While large pre-trained models have transformed the field of natural language processing (NLP), the high training cost and low cross-lingual availability of such models prevent the new advances from being equally shared by users across all languages, especially the less spoken ones. To promote equal opportunities for all language speakers in NLP research and to reduce energy consumption for sustainability, this study proposes an effective and energy-efficient framework GreenPLM that uses bilingual lexicons to directly translate language models of one language into other languages at (almost) no additional cost. We validate this approach in 18 languages and show that this framework is comparable to, if not better than, other heuristics trained with high cost. In addition, when given a low computational cost (2.5\%), the framework outperforms the original monolingual language models in six out of seven tested languages. We release language models in 50 languages translated from English and the source code here.

Covid-19-Pandemic继续在社交媒体上提出各种讨论或辩论的主题。为了探索大流行对人们生活的影响，了解公众对与大流行有关的实体（例如药物，疫苗）对社交媒体的关注和态度至关重要。但是，对现有命名实体识别（NER）或目标情感分析（TSA）数据集培训的模型具有有限的理解与COVID相关的社交媒体文本的能力有限，因为这些数据集并未从医学角度设计或注释。本文释放了Mets-COV，这是一种包含医疗实体的数据集和与COVID相关的推文中的目标情感。 Mets-COV包含10,000条带有7种实体的推文，包括4种医疗实体类型（疾病，药物，症状和疫苗）和3种通用实体类型（人，位置和组织）。为了进一步调查推文用户对特定实体的态度，选择了4种类型的实体（人，组织，药物和疫苗），并用用户情感注释，从而产生了具有9,101个实体（5,278个推文）的目标情感数据集。据我们所知，METS-COV是第一个收集与COVID相关推文的医疗实体和相应情感的数据集。我们通过广泛的实验对经典机器学习模型和最先进的深度学习模型进行基准测试。结果表明，该数据集在NER和TSA任务方面都有大量改进的空间。 METS-COV是开发更好的医学社交媒体工具并促进计算社会科学研究的重要资源，尤其是在流行病学方面。我们的数据，注释准则，基准模型和源代码公开可用（https://github.com/ylab-open/mets-cov），以确保可重复性。

了解公众关于紧急使用未经证实的治疗剂的论述对于监视安全使用和打击错误信息至关重要。我们开发了一种基于自然语言处理（NLP）的管道，以了解公众对COVID-19与19与COVID相关药物的立场的看法。这项回顾性研究包括2020年1月29日，2020年至2021年11月30日之间的609,189个基于美国的推文，涉及四种药物，这些药物在19日期期间在流行期间引起了广泛关注：1）羟基氯喹和伊维菌素，毒品疗法，具有轶事证据； 2）Molnupiravir和Remdesivir，适合合格患者的FDA批准的治疗选择。时间趋势分析用于了解受欢迎程度和相关事件。进行了内容和人口统计分析，以探讨人们对每种药物的立场的潜在理由。时间趋势分析表明，羟氯喹和伊维菌素的讨论比Molnupiravir和Remdesivir更多，尤其是在Covid-19-19潮中期。羟氯喹和伊维菌素高度政治化，与阴谋论，传闻，名人效应等有关。美国两个主要政党之间立场的分布大不相同（p <0.001）；共和党人比民主党人更有可能支持羟氯喹（+55％）和伊维菌素（+30％）。具有医疗保健背景的人倾向于比普通人群多反对羟氯喹（+7％）。相比之下，普通人群更有可能支持伊维菌素（+14％）。我们在https://github.com/ningkko/covid-drug上提供所有数据，代码和模型。

In this paper, a semantic communication framework for image transmission is developed. In the investigated framework, a set of servers cooperatively transmit images to a set of users utilizing semantic communication techniques. To evaluate the performance of studied semantic communication system, a multimodal metric is proposed to measure the correlation between the extracted semantic information and the original image. To meet the ISS requirement of each user, each server must jointly determine the semantic information to be transmitted and the resource blocks (RBs) used for semantic information transmission. We formulate this problem as an optimization problem aiming to minimize each server's transmission latency while reaching the ISS requirement. To solve this problem, a value decomposition based entropy-maximized multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) is proposed, which enables servers to coordinate for training and execute RB allocation in a distributed manner to approach to a globally optimal performance with less training iterations. Compared to traditional multi-agent RL, the proposed RL improves the valuable action exploration of servers and the probability of finding a globally optimal RB allocation policy based on local observation. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the transmission delay by up to 16.1% compared to traditional multi-agent RL.

This paper presents a practical global optimization algorithm for the K-center clustering problem, which aims to select K samples as the cluster centers to minimize the maximum within-cluster distance. This algorithm is based on a reduced-space branch and bound scheme and guarantees convergence to the global optimum in a finite number of steps by only branching on the regions of centers. To improve efficiency, we have designed a two-stage decomposable lower bound, the solution of which can be derived in a closed form. In addition, we also propose several acceleration techniques to narrow down the region of centers, including bounds tightening, sample reduction, and parallelization. Extensive studies on synthetic and real-world datasets have demonstrated that our algorithm can solve the K-center problems to global optimal within 4 hours for ten million samples in the serial mode and one billion samples in the parallel mode. Moreover, compared with the state-of-the-art heuristic methods, the global optimum obtained by our algorithm can averagely reduce the objective function by 25.8% on all the synthetic and real-world datasets.

Previous work has shown the potential of deep learning to predict renal obstruction using kidney ultrasound images. However, these image-based classifiers have been trained with the goal of single-visit inference in mind. We compare methods from video action recognition (i.e. convolutional pooling, LSTM, TSM) to adapt single-visit convolutional models to handle multiple visit inference. We demonstrate that incorporating images from a patient's past hospital visits provides only a small benefit for the prediction of obstructive hydronephrosis. Therefore, inclusion of prior ultrasounds is beneficial, but prediction based on the latest ultrasound is sufficient for patient risk stratification.

The core operation of current Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is the aggregation enabled by the graph Laplacian or message passing, which filters the neighborhood information of nodes. Though effective for various tasks, in this paper, we show that they are potentially a problematic factor underlying all GNN models for learning on certain datasets, as they force the node representations similar, making the nodes gradually lose their identity and become indistinguishable. Hence, we augment the aggregation operations with their dual, i.e. diversification operators that make the node more distinct and preserve the identity. Such augmentation replaces the aggregation with a two-channel filtering process that, in theory, is beneficial for enriching the node representations. In practice, the proposed two-channel filters can be easily patched on existing GNN methods with diverse training strategies, including spectral and spatial (message passing) methods. In the experiments, we observe desired characteristics of the models and significant performance boost upon the baselines on 9 node classification tasks.

Ramp merging is a typical application of cooperative intelligent transportation system (C-ITS). Vehicle trajectories perceived by roadside sensors are importation complement to the limited visual field of on-board perception. Vehicle tracking and trajectory denoising algorithm is proposed in this paper to take full advantage of roadside cameras for vehicle trajectory and speed profile estimation. Dynamic speed guidance algorithm is proposed to help on-ramp vehicles to merge into mainline smoothly, even in non-cooperative environment where mainline vehicles are not expected to slow down to accommodate on-ramp vehicles. On-site experiments were taken out in a merging area of Hangzhou Belt Highway to testify our prototype system, and simulation analysis shows our proposed algorithm can achieve significant fuel savings during the ramp merging process.

The quality of knowledge retrieval is crucial in knowledge-intensive conversations. Two common strategies to improve the retrieval quality are finetuning the retriever or generating a self-contained query, while they encounter heavy burdens on expensive computation and elaborate annotations. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised query enhanced approach for knowledge-intensive conversations, namely QKConv. There are three modules in QKConv: a query generator, an off-the-shelf knowledge selector, and a response generator. Without extra supervision, the end-to-end joint training of QKConv explores multiple candidate queries and utilizes corresponding selected knowledge to yield the target response. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted comprehensive experiments on conversational question-answering, task-oriented dialogue, and knowledge-grounded conversation. Experimental results demonstrate that QKConv achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to unsupervised methods and competitive performance compared to supervised methods.

Negotiation is one of the crucial abilities in human communication, and there has been a resurgent research interest in negotiation dialogue systems recently, which goal is to empower intelligent agents with such ability that can efficiently help humans resolve conflicts or reach beneficial agreements. Although there have been many explorations in negotiation dialogue systems, a systematic review of this task has to date remained notably absent. To this end, we aim to fill this gap by reviewing contemporary studies in the emerging field of negotiation dialogue systems, covering benchmarks, evaluations, and methodologies. Furthermore, we also discuss potential future directions, including multi-modal, multi-party, and cross-cultural negotiation scenarios. Our goal is to provide the community with a systematic overview of negotiation dialogue systems and to inspire future research.