ClimateIQA enhances VLM training by incorporating spatial cues, geographic metadata, and reanalysis data, improving model accuracy in interpreting and describing extreme weather features. Furthermore, we develop Climate-Zoo, a suite of fine-tuned VLMs based on SPOT-empowered ClimateIQA, which significantly outperforms existing models in meteorological heatmap tasks.

As multimedia content continues to grow on the web, the integration of visual and textual data has become a crucial challenge for web applications, particularly in recommendation systems. Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated considerable potential in addressing this challenge across various tasks that require such multimodal integration. However, their application in multimodal sequential recommendation (MSR) has not been extensively studied. To bridge this gap, we introduce MSRBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to systematically evaluate different LVLM integration strategies in web-based recommendation scenarios. We benchmark three state-of-the-art LVLMs, i.e., GPT-4 Vision, GPT-4o, and Claude-3-Opus, on the next item prediction task using the constructed Amazon Review Plus dataset, which includes additional item descriptions generated by LVLMs. Our evaluation examines five integration strategies: using LVLMs as recommender, item enhancer, reranker, and various combinations of these roles. The benchmark results reveal that 1) using LVLMs as rerankers is the most effective strategy, significantly outperforming others that rely on LVLMs to directly generate recommendations or only enhance items; 2) GPT-4o consistently achieves the best performance across most scenarios, particularly when employed as a reranker; 3) the computational inefficiency of LVLMs presents a major barrier to their widespread adoption in real-time multimodal recommendation systems. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/PALIN2018/MSRBench.

Jian Chen, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Loh Xin, Kehui Chen, Ziyuan Li, Bing Zhu, Junwei Liang. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Sequential recommender systems (SRS) are designed to predict users' future behaviors based on their historical interaction data. Recent research has increasingly utilized contrastive learning (CL) to leverage unsupervised signals to alleviate the data sparsity issue in SRS. In general, CL-based SRS first augments the raw sequential interaction data by using data augmentation strategies and employs a contrastive training scheme to enforce the representations of those sequences from the same raw interaction data to be similar. Despite the growing popularity of CL, data augmentation, as a basic component of CL, has not received sufficient attention. This raises the question: Is it possible to achieve superior recommendation results solely through data augmentation? To answer this question, we benchmark eight widely used data augmentation strategies, as well as state-of-the-art CL-based SRS methods, on four real-world datasets under both warm- and cold-start settings. Intriguingly, the conclusion drawn from our study is that, certain data augmentation strategies can achieve similar or even superior performance compared with some CL-based methods, demonstrating the potential to significantly alleviate the data sparsity issue with fewer computational overhead. We hope that our study can further inspire more fundamental studies on the key functional components of complex CL techniques. Our processed datasets and codes are available at https://github.com/AIM-SE/DA4Rec.

OBJECTIVE: Social media-based public health research is crucial for epidemic surveillance, but most studies identify relevant corpora with keyword-matching. This study develops a system to streamline the process of curating colloquial medical dictionaries. We demonstrate the pipeline by curating a Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)-colloquial symptom dictionary from COVID-19-related tweets as proof of concept. METHODS: COVID-19-related tweets from February 1, 2020, to April 30, 2022 were used. The pipeline includes three modules: a named entity recognition module to detect symptoms in tweets; an entity normalization module to aggregate detected entities; and a mapping module that iteratively maps entities to Unified Medical Language System concepts. A random 500 entity samples were drawn from the final dictionary for accuracy validation. Additionally, we conducted a symptom frequency distribution analysis to compare our dictionary to a pre-defined lexicon from previous research. RESULTS: We identified 498 480 unique symptom entity expressions from the tweets. Pre-processing reduces the number to 18 226. The final dictionary contains 38 175 unique expressions of symptoms that can be mapped to 966 UMLS concepts (accuracy = 95%). Symptom distribution analysis found that our dictionary detects more symptoms and is effective at identifying psychiatric disorders like anxiety and depression, often missed by pre-defined lexicons. CONCLUSIONS: This study advances public health research by implementing a novel, systematic pipeline for curating symptom lexicons from social media data. The final lexicon's high accuracy, validated by medical professionals, underscores the potential of this methodology to reliably interpret, and categorize vast amounts of unstructured social media data into actionable medical insights across diverse linguistic and regional landscapes.

Transformer-based sequential recommendation (SR) has been booming in recent years, with the self-attention mechanism as its key component. Self-attention has been widely believed to be able to effectively select those informative and relevant items from a sequence of interacted items for next-item prediction via learning larger attention weights for these items. However, this may not always be true in reality. Our empirical analysis of some representative Transformer-based SR models reveals that it is not uncommon for large attention weights to be assigned to less relevant items, which can result in inaccurate recommendations. Through further in-depth analysis, we find two factors that may contribute to such inaccurate assignment of attention weights:sub-optimal position encoding andnoisy input. To this end, in this paper, we aim to address this significant yet challenging gap in existing works. To be specific, we propose a simple yet effective framework called Attention Calibration for Transformer-based Sequential Recommendation (AC-TSR). In AC-TSR, a novel spatial calibrator and adversarial calibrator are designed respectively to directly calibrates those incorrectly assigned attention weights. The former is devised to explicitly capture the spatial relationships (i.e., order and distance) among items for more precise calculation of attention weights. The latter aims to redistribute the attention weights based on each item's contribution to the next-item prediction. AC-TSR is readily adaptable and can be seamlessly integrated into various existing transformer-based SR models. Extensive experimental results on four benchmark real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed AC-TSR via significant recommendation performance enhancements. The source code is available at https://github.com/AIM-SE/AC-TSR.

Transformer-based models attain excellent results and generalize well when trained on sufficient amounts of data. However, constrained by the limited data available in the audio domain, most transformer-based models for audio tasks are finetuned from pre-trained models in other domains (e.g. image), which has a notable gap with the audio domain. Other methods explore the self-supervised learning approaches directly in the audio domain but currently do not perform well in the downstream tasks. In this paper, we present a novel self-supervised learning method for transformer-based audio models, called masked spectrogram prediction (MaskSpec), to learn powerful audio representations from unlabeled audio data (AudioSet used in this paper). Our method masks random patches of the input spectrogram and reconstructs the masked regions with an encoder-decoder architecture. Experimental results demonstrate MaskSpec reaches the performance of 0.471 (mAP) on AudioSet, 0.854 (mAP) on Open-MIC2018, 0.982 (accuracy) on ESC-50, 0.976 (accuracy) on SCV2, and 0.823 (accuracy) on DCASE2019 Task1A. The source code and pre-trained models have been released.1

Large pre-trained models have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) research and applications, but high training costs and limited data resources have prevented their benefits from being shared equally amongst speakers of all the world's languages. To address issues of cross-linguistic access to such models and reduce energy consumption for sustainability during large-scale model training, this study proposes an effective and energy-efficient framework called GreenPLM that uses bilingual lexicons to directly ``translate'' pre-trained language models of one language into another at almost no additional cost. We validate this approach in 18 languages' BERT models and show that this framework is comparable to, if not better than, other heuristics with high training costs. In addition, given lightweight continued pre-training on limited data where available, this framework outperforms the original monolingual language models in six out of seven tested languages with up to 200x less pre-training efforts. Aiming at the Leave No One Behind Principle (LNOB), our approach manages to reduce inequalities between languages and energy consumption greatly. We make our codes and models publicly available at https://github.com/qcznlp/GreenPLMs.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have transformed the field of question answering (QA). However, evaluating LLMs in the medical field is challenging due to the lack of standardized and comprehensive datasets. To address this gap, we introduce CMExam, sourced from the Chinese National Medical Licensing Examination. CMExam consists of 60K+ multiple-choice questions for standardized and objective evaluations, as well as solution explanations for model reasoning evaluation in an open-ended manner. For in-depth analyses of LLMs, we invited medical professionals to label five additional question-wise annotations, including disease groups, clinical departments, medical disciplines, areas of competency, and question difficulty levels. Alongside the dataset, we further conducted thorough experiments with representative LLMs and QA algorithms on CMExam. The results show that GPT-4 had the best accuracy of 61.6% and a weighted F1 score of 0.617. These results highlight a great disparity when compared to human accuracy, which stood at 71.6%. For explanation tasks, while LLMs could generate relevant reasoning and demonstrate improved performance after finetuning, they fall short of a desired standard, indicating ample room for improvement. To the best of our knowledge, CMExam is the first Chinese medical exam dataset to provide comprehensive medical annotations. The experiments and findings of LLM evaluation also provide valuable insights into the challenges and potential solutions in developing Chinese medical QA systems and LLM evaluation pipelines.

Existing research efforts for multi-interest candidate matching in recommender systems mainly focus on improving model architecture or incorporating additional information, neglecting the importance of training schemes. This work revisits the training framework and uncovers two major problems hindering the expressiveness of learned multi-interest representations. First, the current training objective (i.e., uniformly sampled softmax) fails to effectively train discriminative representations in a multi-interest learning scenario due to the severe increase in easy negative samples. Second, a routing collapse problem is observed where each learned interest may collapse to express information only from a single item, resulting in information loss. To address these issues, we propose the REMI framework, consisting of an Interest-aware Hard Negative mining strategy (IHN) and a Routing Regularization (RR) method. IHN emphasizes interest-aware hard negatives by proposing an ideal sampling distribution and developing a Monte-Carlo strategy for efficient approximation. RR prevents routing collapse by introducing a novel regularization term on the item-to-interest routing matrices. These two components enhance the learned multi-interest representations from both the optimization objective and the composition information. REMI is a general framework that can be readily applied to various existing multi-interest candidate matching methods. Experiments on three real-world datasets show our method can significantly improve state-of-the-art methods with easy implementation and negligible computational overhead. The source code is available at https://github.com/Tokkiu/REMI.

Contrastive learning (CL) benefits the training of sequential recommendation models with informative self-supervision signals. Existing solutions apply general sequential data augmentation strategies to generate positive pairs and encourage their representations to be invariant. However, due to the inherent properties of user behavior sequences, some augmentation strategies, such as item substitution, can lead to changes in user intent. Learning indiscriminately invariant representations for all augmentation strategies might be sub-optimal. Therefore, we propose Equivariant Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (ECL-SR), which endows SR models with great discriminative power, making the learned user behavior representations sensitive to invasive augmentations (e.g., item substitution) and insensitive to mild augmentations (e.g., feature-level dropout masking). In detail, we use the conditional discriminator to capture differences in behavior due to item substitution, which encourages the user behavior encoder to be equivariant to invasive augmentations. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that the proposed ECL-SR framework achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art SR models. The source code is available at https://github.com/Tokkiu/ECL.

Intent detection and slot filling are two main tasks in natural language understanding (NLU). These two tasks are highly related and often trained jointly. However, most previous works assume an utterance only corresponds to one intent, ignoring that it can include multiple intents. In this paper, we propose a novel Self-Distillation Joint NLU model (SDJN) for multi-intent NLU. Specifically, we adopt three orderly connected decoders and a self-distillation approach to form an auxiliary loop that establishes interrelated connections between multiple intents and slots. The output of each decoder serves as auxiliary information for the next decoder, and the auxiliary loop completes via the self-distillation. Furthermore, we formulate multiple intent detection as a weakly supervised task and handle it with multiple instance learning (MIL), which exploits token-level intent information to predict multiple intents and guide slot decoder. Experimental results indicate that our model achieves competitive performance compared to others.

Accented speech recognition and accent classification are relatively under-explored research areas in speech technology.Recently, deep learning-based methods and Transformer-based pretrained models have achieved superb performances in both areas.However, most accent classification tasks focused on classifying different kinds of English accents and little attention was paid to geographically-proximate accent classification, especially under a low-resource setting where forensic speech science tasks usually encounter.In this paper, we explored three main accent modelling methods combined with two different classifiers based on 105 speaker recordings retrieved from five urban varieties in Northern England.Although speech representations generated from pretrained models generally have better performances in downstream classification, traditional methods like Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) and formant measurements are equipped with specific strengths.These results suggest that in forensic phonetics scenario where data are relatively scarce, a simple modelling method and classifier could be competitive with state-of-the-art pretrained speech models as feature extractors, which could enhance a sooner estimation for the accent information in practices.Besides, our findings also cross-validated a new methodology in quantifying sociophonetic changes.

The past ten years have witnessed the rapid development of textbased intent detection, whose benchmark performances have already been taken to a remarkable level by deep learning techniques.However, automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors are inevitable in real-world applications due to the environment noise, unique speech patterns and etc, leading to sharp performance drop in state-of-the-art text-based intent detection models.Essentially, this phenomenon is caused by the semantic drift brought by ASR errors and most existing works tend to focus on designing new model structures to reduce its impact, which is at the expense of versatility and flexibility.Different from previous one-piece model, in this paper, we propose a novel and agile framework called CR-ID for ASR error robust intent detection with two plug-and-play modules, namely semantic drift calibration module (SDCM) and phonemic refinement module (PRM), which are both model-agnostic and thus could be easily integrated to any existing intent detection models without modifying their structures.Experimental results on SNIPS dataset show that, our proposed CR-ID framework achieves competitive performance and outperform all the baseline methods on ASR outputs, which verifies that CR-ID can effectively alleviate the semantic drift caused by ASR errors.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to bring up various topics discussed or debated on social media. In order to explore the impact of pandemics on people's lives, it is crucial to understand the public's concerns and attitudes towards pandemic-related entities (e.g., drugs, vaccines) on social media. However, models trained on existing named entity recognition (NER) or targeted sentiment analysis (TSA) datasets have limited ability to understand COVID-19-related social media texts because these datasets are not designed or annotated from a medical perspective. In this paper, we release METS-CoV, a dataset containing medical entities and targeted sentiments from COVID-19 related tweets. METS-CoV contains 10,000 tweets with 7 types of entities, including 4 medical entity types (Disease, Drug, Symptom, and Vaccine) and 3 general entity types (Person, Location, and Organization). To further investigate tweet users' attitudes toward specific entities, 4 types of entities (Person, Organization, Drug, and Vaccine) are selected and annotated with user sentiments, resulting in a targeted sentiment dataset with 9,101 entities (in 5,278 tweets). To the best of our knowledge, METS-CoV is the first dataset to collect medical entities and corresponding sentiments of COVID-19 related tweets. We benchmark the performance of classical machine learning models and state-of-the-art deep learning models on NER and TSA tasks with extensive experiments. Results show that this dataset has vast room for improvement for both NER and TSA tasks. With rich annotations and comprehensive benchmark results, we believe METS-CoV is a fundamental resource for building better medical social media understanding tools and facilitating computational social science research, especially on epidemiological topics. Our data, annotation guidelines, benchmark models, and source code are publicly available (\url{https://github.com/YLab-Open/METS-CoV}) to ensure reproducibility.

Side information fusion for sequential recommendation (SR) aims to effectively leverage various side information to enhance the performance of next-item prediction. Most state-of-the-art methods build on self-attention networks and focus on exploring various solutions to integrate the item embedding and side information embeddings before the attention layer. However, our analysis shows that the early integration of various types of embeddings limits the expressiveness of attention matrices due to a rank bottleneck and constrains the flexibility of gradients. Also, it involves mixed correlations among the different heterogeneous information resources, which brings extra disturbance to attention calculation. Motivated by this, we propose Decoupled Side Information Fusion for Sequential Recommendation (DIF-SR), which moves the side information from the input to the attention layer and decouples the attention calculation of various side information and item representation. We theoretically and empirically show that the proposed solution allows higher-rank attention matrices and flexible gradients to enhance the modeling capacity of side information fusion. Also, auxiliary attribute predictors are proposed to further activate the beneficial interaction between side information and item representation learning. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed solution stably outperforms state-of-the-art SR models. Further studies show that our proposed solution can be readily incorporated into current attention-based SR models and significantly boost performance. Our source code is available at https://github.com/AIM-SE/DIF-SR.

Recently, the attention-enhanced multi-layer encoder, such as Transformer, has been extensively studied in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC). To predict the answer, it is common practice to employ a predictor to draw information only from the final encoder layer which generates the coarse-grained representations of the source sequences, i.e., passage and question. Previous studies have shown that the representation of source sequence becomes more coarse-grained from fine-grained as the encoding layer increases. It is generally believed that with the growing number of layers in deep neural networks, the encoding process will gather relevant information for each location increasingly, resulting in more coarse-grained representations, which adds the likelihood of similarity to other locations (referring to homogeneity). Such a phenomenon will mislead the model to make wrong judgments so as to degrade the performance. To this end, we propose a novel approach called Adaptive Bidirectional Attention, which adaptively exploits the source representations of different levels to the predictor. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset, SQuAD 2.0 demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, and the results are better than the previous state-of-the-art model by 2.5% EM and 2.3% F1 scores.

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is an essential part of the spoken dialogue system, which typically consists of intent detection (ID) and slot filling (SF) tasks. During the conversation, most utterances of people contain rich sentimental information, which is helpful for performing the ID and SF tasks but ignored to be explored by existing works. In this paper, we argue that implicitly introducing sentimental features can promote SLU performance. Specifically, we present a Multitask Learning (MTL) framework to implicitly extract and utilize the aspect-based sentimental text features. Besides, we introduce an Iteratively Co-Interactive Network (ICN) for the SLU task to fully utilize the comprehensive text features. Experimental results show that with the external BERT representation, our framework achieves new state-of-the-art on two benchmark datasets, i.e., SNIPS and ATIS.

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is an essential part of the spoken dialogue system, which typically consists of intent detection (ID) and slot filling (SF) tasks. Recently, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) based methods achieved the state-of-the-art for SLU. It is noted that, in the existing RNN-based approaches, ID and SF tasks are often jointly modeled to utilize the correlation information between them. However, we noted that, so far, the efforts to obtain better performance by supporting bidirectional and explicit information exchange between ID and SF are not well studied. In addition, few studies attempt to capture the local context information to enhance the performance of SF. Motivated by these findings, in this paper, Parallel Interactive Network (PIN) is proposed to model the mutual guidance between ID and SF. Specifically, given an utterance, a Gaussian self-attentive encoder is introduced to generate the context-aware feature embedding of the utterance which is able to capture local context information. Taking the feature embedding of the utterance, Slot2Intent module and Intent2Slot module are developed to capture the bidirectional information flow for ID and SF tasks. Finally, a cooperation mechanism is constructed to fuse the information obtained from Slot2Intent and Intent2Slot modules to further reduce the prediction bias. The experiments on two benchmark datasets, i.e., SNIPS and ATIS, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which achieves a competitive result with state-of-the-art models. More encouragingly, by using the feature embedding of the utterance generated by the pre-trained language model BERT, our method achieves the state-of-the-art among all comparison approaches.

Humanitarian disasters have been on the rise in recent years due to the effects of climate change and socio-political situations such as the refugee crisis. Technology can be used to best mobilize resources such as food and water in the event of a natural disaster, by semi-automatically flagging tweets and short messages as indicating an urgent need. The problem is challenging not just because of the sparseness of data in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, but because of the varying characteristics of disasters in developing countries (making it difficult to train just one system) and the noise and quirks in social media. In this paper, we present a robust, low-supervision social media urgency system that adapts to arbitrary crises by leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data in an ensemble setting. The system is also able to adapt to new crises where an unlabeled background corpus may not be available yet by utilizing a simple and effective transfer learning methodology. Experimentally, our transfer learning and low-supervision approaches are found to outperform viable baselines with high significance on myriad disaster datasets. In this short paper, we provide details on the low-supervision approach for urgency detection on Twitter feeds.

Due to climate change and the effects of geopolitical and social challenges like the refugee crisis in Europe, the world is facing an unprecedented set of humanitarian problems. According to the United Nations, there is a projected funding shortfall of more than 20 billion dollars in addressing these needs. Technology can play a vital role in mitigating this burden, especially with the advent of real-time social media and advances in areas like Natural Language Processing and machine learning. An important problem addressed by machine learning in current crisis informatics platforms is situation labeling, which can be intuitively defined as semi-automatically assigning one or more actionable labels (such as food, medicine or water) to tweets or documents from a controlled vocabulary. Despite multiple advances, current situation labeling systems are noisy and do not generalize very well to arbitrary crisis data. Consequentially, consumers of these outputs (which include humanitarian responders) are unwilling to trust these outputs without due diligence or provenance. In this paper, we demonstrate an interactive visualization platform called SAVIZ that provides non-technical first responders with such capabilities. SAVIZ is completely built using open-source technologies, can be rendered on a web browser and is backward-compatible with several pre-existing crisis intelligence platforms. We use two real-world scenarios (the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, and the unfolding Ebola crisis in Africa) to illustrate the potential of SAVIZ.