pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
CampNet: Context-Aware Mask Prediction for End-to-End Text-Based Speech Editing
Authors: Tao Wang, Jiangyan Yi, Ruibo Fu, JianHua Tao, Zhengqi Wen
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Sentence

The text-based speech editor allows the editing of speech through intuitive cutting, copying, and pasting operations to speed up the process of editing speech. However, the major drawback of current systems is that edited speech often sounds unnatural due to cut-copy-paste operation. In addition, it is not obvious how to synthesize records according to a new word not appearing in the transcript. This paper proposes a novel end-to-end text-based speech editing method called context-aware mask prediction network (CampNet). The model can simulate the text-based speech editing process by randomly masking part of speech and then predicting the masked region by sensing the speech context. It can solve unnatural prosody in the edited region and synthesize the speech corresponding to the unseen words in the transcript. Secondly, for the possible operation of text-based speech editing, we design three text-based operations based on CampNet: deletion, insertion, and replacement. These operations can cover various situations of speech editing. Thirdly, to synthesize the speech corresponding to long text in insertion and replacement operations, a word-level autoregressive generation method is proposed. Fourthly, we propose a speaker adaptation method using only one sentence for CampNet and explore the ability of few-shot learning based on CampNet, which provides a new idea for speech forgery tasks. The subjective and objective experiments on VCTK and LibriTTS datasets show that the speech editing results based on CampNet are better than TTS technology, manual editing, and VoCo method. We also conduct detailed ablation experiments to explore the effect of the CampNet structure on its performance. Finally, the experiment shows that speaker adaptation with only one sentence can further improve the naturalness of speech. Examples of generated speech can be found at https://hairuo55.github.io/CampNet.
MACRONYM: A Large-Scale Dataset for Multilingual and Multi-Domain Acronym Extraction
Authors: Amir Pouran Ben Veyseh, Nicole Meister, Seunghyun Yoon, Rajiv Jain, Franck Dernoncourt, Thien Huu Nguyen
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10

Acronym extraction is the task of identifying acronyms and their expanded forms in texts that is necessary for various NLP applications. Despite major progress for this task in recent years, one limitation of existing AE research is that they are limited to the English language and certain domains (i.e., scientific and biomedical). As such, challenges of AE in other languages and domains is mainly unexplored. Lacking annotated datasets in multiple languages and domains has been a major issue to hinder research in this area. To address this limitation, we propose a new dataset for multilingual multi-domain AE. Specifically, 27,200 sentences in 6 typologically different languages and 2 domains, i.e., Legal and Scientific, is manually annotated for AE. Our extensive experiments on the proposed dataset show that AE in different languages and different learning settings has unique challenges, emphasizing the necessity of further research on multilingual and multi-domain AE.
Is there an aesthetic component of language?
Authors: Harshit Parmar, Jeffrey P. Williams
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00

Speakers of all human languages make use of grammatical devices to express attributional qualities, feelings, and opinions as well as to provide meta-commentary on topics in discourse. In general, linguists refer to this category as 'expressives'in spite of the fact that defining exactly what 'expressives' are remains elusive. The elusiveness of expressives has given rise to considerable speculation about the nature of expressivity as a linguistic principle. Specifically, several scholars have pointed out the 'special' or 'unusual' nature of expressives vis-a-vis 'normal' or 'natural' morpho-syntax.
CALCS 2021 Shared Task: Machine Translation for Code-Switched Data
Authors: Shuguang Chen, Gustavo Aguilar, Anirudh Srinivasan, Mona Diab, Thamar Solorio
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Identification, Machine Translation, NER, POS, Translation

To date, efforts in the code-switching literature have focused for the most part on language identification, POS, NER, and syntactic parsing. In this paper, we address machine translation for code-switched social media data. We create a community shared task. We provide two modalities for participation: supervised and unsupervised. For the supervised setting, participants are challenged to translate English into Hindi-English (Eng-Hinglish) in a single direction. For the unsupervised setting, we provide the following language pairs: English and Spanish-English (Eng-Spanglish), and English and Modern Standard Arabic-Egyptian Arabic (Eng-MSAEA) in both directions. We share insights and challenges in curating the "into" code-switching language evaluation data. Further, we provide baselines for all language pairs in the shared task. The leaderboard for the shared task comprises 12 individual system submissions corresponding to 5 different teams. The best performance achieved is 12.67% BLEU score for English to Hinglish and 25.72% BLEU score for MSAEA to English.
Models and Datasets for Cross-Lingual Summarisation
Authors: Laura Perez-Beltrachini, Mirella Lapata
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Articles, Sentence

We present a cross-lingual summarisation corpus with long documents in a source language associated with multi-sentence summaries in a target language. The corpus covers twelve language pairs and directions for four European languages, namely Czech, English, French and German, and the methodology for its creation can be applied to several other languages. We derive cross-lingual document-summary instances from Wikipedia by combining lead paragraphs and articles' bodies from language aligned Wikipedia titles. We analyse the proposed cross-lingual summarisation task with automatic metrics and validate it with a human study. To illustrate the utility of our dataset we report experiments with multi-lingual pre-trained models in supervised, zero- and few-shot, and out-of-domain scenarios.
Data-Driven Mitigation of Adversarial Text Perturbation
Authors: Rasika Bhalerao, Mohammad Al-Rubaie, Anand Bhaskar, Igor Markov
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Text, Classification, Robust classification, Word Embeddings

Social networks have become an indispensable part of our lives, with billions of people producing ever-increasing amounts of text. At such scales, content policies and their enforcement become paramount. To automate moderation, questionable content is detected by Natural Language Processing (NLP) classifiers. However, high-performance classifiers are hampered by misspellings and adversarial text perturbations. In this paper, we classify intentional and unintentional adversarial text perturbation into ten types and propose a deobfuscation pipeline to make NLP models robust to such perturbations. We propose Continuous Word2Vec (CW2V), our data-driven method to learn word embeddings that ensures that perturbations of words have embeddings similar to those of the original words. We show that CW2V embeddings are generally more robust to text perturbations than embeddings based on character ngrams. Our robust classification pipeline combines deobfuscation and classification, using proposed defense methods and word embeddings to classify whether Facebook posts are requesting engagement such as likes. Our pipeline results in engagement bait classification that goes from 0.70 to 0.67 AUC with adversarial text perturbation, while character ngram-based word embedding methods result in downstream classification that goes from 0.76 to 0.64.
From Hesitancy Framings to Vaccine Hesitancy Profiles: A Journey of Stance, Ontological Commitments and Moral Foundations
Authors: Maxwell Weinzierl, Sanda Harabagiu
Date: 2022-02-18 00:00:00

While billions of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, too many people remain hesitant. Twitter, with its substantial reach and daily exposure, is an excellent resource for examining how people frame their vaccine hesitancy and to uncover vaccine hesitancy profiles. In this paper we expose our processing journey from identifying Vaccine Hesitancy Framings in a collection of 9,133,471 original tweets discussing the COVID-19 vaccines, establishing their ontological commitments, annotating the Moral Foundations they imply to the automatic recognition of the stance of the tweet authors toward any of the CoVaxFrames that we have identified. When we found that 805,336 Twitter users had a stance towards some CoVaxFrames in either the 9,133,471 original tweets or their 17,346,664 retweets, we were able to derive nine different Vaccine Hesitancy Profiles of these users and to interpret these profiles based on the ontological commitments of the frames they evoked in their tweets and on value of their stance towards the evoked frames.
From FreEM to D'AlemBERT: a Large Corpus and a Language Model for Early Modern French
Authors: Simon Gabay, Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Alexandre Bartz, Alix Chagué, Rachel Bawden, Philippe Gambette, Benoît Sagot
Date: 2022-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, Transfer Learning

Language models for historical states of language are becoming increasingly important to allow the optimal digitisation and analysis of old textual sources. Because these historical states are at the same time more complex to process and more scarce in the corpora available, specific efforts are necessary to train natural language processing (NLP) tools adapted to the data. In this paper, we present our efforts to develop NLP tools for Early Modern French (historical French from the 16$^\text{th}$ to the 18$^\text{th}$ centuries). We present the $\text{FreEM}_{\text{max}}$ corpus of Early Modern French and D'AlemBERT, a RoBERTa-based language model trained on $\text{FreEM}_{\text{max}}$. We evaluate the usefulness of D'AlemBERT by fine-tuning it on a part-of-speech tagging task, outperforming previous work on the test set. Importantly, we find evidence for the transfer learning capacity of the language model, since its performance on lesser-resourced time periods appears to have been boosted by the more resourced ones. We release D'AlemBERT and the open-sourced subpart of the $\text{FreEM}_{\text{max}}$ corpus.
VaccineLies: A Natural Language Resource for Learning to Recognize Misinformation about the COVID-19 and HPV Vaccines
Authors: Maxwell Weinzierl, Sanda Harabagiu
Date: 2022-02-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Misinformation

Billions of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, but many remain hesitant. Misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines and other vaccines, propagating on social media, is believed to drive hesitancy towards vaccination. The ability to automatically recognize misinformation targeting vaccines on Twitter depends on the availability of data resources. In this paper we present VaccineLies, a large collection of tweets propagating misinformation about two vaccines: the COVID-19 vaccines and the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines. Misinformation targets are organized in vaccine-specific taxonomies, which reveal the misinformation themes and concerns. The ontological commitments of the Misinformation taxonomies provide an understanding of which misinformation themes and concerns dominate the discourse about the two vaccines covered in VaccineLies. The organization into training, testing and development sets of VaccineLies invites the development of novel supervised methods for detecting misinformation on Twitter and identifying the stance towards it. Furthermore, VaccineLies can be a stepping stone for the development of datasets focusing on misinformation targeting additional vaccines.
Identifying the Adoption or Rejection of Misinformation Targeting COVID-19 Vaccines in Twitter Discourse
Authors: Maxwell Weinzierl, Sanda Harabagiu
Date: 2022-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation

Although billions of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, too many people remain hesitant. Misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines, propagating on social media, is believed to drive hesitancy towards vaccination. However, exposure to misinformation does not necessarily indicate misinformation adoption. In this paper we describe a novel framework for identifying the stance towards misinformation, relying on attitude consistency and its properties. The interactions between attitude consistency, adoption or rejection of misinformation and the content of microblogs are exploited in a novel neural architecture, where the stance towards misinformation is organized in a knowledge graph. This new neural framework is enabling the identification of stance towards misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines with state-of-the-art results. The experiments are performed on a new dataset of misinformation towards COVID-19 vaccines, called CoVaxLies, collected from recent Twitter discourse. Because CoVaxLies provides a taxonomy of the misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, we are able to show which type of misinformation is mostly adopted and which is mostly rejected.
Synthetic Disinformation Attacks on Automated Fact Verification Systems
Authors: Yibing Du, Antoine Bosselut, Christopher D. Manning
Date: 2022-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Fact Verification, Misinformation

Automated fact-checking is a needed technology to curtail the spread of online misinformation. One current framework for such solutions proposes to verify claims by retrieving supporting or refuting evidence from related textual sources. However, the realistic use cases for fact-checkers will require verifying claims against evidence sources that could be affected by the same misinformation. Furthermore, the development of modern NLP tools that can produce coherent, fabricated content would allow malicious actors to systematically generate adversarial disinformation for fact-checkers. In this work, we explore the sensitivity of automated fact-checkers to synthetic adversarial evidence in two simulated settings: AdversarialAddition, where we fabricate documents and add them to the evidence repository available to the fact-checking system, and AdversarialModification, where existing evidence source documents in the repository are automatically altered. Our study across multiple models on three benchmarks demonstrates that these systems suffer significant performance drops against these attacks. Finally, we discuss the growing threat of modern NLG systems as generators of disinformation in the context of the challenges they pose to automated fact-checkers.
Simple Genetic Operators are Universal Approximators of Probability Distributions (and other Advantages of Expressive Encodings)
Authors: Elliot Meyerson, Xin Qiu, Risto Miikkulainen
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

This paper characterizes the inherent power of evolutionary algorithms. This power depends on the computational properties of the genetic encoding. With some encodings, two parents recombined with a simple crossover operator can sample from an arbitrary distribution of child phenotypes. Such encodings are termed \emph{expressive encodings} in this paper. Universal function approximators, including popular evolutionary substrates of genetic programming and neural networks, can be used to construct expressive encodings. Remarkably, this approach need not be applied only to domains where the phenotype is a function: Expressivity can be achieved even when optimizing static structures, such as binary vectors. Such simpler settings make it possible to characterize expressive encodings theoretically: Across a variety of test problems, expressive encodings are shown to achieve up to super-exponential convergence speed-ups over the standard direct encoding. The conclusion is that, across evolutionary computation areas as diverse as genetic programming, neuroevolution, genetic algorithms, and theory, expressive encodings can be a key to understanding and realizing the full power of evolution.
ABO3 Perovskites' Formability Prediction and Crystal Structure Classification using Machine Learning
Authors: Minhaj Uddin Ahmad, A. Abdur Rahman Akib, Md. Mohsin Sarker Raihan, Abdullah Bin Shams
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Renewable energy sources are of great interest to combat global warming, yet promising sources like photovoltaic (PV) cells are not efficient and cheap enough to act as an alternative to traditional energy sources. Perovskite has high potential as a PV material but engineering the right material for a specific application is often a lengthy process. In this paper, ABO3 type perovskites' formability is predicted and its crystal structure is classified using machine learning with high accuracy, which provides a fast screening process. Although the study was done with solar-cell application in mind, the prediction framework is generic enough to be used for other purposes. Formability of perovskite is predicted and its crystal structure is classified with an accuracy of 98.57% and 90.53% respectively using Random Forest after 5-fold cross-validation. Our machine learning model may aid in the accelerated development of a desired perovskite structure by providing a quick mechanism to get insight into the material's properties in advance.
S3T: Self-Supervised Pre-training with Swin Transformer for Music Classification
Authors: Hang Zhao, Chen Zhang, Belei Zhu, Zejun Ma, Kejun Zhang
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Data Augmentation, Genre classification, Music Classification, Music Genre Classification, Music Tagging, Self-Supervised Learning

In this paper, we propose S3T, a self-supervised pre-training method with Swin Transformer for music classification, aiming to learn meaningful music representations from massive easily accessible unlabeled music data. S3T introduces a momentum-based paradigm, MoCo, with Swin Transformer as its feature extractor to music time-frequency domain. For better music representations learning, S3T contributes a music data augmentation pipeline and two specially designed pre-processors. To our knowledge, S3T is the first method combining the Swin Transformer with a self-supervised learning method for music classification. We evaluate S3T on music genre classification and music tagging tasks with linear classifiers trained on learned representations. Experimental results show that S3T outperforms the previous self-supervised method (CLMR) by 12.5 percents top-1 accuracy and 4.8 percents PR-AUC on two tasks respectively, and also surpasses the task-specific state-of-the-art supervised methods. Besides, S3T shows advances in label efficiency using only 10% labeled data exceeding CLMR on both tasks with 100% labeled data.
An open-source integrated framework for the automation of citation collection and screening in systematic reviews
Authors: Angelo D'Ambrosio, Hajo Grundmann, Tjibbe Donker
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensitivity

The exponential growth of scientific production makes secondary literature abridgements increasingly demanding. We introduce a new open-source framework for systematic reviews that significantly reduces time and workload for collecting and screening scientific literature. The framework provides three main tools: 1) an automatic citation search engine and manager that collects records from multiple online sources with a unified query syntax, 2) a Bayesian, active machine learning, citation screening tool based on iterative human-machine interaction to increase predictive accuracy and, 3) a semi-automatic, data-driven query generator to create new search queries from existing citation data sets. To evaluate the automatic screener's performance, we estimated the median posterior sensitivity and efficiency [90% Credible Intervals] using Bayesian simulation to predict the distribution of undetected potentially relevant records. Tested on an example topic, the framework collected 17,755 unique records through the citation manager; 766 records required human evaluation while the rest were excluded by the automatic classifier; the theoretical efficiency was 95.6% [95.3%, 95.7%] with a sensitivity of 100% [93.5%, 100%]. A new search query was generated from the labelled dataset, and 82,579 additional records were collected; only 567 records required human review after automatic screening, and six additional positive matches were found. The overall expected sensitivity decreased to 97.3% [73.8%, 100%] while the efficiency increased to 98.6% [98.2%, 98.7%]. The framework can significantly reduce the workload required to conduct large literature reviews by simplifying citation collection and screening while demonstrating exceptional sensitivity. Such a tool can improve the standardization and repeatability of systematic reviews.
The Effects of System Initiative during Conversational Collaborative Search
Authors: Sandeep Avula, Bogeum Choi, Jaime Arguello
Date: 2022-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Search

Our research in this paper lies at the intersection of collaborative and conversational search. We report on a Wizard of Oz lab study in which 27 pairs of participants collaborated on search tasks over the Slack messaging platform. To complete tasks, pairs of collaborators interacted with a so-called \emph{searchbot} with conversational capabilities. The role of the searchbot was played by a reference librarian. It is widely accepted that conversational search systems should be able to engage in \emph{mixed-initiative interaction} -- take and relinquish control of a multi-agent conversation as appropriate. Research in discourse analysis differentiates between dialog- and task-level initiative. Taking \emph{dialog-level} initiative involves leading a conversation for the sole purpose of establishing mutual belief between agents. Conversely, taking \emph{task-level} initiative involves leading a conversation with the intent to influence the goals of the other agent(s). Participants in our study experienced three \emph{searchbot conditions}, which varied based on the level of initiative the human searchbot was able to take: (1) no initiative, (2) only dialog-level initiative, and (3) both dialog- and task-level initiative. We investigate the effects of the searchbot condition on six different types of outcomes: (RQ1) perceptions of the searchbot's utility, (RQ2) perceptions of workload, (RQ3) perceptions of the collaboration, (RQ4) patterns of communication and collaboration, and perceived (RQ5) benefits and (RQ6) challenges from engaging with the searchbot.
A Deep Learning Approach for Repairing Missing Activity Labels in Event Logs for Process Mining
Authors: Yang Lu, Qifan Chen, Simon K. Poon
Date: 2022-02-17 00:00:00

Process mining is a relatively new subject that builds a bridge between traditional process modeling and data mining. Process discovery is one of the most critical parts of process mining, which aims at discovering process models automatically from event logs. The performance of existing process discovery algorithms can be affected when there are missing activity labels in event logs. Several methods have been proposed to repair missing activity labels, but their accuracy can drop when a large number of activity labels are missing. In this paper, we propose an LSTM-based prediction model to predict the missing activity labels in event logs. The proposed model takes both the prefix and suffix sequences of the events with missing activity labels as input. Additional attributes of event logs are also utilized to improve the performance. Our evaluation of several publicly available datasets shows that the proposed method performed consistently better than existing methods in terms of repairing missing activity labels in event logs.