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 other sentence embeddings methods are evaluated?
Context 1: Introduction
In this publication, we present Sentence-BERT (SBERT), a modification of the BERT network using siamese and triplet networks that is able to derive semantically meaningful sentence embeddings  This enables BERT to be used for certain new tasks, which up-to-now were not applicable for BERT  These tasks include large-scale semantic similarity comparison, clustering, and information retrieval via semantic search 
BERT set new state-of-the-art performance on various sentence classification and sentence-pair regression tasks  BERT uses a cross-encoder: Two sentences are passed to the transformer network and the target value is predicted  However, this setup is unsuitable for various pair regression tasks due to too many possible combinations  Finding in a collection of $n=10\,000$ sentences the pair with the highest similarity requires with BERT $n\cdot (n-1)/2=49\,995\,000$ inference computations  On a modern V100 GPU, this requires about 65 hours  Similar, finding which of the over 40 million existent questions of Quora is the most similar for a new question could be modeled as a pair-wise comparison with BERT, however, answering a single query would require over 50 hours 
A common method to address clustering and semantic search is to map each sentence to a vector space such that semantically similar sentences are close  Researchers have started to input individual sentences into BERT and to derive fixed-size sentence embeddings  The most commonly used approach is to average the BERT output layer (known as BERT embeddings) or by using the output of the first token (the [CLS] token)  As we will show, this common practice yields rather bad sentence embeddings, often worse than averaging GloVe embeddings BIBREF2 
To alleviate this issue, we developed SBERT  The siamese network architecture enables that fixed-sized vectors for input sentences can be derived  Using a similarity measure like cosine-similarity or Manhatten / Euclidean distance, semantically similar sentences can be found  These similarity measures can be performed extremely efficient on modern hardware, allowing SBERT to be used for semantic similarity search as well as for clustering  The complexity for finding the most similar sentence pair in a collection of 10,000 sentences is reduced from 65 hours with BERT to the computation of 10,000 sentence embeddings (5 seconds with SBERT) and computing cosine-similarity (0 01 seconds)  By using optimized index structures, finding the most similar Quora question can be reduced from 50 hours to a few milliseconds BIBREF3 
We fine-tune SBERT on NLI data, which creates sentence embeddings that significantly outperform other state-of-the-art sentence embedding methods like InferSent BIBREF4 and Universal Sentence Encoder BIBREF5  On seven Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) tasks, SBERT achieves an improvement of 11 7 points compared to InferSent and 5 5 points compared to Universal Sentence Encoder  On SentEval BIBREF6, an evaluation toolkit for sentence embeddings, we achieve an improvement of 2 1 and 2 6 points, respectively 
SBERT can be adapted to a specific task  It sets new state-of-the-art performance on a challenging argument similarity dataset BIBREF7 and on a triplet dataset to distinguish sentences from different sections of a Wikipedia article BIBREF8 
The paper is structured in the following way: Section SECREF3 presents SBERT, section SECREF4 evaluates SBERT on common STS tasks and on the challenging Argument Facet Similarity (AFS) corpus BIBREF7  Section SECREF5 evaluates SBERT on SentEval  In section SECREF6, we perform an ablation study to test some design aspect of SBERT  In section SECREF7, we compare the computational efficiency of SBERT sentence embeddings in contrast to other state-of-the-art sentence embedding methods 
Related Work
We first introduce BERT, then, we discuss state-of-the-art sentence embedding methods 
BERT BIBREF0 is a pre-trained transformer network BIBREF9, which set for various NLP tasks new state-of-the-art results, including question answering, sentence classification, and sentence-pair regression  The input for BERT for sentence-pair regression consists of the two sentences, separated by a special [SEP] token  Multi-head attention over 12 (base-model) or 24 layers (large-model) is applied and the output is passed to a simple regression function to derive the final label  Using this setup, BERT set a new state-of-the-art performance on the Semantic Textual Semilarity (STS) benchmark BIBREF10  RoBERTa BIBREF1 showed, that the performance of BERT can further improved by small adaptations to the pre-training process  We also tested XLNet BIBREF11, but it led in general to worse results than BERT 
A large disadvantage of the BERT network structure is that no independent sentence embeddings are computed, which makes it difficult to derive sentence embeddings from BERT  To bypass this limitations, researchers passed single sentences through BERT and then derive a fixed sized vector by either averaging the outputs (similar to average word embeddings) or by using the output of the special CLS token (for example: bertsentenceembeddings1,bertsentenceembeddings2,bertsentenceembeddings3)  These two options are also provided by the popular bert-as-a-service-repository  Up to our knowledge, there is so far no evaluation if these methods lead to useful sentence embeddings 
Sentence embeddings are a well studied area with dozens of proposed methods  Skip-Thought BIBREF12 trains an encoder-decoder architecture to predict the surrounding sentences  InferSent BIBREF4 uses labeled data of the Stanford Natural Language Inference dataset BIBREF13 and the Multi-Genre NLI dataset BIBREF14 to train a siamese BiLSTM network with max-pooling over the output  Conneau et al  showed, that InferSent consistently outperforms unsupervised methods like SkipThought  Universal Sentence Encoder BIBREF5 trains a transformer network and augments unsupervised learning with training on SNLI  hill-etal-2016-learning showed, that the task on which sentence embeddings are trained significantly impacts their quality  Previous work BIBREF4, BIBREF5 found that the SNLI datasets are suitable for training sentence embeddings  yang-2018-learning presented a method to train on conversations from Reddit using siamese DAN and siamese transformer networks, which yielded good results on the STS benchmark dataset 
polyencoders addresses the run-time overhead of the cross-encoder from BERT and present a method (poly-encoders) to compute a score between $m$ context vectors and pre-computed candidate embeddings using attention  This idea works for finding the highest scoring sentence in a larger collection  However, poly-encoders have the drawback that the score function is not symmetric and the computational overhead is too large for use-cases like clustering, which would require $O(n^2)$ score computations 
Previous neural sentence embedding methods started the training from a random initialization  In this publication, we use the pre-trained BERT and RoBERTa network and only fine-tune it to yield useful sentence embeddings  This reduces significantly the needed training time: SBERT can be tuned in less than 20 minutes, while yielding better results than comparable sentence embedding methods 
Model
SBERT adds a pooling operation to the output of BERT / RoBERTa to derive a fixed sized sentence embedding  We experiment with three pooling strategies: Using the output of the CLS-token, computing the mean of all output vectors (MEAN-strategy), and computing a max-over-time of the output vectors (MAX-strategy)  The default configuration is MEAN 
In order to fine-tune BERT / RoBERTa, we create siamese and triplet networks BIBREF15 to update the weights such that the produced sentence embeddings are semantically meaningful and can be compared with cosine-similarity 
The network structure depends on the available training data  We experiment with the following structures and objective functions 
Classification Objective Function  We concatenate the sentence embeddings $u$ and $v$ with the element-wise difference $|u-v|$ and multiply it with the trainable weight $W_t \in \mathbb {R}^{3n \times k}$:
where $n$ is the dimension of the sentence embeddings and $k$ the number of labels  We optimize cross-entropy loss  This structure is depicted in Figure FIGREF4 
Regression Objective Function  The cosine-similarity between the two sentence embeddings $u$ and $v$ is computed (Figure FIGREF5)  We use mean-squared-error loss as the objective function 
Triplet Objective Function  Given an anchor sentence $a$, a positive sentence $p$, and a negative sentence $n$, triplet loss tunes the network such that the distance between $a$ and $p$ is smaller than the distance between $a$ and $n$  Mathematically, we minimize the following loss function:
with $s_x$ the sentence embedding for $a$/$n$/$p$, $||\cdot ||$ a distance metric and margin $\epsilon $  Margin $\epsilon $ ensures that $s_p$ is at least $\epsilon $ closer to $s_a$ than $s_n$  As metric we use Euclidean distance and we set $\epsilon =1$ in our experiments 
Model ::: Training Details
We train SBERT on the combination of the SNLI BIBREF13 and the Multi-Genre NLI BIBREF14 dataset  The SNLI is a collection of 570,000 sentence pairs annotated with the labels contradiction, eintailment, and neutral  MultiNLI contains 430,000 sentence pairs and covers a range of genres of spoken and written text  We fine-tune SBERT with a 3-way softmax-classifier objective function for one epoch  We used a batch-size of 16, Adam optimizer with learning rate $2\mathrm {e}{-5}$, and a linear learning rate warm-up over 10% of the training data  Our default pooling strategy is MEAN 
Evaluation - Semantic Textual Similarity
We evaluate the performance of SBERT for common Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) tasks  State-of-the-art methods often learn a (complex) regression function that maps sentence embeddings to a similarity score  However, these regression functions work pair-wise and due to the combinatorial explosion those are often not scalable if the collection of sentences reaches a certain size  Instead, we always use cosine-similarity to compare the similarity between two sentence embeddings  We ran our experiments also with negative Manhatten and negative Euclidean distances as similarity measures, but the results for all approaches remained roughly the same 
Evaluation - Semantic Textual Similarity ::: Unsupervised STS
We evaluate the performance of SBERT for STS without using any STS specific training data  We use the STS tasks 2012 - 2016 BIBREF16, BIBREF17, BIBREF18, BIBREF19, BIBREF20, the STS benchmark BIBREF10, and the SICK-Relatedness dataset BIBREF21  These datasets provide labels between 0 and 5 on the semantic relatedness of sentence pairs  We showed in BIBREF22 that Pearson correlation is badly suited for STS  Instead, we compute the Spearman's rank correlation between the cosine-similarity of the sentence embeddings and the gold labels  The setup for the other sentence embedding methods is equivalent, the similarity is computed by cosine-similarity  The results are depicted in Table TABREF6 
The results shows that directly using the output of BERT leads to rather poor performances  Averaging the BERT embeddings achieves an average correlation of only 54 81, and using the CLS-token output only achieves an average correlation of 29 19  Both are worse than computing average GloVe embeddings 
Using the described siamese network structure and fine-tuning mechanism substantially improves the correlation, outperforming both InferSent and Universal Sentence Encoder substantially  The only dataset where SBERT performs worse than Universal Sentence Encoder is SICK-R  Universal Sentence Encoder was trained on various datasets, including news, question-answer pages and discussion forums, which appears to be more suitable to the data of SICK-R  In contrast, SBERT was pre-trained only on Wikipedia (via BERT) and on NLI data 
While RoBERTa was able to improve the performance for several supervised tasks, we only observe minor difference between SBERT and SRoBERTa for generating sentence embeddings 
Evaluation - Semantic Textual Similarity ::: Supervised STS
The STS benchmark (STSb) BIBREF10 provides is a popular dataset to evaluate supervised STS systems  The data includes 8,628 sentence pairs from the three categories captions, news, and forums  It is divided into train (5,749), dev (1,500) and test (1,379)  BERT set a new state-of-the-art performance on this dataset by passing both sentences to the network and using a simple regression method for the output 
We use the training set to fine-tune SBERT using the regression objective function  At prediction time, we compute the cosine-similarity between the sentence embeddings  All systems are trained with 10 random seeds to counter variances BIBREF23 
The results are depicted in Table TABREF10  We experimented with two setups: Only training on STSb, and first training on NLI, then training on STSb  We observe that the later strategy leads to a slight improvement of 1-2 points  This two-step approach had an especially large impact for the BERT cross-encoder, which improved the performance by 3-4 points  We do not observe a significant difference between BERT and RoBERTa 
Evaluation - Semantic Textual Similarity ::: Argument Facet Similarity
We evaluate SBERT on the Argument Facet Similarity (AFS) corpus by MisraEW16  The AFS corpus annotated 6,000 sentential argument pairs from social media dialogs on three controversial topics: gun control, gay marriage, and death penalty  The data was annotated on a scale from 0 (“different topic") to 5 (“completely equivalent")  The similarity notion in the AFS corpus is fairly different to the similarity notion in the STS datasets from SemEval  STS data is usually descriptive, while AFS data are argumentative excerpts from dialogs  To be considered similar, arguments must not only make similar claims, but also provide a similar reasoning  Further, the lexical gap between the sentences in AFS is much larger  Hence, simple unsupervised methods as well as state-of-the-art STS systems perform badly on this dataset BIBREF24 
We evaluate SBERT on this dataset in two scenarios: 1) As proposed by Misra et al , we evaluate SBERT using 10-fold cross-validation  A draw-back of this evaluation setup is that it is not clear how well approaches generalize to different topics  Hence, 2) we evaluate SBERT in a cross-topic setup  Two topics serve for training and the approach is evaluated on the left-out topic  We repeat this for all three topics and average the results 
SBERT is fine-tuned using the Regression Objective Function  The similarity score is computed using cosine-similarity based on the sentence embeddings  We also provide the Pearson correlation $r$ to make the results comparable to Misra et al  However, we showed BIBREF22 that Pearson correlation has some serious drawbacks and should be avoided for comparing STS systems  The results are depicted in Table TABREF12 
Unsupervised methods like tf-idf, average GloVe embeddings or InferSent perform rather badly on this dataset with low scores  Training SBERT in the 10-fold cross-validation setup gives a performance that is nearly on-par with BERT 
However, in the cross-topic evaluation, we observe a performance drop of SBERT by about 7 points Spearman correlation  To be considered similar, arguments should address the same claims and provide the same reasoning  BERT is able to use attention to compare directly both sentences (e g  word-by-word comparison), while SBERT must map individual sentences from an unseen topic to a vector space such that arguments with similar claims and reasons are close  This is a much more challenging task, which appears to require more than just two topics for training to work on-par with BERT 
Evaluation - Semantic Textual Similarity ::: Wikipedia Sections Distinction
ein-dor-etal-2018-learning use Wikipedia to create a thematically fine-grained train, dev and test set for sentence embeddings methods  Wikipedia articles are separated into distinct sections focusing on certain aspects  Dor et al  assume that sentences in the same section are thematically closer than sentences in different sections  They use this to create a large dataset of weakly labeled sentence triplets: The anchor and the positive example come from the same section, while the negative example comes from a different section of the same article  For example, from the Alice Arnold article: Anchor: Arnold joined the BBC Radio Drama Company in 1988 , positive: Arnold gained media attention in May 2012 , negative: Balding and Arnold are keen amateur golfers 
We use the dataset from Dor et al  We use the Triplet Objective, train SBERT for one epoch on the about 1 8 Million training triplets and evaluate it on the 222,957 test triplets  Test triplets are from a distinct set of Wikipedia articles  As evaluation metric, we use accuracy: Is the positive example closer to the anchor than the negative example?
Results are presented in Table TABREF14  Dor et al  fine-tuned a BiLSTM architecture with triplet loss to derive sentence embeddings for this dataset  As the table shows, SBERT clearly outperforms the BiLSTM approach by Dor et al 
Evaluation - SentEval
SentEval BIBREF6 is a popular toolkit to evaluate the quality of sentence embeddings  Sentence embeddings are used as features for a logistic regression classifier  The logistic regression classifier is trained on various tasks in a 10-fold cross-validation setup and the prediction accuracy is computed for the test-fold 
The purpose of SBERT sentence embeddings are not to be used for transfer learning for other tasks  Here, we think fine-tuning BERT as described by devlin2018bert for new tasks is the more suitable method, as it updates all layers of the BERT network  However, SentEval can still give an impression on the quality of our sentence embeddings for various tasks 
We compare the SBERT sentence embeddings to other sentence embeddings methods on the following seven SentEval transfer tasks:
MR: Sentiment prediction for movie reviews snippets on a five start scale BIBREF25 
CR: Sentiment prediction of customer product reviews BIBREF26 
SUBJ: Subjectivity prediction of sentences from movie reviews and plot summaries BIBREF27 
MPQA: Phrase level opinion polarity classification from newswire BIBREF28 
SST: Stanford Sentiment Treebank with binary labels BIBREF29 
TREC: Fine grained question-type classification from TREC BIBREF30 
MRPC: Microsoft Research Paraphrase Corpus from parallel news sources BIBREF31 
The results can be found in Table TABREF15  SBERT is able to achieve the best performance in 5 out of 7 tasks  The average performance increases by about 2 percentage points compared to InferSent as well as the Universal Sentence Encoder  Even though transfer learning is not the purpose of SBERT, it outperforms other state-of-the-art sentence embeddings methods on this task 
It appears that the sentence embeddings from SBERT capture well sentiment information: We observe large improvements for all sentiment tasks (MR, CR, and SST) from SentEval in comparison to InferSent and Universal Sentence Encoder 
The only dataset where SBERT is significantly worse than Universal Sentence Encoder is the TREC dataset  Universal Sentence Encoder was pre-trained on question-answering data, which appears to be beneficial for the question-type classification task of the TREC dataset 
Average BERT embeddings or using the CLS-token output from a BERT network achieved bad results for various STS tasks (Table TABREF6), worse than average GloVe embeddings  However, for SentEval, average BERT embeddings and the BERT CLS-token output achieves decent results (Table TABREF15), outperforming average GloVe embeddings  The reason for this are the different setups  For the STS tasks, we used cosine-similarity to estimate the similarities between sentence embeddings  Cosine-similarity treats all dimensions equally  In contrast, SentEval fits a logistic regression classifier to the sentence embeddings  This allows that certain dimensions can have higher or lower impact on the classification result 
We conclude that average BERT embeddings / CLS-token output from BERT return sentence embeddings that are infeasible to be used with cosine-similarity or with Manhatten / Euclidean distance  For transfer learning, they yield slightly worse results than InferSent or Universal Sentence Encoder  However, using the described fine-tuning setup with a siamese network structure on NLI datasets yields sentence embeddings that achieve a new state-of-the-art for the SentEval toolkit 
Ablation Study
We have demonstrated strong empirical results for the quality of SBERT sentence embeddings  In this section, we perform an ablation study of different aspects of SBERT in order to get a better understanding of their relative importance 
We evaluated different pooling strategies (MEAN, MAX, and CLS)  For the classification objective function, we evaluate different concatenation methods  For each possible configuration, we train SBERT with 10 different random seeds and average the performances 
The objective function (classification vs  regression) depends on the annotated dataset  For the classification objective function, we train SBERT-base on the SNLI and the Multi-NLI dataset  For the regression objective function, we train on the training set of the STS benchmark dataset  Performances are measured on the development split of the STS benchmark dataset  Results are shown in Table TABREF23 
When trained with the classification objective function on NLI data, the pooling strategy has a rather minor impact  The impact of the concatenation mode is much larger  InferSent BIBREF4 and Universal Sentence Encoder BIBREF5 both use $(u, v, |u-v|, u*v)$ as input for a softmax classifier  However, in our architecture, adding the element-wise $u*v$ decreased the performance 
The most important component is the element-wise difference $|u-v|$  Note, that the concatenation mode is only relevant for training the softmax classifier  At inference, when predicting similarities for the STS benchmark dataset, only the sentence embeddings $u$ and $v$ are used in combination with cosine-similarity  The element-wise difference measures the distance between the dimensions of the two sentence embeddings, ensuring that similar pairs are closer and dissimilar pairs are further apart 
When trained with the regression objective function, we observe that the pooling strategy has a large impact  There, the MAX strategy perform significantly worse than MEAN or CLS-token strategy  This is in contrast to BIBREF4, who found it beneficial for the BiLSTM-layer of InferSent to use MAX instead of MEAN pooling 
Computational Efficiency
Sentence embeddings need potentially be computed for Millions of sentences, hence, a high computation speed is desired  In this section, we compare SBERT to average GloVe embeddings, InferSent BIBREF4, and Universal Sentence Encoder BIBREF5 
For our comparison we use the sentences from the STS benchmark BIBREF10  We compute average GloVe embeddings using a simple for-loop with python dictionary lookups and NumPy  InferSent is based on PyTorch  For Universal Sentence Encoder, we use the TensorFlow Hub version, which is based on TensorFlow  SBERT is based on PyTorch  For improved computation of sentence embeddings, we implemented a smart batching strategy: Sentences with similar lengths are grouped together and are only padded to the longest element in a mini-batch  This drastically reduces computational overhead from padding tokens 
Performances were measured on a server with Intel i7-5820K CPU @ 3 30GHz, Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU, CUDA 9 2 and cuDNN  The results are depicted in Table TABREF26 
On CPU, InferSent is about 65% faster than SBERT  This is due to the much simpler network architecture  InferSent uses a single BiLSTM layer, while BERT uses 12 stacked transformer layers  However, an advantage of transformer networks is the computational efficiency on GPUs  There, SBERT with smart batching is about 9% faster than InferSent and about 55% faster than Universal Sentence Encoder  Smart batching achieves a speed-up of 89% on CPU and 48% on GPU  Average GloVe embeddings is obviously by a large margin the fastest method to compute sentence embeddings 
Conclusion
We showed that BERT out-of-the-box maps sentences to a vector space that is rather unsuitable to be used with common similarity measures like cosine-similarity  The performance for seven STS tasks was below the performance of average GloVe embeddings 
To overcome this shortcoming, we presented Sentence-BERT (SBERT)  SBERT fine-tunes BERT in a siamese / triplet network architecture  We evaluated the quality on various common benchmarks, where it could achieve a significant improvement over state-of-the-art sentence embeddings methods  Replacing BERT with RoBERTa did not yield a significant improvement in our experiments 
SBERT is computationally efficient  On a GPU, it is about 9% faster than InferSent and about 55% faster than Universal Sentence Encoder  SBERT can be used for tasks which are computationally not feasible to be modeled with BERT  For example, clustering of 10,000 sentences with hierarchical clustering requires with BERT about 65 hours, as around 50 Million sentence combinations must be computed  With SBERT, we were able to reduce the effort to about 5 seconds 
Acknowledgments
This work has been supported by the German Research Foundation through the German-Israeli Project Cooperation (DIP, grant DA 1600/1-1 and grant GU 798/17-1)  It has been co-funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the promotional references 03VP02540 (ArgumenText) 
Context 3: Introduction
Nowadays deep learning techniques outperform the other conventional methods in most of the speech-related tasks  Training robust deep neural networks for each task depends on the availability of powerful processing GPUs, as well as standard and large scale datasets  In text-independent speaker verification, large-scale datasets are available, thanks to the NIST SRE evaluations and other data collection projects such as VoxCeleb BIBREF0 
In text-dependent speaker recognition, experiments with end-to-end architectures conducted on large proprietary databases have demonstrated their superiority over traditional approaches BIBREF1  Yet, contrary to text-independent speaker recognition, text-dependent speaker recognition lacks large-scale publicly available databases  The two most well-known datasets are probably RSR2015 BIBREF2 and RedDots BIBREF3  The former contains speech data collected from 300 individuals in a controlled manner, while the latter is used primarily for evaluation rather than training, due to its small number of speakers (only 64)  Motivated by this lack of large-scale dataset for text-dependent speaker verification, we chose to proceed with the collection of the DeepMine dataset, which we expect to become a standard benchmark for the task 
Apart from speaker recognition, large amounts of training data are required also for training automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems  Such datasets should not only be large in size, they should also be characterized by high variability with respect to speakers, age and dialects  While several datasets with these properties are available for languages like English, Mandarin, French, this is not the case for several other languages, such as Persian  To this end, we proceeded with collecting a large-scale dataset, suitable for building robust ASR models in Persian 
The main goal of the DeepMine project was to collect speech from at least a few thousand speakers, enabling research and development of deep learning methods  The project started at the beginning of 2017, and after designing the database and the developing Android and server applications, the data collection began in the middle of 2017  The project finished at the end of 2018 and the cleaned-up and final version of the database was released at the beginning of 2019  In BIBREF4, the running project and its data collection scenarios were described, alongside with some preliminary results and statistics  In this paper, we announce the final and cleaned-up version of the database, describe its different parts and provide various evaluation setups for each part  Finally, since the database was designed mainly for text-dependent speaker verification purposes, some baseline results are reported for this task on the official evaluation setups  Additional baseline results are also reported for Persian speech recognition  However, due to the space limitation in this paper, the baseline results are not reported for all the database parts and conditions  They will be defined and reported in the database technical documentation and in a future journal paper 
Data Collection
DeepMine is publicly available for everybody with a variety of licenses for different users  It was collected using crowdsourcing BIBREF4  The data collection was done using an Android application  Each respondent installed the application on his/her personal device and recorded several phrases in different sessions  The Android application did various checks on each utterance and if it passed all of them, the respondent was directed to the next phrase  For more information about data collection scenario, please refer to BIBREF4 
Data Collection ::: Post-Processing
In order to clean-up the database, the main post-processing step was to filter out problematic utterances  Possible problems include speaker word insertions (e g  repeating some part of a phrase), deletions, substitutions, and involuntary disfluencies  To detect these, we implemented an alignment stage, similar to the second alignment stage in the LibriSpeech project BIBREF5  In this method, a custom decoding graph was generated for each phrase  The decoding graph allows for word skipping and word insertion in the phrase 
For text-dependent and text-prompted parts of the database, such errors are not allowed  Hence, any utterances with errors were removed from the enrollment and test lists  For the speech recognition part, a sub-part of the utterance which is correctly aligned to the corresponding transcription is kept  After the cleaning step, around 190 thousand utterances with full transcription and 10 thousand with sub-part alignment have remained in the database 
Data Collection ::: Statistics
After processing the database and removing problematic respondents and utterances, 1969 respondents remained in the database, with 1149 of them being male and 820 female  297 of the respondents could not read English and have therefore read only the Persian prompts  About 13200 sessions were recorded by females and similarly, about 9500 sessions by males, i e  women are over-represented in terms of sessions, even though their number is 17% smaller than that of males  Other useful statistics related to the database are shown in Table TABREF4 
The last status of the database, as well as other related and useful information about its availability can be found on its website, together with a limited number of samples 
DeepMine Database Parts
The DeepMine database consists of three parts  The first one contains fixed common phrases to perform text-dependent speaker verification  The second part consists of random sequences of words useful for text-prompted speaker verification, and the last part includes phrases with word- and phoneme-level transcription, useful for text-independent speaker verification using a random phrase (similar to Part4 of RedDots)  This part can also serve for Persian ASR training  Each part is described in more details below  Table TABREF11 shows the number of unique phrases in each part of the database  For the English text-dependent part, the following phrases were selected from part1 of the RedDots database, hence the RedDots can be used as an additional training set for this part:
“My voice is my password ”
“OK Google ”
“Artificial intelligence is for real ”
“Actions speak louder than words ”
“There is no such thing as a free lunch ”
DeepMine Database Parts ::: Part1 - Text-dependent (TD)
This part contains a set of fixed phrases which are used to verify speakers in text-dependent mode  Each speaker utters 5 Persian phrases, and if the speaker can read English, 5 phrases selected from Part1 of the RedDots database are also recorded 
We have created three experimental setups with different numbers of speakers in the evaluation set  For each setup, speakers with more recording sessions are included in the evaluation set and the rest of the speakers are used for training in the background set (in the database, all background sets are basically training data)  The rows in Table TABREF13 corresponds to the different experimental setups and shows the numbers of speakers in each set  Note that, for English, we have filtered the (Persian native) speakers by the ability to read English  Therefore, there are fewer speakers in each set for English than for Persian  There is a small “dev” set in each setup which can be used for parameter tuning to prevent over-tuning on the evaluation set 
For each experimental setup, we have defined several official trial lists with different numbers of enrollment utterances per trial in order to investigate the effects of having different amounts of enrollment data  All trials in one trial list have the same number of enrollment utterances (3 to 6) and only one test utterance  All enrollment utterances in a trial are taken from different consecutive sessions and the test utterance is taken from yet another session  From all the setups and conditions, the 100-spk with 3-session enrollment (3-sess) is considered as the main evaluation condition

ground_truth: GloVe, BERT, Universal Sentence Encoder, TF-IDF, InferSent

Avg. GloVe embeddings, Avg. fast-text embeddings, Avg. BERT embeddings, BERT CLS-vector, InferSent - GloVe and Universal Sentence Encoder.

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 accuracy does the proposed system achieve?
Context 2: Introduction
There has been significant progress on Named Entity Recognition (NER) in recent years using models based on machine learning algorithms BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , BIBREF2   As with other Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, building NER systems typically requires a massive amount of labeled training data which are annotated by experts  In real applications, we often need to consider new types of entities in new domains where we do not have existing annotated data  For such new types of entities, however, it is very hard to find experts to annotate the data within short time limits and hiring experts is costly and non-scalable, both in terms of time and money 
In order to quickly obtain new training data, we can use crowdsourcing as one alternative way at lower cost in a short time  But as an exchange, crowd annotations from non-experts may be of lower quality than those from experts  It is one biggest challenge to build a powerful NER system on such a low quality annotated data  Although we can obtain high quality annotations for each input sentence by majority voting, it can be a waste of human labors to achieve such a goal, especially for some ambiguous sentences which may require a number of annotations to reach an agreement  Thus majority work directly build models on crowd annotations, trying to model the differences among annotators, for example, some of the annotators may be more trustful BIBREF3 , BIBREF4  
Here we focus mainly on the Chinese NER, which is more difficult than NER for other languages such as English for the lack of morphological variations such as capitalization and in particular the uncertainty in word segmentation  The Chinese NE taggers trained on news domain often perform poor in other domains  Although we can alleviate the problem by using character-level tagging to resolve the problem of poor word segmentation performances BIBREF5 , still there exists a large gap when the target domain changes, especially for the texts of social media  Thus, in order to get a good tagger for new domains and also for the conditions of new entity types, we require large amounts of labeled data  Therefore, crowdsourcing is a reasonable solution for these situations 
In this paper, we propose an approach to training a Chinese NER system on the crowd-annotated data  Our goal is to extract additional annotator independent features by adversarial training, alleviating the annotation noises of non-experts  The idea of adversarial training in neural networks has been used successfully in several NLP tasks, such as cross-lingual POS tagging BIBREF6 and cross-domain POS tagging BIBREF7   They use it to reduce the negative influences of the input divergences among different domains or languages, while we use adversarial training to reduce the negative influences brought by different crowd annotators  To our best knowledge, we are the first to apply adversarial training for crowd annotation learning 
In the learning framework, we perform adversarial training between the basic NER and an additional worker discriminator  We have a common Bi-LSTM for representing annotator-generic information and a private Bi-LSTM for representing annotator-specific information  We build another label Bi-LSTM by the crowd-annotated NE label sequence which reflects the mind of the crowd annotators who learn entity definitions by reading the annotation guidebook  The common and private Bi-LSTMs are used for NER, while the common and label Bi-LSTMs are used as inputs for the worker discriminator  The parameters of the common Bi-LSTM are learned by adversarial training, maximizing the worker discriminator loss and meanwhile minimizing the NER loss  Thus the resulting features of the common Bi-LSTM are worker invariant and NER sensitive 
For evaluation, we create two Chinese NER datasets in two domains: dialog and e-commerce  We require the crowd annotators to label the types of entities, including person, song, brand, product, and so on  Identifying these entities is useful for chatbot and e-commerce platforms BIBREF8   Then we conduct experiments on the newly created datasets to verify the effectiveness of the proposed adversarial neural network model  The results show that our system outperforms very strong baseline systems  In summary, we make the following contributions:
Related Work
Our work is related to three lines of research: Sequence labeling, Adversarial training, and Crowdsourcing 
Sequence labeling  NER is widely treated as a sequence labeling problem, by assigning a unique label over each sentential word BIBREF9   Early studies on sequence labeling often use the models of HMM, MEMM, and CRF BIBREF10 based on manually-crafted discrete features, which can suffer the feature sparsity problem and require heavy feature engineering  Recently, neural network models have been successfully applied to sequence labeling BIBREF1 , BIBREF11 , BIBREF2   Among these work, the model which uses Bi-LSTM for feature extraction and CRF for decoding has achieved state-of-the-art performances BIBREF11 , BIBREF2 , which is exploited as the baseline model in our work 
Adversarial Training  Adversarial Networks have achieved great success in computer vision such as image generation BIBREF12 , BIBREF13   In the NLP community, the method is mainly exploited under the settings of domain adaption BIBREF14 , BIBREF7 , cross-lingual BIBREF15 , BIBREF6 and multi-task learning BIBREF16 , BIBREF17   All these settings involve the feature divergences between the training and test examples, and aim to learn invariant features across the divergences by an additional adversarial discriminator, such as domain discriminator  Our work is similar to these work but is applies on crowdsourcing learning, aiming to find invariant features among different crowdsourcing workers 
Crowdsourcing  Most NLP tasks require a massive amount of labeled training data which are annotated by experts  However, hiring experts is costly and non-scalable, both in terms of time and money  Instead, crowdsourcing is another solution to obtain labeled data at a lower cost but with relative lower quality than those from experts  BIBREF18 snow2008cheap collected labeled results for several NLP tasks from Amazon Mechanical Turk and demonstrated that non-experts annotations were quite useful for training new systems  In recent years, a series of work have focused on how to use crowdsourcing data efficiently in tasks such as classification BIBREF19 , BIBREF20 , and compare quality of crowd and expert labels BIBREF21  
In sequence labeling tasks, BIBREF22 dredze2009sequence viewed this task as a multi-label problem while BIBREF3 rodrigues2014sequence took workers identities into account by assuming that each sentential word was tagged correctly by one of the crowdsourcing workers and proposed a CRF-based model with multiple annotators  BIBREF4 nguyen2017aggregating introduced a crowd representation in which the crowd vectors were added into the LSTM-CRF model at train time, but ignored them at test time  In this paper, we apply adversarial training on crowd annotations on Chinese NER in new domains, and achieve better performances than previous studies on crowdsourcing learning 
Baseline: LSTM-CRF
We use a neural CRF model as the baseline system BIBREF9 , treating NER as a sequence labeling problem over Chinese characters, which has achieved state-of-the-art performances BIBREF5   To this end, we explore the BIEO schema to convert NER into sequence labeling, following BIBREF2 lample-EtAl:2016:N16-1, where sentential character is assigned with one unique tag  Concretely, we tag the non-entity character by label “O”, the beginning character of an entity by “B-XX”, the ending character of an entity by “E-XX” and the other character of an entity by “I-XX”, where “XX” denotes the entity type 
We build high-level neural features from the input character sequence by a bi-directional LSTM BIBREF2   The resulting features are combined and then are fed into an output CRF layer for decoding  In summary, the baseline model has three main components  First, we make vector representations for sentential characters $\mathbf {x}_1\mathbf {x}_2\cdots \mathbf {x}_n$ , transforming the discrete inputs into low-dimensional neural inputs  Second, feature extraction is performed to obtain high-level features $\mathbf {h}_1^{\text{ner}}\mathbf {h}_2^{\text{ner}}\cdots \mathbf {h}_n^{\text{ner}}$ , by using a bi-directional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) structure together with a linear transformation over $\mathbf {x}_1\mathbf {x}_2\cdots \mathbf {x}_n$   Third, we apply a CRF tagging module over $\mathbf {h}_1^{\text{ner}}\mathbf {h}_2^{\text{ner}}\cdots \mathbf {h}_n^{\text{ner}}$ , obtaining the final output NE labels  The overall framework of the baseline model is shown by the right part of Figure 1  
Vector Representation of Characters
To represent Chinese characters, we simply exploit a neural embedding layer to map discrete characters into the low-dimensional vector representations  The goal is achieved by a looking-up table $\mathbf {E}^W$ , which is a model parameter and will be fine-tuned during training  The looking-up table can be initialized either by random or by using a pretrained embeddings from large scale raw corpus  For a given Chinese character sequence $c_1c_2\cdots c_n$ , we obtain the vector representation of each sentential character by: $ \mathbf {x}_t = \text{look-up}(c_t, \mathbf {E}^W), \text{~~~} t \in [1, n]$  
Feature Extraction
Based on the vector sequence $\mathbf {x}_1\mathbf {x}_2\cdots \mathbf {x}_n$ , we extract higher-level features $\mathbf {h}_1^{\text{ner}}\mathbf {h}_2^{\text{ner}}\cdots \mathbf {h}_n^{\text{ner}}$ by using a bidirectional LSTM module and a simple feed-forward neural layer, which are then used for CRF tagging at the next step 
LSTM is a type of recurrent neural network (RNN), which is designed for solving the exploding and diminishing gradients of basic RNNs BIBREF23   It has been widely used in a number of NLP tasks, including POS-tagging BIBREF11 , BIBREF24 , parsing BIBREF25 and machine translation BIBREF26 , because of its strong capabilities of modeling natural language sentences 
By traversing $\mathbf {x}_1\mathbf {x}_2\cdots \mathbf {x}_n$ by order and reversely, we obtain the output features $\mathbf {h}_1^{\text{private}}\mathbf {h}_2^{\text{private}}\cdots \mathbf {h}_n^{\text{private}}$ of the bi-LSTM, where $\mathbf {h}_t^{\text{private}} = \overrightarrow{\mathbf {h}}_t \oplus \overleftarrow{\mathbf {h}}_t $   Here we refer this Bi-LSTM as private in order to differentiate it with the common Bi-LSTM over the same character inputs which will be introduced in the next section 
Further we make an integration of the output vectors of bi-directional LSTM by a linear feed-forward neural layer, resulting in the features $\mathbf {h}_1^{\text{ner}}\mathbf {h}_2^{\text{ner}}\cdots \mathbf {h}_n^{\text{ner}}$ by equation:
$$\mathbf {h}_t^{\text{ner}} = \mathbf {W} \mathbf {h}_t^{\text{private}} + \mathbf {b},$$   (Eq  6)
where $\mathbf {W}$ and $\mathbf {b}$ are both model parameters 
CRF Tagging
Finally we feed the resulting features $\mathbf {h}_t^{\text{ner}}, t\in [1, n]$ into a CRF layer directly for NER decoding  CRF tagging is one globally normalized model, aiming to find the best output sequence considering the dependencies between successive labels  In the sequence labeling setting for NER, the output label of one position has a strong dependency on the label of the previous position  For example, the label before “I-XX” must be either “B-XX” or “I-XX”, where “XX” should be exactly the same 
CRF involves two parts for prediction  First we should compute the scores for each label based $\mathbf {h}_t^{\text{ner}}$ , resulting in $\mathbf {o}_t^{\text{ner}}$ , whose dimension is the number of output labels  The other part is a transition matrix $\mathbf {T}$ which defines the scores of two successive labels  $\mathbf {T}$ is also a model parameter  Based on $\mathbf {o}_t^{\text{ner}}$ and $\mathbf {T}$ , we use the Viterbi algorithm to find the best-scoring label sequence 
We can formalize the CRF tagging process as follows:
$$\begin{split} & \mathbf {o}_t^{\text{ner}} = \mathbf {W}^{\text{ner}} \mathbf {h}_t^{\text{ner}}, \text{~~~~} t \in [1,n] \\ & \text{score}(\mathbf {X}, \mathbf {y}) = \sum _{t = 1}^{n}(\mathbf {o}_{t,y_t} + T_{y_{t-1},y_t}) \\ & \mathbf {y}^{\text{ner}} = \mathop {arg~max}_{\mathbf {y}}\big (\text{score}(\mathbf {X}, \mathbf {y}))\big ), \\ \end{split}$$   (Eq  8)
where $\text{score}(\cdot )$ is the scoring function for a given output label sequence $\mathbf {y} = y_1y_2 \cdots y_n$ based on input $\mathbf {X}$ , $\mathbf {y}^{\text{ner}}$ is the resulting label sequence, $\mathbf {W}^{\text{ner}}$ is a model parameter 
Training
To train model parameters, we exploit a negative log-likelihood objective as the loss function  We apply softmax over all candidate output label sequences, thus the probability of the crowd-annotated label sequence is computed by:
$$p(\mathbf {\bar{y}}|\mathbf {X}) = \frac{\exp \big (\text{score}(\mathbf {X}, \mathbf {\bar{y}})\big )}{\sum _{\mathbf {y} \in \mathbf {Y}_{\mathbf {X}}} \exp \big (\text{score}(\mathbf {X}, \mathbf {y})\big )},$$   (Eq  10)
where $\mathbf {\bar{y}}$ is the crowd-annotated label sequences and $\mathbf {Y}_{\mathbf {X}}$ is all candidate label sequence of input $\mathbf {X}$  
Based on the above formula, the loss function of our baseline model is:
$$\text{loss}(\Theta , \mathbf {X}, \mathbf {\bar{y}}) = -\log p(\mathbf {\bar{y}}|\mathbf {X}),$$   (Eq  11)
where $\Theta $ is the set of all model parameters  We use standard back-propagation method to minimize the loss function of the baseline CRF model 
Worker Adversarial
Adversarial learning has been an effective mechanism to resolve the problem of the input features between the training and test examples having large divergences BIBREF27 , BIBREF13   It has been successfully applied on domain adaption BIBREF7 , cross-lingual learning BIBREF15 and multi-task learning BIBREF17   All settings involve feature shifting between the training and testing 
In this paper, our setting is different  We are using the annotations from non-experts, which are noise and can influence the final performances if they are not properly processed  Directly learning based on the resulting corpus may adapt the neural feature extraction into the biased annotations  In this work, we assume that individual workers have their own guidelines in mind after short training  For example, a perfect worker can annotate highly consistently with an expert, while common crowdsourcing workers may be confused and have different understandings on certain contexts  Based on the assumption, we make an adaption for the original adversarial neural network to our setting 
Our adaption is very simple  Briefly speaking, the original adversarial learning adds an additional discriminator to classify the type of source inputs, for example, the domain category in the domain adaption setting, while we add a discriminator to classify the annotation workers  Solely the features from the input sentence is not enough for worker classification  The annotation result of the worker is also required  Thus the inputs of our discriminator are different  Here we exploit both the source sentences and the crowd-annotated NE labels as basic inputs for the worker discrimination 
In the following, we describe the proposed adversarial learning module, including both the submodels and the training method  As shown by the left part of Figure 1 , the submodel consists of four parts: (1) a common Bi-LSTM over input characters; (2) an additional Bi-LSTM to encode crowd-annotated NE label sequence; (3) a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract features for worker discriminator; (4) output and prediction 
Common Bi-LSTM over Characters
To build the adversarial part, first we create a new bi-directional LSTM, named by the common Bi-LSTM:
$$\mathbf {h}_1^{\text{\tiny common}} \mathbf {h}_2^{\text{\tiny common}} \cdots \mathbf {h}_n^{\text{\tiny common}} = \text{Bi-LSTM}(\mathbf {x}_1\mathbf {x}_2\cdots \mathbf {x}_n) $$   (Eq  13)
As shown in Figure 1 , this Bi-LSTM is constructed over the same input character representations of the private Bi-LSTM, in order to extract worker independent features 
The resulting features of the common Bi-LSTM are used for both NER and the worker discriminator, different with the features of private Bi-LSTM which are used for NER only  As shown in Figure 1 , we concatenate the outputs of the common and private Bi-LSTMs together, and then feed the results into the feed-forward combination layer of the NER part  Thus Formula 6 can be rewritten as:
$$\mathbf {h}_t^{\text{ner}} = \mathbf {W} (\mathbf {h}_t^{\text{common}} \oplus \mathbf {h}_t^{\text{private}}) + \mathbf {b},$$   (Eq  14)
where $\mathbf {W}$ is wider than the original combination because the newly-added $\mathbf {h}_t^{\text{common}}$  
Noticeably, although the resulting common features are used for the worker discriminator, they actually have no capability to distinguish the workers  Because this part is exploited to maximize the loss of the worker discriminator, it will be interpreted in the later training subsection  These features are invariant among different workers, thus they can have less noises for NER  This is the goal of adversarial learning, and we hope the NER being able to find useful features from these worker independent features 
Additional Bi-LSTM over Annotated NER Labels
In order to incorporate the annotated NE labels to predict the exact worker, we build another bi-directional LSTM (named by label Bi-LSTM) based on the crowd-annotated NE label sequence  This Bi-LSTM is used for worker discriminator only  During the decoding of the testing phase, we will never have this Bi-LSTM, because the worker discriminator is no longer required 
Assuming the crowd-annotated NE label sequence annotated by one worker is $\mathbf {\bar{y}} = \bar{y}_1\bar{y}_2 \cdots \bar{y}_n$ , we exploit a looking-up table $\mathbf {E}^{L}$ to obtain the corresponding sequence of their vector representations $\mathbf {x^{\prime }}_1\mathbf {x^{\prime }}_2\cdots \mathbf {x^{\prime }}_n$ , similar to the method that maps characters into their neural representations  Concretely, for one NE label $\bar{y}_t$ ( $t \in [1, n]$ ), we obtain its neural vector by: $\mathbf {x^{\prime }}_t = \text{look-up}(\bar{y}_t, \mathbf {E}^L)$  
Next step we apply bi-directional LSTM over the sequence $\mathbf {x^{\prime }}_1\mathbf {x^{\prime }}_2\cdots \mathbf {x^{\prime }}_n$ , which can be formalized as:
$$\mathbf {h}_1^{\text{label}} \mathbf {h}_2^{\text{label}} \cdots \mathbf {h}_n^{\text{label}} = \text{Bi-LSTM}(\mathbf {x^{\prime }}_1\mathbf {x^{\prime }}_2\cdots \mathbf {x^{\prime }}_n) $$   (Eq  16)
The resulting feature sequence is concatenated with the outputs of the common Bi-LSTM, and further be used for worker classification 
CNN
Following, we add a convolutional neural network (CNN) module based on the concatenated outputs of the common Bi-LSTM and the label Bi-LSTM, to produce the final features for worker discriminator  A convolutional operator with window size 5 is used, and then max pooling strategy is applied over the convolution sequence to obtain the final fixed-dimensional feature vector  The whole process can be described by the following equations:
$$\begin{split} &\mathbf {h}_t^{\text{worker}} = \mathbf {h}_t^{\text{common}} \oplus \mathbf {h}_t^{\text{label}} \\ &\mathbf {\tilde{h}}_t^{\text{worker}} = \tanh (\mathbf {W}^{\text{cnn}}[\mathbf {h}_{t-2}^{\text{worker}}, \mathbf {h}_{t-1}^{\text{worker}}, \cdots , \mathbf {h}_{t+2}^{\text{worker}}]) \\ &\mathbf {h}^{\text{worker}} = \text{max-pooling}(\mathbf {\tilde{h}}_1^{\text{worker}}\mathbf {\tilde{h}}_2^{\text{worker}} \cdots \mathbf {\tilde{h}}_n^{\text{worker}}) \\ \end{split}$$   (Eq  18)
where $t \in [1,n]$ and $\mathbf {W}^{\text{cnn}}$ is one model parameter  We exploit zero vector to paddle the out-of-index vectors 
Output and Prediction
After obtaining the final feature vector for the worker discriminator, we use it to compute the output vector, which scores all the annotation workers  The score function is defined by:
$$\mathbf {o}^{\text{worker}} = \mathbf {W}^{\text{worker}} \mathbf {h}^{\text{worker}},$$   (Eq  20)
where $\mathbf {W}^{\text{worker}}$ is one model parameter and the output dimension equals the number of total non-expert annotators  The prediction is to find the worker which is responsible for this annotation 
Adversarial Training
The training objective with adversarial neural network is different from the baseline model, as it includes the extra worker discriminator  Thus the new objective includes two parts, one being the negative log-likelihood from NER which is the same as the baseline, and the other being the negative the log-likelihood from the worker discriminator 
In order to obtain the negative log-likelihood of the worker discriminator, we use softmax to compute the probability of the actual worker $\bar{z}$ as well, which is defined by:
$$p(\bar{z}|\mathbf {X}, \mathbf {\bar{y}}) = \frac{\exp (\mathbf {o}^{\text{worker}}_{\bar{z}})}{\sum _{z} \exp (\mathbf {o}^{\text{worker}}_z)},$$   (Eq  22)
where $z$ should enumerate all workers 
Based on the above definition of probability, our new objective is defined as follows:
$$\begin{split} \text{R}(\Theta , \Theta ^{\prime }, \mathbf {X}, \mathbf {\bar{y}}, \bar{z}) &= \text{loss}(\Theta , \mathbf {X}, \mathbf {\bar{y}}) - \text{loss}(\Theta , \Theta ^{\prime }, \mathbf {X}) \\ \text{~~~~~~} &= -\log p(\mathbf {\bar{y}}|\mathbf {X}) + \log p(\bar{z}|\mathbf {X}, \mathbf {\bar{y}}), \end{split}$$   (Eq  23)
where $\Theta $ is the set of all model parameters related to NER, and $\Theta ^{\prime }$ is the set of the remaining parameters which are only related to the worker discriminator, $\mathbf {X}$ , $\mathbf {\bar{y}}$ and $\bar{z}$ are the input sentence, the crowd-annotated NE labels and the corresponding annotator for this annotation, respectively  It is worth noting that the parameters of the common Bi-LSTM are included in the set of $\Theta $ by definition 
In particular, our goal is not to simply minimize the new objective  Actually, we aim for a saddle point, finding the parameters $\Theta $ and $\Theta ^{\prime }$ satisfying the following conditions:
$$\begin{split} \hat{\Theta } &= \mathop {arg~min}_{\Theta }\text{R}(\Theta , \Theta ^{\prime }, \mathbf {X}, \mathbf {\bar{y}}, \bar{z}) \\ \hat{\Theta }^{\prime } &= \mathop {arg~max}_{\Theta ^{\prime }}\text{R}(\hat{\Theta }, \Theta ^{\prime }, \mathbf {X}, \mathbf {\bar{y}}, \bar{z}) \\ \end{split}$$   (Eq  24)
where the first equation aims to find one $\Theta $ that minimizes our new objective $\text{R}(\cdot )$ , and the second equation aims to find one $\Theta ^{\prime }$ maximizing the same objective 
Intuitively, the first equation of Formula 24 tries to minimize the NER loss, but at the same time maximize the worker discriminator loss by the shared parameters of the common Bi-LSTM  Thus the resulting features of common Bi-LSTM actually attempt to hurt the worker discriminator, which makes these features worker independent since they are unable to distinguish different workers  The second equation tries to minimize the worker discriminator loss by its own parameter $\Theta ^{\prime }$  
We use the standard back-propagation method to train the model parameters, the same as the baseline model  In order to incorporate the term of the argmax part of Formula 24 , we follow the previous work of adversarial training BIBREF13 , BIBREF15 , BIBREF17 , by introducing a gradient reverse layer between the common Bi-LSTM and the CNN module, whose forward does nothing but the backward simply negates the gradients 
Data Sets
With the purpose of obtaining evaluation datasets from crowd annotators, we collect the sentences from two domains: Dialog and E-commerce domain  We hire undergraduate students to annotate the sentences  They are required to identify the predefined types of entities in the sentences  Together with the guideline document, the annotators are educated some tips in fifteen minutes and also provided with 20 exemplifying sentences 
Labeled Data: DL-PS  In Dialog domain (DL), we collect raw sentences from a chatbot application  And then we randomly select 20K sentences as our pool and hire 43 students to annotate the sentences  We ask the annotators to label two types of entities: Person-Name and Song-Name  The annotators label the sentences independently  In particular, each sentence is assigned to three annotators for this data  Although the setting can be wasteful of labor, we can use the resulting dataset to test several well-known baselines such as majority voting 
After annotation, we remove some illegal sentences reported by the annotators  Finally, we have 16,948 sentences annotated by the students  Table 1 shows the information of annotated data  The average Kappa value among the annotators is 0 6033, indicating that the crowd annotators have moderate agreement on identifying entities on this data 
In order to evaluate the system performances, we create a set of corpus with gold annotations  Concretely, we randomly select 1,000 sentences from the final dataset and let two experts generate the gold annotations  Among them, we use 300 sentences as the development set and the remaining 700 as the test set  The rest sentences with only student annotations are used as the training set 
Labeled data: EC-MT and EC-UQ  In E-commerce domain (EC), we collect raw sentences from two types of texts: one is titles of merchandise entries (EC-MT) and another is user queries (EC-UQ)  The annotators label five types of entities: Brand, Product, Model, Material, and Specification  These five types of entities are very important for E-commerce platform, for example building knowledge graph of merchandises  Five students participate the annotations for this domain since the number of sentences is small  We use the similar strategy as DL-PS to annotate the sentences, except that only two annotators are assigned for each sentence, because we aim to test the system performances under very small duplicated annotations 
Finally, we obtain 2,337 sentences for EC-MT and 2,300 for EC-UQ  Table 1 shows the information of annotated results  Similarly, we produce the development and test datasets for system evaluation, by randomly selecting 400 sentences and letting two experts to generate the groundtruth annotations  Among them, we use 100 sentences as the development set and the remaining 300 as the test set  The rest sentences with only crowdsourcing annotations are used as the training set 
Unlabeled data  The vector representations of characters are basic inputs of our baseline and proposed models, which are obtained by the looking-up table $\mathbf {E}^W$   As introduced before, we can use pretrained embeddings from large-scale raw corpus to initialize the table  In order to pretrain the character embeddings, we use one large-scale unlabeled data from the user-generated content in Internet  Totally, we obtain a number of 5M sentences  Finally, we use the tool word2vec to pretrain the character embeddings based on the unlabeled dataset in our experiments 
Settings
For evaluation, we use the entity-level metrics of Precision (P), Recall (R), and their F1 value in our experiments, treating one tagged entity as correct only when it matches the gold entity exactly 
There are several hyper-parameters in the baseline LSTM-CRF and our final models  We set them empirically by the development performances  Concretely, we set the dimension size of the character embeddings by 100, the dimension size of the NE label embeddings by 50, and the dimension sizes of all the other hidden features by 200 
We exploit online training with a mini-batch size 128 to learn model parameters  The max-epoch iteration is set by 200, and the best-epoch model is chosen according to the development performances  We use RMSprop BIBREF28 with a learning rate $10^{-3}$ to update model parameters, and use $l_2$ -regularization by a parameter $10^{-5}$   We adopt the dropout technique to avoid overfitting by a drop value of $0 2$  
Comparison Systems
The proposed approach (henceforward referred to as “ALCrowd”) is compared with the following systems:
CRF: We use the Crfsuite tool to train a model on the crowdsourcing labeled data  As for the feature settings, we use the supervised version of BIBREF0 zhao2008unsupervised 
CRF-VT: We use the same settings of the CRF system, except that the training data is the voted version, whose groundtruths are produced by majority voting at the character level for each annotated sentence 
CRF-MA: The CRF model proposed by BIBREF3 rodrigues2014sequence, which uses a prior distributation to model multiple crowdsourcing annotators  We use the source code provided by the authors 
LSTM-CRF: Our baseline system trained on the crowdsourcing labeled data 
LSTM-CRF-VT: Our baseline system trained on the voted corpus, which is the same as CRF-VT 
LSTM-Crowd: The LSTM-CRF model with crowd annotation learning proposed by BIBREF4 nguyen2017aggregating  We use the source code provided by the authors 
The first three systems are based on the CRF model using traditional handcrafted features, and the last three systems are based on the neural LSTM-CRF model  Among them, CRF-MA, LSTM-Crowd and our system with adversarial learning (ALCrowd) are based on crowd annotation learning that directly trains the model on the crowd-annotations  Five systems, including CRF, CRF-MA, LSTM-CRF, LSTM-Crowd, and ALCrowd, are trained on the original version of labeled data, while CRF-VT and LSTM-CRF-VT are trained on the voted version  Since CRF-VT, CRF-MA and LSTM-CRF-VT all require ground-truth answers for each training sentence, which are difficult to be produced with only two annotations, we do not apply the three models on the two EC datasets 
Main Results
In this section, we show the model performances of our proposed crowdsourcing learning system (ALCrowd), and meanwhile compare it with the other systems mentioned above  Table 2 shows the experimental results on the DL-PS datasets and Table 3 shows the experiment results on the EC-MT and EC-UQ datasets, respectively 
The results of CRF and LSTM-CRF mean that the crowd annotation is an alternative solution with low cost for labeling data that could be used for training a NER system even there are some inconsistencies  Compared with CRF, LSTM-CRF achieves much better performances on all the three data, showing +6 12 F1 improvement on DL-PS, +4 51 on EC-MT, and +9 19 on EC-UQ  This indicates that LSTM-CRF is a very strong baseline system, demonstrating the effectiveness of neural network 
Interestingly, when compared with CRF and LSTM-CRF, CRF-VT and LSTM-CRF-VT trained on the voted version perform worse in the DL-PS dataset  This trend is also mentioned in BIBREF4 nguyen2017aggregating  This fact shows that the majority voting method might be unsuitable for our task  There are two possible reasons accounting for the observation  On the one hand, simple character-level voting based on three annotations for each sentence may be still not enough  In the DL-PS dataset, even with only two predefined entity types, one character can have nine NE labels  Thus the majority-voting may be incapable of handling some cases  While the cost by adding more annotations for each sentence would be greatly increased  On the other hand, the lost information produced by majority-voting may be important, at least the ambiguous annotations denote that the input sentence is difficult for NER  The normal CRF and LSTM-CRF models without discard any annotations can differentiate these difficult contexts through learning 
Three crowd-annotation learning systems provide better performances than their counterpart systems, (CRF-MA VS CRF) and (LSTM-Crowd/ALCrowd VS LSTM-CRF)  Compared with the strong baseline LSTM-CRF, ALCrowd shows its advantage with +1 08 F1 improvements on DL-PS, +1 24 on EC-MT, and +2 38 on EC-UQ, respectively  This indicates that adding the crowd-annotation learning is quite useful for building NER systems  In addition, ALCrowd also outperforms LSTM-Crowd on all the datasets consistently, demonstrating the high effectiveness of ALCrowd in extracting worker independent features  Among all the systems, ALCrowd performs the best, and significantly better than all the other models (the p-value is below $10^{-5}$ by using t-test)  The results indicate that with the help of adversarial training, our system can learn a better feature representation from crowd annotation 
Discussion
Impact of Character Embeddings  First, we investigate the effect of the pretrained character embeddings in our proposed crowdsourcing learning model  The comparison results are shown in Figure 2 , where Random refers to the random initialized character embeddings, and Pretrained refers to the embeddings pretrained on the unlabeled data  According to the results, we find that our model with the pretrained embeddings significantly outperforms that using the random embeddings, demonstrating that the pretrained embeddings successfully provide useful information 
Case Studies  Second, we present several case studies in order to study the differences between our baseline and the worker adversarial models  We conduct a closed test on the training set, the results of which can be regarded as modifications of the training corpus, since there exist inconsistent annotations for each training sentence among the different workers  Figure 3 shows the two examples from the DL-PS dataset, which compares the outputs of the baseline and our final models, as well as the majority-voting strategy 
In the first case, none of the annotations get the correct NER result, but our proposed model can capture it  The result of LSTM-CRF is the same as majority-voting  In the second example, the output of majority-voting is the worst, which can account for the reason why the same model trained on the voted corpus performs so badly, as shown in Table 2   The model of LSTM-CRF fails to recognize the named entity “Xiexie” because of not trusting the second annotation, treating it as one noise annotation  Our proposed model is able to recognize it, because of its ability of extracting worker independent features 
Conclusions
In this paper, we presented an approach to performing crowd annotation learning based on the idea of adversarial training for Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER)  In our approach, we use a common and private Bi-LSTMs for representing annotator-generic and -specific information, and learn a label Bi-LSTM from the crowd-annotated NE label sequences  Finally, the proposed approach adopts a LSTM-CRF model to perform tagging  In our experiments, we create two data sets for Chinese NER tasks in the dialog and e-commerce domains  The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms strong baseline systems 
 Acknowledgments
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No  61572338, 61525205, and 61602160)  This work is also partially supported by the joint research project of Alibaba and Soochow University  Wenliang is also partially supported by Collaborative Innovation Center of Novel Software Technology and Industrialization 
Context 3:  In Table TABREF14, the number of trials for Persian 3-sess are shown for the different types of trial in the text-dependent speaker verification (SV)  Note that for Imposter-Wrong (IW) trials (i e  imposter speaker pronouncing wrong phrase), we merely create one wrong trial for each Imposter-Correct (IC) trial to limit the huge number of possible trials for this case  So, the number of trials for IC and IW cases are the same 
DeepMine Database Parts ::: Part2 - Text-prompted (TP)
For this part, in each session, 3 random sequences of Persian month names are shown to the respondent in two modes: In the first mode, the sequence consists of all 12 months, which will be used for speaker enrollment  The second mode contains a sequence of 3 month names that will be used as a test utterance  In each 8 sessions received by a respondent from the server, there are 3 enrollment phrases of all 12 months (all in just one session), and $7 \times 3$ other test phrases, containing fewer words  For a respondent who can read English, 3 random sequences of English digits are also recorded in each session  In one of the sessions, these sequences contain all digits and the remaining ones contain only 4 digits 
Similar to the text-dependent case, three experimental setups with different number of speaker in the evaluation set are defined (corresponding to the rows in Table TABREF16)  However, different strategy is used for defining trials: Depending on the enrollment condition (1- to 3-sess), trials are enrolled on utterances of all words from 1 to 3 different sessions (i e  3 to 9 utterances)  Further, we consider two conditions for test utterances: seq test utterance with only 3 or 4 words and full test utterances with all words (i e  same words as in enrollment but in different order)  From all setups an all conditions, the 100-spk with 1-session enrolment (1-sess) is considered as the main evaluation condition for the text-prompted case  In Table TABREF16, the numbers of trials (sum for both seq and full conditions) for Persian 1-sess are shown for the different types of trials in the text-prompted SV  Again, we just create one IW trial for each IC trial 
DeepMine Database Parts ::: Part3 - Text-independent (TI)
In this part, 8 Persian phrases that have already been transcribed on the phone level are displayed to the respondent  These phrases are chosen mostly from news and Persian Wikipedia  If the respondent is unable to read English, instead of 5 fixed phrases and 3 random digit strings, 8 other Persian phrases are also prompted to the respondent to have exactly 24 phrases in each recording session 
This part can be useful at least for three potential applications  First, it can be used for text-independent speaker verification  The second application of this part (same as Part4 of RedDots) is text-prompted speaker verification using random text (instead of a random sequence of words)  Finally, the third application is large vocabulary speech recognition in Persian (explained in the next sub-section) 
Based on the recording sessions, we created two experimental setups for speaker verification  In the first one, respondents with at least 17 recording sessions are included to the evaluation set, respondents with 16 sessions to the development and the rest of respondents to the background set (can be used as training data)  In the second setup, respondents with at least 8 sessions are included to the evaluation set, respondents with 6 or 7 sessions to the development and the rest of respondents to the background set  Table TABREF18 shows numbers of speakers in each set of the database for text-independent SV case 
For text-independent SV, we have considered 4 scenarios for enrollment and 4 scenarios for test  The speaker can be enrolled using utterances from 1, 2 or 3 consecutive sessions (1sess to 3sess) or using 8 utterances from 8 different sessions  The test speech can be one utterance (1utt) for short duration scenario or all utterances in one session (1sess) for long duration case  In addition, test speech can be selected from 5 English phrases for cross-language testing (enrollment using Persian utterances and test using English utterances)  From all setups, 1sess-1utt and 1sess-1sess for 438-spk set are considered as the main evaluation setups for text-independent case  Table TABREF19 shows number of trials for these setups 
For text-prompted SV with random text, the same setup as text-independent case together with corresponding utterance transcriptions can be used 
DeepMine Database Parts ::: Part3 - Speech Recognition
As explained before, Part3 of the DeepMine database can be used for Persian read speech recognition  There are only a few databases for speech recognition in Persian BIBREF6, BIBREF7  Hence, this part can at least partly address this problem and enable robust speech recognition applications in Persian  Additionally, it can be used for speaker recognition applications, such as training deep neural networks (DNNs) for extracting bottleneck features BIBREF8, or for collecting sufficient statistics using DNNs for i-vector training 
We have randomly selected 50 speakers (25 for each gender) from the all speakers in the database which have net speech (without silence parts) between 25 minutes to 50 minutes as test speakers  For each speaker, the utterances in the first 5 sessions are included to (small) test-set and the other utterances of test speakers are considered as a large-test-set  The remaining utterances of the other speakers are included in the training set  The test-set, large-test-set and train-set contain 5 9, 28 5 and 450 hours of speech respectively 
There are about 8300 utterances in Part3 which contain only Persian full names (i e  first and family name pairs)  Each phrase consists of several full names and their phoneme transcriptions were extracted automatically using a trained Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P)  These utterances can be used to evaluate the performance of a systems for name recognition, which is usually more difficult than the normal speech recognition because of the lack of a reliable language model 
Experiments and Results
Due to the space limitation, we present results only for the Persian text-dependent speaker verification and speech recognition 
Experiments and Results ::: Speaker Verification Experiments
We conducted an experiment on text-dependent speaker verification part of the database, using the i-vector based method proposed in BIBREF9, BIBREF10 and applied it to the Persian portion of Part1  In this experiment, 20-dimensional MFCC features along with first and second derivatives are extracted from 16 kHz signals using HTK BIBREF11 with 25 ms Hamming windowed frames with 15 ms overlap 
The reported results are obtained with a 400-dimensional gender independent i-vector based system  The i-vectors are first length-normalized and are further normalized using phrase- and gender-dependent Regularized Within-Class Covariance Normalization (RWCCN) BIBREF10  Cosine distance is used to obtain speaker verification scores and phrase- and gender-dependent s-norm is used for normalizing the scores  For aligning speech frames to Gaussian components, monophone HMMs with 3 states and 8 Gaussian components in each state are used BIBREF10  We only model the phonemes which appear in the 5 Persian text-dependent phrases 
For speaker verification experiments, the results were reported in terms of Equal Error Rate (EER) and Normalized Detection Cost Function as defined for NIST SRE08 ($\mathrm {NDCF_{0 01}^{min}}$) and NIST SRE10 ($\mathrm {NDCF_{0 001}^{min}}$)  As shown in Table TABREF22, in text-dependent SV there are 4 types of trials: Target-Correct and Imposter-Correct refer to trials when the pass-phrase is uttered correctly by target and imposter speakers respectively, and in same manner, Target-Wrong and Imposter-Wrong refer to trials when speakers uttered a wrong pass-phrase  In this paper, only the correct trials (i e  Target-Correct as target trials vs Imposter-Correct as non-target trials) are considered for evaluating systems as it has been proved that these are the most challenging trials in text-dependent SV BIBREF8, BIBREF12

ground_truth: F1 scores of 85.99 on the DL-PS data,  75.15 on the EC-MT data and 71.53 on the EC-UQ data 

F1 of 85.99 on the DL-PS dataset (dialog domain); 75.15 on EC-MT and 71.53 on EC-UQ (e-commerce domain)

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 accents are present in the corpus?
Context 3: 
Table TABREF23 shows the results of text-dependent experiments using Persian 100-spk and 3-sess setup  For filtering trials, the respondents' mobile brand and model were used in this experiment  In the table, the first two letters in the filter notation relate to the target trials and the second two letters (i e  right side of the colon) relate for non-target trials  For target trials, the first Y means the enrolment and test utterances were recorded using a device with the same brand by the target speaker  The second Y letter means both recordings were done using exactly the same device model  Similarly, the first Y for non-target trials means that the devices of target and imposter speakers are from the same brand (i e  manufacturer)  The second Y means that, in addition to the same brand, both devices have the same model  So, the most difficult target trials are “NN”, where the speaker has used different a device at the test time  In the same manner, the most difficult non-target trials which should be rejected by the system are “YY” where the imposter speaker has used the same device model as the target speaker (note that it does not mean physically the same device because each speaker participated in the project using a personal mobile device)  Hence, the similarity in the recording channel makes rejection more difficult 
The first row in Table TABREF23 shows the results for all trials  By comparing the results with the best published results on RSR2015 and RedDots BIBREF10, BIBREF8, BIBREF12, it is clear that the DeepMine database is more challenging than both RSR2015 and RedDots databases  For RSR2015, the same i-vector/HMM-based method with both RWCCN and s-norm has achieved EER less than 0 3% for both genders (Table VI in BIBREF10)  The conventional Relevance MAP adaptation with HMM alignment without applying any channel-compensation techniques (i e  without applying RWCCN and s-norm due to the lack of suitable training data) on RedDots Part1 for the male has achieved EER around 1 5% (Table XI in BIBREF10)  It is worth noting that EERs for DeepMine database without any channel-compensation techniques are 2 1 and 3 7% for males and females respectively 
One interesting advantage of the DeepMine database compared to both RSR2015 and RedDots is having several target speakers with more than one mobile device  This is allows us to analyse the effects of channel compensation methods  The second row in Table TABREF23 corresponds to the most difficult trials where the target trials come from mobile devices with different models while imposter trials come from the same device models  It is clear that severe degradation was caused by this kind of channel effects (i e  decreasing within-speaker similarities while increasing between-speaker similarities), especially for females 
The results in the third row show the condition when target speakers at the test time use exactly the same device that was used for enrollment  Comparing this row with the results in the first row proves how much improvement can be achieved when exactly the same device is used by the target speaker 
The results in the fourth row show the condition when imposter speakers also use the same device model at test time to fool the system  So, in this case, there is no device mismatch in all trials  By comparing the results with the third row, we can see how much degradation is caused if we only consider the non-target trials with the same device 
The fifth row shows similar results when the imposter speakers use device of the same brand as the target speaker but with a different model  Surprisingly, in this case, the degradation is negligible and it means that mobiles from a specific brand (manufacturer) have different recording channel properties 
The degraded female results in the sixth row as compared to the third row show the effect of using a different device model from the same brand for target trials  For males, the filters brings almost the same subsets of trials, which explains the very similar results in this case 
Looking at the first two and the last row of Table TABREF23, one can notice the significantly worse performance obtained for the female trials as compared to males  Note that these three rows include target trials where the devices used for enrollment do not necessarily match the devices used for recording test utterances  On the other hand, in rows 3 to 6, which exclude such mismatched trials, the performance for males and females is comparable  This suggest that the degraded results for females are caused by some problematic trials with device mismatch  The exact reason for this degradation is so far unclear and needs a further investigation 
In the last row of the table, the condition of the second row is relaxed: the target device should have different model possibly from the same brand and imposter device only needs to be from the same brand  In this case, as was expected, the performance degradation is smaller than in the second row 
Experiments and Results ::: Speech Recognition Experiments
In addition to speaker verification, we present several speech recognition experiments on Part3  The experiments were performed with the Kaldi toolkit BIBREF13  For training HMM-based MonoPhone model, only 20 thousands of shortest utterances are used and for other models the whole training data is used  The DNN based acoustic model is a time-delay DNN with low-rank factorized layers and skip connections without i-vector adaptation (a modified network from one of the best performing LibriSpeech recipes)  The network is shown in Table TABREF25: there are 16 F-TDNN layers, with dimension 1536 and linear bottleneck layers of dimension 256  The acoustic model is trained for 10 epochs using lattice-free maximum mutual information (LF-MMI) with cross-entropy regularization BIBREF14  Re-scoring is done using a pruned trigram language model and the size of the dictionary is around 90,000 words 
Table TABREF26 shows the results in terms of word error rate (WER) for different evaluated methods  As can be seen, the created database can be used to train well performing and practically usable Persian ASR models 
Conclusions
In this paper, we have described the final version of a large speech corpus, the DeepMine database  It has been collected using crowdsourcing and, according to the best of our knowledge, it is the largest public text-dependent and text-prompted speaker verification database in two languages: Persian and English  In addition, it is the largest text-independent speaker verification evaluation database, making it suitable to robustly evaluate state-of-the-art methods on different conditions  Alongside these appealing properties, it comes with phone-level transcription, making it suitable to train deep neural network models for Persian speech recognition 
We provided several evaluation protocols for each part of the database  The protocols allow researchers to investigate the performance of different methods in various scenarios and study the effects of channels, duration and phrase text on the performance  We also provide two test sets for speech recognition: One normal test set with a few minutes of speech for each speaker and one large test set with more (30 minutes on average) speech that can be used for any speaker adaptation method 
As baseline results, we reported the performance of an i-vector/HMM based method on Persian text-dependent part  Moreover, we conducted speech recognition experiments using conventional HMM-based methods, as well as state-of-the-art deep neural network based method using Kaldi toolkit with promising performance  Text-dependent results have shown that the DeepMine database is more challenging than RSR2015 and RedDots databases 
Acknowledgments
The data collection project was mainly supported by Sharif DeepMine company  The work on the paper was supported by Czech National Science Foundation (GACR) project "NEUREM3" No  19-26934X and the National Programme of Sustainability (NPU II) project "IT4Innovations excellence in science - LQ1602" 

ground_truth: Unanswerable

Unanswerable