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  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)

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 was the baseline for this task?
Context 2: Introduction
Propaganda aims at influencing people's mindset with the purpose of advancing a specific agenda  In the Internet era, thanks to the mechanism of sharing in social networks, propaganda campaigns have the potential of reaching very large audiences BIBREF0, BIBREF1, BIBREF2 
Propagandist news articles use specific techniques to convey their message, such as whataboutism, red Herring, and name calling, among many others (cf  Section SECREF3)  Whereas proving intent is not easy, we can analyse the language of a claim/article and look for the use of specific propaganda techniques  Going at this fine-grained level can yield more reliable systems and it also makes it possible to explain to the user why an article was judged as propagandist by an automatic system 
With this in mind, we organised the shared task on fine-grained propaganda detection at the NLP4IF@EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 workshop  The task is based on a corpus of news articles annotated with an inventory of 18 propagandist techniques at the fragment level  We hope that the corpus would raise interest outside of the community of researchers studying propaganda  For example, the techniques related to fallacies and the ones relying on emotions might provide a novel setting for researchers interested in Argumentation and Sentiment Analysis 
Related Work
Propaganda has been tackled mostly at the article level  BIBREF3 created a corpus of news articles labelled as propaganda, trusted, hoax, or satire  BIBREF4 experimented with a binarized version of that corpus: propaganda vs  the other three categories  BIBREF5 annotated a large binary corpus of propagandist vs  non-propagandist articles and proposed a feature-based system for discriminating between them  In all these cases, the labels were obtained using distant supervision, assuming that all articles from a given news outlet share the label of that outlet, which inevitably introduces noise BIBREF6 
A related field is that of computational argumentation which, among others, deals with some logical fallacies related to propaganda  BIBREF7 presented a corpus of Web forum discussions with instances of ad hominem fallacy  BIBREF8, BIBREF9 introduced Argotario, a game to educate people to recognize and create fallacies, a by-product of which is a corpus with $1 3k$ arguments annotated with five fallacies such as ad hominem, red herring and irrelevant authority, which directly relate to propaganda 
Unlike BIBREF8, BIBREF9, BIBREF7, our corpus uses 18 techniques annotated on the same set of news articles  Moreover, our annotations aim at identifying the minimal fragments related to a technique instead of flagging entire arguments 
The most relevant related work is our own, which is published in parallel to this paper at EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 BIBREF10 and describes a corpus that is a subset of the one used for this shared task 
Propaganda Techniques
Propaganda uses psychological and rhetorical techniques to achieve its objective  Such techniques include the use of logical fallacies and appeal to emotions  For the shared task, we use 18 techniques that can be found in news articles and can be judged intrinsically, without the need to retrieve supporting information from external resources  We refer the reader to BIBREF10 for more details on the propaganda techniques; below we report the list of techniques:
Propaganda Techniques ::: 1  Loaded language 
Using words/phrases with strong emotional implications (positive or negative) to influence an audience BIBREF11 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 2  Name calling or labeling 
Labeling the object of the propaganda as something the target audience fears, hates, finds undesirable or otherwise loves or praises BIBREF12 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 3  Repetition 
Repeating the same message over and over again, so that the audience will eventually accept it BIBREF13, BIBREF12 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 4  Exaggeration or minimization 
Either representing something in an excessive manner: making things larger, better, worse, or making something seem less important or smaller than it actually is BIBREF14, e g , saying that an insult was just a joke 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 5  Doubt 
Questioning the credibility of someone or something 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 6  Appeal to fear/prejudice 
Seeking to build support for an idea by instilling anxiety and/or panic in the population towards an alternative, possibly based on preconceived judgments 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 7  Flag-waving 
Playing on strong national feeling (or with respect to a group, e g , race, gender, political preference) to justify or promote an action or idea BIBREF15 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 8  Causal oversimplification 
Assuming one cause when there are multiple causes behind an issue  We include scapegoating as well: the transfer of the blame to one person or group of people without investigating the complexities of an issue 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 9  Slogans 
A brief and striking phrase that may include labeling and stereotyping  Slogans tend to act as emotional appeals BIBREF16 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 10  Appeal to authority 
Stating that a claim is true simply because a valid authority/expert on the issue supports it, without any other supporting evidence BIBREF17  We include the special case where the reference is not an authority/expert, although it is referred to as testimonial in the literature BIBREF14 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 11  Black-and-white fallacy, dictatorship 
Presenting two alternative options as the only possibilities, when in fact more possibilities exist BIBREF13  As an extreme case, telling the audience exactly what actions to take, eliminating any other possible choice (dictatorship) 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 12  Thought-terminating cliché 
Words or phrases that discourage critical thought and meaningful discussion about a given topic  They are typically short and generic sentences that offer seemingly simple answers to complex questions or that distract attention away from other lines of thought BIBREF18 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 13  Whataboutism 
Discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly disproving their argument BIBREF19 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 14  Reductio ad Hitlerum 
Persuading an audience to disapprove an action or idea by suggesting that the idea is popular with groups hated in contempt by the target audience  It can refer to any person or concept with a negative connotation BIBREF20 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 15  Red herring 
Introducing irrelevant material to the issue being discussed, so that everyone's attention is diverted away from the points made BIBREF11  Those subjected to a red herring argument are led away from the issue that had been the focus of the discussion and urged to follow an observation or claim that may be associated with the original claim, but is not highly relevant to the issue in dispute BIBREF20 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 16  Bandwagon 
Attempting to persuade the target audience to join in and take the course of action because “everyone else is taking the same action” BIBREF15 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 17  Obfuscation, intentional vagueness, confusion 
Using deliberately unclear words, to let the audience have its own interpretation BIBREF21, BIBREF11  For instance, when an unclear phrase with multiple possible meanings is used within the argument and, therefore, it does not really support the conclusion 
Propaganda Techniques ::: 18  Straw man 
When an opponent's proposition is substituted with a similar one which is then refuted in place of the original BIBREF22 
Tasks
The shared task features two subtasks:
Tasks ::: Fragment-Level Classification task (FLC) 
Given a news article, detect all spans of the text in which a propaganda technique is used  In addition, for each span the propaganda technique applied must be identified 
Tasks ::: Sentence-Level Classification task (SLC) 
A sentence is considered propagandist if it contains at least one propagandist fragment  We then define a binary classification task in which, given a sentence, the correct label, either propaganda or non-propaganda, is to be predicted 
Data
The input for both tasks consists of news articles in free-text format, collected from 36 propagandist and 12 non-propagandist news outlets and then annotated by professional annotators  More details about the data collection and the annotation, as well as statistics about the corpus can be found in BIBREF10, where an earlier version of the corpus is described, which includes 450 news articles  We further annotated 47 additional articles for the purpose of the shared task using the same protocol and the same annotators 
The training, the development, and the test partitions of the corpus used for the shared task consist of 350, 61, and 86 articles and of 16,965, 2,235, and 3,526 sentences, respectively  Figure FIGREF15 shows an annotated example, which contains several propaganda techniques  For example, the fragment babies on line 1 is an instance of both Name_Calling and Labeling  Note that the fragment not looking as though Trump killed his grandma on line 4 is an instance of Exaggeration_or_Minimisation and it overlaps with the fragment killed his grandma, which is an instance of Loaded_Language 
Table TABREF23 reports the total number of instances per technique and the percentage with respect to the total number of annotations, for the training and for the development sets 
Setup
The shared task had two phases: In the development phase, the participants were provided labeled training and development datasets; in the testing phase, testing input was further provided 
The participants tried to achieve the best performance on the development set  A live leaderboard kept track of the submissions 
The test set was released and the participants had few days to make final predictions 
In phase 2, no immediate feedback on the submissions was provided  The winner was determined based on the performance on the test set 
Evaluation ::: FLC task 
FLC is a composition of two subtasks: the identification of the propagandist text fragments and the identification of the techniques used (18-way classification task)  While F$_1$ measure is appropriate for a multi-class classification task, we modified it to account for partial matching between the spans; see BIBREF10 for more details  We further computed an F$_1$ value for each propaganda technique (not shown below for the sake of saving space, but available on the leaderboard) 
Evaluation ::: SLC task 
SLC is a binary classification task with imbalanced data  Therefore, the official evaluation measure for the task is the standard F$_1$ measure  We further report Precision and Recall 
Baselines
The baseline system for the SLC task is a very simple logistic regression classifier with default parameters, where we represent the input instances with a single feature: the length of the sentence  The performance of this baseline on the SLC task is shown in Tables TABREF33 and TABREF34 
The baseline for the FLC task generates spans and selects one of the 18 techniques randomly  The inefficacy of such a simple random baseline is illustrated in Tables TABREF36 and TABREF41 
Participants and Approaches
A total of 90 teams registered for the shared task, and 39 of them submitted predictions for a total of 3,065 submissions  For the FLC task, 21 teams made a total of 527 submissions, and for the SLC task, 35 teams made a total of 2,538 submissions 
Below, we give an overview of the approaches as described in the participants' papers  Tables TABREF28 and TABREF29 offer a high-level summary 
Participants and Approaches ::: Teams Participating in the Fragment-Level Classification Only
Team newspeak BIBREF23 achieved the best results on the test set for the FLC task using 20-way word-level classification based on BERT BIBREF24: a word could belong to one of the 18 propaganda techniques, to none of them, or to an auxiliary (token-derived) class  The team fed one sentence at a time in order to reduce the workload  In addition to experimenting with an out-of-the-box BERT, they also tried unsupervised fine-tuning both on the 1M news dataset and on Wikipedia  Their best model was based on the uncased base model of BERT, with 12 Transformer layers BIBREF25, and 110 million parameters  Moreover, oversampling of the least represented classes proved to be crucial for the final performance  Finally, careful analysis has shown that the model pays special attention to adjectives and adverbs 
Team Stalin BIBREF26 focused on data augmentation to address the relatively small size of the data for fine-tuning contextual embedding representations based on ELMo BIBREF27, BERT, and Grover BIBREF28  The balancing of the embedding space was carried out by means of synthetic minority class over-sampling  Then, the learned representations were fed into an LSTM 
Participants and Approaches ::: Teams Participating in the Sentence-Level Classification Only
Team CAUnLP BIBREF29 used two context-aware representations based on BERT  In the first representation, the target sentence is followed by the title of the article  In the second representation, the previous sentence is also added  They performed subsampling in order to deal with class imbalance, and experimented with BERT$_{BASE}$ and BERT$_{LARGE}$
Team LIACC BIBREF30 used hand-crafted features and pre-trained ELMo embeddings  They also observed a boost in performance when balancing the dataset by dropping some negative examples 
Team JUSTDeep BIBREF31 used a combination of models and features, including word embeddings based on GloVe BIBREF32 concatenated with vectors representing affection and lexical features  These were combined in an ensemble of supervised models: bi-LSTM, XGBoost, and variations of BERT 
Team YMJA BIBREF33 also based their approach on fine-tuned BERT  Inspired by kaggle competitions on sentiment analysis, they created an ensemble of models via cross-validation 
Team jinfen BIBREF34 used a logistic regression model fed with a manifold of representations, including TF IDF and BERT vectors, as well as vocabularies and readability measures 
Team Tha3aroon BIBREF35 implemented an ensemble of three classifiers: two based on BERT and one based on a universal sentence encoder BIBREF36 
Team NSIT BIBREF37 explored three of the most popular transfer learning models: various versions of ELMo, BERT, and RoBERTa BIBREF38 
Team Mindcoders BIBREF39 combined BERT, Bi-LSTM and Capsule networks BIBREF40 into a single deep neural network and pre-trained the resulting network on corpora used for related tasks, e g , emotion classification 
Finally, team ltuorp BIBREF41 used an attention transformer using BERT trained on Wikipedia and BookCorpus 
Participants and Approaches ::: Teams Participating in Both Tasks
Team MIC-CIS BIBREF42 participated in both tasks  For the sentence-level classification, they used a voting ensemble including logistic regression, convolutional neural networks, and BERT, in all cases using FastText embeddings BIBREF43 and pre-trained BERT models  Beside these representations, multiple features of readability, sentiment and emotions were considered  For the fragment-level task, they used a multi-task neural sequence tagger, based on LSTM-CRF BIBREF44, in conjunction with linguistic features  Finally, they applied sentence- and fragment-level models jointly 
Team CUNLP BIBREF45 considered two approaches for the sentence-level task  The first approach was based on fine-tuning BERT  The second approach complemented the fine-tuned BERT approach by feeding its decision into a logistic regressor, together with features from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) lexicon and punctuation-derived features  Similarly to BIBREF42, for the fragment-level problem they used a Bi-LSTM-CRF architecture, combining both character- and word-level embeddings 
Team ProperGander BIBREF46 also used BERT, but they paid special attention to the imbalance of the data, as well as to the differences between training and testing  They showed that augmenting the training data by oversampling yielded improvements when testing on data that is temporally far from the training (by increasing recall)  In order to deal with the imbalance, they performed cost-sensitive classification, i e , the errors on the smaller positive class were more costly  For the fragment-level classification, inspired by named entity recognition, they used a model based on BERT using Continuous Random Field stacked on top of an LSTM 
Evaluation Results
The results on the test set for the SLC task are shown in Table TABREF33, while Table TABREF34 presents the results on the development set at the end of phase 1 (cf  Section SECREF6)  The general decrease of the F$_1$ values between the development and the test set could indicate that systems tend to overfit on the development set  Indeed, the winning team ltuorp chose the parameters of their system both on the development set and on a subset of the training set in order to improve the robustness of their system 
Tables TABREF36 and TABREF41 report the results on the test and on the development sets for the FLC task  For this task, the results tend to be more stable across the two sets  Indeed, team newspeak managed to almost keep the same difference in performance with respect to team Antiganda  Note that team MIC-CIS managed to reach the third position despite never having submitted a run on the development set 
Conclusion and Further Work
We have described the NLP4IF@EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 shared task on fine-grained propaganda identification  We received 25 and 12 submissions on the test set for the sentence-level classification and the fragment-level classification tasks, respectively  Overall, the sentence-level task was easier and most submitted systems managed to outperform the baseline  The fragment-level task proved to be much more challenging, with lower absolute scores, but most teams still managed to outperform the baseline 
We plan to make the schema and the dataset publicly available to be used beyond NLP4IF  We hope that the corpus would raise interest outside of the community of researchers studying propaganda: the techniques related to fallacies and the ones relying on emotions might provide a novel setting for researchers interested in Argumentation and Sentiment Analysis 
As a kind of advertisement, Task 11 at SemEval 2020 is a follow up of this shared task  It features two complimentary tasks:
Given a free-text article, identify the propagandist text spans 
Given a text span already flagged as propagandist and its context, identify the specific propaganda technique it contains 
This setting would allow participants to focus their efforts on binary sequence labeling for Task 1 and on multi-class classification for Task 2 
Acknowledgments
This research is part of the Propaganda Analysis Project, which is framed within the Tanbih project  The Tanbih project aims to limit the effect of “fake news”, propaganda, and media bias by making users aware of what they are reading, thus promoting media literacy and critical thinking, which is arguably the best way to address disinformation and “fake news ” The project is developed in collaboration between the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), HBKU and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) 
The corpus for the task was annotated by A Data Pro, a company that performs high-quality manual annotations 
Context 3:  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 
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: The baseline system for the SLC task is a very simple logistic regression classifier with default parameters. The baseline for the FLC task generates spans and selects one of the 18 techniques randomly.

SLC task is a very simple logistic regression classifier, FLC task generates spans and selects one of the 18 techniques randomly

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 4:  Depending on the points of reference, we cover an average 52% to 60% of the BioBERT – BERT F1 delta (54% for BioBERTv1 0, 60% for BioBERTv1 1 and 52% for our reproduction experiments)  Table TABREF17 (top) shows the importance of vector space alignment: If we replace the aligned Word2Vec vectors with their non-aligned counterparts (by setting $\mathbf {W} = \mathbf {1}$) or with randomly initialized vectors, F1 drops on all tasks 
Experiment 2: Covid-19 QA
In this section, we use the proposed method to quickly adapt an existing general-domain QA model to an emerging target domain: Covid-19  Our baseline model is SQuADBERT (bert-large-uncased-whole-word-masking-finetuned-squad), a version of BERT that was finetuned on general-domain SQuAD BIBREF19  We evaluate on Deepset-AI Covid-QA, a SQuAD-style dataset with 1380 questions (see Appendix for details on data and preprocessing)  We assume that there is no target-domain finetuning data, which is a realistic setup for a new domain 
Experiment 2: Covid-19 QA ::: Domain adaptation
We train Word2Vec with vector size $d_\mathrm {W2V} = d_\mathrm {LM} = 1024$ on CORD-19 (Covid-19 Open Research Dataset) and/or PubMed+PMC  The process takes less than an hour on CORD-19 and about one day on the combined corpus, again without the need for a GPU  Then, we update SQuADBERT's wordpiece embedding layer and tokenizer, as described in Section SECREF3  We refer to the resulting model as GreenCovidSQuADBERT 
Experiment 2: Covid-19 QA ::: Results and discussion
Table TABREF17 (bottom) shows that GreenCovidSQuADBERT outperforms general-domain SQuADBERT in all metrics  Most of the improvement can be achieved with just the small CORD-19 corpus, which is more specific to the target domain (compare “Cord-19 only” and “Cord-19+PubMed+PMC”) 
Conclusion
As a reaction to the trend towards high-resource models, we have proposed an inexpensive, CPU-only method for domain-adapting Pretrained Language Models: We train Word2Vec vectors on target-domain data and align them with the wordpiece vector space of a general-domain PTLM 
On eight biomedical NER tasks, we cover over 50% of the BioBERT – BERT F1 delta, at 5% of BioBERT's domain adaptation CO$_2$ footprint and 2% of its cloud compute cost  We have also shown how to rapidly adapt an existing BERT QA model to an emerging domain – the Covid-19 pandemic – without the need for target-domain Language Model pretraining or finetuning 
We hope that our approach will benefit practitioners with limited time or resources, and that it will encourage environmentally friendlier NLP 
Inexpensive Domain Adaptation of Pretrained Language Models (Appendix) ::: Word2Vec training
We downloaded the PubMed, PMC and CORD-19 corpora from:
https://ftp ncbi nlm nih gov/pub/pmc/oa_bulk/ [20 January 2020, 68GB raw text]
https://ftp ncbi nlm nih gov/pubmed/baseline/ [20 January 2020, 24GB raw text]
https://pages semanticscholar org/coronavirus-research [17 April 2020, 2GB raw text]
We extract all abstracts and text bodies and apply the BERT basic tokenizer (a word tokenizer that standard BERT uses before wordpiece tokenization)  Then, we train CBOW Word2Vec with negative sampling  We use default parameters except for the vector size (which we set to $d_\mathrm {W2V} = d_\mathrm {LM}$) 
Inexpensive Domain Adaptation of Pretrained Language Models (Appendix) ::: Experiment 1: Biomedical NER ::: Pretrained models
General-domain BERT and BioBERTv1 0 were downloaded from:
https://storage googleapis com/bert_models/2018_10_18/cased_L-12_H-768_A-12 zip
https://github com/naver/biobert-pretrained
Inexpensive Domain Adaptation of Pretrained Language Models (Appendix) ::: Experiment 1: Biomedical NER ::: Data
We downloaded the NER datasets by following instructions on https://github com/dmis-lab/biobert#Datasets  For detailed dataset statistics, see BIBREF2 
Inexpensive Domain Adaptation of Pretrained Language Models (Appendix) ::: Experiment 1: Biomedical NER ::: Preprocessing
We cut all sentences into chunks of 30 or fewer whitespace-tokenized words (without splitting inside labeled spans)  Then, we tokenize every chunk $S$ with $\mathcal {T} = \mathcal {T}_\mathrm {LM}$ or $\mathcal {T} = \hat{\mathcal {T}}_\mathrm {LM}$ and add special tokens:
Word-initial wordpieces in $\mathcal {T}(S)$ are labeled as B(egin), I(nside) or O(utside), while non-word-initial wordpieces are labeled as X(ignore) 
Inexpensive Domain Adaptation of Pretrained Language Models (Appendix) ::: Experiment 1: Biomedical NER ::: Modeling, training and inference
We follow BIBREF2's implementation (https://github com/dmis-lab/biobert): We add a randomly initialized softmax classifier on top of the last BERT layer to predict the labels  We finetune the entire model to minimize negative log likelihood, with the standard Adam optimizer BIBREF20 and a linear learning rate scheduler (10% warmup)  Like BIBREF2, we finetune on the concatenation of the training and development set  All finetuning runs were done on a GeForce Titan X GPU (12GB) 
Since we do not have the resources for an extensive hyperparameter search, we use defaults and recommendations from the BioBERT repository: Batch size of 32, peak learning rate of $1 \cdot 10^{-5}$, and 100 epochs 
At inference time, we gather the output logits of word-initial wordpieces only  Since the number of word-initial wordpieces is the same for $\mathcal {T}_\mathrm {LM}(S)$ and $\hat{\mathcal {T}}_\mathrm {LM}(S)$, this makes mean-pooling the logits straightforward 
Inexpensive Domain Adaptation of Pretrained Language Models (Appendix) ::: Experiment 1: Biomedical NER ::: Note on our reproduction experiments
We found it easier to reproduce or exceed BIBREF2's results for general-domain BERT, compared to their results for BioBERTv1 0 (see Figure FIGREF13, main paper)  While this may be due to hyperparameters, it suggests that BioBERTv1 0 was more strongly tuned than BERT in the original BioBERT paper  This observation does not affect our conclusions, as GreenBioBERT performs better than reproduced BERT as well 
Inexpensive Domain Adaptation of Pretrained Language Models (Appendix) ::: Experiment 2: Covid-19 QA ::: Pretrained model
We downloaded the SQuADBERT baseline from:
https://huggingface co/bert-large-uncased-whole-word-masking-finetuned-squad
Inexpensive Domain Adaptation of Pretrained Language Models (Appendix) ::: Experiment 2: Covid-19 QA ::: Data
We downloaded the Deepset-AI Covid-QA dataset from:
https://github com/deepset-ai/COVID-QA/blob/master/data/question-answering/200423_covidQA json [24 April 2020]
At the time of writing, the dataset contains 1380 questions and gold answer spans  Every question is associated with one of 98 research papers (contexts)  We treat the entire dataset as a test set 
Note that there are some important differences between the dataset and SQuAD, which make the task challenging:
The contexts are full documents rather than single paragraphs  Thus, the correct answer may appear several times, often with slightly different wordings  Only a single one of the occurrences is annotated as correct, e g :
What was the prevalence of Coronavirus OC43 in community samples in Ilorin, Nigeria?
13 3% (95% CI 6 9-23 6%) # from main text
(13 3%, 10/75)  # from abstract
SQuAD gold answers are defined as the “shortest span in the paragraph that answered the question” BIBREF19, but many Covid-QA gold answers are longer and contain non-essential context, e g :
When was the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus isolated first?
(MERS-CoV) was first isolated in 2012, in a 60-year-old man who died in Jeddah, KSA due to severe acute pneumonia and multiple organ failure
2012,
Inexpensive Domain Adaptation of Pretrained Language Models (Appendix) ::: Experiment 2: Covid-19 QA ::: Preprocessing
We tokenize every question-context pair $(Q, C)$ with $\mathcal {T} = \mathcal {T}_\mathrm {LM}$ or $\mathcal {T} = \hat{\mathcal {T}}_\mathrm {LM}$, which yields $(\mathcal {T}(Q), \mathcal {T}(C))$  Since $\mathcal {T}(C)$ is usually too long to be digested in a single forward pass, we define a sliding window with width and stride $N = \mathrm {floor}(\frac{509 - |\mathcal {T}(Q)|}{2})$  At step $n$, the “active” window is between $a^{(l)}_n = nN$ and $a^{(r)}_n = \mathrm {min}(|C|, nN+N)$  The input is defined as:
$p^{(l)}_n$ and $p^{(r)}_n$ are chosen such that $|X^{(n)}| = 512$, and such that the active window is in the center of the input (if possible) 
Inexpensive Domain Adaptation of Pretrained Language Models (Appendix) ::: Experiment 2: Covid-19 QA ::: Modeling and inference
Feeding $X^{(n)}$ into the pretrained QA model yields start logits $\mathbf {h^{\prime }}^{(\mathrm {start}, n)} \in \mathbb {R}^{|X^{(n)}|}$ and end logits $\mathbf {h^{\prime }}^{(\mathrm {end},n)} \in \mathbb {R}^{|X^{(n)}|}$  We extract and concatenate the slices that correspond to the active windows of all steps:
Next, we map the logits from the wordpiece level to the word level  This allows us to mean-pool the outputs of $\mathcal {T}_\mathrm {LM}$ and $\hat{\mathcal {T}}_\mathrm {LM}$ even when $|\mathcal {T}_\mathrm {LM}(C)| \ne |\hat{\mathcal {T}}_\mathrm {LM}(C)|$ 
Let $c_i$ be a whitespace-delimited word in $C$  Let $\mathcal {T}(C)_{j:j+|\mathcal {T}(c_i)|}$ be the corresponding wordpieces  The start and end logits of $c_i$ are derived as:
Finally, we return the answer span $C_{k:k^{\prime }}$ that maximizes $o^{(\mathrm {start})}_k + o^{(\mathrm {end})}_{k^{\prime }}$, subject to the constraints that $k^{\prime }$ does not precede $k$ and the answer span is not longer than 500 characters 

ground_truth: Unanswerable

Unanswerable