Special Issue:Questions&Data for Better Science and Innovation Call for submissions

Editors Yang Wang,Xi'an Jiaotong University Dongbo Shi,Shanghai Jiaotong University Ye Sun,University College London Zhesi Shen,National Science Library,CAS Topic of the Special Issue What are the top questions towards better science and innovation and the required data to answer these questions?

PAL-BERT:An Improved Question Answering Model

In the field of natural language processing(NLP),there have been various pre-training language models in recent years,with question answering systems gaining significant attention.However,as algorithms,data,and computing power advance,the issue of increasingly larger models and a growing number of parameters has surfaced.Consequently,model training has become more costly and less efficient.To enhance the efficiency and accuracy of the training process while reducing themodel volume,this paper proposes a first-order pruningmodel PAL-BERT based on the ALBERT model according to the characteristics of question-answering(QA)system and language model.Firstly,a first-order network pruning method based on the ALBERT model is designed,and the PAL-BERT model is formed.Then,the parameter optimization strategy of the PAL-BERT model is formulated,and the Mish function was used as an activation function instead of ReLU to improve the performance.Finally,after comparison experiments with traditional deep learning models TextCNN and BiLSTM,it is confirmed that PALBERT is a pruning model compression method that can significantly reduce training time and optimize training efficiency.Compared with traditional models,PAL-BERT significantly improves the NLP task’s performance.

DPAL-BERT:A Faster and Lighter Question Answering Model

Recent advancements in natural language processing have given rise to numerous pre-training language models in question-answering systems.However,with the constant evolution of algorithms,data,and computing power,the increasing size and complexity of these models have led to increased training costs and reduced efficiency.This study aims to minimize the inference time of such models while maintaining computational performance.It also proposes a novel Distillation model for PAL-BERT(DPAL-BERT),specifically,employs knowledge distillation,using the PAL-BERT model as the teacher model to train two student models:DPAL-BERT-Bi and DPAL-BERTC.This research enhances the dataset through techniques such as masking,replacement,and n-gram sampling to optimize knowledge transfer.The experimental results showed that the distilled models greatly outperform models trained from scratch.In addition,although the distilled models exhibit a slight decrease in performance compared to PAL-BERT,they significantly reduce inference time to just 0.25%of the original.This demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach in balancing model performance and efficiency.

Operational requirements analysis method based on question answering of WEKG

The weapon and equipment operational requirement analysis(WEORA) is a necessary condition to win a future war,among which the acquisition of knowledge about weapons and equipment is a great challenge. The main challenge is that the existing weapons and equipment data fails to carry out structured knowledge representation, and knowledge navigation based on natural language cannot efficiently support the WEORA. To solve above problem, this research proposes a method based on question answering(QA) of weapons and equipment knowledge graph(WEKG) to construct and navigate the knowledge related to weapons and equipment in the WEORA. This method firstly constructs the WEKG, and builds a neutral network-based QA system over the WEKG by means of semantic parsing for knowledge navigation. Finally, the method is evaluated and a chatbot on the QA system is developed for the WEORA. Our proposed method has good performance in the accuracy and efficiency of searching target knowledge, and can well assist the WEORA.

MKEAH:Multimodal knowledge extraction and accumulation based on hyperplane embedding for knowledge-based visual question answering

Background External knowledge representations play an essential role in knowledge-based visual question and answering to better understand complex scenarios in the open world.Recent entity-relationship embedding approaches are deficient in representing some complex relations,resulting in a lack of topic-related knowledge and redundancy in topic-irrelevant information.Methods To this end,we propose MKEAH:Multimodal Knowledge Extraction and Accumulation on Hyperplanes.To ensure that the lengths of the feature vectors projected onto the hyperplane compare equally and to filter out sufficient topic-irrelevant information,two losses are proposed to learn the triplet representations from the complementary views:range loss and orthogonal loss.To interpret the capability of extracting topic-related knowledge,we present the Topic Similarity(TS)between topic and entity-relations.Results Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of hyperplane embedding for knowledge representation in knowledge-based visual question answering.Our model outperformed state-of-the-art methods by 2.12%and 3.24%on two challenging knowledge-request datasets:OK-VQA and KRVQA,respectively.Conclusions The obvious advantages of our model in TS show that using hyperplane embedding to represent multimodal knowledge can improve its ability to extract topic-related knowledge.

Analysis of community question-answering issues via machine learning and deep learning:State-of-the-art review

Over the last couple of decades,community question-answering sites(CQAs)have been a topic of much academic interest.Scholars have often leveraged traditional machine learning(ML)and deep learning(DL)to explore the ever-growing volume of content that CQAs engender.To clarify the current state of the CQA literature that has used ML and DL,this paper reports a systematic literature review.The goal is to summarise and synthesise the major themes of CQA research related to(i)questions,(ii)answers and(iii)users.The final review included 133 articles.Dominant research themes include question quality,answer quality,and expert identification.In terms of dataset,some of the most widely studied platforms include Yahoo!Answers,Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow.The scope of most articles was confined to just one platform with few cross-platform investigations.Articles with ML outnumber those with DL.Nonetheless,the use of DL in CQA research is on an upward trajectory.A number of research directions are proposed.

Expert Recommendation in Community Question Answering via Heterogeneous Content Network Embedding

ExpertRecommendation(ER)aims to identify domain experts with high expertise and willingness to provide answers to questions in Community Question Answering(CQA)web services.How to model questions and users in the heterogeneous content network is critical to this task.Most traditional methods focus on modeling questions and users based on the textual content left in the community while ignoring the structural properties of heterogeneous CQA networks and always suffering from textual data sparsity issues.Recent approaches take advantage of structural proximities between nodes and attempt to fuse the textual content of nodes for modeling.However,they often fail to distinguish the nodes’personalized preferences and only consider the textual content of a part of the nodes in network embedding learning,while ignoring the semantic relevance of nodes.In this paper,we propose a novel framework that jointly considers the structural proximity relations and textual semantic relevance to model users and questions more comprehensively.Specifically,we learn topology-based embeddings through a hierarchical attentive network learning strategy,in which the proximity information and the personalized preference of nodes are encoded and preserved.Meanwhile,we utilize the node’s textual content and the text correlation between adjacent nodes to build the content-based embedding through a meta-context-aware skip-gram model.In addition,the user’s relative answer quality is incorporated to promote the ranking performance.Experimental results show that our proposed framework consistently and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on three real-world datasets by taking the deep semantic understanding and structural feature learning together.The performance of the proposed work is analyzed in terms of MRR,P@K,and MAP and is proven to be more advanced than the existing methodologies.

ALBERT with Knowledge Graph Encoder Utilizing Semantic Similarity for Commonsense Question Answering

Recently,pre-trained language representation models such as bidirec-tional encoder representations from transformers(BERT)have been performing well in commonsense question answering(CSQA).However,there is a problem that the models do not directly use explicit information of knowledge sources existing outside.To augment this,additional methods such as knowledge-aware graph network(KagNet)and multi-hop graph relation network(MHGRN)have been proposed.In this study,we propose to use the latest pre-trained language model a lite bidirectional encoder representations from transformers(ALBERT)with knowledge graph information extraction technique.We also propose to applying the novel method,schema graph expansion to recent language models.Then,we analyze the effect of applying knowledge graph-based knowledge extraction techniques to recent pre-trained language models and confirm that schema graph expansion is effective in some extent.Furthermore,we show that our proposed model can achieve better performance than existing KagNet and MHGRN models in CommonsenseQA dataset.

Question classification in question answering based on real-world web data sets

To improve question answering （QA） performance based on real-world web data sets,a new set of question classes and a general answer re-ranking model are defined.With pre-defined dictionary and grammatical analysis,the question classifier draws both semantic and grammatical information into information retrieval and machine learning methods in the form of various training features,including the question word,the main verb of the question,the dependency structure,the position of the main auxiliary verb,the main noun of the question,the top hypernym of the main noun,etc.Then the QA query results are re-ranked by question class information.Experiments show that the questions in real-world web data sets can be accurately classified by the classifier,and the QA results after re-ranking can be obviously improved.It is proved that with both semantic and grammatical information,applications such as QA, built upon real-world web data sets, can be improved,thus showing better performance.

Information Extraction Based on Multi-turn Question Answering for Analyzing Korean Research Trends

Analyzing Research and Development(R&D)trends is important because it can influence future decisions regarding R&D direction.In typical trend analysis,topic or technology taxonomies are employed to compute the popularities of the topics or codes over time.Although it is simple and effective,the taxonomies are difficult to manage because new technologies are introduced rapidly.Therefore,recent studies exploit deep learning to extract pre-defined targets such as problems and solutions.Based on the recent advances in question answering(QA)using deep learning,we adopt a multi-turn QA model to extract problems and solutions from Korean R&D reports.With the previous research,we use the reports directly and analyze the difficulties in handling them using QA style on Information Extraction(IE)for sentence-level benchmark dataset.After investigating the characteristics of Korean R&D,we propose a model to deal with multiple and repeated appearances of targets in the reports.Accordingly,we propose a model that includes an algorithm with two novel modules and a prompt.A newly proposed methodology focuses on reformulating a question without a static template or pre-defined knowledge.We show the effectiveness of the proposed model using a Korean R&D report dataset that we constructed and presented an in-depth analysis of the benefits of the multi-turn QA model.

Structure of the Quarks and a New Model of Protons and Neutrons: Answer to Some Open Questions

The described structural model tries to answer some open questions such as: Why do quarks not exist in the open state? Where are the antiparticles from the Big Bang?

Improved Blending Attention Mechanism in Visual Question Answering

Visual question answering(VQA)has attracted more and more attention in computer vision and natural language processing.Scholars are committed to studying how to better integrate image features and text features to achieve better results in VQA tasks.Analysis of all features may cause information redundancy and heavy computational burden.Attention mechanism is a wise way to solve this problem.However,using single attention mechanism may cause incomplete concern of features.This paper improves the attention mechanism method and proposes a hybrid attention mechanism that combines the spatial attention mechanism method and the channel attention mechanism method.In the case that the attention mechanism will cause the loss of the original features,a small portion of image features were added as compensation.For the attention mechanism of text features,a selfattention mechanism was introduced,and the internal structural features of sentences were strengthened to improve the overall model.The results show that attention mechanism and feature compensation add 6.1%accuracy to multimodal low-rank bilinear pooling network.

Deep Multi-Module Based Language Priors Mitigation Model for Visual Question Answering

The original intention of visual question answering(VQA)models is to infer the answer based on the relevant information of the question text in the visual image,but many VQA models often yield answers that are biased by some prior knowledge,especially the language priors.This paper proposes a mitigation model called language priors mitigation-VQA(LPM-VQA)for the language priors problem in VQA model,which divides language priors into positive and negative language priors.Different network branches are used to capture and process the different priors to achieve the purpose of mitigating language priors.A dynamically-changing language prior feedback objective function is designed with the intermediate results of some modules in the VQA model.The weight of the loss value for each answer is dynamically set according to the strength of its language priors to balance its proportion in the total VQA loss to further mitigate the language priors.This model does not depend on the baseline VQA architectures and can be configured like a plug-in to improve the performance of the model over most existing VQA models.The experimental results show that the proposed model is general and effective,achieving state-of-the-art accuracy in the VQA-CP v2 dataset.

The Taiwan Question China From the Perspective of International Crisis Management:History and Future

The Taiwan Question China discussed in this paper belongs to the theoretical crisis discussion on international relations and does not regard the Cross-Strait relations as relations between different countries.The outcome of the 2024 Taiwan Election has a great impact on the Taiwan question,the latest poll shows that the possibility of the Democratic Progressive Party(DPP)candidate to come to power is still very high,because its political evolution trend of Taiwan independence still exists.

On Answering the Question Related to the Legal Regulation of Working Hours in the New Era:Western Experience and Chinese Approach

The popularity of flexible working hours around the world has slowed down the historical trend of reducing working hours.It even shows signs of regression.Whether and how to guide the cur-rent society with flexible working hours to return to the historical track of reducing working hours,improve the quality of working hours,and promote a smooth transition from the era of traditional standard work-ing hours to the era of flexible working hours has become a question related to the legal regulation of working hours in the new era.In this regard,although Western countries have proposed new regulatory concepts and carried out legislative practices with distinctive charac-teristics,the limitations of legal regulation capabilities have prevented them from proposing a package of institutional solutions.The advan-tage of China in the ability of legal regulation of working hours has been gradually formed in the legislation on working hours unnder the leadership of the CPC in the past century.It enables China to break through the limitations of the West and propose a Chinese approach to answer the question of the legal regulation of working hours in the new era from three aspects:limiting the extension of working hours,improving the quality of flexible working hours,and optimizing the funnctions of the multi-funnctional regulatory system for working hours.

Gender Differences In Using Questions——An Investigation of the Questions Used by Mr. Rochester and Jane in Jane Eyre

In literature,differences in the description of female and male characters have been noticeable for a long time.In this study,the novel Jane Eyre is uses as a material to investigate whether there are in fact any significant differences in the questions Mr.Rochester and Jane use and how the questions function to portray these two main characters.

Ontology-based question expansion for question similarity calculation

A new ontology-based question expansion （OBQE） method is proposed for question similarity calculation in a frequently asked question （FAQ） answering system. Traditional question similarity calculation methods use ＂word＂ to compose question vector, that the semantic relations between words are ignored. OBQE takes the relation as an important part. The process of the new system is：① to build two-layered domain ontology referring to WordNet and domain corpse;② to expand question trunks into domain cases;③ to use domain case composed vector to calculate question similarity. The experimental result shows that the performance of question similarity calculation with OBQE is being improved.

The most important questions in cancer research and clinical oncology Question 2-5.Obesity-related cancers:more questions than answers

Obesity is recognized as the second highest risk factor for cancer. The pathogenic mechanisms underlying tobaccorelated cancers are well characterized and efective programs have led to a decline in smoking and related cancers, but there is a global epidemic of obesity without a clear understanding of how obesity causes cancer. Obesity is heterogeneous, and approximately 25% of obese individuals remain healthy(metabolically healthy obese, MHO), so which fat deposition(subcutaneous versus visceral, adipose versus ectopic) is "malignant"? What is the mechanism of carcinogenesis? Is it by metabolic dysregulation or chronic inflammation? Through which chemokines/genes/signaling pathways does adipose tissue influence carcinogenesis? Can selective inhibition of these pathways uncouple obesity from cancers? Do all obesity related cancers(ORCs) share a molecular signature? Are there common(overlapping) genetic loci that make individuals susceptible to obesity, metabolic syndrome, and cancers? Can we identify precursor lesions of ORCs and will early intervention of high risk individuals alter the natural history? It appears unlikely that the obesity epidemic will be controlled anytime soon; answers to these questions will help to reduce the adverse efect of obesity on human condition.

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