We think of match as an operator that takes two graph-like structures (e.g. database schemas or ontologies) and produces a mapping between elements of the two graphs that correspond semantically to each other. The goal of this paper is to propose a new approach to matching, called semantic matching . As its name indicates, in semantic matching the key intuition is to exploit the model-theoretic information, which is codified in the nodes and the structure of graphs. The contributions of this paper are (i) a rational reconstruction of the major matching problems and their articulation in terms of the more generic problem of matching graphs, (ii) the identification of semantic matching as a new approach for performing generic matching and (iii) a proposal for implementing semantic matching by testing propositional satisfiability.

It is well known that AI-based language technology—large language models, machine translation systems, multilingual dictionaries, and corpora—is currently limited to three percent of the world’s most widely spoken, financially and politically backed languages. In response, recent efforts have sought to address the “digital language divide” by extending the reach of large language models to “underserved languages.” We show how some of these efforts tend to produce flawed solutions that adhere to a hard-wired representational preference for certain languages, which we call language modeling bias. Language modeling bias is a specific and under-studied form of linguistic bias were language technology by design favors certain languages, dialects, or sociolects with respect to others. We show that language modeling bias can result in systems that, while being precise regarding languages and cultures of dominant powers, are limited in the expression of socio-culturally relevant notions of other communities. We further argue that at the root of this problem lies a systematic tendency of technology developer communities to apply a simplistic understanding of diversity which does not do justice to the more profound differences that languages, and ultimately the communities that speak them, embody. Drawing on the concept of epistemic injustice, we point to the broader ethico-political implications and show how it can lead not only to a disregard for valuable aspects of diversity but also to an under-representation of the needs of marginalized language communities. Finally, we present an alternative socio-technical approach that is designed to tackle some of the analyzed problems.

Mood inference with mobile sensing data has been studied in ubicomp literature over the last decade. This inference enables context-aware and personalized user experiences in general mobile apps and valuable feedback and interventions in mobile health apps. However, even though model generalization issues have been highlighted in many studies, the focus has always been on improving the accuracies of models using different sensing modalities and machine learning techniques, with datasets collected in homogeneous populations. In contrast, less attention has been given to studying the performance of mood inference models to assess whether models generalize to new countries. In this study, we collected a mobile sensing dataset with 329K self-reports from 678 participants in eight countries (China, Denmark, India, Italy, Mexico, Mongolia, Paraguay, UK) to assess the effect of geographical diversity on mood inference models. We define and evaluate country-specific (trained and tested within a country), continent-specific (trained and tested within a continent), country-agnostic (tested on a country not seen on training data), and multi-country (trained and tested with multiple countries) approaches trained on sensor data for two mood inference tasks with population-level (non-personalized) and hybrid (partially personalized) models. We show that partially personalized country-specific models perform the best yielding area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) scores of the range 0.78--0.98 for two-class (negative vs. positive valence) and 0.76--0.94 for three-class (negative vs. neutral vs. positive valence) inference. Further, with the country-agnostic approach, we show that models do not perform well compared to country-specific settings, even when models are partially personalized. We also show that continent-specific models outperform multi-country models in the case of Europe. Overall, we uncover generalization issues of mood inference models to new countries and how the geographical similarity of countries might impact mood inference.

Compared with remote sensing image (RSI) captioning methods based on the traditional encoder-decoder model, two-stage RSI captioning methods include an auxiliary remote sensing task to provide prior information, which enables them to generate more accurate descriptions. In previous two-stage RSI captioning methods, however, the image captioning and the auxiliary remote sensing tasks are handled separately, which is time-consuming and ignores mutual interference between tasks. To solve this problem, we propose a novel joint-training two-stage (JTTS) RSI captioning method. We use multi-label classification to provide prior information, and we design a differentiable sampling operator to replace the traditional non-differentiable sampling operation to index the multi-label classification result. In contrast to previous two-stage RSI captioning methods, our method can implement joint-training, and the joint loss allows the error of the generated description to flow into the optimization of the multi-label classification via back-propagation. Specifically, we approximate the Heaviside step function with the steep logistic function to implement a differentiable sampling operator for the multi-label classification. We propose a dynamic contrast loss function for multi-label classification task to ensure that a certain margin is maintained between the probabilities of the positive label and the negative label during sampling. We design an attribute-guided decoder to filter the multi-label prior information obtained by the sampling operator to generate more accurate image captions. The results of extensive experiments show that the JTTS method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the RSICD, the UCM-Captions, and the Sydney-Captions datasets.

Mitigating bias in algorithmic systems is a critical issue drawing attention across communities within the information and computer sciences. Given the complexity of the problem and the involvement of multiple stakeholders—including developers, end users, and third-parties—there is a need to understand the landscape of the sources of bias, and the solutions being proposed to address them, from a broad, cross-domain perspective. This survey provides a “fish-eye view,” examining approaches across four areas of research. The literature describes three steps toward a comprehensive treatment—bias detection, fairness management, and explainability management—and underscores the need to work from within the system as well as from the perspective of stakeholders in the broader context.