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Artificial Intelligence and Security 6th International Conference ICAIS 2020 Hohhot China July 17 20 2020 Proceedings Part I Xingming Sun
Artificial Intelligence and Security 6th International Conference ICAIS 2020 Hohhot China July 17 20 2020 Proceedings Part I Xingming Sun
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Xingming Sun
Jinwei Wang
Elisa Bertino (Eds.)
LNCS 12239
Artificial Intelligence
and Security
6th International Conference, ICAIS 2020
Hohhot, China, July 17–20, 2020
Proceedings, Part I
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 12239
Founding Editors
Gerhard Goos
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany
Juris Hartmanis
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Artificial Intelligence
and Security
6th International Conference, ICAIS 2020
Hohhot, China, July 17–20, 2020
Proceedings, Part I
123
Editors
Xingming Sun Jinwei Wang
Nanjing University of Information Science Nanjing University of Information Science
Nanjing, China Nanjing, China
Elisa Bertino
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN, USA
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
The 6th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Security (ICAIS 2020),
formerly called the International Conference on Cloud Computing and Security
(ICCCS), was held during July 17–20, 2020, in Hohhot, China. Over the past five
years, ICAIS has become a leading conference for researchers and engineers to share
their latest results of research, development, and applications in the fields of artificial
intelligence and information security.
We used the Microsoft Conference Management Toolkits (CMT) system to manage
the submission and review processes of ICAIS 2020. We received 1,064 submissions
from 20 countries and regions, including Canada, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Russia, France,
Australia, South Korea, South Africa, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Ghana,
China, Taiwan, Macao, the USA, and the UK. The submissions cover the areas of
artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing and security, information hiding, IoT
security, multimedia forensics, encryption, cybersecurity, and so on. We thank our
Technical Program Committee (TPC) members and external reviewers for their efforts
in reviewing papers and providing valuable comments to the authors. From the total of
1,064 submissions, and based on at least three reviews per submission, the program
chairs decided to accept 142 papers, yielding an acceptance rate of 13%. The volume
of the conference proceedings contains all the regular, poster, and workshop papers.
The conference program was enriched by a series of keynote presentations, and the
keynote speakers included: Xiang-Yang Li, University of Science and Technology of
China, China; Hai Jin, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST),
China; and Jie Tang, Tsinghua University, China. We thank them for their wonderful
speeches.
There were 56 workshops organized in ICAIS 2020 which covered all the hot topics
in artificial intelligence and security. We would like to take this moment to express our
sincere appreciation for the contribution of all the workshop chairs and their partici-
pants. We would like to extend our sincere thanks to all authors who submitted papers
to ICAIS 2020 and to all TPC members. It was a truly great experience to work with
such talented and hard-working researchers. We also appreciate the external reviewers
for assisting the TPC members in their particular areas of expertise. Moreover, we want
to thank our sponsors: Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology,
New York University, ACM China, Michigan State University, University of Central
Arkansas, Université Bretagne Sud, National Natural Science Foundation of China,
Tech Science Press, Nanjing Normal University, Inner Mongolia University, and
Northeastern State University.
General Chairs
Yun Q. Shi New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA
Mauro Barni University of Siena, Italy
Elisa Bertino Purdue University, USA
Guanglai Gao Inner Mongolia University, China
Xingming Sun Nanjing University of Information Science
and Technology, China
Publication Chair
Zhaoqing Pan Nanjing University of Information Science
and Technology, China
Workshop Chair
Baowei Wang Nanjing University of Information Science
and Technology, China
Organization Chairs
Zhangjie Fu Nanjing University of Information Science
and Technology, China
Xiaorui Zhang Nanjing University of Information Science
and Technology, China
Wuyungerile Li Inner Mongolia University, China
Artificial Intelligence
Air Quality Index Prediction Based on Deep Recurrent Neural Network . . . . 291
Zhiyu Chen, Yuzhu Zhang, Gang Liu, and Jianwei Guo
Internet of Things
Internet of Things
Information Security
Designs from the Narrow-Sense Primitive BCH Codes Cðq;qm 1;d3 ;1Þ . . . . . . . . 65
Fujun Zhang, Xiaoni Du, and Jinxia Hu
Correlation Analysis of Chinese Pork Concept Stocks Based on Big Data . . . 475
Yujiao Liu, Lin He, Duohui Li, Xiaozhao Luo, Guo Peng, Xiaoping Fan,
and Guang Sun
Information Processing
1 Introduction
With the rapid development of computer technology and the increasing popularity of
related applications, malicious software technology continues to bring forth the new
through the old. At present, malware has become an important issue that threatens
the security of computer systems and the development of networks. Therefore, how
to identify unknown malware has become a new challenge. In the field of traditional
malware detection, the detection method must obtain the signature of the malware before
it can be detected. This shortcoming increases the probability of a computer infecting
new malware and makes it more difficult to detect malware. With the rise of artificial
intelligence, machine learning has been used in the field of malicious software detection,
in addition, good detection results are obtained [1–3]. To some extent, malware detection
technology combined with machine learning can improve the generalization ability and
the recognition rate of malicious samples.
2 Related Works
2.1 Malicious Software API Sequence
The Application programming interface (API) is an interface function for the Windows
operating system to provide system services to users in the dynamic link library, running
in user mode or kernel mode. The API running in kernel mode is the Native API,
which is an interface function of the kernel-level system service in the dynamic link
library, that is quite different from the API in the user mode. The Native API call
sequence can reflect the characteristics of the application at the kernel level, therefore
can be used as a data source for anomaly detection. The extraction of dynamic API call
sequences is an automated dynamic analysis process that provides true and complete API
call sequences by dynamically running and monitoring each PE file in a real machine
analysis environment. Since the call to the Application Programming Interface (API) of
Method of Multi-feature Fusion 5
the portable executable file can reflect the behavior information of the file, it is one of
the most effective features used as a smart feature detection method based on dynamic
features [1, 4–6, 11].
The Attention mechanism was firstly used in tasks such as dialogue systems or machine
translation, mainly inspired by people’s attention, generally, people only focus on the key
information that can solve the problem when reading. The model processing mechanism
assigns more attention to key parts and allocates less attention to noncritical parts through
reasonable distribution of attention [7]. The Attention mechanism can imitate the way
people think, the principle is to calculate the attention distribution probability of each
element in the input sequence for the current output y in the Decoder stage [16], so that
for each output, a unique corresponding intermediate semantic code C can be calculated.
In this way, the model assigns different weights to different inputs, highlights data with
large weights, and weakens data with small weights, thereby improving the classification
effect [8] (Fig. 1).
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) were firstly used in computer vision, and CNN
model was firstly proposed by Yoon Kim [12]. CNN is applied to the text classification
task, and multiple kernel with different sizes are used to extract the key information in
sentences, so as to better capture the local correlation [17]. Convolutional layers have
been successfully applied to sequence classification and text classification problems.
CNN mainly learns the local features of the input through the convolutional layer and the
pooling layer, extracting and retaining the important information of the representation.
CNN can achieve the desired results without excessive pre-processing work, significantly
reducing the reliance on feature engineering [11]. The CNN mainly consists of an input
layer, a convolutional layer, a pooling layer and a fully connected layer. For the sake of
CNN used in the field of natural language processing and sequence processing, the input
layer is a vector representation of the vocabulary [15].
6 Y. Wang and S. Xu
For a given sentence of length n, the representation of the input layer matrix is as
shown in formula (1).
E ∈ Rn∗m (1)
Where m is the word vector dimension. The convolution layer convolves the input
matrix using convolution kernels of different sizes, extracts local features of the input
data, and obtains the feature vector of the text, as shown in formula (2).
c = f (W ∗ x + b) (2)
Where x is the word embedding matrix, W is the weight matrix, b is the bias amount
and f is the convolution kernel activation function.
The feature vector obtained by the convolution operation can be further down sam-
pled by the pooling layer to extract the most important feature information in the
sequence. The pooled output is used as an input to the fully connected layer to classify
the sequence data.
Where W is the weight matrix connecting the two layers, σ and tanh are the activation
functions, and z and r are the update gate and the reset gate respectively.
The improvement of GRU based on LSTM is shown in Fig. 2 below.
Method of Multi-feature Fusion 7
In order to extract more effective features to identify malicious programs, This paper
proposes a weight generation algorithm based on attention mechanism (ATT-CNN-GRU)
as shown in Fig. 3, Combined with the advantages of CNN and RNN algorithms to learn
local features of the API sequence and dependencies and relations among API sequences.
The model mainly includes Embedding layer, Multi-channel Convolutional layer, GRU
layer, Model fusion layer and Attention layer. This section mainly introduces the malware
detection model proposed in this paper.
This is followed by a multi-channel Convolutional layer and a GRU layer. The multi-
channel convolutional layer uses different convolution kernels to extract sequence feature
information of different granularities, which can extract the contextual information of
the local API sequence more efficiently. GRU is a recurrent neural network layer that
can learn the correlation between embedded vectors. This paper uses both GRU and
multi-channel convolutional layers to extract features from the sequence.
The feature fusion layer is responsible for merging the features extracted by the GRU
and the multi-channel convolutional layer into the attention layer, and the attention layer
assigns weights to different features, which can better grasp the important information
in the API sequence, and finally send the output into the classifier, get malware detection
results.
4 Experiment
4.1 Introduction to Experimental Data
The experimental data comes from the file (Windows executable program) through the
sandbox program simulation run API command sequence, all windows binary executable
program. It is divided into Normal Software (NS), Ransomware (RW), Mine, DDoS,
Worm, Infectious Virus, Backdoor (BD) and Trojans. The data size of each category is
shown in the Table 1 below.
Type Size
Normal Software (NS) 35.8%
Ransomware (RM) 3.6%
Mine 8.6%
DDoS 5.9%
Worm 0.7%
Infectious virus 38.9%
Backdoor (BD) 3.7%
Trojan 10.7%
This paper trains our model using Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam) with batch size
of 32 samples and 50 epochs. Adam algorithm simultaneously has gained the advantages
of the Adaptive Gradient Algorithm (AdaGrad) and Root Mean Square Prop (RMSProp)
algorithms at the same time. Adam not only calculates the adaptive parameter learning
rate based on the first-order moment mean as the RMSProp algorithm, but also makes
full use of the second-order moment mean of the gradient. In this paper, the cross entropy
loss is defined as the loss value of the model. Set the learning rate to 0.1 times of the
current value for every 10 epochs, and then observe the state of the model training
process. Figure 4 shows the curve of the loss and F1 Score value with the number of
iteration steps during the training.
It can be seen that the F1 score of the verification set is steadily increased in the
first 10 epochs, and in the last 40 epochs, the F1 score of the verification set shows
a small amplitude oscillation, and finally tends to be stable, the model classification
effect is optimal at this moment, F1 score and the accuracy rates are 0.896 and 89.4%,
respectively.
10 Y. Wang and S. Xu
Table 2. Average F1 score and average accuracy for ATT-CNN-GRU, logistic, random forests,
and LSTM
As can be seen from Table 2, the ATT-CNN-GRU proposed in this paper is compared
to the previous LSTM, Logistic, and Random Forests. The average F1 score increased
by 17.4%, 11.3%, and 2.25%, respectively, and the recognition accuracy increased by
17.6%, 9.9%, and 2%, separately.
Considering the different totals of various malwares, this paper examines the accu-
racy of individual identification of different malware by several different models. The
result is shown in the following Table 3.
Considering the endless stream of malware in the real scene, this paper controls the
number of malware types, compares the detection capabilities of different models in the
case of increasing software types, and observes the general applicability of the model.
The experimental results are shown in the Fig. 6 below.
It can be seen that the model detection method proposed in this paper still maintains a
good detection effect in the case of increasing types of malware. Compared with the case
where the accuracy of the previous model decreases with the increase of the varieties, the
model proposed in this paper can improve the detection effect better under the condition
of the increasing number of malware.
12 Y. Wang and S. Xu
5 Conclusion
This paper proposes a multi-feature fusion model based on attention mechanism for
malware detection, combined with the advantages of CNN and GRU algorithms to learn
local features of the API sequence and dependencies and relations among API sequences.
The features extracted by different channels are merged to model the system API call
sequences. This paper introduces such a attention mechanism that allows the model to
pay more attention to those parts that have a greater impact on the judgment of emotional
polarity. the experiment tests eight of the most common types of malware, Experimental
results show that the proposed method used in the research of malware detection based
on system API call sequences, works better than the traditional malware detection model
in the field of malicious program detection.
In the next step, consider improving the attention mechanism to promote the stability
and generalization ability of the model. The method of integrating multi-features based
on attention mechanism not only can be applied outside the field of malware detection,
but also can be applied to other fields of sequence data classification. This has certain
reference significance for the classification problems widely existed in machine learning.
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Computing Sentence Embedding
by Merging Syntactic Parsing Tree
and Word Embedding
1 Introduction
Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has acquired a significant break-
through with the rapid development of deep learning. The text embedding rep-
resentations learned from neural network are basic building blocks for NLP and
Information Re-trieval (IR). Researchers compute word embedding which cap-
ture the similarities between words by using diverse methods [6,8,15,18]. Mean-
while researchers generally use the semantic combination for the sake of obtaining
the semantic representation of sentences or documents. German mathematician
Gottlob Frege proposed that the semantics of a sentence was determined by the
Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant
No.61877031, No.61876074.
c Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
X. Sun et al. (Eds.): ICAIS 2020, LNCS 12239, pp. 14–25, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57884-8_2
Computing Sentence Embedding by Merging Syntactic Parsing Tree 15
semantics of its constituent parts and the combination of them [9]. And mostly
previous work has shown that the semantic combination is a good choice for
deriving sentences or documents embedding. Hermann summarizes commonly
used semantic combination methods, such as linear weighting, matrix multiplica-
tion and tensor multiplication [10]. Furthermore, recent work represent sentences
or documents by training neural network [12,22,24,27]. [11] proposed a recur-
rent convolutional neural network that requires fewer parameters and captures
context information as much as possible to preserve long distance word order.
Particularly, [5] proposed the smooth inverse frequency (SIF) for calculating
word weight and merged them with word vectors to represent the sentence. The
weighting method performs well and is quite better or better than the complex
supervision method, but unfortunately the word order is lost. To overcome the
weakness of existing weighting methods, we consider that syntactic parsing tree
can not only derive synthetic structures but also derive word order, which is a
better way to represent synthetic information.
Therefore, we propose a method for sentence embedding based on the results
of syntactic parsing tree and word vector, named SynTree-WordVec. The tradi-
tional way to seize syntactic structure information is to construct a parsing tree
by a parser [13]. And we choose the Stanford Parser for creating syntactic pars-
ing tree. Then merge the parsing tree and word vectors referring to the order
of post-order traversal (LRD) in tree to derive sentence embedding. Our pro-
posed method can preserve the word order and syntactic structure in sentence
embedding, such that our method have the potential to overcome the weakness
of existing methods. Ultimately, we achieve significant improvements on the tex-
tual similarity tasks over the most datasets compared to SIF [5] and traditional
TF-IDF.
In this work, we compute sentence embedding by weighting methods on the
basic of parsing tree and word embedding. The innovation of our proposed
method is to consider syntactic information and word embedding. Compared
to the traditional sentence embedding weighting method, our method achieves
better or comparable performance on various text similarity tasks, especially
with the low dimension of the data set.
2 Related Work
2.1 Sentence Embedding
Previous works combined word embedding by using operations on vectors and
matrices to derive phrase or sentence embedding [7,16,17,25]. The results showed
that operating the vectors by coordinate-wise multiplication achieved a very
well performance in the binary operations studied. And [19–21] focused on the
distributed representations of phrases and sentences. They typically required
parsing and the result was shown to work for sentence-level representations.
And in [11], the recurrent convolutional neural network that synthesized the
advantages of RNN and CNN represented the text precisely. Another approach
raised up an unsupervised algorithm to learn the distributed representations of
16 Y. Wang et al.
sentences or documents [12]. Their experiments indicated that their method was
competitive with state-of-the-art methods.
More recently, [5] explored the smooth inverse frequency (SIF) as word weight
to compute sentence embedding. The word weight of word w in sentence is SIF.
The definition of SIF [5] is
a
SIF = (1)
a + p(w)
where a was scalar hyperparameter and p(w) was estimated marginal probabil-
ities of word w.
Inspired by the weighting method SIF, we merge the weights which are trans-
formed from syntactic parsing tree and the word vectors to calculate sentence
embedding.
3 SynTree-WordVec Method
1, 2, ..., n)). Wnode is the weight of each node and SU M W eights is the sum of
the whole weights.
In Fig. 1, the dashed area is one sub-tree of the whole parsing tree. The parent
node of the sub-tree is Cnodei . The Cnodei ’s vector V Cnodei is merged by its
child nodes’ represented as formula (2).
where WS is the weight of node S. In the same way, the 2-th node N P has one
child node P RP and 3-th node V P has two child nodes V BP and N P . So, VN2 P ,
VV3P are calculated as below.
SynTree-WordVec Method
Sentence s’s parsing tree {Ts : s ∈ Dataset},
Input: word embedding {vw : w ∈ W ordV ector},
nodes’ weights {Wnod : nod ∈ Ts }
Output: Sentence embedding {Vs : s ∈ Dataset}
1: for each sentence s in Dataset do:
i
for each node in Ts do: Vnod ← Wnod · VCnodek ,
k=1
where nod has i child Nodes. end for;
Steps:
i
WP node · VCnode
k
k=1
Vs = SU M W eightTs
, where SU M W eightTs = nod∈Ts Wnod , end for.
2: Computing the first principal component µ of {Vs : s ∈ D}.
3: for all sentences s in D do:Vs ← Vs − µµT Vs
Assuming that there are n (n is 60% of number of sentences pairs for all datasets)
pairs of training sentences (S1n , S2n ), and their vectors are (VSn1 , VSn2 ) , the pre-
dicted score of similarity between sentences pair (S1n , S2n ) is (VSn1 , VSn2 )and the
ground-truth score is GT Score(VSn1 , VSn2 ) .
In generally, the target function is minimizing the difference ΔScore between
pre-dicted scores and ground-truth scores shown in formula (11).
And people will calculate all the combinations of parameters to obtain the opti-
mal distribution of parameters. And there are 36 part-of-speech tags, 22 phrase
tags and 9 clause tags in parsing results. All the part-of-speech tags combine
in different order during adjusting weights, which could be reach 36!=3.721041
combinations amazingly. If we iteratively run the model in all the weights com-
binations, it will cost huge running time.
Therefore, referring to the Expectation Maximization Algorithm (EM), we
keep the rest of the weights intact when adjusting the weight, then we can obtain
the highest Pearson correlation coefficient while the weight values a appropriate
value Watbest (t = 1, 2, 3, ..., 36, a = 1, 2, 3, ...). And we use Xn , Yn to succinctly
represent P Score(VSn1 , VSn2 ), GT Score(VSn1 , VSn2 ) shown in below.
n
(Xi − X̄)(Yi − Ȳ )
i=1
P earson(Xn , Yn ) = (13)
n
2
n
2
( (Xi − X̄) )( (Yi − Ȳ ) )
i=1 i=1
The datasets: 22 textual similarity datasets including all the datasets from
SemEval semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks (2012–2015) [1–4], the SemEval
2015 Twitter task [26] and the SemEval 2014 Semantic Relatedness task [14].
We run our SynTree-WordVec method on all these datasets to predict the
similarity between pairs of sentences. The evaluation criterion is the Pearson’s
coefficient between the predicted scores and the ground-truth scores.
On our return to Munich that evening, Craig told us that preparations were being made
for the immediate restitution of several important masterpieces recovered in the American
Zone. General Eisenhower had approved a proposal to return at once to each of the
countries overrun by the Germans at least one outstanding work of art. This was to be
done in his name, as a gesture of “token restitution” symbolizing American policy with
regard to ultimate restitution of all stolen art treasures to the rightful owner nations. It was
felt that the gracious gesture on the part of the Commanding General of United States
Forces in Europe would serve to reaffirm our intentions to right the wrongs of Nazi
oppression. In view of the vast amount of art which had thus far been recovered, it would
be months before it could all be restored to the plundered countries. Meanwhile these
“token restitutions” would be an earnest of American good will. They would be sent back
from Germany at the expense of the United States Government. Thereafter,
representatives of the various countries would be invited to come to our Collecting Points
to select, assemble and, in transportation of their own providing, remove those objects
which the Germans had stolen.
Belgium was to receive the first token restitution. The great van Eyck altarpiece—The
Adoration of the Mystic Lamb—was the obvious choice among the stolen Belgian
treasures.
The famous panels had been reposing in the Central Collecting Point at Munich since
we had removed them from the salt mine at Alt Aussee. A special plane had been
chartered to fly them to Brussels. The Belgian Government had signified approval of air
transportation. Direct rail communication between Munich and Brussels had not been
resumed, and the highways were not in the best of condition. By truck, it would be a
rough two-day trip; by air, a matter of three hours.
Bancel La Farge had already flown from Frankfurt to Brussels, where plans had been
made for an appropriate ceremony on the arrival of the altarpiece. The American
Ambassador was to present the panels to the Prince Regent on behalf of General
Eisenhower. It was to be an historic occasion.
I went out to the airport to confirm the arrangements for the C-54. It was only a fifteen-
minute drive from the Königsplatz to the field. I was also to check on the condition of the
streets: they were in good shape all the way.
The plane was to take off at noon. Lamont, Steve and I supervised the loading of the
ten precious cases. We led off in a jeep. The truck followed with the panels. Four of the
civilian packers went along to load the cases onto the plane. Captain Posey was to escort
the altarpiece to Brussels.
When we got to the airport we learned that the plane had not arrived. There would be a
two-hour delay. At the end of two hours, we were informed that there was bad weather
south of Brussels. All flights had been canceled for the day. We drove back to the
Collecting Point at the Königsplatz and had just finished unloading the panels when a
message came from the field. The weather had cleared. The plane would be taking off in
half an hour. I caught Captain Posey as he was leaving the building for his office at Third
Army Headquarters. The cases were reloaded and we were on our way to the field in
fifteen minutes.
The truck was driven onto the field where the big C-54 stood waiting. In another quarter
of an hour the panels were aboard and lashed securely to metal supports in the forepart
of the passenger compartment. Captain Posey, the only passenger, waved jauntily as the
doors swung shut. Enviously we watched the giant plane roll down the field, lift
waveringly from the airstrip and swing off to the northwest. The altarpiece was on the last
lap of an extraordinary journey. We wished George Stout could have been in on this.
The plane reached Brussels without mishap. The return of the great national treasure
was celebrated throughout the country. Encouraged by the success of this first “token
restitution,” Major La Farge directed that a similar gesture be made to France. At the
Collecting Point Craig selected seventy-one masterpieces looted from French private
collections. The group included Fragonard, Chardin, Lancret, Rubens, Van Dyck, Hals,
and a large number of seventeenth century Dutch masters. Only examples of the highest
quality were chosen.
Ham Coulter, the naval officer who worked with Craig at the “Bau,” was the emissary
appointed to accompany the paintings to Paris. It was decided to return them by truck,
inasmuch as it would have been impracticable to attempt shipping uncrated pictures by
air. The convoy consisted of two trucks—one for the pictures, the other for extra gasoline.
It was a hard two-day trip from Munich to Paris. Ham got through safely, but reported on
his return that the roads had been extremely rough a good part of the way. He had
delivered the pictures in Paris to the Musée du Jeu de Paume, the little museum which
the Germans had used during the Occupation as the clearinghouse for their methodical
plundering of the Jewish collections. His expedition had been marred by only one minor
incident. When the paintings were being unloaded at the museum, one of the women
attendants watching the operation noticed that some of the canvases were unframed.
She had asked, “And where are the frames?” This was too much for Coulter. In perfect
French, the courteous lieutenant told her precisely what she could do about the frames.
Shortly after the return of the Ghent altarpiece, Captain Posey was demobilized. His
duties as MFA&A Officer at Third Army Headquarters in Munich were assumed by
Captain Edwin Rae. I had not seen Rae since the early summer when he and Lieutenant
Edith Standen had been assigned to assist me in inventorying the collections of the Berlin
museums in the vaults of the Reichsbank at Frankfurt. Edwin was a meticulous fellow,
gentle but determined. Although by no means lacking in a sense of humor, he resented
joking references to a fancied resemblance to Houdon’s well known portrait of Voltaire,
and I didn’t blame him.
He took on his new responsibilities with quiet assurance and in a short time won the
complete confidence of his superiors at Third Army Headquarters. Throughout his long
tenure of office, he maintained an unruffled calm in the face of obstacles which would
have exhausted a less patient man. He was responsible for all matters pertaining to the
Fine Arts in the Eastern Military District of the American Zone—that is, Bavaria—an area
more than twice the size of the two provinces Greater Hesse and Württemberg-Baden
comprising the Western Military District of our Zone.
During the early days of Captain Rae’s regime, Charlie Kuhn paid a brief visit to
Munich. He had just completed the transfer of the Berlin Museum collections from
Frankfurt to the Landesmuseum at Wiesbaden. The university buildings in Frankfurt—
which I had requisitioned for a Collecting Point—had proved unsuitable. The repairs, he
said, would have taken months. On the other hand, the Wiesbaden Museum, though
damaged, was ideal for the purpose. Of course there hadn’t been a glass left in any of the
windows, and the roof had had to be repaired. But thanks to the energy and ingenuity of
Walter Farmer, the building had been rehabilitated in two months. Captain Farmer was
the director of the new Collecting Point. When I asked where Farmer had got the glass,
Charlie was evasive. All he would say was that Captain Farmer was “wise in the ways of
the Army.”
Charlie was headed for Vienna to confer with Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Dewald, Chief
of the MFA&A Section at USFA Headquarters (United States Forces, Austria). Colonel
Dewald wanted to complete the evacuation of the mine at Alt Aussee, which was now
under his jurisdiction. For this project he hoped to obtain the services of the officers who
had worked there when the mine had been Third Army’s responsibility. Captain Rae was
reluctant to lend the Special Evacuation Team, because there was still so much work to
be done in Bavaria. But he agreed, provided that Charlie could sell the idea to the Chief
of Staff at Third Army. This Charlie succeeded in doing, and departed for Vienna a day
later. Steve was crazy to see Vienna—I think his parents had been born there—so
Charlie took him along.
After they had left, Captain Rae requested Lamont and me to make an inspection trip
to northern Bavaria. Our first stop was Bamberg. There we examined the Neue Residenz,
which Rae contemplated establishing as an auxiliary Collecting Point to house the
contents of various repositories in Upper Franconia. Reports reaching his office indicated
that storage conditions in that area were unsatisfactory. Either the repositories were not
weatherproof, or they were not being adequately guarded.
It was also rumored that UNRRA was planning to fill the Neue Residenz with DPs—
Displaced Persons. Captain Rae was determined to put a stop to that, because the
building, a fine example of late seventeenth century architecture, was on the SHAEF List
of Protected Monuments. This fact should have guaranteed its immunity from such a
hazard. Even during combat, the SHAEF list had been a great protection to monuments
of historic and artistic importance. Now that no “doctrine of military necessity” could be
invoked to justify improper use of the building, Rae did not propose to countenance its
occupancy by DPs.
The Neue Residenz contained dozens of empty, brocaded rooms—but no plumbing.
We decided that it would do for a Collecting Point and agreed with Rae that the DPs
should be housed elsewhere if possible. The officer from the local MG Detachment, who
was showing us around, confirmed the report that UNRRA intended to move in. He didn’t
think they would relinquish the building without a protest. The influx of refugees from the
Russian Zone had doubled the town’s normal population of sixty thousand.
It was a disappointment to find that the superb sculpture in the cathedral across the
square was still bricked up. The shelters had proved a needless precaution, for Bamberg
had not been bombed. Only the bridge over the Regnitz had been blown up, and the
Germans had done that themselves.
From Bamberg we drove north to Coburg, where we had a twofold mission. First we
were to obtain specific information about ten cases which contained a collection of art
objects belonging to a prince of Hesse. The cases were said to be stored in Feste
Coburg, the walled castle above the town. If they were the property of Philip of Hesse,
then they would probably be taken into custody by the American authorities. We had
been told that he was in prison. His art dealings during the past few years were being
reviewed by the OSS officers charged with the special investigation of Nazi art-looting
activities. Philip was the son of the Landgräfin of Hesse. It was in the flower-filled
Waffenraum of her castle near Frankfurt that I had seen the family tombs months before.
If, on the other hand, the cases belonged to a different prince of Hesse—one whose
political record was clean—and storage conditions were satisfactory, we would simply
leave them where they were for the time being.
Our second objective was Schloss Tambach, a few kilometers from Coburg. Paintings
stolen by Frank, the Nazi Governor of Poland, from the palace at Warsaw were stored
there. Schloss Tambach also contained pictures from the Stettin Museum. Stettin was
now in the Russian Zone of Occupied Germany.
On our arrival in Coburg, Lamont and I drove to the headquarters of the local MG
Detachment, which were located in the Palais Edinburgh. This unpretentious building was
once the residence of Queen Victoria’s son, the Duke of Edinburgh. There we arranged
with Lieutenant Milton A. Pelz, the Monuments officer of the Coburg Detachment, to
inspect the storage rooms at the castle.
Pelz was a big fellow who spoke German fluently. He welcomed us hospitably and took
us up to the castle where we met Dr. Grundmann, who had the keys to the storage
rooms. This silent, sour-faced German was curator of the Prince’s collections. He said
that his employer was Prince Ludwig of Hesse, a cousin of Philip. The cases contained
paintings and objets d’art which had been in the possession of the family for years.
Grundmann had personally removed them from Ludwig’s estate in Silesia the day before
the Russians occupied the area.
Ludwig’s most important treasure was the world-famous painting by Holbein known as
the Madonna of Bürgermeister Meyer. Painted in 1526, it had hung for years in the
palace at Darmstadt. The Dresden Gallery owned a seventeenth century replica. Early in
the war, Prince Ludwig had sent the original to his Silesian castle for safekeeping.
Grundmann had brought it back to Bavaria along with the ten cases now at Coburg. From
Coburg he had taken the Holbein to Schloss Banz, a castle not far from Bamberg.
He said that the Prince was living at Wolfsgarten, a small country place near
Darmstadt. Ludwig was eager to regain possession of the painting. Did we think that
could be arranged? We told him he would have to obtain an authorization from Captain
Rae at Munich.
Schloss Tambach was a ten-minute drive from Coburg. This great country house, built
around three sides of a courtyard, belonged to the Countess of Ortenburg. She occupied
the center section. A detachment of troops was billeted in one wing. The other was filled
with the Stettin and Warsaw pictures. There were over two hundred from the Stettin
Museum. Nineteenth century German paintings predominated, but I noticed two fine Hals
portraits and a Van Gogh landscape among them.
The civilian custodian, answerable to the MG authorities at Coburg, was Dr. Wilhelm
Eggebrecht. He had been curator of the Stettin Museum until thrown out by the Nazis
because his wife was one-quarter Jewish. He was a mousy little fellow with a bald head
and gold-rimmed spectacles. He asked apprehensively if we intended to send the
paintings back to Russian-held Stettin. We said that we had come only to check on the
physical security of the present storage place. So far as we knew, the paintings would
remain where they were for the present. This inconclusive piece of information seemed to
reassure him.
The paintings looted from Warsaw were the pièces de résistance of the treasures at
Schloss Tambach—especially the nine great canvases by Bellotto, the eighteenth century
Venetian master. Governor Frank had ruthlessly removed the pictures from their
stretchers and rolled them up for shipment. As a result of this rough handling, the paint
had flaked off in places, but the damage was not serious. When we examined the
pictures, they were spread out on the floor. They filled two rooms, forty feet square. Later
they were taken to the Munich Collecting Point and mounted on new stretchers, in
preparation for their return to Warsaw.
When we got back to Munich, Steve had returned from Vienna. He had news for us.
Charlie Kuhn had already left for Frankfurt. Colonel Dewald was coming to Munich in a
few days to talk to Colonel Roy Dalferes, Rae’s Chief of Staff at Third Army, about
reopening the Alt Aussee mine. Either Charlie or Bancel would come down from USFET
Headquarters when Dewald arrived. A new man had joined the MFA&A Section at USFA
—Andrew Ritchie, director of the Buffalo Museum. He had come over as a civilian. Steve
thought that Ritchie would be the USFA representative at Munich. There was a lot of stuff
at the Collecting Point which would eventually go back to Austria. It would have to be
checked with the records there. That would be Ritchie’s job. Steve told us also that
Lincoln Kirstein had gone home. His mother was seriously ill and Lincoln had left on
emergency orders.
The three of us went to Captain Rae’s office. Lamont and I had to make a report on our
trip to Coburg. Rae had a new assignment for us. He had just received orders from
USFET Headquarters to prepare the Cracow altarpiece for shipment. It was to be sent
back to Poland as a token restitution. This was the colossal carved altarpiece by Veit
Stoss which the Nazis had stolen from the Church of St. Mary at Cracow. Veit Stoss had
been commissioned by the King of Poland in 1477 to carve the great work. It had taken
him ten years. After the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazis had carted it off, lock, stock
and barrel, to Nürnberg. They contended that, since Veit Stoss had been a native of
Nürnberg, it belonged in the city of his birth.
The missing altarpiece was the first of her looted treasures for which Poland had
registered a claim with the American authorities at the close of the war. After months of
diligent investigation, it was found by American officers in an underground bunker across
the street from the Albrecht Dürer house in Nürnberg. In addition to the dismantled
figures of the central panel—painted and gilded figures of hollow wood ten feet high—the
twelve ornate side panels, together with the statues and pinnacles surmounting the
framework, had been crowded into the bunker.
The same bunker contained another priceless looted treasure—the coronation regalia
of the Holy Roman Empire. Among these venerable objects were the jeweled crown of
the Emperor Conrad—commonly called the “Crown of Charlemagne”—dating from the
eleventh century, a shield, two swords and the orb. Since 1804 they had been preserved
in the Schatzkammer, the Imperial Treasure Room, at Vienna. In 1938, the Nazis
removed them to Nürnberg, basing their claim to possession on a fifteenth century decree
of the Emperor Sigismund that they were to be kept in that city.
On the eve of the German collapse, two high officials of the city had spirited away
these five pieces. The credit for recovering the treasures goes to an American officer of
German birth, Lieutenant Walter Horn, professor of art at the University of California. The
two officials at first disclaimed any knowledge of their whereabouts. After hours of
relentless grilling by Lieutenant Horn, the men finally admitted their guilt. They were
promptly tried, heavily fined and sent to prison. Three months later, at the request of the
Austrian Government, the imperial treasures were flown back to Vienna. This historic
shipment contained other relics which the Nazis had taken from the Schatzkammer—
relics of the greatest religious significance. They included an alleged fragment of the True
Cross, a section of the tablecloth said to have been used at the Last Supper, a lance
venerated as the one which had touched the wounds of Christ, and links from the chains
traditionally believed to have bound St. Peter, St. Paul and St. John.
On Captain Rae’s instructions, Steve and I went to Nürnberg to pack the Stoss
altarpiece. (At that time the coronation regalia was still in the bunker, where, on the
afternoon of our arrival, we had an opportunity to examine it.) We found that the heavy
framework which supported the altar panels was not stored in the bunker. Because of its
size—the upright pieces were thirty feet high—it had been taken to Schloss Wiesenthau,
an old castle outside Forchheim, thirty miles away.
Leaving Steve to start packing the smaller figures and pinnacles, I got hold of a
semitrailer, the only vehicle long enough to accommodate a load of such length. It was an
hour’s drive to the castle. With a crew of twenty PWs, I finished loading the framework in
two hours and returned to Nürnberg in time for supper.
That evening Steve and I figured out the number of trucks we would need for the
altarpiece. Lamont had remained in Munich to make tentative arrangements, pending
word from us. He was going to ask for ten trucks and we came to the conclusion that this
would be about the right number—in addition, of course, to the semitrailer for the
supporting framework. We got out our maps and studied our probable route to Cracow.
One road would take us through Dresden and Breslau; another by way of Pilsen and
Prague. Perhaps we could go one way and return the other. In either case we would have
to pass through Russian-occupied territory. It would probably take some time to obtain the
necessary clearances. We figured on taking enough gas for the round trip, since we
doubted if there would be any to spare in Poland. Altogether it promised to be a
complicated expedition, but already we had visions of a triumphal entry into Cracow.
Our ambitious plans collapsed the following morning. While Steve and I were at
breakfast, I was called to the telephone. The corporal in Captain Rae’s office was on the
wire. I was to return to Munich at once. Major La Farge was arriving from Frankfurt and
wanted to see me that night. Plans for the trip to Cracow were indefinitely postponed.
Internal conditions in Poland were too unsettled to risk returning the altarpiece.
Our plans had miscarried before, but this was our first major disappointment. We had
begun to look on the Polish venture as the fitting climax of our work as a Special
Evacuation Team. On the way back to Munich, Steve said he had a feeling that the team
was going to be split up.
Steve’s misgivings were prophetic. At Craig’s apartment after dinner, Bancel La Farge
outlined the plans he had for us. Colonel Dalferes had acceded to Colonel Dewald’s
request. Lamont, Steve and a third officer—new to MFA&A work—were to resume the
evacuation of the salt mine at Alt Aussee. If the snows held off, it would be possible to
carry on operations there for another month or six weeks.
I was to return to USFET Headquarters at Frankfurt as Deputy Chief of the MFA&A
Section, replacing Charlie Kuhn who had just received his orders to go home. I knew that
Charlie would soon be eligible for release from active duty, but had no idea that his
departure was so imminent.
We didn’t have much to say to one another on the way to our quarters that night. Steve
had already made up his mind that he wasn’t going to like the new man. Lamont said that
he thought it was going to be an awful anticlimax to reopen the mine. And for me, the
prospect of routine administrative work at USFET was uninviting. After three months of
strenuous and exciting field work, it wouldn’t be easy to settle down in an office. All three
of us felt that the great days were over.
During our last week together in Munich we had little time to feel sorry for ourselves.
Everyone was preoccupied with the restitution program. We had our full share of the
work. Another important shipment was to be made to Belgium. It was to include the
Michelangelo Madonna, the eleven paintings stolen from the church in Bruges when the
statue was taken, and the four panels by Dirk Bouts from the famous altarpiece in the
church of St. Pierre at Louvain. These panels, which formed the wings of the altarpiece,
had been removed by the Germans in August 1942. Before the first World War one wing
had been in the Berlin Gallery, the other in the Alte Pinakothek at Munich. As in the case
of the Ghent altarpiece, they had been restored—unjustly, according to the Germans—to
Belgium by the Versailles Treaty.
This shipment to Belgium represented the first practical application of the “come and
get it” theory of restitution, evolved by Major La Farge. Belgium had already received the
Ghent altarpiece as token restitution. Now it was up to the Belgians to carry on at their
own expense. The special representatives who came down from Brussels to supervise
this initial shipment were Dr. Paul Coremans, a great technical expert, and Lieutenant
Pierre Longuy of the Ministry of Fine Arts. They had their own truck but had been unable
to bring suitable packing materials. We had an ample supply of pads and blankets which
we had stored at the Collecting Point after our evacuation of the Göring collection. We
placed them at the disposal of the Belgians. But it was Saturday and no civilian packers
were available. Dr. Coremans gratefully accepted the offer of our services. Steve, Lamont
and I loaded the truck. It was the last operation of the Special Evacuation Team.
The Belgians had no sooner departed than the French and Dutch representatives
arrived. Captain Hubert de Brye for France looked more like a sportsman than a scholar;
but he was a man of wide cultivation and had a sense of humor which endeared him to
his associates in Munich. He and Ham Coulter were kindred spirits and became great
friends.
Ham, who had been responsible for the rehabilitation of both the Collecting Point and
the Führerbau, now had two assistants—Captain George Lacy and Dietrich Sattler, the
latter a German architect. Through this division of the work, Ham found time for new
duties: he took the foreign representatives in tow, arranged for their billets, their mess
cards, their PX rations and so on. It was an irritating but not a thankless job, for the
recipients of his attentions were devoted to their “wet nurse.”
The Albrecht Dürer house at Nürnberg—before and after the German collapse. In an underground bunker
across the street were stored the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire and the famous Veit Stoss
altarpiece.