arXiv research

Building machine translation (MT) test sets is a relatively expensive task. As MT becomes increasingly desired for more and more language pairs and more and more domains, it becomes necessary to build test sets for each case. In this paper, we investigate using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to make MT test sets chea…

Study estimates 163 million online freelancers globally.

We explore how to improve machine translation systems by adding more translation data in situations where we already have substantial resources. The main challenge is how to buck the trend of diminishing returns that is commonly encountered. We present an active learning-style data solicitation algorithm to meet this c…

Annotation errors can significantly hurt classifier performance, yet datasets are only growing noisier with the increased use of Amazon Mechanical Turk and techniques like distant supervision that automatically generate labels. In this paper, we present a robust extension of logistic regression that incorporates the po…

We study reinforcement learning of chatbots with recurrent neural network architectures when the rewards are noisy and expensive to obtain. For instance, a chatbot used in automated customer service support can be scored by quality assurance agents, but this process can be expensive, time consuming and noisy. Previous …

Modern online platforms rely on effective rating systems to learn about items. We consider the optimal design of rating systems that collect binary feedback after transactions. We make three contributions. First, we formalize the performance of a rating system as the speed with which it recovers the true underlying ran…

Automatic classification of scientific articles based on common characteristics is an interesting problem with many applications in digital library and information retrieval systems. Properly organized articles can be useful for automatic generation of taxonomies in scientific writings, textual summarization, efficient…

We propose a cost-effective framework for preference elicitation and aggregation under the Plackett-Luce model with features. Given a budget, our framework iteratively computes the most cost-effective elicitation questions in order to help the agents make a better group decision. We illustrate the viability of the fram…

We use automatic speech recognition to assess spoken English learner pronunciation based on the authentic intelligibility of the learners' spoken responses determined from support vector machine (SVM) classifier or deep learning neural network model predictions of transcription correctness. Using numeric features produ…

Large datasets often have unreliable labels-such as those obtained from Amazon's Mechanical Turk or social media platforms-and classifiers trained on mislabeled datasets often exhibit poor performance. We present a simple, effective technique for accounting for label noise when training deep neural networks. We augment…

Large-scale labeled dataset is the indispensable fuel that ignites the AI revolution as we see today. Most such datasets are constructed using crowdsourcing services such as Amazon Mechanical Turk which provides noisy labels from non-experts at a fair price. The sheer size of such datasets mandates that it is only feas…

The use of synthetic data generated by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has become quite a popular method to do data augmentation for many applications. While practitioners celebrate this as an economical way to get more synthetic data that can be used to train downstream classifiers, it is not clear that they re…

The democratization of machine learning (ML) has led to ML-based machine vision systems for autonomous driving, traffic monitoring, and video surveillance. However, true democratization cannot be achieved without greatly simplifying the process of collecting groundtruth for training and testing these systems. This grou…

When eliciting judgements from humans for an unknown quantity, one often has the choice of making direct-scoring (cardinal) or comparative (ordinal) measurements. In this paper we study the relative merits of either choice, providing empirical and theoretical guidelines for the selection of a measurement scheme. We pro…

Traditionally, psychophysical experiments are conducted by repeated measurements on a few well-trained participants under well-controlled conditions, often resulting in, if done properly, high quality data. In recent years, however, crowdsourcing platforms are becoming increasingly popular means of data collection, mea…

A popular approach for large scale data annotation tasks is crowdsourcing, wherein each data point is labeled by multiple noisy annotators. We consider the problem of inferring ground truth from noisy ordinal labels obtained from multiple annotators of varying and unknown expertise levels. Annotation models for ordinal…

OpinionRank uses graph-based ranking to improve unreliable crowdsourced labels.

Survey of Turk's head knots and links properties.

Although freelancing work has grown substantially in recent years, in part facilitated by a number of online labor marketplaces, (e.g., Guru, Freelancer, Amazon Mechanical Turk), traditional forms of "in-sourcing" work continue being the dominant form of employment. This means that, at least for the time being, freelan…

The paper identifies and analyzes subjective class issues in user-generated data.

Crowdsourcing and active learning reduce manual annotation in social media event classification.

Enhances AI models with human feedback for noisy data.

When might human input help (or not) when assessing risk in fairness domains? Dressel and Farid (2018) asked Mechanical Turk workers to evaluate a subset of defendants in the ProPublica COMPAS data for risk of recidivism, and concluded that COMPAS predictions were no more accurate or fair than predictions made by human…

One of the major challenges in machine learning nowadays is to provide predictions with not only high accuracy but also user-friendly explanations. Although in recent years we have witnessed increasingly popular use of deep neural networks for sequence modeling, it is still challenging to explain the rationales behind …

From human crowds to cells in tissue, the detection and efficient tracking of multiple objects in dense configurations is an important and unsolved problem. In the past, limitations of image analysis have restricted studies of dense groups to tracking a single or subset of marked individuals, or to coarse-grained group…

The minimum number of colors is a challenging knot invariant since, by definition, its calculation requires taking the minimum over infinitely many minima. In this article we estimate and in some cases calculate the minimum number of colors for the Turk's head knots on three strands.

Many important forms of data are stored digitally in XML format. Errors can occur in the textual content of the data in the fields of the XML. Fixing these errors manually is time-consuming and expensive, especially for large amounts of data. There is increasing interest in the research, development, and use of automat…

Fox's trapezoidal conjecture for four-strand Turk's head knots is proven.

We compute the Kauffman bracket polynomial of the three-lead Turk's head, the chain sinnet and the figure-eight chain shadow diagrams. Each of these knots can in fact be constructed by repeatedly concatenating the same 3-tangle, respectively, then taking the closure. The bracket is then evaluated by expressing the stat…

The m,n Turk's Head Knot, THK(m,n), is an "alternating (m,n) torus knot." We prove the Harary-Kauffman conjecture for all THK(m,n) except for the case where m \geq 5 is odd and n \geq 3 is relatively prime to m. We also give evidence in support of the conjecture in that case. Our proof rests on the observation that non…

Research classifies knots based on sliceness and amphichirality.

Study real-world noisy labels from human annotations for better understanding.

Study knots with large $\mathrm{SL}_2(\mathbb{C})$ character varieties.

We explore training an automatic modality tagger. Modality is the attitude that a speaker might have toward an event or state. One of the main hurdles for training a linguistic tagger is gathering training data. This is particularly problematic for training a tagger for modality because modality triggers are sparse for…

An ongoing challenge in the analysis of document collections is how to summarize content in terms of a set of inferred themes that can be interpreted substantively in terms of topics. The current practice of parametrizing the themes in terms of most frequent words limits interpretability by ignoring the differential us…

We derive a factorization of the Alexander polynomial of the 4-strand Turk's head knot using hypergeometric representations.

Model predicts short-term Amazon rainforest fires with high accuracy.

Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor detects drift in deployed ML models.

Amazon SageMaker AMT automates machine learning model tuning.

SFC aims to protect the Amazon with a digital currency and smart contracts.

Our study employs sentiment analysis to evaluate the compatibility of Amazon.com reviews with their corresponding ratings. Sentiment analysis is the task of identifying and classifying the sentiment expressed in a piece of text as being positive or negative. On e-commerce websites such as Amazon.com, consumers can subm…

The paper uses data science to predict stock trends of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

GANs improve missing data imputation for ranking tasks.

Sponsored search in E-commerce platforms such as Amazon, Taobao and Tmall provides sellers an effective way to reach potential buyers with most relevant purpose. In this paper, we study the auction mechanism optimization problem in sponsored search on Alibaba's mobile E-commerce platform. Besides generating revenue, we…

Human annotations serve an important role in computational models where the target constructs under study are hidden, such as dimensions of affect. This is especially relevant in machine learning, where subjective labels derived from related observable signals (e.g., audio, video, text) are needed to support model trai…

We introduce and describe the results of a novel shared task on bandit learning for machine translation. The task was organized jointly by Amazon and Heidelberg University for the first time at the Second Conference on Machine Translation (WMT 2017). The goal of the task is to encourage research on learning machine tra…

Cross-domain sentiment classification (CDSC) is an importance task in domain adaptation and sentiment classification. Due to the domain discrepancy, a sentiment classifier trained on source domain data may not works well on target domain data. In recent years, many researchers have used deep neural network models for c…

We propose a simple yet powerful framework for modeling integer-valued data, such as counts, scores, and rounded data. The data-generating process is defined by Simultaneously Transforming and Rounding (STAR) a continuous-valued process, which produces a flexible family of integer-valued distributions capable of modeli…