pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Do Multilingual Language Models Capture Differing Moral Norms?
Authors: Katharina Hämmerl, Björn Deiseroth, Patrick Schramowski, Jindřich Libovický, Alexander Fraser, Kristian Kersting
Date: 2022-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, XLM-R

Massively multilingual sentence representations are trained on large corpora of uncurated data, with a very imbalanced proportion of languages included in the training. This may cause the models to grasp cultural values including moral judgments from the high-resource languages and impose them on the low-resource languages. The lack of data in certain languages can also lead to developing random and thus potentially harmful beliefs. Both these issues can negatively influence zero-shot cross-lingual model transfer and potentially lead to harmful outcomes. Therefore, we aim to (1) detect and quantify these issues by comparing different models in different languages, (2) develop methods for improving undesirable properties of the models. Our initial experiments using the multilingual model XLM-R show that indeed multilingual LMs capture moral norms, even with potentially higher human-agreement than monolingual ones. However, it is not yet clear to what extent these moral norms differ between languages.
SCoT: Sense Clustering over Time: a tool for the analysis of lexical change
Authors: Christian Haase, Saba Anwar, Seid Muhie Yimam, Alexander Friedrich, Chris Biemann
Date: 2022-03-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: EACL 2021 2
Tasks: Clustering

We present Sense Clustering over Time (SCoT), a novel network-based tool for analysing lexical change. SCoT represents the meanings of a word as clusters of similar words. It visualises their formation, change, and demise. There are two main approaches to the exploration of dynamic networks: the discrete one compares a series of clustered graphs from separate points in time. The continuous one analyses the changes of one dynamic network over a time-span. SCoT offers a new hybrid solution. First, it aggregates time-stamped documents into intervals and calculates one sense graph per discrete interval. Then, it merges the static graphs to a new type of dynamic semantic neighbourhood graph over time. The resulting sense clusters offer uniquely detailed insights into lexical change over continuous intervals with model transparency and provenance. SCoT has been successfully used in a European study on the changing meaning of `crisis'.
Under the Morphosyntactic Lens: A Multifaceted Evaluation of Gender Bias in Speech Translation
Authors: Beatrice Savoldi, Marco Gaido, Luisa Bentivogli, Matteo Negri, Marco Turchi
Date: 2022-03-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: POS, Translation

Gender bias is largely recognized as a problematic phenomenon affecting language technologies, with recent studies underscoring that it might surface differently across languages. However, most of current evaluation practices adopt a word-level focus on a narrow set of occupational nouns under synthetic conditions. Such protocols overlook key features of grammatical gender languages, which are characterized by morphosyntactic chains of gender agreement, marked on a variety of lexical items and parts-of-speech (POS). To overcome this limitation, we enrich the natural, gender-sensitive MuST-SHE corpus (Bentivogli et al., 2020) with two new linguistic annotation layers (POS and agreement chains), and explore to what extent different lexical categories and agreement phenomena are impacted by gender skews. Focusing on speech translation, we conduct a multifaceted evaluation on three language directions (English-French/Italian/Spanish), with models trained on varying amounts of data and different word segmentation techniques. By shedding light on model behaviours, gender bias, and its detection at several levels of granularity, our findings emphasize the value of dedicated analyses beyond aggregated overall results.
AdaVocoder: Adaptive Vocoder for Custom Voice
Authors: Xin Yuan, Yongbing Feng, Mingming Ye, Cheng Tuo, Minghang Zhang
Date: 2022-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis, Transfer Learning

Custom voice is to construct a personal speech synthesis system by adapting the source speech synthesis model to the target model through the target few recordings. The solution to constructing a custom voice is to combine an adaptive acoustic model with a robust vocoder. However, training a robust vocoder usually requires a multi-speaker dataset, which should include various age groups and various timbres, so that the trained vocoder can be used for unseen speakers. Collecting such a multi-speaker dataset is difficult, and the dataset distribution always has a mismatch with the distribution of the target speaker dataset. This paper proposes an adaptive vocoder for custom voice from another novel perspective to solve the above problems. The adaptive vocoder mainly uses a cross-domain consistency loss to solve the overfitting problem encountered by the GAN-based neural vocoder in the transfer learning of few-shot scenes. We construct two adaptive vocoders, AdaMelGAN and AdaHiFi-GAN. First, We pre-train the source vocoder model on AISHELL3 and CSMSC datasets, respectively. Then, fine-tune it on the internal dataset VXI-children with few adaptation data. The empirical results show that a high-quality custom voice system can be built by combining a adaptive acoustic model with a adaptive vocoder.
GRS: Combining Generation and Revision in Unsupervised Sentence Simplification
Authors: Mohammad Dehghan, Dhruv Kumar, Lukasz Golab
Date: 2022-03-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Sentence, Text Generation

We propose GRS: an unsupervised approach to sentence simplification that combines text generation and text revision. We start with an iterative framework in which an input sentence is revised using explicit edit operations, and add paraphrasing as a new edit operation. This allows us to combine the advantages of generative and revision-based approaches: paraphrasing captures complex edit operations, and the use of explicit edit operations in an iterative manner provides controllability and interpretability. We demonstrate these advantages of GRS compared to existing methods on the Newsela and ASSET datasets.
DEAM: Dialogue Coherence Evaluation using AMR-based Semantic Manipulations
Authors: Sarik Ghazarian, Nuan Wen, Aram Galstyan, Nanyun Peng
Date: 2022-03-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Abstract Meaning Representation, Coherence Evaluation, Dialogue Evaluation

Automatic evaluation metrics are essential for the rapid development of open-domain dialogue systems as they facilitate hyper-parameter tuning and comparison between models. Although recently proposed trainable conversation-level metrics have shown encouraging results, the quality of the metrics is strongly dependent on the quality of training data. Prior works mainly resort to heuristic text-level manipulations (e.g. utterances shuffling) to bootstrap incoherent conversations (negative examples) from coherent dialogues (positive examples). Such approaches are insufficient to appropriately reflect the incoherence that occurs in interactions between advanced dialogue models and humans. To tackle this problem, we propose DEAM, a Dialogue coherence Evaluation metric that relies on Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) to apply semantic-level Manipulations for incoherent (negative) data generation. AMRs naturally facilitate the injection of various types of incoherence sources, such as coreference inconsistency, irrelevancy, contradictions, and decrease engagement, at the semantic level, thus resulting in more natural incoherent samples. Our experiments show that DEAM achieves higher correlations with human judgments compared to baseline methods on several dialog datasets by significant margins. We also show that DEAM can distinguish between coherent and incoherent dialogues generated by baseline manipulations, whereas those baseline models cannot detect incoherent examples generated by DEAM. Our results demonstrate the potential of AMR-based semantic manipulations for natural negative example generation.
Improve few-shot voice cloning using multi-modal learning
Authors: Haitong Zhang, Yue Lin
Date: 2022-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Voice Cloning, Voice Conversion

Recently, few-shot voice cloning has achieved a significant improvement. However, most models for few-shot voice cloning are single-modal, and multi-modal few-shot voice cloning has been understudied. In this paper, we propose to use multi-modal learning to improve the few-shot voice cloning performance. Inspired by the recent works on unsupervised speech representation, the proposed multi-modal system is built by extending Tacotron2 with an unsupervised speech representation module. We evaluate our proposed system in two few-shot voice cloning scenarios, namely few-shot text-to-speech(TTS) and voice conversion(VC). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed multi-modal learning can significantly improve the few-shot voice cloning performance over their counterpart single-modal systems.
Hate speech, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech: The Changing Policies of Reddit
Authors: Elissa Nakajima Wickham, Emily Öhman
Date: 2022-03-18 00:00:00

This paper examines the shift in focus on content policies and user attitudes on the social media platform Reddit. We do this by focusing on comments from general Reddit users from five posts made by admins (moderators) on updates to Reddit Content Policy. All five concern the nature of what kind of content is allowed to be posted on Reddit, and which measures will be taken against content that violates these policies. We use topic modeling to probe how the general discourse for Redditors has changed around limitations on content, and later, limitations on hate speech, or speech that incites violence against a particular group. We show that there is a clear shift in both the contents and the user attitudes that can be linked to contemporary societal upheaval as well as newly passed laws and regulations, and contribute to the wider discussion on hate speech moderation.
Deep Reinforcement Agent for Efficient Instant Search
Authors: Ravneet Singh Arora, Sreejith Menon, Ayush Jain, Nehil Jain
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00

Instant Search is a paradigm where a search system retrieves answers on the fly while typing. The na\"ive implementation of an Instant Search system would hit the search back-end for results each time a user types a key, imposing a very high load on the underlying search system. In this paper, we propose to address the load issue by identifying tokens that are semantically more salient towards retrieving relevant documents and utilize this knowledge to trigger an instant search selectively. We train a reinforcement agent that interacts directly with the search engine and learns to predict the word's importance. Our proposed method treats the underlying search system as a black box and is more universally applicable to a diverse set of architectures. Furthermore, a novel evaluation framework is presented to study the trade-off between the number of triggered searches and the system's performance. We utilize the framework to evaluate and compare the proposed reinforcement method with other intuitive baselines. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method towards achieving a superior trade-off.
Dim Wihl Gat Tun: The Case for Linguistic Expertise in NLP for Underdocumented Languages
Authors: Clarissa Forbes, Farhan Samir, Bruce Harold Oliver, Changbing Yang, Edith Coates, Garrett Nicolai, Miikka Silfverberg
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00

Recent progress in NLP is driven by pretrained models leveraging massive datasets and has predominantly benefited the world's political and economic superpowers. Technologically underserved languages are left behind because they lack such resources. Hundreds of underserved languages, nevertheless, have available data sources in the form of interlinear glossed text (IGT) from language documentation efforts. IGT remains underutilized in NLP work, perhaps because its annotations are only semi-structured and often language-specific. With this paper, we make the case that IGT data can be leveraged successfully provided that target language expertise is available. We specifically advocate for collaboration with documentary linguists. Our paper provides a roadmap for successful projects utilizing IGT data: (1) It is essential to define which NLP tasks can be accomplished with the given IGT data and how these will benefit the speech community. (2) Great care and target language expertise is required when converting the data into structured formats commonly employed in NLP. (3) Task-specific and user-specific evaluation can help to ascertain that the tools which are created benefit the target language speech community. We illustrate each step through a case study on developing a morphological reinflection system for the Tsimchianic language Gitksan.
HiStruct+: Improving Extractive Text Summarization with Hierarchical Structure Information
Authors: Qian Ruan, Malte Ostendorff, Georg Rehm
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Extractive Summarization, Extractive Text Summarization, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Position, Text Summarization

Transformer-based language models usually treat texts as linear sequences. However, most texts also have an inherent hierarchical structure, i.e., parts of a text can be identified using their position in this hierarchy. In addition, section titles usually indicate the common topic of their respective sentences. We propose a novel approach to formulate, extract, encode and inject hierarchical structure information explicitly into an extractive summarization model based on a pre-trained, encoder-only Transformer language model (HiStruct+ model), which improves SOTA ROUGEs for extractive summarization on PubMed and arXiv substantially. Using various experimental settings on three datasets (i.e., CNN/DailyMail, PubMed and arXiv), our HiStruct+ model outperforms a strong baseline collectively, which differs from our model only in that the hierarchical structure information is not injected. It is also observed that the more conspicuous hierarchical structure the dataset has, the larger improvements our method gains. The ablation study demonstrates that the hierarchical position information is the main contributor to our model's SOTA performance.
Robotic Speech Synthesis: Perspectives on Interactions, Scenarios, and Ethics
Authors: Yuanchao Li, Catherine Lai
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics, Speech Synthesis

In recent years, many works have investigated the feasibility of conversational robots for performing specific tasks, such as healthcare and interview. Along with this development comes a practical issue: how should we synthesize robotic voices to meet the needs of different situations? In this paper, we discuss this issue from three perspectives: 1) the difficulties of synthesizing non-verbal and interaction-oriented speech signals, particularly backchannels; 2) the scenario classification for robotic voice synthesis; 3) the ethical issues regarding the design of robot voice for its emotion and identity. We present the findings of relevant literature and our prior work, trying to bring the attention of human-robot interaction researchers to design better conversational robots in the future.
Towards Responsible Natural Language Annotation for the Varieties of Arabic
Authors: A. Stevie Bergman, Mona T. Diab
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

When building NLP models, there is a tendency to aim for broader coverage, often overlooking cultural and (socio)linguistic nuance. In this position paper, we make the case for care and attention to such nuances, particularly in dataset annotation, as well as the inclusion of cultural and linguistic expertise in the process. We present a playbook for responsible dataset creation for polyglossic, multidialectal languages. This work is informed by a study on Arabic annotation of social media content.
Collaborative Driving: Learning- Aided Joint Topology Formulation and Beamforming
Authors: Yao Zhang, Changle Li, Tom H. Luan, Chau Yuen Yuchuan Fu
Date: 2022-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles

Currently, autonomous vehicles are able to drive more naturally based on the driving policies learned from millions of driving miles in real environments. However, to further improve the automation level of vehicles is a challenging task, especially in the case of multi-vehicle cooperation. In recent heated discussions of 6G, millimeter-wave (mmWave) and terahertz (THz) bands are deemed to play important roles in new radio communication architectures and algorithms. To enable reliable autonomous driving in 6G, in this paper, we envision collaborative autonomous driving, a new framework that jointly controls driving topology and formulate vehicular networks in the mmWave/THz bands. As a swarm intelligence system, the collaborative driving scheme goes beyond existing autonomous driving patterns based on single-vehicle intelligence in terms of safety and efficiency. With efficient data sharing, the proposed framework is able to achieve cooperative sensing and load balancing so that improve sensing efficiency with saved computational resources. To deal with the new challenges in the collaborative driving framework, we further illustrate two promising approaches for mmWave/THz-based vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. Finally, we discuss several potential open research problems for the proposed collaborative driving scheme.
Identifying Transients in the Dark Energy Survey using Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Venkitesh Ayyar, Robert Knop Jr., Autumn Awbrey, Alexis Andersen, Peter Nugent
Date: 2022-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Astronomy, image-classification, Image Classification

The ability to discover new transients via image differencing without direct human intervention is an important task in observational astronomy. For these kind of image classification problems, machine Learning techniques such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown remarkable success. In this work, we present the results of an automated transient identification on images with CNNs for an extant dataset from the Dark Energy Survey Supernova program (DES-SN), whose main focus was on using Type Ia supernovae for cosmology. By performing an architecture search of CNNs, we identify networks that efficiently select non-artifacts (e.g. supernovae, variable stars, AGN, etc.) from artifacts (image defects, mis-subtractions, etc.), achieving the efficiency of previous work performed with random Forests, without the need to expend any effort in feature identification. The CNNs also help us identify a subset of mislabeled images. Performing a relabeling of the images in this subset, the resulting classification with CNNs is significantly better than previous results.
The price of unfairness in linear bandits with biased feedback
Authors: Solenne Gaucher, Alexandra Carpentier, Christophe Giraud
Date: 2022-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Decision Making, Sequential Decision Making

In this paper, we study the problem of fair sequential decision making with biased linear bandit feedback. At each round, a player selects an action described by a covariate and by a sensitive attribute. The perceived reward is a linear combination of the covariates of the chosen action, but the player only observes a biased evaluation of this reward, depending on the sensitive attribute. To characterize the difficulty of this problem, we design a phased elimination algorithm that corrects the unfair evaluations, and establish upper bounds on its regret. We show that the worst-case regret is smaller than $\mathcal{O}(\kappa_*^{1/3}\log(T)^{1/3}T^{2/3})$, where $\kappa_*$ is an explicit geometrical constant characterizing the difficulty of bias estimation. We prove lower bounds on the worst-case regret for some sets of actions showing that this rate is tight up to a possible sub-logarithmic factor. We also derive gap-dependent upper bounds on the regret, and matching lower bounds for some problem instance.Interestingly, these results reveal a transition between a regime where the problem is as difficult as its unbiased counterpart, and a regime where it can be much harder.
Secondary complementary balancing compressive imaging with a free-space balanced amplified photodetector
Authors: Wen-Kai Yu, Ying Yang, Jin-Rui Liu, Ning Wei, Shuo-Fei Wang
Date: 2022-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration

Single-pixel imaging (SPI) has attracted widespread attention because it generally uses a non-pixelated photodetector and a digital micromirror device (DMD) to acquire the object image. Since the modulated patterns seen from two reflection directions of the DMD are naturally complementary, one can apply complementary balanced measurements to greatly improve the measurement signal-to-noise ratio and reconstruction quality. However, the balance between two reflection arms significantly determines the quality of differential measurements. In this work, we propose and demonstrate a simple secondary complementary balancing mechanism to minimize the impact of the imbalance on the imaging system. In our SPI setup, we used a silicon free-space balanced amplified photodetector with 5 mm active diameter which could directly output the difference between two optical input signals in two reflection arms. Both simulation and experimental results have demonstrated that the use of secondary complementary balancing can result in a better cancellation of direct current components of measurements and a better image restoration quality.
Training a Tokenizer for Free with Private Federated Learning
Authors: Eugene Bagdasaryan, Congzheng Song, Rogier Van Dalen, Matt Seigel, Áine Cahill
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Language Modelling

Federated learning with differential privacy, i.e. private federated learning (PFL), makes it possible to train models on private data distributed across users' devices without harming privacy. PFL is efficient for models, such as neural networks, that have a fixed number of parameters, and thus a fixed-dimensional gradient vector. Such models include neural-net language models, but not tokenizers, the topic of this work. Training a tokenizer requires frequencies of words from an unlimited vocabulary, and existing methods for finding an unlimited vocabulary need a separate privacy budget. A workaround is to train the tokenizer on publicly available data. However, in this paper we first show that a tokenizer trained on mismatched data results in worse model performance compared to a privacy-violating "oracle" tokenizer that accesses user data, with perplexity increasing by 20%. We also show that sub-word tokenizers are better suited to the federated context than word-level ones, since they can encode new words, though with more tokens per word. Second, we propose a novel method to obtain a tokenizer without using any additional privacy budget. During private federated learning of the language model, we sample from the model, train a new tokenizer on the sampled sequences, and update the model embeddings. We then continue private federated learning, and obtain performance within 1% of the "oracle" tokenizer. Since this process trains the tokenizer only indirectly on private data, we can use the "postprocessing guarantee" of differential privacy and thus use no additional privacy budget.