pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Long Document Summarization in a Low Resource Setting using Pretrained Language Models
Authors: Ahsaas Bajaj, Pavitra Dangati, Kalpesh Krishna, Pradhiksha Ashok Kumar, Rheeya Uppaal, Bradford Windsor, Eliot Brenner, Dominic Dotterrer, Rajarshi Das, Andrew McCallum
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Document Summarization, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Abstractive summarization is the task of compressing a long document into a coherent short document while retaining salient information. Modern abstractive summarization methods are based on deep neural networks which often require large training datasets. Since collecting summarization datasets is an expensive and time-consuming task, practical industrial settings are usually low-resource. In this paper, we study a challenging low-resource setting of summarizing long legal briefs with an average source document length of 4268 words and only 120 available (document, summary) pairs. To account for data scarcity, we used a modern pretrained abstractive summarizer BART (Lewis et al., 2020), which only achieves 17.9 ROUGE-L as it struggles with long documents. We thus attempt to compress these long documents by identifying salient sentences in the source which best ground the summary, using a novel algorithm based on GPT-2 (Radford et al., 2019) language model perplexity scores, that operates within the low resource regime. On feeding the compressed documents to BART, we observe a 6.0 ROUGE-L improvement. Our method also beats several competitive salience detection baselines. Furthermore, the identified salient sentences tend to agree with an independent human labeling by domain experts.
M6: A Chinese Multimodal Pretrainer
Authors: Junyang Lin, Rui Men, An Yang, Chang Zhou, Ming Ding, Yichang Zhang, Peng Wang, Ang Wang, Le Jiang, Xianyan Jia, Jie Zhang, Jianwei Zhang, Xu Zou, Zhikang Li, Xiaodong Deng, Jie Liu, Jinbao Xue, Huiling Zhou, Jianxin Ma, Jin Yu, Yong Li, Wei Lin, Jingren Zhou, Jie Tang, Hongxia Yang
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

In this work, we construct the largest dataset for multimodal pretraining in Chinese, which consists of over 1.9TB images and 292GB texts that cover a wide range of domains. We propose a cross-modal pretraining method called M6, referring to Multi-Modality to Multi-Modality Multitask Mega-transformer, for unified pretraining on the data of single modality and multiple modalities. We scale the model size up to 10 billion and 100 billion parameters, and build the largest pretrained model in Chinese. We apply the model to a series of downstream applications, and demonstrate its outstanding performance in comparison with strong baselines. Furthermore, we specifically design a downstream task of text-guided image generation, and show that the finetuned M6 can create high-quality images with high resolution and abundant details.
Vyākarana: A Colorless Green Benchmark for Syntactic Evaluation in Indic Languages
Authors: Rajaswa Patil, Jasleen Dhillon, Siddhant Mahurkar, Saumitra Kulkarni, Manav Malhotra, Veeky Baths
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (MRL) 2021 11
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction, POS, POS Tagging, Sentence, XLM-R

While there has been significant progress towards developing NLU resources for Indic languages, syntactic evaluation has been relatively less explored. Unlike English, Indic languages have rich morphosyntax, grammatical genders, free linear word-order, and highly inflectional morphology. In this paper, we introduce Vy\=akarana: a benchmark of Colorless Green sentences in Indic languages for syntactic evaluation of multilingual language models. The benchmark comprises four syntax-related tasks: PoS Tagging, Syntax Tree-depth Prediction, Grammatical Case Marking, and Subject-Verb Agreement. We use the datasets from the evaluation tasks to probe five multilingual language models of varying architectures for syntax in Indic languages. Due to its prevalence, we also include a code-switching setting in our experiments. Our results show that the token-level and sentence-level representations from the Indic language models (IndicBERT and MuRIL) do not capture the syntax in Indic languages as efficiently as the other highly multilingual language models. Further, our layer-wise probing experiments reveal that while mBERT, DistilmBERT, and XLM-R localize the syntax in middle layers, the Indic language models do not show such syntactic localization.
Inductive biases, pretraining and fine-tuning jointly account for brain responses to speech
Authors: Juliette Millet, Jean-Remi King
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Classification, Speech-to-Text

Our ability to comprehend speech remains, to date, unrivaled by deep learning models. This feat could result from the brain's ability to fine-tune generic sound representations for speech-specific processes. To test this hypothesis, we compare i) five types of deep neural networks to ii) human brain responses elicited by spoken sentences and recorded in 102 Dutch subjects using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Each network was either trained on an acoustics scene classification, a speech-to-text task (based on Bengali, English, or Dutch), or not trained. The similarity between each model and the brain is assessed by correlating their respective activations after an optimal linear projection. The differences in brain-similarity across networks revealed three main results. First, speech representations in the brain can be accounted for by random deep networks. Second, learning to classify acoustic scenes leads deep nets to increase their brain similarity. Third, learning to process phonetically-related speech inputs (i.e., Dutch vs English) leads deep nets to reach higher levels of brain-similarity than learning to process phonetically-distant speech inputs (i.e. Dutch vs Bengali). Together, these results suggest that the human brain fine-tunes its heavily-trained auditory hierarchy to learn to process speech.
Adapting MARBERT for Improved Arabic Dialect Identification: Submission to the NADI 2021 Shared Task
Authors: Badr AlKhamissi, Mohamed Gabr, Muhammad ElNokrashy, Khaled Essam
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: EACL (WANLP) 2021 4
Tasks: Dialect Identification

In this paper, we tackle the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task (Abdul-Mageed et al., 2021) and demonstrate state-of-the-art results on all of its four subtasks. Tasks are to identify the geographic origin of short Dialectal (DA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) utterances at the levels of both country and province. Our final model is an ensemble of variants built on top of MARBERT that achieves an F1-score of 34.03% for DA at the country-level development set -- an improvement of 7.63% from previous work.
Sentiment Analysis of Users' Reviews on COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps with a Benchmark Dataset
Authors: Kashif Ahmad, Firoj Alam, Junaid Qadir, Basheer Qolomany, Imran Khan, Talhat Khan, Muhammad Suleman, Naina Said, Syed Zohaib Hassan, Asma Gul, Ala Al-Fuqaha
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

Contact tracing has been globally adopted in the fight to control the infection rate of COVID-19. Thanks to digital technologies, such as smartphones and wearable devices, contacts of COVID-19 patients can be easily traced and informed about their potential exposure to the virus. To this aim, several interesting mobile applications have been developed. However, there are ever-growing concerns over the working mechanism and performance of these applications. The literature already provides some interesting exploratory studies on the community's response to the applications by analyzing information from different sources, such as news and users' reviews of the applications. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no existing solution that automatically analyzes users' reviews and extracts the evoked sentiments. In this work, we propose a pipeline starting from manual annotation via a crowd-sourcing study and concluding on the development and training of AI models for automatic sentiment analysis of users' reviews. In total, we employ eight different methods achieving up to an average F1-Scores 94.8% indicating the feasibility of automatic sentiment analysis of users' reviews on the COVID-19 contact tracing applications. We also highlight the key advantages, drawbacks, and users' concerns over the applications. Moreover, we also collect and annotate a large-scale dataset composed of 34,534 reviews manually annotated from the contract tracing applications of 46 distinct countries. The presented analysis and the dataset are expected to provide a baseline/benchmark for future research in the domain.
Exploiting ultrasound tongue imaging for the automatic detection of speech articulation errors
Authors: Manuel Sam Ribeiro, Joanne Cleland, Aciel Eshky, Korin Richmond, Steve Renals
Date: 2021-02-27 00:00:00

Speech sound disorders are a common communication impairment in childhood. Because speech disorders can negatively affect the lives and the development of children, clinical intervention is often recommended. To help with diagnosis and treatment, clinicians use instrumented methods such as spectrograms or ultrasound tongue imaging to analyse speech articulations. Analysis with these methods can be laborious for clinicians, therefore there is growing interest in its automation. In this paper, we investigate the contribution of ultrasound tongue imaging for the automatic detection of speech articulation errors. Our systems are trained on typically developing child speech and augmented with a database of adult speech using audio and ultrasound. Evaluation on typically developing speech indicates that pre-training on adult speech and jointly using ultrasound and audio gives the best results with an accuracy of 86.9%. To evaluate on disordered speech, we collect pronunciation scores from experienced speech and language therapists, focusing on cases of velar fronting and gliding of /r/. The scores show good inter-annotator agreement for velar fronting, but not for gliding errors. For automatic velar fronting error detection, the best results are obtained when jointly using ultrasound and audio. The best system correctly detects 86.6% of the errors identified by experienced clinicians. Out of all the segments identified as errors by the best system, 73.2% match errors identified by clinicians. Results on automatic gliding detection are harder to interpret due to poor inter-annotator agreement, but appear promising. Overall findings suggest that automatic detection of speech articulation errors has potential to be integrated into ultrasound intervention software for automatically quantifying progress during speech therapy.
Silent versus modal multi-speaker speech recognition from ultrasound and video
Authors: Manuel Sam Ribeiro, Aciel Eshky, Korin Richmond, Steve Renals
Date: 2021-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Silent Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

We investigate multi-speaker speech recognition from ultrasound images of the tongue and video images of the lips. We train our systems on imaging data from modal speech, and evaluate on matched test sets of two speaking modes: silent and modal speech. We observe that silent speech recognition from imaging data underperforms compared to modal speech recognition, likely due to a speaking-mode mismatch between training and testing. We improve silent speech recognition performance using techniques that address the domain mismatch, such as fMLLR and unsupervised model adaptation. We also analyse the properties of silent and modal speech in terms of utterance duration and the size of the articulatory space. To estimate the articulatory space, we compute the convex hull of tongue splines, extracted from ultrasound tongue images. Overall, we observe that the duration of silent speech is longer than that of modal speech, and that silent speech covers a smaller articulatory space than modal speech. Although these two properties are statistically significant across speaking modes, they do not directly correlate with word error rates from speech recognition.
LRG at TREC 2020: Document Ranking with XLNet-Based Models
Authors: Abheesht Sharma, Harshit Pandey
Date: 2021-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Document Ranking, Information Retrieval, Re-Ranking, Retrieval

Establishing a good information retrieval system in popular mediums of entertainment is a quickly growing area of investigation for companies and researchers alike. We delve into the domain of information retrieval for podcasts. In Spotify's Podcast Challenge, we are given a user's query with a description to find the most relevant short segment from the given dataset having all the podcasts. Previous techniques that include solely classical Information Retrieval (IR) techniques, perform poorly when descriptive queries are presented. On the other hand, models which exclusively rely on large neural networks tend to perform better. The downside to this technique is that a considerable amount of time and computing power are required to infer the result. We experiment with two hybrid models which first filter out the best podcasts based on user's query with a classical IR technique, and then perform re-ranking on the shortlisted documents based on the detailed description using a transformer-based model.
Alignment Knowledge Distillation for Online Streaming Attention-based Speech Recognition
Authors: Hirofumi Inaguma, Tatsuya Kawahara
Date: 2021-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Decoder, Knowledge Distillation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This article describes an efficient training method for online streaming attention-based encoder-decoder (AED) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. AED models have achieved competitive performance in offline scenarios by jointly optimizing all components. They have recently been extended to an online streaming framework via models such as monotonic chunkwise attention (MoChA). However, the elaborate attention calculation process is not robust for long-form speech utterances. Moreover, the sequence-level training objective and time-restricted streaming encoder cause a nonnegligible delay in token emission during inference. To address these problems, we propose CTC synchronous training (CTC-ST), in which CTC alignments are leveraged as a reference for token boundaries to enable a MoChA model to learn optimal monotonic input-output alignments. We formulate a purely end-to-end training objective to synchronize the boundaries of MoChA to those of CTC. The CTC model shares an encoder with the MoChA model to enhance the encoder representation. Moreover, the proposed method provides alignment information learned in the CTC branch to the attention-based decoder. Therefore, CTC-ST can be regarded as self-distillation of alignment knowledge from CTC to MoChA. Experimental evaluations on a variety of benchmark datasets show that the proposed method significantly reduces recognition errors and emission latency simultaneously. The robustness to long-form and noisy speech is also demonstrated. We compare CTC-ST with several methods that distill alignment knowledge from a hybrid ASR system and show that the CTC-ST can achieve a comparable tradeoff of accuracy and latency without relying on external alignment information. The best MoChA system shows recognition accuracy comparable to that of RNN-transducer (RNN-T) while achieving lower emission latency.
NLP-CUET@DravidianLangTech-EACL2021: Investigating Visual and Textual Features to Identify Trolls from Multimodal Social Media Memes
Authors: Eftekhar Hossain, Omar Sharif, Mohammed Moshiul Hoque
Date: 2021-02-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: EACL (DravidianLangTech) 2021 4

In the past few years, the meme has become a new way of communication on the Internet. As memes are the images with embedded text, it can quickly spread hate, offence and violence. Classifying memes are very challenging because of their multimodal nature and region-specific interpretation. A shared task is organized to develop models that can identify trolls from multimodal social media memes. This work presents a computational model that we have developed as part of our participation in the task. Training data comes in two forms: an image with embedded Tamil code-mixed text and an associated caption given in English. We investigated the visual and textual features using CNN, VGG16, Inception, Multilingual-BERT, XLM-Roberta, XLNet models. Multimodal features are extracted by combining image (CNN, ResNet50, Inception) and text (Long short term memory network) features via early fusion approach. Results indicate that the textual approach with XLNet achieved the highest weighted $f_1$-score of $0.58$, which enabled our model to secure $3^{rd}$ rank in this task.
Topic Modelling Meets Deep Neural Networks: A Survey
Authors: He Zhao, Dinh Phung, Viet Huynh, Yuan Jin, Lan Du, Wray Buntine
Date: 2021-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Survey, Text Generation, Topic Models

Topic modelling has been a successful technique for text analysis for almost twenty years. When topic modelling met deep neural networks, there emerged a new and increasingly popular research area, neural topic models, with over a hundred models developed and a wide range of applications in neural language understanding such as text generation, summarisation and language models. There is a need to summarise research developments and discuss open problems and future directions. In this paper, we provide a focused yet comprehensive overview of neural topic models for interested researchers in the AI community, so as to facilitate them to navigate and innovate in this fast-growing research area. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first review focusing on this specific topic.
Learning Reasoning Paths over Semantic Graphs for Video-grounded Dialogues
Authors: Hung Le, Nancy F. Chen, Steven C. H. Hoi
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Compared to traditional visual question answering, video-grounded dialogues require additional reasoning over dialogue context to answer questions in a multi-turn setting. Previous approaches to video-grounded dialogues mostly use dialogue context as a simple text input without modelling the inherent information flows at the turn level. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of Reasoning Paths in Dialogue Context (PDC). PDC model discovers information flows among dialogue turns through a semantic graph constructed based on lexical components in each question and answer. PDC model then learns to predict reasoning paths over this semantic graph. Our path prediction model predicts a path from the current turn through past dialogue turns that contain additional visual cues to answer the current question. Our reasoning model sequentially processes both visual and textual information through this reasoning path and the propagated features are used to generate the answer. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and provide additional insights on how models use semantic dependencies in a dialogue context to retrieve visual cues.
AdaSpeech: Adaptive Text to Speech for Custom Voice
Authors: Mingjian Chen, Xu Tan, Bohan Li, Yanqing Liu, Tao Qin, Sheng Zhao, Tie-Yan Liu
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Custom voice, a specific text to speech (TTS) service in commercial speech platforms, aims to adapt a source TTS model to synthesize personal voice for a target speaker using few speech data. Custom voice presents two unique challenges for TTS adaptation: 1) to support diverse customers, the adaptation model needs to handle diverse acoustic conditions that could be very different from source speech data, and 2) to support a large number of customers, the adaptation parameters need to be small enough for each target speaker to reduce memory usage while maintaining high voice quality. In this work, we propose AdaSpeech, an adaptive TTS system for high-quality and efficient customization of new voices. We design several techniques in AdaSpeech to address the two challenges in custom voice: 1) To handle different acoustic conditions, we use two acoustic encoders to extract an utterance-level vector and a sequence of phoneme-level vectors from the target speech during training; in inference, we extract the utterance-level vector from a reference speech and use an acoustic predictor to predict the phoneme-level vectors. 2) To better trade off the adaptation parameters and voice quality, we introduce conditional layer normalization in the mel-spectrogram decoder of AdaSpeech, and fine-tune this part in addition to speaker embedding for adaptation. We pre-train the source TTS model on LibriTTS datasets and fine-tune it on VCTK and LJSpeech datasets (with different acoustic conditions from LibriTTS) with few adaptation data, e.g., 20 sentences, about 1 minute speech. Experiment results show that AdaSpeech achieves much better adaptation quality than baseline methods, with only about 5K specific parameters for each speaker, which demonstrates its effectiveness for custom voice. Audio samples are available at https://speechresearch.github.io/adaspeech/.
OmniNet: Omnidirectional Representations from Transformers
Authors: Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Vamsi Aribandi, Jai Gupta, Philip Pham, Zhen Qin, Dara Bahri, Da-Cheng Juan, Donald Metzler
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: de-en, Few-Shot Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Translation

This paper proposes Omnidirectional Representations from Transformers (OmniNet). In OmniNet, instead of maintaining a strictly horizontal receptive field, each token is allowed to attend to all tokens in the entire network. This process can also be interpreted as a form of extreme or intensive attention mechanism that has the receptive field of the entire width and depth of the network. To this end, the omnidirectional attention is learned via a meta-learner, which is essentially another self-attention based model. In order to mitigate the computationally expensive costs of full receptive field attention, we leverage efficient self-attention models such as kernel-based (Choromanski et al.), low-rank attention (Wang et al.) and/or Big Bird (Zaheer et al.) as the meta-learner. Extensive experiments are conducted on autoregressive language modeling (LM1B, C4), Machine Translation, Long Range Arena (LRA), and Image Recognition. The experiments show that OmniNet achieves considerable improvements across these tasks, including achieving state-of-the-art performance on LM1B, WMT'14 En-De/En-Fr, and Long Range Arena. Moreover, using omnidirectional representation in Vision Transformers leads to significant improvements on image recognition tasks on both few-shot learning and fine-tuning setups.
BERT based patent novelty search by training claims to their own description
Authors: Michael Freunek, André Bodmer
Date: 2021-03-01 00:00:00

In this paper we present a method to concatenate patent claims to their own description. By applying this method, BERT trains suitable descriptions for claims. Such a trained BERT (claim-to-description- BERT) could be able to identify novelty relevant descriptions for patents. In addition, we introduce a new scoring scheme, relevance scoring or novelty scoring, to process the output of BERT in a meaningful way. We tested the method on patent applications by training BERT on the first claims of patents and corresponding descriptions. BERT's output has been processed according to the relevance score and the results compared with the cited X documents in the search reports. The test showed that BERT has scored some of the cited X documents as highly relevant.