pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LDKP: A Dataset for Identifying Keyphrases from Long Scientific Documents
Authors: Debanjan Mahata, Navneet Agarwal, Dibya Gautam, Amardeep Kumar, Swapnil Parekh, Yaman Kumar Singla, Anish Acharya, Rajiv Ratn Shah
Date: 2022-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Information Retrieval, Keyphrase Extraction, Keyphrase Generation, Retrieval

Identifying keyphrases (KPs) from text documents is a fundamental task in natural language processing and information retrieval. Vast majority of the benchmark datasets for this task are from the scientific domain containing only the document title and abstract information. This limits keyphrase extraction (KPE) and keyphrase generation (KPG) algorithms to identify keyphrases from human-written summaries that are often very short (approx 8 sentences). This presents three challenges for real-world applications: human-written summaries are unavailable for most documents, the documents are almost always long, and a high percentage of KPs are directly found beyond the limited context of title and abstract. Therefore, we release two extensive corpora mapping KPs of ~1.3M and ~100K scientific articles with their fully extracted text and additional metadata including publication venue, year, author, field of study, and citations for facilitating research on this real-world problem.
Improving Persian Relation Extraction Models by Data Augmentation
Authors: Moein Salimi Sartakhti, Romina Etezadi, Mehrnoush Shamsfard
Date: 2022-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Relation, Relation Extraction, Sentence

Relation extraction that is the task of predicting semantic relation type between entities in a sentence or document is an important task in natural language processing. Although there are many researches and datasets for English, Persian suffers from sufficient researches and comprehensive datasets. The only available Persian dataset for this task is PERLEX, which is a Persian expert-translated version of the SemEval-2010-Task-8 dataset. In this paper, we present our augmented dataset and the results and findings of our system, participated in the Persian relation Extraction shared task of NSURL 2021 workshop. We use PERLEX as the base dataset and enhance it by applying some text preprocessing steps and by increasing its size via data augmentation techniques to improve the generalization and robustness of applied models. We then employ two different models including ParsBERT and multilingual BERT for relation extraction on the augmented PERLEX dataset. Our best model obtained 64.67% of Macro-F1 on the test phase of the contest and it achieved 83.68% of Macro-F1 on the test set of PERLEX.
Noise-robust Speech Recognition with 10 Minutes Unparalleled In-domain Data
Authors: Chen Chen, Nana Hou, Yuchen Hu, Shashank Shirol, Eng Siong Chng
Date: 2022-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Robust Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Noise-robust speech recognition systems require large amounts of training data including noisy speech data and corresponding transcripts to achieve state-of-the-art performances in face of various practical environments. However, such plenty of in-domain data is not always available in the real-life world. In this paper, we propose a generative adversarial network to simulate noisy spectrum from the clean spectrum (Simu-GAN), where only 10 minutes of unparalleled in-domain noisy speech data is required as labels. Furthermore, we also propose a dual-path speech recognition system to improve the robustness of the system under noisy conditions. Experimental results show that the proposed speech recognition system achieves 7.3% absolute improvement with simulated noisy data by Simu-GAN over the best baseline in terms of word error rate (WER).
Applying Syntax$\unicode{x2013}$Prosody Mapping Hypothesis and Prosodic Well-Formedness Constraints to Neural Sequence-to-Sequence Speech Synthesis
Authors: Kei Furukawa, Takeshi Kishiyama, Satoshi Nakamura
Date: 2022-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

End-to-end text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), which generates speech sounds directly from strings of texts or phonemes, has improved the quality of speech synthesis over the conventional TTS. However, most previous studies have been evaluated based on subjective naturalness and have not objectively examined whether they can reproduce pitch patterns of phonological phenomena such as downstep, rhythmic boost, and initial lowering that reflect syntactic structures in Japanese. These phenomena can be linguistically explained by phonological constraints and the syntax$\unicode{x2013}$prosody mapping hypothesis (SPMH), which assumes projections from syntactic structures to phonological hierarchy. Although some experiments in psycholinguistics have verified the validity of the SPMH, it is crucial to investigate whether it can be implemented in TTS. To synthesize linguistic phenomena involving syntactic or phonological constraints, we propose a model using phonological symbols based on the SPMH and prosodic well-formedness constraints. Experimental results showed that the proposed method synthesized similar pitch patterns to those reported in linguistics experiments for the phenomena of initial lowering and rhythmic boost. The proposed model efficiently synthesizes phonological phenomena in the test data that were not explicitly included in the training data.
Analysis of EEG frequency bands for Envisioned Speech Recognition
Authors: Ayush Tripathi
Date: 2022-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

The use of Automatic speech recognition (ASR) interfaces have become increasingly popular in daily life for use in interaction and control of electronic devices. The interfaces currently being used are not feasible for a variety of users such as those suffering from a speech disorder, locked-in syndrome, paralysis or people with utmost privacy requirements. In such cases, an interface that can identify envisioned speech using electroencephalogram (EEG) signals can be of great benefit. Various works targeting this problem have been done in the past. However, there has been limited work in identifying the frequency bands ($\delta, \theta, \alpha, \beta, \gamma$) of the EEG signal that contribute towards envisioned speech recognition. Therefore, in this work, we aim to analyze the significance of different EEG frequency bands and signals obtained from different lobes of the brain and their contribution towards recognizing envisioned speech. Signals obtained from different lobes and bandpass filtered for different frequency bands are fed to a spatio-temporal deep learning architecture with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). The performance is evaluated on a publicly available dataset comprising of three classification tasks - digit, character and images. We obtain a classification accuracy of $85.93\%$, $87.27\%$ and $87.51\%$ for the three tasks respectively. The code for the implementation has been made available at https://github.com/ayushayt/ImaginedSpeechRecognition.
Shifted Chunk Encoder for Transformer Based Streaming End-to-End ASR
Authors: Fangyuan Wang, Bo Xu
Date: 2022-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Currently, there are mainly three kinds of Transformer encoder based streaming End to End (E2E) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) approaches, namely time-restricted methods, chunk-wise methods, and memory-based methods. Generally, all of them have limitations in aspects of linear computational complexity, global context modeling, and parallel training. In this work, we aim to build a model to take all these three advantages for streaming Transformer ASR. Particularly, we propose a shifted chunk mechanism for the chunk-wise Transformer which provides cross-chunk connections between chunks. Therefore, the global context modeling ability of chunk-wise models can be significantly enhanced while all the original merits inherited. We integrate this scheme with the chunk-wise Transformer and Conformer, and identify them as SChunk-Transformer and SChunk-Conformer, respectively. Experiments on AISHELL-1 show that the SChunk-Transformer and SChunk-Conformer can respectively achieve CER 6.43% and 5.77%. And the linear complexity makes them possible to train with large batches and infer more efficiently. Our models can significantly outperform their conventional chunk-wise counterparts, while being competitive, with only 0.22 absolute CER drop, when compared with U2 which has quadratic complexity. A better CER can be achieved if compared with existing chunk-wise or memory-based methods, such as HS-DACS and MMA. Code is released.
Visualizations of Complex Sequences of Family-Infant Vocalizations Using Bag-of-Audio-Words Approach Based on Wav2vec 2.0 Features
Authors: Jialu Li, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Nancy L. McElwain
Date: 2022-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: speaker-diarization, Speaker Diarization

In the U.S., approximately 15-17% of children 2-8 years of age are estimated to have at least one diagnosed mental, behavioral or developmental disorder. However, such disorders often go undiagnosed, and the ability to evaluate and treat disorders in the first years of life is limited. To analyze infant developmental changes, previous studies have shown advanced ML models excel at classifying infant and/or parent vocalizations collected using cell phone, video, or audio-only recording device like LENA. In this study, we pilot test the audio component of a new infant wearable multi-modal device that we have developed called LittleBeats (LB). LB audio pipeline is advanced in that it provides reliable labels for both speaker diarization and vocalization classification tasks, compared with other platforms that only record audio and/or provide speaker diarization labels. We leverage wav2vec 2.0 to obtain superior and more nuanced results with the LB family audio stream. We use a bag-of-audio-words method with wav2vec 2.0 features to create high-level visualizations to understand family-infant vocalization interactions. We demonstrate that our high-quality visualizations capture major types of family vocalization interactions, in categories indicative of mental, behavioral, and developmental health, for both labeled and unlabeled LB audio.
Improving Generalization of Deep Neural Network Acoustic Models with Length Perturbation and N-best Based Label Smoothing
Authors: Xiaodong Cui, George Saon, Tohru Nagano, Masayuki Suzuki, Takashi Fukuda, Brian Kingsbury, Gakuto Kurata
Date: 2022-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Data Augmentation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

We introduce two techniques, length perturbation and n-best based label smoothing, to improve generalization of deep neural network (DNN) acoustic models for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Length perturbation is a data augmentation algorithm that randomly drops and inserts frames of an utterance to alter the length of the speech feature sequence. N-best based label smoothing randomly injects noise to ground truth labels during training in order to avoid overfitting, where the noisy labels are generated from n-best hypotheses. We evaluate these two techniques extensively on the 300-hour Switchboard (SWB300) dataset and an in-house 500-hour Japanese (JPN500) dataset using recurrent neural network transducer (RNNT) acoustic models for ASR. We show that both techniques improve the generalization of RNNT models individually and they can also be complementary. In particular, they yield good improvements over a strong SWB300 baseline and give state-of-art performance on SWB300 using RNNT models.
Human-AI Collaboration Enables More Empathic Conversations in Text-based Peer-to-Peer Mental Health Support
Authors: ASHISH SHARMA, Inna W. Lin, Adam S. Miner, David C. Atkins, Tim Althoff
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling systems that augment and collaborate with humans to perform simple, mechanistic tasks like scheduling meetings and grammar-checking text. However, such Human-AI collaboration poses challenges for more complex, creative tasks, such as carrying out empathic conversations, due to difficulties of AI systems in understanding complex human emotions and the open-ended nature of these tasks. Here, we focus on peer-to-peer mental health support, a setting in which empathy is critical for success, and examine how AI can collaborate with humans to facilitate peer empathy during textual, online supportive conversations. We develop Hailey, an AI-in-the-loop agent that provides just-in-time feedback to help participants who provide support (peer supporters) respond more empathically to those seeking help (support seekers). We evaluate Hailey in a non-clinical randomized controlled trial with real-world peer supporters on TalkLife (N=300), a large online peer-to-peer support platform. We show that our Human-AI collaboration approach leads to a 19.60% increase in conversational empathy between peers overall. Furthermore, we find a larger 38.88% increase in empathy within the subsample of peer supporters who self-identify as experiencing difficulty providing support. We systematically analyze the Human-AI collaboration patterns and find that peer supporters are able to use the AI feedback both directly and indirectly without becoming overly reliant on AI while reporting improved self-efficacy post-feedback. Our findings demonstrate the potential of feedback-driven, AI-in-the-loop writing systems to empower humans in open-ended, social, creative tasks such as empathic conversations.
Filler Word Detection and Classification: A Dataset and Benchmark
Authors: Ge Zhu, Juan-Pablo Caceres, Justin Salamon
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Keyword Spotting, Sound Event Localization and Detection

Filler words such as `uh' or `um' are sounds or words people use to signal they are pausing to think. Finding and removing filler words from recordings is a common and tedious task in media editing. Automatically detecting and classifying filler words could greatly aid in this task, but few studies have been published on this problem to date. A key reason is the absence of a dataset with annotated filler words for model training and evaluation. In this work, we present a novel speech dataset, PodcastFillers, with 35K annotated filler words and 50K annotations of other sounds that commonly occur in podcasts such as breaths, laughter, and word repetitions. We propose a pipeline that leverages VAD and ASR to detect filler candidates and a classifier to distinguish between filler word types. We evaluate our proposed pipeline on PodcastFillers, compare to several baselines, and present a detailed ablation study. In particular, we evaluate the importance of using ASR and how it compares to a transcription-free approach resembling keyword spotting. We show that our pipeline obtains state-of-the-art results, and that leveraging ASR strongly outperforms a keyword spotting approach. We make PodcastFillers publicly available, in the hope that our work serves as a benchmark for future research.
A Well-Composed Text is Half Done! Composition Sampling for Diverse Conditional Generation
Authors: Shashi Narayan, Gonçalo Simões, Yao Zhao, Joshua Maynez, Dipanjan Das, Michael Collins, Mirella Lapata
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Question Generation, Question-Generation

We propose Composition Sampling, a simple but effective method to generate diverse outputs for conditional generation of higher quality compared to previous stochastic decoding strategies. It builds on recently proposed plan-based neural generation models (Narayan et al, 2021) that are trained to first create a composition of the output and then generate by conditioning on it and the input. Our approach avoids text degeneration by first sampling a composition in the form of an entity chain and then using beam search to generate the best possible text grounded to this entity chain. Experiments on summarization (CNN/DailyMail and XSum) and question generation (SQuAD), using existing and newly proposed automatic metrics together with human-based evaluation, demonstrate that Composition Sampling is currently the best available decoding strategy for generating diverse meaningful outputs.
Efficiently Evolving Swarm Behaviors Using Grammatical Evolution With PPA-style Behavior Trees
Authors: Aadesh Neupane, Michael A. Goodrich
Date: 2022-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

Evolving swarm behaviors with artificial agents is computationally expensive and challenging. Because reward structures are often sparse in swarm problems, only a few simulations among hundreds evolve successful swarm behaviors. Additionally, swarm evolutionary algorithms typically rely on ad hoc fitness structures, and novel fitness functions need to be designed for each swarm task. This paper evolves swarm behaviors by systematically combining Postcondition-Precondition-Action (PPA) canonical Behavior Trees (BT) with a Grammatical Evolution. The PPA structure replaces ad hoc reward structures with systematic postcondition checks, which allows a common grammar to learn solutions to different tasks using only environmental cues and BT feedback. The static performance of learned behaviors is poor because no agent learns all necessary subtasks, but performance while evolving is excellent because agents can quickly change behaviors in new contexts. The evolving algorithm succeeded in 75\% of learning trials for both foraging and nest maintenance tasks, an eight-fold improvement over prior work.
A Two-phase Framework with a Bézier Simplex-based Interpolation Method for Computationally Expensive Multi-objective Optimization
Authors: Ryoji Tanabe, Youhei Akimoto, Ken Kobayashi, Hiroshi Umeki, Shinichi Shirakawa, Naoki Hamada
Date: 2022-03-29 00:00:00

This paper proposes a two-phase framework with a B\'{e}zier simplex-based interpolation method (TPB) for computationally expensive multi-objective optimization. The first phase in TPB aims to approximate a few Pareto optimal solutions by optimizing a sequence of single-objective scalar problems. The first phase in TPB can fully exploit a state-of-the-art single-objective derivative-free optimizer. The second phase in TPB utilizes a B\'{e}zier simplex model to interpolate the solutions obtained in the first phase. The second phase in TPB fully exploits the fact that a B\'{e}zier simplex model can approximate the Pareto optimal solution set by exploiting its simplex structure when a given problem is simplicial. We investigate the performance of TPB on the 55 bi-objective BBOB problems. The results show that TPB performs significantly better than HMO-CMA-ES and some state-of-the-art meta-model-based optimizers.
Assessing Evolutionary Terrain Generation Methods for Curriculum Reinforcement Learning
Authors: David Howard, Josh Kannemeyer, Davide Dolcetti, Humphrey Munn, Nicole Robinson
Date: 2022-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Curriculum learning allows complex tasks to be mastered via incremental progression over `stepping stone' goals towards a final desired behaviour. Typical implementations learn locomotion policies for challenging environments through gradual complexification of a terrain mesh generated through a parameterised noise function. To date, researchers have predominantly generated terrains from a limited range of noise functions, and the effect of the generator on the learning process is underrepresented in the literature. We compare popular noise-based terrain generators to two indirect encodings, CPPN and GAN. To allow direct comparison between both direct and indirect representations, we assess the impact of a range of representation-agnostic MAP-Elites feature descriptors that compute metrics directly from the generated terrain meshes. Next, performance and coverage are assessed when training a humanoid robot in a physics simulator using the PPO algorithm. Results describe key differences between the generators that inform their use in curriculum learning, and present a range of useful feature descriptors for uptake by the community.
A Distribution Evolutionary Algorithm for the Graph Coloring Problem
Authors: Yongjian Xu, Huabin Cheng, Ning Xu, Yu Chen, Chengwang Xie
Date: 2022-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

Graph coloring is a challenging combinatorial optimization problem with a wide range of applications. In this paper, a distribution evolutionary algorithm based on a population of probability model (DEA-PPM) is developed to address it efficiently. Unlike existing estimation of distribution algorithms where a probability model is updated by generated solutions, DEA-PPM employs a distribution population based on a novel probability model, and an orthogonal exploration strategy is introduced to search the distribution space with the assistance of an refinement strategy. By sampling the distribution population, efficient search in the solution space is realized based on a tabu search process. Meanwhile, DEA-PPM introduces an iterative vertex removal strategy to improve the efficiency of $k$-coloring, and an inherited initialization strategy is implemented to address the chromatic problem well. The cooperative evolution of the distribution population and the solution population leads to a good balance between exploration and exploitation. Numerical results demonstrate that the DEA-PPM of small population size is competitive to the state-of-the-art metaheuristics.utes to its competitiveness to the state-of-the-art metaheuristics.
An Unbiased Symmetric Matrix Estimator for Topology Inference under Partial Observability
Authors: Yupeng Chen, Zhiguo Wang, Xiaojing Shen
Date: 2022-03-29 00:00:00

Network topology inference is a fundamental problem in many applications of network science, such as locating the source of fake news, brain connectivity networks detection, etc. Many real-world situations suffer from a critical problem that only a limited part of observed nodes are available. This letter considers the problem of network topology inference under the framework of partial observability. Based on the vector autoregressive model, we propose a novel unbiased estimator for the symmetric network topology with the Gaussian noise and the Laplacian combination rule. Theoretically, we prove that it converges to the network combination matrix in probability. Furthermore, by utilizing the Gaussian mixture model algorithm, an effective algorithm called network inference Gauss algorithm is developed to infer the network structure. Finally, compared with the state-of-the-art methods, numerical experiments demonstrate the proposed algorithm enjoys better performance in the case of small sample sizes.
Selective inference for k-means clustering
Authors: Yiqun T. Chen, Daniela M. Witten
Date: 2022-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

We consider the problem of testing for a difference in means between clusters of observations identified via k-means clustering. In this setting, classical hypothesis tests lead to an inflated Type I error rate. To overcome this problem, we take a selective inference approach. We propose a finite-sample p-value that controls the selective Type I error for a test of the difference in means between a pair of clusters obtained using k-means clustering, and show that it can be efficiently computed. We apply our proposal in simulation, and on hand-written digits data and single-cell RNA-sequencing data.