pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SpeechStew: Simply Mix All Available Speech Recognition Data to Train One Large Neural Network
Authors: William Chan, Daniel Park, Chris Lee, Yu Zhang, Quoc Le, Mohammad Norouzi
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Transfer Learning

We present SpeechStew, a speech recognition model that is trained on a combination of various publicly available speech recognition datasets: AMI, Broadcast News, Common Voice, LibriSpeech, Switchboard/Fisher, Tedlium, and Wall Street Journal. SpeechStew simply mixes all of these datasets together, without any special re-weighting or re-balancing of the datasets. SpeechStew achieves SoTA or near SoTA results across a variety of tasks, without the use of an external language model. Our results include 9.0\% WER on AMI-IHM, 4.7\% WER on Switchboard, 8.3\% WER on CallHome, and 1.3\% on WSJ, which significantly outperforms prior work with strong external language models. We also demonstrate that SpeechStew learns powerful transfer learning representations. We fine-tune SpeechStew on a noisy low resource speech dataset, CHiME-6. We achieve 38.9\% WER without a language model, which compares to 38.6\% WER to a strong HMM baseline with a language model.
SpeakerStew: Scaling to Many Languages with a Triaged Multilingual Text-Dependent and Text-Independent Speaker Verification System
Authors: Roza Chojnacka, Jason Pelecanos, Quan Wang, Ignacio Lopez Moreno
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Recognition, Speaker Verification, Text-Independent Speaker Verification

In this paper, we describe SpeakerStew - a hybrid system to perform speaker verification on 46 languages. Two core ideas were explored in this system: (1) Pooling training data of different languages together for multilingual generalization and reducing development cycles; (2) A novel triage mechanism between text-dependent and text-independent models to reduce runtime cost and expected latency. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of speaker verification systems at the scale of 46 languages. The problem is framed from the perspective of using a smart speaker device with interactions consisting of a wake-up keyword (text-dependent) followed by a speech query (text-independent). Experimental evidence suggests that training on multiple languages can generalize to unseen varieties while maintaining performance on seen varieties. We also found that it can reduce computational requirements for training models by an order of magnitude. Furthermore, during model inference on English data, we observe that leveraging a triage framework can reduce the number of calls to the more computationally expensive text-independent system by 73% (and reduce latency by 59%) while maintaining an EER no worse than the text-independent setup.
Nonlinear model reduction for slow-fast stochastic systems near unknown invariant manifolds
Authors: Felix X. -F. Ye, Sichen Yang, Mauro Maggioni
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Efficient Exploration

We introduce a nonlinear stochastic model reduction technique for high-dimensional stochastic dynamical systems that have a low-dimensional invariant effective manifold with slow dynamics, and high-dimensional, large fast modes. Given only access to a black box simulator from which short bursts of simulation can be obtained, we design an algorithm that outputs an estimate of the invariant manifold, a process of the effective stochastic dynamics on it, which has averaged out the fast modes, and a simulator thereof. This simulator is efficient in that it exploits of the low dimension of the invariant manifold, and takes time steps of size dependent on the regularity of the effective process, and therefore typically much larger than that of the original simulator, which had to resolve the fast modes. The algorithm and the estimation can be performed on-the-fly, leading to efficient exploration of the effective state space, without losing consistency with the underlying dynamics. This construction enables fast and efficient simulation of paths of the effective dynamics, together with estimation of crucial features and observables of such dynamics, including the stationary distribution, identification of metastable states, and residence times and transition rates between them.
Automated Performance Testing Based on Active Deep Learning
Authors: Ali Sedaghatbaf, Mahshid Helali Moghadam, Mehrdad Saadatmand
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Deep Learning

Generating tests that can reveal performance issues in large and complex software systems within a reasonable amount of time is a challenging task. On one hand, there are numerous combinations of input data values to explore. On the other hand, we have a limited test budget to execute tests. What makes this task even more difficult is the lack of access to source code and the internal details of these systems. In this paper, we present an automated test generation method called ACTA for black-box performance testing. ACTA is based on active learning, which means that it does not require a large set of historical test data to learn about the performance characteristics of the system under test. Instead, it dynamically chooses the tests to execute using uncertainty sampling. ACTA relies on a conditional variant of generative adversarial networks,and facilitates specifying performance requirements in terms of conditions and generating tests that address those conditions.We have evaluated ACTA on a benchmark web application, and the experimental results indicate that this method is comparable with random testing, and two other machine learning methods,i.e. PerfXRL and DN.
Analytic function approximation by path norm regularized deep networks
Authors: Aleksandr Beknazaryan
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00

We show that neural networks with absolute value activation function and with the path norm, the depth, the width and the network weights having logarithmic dependence on $1/\varepsilon$ can $\varepsilon$-approximate functions that are analytic on certain regions of $\mathbb{C}^d$.
An Analysis of State-of-the-art Activation Functions For Supervised Deep Neural Network
Authors: Anh Nguyen, Khoa Pham, Dat Ngo, Thanh Ngo, Lam Pham
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Acoustic Scene Classification, Classification, General Classification, Scene Classification

This paper provides an analysis of state-of-the-art activation functions with respect to supervised classification of deep neural network. These activation functions comprise of Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), Exponential Linear Unit (ELU), Scaled Exponential Linear Unit (SELU), Gaussian Error Linear Unit (GELU), and the Inverse Square Root Linear Unit (ISRLU). To evaluate, experiments over two deep learning network architectures integrating these activation functions are conducted. The first model, basing on Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), is evaluated with MNIST dataset to perform these activation functions. Meanwhile, the second model, likely VGGish-based architecture, is applied for Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC) Task 1A in DCASE 2018 challenge, thus evaluate whether these activation functions work well in different datasets as well as different network architectures.
Principal Component Analysis Applied to Gradient Fields in Band Gap Optimization Problems for Metamaterials
Authors: Giorgio Gnecco, Andrea Bacigalupo, Francesca Fantoni, Daniela Selvi
Date: 2021-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Band Gap, BIG-bench Machine Learning

A promising technique for the spectral design of acoustic metamaterials is based on the formulation of suitable constrained nonlinear optimization problems. Unfortunately, the straightforward application of classical gradient-based iterative optimization algorithms to the numerical solution of such problems is typically highly demanding, due to the complexity of the underlying physical models. Nevertheless, supervised machine learning techniques can reduce such a computational effort, e.g., by replacing the original objective functions of such optimization problems with more-easily computable approximations. In this framework, the present article describes the application of a related unsupervised machine learning technique, namely, principal component analysis, to approximate the gradient of the objective function of a band gap optimization problem for an acoustic metamaterial, with the aim of making the successive application of a gradient-based iterative optimization algorithm faster. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Adversarial Semi-supervised Learning for Corporate Credit Ratings
Authors: Bojing Feng, Wenfang Xue
Date: 2021-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Corporate credit rating is an analysis of credit risks within a corporation, which plays a vital role during the management of financial risk. Traditionally, the rating assessment process based on the historical profile of corporation is usually expensive and complicated, which often takes months. Therefore, most of the corporations, which are lacking in money and time, can't get their own credit level. However, we believe that although these corporations haven't their credit rating levels (unlabeled data), this big data contains useful knowledge to improve credit system. In this work, its major challenge lies in how to effectively learn the knowledge from unlabeled data and help improve the performance of the credit rating system. Specifically, we consider the problem of adversarial semi-supervised learning (ASSL) for corporate credit rating which has been rarely researched before. A novel framework adversarial semi-supervised learning for corporate credit rating (ASSL4CCR) which includes two phases is proposed to address these problems. In the first phase, we train a normal rating system via a normal machine-learning algorithm to give unlabeled data pseudo rating level. Then in the second phase, adversarial semi-supervised learning is applied uniting labeled data and pseudo-labeled data. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ASSL4CCR, we conduct extensive experiments on the Chinese public-listed corporate rating dataset, which proves that ASSL4CCR outperforms the state-of-the-art methods consistently.
Neural Process for Black-Box Model Optimization Under Bayesian Framework
Authors: Zhongkai Shangguan, Lei Lin, Wencheng Wu, Beilei Xu
Date: 2021-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Model Optimization

There are a large number of optimization problems in physical models where the relationships between model parameters and outputs are unknown or hard to track. These models are named as black-box models in general because they can only be viewed in terms of inputs and outputs, without knowledge of the internal workings. Optimizing the black-box model parameters has become increasingly expensive and time consuming as they have become more complex. Hence, developing effective and efficient black-box model optimization algorithms has become an important task. One powerful algorithm to solve such problem is Bayesian optimization, which can effectively estimates the model parameters that lead to the best performance, and Gaussian Process (GP) has been one of the most widely used surrogate model in Bayesian optimization. However, the time complexity of GP scales cubically with respect to the number of observed model outputs, and GP does not scale well with large parameter dimension either. Consequently, it has been challenging for GP to optimize black-box models that need to query many observations and/or have many parameters. To overcome the drawbacks of GP, in this study, we propose a general Bayesian optimization algorithm that employs a Neural Process (NP) as the surrogate model to perform black-box model optimization, namely, Neural Process for Bayesian Optimization (NPBO). In order to validate the benefits of NPBO, we compare NPBO with four benchmark approaches on a power system parameter optimization problem and a series of seven benchmark Bayesian optimization problems. The results show that the proposed NPBO performs better than the other four benchmark approaches on the power system parameter optimization problem and competitively on the seven benchmark problems.
COVID-19 Detection in Cough, Breath and Speech using Deep Transfer Learning and Bottleneck Features
Authors: Madhurananda Pahar, Marisa Klopper, Robin Warren, Thomas Niesler
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Classification, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Transfer Learning

We present an experimental investigation into the effectiveness of transfer learning and bottleneck feature extraction in detecting COVID-19 from audio recordings of cough, breath and speech. This type of screening is non-contact, does not require specialist medical expertise or laboratory facilities and can be deployed on inexpensive consumer hardware. We use datasets that contain recordings of coughing, sneezing, speech and other noises, but do not contain COVID-19 labels, to pre-train three deep neural networks: a CNN, an LSTM and a Resnet50. These pre-trained networks are subsequently either fine-tuned using smaller datasets of coughing with COVID-19 labels in the process of transfer learning, or are used as bottleneck feature extractors. Results show that a Resnet50 classifier trained by this transfer learning process delivers optimal or near-optimal performance across all datasets achieving areas under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC AUC) of 0.98, 0.94 and 0.92 respectively for all three sound classes (coughs, breaths and speech). This indicates that coughs carry the strongest COVID-19 signature, followed by breath and speech. Our results also show that applying transfer learning and extracting bottleneck features using the larger datasets without COVID-19 labels led not only to improve performance, but also to minimise the standard deviation of the classifier AUCs among the outer folds of the leave-$p$-out cross-validation, indicating better generalisation. We conclude that deep transfer learning and bottleneck feature extraction can improve COVID-19 cough, breath and speech audio classification, yielding automatic classifiers with higher accuracy.
Query2Prod2Vec Grounded Word Embeddings for eCommerce
Authors: Federico Bianchi, Jacopo Tagliabue, Bingqing Yu
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings

We present Query2Prod2Vec, a model that grounds lexical representations for product search in product embeddings: in our model, meaning is a mapping between words and a latent space of products in a digital shop. We leverage shopping sessions to learn the underlying space and use merchandising annotations to build lexical analogies for evaluation: our experiments show that our model is more accurate than known techniques from the NLP and IR literature. Finally, we stress the importance of data efficiency for product search outside of retail giants, and highlight how Query2Prod2Vec fits with practical constraints faced by most practitioners.
Solving Large Scale Quadratic Constrained Basis Pursuit
Authors: Jirong Yi
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00

Inspired by alternating direction method of multipliers and the idea of operator splitting, we propose a efficient algorithm for solving large-scale quadratically constrained basis pursuit. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve 50~~100 times speedup when compared with the baseline interior point algorithm implemented in CVX.
Personalized Entity Resolution with Dynamic Heterogeneous Knowledge Graph Representations
Authors: Ying Lin, Han Wang, Jiangning Chen, Tong Wang, Yue Liu, Heng Ji, Yang Liu, Premkumar Natarajan
Date: 2021-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Resolution, Reranking

The growing popularity of Virtual Assistants poses new challenges for Entity Resolution, the task of linking mentions in text to their referent entities in a knowledge base. Specifically, in the shopping domain, customers tend to use implicit utterances (e.g., "organic milk") rather than explicit names, leading to a large number of candidate products. Meanwhile, for the same query, different customers may expect different results. For example, with "add milk to my cart", a customer may refer to a certain organic product, while some customers may want to re-order products they regularly purchase. To address these issues, we propose a new framework that leverages personalized features to improve the accuracy of product ranking. We first build a cross-source heterogeneous knowledge graph from customer purchase history and product knowledge graph to jointly learn customer and product embeddings. After that, we incorporate product, customer, and history representations into a neural reranking model to predict which candidate is most likely to be purchased for a specific customer. Experiments show that our model substantially improves the accuracy of the top ranked candidates by 24.6% compared to the state-of-the-art product search model.
EasyCall corpus: a dysarthric speech dataset
Authors: Rosanna Turrisi, Arianna Braccia, Marco Emanuele, Simone Giulietti, Maura Pugliatti, Mariachiara Sensi, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Badino
Date: 2021-04-06 00:00:00

This paper introduces a new dysarthric speech command dataset in Italian, called EasyCall corpus. The dataset consists of 21386 audio recordings from 24 healthy and 31 dysarthric speakers, whose individual degree of speech impairment was assessed by neurologists through the Therapy Outcome Measure. The corpus aims at providing a resource for the development of ASR-based assistive technologies for patients with dysarthria. In particular, it may be exploited to develop a voice-controlled contact application for commercial smartphones, aiming at improving dysarthric patients' ability to communicate with their family and caregivers. Before recording the dataset, participants were administered a survey to evaluate which commands are more likely to be employed by dysarthric individuals in a voice-controlled contact application. In addition, the dataset includes a list of non-commands (i.e., words near/inside commands or phonetically close to commands) that can be leveraged to build a more robust command recognition system. At present commercial ASR systems perform poorly on the EasyCall Corpus as we report in this paper. This result corroborates the need for dysarthric speech corpora for developing effective assistive technologies. To the best of our knowledge, this database represents the richest corpus of dysarthric speech to date.
Optimal Transport-based Adaptation in Dysarthric Speech Tasks
Authors: Rosanna Turrisi, Leonardo Badino
Date: 2021-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

In many real-world applications, the mismatch between distributions of training data (source) and test data (target) significantly degrades the performance of machine learning algorithms. In speech data, causes of this mismatch include different acoustic environments or speaker characteristics. In this paper, we address this issue in the challenging context of dysarthric speech, by multi-source domain/speaker adaptation (MSDA/MSSA). Specifically, we propose the use of an optimal-transport based approach, called MSDA via Weighted Joint Optimal Transport (MSDA-WDJOT). We confront the mismatch problem in dysarthria detection for which the proposed approach outperforms both the Baseline and the state-of-the-art MSDA models, improving the detection accuracy of 0.9% over the best competitor method. We then employ MSDA-WJDOT for dysarthric speaker adaptation in command speech recognition. This provides a Command Error Rate relative reduction of 16% and 7% over the baseline and the best competitor model, respectively. Interestingly, MSDA-WJDOT provides a similarity score between the source and the target, i.e. between speakers in this case. We leverage this similarity measure to define a Dysarthric and Healthy score of the target speaker and diagnose the dysarthria with an accuracy of 95%.
AI4D -- African Language Program
Authors: Kathleen Siminyu, Godson Kalipe, Davor Orlic, Jade Abbott, Vukosi Marivate, Sackey Freshia, Prateek Sibal, Bhanu Neupane, David I. Adelani, Amelia Taylor, Jamiil Toure Ali, Kevin Degila, Momboladji Balogoun, Thierno Ibrahima DIOP, Davis David, Chayma Fourati, Hatem Haddad, Malek Naski
Date: 2021-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Translation

Advances in speech and language technologies enable tools such as voice-search, text-to-speech, speech recognition and machine translation. These are however only available for high resource languages like English, French or Chinese. Without foundational digital resources for African languages, which are considered low-resource in the digital context, these advanced tools remain out of reach. This work details the AI4D - African Language Program, a 3-part project that 1) incentivised the crowd-sourcing, collection and curation of language datasets through an online quantitative and qualitative challenge, 2) supported research fellows for a period of 3-4 months to create datasets annotated for NLP tasks, and 3) hosted competitive Machine Learning challenges on the basis of these datasets. Key outcomes of the work so far include 1) the creation of 9+ open source, African language datasets annotated for a variety of ML tasks, and 2) the creation of baseline models for these datasets through hosting of competitive ML challenges.
SERRANT: a syntactic classifier for English Grammatical Error Types
Authors: Leshem Choshen, Matanel Oren, Dmitry Nikolaev, Omri Abend
Date: 2021-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

SERRANT is a system and code for automatic classification of English grammatical errors that combines SErCl and ERRANT. SERRANT uses ERRANT's annotations when they are informative and those provided by SErCl otherwise.
ODE Transformer: An Ordinary Differential Equation-Inspired Model for Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Bei Li, Quan Du, Tao Zhou, Shuhan Zhou, Xin Zeng, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu
Date: 2021-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

It has been found that residual networks are an Euler discretization of solutions to Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs). In this paper, we explore a deeper relationship between Transformer and numerical methods of ODEs. We show that a residual block of layers in Transformer can be described as a higher-order solution to ODEs. This leads us to design a new architecture (call it ODE Transformer) analogous to the Runge-Kutta method that is well motivated in ODEs. As a natural extension to Transformer, ODE Transformer is easy to implement and parameter efficient. Our experiments on three WMT tasks demonstrate the genericity of this model, and large improvements in performance over several strong baselines. It achieves 30.76 and 44.11 BLEU scores on the WMT'14 En-De and En-Fr test data. This sets a new state-of-the-art on the WMT'14 En-Fr task.
Non-autoregressive Mandarin-English Code-switching Speech Recognition
Authors: Shun-Po Chuang, Heng-Jui Chang, Sung-Feng Huang, Hung-Yi Lee
Date: 2021-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Sentence, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Mandarin-English code-switching (CS) is frequently used among East and Southeast Asian people. However, the intra-sentence language switching of the two very different languages makes recognizing CS speech challenging. Meanwhile, the recent successful non-autoregressive (NAR) ASR models remove the need for left-to-right beam decoding in autoregressive (AR) models and achieved outstanding performance and fast inference speed, but it has not been applied to Mandarin-English CS speech recognition. This paper takes advantage of the Mask-CTC NAR ASR framework to tackle the CS speech recognition issue. We further propose to change the Mandarin output target of the encoder to Pinyin for faster encoder training and introduce the Pinyin-to-Mandarin decoder to learn contextualized information. Moreover, we use word embedding label smoothing to regularize the decoder with contextualized information and projection matrix regularization to bridge that gap between the encoder and decoder. We evaluate these methods on the SEAME corpus and achieved exciting results.