Deep learning methods, and in particular convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have led to an enormous breakthrough in a wide range of computer vision tasks, primarily by using large-scale annotated datasets. However, obtaining such datasets in the medical domain remains a challenge. In this paper, we present methods for generating synthetic medical images using recently presented deep learning Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Furthermore, we show that generated medical images can be used for synthetic data augmentation, and improve the performance of CNN for medical image classification. Our novel method is demonstrated on a limited dataset of computed tomography (CT) images of 182 liver lesions (53 cysts, 64 metastases and 65 hemangiomas). We first exploit GAN architectures for synthesizing high quality liver lesion ROIs. Then we present a novel scheme for liver lesion classification using CNN. Finally, we train the CNN using classic data augmentation and our synthetic data augmentation and compare performance. In addition, we explore the quality of our synthesized examples using visualization and expert assessment. The classification performance using only classic data augmentation yielded 78.6% sensitivity and 88.4% specificity. By adding the synthetic data augmentation the results increased to 85.7% sensitivity and 92.4% specificity. We believe that this approach to synthetic data augmentation can generalize to other medical classification applications and thus support radiologists' efforts to improve diagnosis.

Context representations are central to various NLP tasks, such as word sense disambiguation, named entity recognition, coreference resolution, and many more. In this work we present a neural model for efficiently learning a generic context embedding function from large corpora, using bidirectional LSTM. With a very simple application of our context representations, we manage to surpass or nearly reach state-of-the-art results on sentence completion, lexical substitution and word sense disambiguation tasks, while substantially outperforming the popular context representation of averaged word embeddings. We release our code and pretrained models, suggesting they could be useful in a wide variety of NLP tasks.

In this paper, we present a data augmentation method that generates synthetic medical images using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We propose a training scheme that first uses classical data augmentation to enlarge the training set and then further enlarges the data size and its diversity by applying GAN techniques for synthetic data augmentation. Our method is demonstrated on a limited dataset of computed tomography (CT) images of 182 liver lesions (53 cysts, 64 metastases and 65 hemangiomas). The classification performance using only classic data augmentation yielded 78.6% sensitivity and 88.4% specificity. By adding the synthetic data augmentation the results significantly increased to 85.7% sensitivity and 92.4% specificity.

Entailment rules between predicates are fundamental to many semantic-inference applications. Consequently, learning such rules has been an active field of research in recent years. Methods for learning entailment rules between predicates that take into account dependencies between different rules (e.g., entailment is a transitive relation) have been shown to improve rule quality, but suffer from scalability issues, that is, the number of predicates handled is often quite small. In this article, we present methods for learning transitive graphs that contain tens of thousands of nodes, where nodes represent predicates and edges correspond to entailment rules (termed entailment graphs). Our methods are able to scale to a large number of predicates by exploiting structural properties of entailment graphs such as the fact that they exhibit a “tree-like” property. We apply our methods on two data sets and demonstrate that our methods find high-quality solutions faster than methods proposed in the past, and moreover our methods for the first time scale to large graphs containing 20,000 nodes and more than 100,000 edges.

Man-made scenes can be densely packed, containing numerous objects, often identical, positioned in close proximity. We show that precise object detection in such scenes remains a challenging frontier even for state-of-the-art object detectors. We propose a novel, deep-learning based method for precise object detection, designed for such challenging settings. Our contributions include: (1) A layer for estimating the Jaccard index as a detection quality score;(2) a novel EM merging unit, which uses our quality scores to resolve detection overlap ambiguities; finally, (3) an extensive, annotated data set, SKU-110K, representing packed retail environments, released for training and testing under such extreme settings. Detection tests on SKU-110K and counting tests on the CARPK and PUCPR+ show our method to outperform existing state-of-the-art with substantial margins. The code and data will be made available on