pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Comparative Study on Neural Architectures and Training Methods for Japanese Speech Recognition
Authors: Shigeki Karita, Yotaro Kubo, Michiel Adriaan Unico Bacchiani, Llion Jones
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Data Augmentation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

End-to-end (E2E) modeling is advantageous for automatic speech recognition (ASR) especially for Japanese since word-based tokenization of Japanese is not trivial, and E2E modeling is able to model character sequences directly. This paper focuses on the latest E2E modeling techniques, and investigates their performances on character-based Japanese ASR by conducting comparative experiments. The results are analyzed and discussed in order to understand the relative advantages of long short-term memory (LSTM), and Conformer models in combination with connectionist temporal classification, transducer, and attention-based loss functions. Furthermore, the paper investigates on effectivity of the recent training techniques such as data augmentation (SpecAugment), variational noise injection, and exponential moving average. The best configuration found in the paper achieved the state-of-the-art character error rates of 4.1%, 3.2%, and 3.5% for Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ) eval1, eval2, and eval3 tasks, respectively. The system is also shown to be computationally efficient thanks to the efficiency of Conformer transducers.
Text-to-SQL in the Wild: A Naturally-Occurring Dataset Based on Stack Exchange Data
Authors: Moshe Hazoom, Vibhor Malik, Ben Bogin
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL (NLP4Prog) 2021 8
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding, Semantic Parsing, Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

Most available semantic parsing datasets, comprising of pairs of natural utterances and logical forms, were collected solely for the purpose of training and evaluation of natural language understanding systems. As a result, they do not contain any of the richness and variety of natural-occurring utterances, where humans ask about data they need or are curious about. In this work, we release SEDE, a dataset with 12,023 pairs of utterances and SQL queries collected from real usage on the Stack Exchange website. We show that these pairs contain a variety of real-world challenges which were rarely reflected so far in any other semantic parsing dataset, propose an evaluation metric based on comparison of partial query clauses that is more suitable for real-world queries, and conduct experiments with strong baselines, showing a large gap between the performance on SEDE compared to other common datasets.
Psycholinguistic Tripartite Graph Network for Personality Detection
Authors: Tao Yang, Feifan Yang, Haolan Ouyang, Xiaojun Quan
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Graph Attention, Graph Learning

Most of the recent work on personality detection from online posts adopts multifarious deep neural networks to represent the posts and builds predictive models in a data-driven manner, without the exploitation of psycholinguistic knowledge that may unveil the connections between one's language usage and his psychological traits. In this paper, we propose a psycholinguistic knowledge-based tripartite graph network, TrigNet, which consists of a tripartite graph network and a BERT-based graph initializer. The graph network injects structural psycholinguistic knowledge from LIWC, a computerized instrument for psycholinguistic analysis, by constructing a heterogeneous tripartite graph. The graph initializer is employed to provide initial embeddings for the graph nodes. To reduce the computational cost in graph learning, we further propose a novel flow graph attention network (GAT) that only transmits messages between neighboring parties in the tripartite graph. Benefiting from the tripartite graph, TrigNet can aggregate post information from a psychological perspective, which is a novel way of exploiting domain knowledge. Extensive experiments on two datasets show that TrigNet outperforms the existing state-of-art model by 3.47 and 2.10 points in average F1. Moreover, the flow GAT reduces the FLOPS and Memory measures by 38% and 32%, respectively, in comparison to the original GAT in our setting.
Auto-tagging of Short Conversational Sentences using Natural Language Processing Methods
Authors: Şükrü Ozan, D. Emre Taşar
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, TAG

In this study, we aim to find a method to auto-tag sentences specific to a domain. Our training data comprises short conversational sentences extracted from chat conversations between company's customer representatives and web site visitors. We manually tagged approximately 14 thousand visitor inputs into ten basic categories, which will later be used in a transformer-based language model with attention mechanisms for the ultimate goal of developing a chatbot application that can produce meaningful dialogue. We considered three different state-of-the-art models and reported their auto-tagging capabilities. We achieved the best performance with the bidirectional encoder representation from transformers (BERT) model. Implementation of the models used in these experiments can be cloned from our GitHub repository and tested for similar auto-tagging problems without much effort.
Fragmented and Valuable: Following Sentiment Changes in Food Tweets
Authors: Maija Kāle, Matīss Rikters
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction, Relation

We analysed sentiment and frequencies related to smell, taste and temperature expressed by food tweets in the Latvian language. To get a better understanding of the role of smell, taste and temperature in the mental map of food associations, we looked at such categories as 'tasty' and 'healthy', which turned out to be mutually exclusive. By analysing the occurrence frequency of words associated with these categories, we discovered that food discourse overall was permeated by `tasty' while the category of 'healthy' was relatively small. Finally, we used the analysis of temporal dynamics to see if we can trace seasonality or other temporal aspects in smell, taste and temperature as reflected in food tweets. Understanding the composition of social media content with relation to smell, taste and temperature in food tweets allows us to develop our work further - on food culture/seasonality and its relation to temperature, on our limited capacity to express smell-related sentiments, and the lack of the paradigm of taste in discussing food healthiness.
Unsupervised Automatic Speech Recognition: A Review
Authors: Hanan Aldarmaki, Asad Ullah, Nazar Zaki
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems can be trained to achieve remarkable performance given large amounts of manually transcribed speech, but large labeled data sets can be difficult or expensive to acquire for all languages of interest. In this paper, we review the research literature to identify models and ideas that could lead to fully unsupervised ASR, including unsupervised segmentation of the speech signal, unsupervised mapping from speech segments to text, and semi-supervised models with nominal amounts of labeled examples. The objective of the study is to identify the limitations of what can be learned from speech data alone and to understand the minimum requirements for speech recognition. Identifying these limitations would help optimize the resources and efforts in ASR development for low-resource languages.
DravidianMultiModality: A Dataset for Multi-modal Sentiment Analysis in Tamil and Malayalam
Authors: Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Jishnu Parameswaran P. K, Premjith B, K. P Soman, Rahul Ponnusamy, Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan, Kingston Pal Thamburaj, John P. McCrae
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Analysis

Human communication is inherently multimodal and asynchronous. Analyzing human emotions and sentiment is an emerging field of artificial intelligence. We are witnessing an increasing amount of multimodal content in local languages on social media about products and other topics. However, there are not many multimodal resources available for under-resourced Dravidian languages. Our study aims to create a multimodal sentiment analysis dataset for the under-resourced Tamil and Malayalam languages. First, we downloaded product or movies review videos from YouTube for Tamil and Malayalam. Next, we created captions for the videos with the help of annotators. Then we labelled the videos for sentiment, and verified the inter-annotator agreement using Fleiss's Kappa. This is the first multimodal sentiment analysis dataset for Tamil and Malayalam by volunteer annotators.
UniKeyphrase: A Unified Extraction and Generation Framework for Keyphrase Prediction
Authors: Huanqin Wu, Wei Liu, Lei LI, Dan Nie, Tao Chen, Feng Zhang, Di Wang
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2021 8
Tasks: Diversity, Relation

Keyphrase Prediction (KP) task aims at predicting several keyphrases that can summarize the main idea of the given document. Mainstream KP methods can be categorized into purely generative approaches and integrated models with extraction and generation. However, these methods either ignore the diversity among keyphrases or only weakly capture the relation across tasks implicitly. In this paper, we propose UniKeyphrase, a novel end-to-end learning framework that jointly learns to extract and generate keyphrases. In UniKeyphrase, stacked relation layer and bag-of-words constraint are proposed to fully exploit the latent semantic relation between extraction and generation in the view of model structure and training process, respectively. Experiments on KP benchmarks demonstrate that our joint approach outperforms mainstream methods by a large margin.
RealTranS: End-to-End Simultaneous Speech Translation with Convolutional Weighted-Shrinking Transformer
Authors: Xingshan Zeng, Liangyou Li, Qun Liu
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2021 8
Tasks: Reranking, Translation

End-to-end simultaneous speech translation (SST), which directly translates speech in one language into text in another language in real-time, is useful in many scenarios but has not been fully investigated. In this work, we propose RealTranS, an end-to-end model for SST. To bridge the modality gap between speech and text, RealTranS gradually downsamples the input speech with interleaved convolution and unidirectional Transformer layers for acoustic modeling, and then maps speech features into text space with a weighted-shrinking operation and a semantic encoder. Besides, to improve the model performance in simultaneous scenarios, we propose a blank penalty to enhance the shrinking quality and a Wait-K-Stride-N strategy to allow local reranking during decoding. Experiments on public and widely-used datasets show that RealTranS with the Wait-K-Stride-N strategy outperforms prior end-to-end models as well as cascaded models in diverse latency settings.
Probing Multilingual Language Models for Discourse
Authors: Murathan Kurfali, Robert Östling
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL (RepL4NLP) 2021 8
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Sentence

Pre-trained multilingual language models have become an important building block in multilingual natural language processing. In the present paper, we investigate a range of such models to find out how well they transfer discourse-level knowledge across languages. This is done with a systematic evaluation on a broader set of discourse-level tasks than has been previously been assembled. We find that the XLM-RoBERTa family of models consistently show the best performance, by simultaneously being good monolingual models and degrading relatively little in a zero-shot setting. Our results also indicate that model distillation may hurt the ability of cross-lingual transfer of sentence representations, while language dissimilarity at most has a modest effect. We hope that our test suite, covering 5 tasks with a total of 22 languages in 10 distinct families, will serve as a useful evaluation platform for multilingual performance at and beyond the sentence level.
MICE: A Crosslinguistic Emotion Corpus in Malay, Indonesian, Chinese and English
Authors: Ng Bee Chin, Yosephine Susanto, Erik Cambria
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

MICE is a corpus of emotion words in four languages which is currently working progress. There are two sections to this study, Part I: Emotion word corpus and Part II: Emotion word survey. In Part 1, the method of how the emotion data is culled for each of the four languages will be described and very preliminary data will be presented. In total, we identified 3,750 emotion expressions in Malay, 6,657 in Indonesian, 3,347 in Mandarin Chinese and 8,683 in English. We are currently evaluating and double checking the corpus and doing further analysis on the distribution of these emotion expressions. Part II Emotion word survey involved an online language survey which collected information on how speakers assigned the emotion words into basic emotion categories, the rating for valence and intensity as well as biographical information of all the respondents.
Catchphrase: Automatic Detection of Cultural References
Authors: Nir Sweed, Dafna Shahaf
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

A snowclone is a customizable phrasal template that can be realized in multiple, instantly recognized variants. For example, ``* is the new *" (Orange is the new black, 40 is the new 30). Snowclones are extensively used in social media. In this paper, we study snowclones originating from pop-culture quotes; our goal is to automatically detect cultural references in text. We introduce a new, publicly available data set of pop-culture quotes and their corresponding snowclone usages and train models on them. We publish code for Catchphrase, an internet browser plugin to automatically detect and mark references in real-time, and examine its performance via a user study. Aside from assisting people to better comprehend cultural references, we hope that detecting snowclones can complement work on paraphrasing and help to tackle long-standing questions in social science about the dynamics of information propagation.
Making Better Use of Bilingual Information for Cross-Lingual AMR Parsing
Authors: Yitao Cai, Zhe Lin, Xiaojun Wan
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2021 8
Tasks: Abstract Meaning Representation, AMR Parsing, Decoder

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a rooted, labeled, acyclic graph representing the semantics of natural language. As previous works show, although AMR is designed for English at first, it can also represent semantics in other languages. However, they find that concepts in their predicted AMR graphs are less specific. We argue that the misprediction of concepts is due to the high relevance between English tokens and AMR concepts. In this work, we introduce bilingual input, namely the translated texts as well as non-English texts, in order to enable the model to predict more accurate concepts. Besides, we also introduce an auxiliary task, requiring the decoder to predict the English sequences at the same time. The auxiliary task can help the decoder understand what exactly the corresponding English tokens are. Our proposed cross-lingual AMR parser surpasses previous state-of-the-art parser by 10.6 points on Smatch F1 score. The ablation study also demonstrates the efficacy of our proposed modules.
A Review of Human Evaluation for Style Transfer
Authors: Eleftheria Briakou, Sweta Agrawal, Ke Zhang, Joel Tetreault, Marine Carpuat
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL (GEM) 2021 8
Tasks: Style Transfer

This paper reviews and summarizes human evaluation practices described in 97 style transfer papers with respect to three main evaluation aspects: style transfer, meaning preservation, and fluency. In principle, evaluations by human raters should be the most reliable. However, in style transfer papers, we find that protocols for human evaluations are often underspecified and not standardized, which hampers the reproducibility of research in this field and progress toward better human and automatic evaluation methods.
Sequential End-to-End Intent and Slot Label Classification and Localization
Authors: Yiran Cao, Nihal Potdar, Anderson R. Avila
Date: 2021-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Classification, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Spoken Language Understanding, Temporal Localization

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is significantly impacted by delayed responses from a spoken dialogue system. Hence, end-to-end (e2e) spoken language understanding (SLU) solutions have recently been proposed to decrease latency. Such approaches allow for the extraction of semantic information directly from the speech signal, thus bypassing the need for a transcript from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. In this paper, we propose a compact e2e SLU architecture for streaming scenarios, where chunks of the speech signal are processed continuously to predict intent and slot values. Our model is based on a 3D convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) and a unidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM). We compare the performance of two alignment-free losses: the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) method and its adapted version, namely connectionist temporal localization (CTL). The latter performs not only the classification but also localization of sequential audio events. The proposed solution is evaluated on the Fluent Speech Command dataset and results show our model ability to process incoming speech signal, reaching accuracy as high as 98.97 % for CTC and 98.78 % for CTL on single-label classification, and as high as 95.69 % for CTC and 95.28 % for CTL on two-label prediction.
Comprehension Based Question Answering using Bloom's Taxonomy
Authors: Pritish Sahu, Michael Cogswell, Sara Rutherford-Quach, Ajay Divakaran
Date: 2021-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Question Answering

Current pre-trained language models have lots of knowledge, but a more limited ability to use that knowledge. Bloom's Taxonomy helps educators teach children how to use knowledge by categorizing comprehension skills, so we use it to analyze and improve the comprehension skills of large pre-trained language models. Our experiments focus on zero-shot question answering, using the taxonomy to provide proximal context that helps the model answer questions by being relevant to those questions. We show targeting context in this manner improves performance across 4 popular common sense question answer datasets.
Compacter: Efficient Low-Rank Hypercomplex Adapter Layers
Authors: Rabeeh Karimi Mahabadi, James Henderson, Sebastian Ruder
Date: 2021-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Adapting large-scale pretrained language models to downstream tasks via fine-tuning is the standard method for achieving state-of-the-art performance on NLP benchmarks. However, fine-tuning all weights of models with millions or billions of parameters is sample-inefficient, unstable in low-resource settings, and wasteful as it requires storing a separate copy of the model for each task. Recent work has developed parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, but these approaches either still require a relatively large number of parameters or underperform standard fine-tuning. In this work, we propose Compacter, a method for fine-tuning large-scale language models with a better trade-off between task performance and the number of trainable parameters than prior work. Compacter accomplishes this by building on top of ideas from adapters, low-rank optimization, and parameterized hypercomplex multiplication layers. Specifically, Compacter inserts task-specific weight matrices into a pretrained model's weights, which are computed efficiently as a sum of Kronecker products between shared "slow" weights and "fast" rank-one matrices defined per Compacter layer. By only training 0.047% of a pretrained model's parameters, Compacter performs on par with standard fine-tuning on GLUE and outperforms standard fine-tuning on SuperGLUE and low-resource settings. Our code is publicly available at~\url{https://github.com/rabeehk/compacter}.
Neural Extractive Search
Authors: Shauli Ravfogel, Hillel Taub-Tabib, Yoav Goldberg
Date: 2021-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Retrieval

Domain experts often need to extract structured information from large corpora. We advocate for a search paradigm called ``extractive search'', in which a search query is enriched with capture-slots, to allow for such rapid extraction. Such an extractive search system can be built around syntactic structures, resulting in high-precision, low-recall results. We show how the recall can be improved using neural retrieval and alignment. The goals of this paper are to concisely introduce the extractive-search paradigm; and to demonstrate a prototype neural retrieval system for extractive search and its benefits and potential. Our prototype is available at \url{https://spike.neural-sim.apps.allenai.org/} and a video demonstration is available at \url{https://vimeo.com/559586687}.
Multiple simultaneous solution representations in a population based evolutionary algorithm
Authors: Eric S. Fraga
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00

The representation used for solutions in optimization can have a significant impact on the performance of the optimization method. Traditional population based evolutionary methods have homogeneous populations where all solutions use the same representation. If different representations are to be considered, different runs are required to investigate the relative performance. In this paper, we illustrate the use of a population based evolutionary method, Fresa, inspired by the propagation of Strawberry plants, which allows for multiple representations to co-exist in the population. Fresa is implemented in the Julia language. Julia provides dynamic typing and multiple dispatch. In multiple dispatch, the function invoked is determined, dynamically at run time, by the types of the arguments passed to it. This enables a generic implementation of key steps in the plant propagation algorithm which allows for a heterogeneous population. The search procedure then leads to a competition between representations automatically. A simple case study from the design of operating conditions for a batch reactor system is used to illustrate heterogeneous population based search.
A Case Study: Using Genetic Algorithm for Job Scheduling Problem
Authors: Burak Tağtekin, Mahiye Uluyağmur Öztürk, Mert Kutay Sezer
Date: 2021-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Nowadays, DevOps pipelines of huge projects are getting more and more complex. Each job in the pipeline might need different requirements including specific hardware specifications and dependencies. To achieve minimal makespan, developers always apply as much machines as possible. Consequently, others may be stalled for waiting resource released. Minimizing the makespan of each job using a few resource is a challenging problem. In this study, it is aimed to 1) automatically determine the priority of jobs to reduce the waiting time in the line, 2) automatically allocate the machine resource to each job. In this work, the problem is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem. We use GA algorithm to automatically determine job priorities and resource demand for minimizing individual makespan and resource usage. Finally, the experimental results show that our proposed priority list generation algorithm is more effective than current priority list producing method in the aspects of makespan and allocated machine count.