Ziang Ren

Ruiyang Qin, Haozheng Luo, Zheheng Fan et al.

Idioms are special fixed phrases usually derived from stories. They are commonly used in casual conversations and literary writings. Their meanings are usually highly non-compositional. The idiom cloze task is a challenge problem in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research problem. Previous approaches to this task are built on sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models and achieved reasonably well performance on existing datasets. However, they fall short in understanding the highly non-compositional meaning of idiomatic expressions. They also do not consider both the local and global context at the same time. In this paper, we proposed a BERT-based embedding Seq2Seq model that encodes idiomatic expressions and considers them in both global and local context. Our model uses XLNET as the encoder and RoBERTa for choosing the most probable idiom for a given context. Experiments on the EPIE Static Corpus dataset show that our model performs better than existing state-of-the-arts.

Ren Liu, Ziang Ren

2020 has been a year marked by the COVID-19 pandemic. This event has caused disruptions to many aspects of normal life. An important aspect in reducing the impact of the pandemic is to control its spread. Studies have shown that one effective method in reducing the transmission of COVID-19 is to wear masks. Strict mask-wearing policies have been met with not only public sensation but also practical difficulty. We cannot hope to manually check if everyone on a street is wearing a mask properly. Existing technology to help automate mask checking uses deep learning models on real-time surveillance camera footages. The current dominant method to perform real-time mask detection uses Mask-RCNN with ResNet as the backbone. While giving good detection results, this method is computationally intensive and its efficiency in real-time face mask detection is not ideal. Our research proposes a new approach to mask detection by replacing Mask-R-CNN with a more efficient model "YOLO" to increase the processing speed of real-time mask detection and not compromise on accuracy. Besides, given the small volume as well as extreme imbalance of the mask detection datasets, we adopt a latest progress made in few-shot visual classification, simple CNAPs, to improve the classification performance.