NeSyA: Neurosymbolic Automata

Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence (NeSy) has emerged as a promising direction to integrate low level perception with high level reasoning. Unfortunately, little attention has been given to developing NeSy systems tailored to temporal/sequential problems. This entails reasoning symbolically over sequences of subsymbolic observations towards a target prediction. We show that using a probabilistic semantics symbolic automata, which combine the power of automata for temporal structure specification with that of propositional logic, can be used to reason efficiently and differentiably over subsymbolic sequences. The proposed system, which we call NeSyA (Neuro Symbolic Automata), is shown to either scale or perform better than existing NeSy approaches when applied to problems with a temporal component.

Regulatory Compliance through Doc2Doc Information Retrieval: A case study in EU/UK legislation where text similarity has limitations

Major scandals in corporate history have urged the need for regulatory compliance, where organizations need to ensure that their controls (processes) comply with relevant laws, regulations, and policies. However, keeping track of the constantly changing legislation is difficult, thus organizations are increasingly adopting Regulatory Technology (RegTech) to facilitate the process. To this end, we introduce regulatory information retrieval (REG-IR), an application of document-to-document information retrieval (DOC2DOC IR), where the query is an entire document making the task more challenging than traditional IR where the queries are short. Furthermore, we compile and release two datasets based on the relationships between EU directives and UK legislation. We experiment on these datasets using a typical two-step pipeline approach comprising a pre-fetcher and a neural re-ranker. Experimenting with various pre-fetchers from BM25 to k nearest neighbors over representations from several BERT models, we show that fine-tuning a BERT model on an in-domain classification task produces the best representations for IR. We also show that neural re-rankers under-perform due to contradicting supervision, i.e., similar query-document pairs with opposite labels. Thus, they are biased towards the pre-fetcher's score. Interestingly, applying a date filter further improves the performance, showcasing the importance of the time dimension.

Layer-wise Guided Training for BERT: Learning Incrementally Refined Document Representations

Although BERT is widely used by the NLP community, little is known about its inner workings. Several attempts have been made to shed light on certain aspects of BERT, often with contradicting conclusions. A much raised concern focuses on BERT's over-parameterization and under-utilization issues. To this end, we propose o novel approach to fine-tune BERT in a structured manner. Specifically, we focus on Large Scale Multilabel Text Classification (LMTC) where documents are assigned with one or more labels from a large predefined set of hierarchically organized labels. Our approach guides specific BERT layers to predict labels from specific hierarchy levels. Experimenting with two LMTC datasets we show that this structured fine-tuning approach not only yields better classification results but also leads to better parameter utilization.