pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Efficient EUD Parsing
Authors: Mathieu Dehouck, Mark Anderson, Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7

We present the system submission from the FASTPARSE team for the EUD Shared Task at IWPT 2020. We engaged with the task by focusing on efficiency. For this we considered training costs and inference efficiency. Our models are a combination of distilled neural dependency parsers and a rule-based system that projects UD trees into EUD graphs. We obtained an average ELAS of 74.04 for our official submission, ranking 4th overall.
Rhetoric, Logic, and Dialectic: Advancing Theory-based Argument Quality Assessment in Natural Language Processing
Authors: Anne Lauscher, Lily Ng, Courtney Napoles, Joel Tetreault
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8

Though preceding work in computational argument quality (AQ) mostly focuses on assessing overall AQ, researchers agree that writers would benefit from feedback targeting individual dimensions of argumentation theory. However, a large-scale theory-based corpus and corresponding computational models are missing. We fill this gap by conducting an extensive analysis covering three diverse domains of online argumentative writing and presenting GAQCorpus: the first large-scale English multi-domain (community Q&A forums, debate forums, review forums) corpus annotated with theory-based AQ scores. We then propose the first computational approaches to theory-based assessment, which can serve as strong baselines for future work. We demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale AQ annotation, show that exploiting relations between dimensions yields performance improvements, and explore the synergies between theory-based prediction and practical AQ assessment.
Distilling Neural Networks for Greener and Faster Dependency Parsing
Authors: Mark Anderson, Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7
Tasks: CPU, Dependency Parsing, GPU

The carbon footprint of natural language processing research has been increasing in recent years due to its reliance on large and inefficient neural network implementations. Distillation is a network compression technique which attempts to impart knowledge from a large model to a smaller one. We use teacher-student distillation to improve the efficiency of the Biaffine dependency parser which obtains state-of-the-art performance with respect to accuracy and parsing speed (Dozat and Manning, 2017). When distilling to 20\% of the original model's trainable parameters, we only observe an average decrease of $\sim$1 point for both UAS and LAS across a number of diverse Universal Dependency treebanks while being 2.30x (1.19x) faster than the baseline model on CPU (GPU) at inference time. We also observe a small increase in performance when compressing to 80\% for some treebanks. Finally, through distillation we attain a parser which is not only faster but also more accurate than the fastest modern parser on the Penn Treebank.
Sarcasm Detection using Context Separators in Online Discourse
Authors: Kartikey Pant, Tanvi Dadu
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7
Tasks: Sarcasm Detection

Sarcasm is an intricate form of speech, where meaning is conveyed implicitly. Being a convoluted form of expression, detecting sarcasm is an assiduous problem. The difficulty in recognition of sarcasm has many pitfalls, including misunderstandings in everyday communications, which leads us to an increasing focus on automated sarcasm detection. In the second edition of the Figurative Language Processing (FigLang 2020) workshop, the shared task of sarcasm detection released two datasets, containing responses along with their context sampled from Twitter and Reddit. In this work, we use RoBERTa_large to detect sarcasm in both the datasets. We further assert the importance of context in improving the performance of contextual word embedding based models by using three different types of inputs - Response-only, Context-Response, and Context-Response (Separated). We show that our proposed architecture performs competitively for both the datasets. We also show that the addition of a separation token between context and target response results in an improvement of 5.13% in the F1-score in the Reddit dataset.
Attention Word Embedding
Authors: Shashank Sonkar, Andrew E. Waters, Richard G. Baraniuk
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Sentence, Word Similarity

Word embedding models learn semantically rich vector representations of words and are widely used to initialize natural processing language (NLP) models. The popular continuous bag-of-words (CBOW) model of word2vec learns a vector embedding by masking a given word in a sentence and then using the other words as a context to predict it. A limitation of CBOW is that it equally weights the context words when making a prediction, which is inefficient, since some words have higher predictive value than others. We tackle this inefficiency by introducing the Attention Word Embedding (AWE) model, which integrates the attention mechanism into the CBOW model. We also propose AWE-S, which incorporates subword information. We demonstrate that AWE and AWE-S outperform the state-of-the-art word embedding models both on a variety of word similarity datasets and when used for initialization of NLP models.
Amnesic Probing: Behavioral Explanation with Amnesic Counterfactuals
Authors: Yanai Elazar, Shauli Ravfogel, Alon Jacovi, Yoav Goldberg
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00

A growing body of work makes use of probing to investigate the working of neural models, often considered black boxes. Recently, an ongoing debate emerged surrounding the limitations of the probing paradigm. In this work, we point out the inability to infer behavioral conclusions from probing results and offer an alternative method that focuses on how the information is being used, rather than on what information is encoded. Our method, Amnesic Probing, follows the intuition that the utility of a property for a given task can be assessed by measuring the influence of a causal intervention that removes it from the representation. Equipped with this new analysis tool, we can ask questions that were not possible before, e.g. is part-of-speech information important for word prediction? We perform a series of analyses on BERT to answer these types of questions. Our findings demonstrate that conventional probing performance is not correlated to task importance, and we call for increased scrutiny of claims that draw behavioral or causal conclusions from probing results.
Toxicity Detection: Does Context Really Matter?
Authors: John Pavlopoulos, Jeffrey Sorensen, Lucas Dixon, Nithum Thain, Ion Androutsopoulos
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6

Moderation is crucial to promoting healthy on-line discussions. Although several `toxicity' detection datasets and models have been published, most of them ignore the context of the posts, implicitly assuming that comments maybe judged independently. We investigate this assumption by focusing on two questions: (a) does context affect the human judgement, and (b) does conditioning on context improve performance of toxicity detection systems? We experiment with Wikipedia conversations, limiting the notion of context to the previous post in the thread and the discussion title. We find that context can both amplify or mitigate the perceived toxicity of posts. Moreover, a small but significant subset of manually labeled posts (5% in one of our experiments) end up having the opposite toxicity labels if the annotators are not provided with context. Surprisingly, we also find no evidence that context actually improves the performance of toxicity classifiers, having tried a range of classifiers and mechanisms to make them context aware. This points to the need for larger datasets of comments annotated in context. We make our code and data publicly available.
A Neural Network Model of Lexical Competition during Infant Spoken Word Recognition
Authors: Mihaela Duta, Kim Plunkett
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00

Visual world studies show that upon hearing a word in a target-absent visual context containing related and unrelated items, toddlers and adults briefly direct their gaze towards phonologically related items, before shifting towards semantically and visually related ones. We present a neural network model that processes dynamic unfolding phonological representations and maps them to static internal semantic and visual representations. The model, trained on representations derived from real corpora, simulates this early phonological over semantic/visual preference. Our results support the hypothesis that incremental unfolding of a spoken word is in itself sufficient to account for the transient preference for phonological competitors over both unrelated and semantically and visually related ones. Phonological representations mapped dynamically in a bottom-up fashion to semantic-visual representations capture the early phonological preference effects reported in a visual world task. The semantic-visual preference observed later in such a trial does not require top-down feedback from a semantic or visual system.
DocBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Document Layout Analysis
Authors: Minghao Li, Yiheng Xu, Lei Cui, Shaohan Huang, Furu Wei, Zhoujun Li, Ming Zhou
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Document Layout Analysis

Document layout analysis usually relies on computer vision models to understand documents while ignoring textual information that is vital to capture. Meanwhile, high quality labeled datasets with both visual and textual information are still insufficient. In this paper, we present \textbf{DocBank}, a benchmark dataset that contains 500K document pages with fine-grained token-level annotations for document layout analysis. DocBank is constructed using a simple yet effective way with weak supervision from the \LaTeX{} documents available on the arXiv.com. With DocBank, models from different modalities can be compared fairly and multi-modal approaches will be further investigated and boost the performance of document layout analysis. We build several strong baselines and manually split train/dev/test sets for evaluation. Experiment results show that models trained on DocBank accurately recognize the layout information for a variety of documents. The DocBank dataset is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/doc-analysis/DocBank}.
Is 42 the Answer to Everything in Subtitling-oriented Speech Translation?
Authors: Alina Karakanta, Matteo Negri, Marco Turchi
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

Subtitling is becoming increasingly important for disseminating information, given the enormous amounts of audiovisual content becoming available daily. Although Neural Machine Translation (NMT) can speed up the process of translating audiovisual content, large manual effort is still required for transcribing the source language, and for spotting and segmenting the text into proper subtitles. Creating proper subtitles in terms of timing and segmentation highly depends on information present in the audio (utterance duration, natural pauses). In this work, we explore two methods for applying Speech Translation (ST) to subtitling: a) a direct end-to-end and b) a classical cascade approach. We discuss the benefit of having access to the source language speech for improving the conformity of the generated subtitles to the spatial and temporal subtitling constraints and show that length is not the answer to everything in the case of subtitling-oriented ST.
NSTM: Real-Time Query-Driven News Overview Composition at Bloomberg
Authors: Joshua Bambrick, Minjie Xu, Andy Almonte, Igor Malioutov, Guim Perarnau, Vittorio Selo, Iat Chong Chan
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Articles, Clustering

Millions of news articles from hundreds of thousands of sources around the globe appear in news aggregators every day. Consuming such a volume of news presents an almost insurmountable challenge. For example, a reader searching on Bloomberg's system for news about the U.K. would find 10,000 articles on a typical day. Apple Inc., the world's most journalistically covered company, garners around 1,800 news articles a day. We realized that a new kind of summarization engine was needed, one that would condense large volumes of news into short, easy to absorb points. The system would filter out noise and duplicates to identify and summarize key news about companies, countries or markets. When given a user query, Bloomberg's solution, Key News Themes (or NSTM), leverages state-of-the-art semantic clustering techniques and novel summarization methods to produce comprehensive, yet concise, digests to dramatically simplify the news consumption process. NSTM is available to hundreds of thousands of readers around the world and serves thousands of requests daily with sub-second latency. At ACL 2020, we will present a demo of NSTM.
Data-driven Detection and Analysis of the Patterns of Creaky Voice
Authors: Thomas Drugman, John Kane, Christer Gobl
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00

This paper investigates the temporal excitation patterns of creaky voice. Creaky voice is a voice quality frequently used as a phrase-boundary marker, but also as a means of portraying attitude, affective states and even social status. Consequently, the automatic detection and modelling of creaky voice may have implications for speech technology applications. The acoustic characteristics of creaky voice are, however, rather distinct from modal phonation. Further, several acoustic patterns can bring about the perception of creaky voice, thereby complicating the strategies used for its automatic detection, analysis and modelling. The present study is carried out using a variety of languages, speakers, and on both read and conversational data and involves a mutual information-based assessment of the various acoustic features proposed in the literature for detecting creaky voice. These features are then exploited in classification experiments where we achieve an appreciable improvement in detection accuracy compared to the state of the art. Both experiments clearly highlight the presence of several creaky patterns. A subsequent qualitative and quantitative analysis of the identified patterns is provided, which reveals a considerable speaker-dependent variability in the usage of these creaky patterns. We also investigate how creaky voice detection systems perform across creaky patterns.
Maximum Voiced Frequency Estimation: Exploiting Amplitude and Phase Spectra
Authors: Thomas Drugman, Yannis Stylianou
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00

Maximum Voiced Frequency (MVF) is used in various speech models as the spectral boundary separating periodic and aperiodic components during the production of voiced sounds. Recent studies have shown that its proper estimation and modeling enhance the quality of statistical parametric speech synthesizers. Contrastingly, these same methods of MVF estimation have been reported to degrade the performance of singing voice synthesizers. This paper proposes a new approach for MVF estimation which exploits both amplitude and phase spectra. It is shown that phase conveys relevant information about the harmonicity of the voice signal, and that it can be jointly used with features derived from the amplitude spectrum. This information is further integrated into a maximum likelihood criterion which provides a decision about the MVF estimate. The proposed technique is compared to two state-of-the-art methods, and shows a superior performance in both objective and subjective evaluations. Perceptual tests indicate a drastic improvement in high-pitched voices.
Residual Excitation Skewness for Automatic Speech Polarity Detection
Authors: Thomas Drugman
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00

Detecting the correct speech polarity is a necessary step prior to several speech processing techniques. An error on its determination could have a dramatic detrimental impact on their performance. As current systems have to deal with increasing amounts of data stemming from multiple devices, the automatic detection of speech polarity has become a crucial problem. For this purpose, we here propose a very simple algorithm based on the skewness of two excitation signals. The method is shown on 10 speech corpora (8545 files) to lead to an error rate of only 0.06% in clean conditions and to clearly outperform four state-of-the-art methods. Besides it significantly reduces the computational load through its simplicity and is observed to exhibit the strongest robustness in both noisy and reverberant environments.
Translating Natural Language Instructions for Behavioral Robot Navigation with a Multi-Head Attention Mechanism
Authors: Patricio Cerda-Mardini, Vladimir Araujo, Alvaro Soto
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7
Tasks: Robot Navigation

We propose a multi-head attention mechanism as a blending layer in a neural network model that translates natural language to a high level behavioral language for indoor robot navigation. We follow the framework established by (Zang et al., 2018a) that proposes the use of a navigation graph as a knowledge base for the task. Our results show significant performance gains when translating instructions on previously unseen environments, therefore, improving the generalization capabilities of the model.
Streaming Language Identification using Combination of Acoustic Representations and ASR Hypotheses
Authors: Chander Chandak, Zeynab Raeesy, Ariya Rastrow, Yuzong Liu, Xiangyang Huang, Siyu Wang, Dong Kwon Joo, Roland Maas
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Identification, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This paper presents our modeling and architecture approaches for building a highly accurate low-latency language identification system to support multilingual spoken queries for voice assistants. A common approach to solve multilingual speech recognition is to run multiple monolingual ASR systems in parallel and rely on a language identification (LID) component that detects the input language. Conventionally, LID relies on acoustic only information to detect input language. We propose an approach that learns and combines acoustic level representations with embeddings estimated on ASR hypotheses resulting in up to 50% relative reduction of identification error rate, compared to a model that uses acoustic only features. Furthermore, to reduce the processing cost and latency, we exploit a streaming architecture to identify the spoken language early when the system reaches a predetermined confidence level, alleviating the need to run multiple ASR systems until the end of input query. The combined acoustic and text LID, coupled with our proposed streaming runtime architecture, results in an average of 1500ms early identification for more than 50% of utterances, with almost no degradation in accuracy. We also show improved results by adopting a semi-supervised learning (SSL) technique using the newly proposed model architecture as a teacher model.
Influence via Ethos: On the Persuasive Power of Reputation in Deliberation Online
Authors: Emaad Manzoor, George H. Chen, Dokyun Lee, Michael D. Smith
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Deliberation among individuals online plays a key role in shaping the opinions that drive votes, purchases, donations and other critical offline behavior. Yet, the determinants of opinion-change via persuasion in deliberation online remain largely unexplored. Our research examines the persuasive power of $\textit{ethos}$ -- an individual's "reputation" -- using a 7-year panel of over a million debates from an argumentation platform containing explicit indicators of successful persuasion. We identify the causal effect of reputation on persuasion by constructing an instrument for reputation from a measure of past debate competition, and by controlling for unstructured argument text using neural models of language in the double machine-learning framework. We find that an individual's reputation significantly impacts their persuasion rate above and beyond the validity, strength and presentation of their arguments. In our setting, we find that having 10 additional reputation points causes a 31% increase in the probability of successful persuasion over the platform average. We also find that the impact of reputation is moderated by characteristics of the argument content, in a manner consistent with a theoretical model that attributes the persuasive power of reputation to heuristic information-processing under cognitive overload. We discuss managerial implications for platforms that facilitate deliberative decision-making for public and private organizations online.
Learning to Recognize Code-switched Speech Without Forgetting Monolingual Speech Recognition
Authors: Sanket Shah, Basil Abraham, Gurunath Reddy M, Sunayana Sitaram, Vikas Joshi
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Recently, there has been significant progress made in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) of code-switched speech, leading to gains in accuracy on code-switched datasets in many language pairs. Code-switched speech co-occurs with monolingual speech in one or both languages being mixed. In this work, we show that fine-tuning ASR models on code-switched speech harms performance on monolingual speech. We point out the need to optimize models for code-switching while also ensuring that monolingual performance is not sacrificed. Monolingual models may be trained on thousands of hours of speech which may not be available for re-training a new model. We propose using the Learning Without Forgetting (LWF) framework for code-switched ASR when we only have access to a monolingual model and do not have the data it was trained on. We show that it is possible to train models using this framework that perform well on both code-switched and monolingual test sets. In cases where we have access to monolingual training data as well, we propose regularization strategies for fine-tuning models for code-switching without sacrificing monolingual accuracy. We report improvements in Word Error Rate (WER) in monolingual and code-switched test sets compared to baselines that use pooled data and simple fine-tuning.
CoAID: COVID-19 Healthcare Misinformation Dataset
Authors: Limeng Cui, Dongwon Lee
Date: 2020-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation

As the COVID-19 virus quickly spreads around the world, unfortunately, misinformation related to COVID-19 also gets created and spreads like wild fire. Such misinformation has caused confusion among people, disruptions in society, and even deadly consequences in health problems. To be able to understand, detect, and mitigate such COVID-19 misinformation, therefore, has not only deep intellectual values but also huge societal impacts. To help researchers combat COVID-19 health misinformation, therefore, we present CoAID (Covid-19 heAlthcare mIsinformation Dataset), with diverse COVID-19 healthcare misinformation, including fake news on websites and social platforms, along with users' social engagement about such news. CoAID includes 4,251 news, 296,000 related user engagements, 926 social platform posts about COVID-19, and ground truth labels. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/cuilimeng/CoAID.