Frank Xing

Tom Young, Frank Xing, Vlad Pandelea et al.

The goal of building intelligent dialogue systems has largely been separately pursued under two paradigms: task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, which perform goal-oriented functions, and open-domain dialogue (ODD) systems, which focus on non-goal-oriented chitchat. The two dialogue modes can potentially be intertwined together seamlessly in the same conversation, as easily done by a friendly human assistant. Such ability is desirable in conversational agents, as the integration makes them more accessible and useful. Our paper addresses this problem of fusing TODs and ODDs in multi-turn dialogues. Based on the popular TOD dataset MultiWOZ, we build a new dataset FusedChat, by rewriting the existing TOD turns and adding new ODD turns. This procedure constructs conversation sessions containing exchanges from both dialogue modes. It features inter-mode contextual dependency, i.e., the dialogue turns from the two modes depend on each other. Rich dependency patterns including co-reference and ellipsis are features. The new dataset, with 60k new human-written ODD turns and 5k re-written TOD turns, offers a benchmark to test a dialogue model's ability to perform inter-mode conversations. This is a more challenging task since the model has to determine the appropriate dialogue mode and generate the response based on the inter-mode context. But such models would better mimic human-level conversation capabilities. We evaluate baseline models on this task, including classification-based two-stage models and two-in-one fused models. We publicly release FusedChat and the baselines to propel future work on inter-mode dialogue systems https://github.com/tomyoung903/FusedChat.

Jiaxi He, Frank Z. Xing, Ran Yang et al.

The quality of images captured in outdoor environments can be affected by poor weather conditions such as fog, dust, and atmospheric scattering of other particles. This problem can bring extra challenges to high-level computer vision tasks like image segmentation and object detection. However, previous studies on image dehazing suffer from a huge computational workload and corruption of the original image, such as over-saturation and halos. In this paper, we present a novel image dehazing approach based on the optical model for haze images and regularized optimization. Specifically, we convert the non-convex, bilinear problem concerning the unknown haze-free image and light transmission distribution to a convex, linear optimization problem by estimating the atmosphere light constant. Our method is further accelerated by introducing a multilevel Haar wavelet transform. The optimization, instead, is applied to the low frequency sub-band decomposition of the original image. This dimension reduction significantly improves the processing speed of our method and exhibits the potential for real-time applications. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art dehazing algorithms in terms of both image reconstruction quality and computational efficiency. For implementation details, source code can be publicly accessed via http://github.com/JiaxiHe/Image-and-Video-Dehazing.

Frank Xing

Large language models (LLMs) have drastically changed the possible ways to design intelligent systems, shifting the focuses from massive data acquisition and new modeling training to human alignment and strategical elicitation of the full potential of existing pre-trained models. This paradigm shift, however, is not fully realized in financial sentiment analysis (FSA), due to the discriminative nature of this task and a lack of prescriptive knowledge of how to leverage generative models in such a context. This study investigates the effectiveness of the new paradigm, i.e., using LLMs without fine-tuning for FSA. Rooted in Minsky's theory of mind and emotions, a design framework with heterogeneous LLM agents is proposed. The framework instantiates specialized agents using prior domain knowledge of the types of FSA errors and reasons on the aggregated agent discussions. Comprehensive evaluation on FSA datasets show that the framework yields better accuracies, especially when the discussions are substantial. This study contributes to the design foundations and paves new avenues for LLMs-based FSA. Implications on business and management are also discussed.

Keane Ong, Rui Mao, Deeksha Varshney et al.

Evaluating corporate sustainability performance is essential to drive sustainable business practices, amid the need for a more sustainable economy. However, this is hindered by the complexity and volume of corporate sustainability data (i.e. sustainability disclosures), not least by the effectiveness of the NLP tools used to analyse them. To this end, we identify three primary challenges - immateriality, complexity, and subjectivity, that exacerbate the difficulty of extracting insights from sustainability disclosures. To address these issues, we introduce ESGSenticNet, a publicly available knowledge base for sustainability analysis. ESGSenticNet is constructed from a neurosymbolic framework that integrates specialised concept parsing, GPT-4o inference, and semi-supervised label propagation, together with a hierarchical taxonomy. This approach culminates in a structured knowledge base of 44k knowledge triplets - ('halve carbon emission', supports, 'emissions control'), for effective sustainability analysis. Experiments indicate that ESGSenticNet, when deployed as a lexical method, more effectively captures relevant and actionable sustainability information from sustainability disclosures compared to state of the art baselines. Besides capturing a high number of unique ESG topic terms, ESGSenticNet outperforms baselines on the ESG relatedness and ESG action orientation of these terms by 26% and 31% respectively. These metrics describe the extent to which topic terms are related to ESG, and depict an action toward ESG. Moreover, when deployed as a lexical method, ESGSenticNet does not require any training, possessing a key advantage in its simplicity for non-technical stakeholders.

Xiaohua Wu, Lin Li, Xiaohui Tao et al.

Happiness computing based on large-scale online web data and machine learning methods is an emerging research topic that underpins a range of issues, from personal growth to social stability. Many advanced Machine Learning (ML) models with explanations are used to compute the happiness online assessment while maintaining high accuracy of results. However, domain knowledge constraints, such as the primary and secondary relations of happiness factors, are absent from these models, which limits the association between computing results and the right reasons for why they occurred. This article attempts to provide new insights into the explanation consistency from an empirical study perspective. Then we study how to represent and introduce domain knowledge constraints to make ML models more trustworthy. We achieve this through: (1) proving that multiple prediction models with additive factor attributions will have the desirable property of primary and secondary relations consistency, and (2) showing that factor relations with quantity can be represented as an importance distribution for encoding domain knowledge. Factor explanation difference is penalized by the Kullback-Leibler divergence-based loss among computing models. Experimental results using two online web datasets show that domain knowledge of stable factor relations exists. Using this knowledge not only improves happiness computing accuracy but also reveals more significative happiness factors for assisting decisions well.

Haodong Bai, Frank Z. Xing, Erik Cambria et al.

Business taxonomies are indispensable tools for investors to do equity research and make professional decisions. However, to identify the structure of industry sectors in an emerging market is challenging for two reasons. First, existing taxonomies are designed for mature markets, which may not be the appropriate classification for small companies with innovative business models. Second, emerging markets are fast-developing, thus the static business taxonomies cannot promptly reflect the new features. In this article, we propose a new method to construct business taxonomies automatically from the content of corporate annual reports. Extracted concepts are hierarchically clustered using greedy affinity propagation. Our method requires less supervision and is able to discover new terms. Experiments and evaluation on the Chinese National Equities Exchange and Quotations (NEEQ) market show several advantages of the business taxonomy we build. Our results provide an effective tool for understanding and investing in the new growth companies.

Frank Z. Xing, Erik Cambria, Lorenzo Malandri et al.

Along with the advance of opinion mining techniques, public mood has been found to be a key element for stock market prediction. However, how market participants' behavior is affected by public mood has been rarely discussed. Consequently, there has been little progress in leveraging public mood for the asset allocation problem, which is preferred in a trusted and interpretable way. In order to address the issue of incorporating public mood analyzed from social media, we propose to formalize public mood into market views, because market views can be integrated into the modern portfolio theory. In our framework, the optimal market views will maximize returns in each period with a Bayesian asset allocation model. We train two neural models to generate the market views, and benchmark the model performance on other popular asset allocation strategies. Our experimental results suggest that the formalization of market views significantly increases the profitability (5% to 10% annually) of the simulated portfolio at a given risk level.

Frank Z. Xing

The Cerebellar Model Articulation Controller (CMAC) is an influential brain-inspired computing model in many relevant fields. Since its inception in the 1970s, the model has been intensively studied and many variants of the prototype, such as Kernel-CMAC, Self-Organizing Map CMAC, and Linguistic CMAC, have been proposed. This review article focus on how the CMAC model is gradually developed and refined to meet the demand of fast, adaptive, and robust control. Two perspective, CMAC as a neural network and CMAC as a table look-up technique are presented. Three aspects of the model: the architecture, learning algorithms and applications are discussed. In the end, some potential future research directions on this model are suggested.