Adam Meyers

Shubham Vatsal, Adam Meyers, John E. Ortega

Models based on bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) produce state of the art (SOTA) results on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as named entity recognition (NER), part-of-speech (POS) tagging etc. An interesting phenomenon occurs when classifying long documents such as those from the US supreme court where BERT-based models can be considered difficult to use on a first-pass or out-of-the-box basis. In this paper, we experiment with several BERT-based classification techniques for US supreme court decisions or supreme court database (SCDB) and compare them with the previous SOTA results. We then compare our results specifically with SOTA models for long documents. We compare our results for two classification tasks: (1) a broad classification task with 15 categories and (2) a fine-grained classification task with 279 categories. Our best result produces an accuracy of 80\% on the 15 broad categories and 60\% on the fine-grained 279 categories which marks an improvement of 8\% and 28\% respectively from previously reported SOTA results.

Mominul Rubel, Adam Meyers, Gabriel Nicolosi

We introduce the Fourier Learning Machine (FLM), a neural network (NN) architecture designed to represent a multidimensional nonharmonic Fourier series. The FLM uses a simple feedforward structure with cosine activation functions to learn the frequencies, amplitudes, and phase shifts of the series as trainable parameters. This design allows the model to create a problem-specific spectral basis adaptable to both periodic and nonperiodic functions. Unlike previous Fourier-inspired NN models, the FLM is the first architecture able to represent a complete, separable Fourier basis in multiple dimensions using a standard Multilayer Perceptron-like architecture. A one-to-one correspondence between the Fourier coefficients and amplitudes and phase-shifts is demonstrated, allowing for the translation between a full, separable basis form and the cosine phase--shifted one. Additionally, we evaluate the performance of FLMs on several scientific computing problems, including benchmark Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) and a family of Optimal Control Problems (OCPs). Computational experiments show that the performance of FLMs is comparable, and often superior, to that of established architectures like SIREN and vanilla feedforward NNs.

Adam Meyers, Advait Pravin Savant, John E. Ortega

This article is about Semantic Role Labeling for English partitive nouns (5%/REL of the price/ARG1; The price/ARG1 rose 5 percent/REL) in the NomBank annotated corpus. Several systems are described using traditional and transformer-based machine learning, as well as ensembling. Our highest scoring system achieves an F1 of 91.74% using "gold" parses from the Penn Treebank and 91.12% when using the Berkeley Neural parser. This research includes both classroom and experimental settings for system development.

Lisa Wang, Adam Meyers, John E. Ortega et al.

Translating between languages with drastically different grammatical conventions poses challenges, not just for human interpreters but also for machine translation systems. In this work, we specifically target the translation challenges posed by attributive nouns in Chinese, which frequently cause ambiguities in English translation. By manually inserting the omitted particle X ('DE'). In news article titles from the Penn Chinese Discourse Treebank, we developed a targeted dataset to fine-tune Hugging Face Chinese to English translation models, specifically improving how this critical function word is handled. This focused approach not only complements the broader strategies suggested by previous studies but also offers a practical enhancement by specifically addressing a common error type in Chinese-English translation.

Nhi Pham, Lachlan Pham, Adam L. Meyers

The prevalence of social media presents a growing opportunity to collect and analyse examples of English varieties. Whilst usage of these varieties was - and, in many cases, still is - used only in spoken contexts or hard-to-access private messages, social media sites like Twitter provide a platform for users to communicate informally in a scrapeable format. Notably, Indian English (Hinglish), Singaporean English (Singlish), and African-American English (AAE) can be commonly found online. These varieties pose a challenge to existing natural language processing (NLP) tools as they often differ orthographically and syntactically from standard English for which the majority of these tools are built. NLP models trained on standard English texts produced biased outcomes for users of underrepresented varieties. Some research has aimed to overcome the inherent biases caused by unrepresentative data through techniques like data augmentation or adjusting training models. We aim to address the issue of bias at its root - the data itself. We curate a dataset of tweets from countries with high proportions of underserved English variety speakers, and propose an annotation framework of six categorical classifications along a pseudo-spectrum that measures the degree of standard English and that thereby indirectly aims to surface the manifestations of English varieties in these tweets. Following best annotation practices, our growing corpus features 170,800 tweets taken from 7 countries, labeled by annotators who are from those countries and can communicate in regionally-dominant varieties of English. Our corpus highlights the accuracy discrepancies in pre-trained language identifiers between western English and non-western (i.e., less standard) English varieties. We hope to contribute to the growing literature identifying and reducing the implicit demographic discrepancies in NLP.