Viviane P. Moreira

Ana L. C. Bazzan, Anderson R. Tavares, André G. Pereira et al.

The thought-provoking analogy between AI and electricity, made by computer scientist and entrepreneur Andrew Ng, summarizes the deep transformation that recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have triggered in the world. This chapter presents an overview of the ever-evolving landscape of AI, written in Portuguese. With no intent to exhaust the subject, we explore the AI applications that are redefining sectors of the economy, impacting society and humanity. We analyze the risks that may come along with rapid technological progress and future trends in AI, an area that is on the path to becoming a general-purpose technology, just like electricity, which revolutionized society in the 19th and 20th centuries. A provocativa comparação entre IA e eletricidade, feita pelo cientista da computação e empreendedor Andrew Ng, resume a profunda transformação que os recentes avanços em Inteligência Artificial (IA) têm desencadeado no mundo. Este capítulo apresenta uma visão geral pela paisagem em constante evolução da IA. Sem pretensões de exaurir o assunto, exploramos as aplicações que estão redefinindo setores da economia, impactando a sociedade e a humanidade. Analisamos os riscos que acompanham o rápido progresso tecnológico e as tendências futuras da IA, área que trilha o caminho para se tornar uma tecnologia de propósito geral, assim como a eletricidade, que revolucionou a sociedade dos séculos XIX e XX.

Abel Corrêa Dias, Viviane Pereira Moreira, João Luiz Dihl Comba

Objective: Scientific publications play a crucial role in uncovering insights, testing novel drugs, and shaping healthcare policies. Accessing the quality of publications requires evaluating their Risk of Bias (RoB), a process typically conducted by human reviewers. In this study, we introduce a new dataset for machine reading comprehension and RoB assessment and present RoBIn (Risk of Bias Inference), an innovative model crafted to automate such evaluation. The model employs a dual-task approach, extracting evidence from a given context and assessing the RoB based on the gathered evidence. Methods: We use data from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) as ground truth to label open-access clinical trial publications from PubMed. This process enabled us to develop training and test datasets specifically for machine reading comprehension and RoB inference. Additionally, we created extractive (RoBInExt) and generative (RoBInGen) Transformer-based approaches to extract relevant evidence and classify the RoB effectively. Results: RoBIn is evaluated across various settings and benchmarked against state-of-the-art methods for RoB inference, including large language models in multiple scenarios. In most cases, the best-performing RoBIn variant surpasses traditional machine learning and LLM-based approaches, achieving an ROC AUC of 0.83. Conclusion: Based on the evidence extracted from clinical trial reports, RoBIn performs a binary classification to decide whether the trial is at a low RoB or a high/unclear RoB. We found that both RoBInGen and RoBInExt are robust and have the best results in many settings.

Danny Suarez Vargas, Lucas R. C. Pessutto, Viviane Pereira Moreira

In the context of sentiment analysis, there has been growing interest in performing a finer granularity analysis focusing on the specific aspects of the entities being evaluated. This is the goal of Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) which basically involves two tasks: aspect extraction and polarity detection. The first task is responsible for discovering the aspects mentioned in the review text and the second task assigns a sentiment orientation (positive, negative, or neutral) to that aspect. Currently, the state-of-the-art in ABSA consists of the application of deep learning methods such as recurrent, convolutional and attention neural networks. The limitation of these techniques is that they require a lot of training data and are computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a simple approach called SUAEx for aspect extraction. SUAEx is unsupervised and relies solely on the similarity of word embeddings. Experimental results on datasets from three different domains have shown that SUAEx achieves results that can outperform the state-of-the-art attention-based approach at a fraction of the time.

Lucas R. C. Pessutto, Tiago de Melo, Viviane P. Moreira et al.

This paper describes the system submitted by our team (BabelEnconding) to SemEval-2020 Task 3: Predicting the Graded Effect of Context in Word Similarity. We propose an approach that relies on translation and multilingual language models in order to compute the contextual similarity between pairs of words. Our hypothesis is that evidence from additional languages can leverage the correlation with the human generated scores. BabelEnconding was applied to both subtasks and ranked among the top-3 in six out of eight task/language combinations and was the highest scoring system three times.

Diego de Vargas Feijo, Viviane Pereira Moreira

BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and ALBERT (A Lite BERT) are methods for pre-training language models which can later be fine-tuned for a variety of Natural Language Understanding tasks. These methods have been applied to a number of such tasks (mostly in English), achieving results that outperform the state-of-the-art. In this paper, our contribution is twofold. First, we make available our trained BERT and Albert model for Portuguese. Second, we compare our monolingual and the standard multilingual models using experiments in semantic textual similarity, recognizing textual entailment, textual category classification, sentiment analysis, offensive comment detection, and fake news detection, to assess the effectiveness of the generated language representations. The results suggest that both monolingual and multilingual models are able to achieve state-of-the-art and the advantage of training a single language model, if any, is small.

Felipe Soares, Viviane Pereira Moreira, Karin Becker

The Scielo database is an important source of scientific information in Latin America, containing articles from several research domains. A striking characteristic of Scielo is that many of its full-text contents are presented in more than one language, thus being a potential source of parallel corpora. In this article, we present the development of a parallel corpus from Scielo in three languages: English, Portuguese, and Spanish. Sentences were automatically aligned using the Hunalign algorithm for all language pairs, and for a subset of trilingual articles also. We demonstrate the capabilities of our corpus by training a Statistical Machine Translation system (Moses) for each language pair, which outperformed related works on scientific articles. Sentence alignment was also manually evaluated, presenting an average of 98.8% correctly aligned sentences across all languages. Our parallel corpus is freely available in the TMX format, with complementary information regarding article metadata.