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This year marks the 150th celebration of Nature. However, the understanding of the way the army of unsung editors-in-chief has strengthened and enriched the integrity and quality of the journal under the umbrella of its original mission remains nominal rather than substantial. This paper scrutinizes the chief vehicle guided by Nature's doctrine with regard to the ways it has conflicted with the advancement of both science and social progress. We first recast quantitative spatiotemporal analysis on the diachronic discourse of Nature since its debut, which promises to articulate the unfolding chronological picture of Nature on a historical time scale, and pinpoint overdue corrective to the strongly-held but flawed notions on editors-in-chief of Nature. Our findings strongly indicate that the army of editors-in-chief have never met with their fair share of identification, and they took on the challenge guided by Nature's doctrine with extraordinary polymath, unparalleled enthusiasm and diverse characters.

The purpose of the covert communication system is to implement the communication process without causing third party perception. In order to achieve complete covert communication, two aspects of security issues need to be considered. The first one is to cover up the existence of information, that is, to ensure the content security of information; the second one is to cover up the behavior of transmitting information, that is, to ensure the behavioral security of communication. However, most of the existing information hiding models are based on the "Prisoners' Model", which only considers the content security of carriers, while ignoring the behavioral security of the sender and receiver. We think that this is incomplete for the security of covert communication. In this paper, we propose a new covert communication framework, which considers both content security and behavioral security in the process of information transmission. In the experimental part, we analyzed a large amount of collected real Twitter data to illustrate the security risks that may be brought to covert communication if we only consider content security and neglect behavioral security. Finally, we designed a toy experiment, pointing out that in addition to most of the existing content steganography, under the proposed new framework of covert communication, we can also use user's behavior to implement behavioral steganography. We hope this new proposed framework will help researchers to design better covert communication systems., Comment: Acceptted by IWDW 2019

With the Volume of Voice over IP (VoIP) traffic rises shapely, more and more VoIP-based steganography methods have emerged in recent years, which poses a great threat to the security of cyberspace. Low bit-rate speech codecs are widely used in the VoIP application due to its powerful compression capability. QIM steganography makes it possible to hide secret information in VoIP streams. Previous research mostly focus on capturing the inter-frame correlation or inner-frame correlation features in code-words but ignore the hierarchical structure which exists in speech frame. In this paper, motivated by the complex multi-scale structure, we design a Hierarchical Representation Network to tackle the steganalysis of QIM steganography in low-bit-rate speech signal. In the proposed model, Convolution Neural Network (CNN) is used to model the hierarchical structure in the speech frame, and three level of attention mechanisms are applied at different convolution block, enabling it to attend differentially to more and less important content in speech frame. Experiments demonstrated that the steganalysis performance of the proposed method can outperforms the state-of-the-art methods especially in detecting both short and low embeded speech samples. Moreover, our model needs less computation and has higher time efficiency to be applied to real online services., Comment: 9 pages

Personalized news recommendation is very important for online news platforms to help users find interested news and improve user experience. News and user representation learning is critical for news recommendation. Existing news recommendation methods usually learn these representations based on single news information, e.g., title, which may be insufficient. In this paper we propose a neural news recommendation approach which can learn informative representations of users and news by exploiting different kinds of news information. The core of our approach is a news encoder and a user encoder. In the news encoder we propose an attentive multi-view learning model to learn unified news representations from titles, bodies and topic categories by regarding them as different views of news. In addition, we apply both word-level and view-level attention mechanism to news encoder to select important words and views for learning informative news representations. In the user encoder we learn the representations of users based on their browsed news and apply attention mechanism to select informative news for user representation learning. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset show our approach can effectively improve the performance of news recommendation.

News recommendation is very important to help users find interested news and alleviate information overload. Different users usually have different interests and the same user may have various interests. Thus, different users may click the same news article with attention on different aspects. In this paper, we propose a neural news recommendation model with personalized attention (NPA). The core of our approach is a news representation model and a user representation model. In the news representation model we use a CNN network to learn hidden representations of news articles based on their titles. In the user representation model we learn the representations of users based on the representations of their clicked news articles. Since different words and different news articles may have different informativeness for representing news and users, we propose to apply both word- and news-level attention mechanism to help our model attend to important words and news articles. In addition, the same news article and the same word may have different informativeness for different users. Thus, we propose a personalized attention network which exploits the embedding of user ID to generate the query vector for the word- and news-level attentions. Extensive experiments are conducted on a real-world news recommendation dataset collected from MSN news, and the results validate the effectiveness of our approach on news recommendation.

Water supplies are crucial for the development of living beings. However, change in the hydrological process i.e. climate and land usage are the key issues. Sustaining water level and accurate estimating for dynamic conditions is a critical job for hydrologists, but predicting hydrological extremes is an open issue. In this paper, we proposed two deep learning techniques and three machine learning algorithms to predict stream flow, given the present climate conditions. The results showed that the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) or Long Short-term Memory (LSTM), an artificial neural network based method, outperform other conventional and machine-learning algorithms for predicting stream flow. Furthermore, we analyzed that stream flow is directly affected by precipitation, land usage, and temperature. These indexes are critical, which can be used by hydrologists to identify the potential for stream flow. We make the dataset publicly available (https://github.com/sadaqat007/Dataset) so that others should be able to replicate and build upon the results published., Comment: 14 pages

With the rapid development of natural language processing technologies, more and more text steganographic methods based on automatic text generation technology have appeared in recent years. These models use the powerful self-learning and feature extraction ability of the neural networks to learn the feature expression of massive normal texts. Then they can automatically generate dense steganographic texts which conform to such statistical distribution based on the learned statistical patterns. In this paper, we observe that the conditional probability distribution of each word in the automatically generated steganographic texts will be distorted after embedded with hidden information. We use Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to extract these feature distribution differences and then classify those features into cover text and stego text categories. Experimental results show that the proposed model can achieve high detection accuracy. Besides, the proposed model can even make use of the subtle differences of the feature distribution of texts to estimate the amount of hidden information embedded in the generated steganographic text., Comment: IEEE Signal Processing Letters

Chinese named entity recognition (CNER) is an important task in Chinese natural language processing field. However, CNER is very challenging since Chinese entity names are highly context-dependent. In addition, Chinese texts lack delimiters to separate words, making it difficult to identify the boundary of entities. Besides, the training data for CNER in many domains is usually insufficient, and annotating enough training data for CNER is very expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a neural approach for CNER. First, we introduce a CNN-LSTM-CRF neural architecture to capture both local and long-distance contexts for CNER. Second, we propose a unified framework to jointly train CNER and word segmentation models in order to enhance the ability of CNER model in identifying entity boundaries. Third, we introduce an automatic method to generate pseudo labeled samples from existing labeled data which can enrich the training data. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our approach can effectively improve the performance of Chinese named entity recognition, especially when training data is insufficient., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, accepted by the 2019 World Wide Web Conference (WWW'19)

Existing methods for CWS usually rely on a large number of labeled sentences to train word segmentation models, which are expensive and time-consuming to annotate. Luckily, the unlabeled data is usually easy to collect and many high-quality Chinese lexicons are off-the-shelf, both of which can provide useful information for CWS. In this paper, we propose a neural approach for Chinese word segmentation which can exploit both lexicon and unlabeled data. Our approach is based on a variant of posterior regularization algorithm, and the unlabeled data and lexicon are incorporated into model training as indirect supervision by regularizing the prediction space of CWS models. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets in both in-domain and cross-domain scenarios validate the effectiveness of our approach., Comment: 7 pages, 11 figures, accepted by the 2019 World Wide Web Conference (WWW '19)

Previous VoIP steganalysis methods face great challenges in detecting speech signals at low embedding rates, and they are also generally difficult to perform real-time detection, making them hard to truly maintain cyberspace security. To solve these two challenges, in this paper, combined with the sliding window detection algorithm and Convolution Neural Network we propose a real-time VoIP steganalysis method which based on multi-channel convolution sliding windows. In order to analyze the correlations between frames and different neighborhood frames in a VoIP signal, we define multi channel sliding detection windows. Within each sliding window, we design two feature extraction channels which contain multiple convolution layers with multiple convolution kernels each layer to extract correlation features of the input signal. Then based on these extracted features, we use a forward fully connected network for feature fusion. Finally, by analyzing the statistical distribution of these features, the discriminator will determine whether the input speech signal contains covert information or not.We designed several experiments to test the proposed model's detection ability under various conditions, including different embedding rates, different speech length, etc. Experimental results showed that the proposed model outperforms all the previous methods, especially in the case of low embedding rate, which showed state-of-the-art performance. In addition, we also tested the detection efficiency of the proposed model, and the results showed that it can achieve almost real-time detection of VoIP speech signals., Comment: 13 pages, summit to ieee transactions on information forensics and security (tifs)

Steganography, as one of the three basic information security systems, has long played an important role in safeguarding the privacy and confidentiality of data in cyberspace. The text is the most widely used information carrier in people's daily life, using text as a carrier for information hiding has broad research prospects. However, due to the high coding degree and less information redundancy in the text, it has been an extremely challenging problem to hide information in it for a long time. In this paper, we propose a steganography method which can automatically generate steganographic text based on the Markov chain model and Huffman coding. It can automatically generate fluent text carrier in terms of secret information which need to be embedded. The proposed model can learn from a large number of samples written by people and obtain a good estimate of the statistical language model. We evaluated the proposed model from several perspectives. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed model is superior to all the previous related methods in terms of information imperceptibility and information hidden capacity., Comment: Submitted to IETE Technical Review

Steganalysis has been an important research topic in cybersecurity that helps to identify covert attacks in public network. With the rapid development of natural language processing technology in the past two years, coverless steganography has been greatly developed. Previous text steganalysis methods have shown unsatisfactory results on this new steganography technique and remain an unsolved challenge. Different from all previous text steganalysis methods, in this paper, we propose a text steganalysis method(TS-CNN) based on semantic analysis, which uses convolutional neural network(CNN) to extract high-level semantic features of texts, and finds the subtle distribution differences in the semantic space before and after embedding the secret information. To train and test the proposed model, we collected and released a large text steganalysis(CT-Steg) dataset, which contains a total number of 216,000 texts with various lengths and various embedding rates. Experimental results show that the proposed model can achieve nearly 100\% precision and recall, outperforms all the previous methods. Furthermore, the proposed model can even estimate the capacity of the hidden information inside. These results strongly support that using the subtle changes in the semantic space before and after embedding the secret information to conduct text steganalysis is feasible and effective., Comment: Submitted to AAAI2019

Steganography, as one of the three basic information security systems, has long played an important role in safeguarding the privacy and confidentiality of data in cyberspace. Audio is one of the most common means of information transmission in our daily life. Thus it's of great practical significance to using audio as a carrier of information hiding. At present, almost all audio-based information hiding methods are based on carrier modification mode. However, this mode is equivalent to adding noise to the original signal, resulting in a difference in the statistical feature distribution of the carrier before and after steganography, which impairs the concealment of the entire system. In this paper, we propose an automatic audio generation-based steganography(AAG-Stega), which can automatically generate high-quality audio covers on the basis of the secret bits stream that needs to be embedded. In the automatic audio generation process, we reasonably encode the conditional probability distribution space of each sampling point and select the corresponding signal output according to the bitstream to realize the secret information embedding. We designed several experiments to test the proposed model from the perspectives of information imperceptibility and information hidden capacity. The experimental results show that the proposed model can guarantee high hidden capacity and concealment at the same time., Comment: Submitted to AAAI2019t

Redundant information of low-bit-rate speech is extremely small, thus it's very difficult to implement large capacity steganography on the low-bit-rate speech. Based on multiple vector quantization characteristics of the Line Spectrum Pair (LSP) of the speech codec, this paper proposes a steganography scheme using a 3D-Magic matrix to enlarge capacity and improve quality of speech. A cyclically moving algorithm to construct a 3D-Magic matrix for steganography is proposed in this paper, as well as an embedding and an extracting algorithm of steganography based on the 3D-Magic matrix in low-bit-rate speech codec. Theoretical analysis is provided to demonstrate that the concealment and the hidden capacity are greatly improved with the proposed scheme. Experimental results show the hidden capacity is raised to 200bps in ITU-T G.723.1 codec. Moreover, the quality of steganography speech in Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) reduces no more than 4%, indicating a little impact on the quality of speech. In addition, the proposed hidden scheme could prevent being detected by some steganalysis tools effectively., Comment: Accepted by Journal of Internet Technology

Chinese word segmentation (CWS) is an important task for Chinese NLP. Recently, many neural network based methods have been proposed for CWS. However, these methods require a large number of labeled sentences for model training, and usually cannot utilize the useful information in Chinese dictionary. In this paper, we propose two methods to exploit the dictionary information for CWS. The first one is based on pseudo labeled data generation, and the second one is based on multi-task learning. The experimental results on two benchmark datasets validate that our approach can effectively improve the performance of Chinese word segmentation, especially when training data is insufficient., Comment: This paper has been accepted by The Seventh CCF International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC 2018)

Automatically extracting useful information from electronic medical records along with conducting disease diagnoses is a promising task for both clinical decision support(CDS) and neural language processing(NLP). Most of the existing systems are based on artificially constructed knowledge bases, and then auxiliary diagnosis is done by rule matching. In this study, we present a clinical intelligent decision approach based on Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN), which can automatically extract high-level semantic information of electronic medical records and then perform automatic diagnosis without artificial construction of rules or knowledge bases. We use collected 18,590 copies of the real-world clinical electronic medical records to train and test the proposed model. Experimental results show that the proposed model can achieve 98.67\% accuracy and 96.02\% recall, which strongly supports that using convolutional neural network to automatically learn high-level semantic features of electronic medical records and then conduct assist diagnosis is feasible and effective., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, Accepted by Scientific Reports

Automatically generating a natural language description of an image is a task close to the heart of image understanding. In this paper, we present a multi-model neural network method closely related to the human visual system that automatically learns to describe the content of images. Our model consists of two sub-models: an object detection and localization model, which extract the information of objects and their spatial relationship in images respectively; Besides, a deep recurrent neural network (RNN) based on long short-term memory (LSTM) units with attention mechanism for sentences generation. Each word of the description will be automatically aligned to different objects of the input image when it is generated. This is similar to the attention mechanism of the human visual system. Experimental results on the COCO dataset showcase the merit of the proposed method, which outperforms previous benchmark models.

This paper contributes a new large-scale dataset for weakly supervised cross-media retrieval, named Twitter100k. Current datasets, such as Wikipedia, NUS Wide and Flickr30k, have two major limitations. First, these datasets are lacking in content diversity, i.e., only some pre-defined classes are covered. Second, texts in these datasets are written in well-organized language, leading to inconsistency with realistic applications. To overcome these drawbacks, the proposed Twitter100k dataset is characterized by two aspects: 1) it has 100,000 image-text pairs randomly crawled from Twitter and thus has no constraint in the image categories; 2) text in Twitter100k is written in informal language by the users. Since strongly supervised methods leverage the class labels that may be missing in practice, this paper focuses on weakly supervised learning for cross-media retrieval, in which only text-image pairs are exploited during training. We extensively benchmark the performance of four subspace learning methods and three variants of the Correspondence AutoEncoder, along with various text features on Wikipedia, Flickr30k and Twitter100k. Novel insights are provided. As a minor contribution, inspired by the characteristic of Twitter100k, we propose an OCR-based cross-media retrieval method. In experiment, we show that the proposed OCR-based method improves the baseline performance.