pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Improving Non-native Word-level Pronunciation Scoring with Phone-level Mixup Data Augmentation and Multi-source Information
Authors: Kaiqi Fu, Shaojun Gao, Kai Wang, Wei Li, Xiaohai Tian, Zejun Ma
Date: 2022-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Word-level pronunciation scoring

Deep learning-based pronunciation scoring models highly rely on the availability of the annotated non-native data, which is costly and has scalability issues. To deal with the data scarcity problem, data augmentation is commonly used for model pretraining. In this paper, we propose a phone-level mixup, a simple yet effective data augmentation method, to improve the performance of word-level pronunciation scoring. Specifically, given a phoneme sequence from lexicon, the artificial augmented word sample can be generated by randomly sampling from the corresponding phone-level features in training data, while the word score is the average of their GOP scores. Benefit from the arbitrary phone-level combination, the mixup is able to generate any word with various pronunciation scores. Moreover, we utilize multi-source information (e.g., MFCC and deep features) to further improve the scoring system performance. The experiments conducted on the Speechocean762 show that the proposed system outperforms the baseline by adding the mixup data for pretraining, with Pearson correlation coefficients (PCC) increasing from 0.567 to 0.61. The results also indicate that proposed method achieves similar performance by using 1/10 unlabeled data of baseline. In addition, the experimental results also demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed multi-source approach.
As Little as Possible, as Much as Necessary: Detecting Over- and Undertranslations with Contrastive Conditioning
Authors: Jannis Vamvas, Rico Sennrich
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Omission and addition of content is a typical issue in neural machine translation. We propose a method for detecting such phenomena with off-the-shelf translation models. Using contrastive conditioning, we compare the likelihood of a full sequence under a translation model to the likelihood of its parts, given the corresponding source or target sequence. This allows to pinpoint superfluous words in the translation and untranslated words in the source even in the absence of a reference translation. The accuracy of our method is comparable to a supervised method that requires a custom quality estimation model.
Context Enhanced Short Text Matching using Clickthrough Data
Authors: Mao Yan Chen, Haiyun Jiang, Yujiu Yang
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Matching

The short text matching task employs a model to determine whether two short texts have the same semantic meaning or intent. Existing short text matching models usually rely on the content of short texts which are lack information or missing some key clues. Therefore, the short texts need external knowledge to complete their semantic meaning. To address this issue, we propose a new short text matching framework for introducing external knowledge to enhance the short text contextual representation. In detail, we apply a self-attention mechanism to enrich short text representation with external contexts. Experiments on two Chinese datasets and one English dataset demonstrate that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art short text matching models.
PeerSum: A Peer Review Dataset for Abstractive Multi-document Summarization
Authors: Miao Li, Jianzhong Qi, Jey Han Lau
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Summarization, Multi-Document Summarization

We present PeerSum, a new MDS dataset using peer reviews of scientific publications. Our dataset differs from the existing MDS datasets in that our summaries (i.e., the meta-reviews) are highly abstractive and they are real summaries of the source documents (i.e., the reviews) and it also features disagreements among source documents. We found that current state-of-the-art MDS models struggle to generate high-quality summaries for PeerSum, offering new research opportunities.
A Simple Hash-Based Early Exiting Approach For Language Understanding and Generation
Authors: Tianxiang Sun, Xiangyang Liu, Wei Zhu, Zhichao Geng, Lingling Wu, Yilong He, Yuan Ni, Guotong Xie, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5

Early exiting allows instances to exit at different layers according to the estimation of difficulty. Previous works usually adopt heuristic metrics such as the entropy of internal outputs to measure instance difficulty, which suffers from generalization and threshold-tuning. In contrast, learning to exit, or learning to predict instance difficulty is a more appealing way. Though some effort has been devoted to employing such "learn-to-exit" modules, it is still unknown whether and how well the instance difficulty can be learned. As a response, we first conduct experiments on the learnability of instance difficulty, which demonstrates that modern neural models perform poorly on predicting instance difficulty. Based on this observation, we propose a simple-yet-effective Hash-based Early Exiting approach (HashEE) that replaces the learn-to-exit modules with hash functions to assign each token to a fixed exiting layer. Different from previous methods, HashEE requires no internal classifiers nor extra parameters, and therefore is more efficient. Experimental results on classification, regression, and generation tasks demonstrate that HashEE can achieve higher performance with fewer FLOPs and inference time compared with previous state-of-the-art early exiting methods.
UDAAN: Machine Learning based Post-Editing tool for Document Translation
Authors: Ayush Maheshwari, Ajay Ravindran, Venkatapathy Subramanian, Ganesh Ramakrishnan
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Document Translation, Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

We introduce UDAAN, an open-source post-editing tool that can reduce manual editing efforts to quickly produce publishable-standard documents in several Indic languages. UDAAN has an end-to-end Machine Translation (MT) plus post-editing pipeline wherein users can upload a document to obtain raw MT output. Further, users can edit the raw translations using our tool. UDAAN offers several advantages: a) Domain-aware, vocabulary-based lexical constrained MT. b) source-target and target-target lexicon suggestions for users. Replacements are based on the source and target texts lexicon alignment. c) Translation suggestions are based on logs created during user interaction. d) Source-target sentence alignment visualisation that reduces the cognitive load of users during editing. e) Translated outputs from our tool are available in multiple formats: docs, latex, and PDF. We also provide the facility to use around 100 in-domain dictionaries for lexicon-aware machine translation. Although we limit our experiments to English-to-Hindi translation, our tool is independent of the source and target languages. Experimental results based on the usage of the tools and users feedback show that our tool speeds up the translation time by approximately a factor of three compared to the baseline method of translating documents from scratch. Our tool is available for both Windows and Linux platforms. The tool is open-source under MIT license, and the source code can be accessed from our website at https://www.udaanproject.org. Demonstration and tutorial videos for various features of our tool can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClfK7iC8J7b22bj3GwAUaCw. Our MT pipeline can be accessed at https://udaaniitb.aicte-india.org/udaan/translate/.
Code Synonyms Do Matter: Multiple Synonyms Matching Network for Automatic ICD Coding
Authors: Zheng Yuan, Chuanqi Tan, Songfang Huang
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Medical Code Prediction, Representation Learning

Automatic ICD coding is defined as assigning disease codes to electronic medical records (EMRs). Existing methods usually apply label attention with code representations to match related text snippets. Unlike these works that model the label with the code hierarchy or description, we argue that the code synonyms can provide more comprehensive knowledge based on the observation that the code expressions in EMRs vary from their descriptions in ICD. By aligning codes to concepts in UMLS, we collect synonyms of every code. Then, we propose a multiple synonyms matching network to leverage synonyms for better code representation learning, and finally help the code classification. Experiments on the MIMIC-III dataset show that our proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.
Neural Architecture Search using Progressive Evolution
Authors: Nilotpal Sinha, Kuan-Wen Chen
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms, Neural Architecture Search

Vanilla neural architecture search using evolutionary algorithms (EA) involves evaluating each architecture by training it from scratch, which is extremely time-consuming. This can be reduced by using a supernet to estimate the fitness of every architecture in the search space due to its weight sharing nature. However, the estimated fitness is very noisy due to the co-adaptation of the operations in the supernet. In this work, we propose a method called pEvoNAS wherein the whole neural architecture search space is progressively reduced to smaller search space regions with good architectures. This is achieved by using a trained supernet for architecture evaluation during the architecture search using genetic algorithm to find search space regions with good architectures. Upon reaching the final reduced search space, the supernet is then used to search for the best architecture in that search space using evolution. The search is also enhanced by using weight inheritance wherein the supernet for the smaller search space inherits its weights from previous trained supernet for the bigger search space. Exerimentally, pEvoNAS gives better results on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 while using significantly less computational resources as compared to previous EA-based methods. The code for our paper can be found in https://github.com/nightstorm0909/pEvoNAS
Kernel Density Estimation by Genetic Algorithm
Authors: Kiheiji Nishida
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation

This study proposes a data condensation method for multivariate kernel density estimation by genetic algorithm. First, our proposed algorithm generates multiple subsamples of a given size with replacement from the original sample. The subsamples and their constituting data points are regarded as $\it{chromosome}$ and $\it{gene}$, respectively, in the terminology of genetic algorithm. Second, each pair of subsamples breeds two new subsamples, where each data point faces either $\it{crossover}$, $\it{mutation}$, or $\it{reproduction}$ with a certain probability. The dominant subsamples in terms of fitness values are inherited by the next generation. This process is repeated generation by generation and brings the sparse representation of kernel density estimator in its completion. We confirmed from simulation studies that the resulting estimator can perform better than other well-known density estimators.
Do Perceived Gender Biases in Retrieval Results Affect Relevance Judgements?
Authors: Klara Krieg, Emilia Parada-Cabaleiro, Markus Schedl, Navid Rekabsaz
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

This work investigates the effect of gender-stereotypical biases in the content of retrieved results on the relevance judgement of users/annotators. In particular, since relevance in information retrieval (IR) is a multi-dimensional concept, we study whether the value and quality of the retrieved documents for some bias-sensitive queries can be judged differently when the content of the documents represents different genders. To this aim, we conduct a set of experiments where the genders of the participants are known as well as experiments where the participants genders are not specified. The set of experiments comprise of retrieval tasks, where participants perform a rated relevance judgement for different search query and search result document compilations. The shown documents contain different gender indications and are either relevant or non-relevant to the query. The results show the differences between the average judged relevance scores among documents with various gender contents. Our work initiates further research on the connection of the perception of gender stereotypes in users with their judgements and effects on IR systems, and aim to raise awareness about the possible biases in this domain.
MBT: A Memory-Based Part of Speech Tagger-Generator
Authors: Walter Daelemans, Jakub Zavrel, Peter Berck, Steven Gillis
Date: 1996-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning, Morphological Analysis, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, TAG

We introduce a memory-based approach to part of speech tagging. Memory-based learning is a form of supervised learning based on similarity-based reasoning. The part of speech tag of a word in a particular context is extrapolated from the most similar cases held in memory. Supervised learning approaches are useful when a tagged corpus is available as an example of the desired output of the tagger. Based on such a corpus, the tagger-generator automatically builds a tagger which is able to tag new text the same way, diminishing development time for the construction of a tagger considerably. Memory-based tagging shares this advantage with other statistical or machine learning approaches. Additional advantages specific to a memory-based approach include (i) the relatively small tagged corpus size sufficient for training, (ii) incremental learning, (iii) explanation capabilities, (iv) flexible integration of information in case representations, (v) its non-parametric nature, (vi) reasonably good results on unknown words without morphological analysis, and (vii) fast learning and tagging. In this paper we show that a large-scale application of the memory-based approach is feasible: we obtain a tagging accuracy that is on a par with that of known statistical approaches, and with attractive space and time complexity properties when using {\em IGTree}, a tree-based formalism for indexing and searching huge case bases.} The use of IGTree has as additional advantage that optimal context size for disambiguation is dynamically computed.
MTet: Multi-domain Translation for English-Vietnamese
Authors: Chinh Ngo, Hieu Tran, Long Phan, Trieu H. Trinh, Hieu Nguyen, Minh Nguyen, Minh-Thang Luong
Date: 2022-03-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: Blog 2022 3
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

We are excited to introduce a new larger and better quality Machine Translation dataset, MTet, which stands for Multi-domain Translation for English and VieTnamese. In our new release, we extend our previous dataset (v1.0) by adding more high-quality English-Vietnamese sentence pairs on various domains. In addition, we also show our new larger Transformer models can achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple test sets.
Privacy-Aware Crowd Labelling for Machine Learning Tasks
Authors: Giannis Haralabopoulos, Ioannis Anagnostopoulos
Date: 2022-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Diversity, Privacy Preserving, Sentiment Analysis

The extensive use of online social media has highlighted the importance of privacy in the digital space. As more scientists analyse the data created in these platforms, privacy concerns have extended to data usage within the academia. Although text analysis is a well documented topic in academic literature with a multitude of applications, ensuring privacy of user-generated content has been overlooked. Most sentiment analysis methods require emotion labels, which can be obtained through crowdsourcing, where non-expert individuals contribute to scientific tasks. The text itself has to be exposed to third parties in order to be labelled. In an effort to reduce the exposure of online users' information, we propose a privacy preserving text labelling method for varying applications, based in crowdsourcing. We transform text with different levels of privacy, and analyse the effectiveness of the transformation with regards to label correlation and consistency. Our results suggest that privacy can be implemented in labelling, retaining the annotational diversity and subjectivity of traditional labelling.
Deep Learning-Based Joint Control of Acoustic Echo Cancellation, Beamforming and Postfiltering
Authors: Thomas Haubner, Walter Kellermann
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Acoustic echo cancellation, Speech Extraction

We introduce a novel method for controlling the functionality of a hands-free speech communication device which comprises a model-based acoustic echo canceller (AEC), minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer (BF) and spectral postfilter (PF). While the AEC removes the early echo component, the MVDR BF and PF suppress the residual echo and background noise. As key innovation, we suggest to use a single deep neural network (DNN) to jointly control the adaptation of the various algorithmic components. This allows for rapid convergence and high steady-state performance in the presence of high-level interfering double-talk. End-to-end training of the DNN using a time-domain speech extraction loss function avoids the design of individual control strategies.
The Vicomtech Audio Deepfake Detection System based on Wav2Vec2 for the 2022 ADD Challenge
Authors: Juan M. Martín-Doñas, Aitor Álvarez
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Deepfake Detection, Audio Synthesis, Data Augmentation, DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping

This paper describes our submitted systems to the 2022 ADD challenge withing the tracks 1 and 2. Our approach is based on the combination of a pre-trained wav2vec2 feature extractor and a downstream classifier to detect spoofed audio. This method exploits the contextualized speech representations at the different transformer layers to fully capture discriminative information. Furthermore, the classification model is adapted to the application scenario using different data augmentation techniques. We evaluate our system for audio synthesis detection in both the ASVspoof 2021 and the 2022 ADD challenges, showing its robustness and good performance in realistic challenging environments such as telephonic and audio codec systems, noisy audio, and partial deepfakes.
Speech segmentation using multilevel hybrid filters
Authors: Marcos Faundez-Zanuy, Francesc Vallverdu-Bayes
Date: 2022-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

A novel approach for speech segmentation is proposed, based on Multilevel Hybrid (mean/min) Filters (MHF) with the following features: An accurate transition location. Good performance in noisy environments (gaussian and impulsive noise). The proposed method is based on spectral changes, with the goal of segmenting the voice into homogeneous acoustic segments. This algorithm is being used for phoneticallysegmented speech coder, with successful results.
Stochastic Model Predictive Control using Initial State Optimization
Authors: Henning Schlüter, Frank Allgöwer
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control

We propose a stochastic MPC scheme using an optimization over the initial state for the predicted trajectory. Considering linear discrete-time systems under unbounded additive stochastic disturbances subject to chance constraints, we use constraint tightening based on probabilistic reachable sets to design the MPC. The scheme avoids the infeasibility issues arising from unbounded disturbances by including the initial state as a decision variable. We show that the stabilizing control scheme can guarantee constraint satisfaction in closed loop, assuming unimodal disturbances. In addition to illustrating these guarantees, the numerical example indicates further advantages of optimizing over the initial state for the transient behavior.
ETCetera: beyond Event-Triggered Control
Authors: Giannis Delimpaltadakis, Gabriel de A. Gleizer, Ivo van Straalen, Manuel Mazo Jr
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00

We present ETCetera, a Python library developed for the analysis and synthesis of the sampling behaviour of event triggered control (ETC) systems. In particular, the tool constructs abstractions of the sampling behaviour of given ETC systems, in the form of timed automata (TA) or finite-state transition systems (FSTSs). When the abstraction is an FSTS, ETCetera provides diverse manipulation tools for analysis of ETC's sampling performance, synthesis of communication traffic schedulers (when networks shared by multiple ETC loops are considered), and optimization of sampling strategies. Additionally, the TA models may be exported to UPPAAL for analysis and synthesis of schedulers. Several examples of the tool's application for analysis and synthesis problems with different types of dynamics and event-triggered implementations are provided.
Phased array beamforming methods for powering biomedical ultrasonic implants
Authors: Braeden C. Benedict, Mohammad Meraj Ghanbari, Rikky Muller
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Millimeter-scale implants using ultrasound for power and communication have been proposed for a range of deep-tissue applications, including neural recording and stimulation. However, published implementations have shown high sensitivity to misalignment with the external ultrasound transducer. Ultrasonic beamforming using a phased array to these implants can improve tolerance to misalignment, reduce implant volume, and allow multiple implants to be operated simultaneously in different locations. This paper details the design of a custom planar phased array ultrasound system, which is capable of steering and focusing ultrasound power within a 3D volume. Analysis and simulation is performed to determine the choice of array element pitch, with special attention given to maximizing the power available at the implant while meeting FDA limits for diagnostic ultrasound. Time reversal is proposed as a computationally simple approach to beamforming that is robust despite scattering and inhomogeneity of the acoustic medium. This technique is demonstrated both in active drive and pulse-echo modes, and it is experimentally compared with other beamforming techniques by measuring energy transfer efficiency. Simultaneous power delivery to multiple implants is also demonstrated.
Hierarchical Supervisory Control under Partial Observation: Normality
Authors: Jan Komenda, Tomáš Masopust
Date: 2022-03-02 00:00:00

Conditions preserving observability of specifications between the plant and its abstraction are essential for hierarchical supervisory control of discrete-event systems under partial observation. Observation consistency and local observation consistency were identified as such conditions. To preserve normality, only observation consistency is required. Although observation consistency preserves normality between the levels for normal specifications, for specifications that are not normal, observation consistency is insufficient to guarantee that the supremal normal sublanguage computed on the low level and on the high level coincide. We define modified observation consistency, under which the supremal normal sublanguages of different levels coincide. We show that the verification of (modified) observation consistency is PSPACE-hard for finite automata and undecidable for slightly more expressive models than finite automata. Decidability of (modified) observation consistency is an open problem. Hence we further discuss two stronger conditions that are easy to verify. Finally, we illustrate the conditions on an example of a railroad controller and on a case study of a part of an MRI scanner.