We describe the design and use of the Stanford CoreNLP toolkit, an extensible pipeline that provides core natural language analysis. This toolkit is quite widely used, both in the research NLP community and also among commercial and government users of open source NLP technology. We suggest that this follows from a simple, approachable design, straightforward interfaces, the inclusion of robust and good quality analysis components, and not requiring use of a large amount of associated baggage.

/pdf/the-stanford-corenlp-natural-language-processing-toolkit-1gq0vc5495.pdf

The Stanford CoreNLP Natural Language Processing Toolkit

We present the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), a new reading comprehension dataset consisting of 100,000+ questions posed by crowdworkers on a set of Wikipedia articles, where the answer to each question is a segment of text from the corresponding reading passage. We analyze the dataset to understand the types of reasoning required to answer the questions, leaning heavily on dependency and constituency trees. We build a strong logistic regression model, which achieves an F1 score of 51.0%, a significant improvement over a simple baseline (20%). However, human performance (86.8%) is much higher, indicating that the dataset presents a good challenge problem for future research. 
The dataset is freely available at this https URL

SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text

Many architects believe that major improvements in cost-energy-performance must now come from domain-specific hardware. This paper evaluates a custom ASIC---called a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)---deployed in datacenters since 2015 that accelerates the inference phase of neural networks (NN). The heart of the TPU is a 65,536 8-bit MAC matrix multiply unit that offers a peak throughput of 92 TeraOps/second (TOPS) and a large (28 MiB) software-managed on-chip memory. The TPU's deterministic execution model is a better match to the 99th-percentile response-time requirement of our NN applications than are the time-varying optimizations of CPUs and GPUs (caches, out-of-order execution, multithreading, multiprocessing, prefetching, ...) that help average throughput more than guaranteed latency. The lack of such features helps explain why, despite having myriad MACs and a big memory, the TPU is relatively small and low power. We compare the TPU to a server-class Intel Haswell CPU and an Nvidia K80 GPU, which are contemporaries deployed in the same datacenters. Our workload, written in the high-level TensorFlow framework, uses production NN applications (MLPs, CNNs, and LSTMs) that represent 95% of our datacenters' NN inference demand. Despite low utilization for some applications, the TPU is on average about 15X - 30X faster than its contemporary GPU or CPU, with TOPS/Watt about 30X - 80X higher. Moreover, using the GPU's GDDR5 memory in the TPU would triple achieved TOPS and raise TOPS/Watt to nearly 70X the GPU and 200X the CPU.

In-Datacenter Performance Analysis of a Tensor Processing Unit

Many architects believe that major improvements in cost-energy-performance must now come from domain-specific hardware. This paper evaluates a custom ASIC---called a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) --- deployed in datacenters since 2015 that accelerates the inference phase of neural networks (NN). The heart of the TPU is a 65,536 8-bit MAC matrix multiply unit that offers a peak throughput of 92 TeraOps/second (TOPS) and a large (28 MiB) software-managed on-chip memory. The TPU's deterministic execution model is a better match to the 99th-percentile response-time requirement of our NN applications than are the time-varying optimizations of CPUs and GPUs that help average throughput more than guaranteed latency. The lack of such features helps explain why, despite having myriad MACs and a big memory, the TPU is relatively small and low power. We compare the TPU to a server-class Intel Haswell CPU and an Nvidia K80 GPU, which are contemporaries deployed in the same datacenters. Our workload, written in the high-level TensorFlow framework, uses production NN applications (MLPs, CNNs, and LSTMs) that represent 95% of our datacenters' NN inference demand. Despite low utilization for some applications, the TPU is on average about 15X -- 30X faster than its contemporary GPU or CPU, with TOPS/Watt about 30X -- 80X higher. Moreover, using the CPU's GDDR5 memory in the TPU would triple achieved TOPS and raise TOPS/Watt to nearly 70X the GPU and 200X the CPU.

/pdf/in-datacenter-performance-analysis-of-a-tensor-processing-4pmp83zqw4.pdf

A number of recent efforts have attempted to design accelerators for popular machine learning algorithms, such as those involving convolutional and deep neural networks (CNNs and DNNs). These algorithms typically involve a large number of multiply-accumulate (dot-product) operations. A recent project, DaDianNao, adopts a near data processing approach, where a specialized neural functional unit performs all the digital arithmetic operations and receives input weights from adjacent eDRAM banks.This work explores an in-situ processing approach, where memristor crossbar arrays not only store input weights, but are also used to perform dot-product operations in an analog manner. While the use of crossbar memory as an analog dot-product engine is well known, no prior work has designed or characterized a full-fledged accelerator based on crossbars. In particular, our work makes the following contributions: (i) We design a pipelined architecture, with some crossbars dedicated for each neural network layer, and eDRAM buffers that aggregate data between pipeline stages. (ii) We define new data encoding techniques that are amenable to analog computations and that can reduce the high overheads of analog-to-digital conversion (ADC). (iii) We define the many supporting digital components required in an analog CNN accelerator and carry out a design space exploration to identify the best balance of memristor storage/compute, ADCs, and eDRAM storage on a chip. On a suite of CNN and DNN workloads, the proposed ISAAC architecture yields improvements of 14.8×, 5.5×, and 7.5× in throughput, energy, and computational density (respectively), relative to the state-of-the-art DaDianNao architecture.

ISAAC: a convolutional neural network accelerator with in-situ analog arithmetic in crossbars

Anomaly detection is a critical step towards building a secure and trustworthy system. The primary purpose of a system log is to record system states and significant events at various critical points to help debug system failures and perform root cause analysis. Such log data is universally available in nearly all computer systems. Log data is an important and valuable resource for understanding system status and performance issues; therefore, the various system logs are naturally excellent source of information for online monitoring and anomaly detection. We propose DeepLog, a deep neural network model utilizing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), to model a system log as a natural language sequence. This allows DeepLog to automatically learn log patterns from normal execution, and detect anomalies when log patterns deviate from the model trained from log data under normal execution. In addition, we demonstrate how to incrementally update the DeepLog model in an online fashion so that it can adapt to new log patterns over time. Furthermore, DeepLog constructs workflows from the underlying system log so that once an anomaly is detected, users can diagnose the detected anomaly and perform root cause analysis effectively. Extensive experimental evaluations over large log data have shown that DeepLog has outperformed other existing log-based anomaly detection methods based on traditional data mining methodologies.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3133956.3134015

DeepLog: Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis from System Logs through Deep Learning

Predicting electricity consumption for commercial and residential buildings using deep recurrent neural networks

Traditionally, text categorization has been studied as the problem of training of a classifier using labeled data. However, people can categorize documents into named categories without any explicit training because we know the meaning of category names. In this paper, we introduce Dataless Classification, a learning protocol that uses world knowledge to induce classifiers without the need for any labeled data. Like humans, a dataless classifier interprets a string of words as a set of semantic concepts. We propose a model for dataless classification and show that the label name alone is often sufficient to induce classifiers. Using Wikipedia as our source of world knowledge, we get 85.29% accuracy on tasks from the 20 Newsgroup dataset and 88.62% accuracy on tasks from a Yahoo! Answers dataset without any labeled or unlabeled data from the data sets. With unlabeled data, we can further improve the results and show quite competitive performance to a supervised learning algorithm that uses 100 labeled examples.

/pdf/importance-of-semantic-representation-dataless-8zndhyuc6h.pdf

Importance of semantic representation: dataless classification

Machine reading calls for programs that read and understand text, but most current work only attempts to extract facts from redundant web-scale corpora. In this paper, we focus on a new reading comprehension task that requires complex reasoning over a single document. The input is a paragraph describing a biological process, and the goal is to answer questions that require an understanding of the relations between entities and events in the process. To answer the questions, we first predict a rich structure representing the process in the paragraph. Then, we map the question to a formal query, which is executed against the predicted structure. We demonstrate that answering questions via predicted structures substantially improves accuracy over baselines that use shallower representations.

/pdf/modeling-biological-processes-for-reading-comprehension-1rbzn5nji2.pdf

Vivek Srikumar

Papers

ISAAC: a convolutional neural network accelerator with in-situ analog arithmetic in crossbars

DeepLog: Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis from System Logs through Deep Learning

Predicting electricity consumption for commercial and residential buildings using deep recurrent neural networks

Importance of semantic representation: dataless classification

Modeling Biological Processes for Reading Comprehension