prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. what are the existing approaches?
Context 1: Introduction
Users of photo-sharing websites such as Flickr often provide short textual descriptions in the form of tags to help others find the images  With the availability of GPS systems in current electronic devices such as smartphones, latitude and longitude coordinates are nowadays commonly made available as well  The tags associated with such georeferenced photos often describe the location where these photos were taken, and Flickr can thus be regarded as a source of environmental information  The use of Flickr for modelling urban environments has already received considerable attention  For instance, various approaches have been proposed for modelling urban regions BIBREF0 , and for identifying points-of-interest BIBREF1 and itineraries BIBREF2 , BIBREF3   However, the usefulness of Flickr for characterizing the natural environment, which is the focus of this paper, is less well-understood 
Many recent studies have highlighted that Flickr tags capture valuable ecological information, which can be used as a complementary source to more traditional sources  To date, however, ecologists have mostly used social media to conduct manual evaluations of image content with little automated exploitation of the associated tags BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , BIBREF6   One recent exception is BIBREF7 , where bag-of-words representations derived from Flickr tags were found to give promising result for predicting a range of different environemental phenomena 
Our main hypothesis in this paper is that by using vector space embeddings instead of bag-of-words representations, the ecological information which is implicitly captured by Flickr tags can be utilized in a more effective way  Vector space embeddings are representations in which the objects from a given domain are encoded using relatively low-dimensional vectors  They have proven useful in natural language processing, especially for encoding word meaning BIBREF8 , BIBREF9 , and in machine learning more generally  In this paper, we are interested in the use of such representations for modelling geographic locations  Our main motivation for using vector space embeddings is that they allow us to integrate the textual information we get from Flickr with available structured information in a very natural way  To this end, we rely on an adaptation of the GloVe word embedding model BIBREF9 , but rather than learning word vectors, we learn vectors representing locations  Similar to how the representation of a word in GloVe is determined by the context words surrounding it, the representation of a location in our model is determined by the tags of the photos that have been taken near that location  To incorporate numerical features from structured environmental datasets (e g  average temperature), we associate with each such feature a linear mapping that can be used to predict that feature from a given location vector  This is inspired by the fact that salient properties of a given domain can often be modelled as directions in vector space embeddings BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 , BIBREF12   Finally, evidence from categorical datasets (e g  land cover types) is taken into account by requiring that locations belonging to the same category are represented using similar vectors, similar to how semantic types are sometimes modelled in the context of knowledge graph embedding BIBREF13  
While our point-of-departure is a standard word embedding model, we found that the off-the-shelf GloVe model performed surprisingly poorly, meaning that a number of modifications are needed to achieve good results  Our main findings are as follows  First, given that the number of tags associated with a given location can be quite small, it is important to apply some kind of spatial smoothing, i e  the importance of a given tag for a given location should not only depend on the occurrences of the tag at that location, but also on its occurrences at nearby locations  To this end, we use a formulation which is based on spatially smoothed version of pointwise mutual information  Second, given the wide diversity in the kind of information that is covered by Flickr tags, we find that term selection is in some cases critical to obtain vector spaces that capture the relevant aspects of geographic locations  For instance, many tags on Flickr refer to photography related terms, which we would normally not want to affect the vector representation of a given location  Finally, even with these modifications, vector space embeddings learned from Flickr tags alone are sometimes outperformed by bag-of-words representations  However, our vector space embeddings lead to substantially better predictions in cases where structured (scientific) information is also taken into account  In this sense, the main value of using vector space embeddings in this context is not so much about abstracting away from specific tag usages, but rather about the fact that such representations allow us to integrate numerical and categorical features in a much more natural way than is possible with bag-of-words representations 
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows  In the next section, we provide a discussion of existing work  Section SECREF3 then presents our model for embedding geographic locations from Flickr tags and structured data  Next, in Section SECREF4 we provide a detailed discussion about the experimental results  Finally, Section SECREF5 summarizes our conclusions 
Vector space embeddings
The use of low-dimensional vector space embeddings for representing objects has already proven effective in a large number of applications, including natural language processing (NLP), image processing, and pattern recognition  In the context of NLP, the most prominent example is that of word embeddings, which represent word meaning using vectors of typically around 300 dimensions  A large number of different methods for learning such word embeddings have already been proposed, including Skip-gram and the Continuous Bag-of-Words (CBOW) model BIBREF8 , GloVe BIBREF9 , and fastText BIBREF14   They have been applied effectively in many downstream NLP tasks such as sentiment analysis BIBREF15 , part of speech tagging BIBREF16 , BIBREF17 , and text classification BIBREF18 , BIBREF19   The model we consider in this paper builds on GloVe, which was designed to capture linear regularities of word-word co-occurrence  In GloVe, there are two word vectors INLINEFORM0 and INLINEFORM1 for each word in the vocabulary, which are learned by minimizing the following objective: DISPLAYFORM0
where INLINEFORM0 is the number of times that word INLINEFORM1 appears in the context of word INLINEFORM2 , INLINEFORM3 is the vocabulary size, INLINEFORM4 is the target word bias, INLINEFORM5 is the context word bias  The weighting function INLINEFORM6 is used to limit the impact of rare terms  It is defined as 1 if INLINEFORM7 and as INLINEFORM8 otherwise, where INLINEFORM9 is usually fixed to 100 and INLINEFORM10 to 0 75  Intuitively, the target word vectors INLINEFORM11 correspond to the actual word representations which we would like to find, while the context word vectors INLINEFORM12 model how occurrences of INLINEFORM13 in the context of a given word INLINEFORM14 affect the representation of this latter word  In this paper we will use a similar model, which will however be aimed at learning location vectors instead of the target word vectors 
Beyond word embeddings, various methods have been proposed for learning vector space representations from structured data such as knowledge graphs BIBREF20 , BIBREF21 , BIBREF22 , social networks BIBREF23 , BIBREF24 and taxonomies BIBREF25 , BIBREF26   The idea of combining a word embedding model with structured information has also been explored by several authors, for example to improve the word embeddings based on information coming from knowledge graphs BIBREF27 , BIBREF28   Along similar lines, various lexicons have been used to obtain word embeddings that are better suited at modelling sentiment BIBREF15 and antonymy BIBREF29 , among others  The method proposed by BIBREF30 imposes the condition that words that belong to the same semantic category are closer together than words from different categories, which is somewhat similar in spirit to how we will model categorical datasets in our model 
Embeddings for geographic information
The problem of representing geographic locations using embeddings has also attracted some attention  An early example is BIBREF31 , which used principal component analysis and stacked autoencoders to learn low-dimensional vector representations of city neighbourhoods based on census data  They use these representations to predict attributes such as crime, which is not included in the given census data, and find that in most of the considered evaluation tasks, the low-dimensional vector representations lead to more faithful predictions than the original high-dimensional census data 
Some existing works combine word embedding models with geographic coordinates  For example, in BIBREF32 an approach is proposed to learn word embeddings based on the assumption that words which tend to be used in the same geographic locations are likely to be similar  Note that their aim is dual to our aim in this paper: while they use geographic location to learn word vectors, we use textual descriptions to learn vectors representing geographic locations 
Several methods also use word embedding models to learn representations of Points-of-Interest (POIs) that can be used for predicting user visits BIBREF33 , BIBREF34 , BIBREF35   These works use the machinery of existing word embedding models to learn POI representations, intuitively by letting sequences of POI visits by a user play the role of sequences of words in a sentence  In other words, despite the use of word embedding models, many of these approaches do not actually consider any textual information  For example, in BIBREF34 the Skip-gram model is utilized to create a global pattern of users' POIs  Each location was treated as a word and the other locations visited before or after were treated as context words  They then use a pair-wise ranking loss BIBREF36 which takes into account the user's location visit frequency to personalize the location recommendations  The methods of BIBREF34 were extended in BIBREF35 to use a temporal embedding and to take more account of geographic context, in particular the distances between preferred and non-preferred neighboring POIs, to create a “geographically hierarchical pairwise preference ranking model”  Similarly, in BIBREF37 the CBOW model was trained with POI data  They ordered POIs spatially within the traffic-based zones of urban areas  The ordering was used to generate characteristic vectors of POI types  Zone vectors represented by averaging the vectors of the POIs contained in them, were then used as features to predict land use types  In the CrossMap method BIBREF38 they learned embeddings for spatio-temporal hotspots obtained from social media data of locations, times and text  In one form of embedding, intended to enable reconstruction of records, neighbourhood relations in space and time were encoded by averaging hotspots in a target location's spatial and temporal neighborhoods  They also proposed a graph-based embedding method with nodes of location, time and text  The concatenation of the location, time and text vectors were then used as features to predict peoples' activities in urban environments  Finally, in BIBREF39 , a method is proposed that uses the Skip-gram model to represent POI types, based on the intuition that the vector representing a given POI type should be predictive of the POI types that found near places of that type 
Our work is different from these studies, as our focus is on representing locations based on a given text description of that location (in the form of Flickr tags), along with numerical and categorical features from scientific datasets 
Analyzing Flickr tags
Many studies have focused on analyzing Flickr tags to extract useful information in domains such as linguistics BIBREF40 , geography BIBREF0 , BIBREF41 , and ecology BIBREF42 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF43   Most closely related to our work, BIBREF7 found that the tags of georeferenced Flickr photos can effectively supplement traditional scientific environmental data in tasks such as predicting climate features, land cover, species occurrence, and human assessments of scenicness  To encode locations, they simply combine a bag-of-words representation of geographically nearby tags with a feature vector that encodes associated structured scientific data  They found that the predictive value of Flickr tags is roughly on a par with that of the scientific datasets, and that combining both types of information leads to significantly better results than using either of them alone  As we show in this paper, however, their straightforward way of combining both information sources, by concatenating the two types of feature vectors, is far from optimal 
Despite the proven importance of Flickr tags, the problem of embedding Flickr tags has so far received very limited attention  To the best of our knowledge, BIBREF44 is the only work that generated embeddings for Flickr tags  However, their focus was on learning embeddings that capture word meaning (being evaluated on word similarity tasks), whereas we use such embeddings as part of our method for representing locations 
Model Description
In this section, we introduce our embedding model, which combines Flickr tags and structured scientific information to represent a set of locations INLINEFORM0   The proposed model has the following form: DISPLAYFORM0
where INLINEFORM0 and INLINEFORM1 are parameters to control the importance of each component in the model  Component INLINEFORM2 will be used to constrain the representation of the locations based on their textual description (i e  Flickr tags), INLINEFORM3 will be used to constrain the representation of the locations based on their numerical features, and INLINEFORM4 will impose the constraint that locations belonging to the same category should be close together in the space  We will discuss each of these components in more detail in the following sections 
Tag Based Location Embedding
Many of the tags associated with Flickr photos describe characteristics of the places where these photos were taken BIBREF45 , BIBREF46 , BIBREF47   For example, tags may correspond to place names (e g  Brussels, England, Scandinavia), landmarks (e g  Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building) or land cover types (e g  mountain, forest, beach)  To allow us to build location models using such tags, we collected the tags and meta-data of 70 million Flickr photos with coordinates in Europe (which is the region our experiments will focus on), all of which were uploaded to Flickr before the end of September 2015  In this section we first explain how tags can be weighted to obtain bag-of-words representations of locations from Flickr  Subsequently we describe a tag selection method, which will allow us to specialize the embedding depending on which aspects of the considered locations are of interest, after which we discuss the actual embedding model 
Tag weighting  Let INLINEFORM0 be a set of geographic locations, each characterized by latitude and longitude coordinates  To generate a bag-of-words representation of a given location, we have to weight the relevance of each tag to that location  To this end, we have followed the weighting scheme from BIBREF7 , which combines a Gaussian kernel (to model spatial proximity) with Positive Pointwise Mutual Information (PPMI) BIBREF48 , BIBREF49  
Let us write INLINEFORM0 for the set of users who have assigned tag INLINEFORM1 to a photo with coordinates near INLINEFORM2   To assess how relevant INLINEFORM3 is to the location INLINEFORM4 , the number of times INLINEFORM5 occurs in photos near INLINEFORM6 is clearly an important criterion  However, rather than simply counting the number of occurrences within some fixed radius, we use a Gaussian kernel to weight the tag occurrences according to their distance from that location: INLINEFORM7
where the threshold INLINEFORM0 is assumed to be fixed, INLINEFORM1 is the location of a Flickr photo, INLINEFORM2 is the Haversine distance, and we will assume that the bandwidth parameter INLINEFORM3 is set to INLINEFORM4   A tag occurrence is counted only once for all photos by the same user at the same location, which is important to reduce the impact of bulk uploading  The value INLINEFORM5 reflects how frequent tag INLINEFORM6 is near location INLINEFORM7 , but it does not yet take into account the total number of tag occurrences near INLINEFORM8 , nor how popular the tag INLINEFORM9 is overall  To measure how strongly tag INLINEFORM10 is associated with location INLINEFORM11 , we use PPMI, which is a commonly used measure of association in natural language processing  However, rather than estimating PPMI scores from term frequencies, we will use the INLINEFORM12 values instead: INLINEFORM13
where: INLINEFORM0
with INLINEFORM0 the set of all tags, and INLINEFORM1 the set of locations 
Tag selection  Inspired by BIBREF50 , we use a term selection method in order to focus on the tags that are most important for the tasks that we want to consider and reduce the impact of tags that might relate only to a given individual or a group of users  In particular, we obtained good results with a method based on Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, which is based on BIBREF51   Let INLINEFORM0 be a set of (mutually exclusive) properties of locations in which we are interested (e g  land cover categories)  For the ease of presentation, we will identify INLINEFORM1 with the set of locations that have the corresponding property  Then, we select tags from INLINEFORM2 that maximize the following score: INLINEFORM3
where INLINEFORM0 is the probability that a photo with tag INLINEFORM1 has a location near INLINEFORM2 and INLINEFORM3 is the probability that an arbitrary tag occurrence is assigned to a photo near a location in INLINEFORM4   Since INLINEFORM5 often has to be estimated from a small number of tag occurrences, it is estimated using Bayesian smoothing: INLINEFORM6
where INLINEFORM0 is a parameter controlling the amount of smoothing, which will be tuned in the experiments  On the other hand, for INLINEFORM1 we can simply use a maximum likelihood estimation: INLINEFORM2
Location embedding  We now want to find a vector INLINEFORM0 for each location INLINEFORM1 such that similar locations are represented using similar vectors  To achieve this, we use a close variant of the GloVe model, where tag occurrences are treated as context words of geographic locations  In particular, with each location INLINEFORM2 we associate a vector INLINEFORM3 and with each tag INLINEFORM4 we associate a vector INLINEFORM5 and a bias term INLINEFORM6 , and consider the following objective (which in our full model ( EQREF7 ) will be combined with components that are derived from the structured information): INLINEFORM7
Note how tags play the role of the context words in the GloVe model, while instead of learning target word vectors we now learn location vectors  In contrast to GloVe, our objective does not directly refer to co-occurrence statistics, but instead uses the INLINEFORM0 scores  One important consequence of this is that we can also consider pairs INLINEFORM1 for which INLINEFORM2 does not occur in INLINEFORM3 at all; such pairs are usually called negative examples  While they cannot be used in the standard GloVe model, some authors have already reported that introducing negative examples in variants of GloVe can lead to an improvement BIBREF52   In practice, evaluating the full objective above would not be computationally feasible, as we may need to consider millions of locations and millions of tags  Therefore, rather than considering all tags in INLINEFORM4 for the inner summation, we only consider those tags that appear at least once near location INLINEFORM5 together with a sample of negative examples 
Structured Environmental Data
There is a wide variety of structured data that can be used to describe locations  In this work, we have restricted ourselves to the same datasets as BIBREF7   These include nine (real-valued) numerical features, which are latitude, longitude, elevation, population, and five climate related features (avg  temperature, avg  precipitation, avg  solar radiation, avg  wind speed, and avg  water vapor pressure)  In addition, 180 categorical features were used, which are CORINE land cover classes at level 1 (5 classes), level 2 (15 classes) and level 3 (44 classes) and 116 soil types (SoilGrids)  Note that each location should belong to exactly 4 categories: one CORINE class at each of the three levels and a soil type 
Numerical features  Numerical features can be treated similarly to the tag occurrences, i e  we will assume that the value of a given numerical feature can be predicted from the location vectors using a linear mapping  In particular, for each numerical feature INLINEFORM0 we consider a vector INLINEFORM1 and a bias term INLINEFORM2 , and the following objective: INLINEFORM3
where we write INLINEFORM0 for set of all numerical features and INLINEFORM1 is the value of feature INLINEFORM2 for location INLINEFORM3 , after z-score normalization 
Categorical features  To take into account the categorical features, we impose the constraint that locations belonging to the same category should be close together in the space  To formalize this, we represent each category type INLINEFORM0 as a vector INLINEFORM1 , and consider the following objective: INLINEFORM2
Evaluation Tasks
We will use the method from BIBREF7 as our main baseline  This will allow us to directly evaluate the effectiveness of embeddings for the considered problem, since we have used the same structured datasets and same tag weighting scheme  For this reason, we will also follow their evaluation methodology  In particular, we will consider three evaluation tasks:
Predicting the distribution of 100 species across Europe, using the European network of nature protected sites Natura 2000 dataset as ground truth  For each of these species, a binary classification problem is considered  The set of locations INLINEFORM0 is defined as the 26,425 distinct sites occurring in the dataset 
Predicting soil type, again each time treating the task as a binary classification problem, using the same set of locations INLINEFORM0 as in the species distribution experiments  For these experiments, none of the soil type features are used for generating the embeddings 
Predicting CORINE land cover classes at levels 1, 2 and level 3, each time treating the task as a binary classification problem, using the same set of locations INLINEFORM0 as in the species distribution experiments  For these experiments, none of the CORINE features are used for generating the embeddings 
In addition, we will also consider the following regression tasks:
Predicting 5 climate related features: the average precipitation, temperature, solar radiation, water vapor pressure, and wind speed  We again use the same set of locations INLINEFORM0 as for species distribution in this experiment  None of the climate features is used for constructing the embeddings for this experiment 
Predicting people's subjective opinions of landscape beauty in Britain, using the crowdsourced dataset from the ScenicOrNot website as ground truth  The set INLINEFORM0 is chosen as the set of locations of 191 605 rated locations from the ScenicOrNot dataset for which at least one georeferenced Flickr photo exists within a 1 km radius 
Experimental Setup
In all experiments, we use Support Vector Machines (SVMs) for classification problems and Support Vector Regression (SVR) for regression problems to make predictions from our representations of geographic locations  In both cases, we used the SVM INLINEFORM0 implementation BIBREF53   For each experiment, the set of locations INLINEFORM1 was split into two-thirds for training, one-sixth for testing, and one-sixth for tuning the parameters  All embedding models are learned with Adagrad using 30 iterations  The number of dimensions is chosen for each experiment from INLINEFORM2 based on the tuning data  For the parameters of our model in Equation EQREF7 , we considered values of INLINEFORM3 from {0 1, 0 01, 0 001, 0 0001} and values of INLINEFORM4 from {1, 10, 100, 1000, 10 000, 100 000}  To compute KL divergence, we need to determine a set of classes INLINEFORM5 for each experiment  For classification problems, we can simply consider the given categories, but for the regression problems we need to define such classes by discretizing the numerical values  For the scenicness experiments, we considered scores 3 and 7 as cut-off points, leading to three classes (i e  less than 3, between 3 and 7, and above 7)  Similarly, for each climate related features, we consider two cut-off values for discretization: 5 and 15 for average temperature, 50 and 100 for average precipitation, 10 000 and 17 000 for average solar radiation, 0 7 and 1 for average water vapor pressure, and 3 and 5 for wind speed  The smoothing parameter INLINEFORM6 was selected among INLINEFORM7 based on the tuning data  In all experiments where term selection is used, we select the top 100 000 tags  We fixed the radius INLINEFORM8 at 1km when counting the number of tag occurrences  Finally, we set the number of negative examples as 10 times the number of positive examples for each location, but with a cap at 1000 negative examples in each region for computational reasons  We tune all parameters with respect to the F1 score for the classification tasks, and Spearman INLINEFORM9 for the regression tasks 
Variants and Baseline Methods
We will refer to our model as EGEL (Embedding GEographic Locations), and will consider the following variants  EGEL-Tags only uses the information from the Flickr tags (i e  component INLINEFORM0 ), without using any negative examples and without feature selection  EGEL-Tags+NS is similar to EGEL-Tags but with the addition of negative examples  EGEL-KL(Tags+NS) additionally considers term selection  EGEL-All is our full method, i e  it additionally uses the structured information  We also consider the following baselines  BOW-Tags represents locations using a bag-of-words representation, using the same tag weighting as the embedding model  BOW-KL(Tags) uses the same representation but after term selection, using the same KL-based method as the embedding model  BOW-All combines the bag-of-words representation with the structured information, encoded as proposed in BIBREF7   GloVe uses the objective from the original GloVe model for learning location vectors, i e  this variant differs from EGEL-Tags in that instead of INLINEFORM1 we use the number of co-occurrences of tag INLINEFORM2 near location INLINEFORM3 , measured as INLINEFORM4  
Results and Discussion
We present our results for the binary classification tasks in Tables TABREF23 – TABREF24 in terms of average precision, average recall and macro average F1 score  The results of the regression tasks are reported in Tables TABREF25 and TABREF29 in terms of the mean absolute error between the predicted and actual scores, as well as the Spearman INLINEFORM0 correlation between the rankings induced by both sets of scores  It can be clearly seen from the results that our proposed method (EGEL-All) can effectively integrate Flickr tags with the available structured information  It outperforms the baselines for all the considered tasks  Furthermore, note that the PPMI-based weighting in EGEL-Tags consistently outperforms GloVe and that both the addition of negative examples and term selection lead to further improvements  The use of term selection leads to particularly substantial improvements for the regression problems 
While our experimental results confirm the usefulness of embeddings for predicting environmental features, this is only consistently the case for the variants that use both the tags and the structured datasets  In particular, comparing BOW-Tags with EGEL-Tags, we sometimes see that the former achieves the best results  While this might seem surprising, it is in accordance with the findings in BIBREF54 , BIBREF38 , among others, where it was also found that bag-of-words representations can sometimes lead to surprisingly effective baselines  Interestingly, we note that in all cases where EGEL-KL(Tags+NS) performs worse than BOW-Tags, we also find that BOW-KL(Tags) performs worse than BOW-Tags  This suggests that for these tasks there is a very large variation in the kind of tags that can inform the prediction model, possibly including e g  user-specific tags  Some of the information captured by such highly specific but rare tags is likely to be lost in the embedding 
To further analyze the difference in performance between BoW representations and embeddings, Figure TABREF29 compares the performance of the GloVe model with the bag-of-words model for predicting place scenicness, as a function of the number of tag occurrences at the considered locations  What is clearly noticeable in Figure TABREF29 is that GloVe performs better than the bag-of-words model for large corpora and worse for smaller corpora  This issue has been alleviated in our embedding method by the addition of negative examples 
 Conclusions
In this paper, we have proposed a model to learn geographic location embeddings using Flickr tags, numerical environmental features, and categorical information  The experimental results show that our model can integrate Flickr tags with structured information in a more effective way than existing methods, leading to substantial improvements over baseline methods on various prediction tasks about the natural environment 
Acknowledgments
Shelan Jeawak has been sponsored by HCED Iraq  Steven Schockaert has been supported by ERC Starting Grant 637277 
Context 3: Introduction
In recent years, gender has become a hot topic within the political, societal and research spheres  Numerous studies have been conducted in order to evaluate the presence of women in media, often revealing their under-representation, such as the Global Media Monitoring Project BIBREF0  In the French context, the CSA BIBREF1 produces a report on gender representation in media on a yearly basis  The 2017 report shows that women represent 40% of French media speakers, with a significant drop during high-audience hours (6:00-8:00pm) reaching a value of only 29%  Another large scale study confirmed this trend with an automatic analysis of gender in French audiovisuals streams, highlighting a huge variation across type of shows BIBREF2 
Besides the social impact of gender representation, broadcast recordings are also a valuable source of data for the speech processing community  Indeed, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems require large amount of annotated speech data to be efficiently trained, which leaves us facing the emerging concern about the fact that "AI artifacts tend to reflect the goals, knowledge and experience of their creators" BIBREF3  Since we know that women are under-represented in media and that the AI discipline has retained a male-oriented focus BIBREF4, we can legitimately wonder about the impact of using such data as a training set for ASR technologies  This concern is strengthened by the recent works uncovering gender bias in several natural language processing (NLP) tools such as BIBREF5, BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8 
In this paper, we first highlight the importance of TV and radio broadcast as a source of data for ASR, and the potential impact it can have  We then perform a statistical analysis of gender representation in a data set composed of four state-of-the-art corpora of French broadcast, widely used within the speech community  Finally we question the impact of such a representation on the systems developed on this data, through the perspective of an ASR system 
From gender representation in data to gender bias in AI ::: On the importance of data
The ever growing use of machine learning in science has been enabled by several progresses among which the exponential growth of data available  The quality of a system now depends mostly on the quality and quantity of the data it has been trained on  If it does not discard the importance of an appropriate architecture, it reaffirms the fact that rich and large corpora are a valuable resource  Corpora are research contributions which do not only allow to save and observe certain phenomena or validate a hypothesis or model, but are also a mandatory part of the technology development  This trend is notably observable within the NLP field, where industrial technologies, such as Apple, Amazon or Google vocal assistants now reach high performance level partly due to the amount of data possessed by these companies BIBREF9 
Surprisingly, as data is said to be “the new oil", few data sets are available for ASR systems  The best known are corpora like TIMIT BIBREF10, Switchboard BIBREF11 or Fisher BIBREF12 which date back to the early 1990s  The scarceness of available corpora is justified by the fact that gathering and annotating audio data is costly both in terms of money and time  Telephone conversations and broadcast recordings have been the primary source of spontaneous speech used  Out of all the 130 audio resources proposed by LDC to train automatic speech recognition systems in English, approximately 14% of them are based on broadcast news and conversation  For French speech technologies, four corpora containing radio and TV broadcast are the most widely used: ESTER1 BIBREF13, ESTER2 BIBREF14, ETAPE BIBREF15 and REPERE BIBREF16  These four corpora have been built alongside evaluation campaigns and are still, to our knowledge, the largest French ones of their type available to date 
From gender representation in data to gender bias in AI ::: From data to bias
The gender issue has returned to the forefront of the media scene in recent years and with the emergence of AI technologies in our daily lives, gender bias has become a scientific topic that researchers are just beginning to address  Several studies revealed the existence of gender bias in AI technologies such as face recognition (GenderShades BIBREF17), NLP (word embeddings BIBREF5 and semantics BIBREF6) and machine translation (BIBREF18, BIBREF7)  The impact of the training data used within these deep-learning algorithms is therefore questioned 
Bias can be found at different levels as pointed out by BIBREF19  BIBREF20 defines bias as a skew that produces a type of harm  She distinguishes two types of harms that are allocation harm and representation harm  The allocation harm occurs when a system is performing better or worse for a certain group while representational harm contributes to the perpetuation of stereotypes  Both types of harm are the results of bias in machine learning that often comes from the data systems are trained on  Disparities in representation in our social structures is captured and reflected by the training data, through statistical patterns  The GenderShades study is a striking example of what data disparity and lack of representation can produce: the authors tested several gender recognition modules used by facial recognition tools and found difference in error-rate as high as 34 percentage points between recognition of white male and black female faces  The scarce presence of women and colored people in training set resulted in bias in performance towards these two categories, with a strong intersectional bias  As written by BIBREF21 "A data set may have many millions of pieces of data, but this does not mean it is random or representative  To make statistical claims about a data set, we need to know where data is coming from; it is similarly important to know and account for the weaknesses in that data " (p 668) 
Regarding ASR technology, little work has explored the presence of gender bias within the systems and no consensus has been reached  BIBREF22 found that speech recognizers perform better on female voice on a broadcast news and telephone corpus  They proposed several explanations to this observation, such as the larger presence of non-professional male speech in the broadcast data, implying a less prepared speech for these speakers or a more normative language and standard pronunciation for women linked to the traditional role of women in language acquisition and education  The same trend was observed by BIBREF23  More recently, BIBREF24 discovered a gender bias within YouTube's automatic captioning system but this bias was not observed in a second study evaluating Bing Speech system and YouTube Automatic Captions on a larger data set BIBREF8  However race and dialect bias were found  General American speakers and white speakers had the lowest error rate for both systems  If the better performance on General American speakers could be explained by the fact that they are all voice professionals, producing clear and articulated speech, but no explanation is provided for biases towards non-white speakers 
Gender bias in ASR technology is still an open research question as no clear answer has been reached so far  It seems that many parameters are to take into account to achieve a general agreement  As we established the importance of TV and radio broadcast as a source of data for ASR, and the potential impact it can have, the following content of this paper is structured as this: we first describe statistically the gender representation of a data set composed of four state-of-the-art corpora of French broadcast, widely used within the speech community, introducing the notion of speaker's role to refine our analysis in terms of voice professionalism  We then question the impact of such a representation on a ASR system trained on these data  BIBREF25
Methodology
This section is organized as follows: we first present the data we are working on  In a second time we explain how we proceed to describe the gender representation in our corpus and introduce the notion of speaker's role  The third subsection introduces the ASR system and metrics used to evaluate gender bias in performance 
Methodology ::: Data presentation
Our data consists of two sets used to train and evaluate our automatic speech recognition system  Four major evaluation campaigns have enabled the creation of wide corpora of French broadcast speech: ESTER1 BIBREF13, ESTER2 BIBREF14, ETAPE BIBREF15 and REPERE BIBREF16  These four collections contain radio and/or TV broadcasts aired between 1998 and 2013 which are used by most academic researchers in ASR  Show duration varies between 10min and an hour  As years went by and speech processing research was progressing, the difficulty of the tasks augmented and the content of these evaluation corpora changed  ESTER1 and ESTER2 mainly contain prepared speech such as broadcast news, whereas ETAPE and REPERE consists also of debates and entertainment shows, spontaneous speech introducing more difficulty in its recognition 
Our training set contains 27,085 speech utterances produced by 2,506 speakers, accounting for approximately 100 hours of speech  Our evaluation set contains 74,064 speech utterances produced by 1,268 speakers for a total of 70 hours of speech  Training data by show, medium and speech type is summarized in Table and evaluation data in Table   Evaluation data has a higher variety of shows with both prepared (P) and spontaneous (S) speech type (accented speech from African radio broadcast is also included in the evaluation set) 
Methodology ::: Methodology for descriptive analysis of gender representation in training data
We first describe the gender representation in training data  Gender representation is measured in terms of number of speakers, number of utterances (or speech turns), and turn lengths (descriptive statistics are given in Section SECREF16)  Each speech turn was mapped to its speaker in order to associate it with a gender 
As pointed out by the CSA report BIBREF1, women presence tends to be marginal within the high-audience hours, showing that women are represented but less than men and within certain given conditions  It is clear that a small number of speakers is responsible for a large number of speech turns  Most of these speakers are journalists, politicians, presenters and such, who are representative of a show  Therefore, we introduce the notion of speaker's role to refine our exploration of gender disparity, following studies which quantified women's presence in terms of role  Within our work, we define the notion of speaker role by two criteria specifying the speaker's on-air presence, namely the number of speech turns and the cumulative duration of his or her speaking time in a show  Based on the available speech transcriptions and meta-data, we compute for each speaker the number of speech turns uttered as well as their total length  We then use the following criteria to define speaker's role: a speaker is considered as speaking often (respectively seldom) if he/she accumulates a total of turns higher (respectively lower) than 1% of the total number of speech turns in a given show  The same process is applied to identify speakers talking for a long period from those who do not  We end up with two salient roles called Anchors and Punctual speakers:
the Anchor speakers (A) are above the threshold of 1% for both criteria, meaning they are intervening often and for a long time thus holding an important place in interaction;
the Punctual speakers (PS) on the contrary are below the threshold of 1% for both the total number of turns and the total speech time 
These roles are defined at the show level  They could be roughly assimilated to the categorization “host/guest” in radio and TV shows  Anchors could be described as professional speakers, producing mostly prepared speech, whereas Punctual speakers are more likely to be “everyday people"  The concept of speaker's role makes sense at both sociological and technical levels  An Anchor speaker is more likely to be known from the audience (society), but he or she will also likely have a professional (clear) way of speaking (as mentioned by BIBREF22 and BIBREF8), as well as a high number of utterances, augmenting the amount of data available for a given gender category 
Methodology ::: Gender bias evaluation procedure of an ASR system performance ::: ASR system
The ASR system used in this work is described in BIBREF25  It uses the KALDI toolkit BIBREF26, following a standard Kaldi recipe  The acoustic model is based on a hybrid HMM-DNN architecture and trained on the data summarized in Table   Acoustic training data correspond to 100h of non-spontaneous speech type (mostly broadcast news) coming from both radio and TV shows  A 5-gram language model is trained from several French corpora (3,323M words in total) using SRILM toolkit BIBREF27  The pronunciation model is developed using the lexical resource BDLEX BIBREF28 as well as automatic grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) transcription to find pronunciation variants of our vocabulary (limited to 80K)  It is important to re-specify here, for further analysis, that our Kaldi pipeline follows speaker adaptive training (SAT) where we train and decode using speaker adapted features (fMLLR-adapted features) in per-speaker mode  It is well known that speaker adaptation acts as an effective procedure to reduce mismatch between training and evaluation conditions BIBREF29, BIBREF26 
Methodology ::: Gender bias evaluation procedure of an ASR system performance ::: Evaluation
Word Error Rate (WER) is a common metric to evaluate ASR performance  It is measured as the sum of errors (insertions, deletions and substitutions) divided by the total number of words in the reference transcription  As we are investigating the impact on performance of speaker's gender and role, we computed the WER for each speaker at the episode (show occurrence) level  Analyzing at such granularity allows us to avoid large WER variation that could be observed at utterance level (especially for short speech turns) but also makes possible to get several WER values for a given speaker, one for each occurrence of a show in which he/she appears on  Speaker's gender was provided by the meta-data and role was obtained using the criteria from Section SECREF6 computed for each show

ground_truth: BOW-Tags, BOW-KL(Tags), BOW-All, GloVe

prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. On top of BERT does the RNN layer work better or the transformer layer?
Context 2: Introduction
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) is a novel Transformer BIBREF0 model, which recently achieved state-of-the-art performance in several language understanding tasks, such as question answering, natural language inference, semantic similarity, sentiment analysis, and others BIBREF1  While well-suited to dealing with relatively short sequences, Transformers suffer from a major issue that hinders their applicability in classification of long sequences, i e  they are able to consume only a limited context of symbols as their input BIBREF2 
There are several natural language (NLP) processing tasks that involve such long sequences  Of particular interest are topic identification of spoken conversations BIBREF3, BIBREF4, BIBREF5 and call center customer satisfaction prediction BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9  Call center conversations, while usually quite short and to the point, often involve agents trying to solve very complex issues that the customers experience, resulting in some calls taking even an hour or more  For speech analytics purposes, these calls are typically transcribed using an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, and processed in textual representations further down the NLP pipeline  These transcripts sometimes exceed the length of 5000 words  Furthermore, temporal information might play an important role in tasks like CSAT  For example, a customer may be angry at the beginning of the call, but after her issue is resolved, she would be very satisfied with the way it was handled  Therefore, simple bag of words models, or any model that does not include temporal dependencies between the inputs, may not be well-suited to handle this category of tasks  This motivates us to employ model such as BERT in this task 
In this paper, we propose a method that builds upon BERT's architecture  We split the input text sequence into shorter segments in order to obtain a representation for each of them using BERT  Then, we use either a recurrent LSTM BIBREF10 network, or another Transformer, to perform the actual classification  We call these techniques Recurrence over BERT (RoBERT) and Transformer over BERT (ToBERT)  Given that these models introduce a hierarchy of representations (segment-wise and document-wise), we refer to them as Hierarchical Transformers  To the best of our knowledge, no attempt has been done before to use the Transformer architecture for classification of such long sequences 
Our novel contributions are:
Two extensions - RoBERT and ToBERT - to the BERT model, which enable its application in classification of long texts by performing segmentation and using another layer on top of the segment representations 
State-of-the-art results on the Fisher topic classification task 
Significant improvement on the CSAT prediction task over the MS-CNN model 
Related work
Several dimensionality reduction algorithms such as RBM, autoencoders, subspace multinomial models (SMM) are used to obtain a low dimensional representation of documents from a simple BOW representation and then classify it using a simple linear classifiers BIBREF11, BIBREF12, BIBREF13, BIBREF4  In BIBREF14 hierarchical attention networks are used for document classification  They evaluate their model on several datasets with average number of words around 150  Character-level CNN are explored in BIBREF15 but it is prohibitive for very long documents  In BIBREF16, dataset collected from arXiv papers is used for classification  For classification, they sample random blocks of words and use them together for classification instead of using full document which may work well as arXiv papers are usually coherent and well written on a well defined topic  Their method may not work well on spoken conversations as random block of words usually do not represent topic of full conversation 
Several researchers addressed the problem of predicting customer satisfaction BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9  In most of these works, logistic regression, SVM, CNN are applied on different kinds of representations 
In BIBREF17, authors use BERT for document classification but the average document length is less than BERT maximum length 512  TransformerXL BIBREF2 is an extension to the Transformer architecture that allows it to better deal with long inputs for the language modelling task  It relies on the auto-regressive property of the model, which is not the case in our tasks 
Method ::: BERT
Because our work builds heavily upon BERT, we provide a brief summary of its features  BERT is built upon the Transformer architecture BIBREF0, which uses self-attention, feed-forward layers, residual connections and layer normalization as the main building blocks  It has two pre-training objectives:
Masked language modelling - some of the words in a sentence are being masked and the model has to predict them based on the context (note the difference from the typical autoregressive language model training objective);
Next sentence prediction - given two input sequences, decide whether the second one is the next sentence or not 
BERT has been shown to beat the state-of-the-art performance on 11 tasks with no modifications to the model architecture, besides adding a task-specific output layer BIBREF1  We follow same procedure suggested in BIBREF1 for our tasks  Fig  FIGREF8 shows the BERT model for classification  We obtain two kinds of representation from BERT: pooled output from last transformer block, denoted by H, and posterior probabilities, denoted by P  There are two variants of BERT - BERT-Base and BERT-Large  In this work we are using BERT-Base for faster training and experimentation, however, our methods are applicable to BERT-Large as well  BERT-Base and BERT-Large are different in model parameters such as number of transformer blocks, number of self-attention heads  Total number of parameters in BERT-Base are 110M and 340M in BERT-Large 
BERT suffers from major limitations in terms of handling long sequences  Firstly, the self-attention layer has a quadratic complexity $O(n^2)$ in terms of the sequence length $n$ BIBREF0  Secondly, BERT uses a learned positional embeddings scheme BIBREF1, which means that it won't likely be able to generalize to positions beyond those seen in the training data 
To investigate the effect of fine-tuning BERT on task performance, we use either the pre-trained BERT weights, or the weights from a BERT fine-tuned on the task-specific dataset on a segment-level (i e  we preserve the original label but fine-tune on each segment separately instead of on the whole text sequence)  We compare these results to using the fine-tuned segment-level BERT predictions directly as inputs to the next layer 
Method ::: Recurrence over BERT
Given that BERT is limited to a particular input length, we split the input sequence into segments of a fixed size with overlap  For each of these segments, we obtain H or P from BERT model  We then stack these segment-level representations into a sequence, which serves as input to a small (100-dimensional) LSTM layer  Its output serves as a document embedding  Finally, we use two fully connected layers with ReLU (30-dimensional) and softmax (the same dimensionality as the number of classes) activations to obtain the final predictions 
With this approach, we overcome BERT's computational complexity, reducing it to $O(n/k * k^2) = O(nk)$ for RoBERT, with $k$ denoting the segment size (the LSTM component has negligible linear complexity $O(k)$)  The positional embeddings are also no longer an issue 
Method ::: Transformer over BERT
Given that Transformers' edge over recurrent networks is their ability to effectively capture long distance relationships between words in a sequence BIBREF0, we experiment with replacing the LSTM recurrent layer in favor of a small Transformer model (2 layers of transformer building block containing self-attention, fully connected, etc )  To investigate if preserving the information about the input sequence order is important, we also build a variant of ToBERT which learns positional embeddings at the segment-level representations (but is limited to sequences of length seen during the training) 
ToBERT's computational complexity $O(\frac{n^2}{k^2})$ is asymptotically inferior to RoBERT, as the top-level Transformer model again suffers from quadratic complexity in the number of segments  However, in practice this number is much smaller than the input sequence length (${\frac{n}{k}} << n$), so we haven't observed performance or memory issues with our datasets 
Experiments
We evaluated our models on 3 different datasets:
CSAT dataset for CSAT prediction, consisting of spoken transcripts (automatic via ASR) 
20 newsgroups for topic identification task, consisting of written text;
Fisher Phase 1 corpus for topic identification task, consisting of spoken transcripts (manual);
Experiments ::: CSAT
CSAT dataset consists of US English telephone speech from call centers  For each call in this dataset, customers participated in that call gave a rating on his experience with agent  Originally, this dataset has labels rated on a scale 1-9 with 9 being extremely satisfied and 1 being extremely dissatisfied  Fig  FIGREF16 shows the histogram of ratings for our dataset  As the distribution is skewed towards extremes, we choose to do binary classification with ratings above 4 5 as satisfied and below 4 5 as dissatisfied  Quantization of ratings also helped us to create a balanced dataset  This dataset contains 4331 calls and we split them into 3 sets for our experiments: 2866 calls for training, 362 calls for validation and, finally, 1103 calls for testing 
We obtained the transcripts by employing an ASR system  The ASR system uses TDNN-LSTM acoustic model trained on Fisher and Switchboard datasets with lattice-free maximum mutual information criterion BIBREF18  The word error rates using four-gram language models were 9 2% and 17 3% respectively on Switchboard and CallHome portions of Eval2000 dataset 
Experiments ::: 20 newsgroups
20 newsgroups data set is one of the frequently used datasets in the text processing community for text classification and text clustering  This data set contains approximately 20,000 English documents from 20 topics to be identified, with 11314 documents for training and 7532 for testing  In this work, we used only 90% of documents for training and the remaining 10% for validation  For fair comparison with other publications, we used 53160 words vocabulary set available in the datasets website 
Experiments ::: Fisher
Fisher Phase 1 US English corpus is often used for automatic speech recognition in speech community  In this work, we used it for topic identification as in BIBREF3  The documents are 10-minute long telephone conversations between two people discussing a given topic  We used same training and test splits as BIBREF3 in which 1374 and 1372 documents are used for training and testing respectively  For validation of our model, we used 10% of training dataset and the remaining 90% was used for actual model training  The number of topics in this data set is 40 
Experiments ::: Dataset Statistics
Table TABREF22 shows statistics of our datasets  It can be observed that average length of Fisher is much higher than 20 newsgroups and CSAT  Cumulative distribution of document lengths for each dataset is shown in Fig  FIGREF21  It can be observed that almost all of the documents in Fisher dataset have length more than 1000 words  For CSAT, more than 50% of the documents have length greater than 500 and for 20newsgroups only 10% of the documents have length greater than 500  Note that, for CSAT and 20newsgroups, there are few documents with length more than 5000 
Experiments ::: Architecture and Training Details
In this work, we split document into segments of 200 tokens with a shift of 50 tokens to extract features from BERT model  For RoBERT, LSTM model is trained to minimize cross-entropy loss with Adam optimizer BIBREF19  The initial learning rate is set to $0 001$ and is reduced by a factor of $0 95$ if validation loss does not decrease for 3-epochs  For ToBERT, the Transformer is trained with the default BERT version of Adam optimizer BIBREF1 with an initial learning rate of $5e$-5  We report accuracy in all of our experiments  We chose a model with the best validation accuracy to calculate accuracy on the test set  To accomodate for non-determinism of some TensorFlow GPU operations, we report accuracy averaged over 5 runs 
Results
Table TABREF25 presents results using pre-trained BERT features  We extracted features from the pooled output of final transformer block as these were shown to be working well for most of the tasks BIBREF1  The features extracted from a pre-trained BERT model without any fine-tuning lead to a sub-par performance  However, We also notice that ToBERT model exploited the pre-trained BERT features better than RoBERT  It also converged faster than RoBERT  Table TABREF26 shows results using features extracted after fine-tuning BERT model with our datasets  Significant improvements can be observed compared to using pre-trained BERT features  Also, it can be noticed that ToBERT outperforms RoBERT on Fisher and 20newsgroups dataset by 13 63% and 0 81% respectively  On CSAT, ToBERT performs slightly worse than RoBERT but it is not statistically significant as this dataset is small 
Table TABREF27 presents results using fine-tuned BERT predictions instead of the pooled output from final transformer block  For each document, having obtained segment-wise predictions we can obtain final prediction for the whole document in three ways:
Compute the average of all segment-wise predictions and find the most probable class;
Find the most frequently predicted class;
Train a classification model 
It can be observed from Table TABREF27 that a simple averaging operation or taking most frequent predicted class works competitively for CSAT and 20newsgroups but not for the Fisher dataset  We believe the improvements from using RoBERT or ToBERT, compared to simple averaging or most frequent operations, are proportional to the fraction of long documents in the dataset  CSAT and 20newsgroups have (on average) significantly shorter documents than Fisher, as seen in Fig  FIGREF21  Also, significant improvements for Fisher could be because of less confident predictions from BERT model as this dataset has 40 classes  Fig  FIGREF31 presents the comparison of average voting and ToBERT for various document length ranges for Fisher dataset  We used fine-tuned BERT segment-level predictions (P) for this analysis  It can be observed that ToBERT outperforms average voting in every interval  To the best of our knowledge, this is a state-of-the-art result reported on the Fisher dataset 
Table TABREF32 presents the effect of position embeddings on the model performance  It can be observed that position embeddings did not significantly affect the model performance for Fisher and 20newsgroups, but they helped slightly in CSAT prediction (an absolute improvement of 0 64% F1-score)  We think that this is explained by the fact that Fisher and 20newsgroups are topic identification tasks, and the topic does not change much throughout these documents  However, CSAT may vary during the call, and in some cases a naive assumption that the sequential nature of the transcripts is irrelevant may lead to wrong conclusions 
Table TABREF33 compares our results with previous works  It can be seen that our model ToBERT outperforms CNN based experiments by significant margin on CSAT and Fisher datasets  For CSAT dataset, we used multi-scale CNN (MS-CNN) as the baseline, given its strong results on Fisher and 20newsgroups  The setup was replicated from BIBREF5 for comparison  We also see that our result on 20 newsgroups is 0 6% worse than the state-of-the-art 
Conclusions
In this paper, we presented two methods for long documents using BERT model: RoBERT and ToBERT  We evaluated our experiments on two classification tasks - customer satisfaction prediction and topic identification - using 3 datasets: CSAT, 20newsgroups and Fisher  We observed that ToBERT outperforms RoBERT on pre-trained BERT features and fine-tuned BERT features for all our tasks  Also, we noticed that fine-tuned BERT performs better than pre-trained BERT  We have shown that both RoBERT and ToBERT improved the simple baselines of taking an average (or the most frequent) of segment-wise predictions for long documents to obtain final prediction  Position embeddings did not significantly affect our models performance, but slightly improved the accuracy on the CSAT task  We obtained the best results on Fisher dataset and good improvements for CSAT task compared to the CNN baseline  It is interesting to note that the longer the average input in a given task, the bigger improvement we observe w r t  the baseline for that task  Our results confirm that both RoBERT and ToBERT can be used for long sequences with competitive performance and quick fine-tuning procedure  For future work, we shall focus on training models on long documents directly (i e  in an end-to-end manner) 
Context 3:  This enables us to analyze our results across gender and role categories which was done using Wilcoxon rank sum tests also called Mann-Whitney U test (with $\alpha $= 0 001) BIBREF30  The choice of a Wilcoxon rank sum test and not the commonly used t-test is motivated by the non-normality of our data 
Results ::: Descriptive analysis of gender representation in training data ::: Gender representation
As expected, we observe a disparity in terms of gender representation in our data (see Table )  Women represent 33 16% of the speakers, confirming the figures given by the GMMP report BIBREF0  However, it is worth noticing that women account for only 22 57% of the total speech time, which leads us to conclude that women also speak less than men 
Results ::: Descriptive analysis of gender representation in training data ::: Speaker's role representation
Table presents roles' representation in training data and shows that despite the small number of Anchor speakers in our data (3 79%), they nevertheless concentrate 35 71 % of the total speech time 
Results ::: Descriptive analysis of gender representation in training data ::: Role and gender interaction
When crossing both parameters, we can observe that the gender distribution is not constant throughout roles  Women represent 29 47% of the speakers within the Anchor category, even less than among the Punctual speakers  Their percentage of speech is also smaller  When calculating the average speech time uttered by a female Anchor, we obtain a value of 15 9 min against 25 2 min for a male Anchor, which suggests that even within the Anchor category men tend to speak more  This confirms the existence of gender disparities within French media  It corroborates with the analysis of the CSA BIBREF1, which shows that women were less present during high-audience hours  Our study shows that they are also less present in important roles  These results legitimate our initial questioning on the impact of gender balance on ASR performance trained on broadcast recordings 
Results ::: Performance (WER) analysis on evaluation data ::: Impact of gender on WER
As explained in Section SECREF13, WER is the sum of errors divided by the number of words in the transcription reference  The higher the WER, the poorer the system performance  Our 70h evaluation data contains a large amount of spontaneous speech and is very challenging for the ASR system trained on prepared speech: we observe an overall average WER of 42 9% for women and 34 3% for men  This difference of WER between men and women is statistically significant (med(M) = 25%; med(F) = 29%; U = 709040; p-value < 0 001) 
However, when observing gender differences across shows, no clear trend can be identified, as shown in Figure FIGREF21  For shows like Africa1 Infos or La Place du Village, we find an average WER lower for women than for men, while the trend is reversed for shows such as Un Temps de Pauchon or Le Masque et la Plume  The disparity of the results depending on the show leads us to believe that other factors may be entangled within the observed phenomenon 
Results ::: Performance (WER) analysis on evaluation data ::: Impact of role on WER
Speaker's role seems to have an impact on WER: we obtain an average WER of 30 8% for the Anchor speakers and 42 23% for the Punctual speakers  This difference is statistically significant with a p-value smaller than $10^{-14}$ (med(A) = 21%; med(P) = 31%; U = 540,430; p-value < 0 001)  
Results ::: Performance (WER) analysis on evaluation data ::: Role and gender interaction
Figure FIGREF25 presents the WER distribution (WER being obtained for each speaker in a show occurrence) according to the speaker's role and gender  It is worth noticing that the gender difference is only significant within the Punctual speakers group  The average WER is of 49 04% for the women and 38 56% for the men with a p-value smaller than $10^{-6}$ (med(F) = 39%; med(M) = 29%; U = 251,450; p-value < 0 001), whereas it is just a trend between male and female Anchors (med(F) = 21%; med(M) = 21%; U = 116,230; p-value = 0 173)  This could be explained by the quantity of data available per speaker 
Results ::: Performance (WER) analysis on evaluation data ::: Speech type as a third entangled factor?
In order to try to explain the observed variation in our results depending on shows and gender (Figure FIGREF21), we add the notion of speech type to shed some light on our results  BIBREF22 and BIBREF24 suggested that the speaker professionalism, associated with clear and hyper-articulated speech could be an explaining factor for better performance 
Based on our categorization in prepared speech (mostly news reports) and spontaneous speech (mostly debates and entertainment shows), we cross this parameter in our performance analysis  As shown on Figure FIGREF26, these results confirm the inherent challenge of spontaneous speech compared to prepared speech  WER scores are similar between men and women when considering prepared speech (med(F) = 18%; med(M) = 21%; U = 217,160; p-value = 0 005) whereas they are worse for women (61 29%) than for men (46 51%) with p-value smaller than $10^{-14}$ for the spontaneous speech type (med(F) = 61%; med(M) = 37%; U = 153,580; p-value < 0 001) 
Discussion
We find a clear disparity in terms of women presence and speech quantity in French media  Our data being recorded between 1998 and 2013, we can expect this disparity to be smaller on more recent broadcast recordings, especially since the French government displays efforts toward parity in media representation  One can also argue that even if our analysis was conducted on a large amount of data it does not reach the exhaustiveness of large-scale studies such as the one of BIBREF2  Nonetheless it does not affect the relevance of our findings, because if real-world gender representation might be more balanced today, these corpora are still used as training data for AI systems 
The performance difference across gender we observed corroborates (on a larger quantity and variety of language data produced by more than 2400 speakers) the results obtained by BIBREF24 on isolated words recognition  However the following study on read speech does not replicate these results  Yet a performance degradation is observed across dialect and race BIBREF8  BIBREF22 found lower WER for women than men on broadcast news and conversational telephone speech for both English and French  The authors suggest that gender stereotypes associated with women role in education and language acquisition induce a more normative elocution  We observed that the higher the degree of normativity of speech the smaller the gender difference  No significant gender bias is observed for prepared speech nor within the Anchor category  Even if we do not find similar results with lower WER for women than men, we obtained a median WER smaller for women on prepared speech and equal to the male median WER for the Anchor speakers 
Another explanation could be the use of adaptation within the pipeline  Most broadcast programs transcription systems have a speaker adaptation step within their decoding pipeline, which is the case for our system  An Anchor speaker intervening more often would have a larger quantity of data to realize such adaptation of the acoustic model  On the contrary, Punctual speakers who appear scarcely in the data are not provided with the same amount of adaptation data  Hence we can hypothesize that gender performance difference observed for Punctual speakers is due to the fact that female speech is further from the (initial non-adapted) acoustic model as it was trained on unbalanced data (as shown in Table )  Considering that Punctual speakers represent 92 78% of the speakers, this explains why gender difference is significant over our entire data set  A way to confirm our hypothesis would be to reproduce our analysis on WER values obtained without using speaker adapted features at the decoding step 
When decoding prepared speech (hence similar to the training data), no significant difference is found in WER between men and women, revealing that the speaker adaptation step could be sufficient to reach same performance for both genders  But when decoding more spontaneous speech, there is a mismatch with the initial acoustic model (trained on prepared speech)  Consequently, the speaker adaptation step might not be enough to recover good ASR performance, especially for women for whom less adaptation data is available (see Section 4 2 3) 
Conclusion
This paper has investigated gender bias in ASR performance through the following research questions: i) what is the proportion of men and women in French radio and TV media data ? ii) what is the impact of the observed disparity on ASR performance ? iii) is this as simple as a problem of gender proportion in the training data or are other factors entangled ? Our contributions are the following:
Descriptive analysis of the broadcast data used to train our ASR system confirms the already known disparity, where 65% of the speakers are men, speaking more than 75% of the time 
When investigating WER scores according to gender, speaker's role and speech type, huge variations are observed  We conclude that gender is clearly a factor of variation in ASR performance, with a WER increase of 24% for women compared to men, exhibiting a clear gender bias 
Gender bias varies across speaker's role and speech spontaneity level  Performance for Punctual speakers respectively spontaneous speech seems to reinforce this gender bias with a WER increase of 27 2% respectively 31 8% between male and female speakers 
We found that an ASR system trained on unbalanced data regarding gender produces gender bias performance  Therefore, in order to create fair systems it is necessary to take into account the representation problems in society that are going to be encapsulated in the data  Understanding how women under-representation in broadcast data can lead to bias in ASR performances is the key to prevent re-implementing and reinforcing discrimination already existing in our societies  This is in line with the concept of “Fairness by Design" proposed by BIBREF31 
Gender, race, religion, nationality are all characteristics that we deem unfair to classify on, and these ethical standpoints needs to be taken into account in systems' design  Characteristics that are not considered as relevant in a given task can be encapsulated in data nonetheless, and lead to bias performance  Being aware of the demographic skews our data set might contain is a first step to track the life cycle of a training data set and a necessary step to control the tools we develop 

ground_truth: Transformer over BERT (ToBERT)

The transformer layer

prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. How big is imbalance in analyzed corpora?
Context 4:   p_m\rbrace $8 triples where the word overlap between the question (Q) and passage (P) is less than 2 words (after excluding the stop words) 
The process relies on the fact that answer candidates from the introduction are likely to be discussed in detail in the remainder of the article  In effect, the cloze question from the introduction and the matching paragraph in the body forms a question and context passage pair  We create two cloze datasets, one each from Wikipedia corpus (for SQuAD and TriviaQA) and PUBMed academic papers (for the BioASQ challenge), consisting of 2 2M and 1M clozes respectively  From analyzing the cloze data manually, we were able to answer 76% times for the Wikipedia set and 80% times for the PUBMed set using the information in the passage  In most cases the cloze paraphrased the information in the passage, which we hypothesized to be a useful signal for the downstream QA task 
We also investigate the utility of forming subsets of the large cloze corpus, where we select the top passage-question-answer triples, based on the different criteria, like i) jaccard similarity of answer bearing sentence in introduction and the passage ii) the tf-idf scores of answer candidates and iii) the length of answer candidates  However, we empirically find that we were better off using the entire set rather than these subsets 
Pre-training: We make use of the generated cloze dataset to pre-train an expressive neural network designed for the task of reading comprehension  We work with two publicly available neural network models – the GA Reader BIBREF2 (to enable comparison with prior work) and BiDAF + Self-Attention (SA) model from BIBREF1 (which is among the best performing models on SQuAD and TriviaQA)  After pretraining, the performance of BiDAF+SA on a dev set of the (Wikipedia) cloze questions is 0 58 F1 score and 0 55 Exact Match (EM) score  This implies that the cloze corpus is neither too easy, nor too difficult to answer 
Fine Tuning: We fine tune the pre-trained model, from the previous step, over a small set of labelled question-answer pairs  As we shall later see, this step is crucial, and it only requires a handful of labelled questions to achieve a significant proportion of the performance typically attained by training on tens of thousands of questions 
Datasets
We apply our system to three datasets from different domains  SQuAD BIBREF3 consists of questions whose answers are free form spans of text from passages in Wikipedia articles  We follow the same setting as in BIBREF0 , and split $10\%$ of training questions as the test set, and report performance when training on subsets of the remaining data ranging from $1\%$ to $90\%$ of the full set  We also report the performance on the dev set when trained on the full training set ( $1^\ast $ in Table 2 )  We use the same hyperparameter settings as in prior work  We compare and study four different settings: 1) the Supervised Learning (SL) setting, which is only trained on the supervised data, 2) the best performing GDAN model from BIBREF0 , 3) pretraining on a Language Modeling (LM) objective and fine-tuning on the supervised data, and 4) pretraining on the Cloze dataset and fine-tuning on the supervised data  The LM and Cloze methods use exactly the same data for pretraining, but differ in the loss functions used  We report F1 and EM scores on our test set using the official evaluation scripts provided by the authors of the dataset 
TriviaQA BIBREF4 comprises of over 95K web question-answer-evidence triples  Like SQuAD, the answers are spans of text  Similar to the setting in SQuAD, we create multiple smaller subsets of the entire set  For our semi-supervised QA system, we use the BiDAF+SA model BIBREF1 – the highest performing publicly available system for TrivaQA  Here again, we compare the supervised learning (SL) settings against the pretraining on Cloze set and fine tuning on the supervised set  We report F1 and EM scores on the dev set 
We also test on the BioASQ 5b dataset, which consists of question-answer pairs from PubMed abstracts  We use the publicly available system from BIBREF14 , and follow the exact same setup as theirs, focusing only on factoid and list questions  For this setting, there are only 899 questions for training  Since this is already a low-resource problem we only report results using 5-fold cross-validation on all the available data  We report Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) on the factoid questions, and F1 score for the list questions 
Main Results
Table 2 shows a comparison of the discussed settings on both SQuAD and TriviaQA  Without any fine-tuning (column 0) the performance is low, probably because the model never saw a real question, but we see significant gains with Cloze pretraining even with very little labeled data  The BiDAF+SA model, exceeds an F1 score of $50\%$ with only $1\%$ of the training data (454 questions for SQuAD, and 746 questions for TriviaQA), and approaches $90\%$ of the best performance with only $10\%$ labeled data  The gains over the SL setting, however, diminish as the size of the labeled set increases and are small when the full dataset is available 
Cloze pretraining outperforms the GDAN baseline from BIBREF0 using the same SQuAD dataset splits  Additionally, we show improvements in the $90\%$ data case unlike GDAN  Our approach is also applicable in the extremely low-resource setting of $1\%$ data, which we suspect GDAN might have trouble with since it uses the labeled data to do reinforcement learning  Furthermore, we are able to use the same cloze dataset to improve performance on both SQuAD and TriviaQA datasets  When we use the same unlabeled data to pre-train with a language modeling objective, the performance is worse, showing the bias we introduce by constructing clozes is important 
On the BioASQ dataset (Table 3 ) we again see a significant improvement when pretraining with the cloze questions over the supervised baseline  The improvement is smaller than what we observe with SQuAD and TriviaQA datasets – we believe this is because questions are generally more difficult in BioASQ  BIBREF14 showed that pretraining on SQuAD dataset improves the downstream performance on BioASQ  Here, we show a much larger improvement by pretraining on cloze questions constructed in an unsupervised manner from the same domain 
Analysis
Regression Analysis: To understand which types of questions benefit from pre-training, we pre-specified certain features (see Figure 1 right) for each of the dev set questions in SQuAD, and then performed linear regression to predict the F1 score for that question from these features  We predict the F1 scores from the cloze pretrained model ( $y^{\text{cloze}}$ ), the supervised model ( $y^{\text{sl}}$ ), and the difference of the two ( $y^{\text{cloze}}-y^{\text{sl}}$ ), when using $10\%$ of labeled data  The coefficients of the fitted model are shown in Figure 1 (left) along with their std errors  Positive coefficients indicate that a high value of that feature is predictive of a high F1 score, and a negative coefficient indicates that a small value of that feature is predictive of a high F1 score (or a high difference of F1 scores from the two models in the case of $y^{\text{cloze}}-y^{\text{sl}}$ ) 
The two strongest effects we observe are that a high lexical overlap between the question and the sentence containing the answer is indicative of high boost with pretraining, and that a high lexical overlap between the question and the whole passage is indicative of the opposite  This is hardly surprising, since our cloze construction process is biased towards questions which have a similar phrasing to the answer sentences in context  Hence, test questions with a similar property are answered correctly after pretraining, whereas those with a high overlap with the whole passage tend to have lower performance  The pretraining also favors questions with short answers because the cloze construction process produces short answer spans  Also passages and questions which consist of tokens infrequent in the SQuAD training corpus receive a large boost after pretraining, since the unlabeled data covers a larger domain 
Performance on question types: Figure 2 shows the average gain in F1 score for different types of questions, when we pretrain on the clozes compared to the supervised case  This analysis is done on the $10\%$ split of the SQuAD training set  We consider two classifications of each question – one determined on the first word (usually a wh-word) of the question (Figure 2 (bottom)) and one based on the output of a separate question type classifier adapted from BIBREF21   We use the coarse grain labels namely Abbreviation (ABBR), Entity (ENTY), Description (DESC), Human (HUM), Location (LOC), Numeric (NUM) trained on a Logistic Regression classification system   While there is an improvement across the board, we find that abbreviation questions in particular receive a large boost  Also, "why" questions show the least improvement, which is in line with our expectation, since these usually require reasoning or world knowledge which cloze questions rarely require 
Conclusion
In this paper, we show that pre-training QA models with automatically constructed cloze questions improves the performance of the models significantly, especially when there are few labeled examples  The performance of the model trained only on the cloze questions is poor, validating the need for fine-tuning  Through regression analysis, we find that pretraining helps with questions which ask for factual information located in a specific part of the context  For future work, we plan to explore the active learning setup for this task – specifically, which passages and / or types of questions can we select to annotate, such that there is a maximum performance gain from fine-tuning  We also want to explore how to adapt cloze style pre-training to NLP tasks other than QA 
Acknowledgments
Bhuwan Dhingra is supported by NSF under grants CCF-1414030 and IIS-1250956 and by grants from Google  Danish Pruthi and Dheeraj Rajagopal are supported by the DARPA Big Mechanism program under ARO contract W911NF-14-1-0436 

ground_truth: Women represent 33.16% of the speakers