pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Topic Model Supervised by Understanding Map
Authors: Gangli Liu
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Topic Models

Inspired by the notion of Center of Mass in physics, an extension called Semantic Center of Mass (SCOM) is proposed, and used to discover the abstract "topic" of a document. The notion is under a framework model called Understanding Map Supervised Topic Model (UM-S-TM). The devise aim of UM-S-TM is to let both the document content and a semantic network -- specifically, Understanding Map -- play a role, in interpreting the meaning of a document. Based on different justifications, three possible methods are devised to discover the SCOM of a document. Some experiments on artificial documents and Understanding Maps are conducted to test their outcomes. In addition, its ability of vectorization of documents and capturing sequential information are tested. We also compared UM-S-TM with probabilistic topic models like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA).
DiscoDVT: Generating Long Text with Discourse-Aware Discrete Variational Transformer
Authors: Haozhe Ji, Minlie Huang
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Story Generation, Text Generation

Despite the recent advances in applying pre-trained language models to generate high-quality texts, generating long passages that maintain long-range coherence is yet challenging for these models. In this paper, we propose DiscoDVT, a discourse-aware discrete variational Transformer to tackle the incoherence issue. DiscoDVT learns a discrete variable sequence that summarizes the global structure of the text and then applies it to guide the generation process at each decoding step. To further embed discourse-aware information into the discrete latent representations, we introduce an auxiliary objective to model the discourse relations within the text. We conduct extensive experiments on two open story generation datasets and demonstrate that the latent codes learn meaningful correspondence to the discourse structures that guide the model to generate long texts with better long-range coherence.
Word Order Does Not Matter For Speech Recognition
Authors: Vineel Pratap, Qiantong Xu, Tatiana Likhomanenko, Gabriel Synnaeve, Ronan Collobert
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

In this paper, we study training of automatic speech recognition system in a weakly supervised setting where the order of words in transcript labels of the audio training data is not known. We train a word-level acoustic model which aggregates the distribution of all output frames using LogSumExp operation and uses a cross-entropy loss to match with the ground-truth words distribution. Using the pseudo-labels generated from this model on the training set, we then train a letter-based acoustic model using Connectionist Temporal Classification loss. Our system achieves 2.3%/4.6% on test-clean/test-other subsets of LibriSpeech, which closely matches with the supervised baseline's performance.
LaoPLM: Pre-trained Language Models for Lao
Authors: Nankai Lin, Yingwen Fu, Chuwei Chen, Ziyu Yang, Shengyi Jiang
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Part-Of-Speech Tagging, text-classification, Text Classification

Trained on the large corpus, pre-trained language models (PLMs) can capture different levels of concepts in context and hence generate universal language representations. They can benefit multiple downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Although PTMs have been widely used in most NLP applications, especially for high-resource languages such as English, it is under-represented in Lao NLP research. Previous work on Lao has been hampered by the lack of annotated datasets and the sparsity of language resources. In this work, we construct a text classification dataset to alleviate the resource-scare situation of the Lao language. We additionally present the first transformer-based PTMs for Lao with four versions: BERT-small, BERT-base, ELECTRA-small and ELECTRA-base, and evaluate it over two downstream tasks: part-of-speech tagging and text classification. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our Lao models. We will release our models and datasets to the community, hoping to facilitate the future development of Lao NLP applications.
MetricGAN-U: Unsupervised speech enhancement/ dereverberation based only on noisy/ reverberated speech
Authors: Szu-Wei Fu, Cheng Yu, Kuo-Hsuan Hung, Mirco Ravanelli, Yu Tsao
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

Most of the deep learning-based speech enhancement models are learned in a supervised manner, which implies that pairs of noisy and clean speech are required during training. Consequently, several noisy speeches recorded in daily life cannot be used to train the model. Although certain unsupervised learning frameworks have also been proposed to solve the pair constraint, they still require clean speech or noise for training. Therefore, in this paper, we propose MetricGAN-U, which stands for MetricGAN-unsupervised, to further release the constraint from conventional unsupervised learning. In MetricGAN-U, only noisy speech is required to train the model by optimizing non-intrusive speech quality metrics. The experimental results verified that MetricGAN-U outperforms baselines in both objective and subjective metrics.
text2sdg: An R package to Monitor Sustainable Development Goals from Text
Authors: Dominik S. Meier, Rui Mata, Dirk U. Wulff
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00

Monitoring progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is important for both academic and non-academic organizations. Existing approaches to monitoring SDGs have focused on specific data types; namely, publications listed in proprietary research databases. We present the text2sdg package for the R language, a user-friendly, open-source package that detects SDGs in any kind of text data using different existing or custom-made query systems. The text2sdg package thereby facilitates the monitoring of SDGs for a wide array of text sources and provides a much-needed basis for validating and improving extant methods to detect SDGs from text.
Adapting TTS models For New Speakers using Transfer Learning
Authors: Paarth Neekhara, Jason Li, Boris Ginsburg
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Transfer Learning, Voice Cloning

Training neural text-to-speech (TTS) models for a new speaker typically requires several hours of high quality speech data. Prior works on voice cloning attempt to address this challenge by adapting pre-trained multi-speaker TTS models for a new voice, using a few minutes of speech data of the new speaker. However, publicly available large multi-speaker datasets are often noisy, thereby resulting in TTS models that are not suitable for use in products. We address this challenge by proposing transfer-learning guidelines for adapting high quality single-speaker TTS models for a new speaker, using only a few minutes of speech data. We conduct an extensive study using different amounts of data for a new speaker and evaluate the synthesized speech in terms of naturalness and voice/style similarity to the target speaker. We find that fine-tuning a single-speaker TTS model on just 30 minutes of data, can yield comparable performance to a model trained from scratch on more than 27 hours of data for both male and female target speakers.
We've had this conversation before: A Novel Approach to Measuring Dialog Similarity
Authors: Ofer Lavi, Ella Rabinovich, Segev Shlomov, David Boaz, Inbal Ronen, Ateret Anaby-Tavor
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00

Dialog is a core building block of human natural language interactions. It contains multi-party utterances used to convey information from one party to another in a dynamic and evolving manner. The ability to compare dialogs is beneficial in many real world use cases, such as conversation analytics for contact center calls and virtual agent design. We propose a novel adaptation of the edit distance metric to the scenario of dialog similarity. Our approach takes into account various conversation aspects such as utterance semantics, conversation flow, and the participants. We evaluate this new approach and compare it to existing document similarity measures on two publicly available datasets. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms the other approaches in capturing dialog flow, and is better aligned with the human perception of conversation similarity.
Quantifying Cognitive Factors in Lexical Decline
Authors: David Francis, Ella Rabinovich, Farhan Samir, David Mortensen, Suzanne Stevenson
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic factors -- semantic, distributional, and phonological -- that we hypothesize are predictive of lexical decline, in which words greatly decrease in frequency over time. Using historical data across three languages (English, French, and German), we find that most of our proposed factors show a significant difference in the expected direction between each curated set of declining words and their matched stable words. Moreover, logistic regression analyses show that semantic and distributional factors are significant in predicting declining words. Further diachronic analysis reveals that declining words tend to decrease in the diversity of their lexical contexts over time, gradually narrowing their 'ecological niches'.
UniSpeech-SAT: Universal Speech Representation Learning with Speaker Aware Pre-Training
Authors: Sanyuan Chen, Yu Wu, Chengyi Wang, Zhengyang Chen, Zhuo Chen, Shujie Liu, Jian Wu, Yao Qian, Furu Wei, Jinyu Li, Xiangzhan Yu
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Multi-Task Learning, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, Speaker Identification, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Representation Learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a long-standing goal for speech processing, since it utilizes large-scale unlabeled data and avoids extensive human labeling. Recent years witness great successes in applying self-supervised learning in speech recognition, while limited exploration was attempted in applying SSL for modeling speaker characteristics. In this paper, we aim to improve the existing SSL framework for speaker representation learning. Two methods are introduced for enhancing the unsupervised speaker information extraction. First, we apply the multi-task learning to the current SSL framework, where we integrate the utterance-wise contrastive loss with the SSL objective function. Second, for better speaker discrimination, we propose an utterance mixing strategy for data augmentation, where additional overlapped utterances are created unsupervisely and incorporate during training. We integrate the proposed methods into the HuBERT framework. Experiment results on SUPERB benchmark show that the proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performance in universal representation learning, especially for speaker identification oriented tasks. An ablation study is performed verifying the efficacy of each proposed method. Finally, we scale up training dataset to 94 thousand hours public audio data and achieve further performance improvement in all SUPERB tasks.
SportsSum2.0: Generating High-Quality Sports News from Live Text Commentary
Authors: Jiaan Wang, Zhixu Li, Qiang Yang, Jianfeng Qu, Zhigang Chen, Qingsheng Liu, Guoping Hu
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Sports game summarization aims to generate news articles from live text commentaries. A recent state-of-the-art work, SportsSum, not only constructs a large benchmark dataset, but also proposes a two-step framework. Despite its great contributions, the work has three main drawbacks: 1) the noise existed in SportsSum dataset degrades the summarization performance; 2) the neglect of lexical overlap between news and commentaries results in low-quality pseudo-labeling algorithm; 3) the usage of directly concatenating rewritten sentences to form news limits its practicability. In this paper, we publish a new benchmark dataset SportsSum2.0, together with a modified summarization framework. In particular, to obtain a clean dataset, we employ crowd workers to manually clean the original dataset. Moreover, the degree of lexical overlap is incorporated into the generation of pseudo labels. Further, we introduce a reranker-enhanced summarizer to take into account the fluency and expressiveness of the summarized news. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline.
SEPP: Similarity Estimation of Predicted Probabilities for Defending and Detecting Adversarial Text
Authors: Hoang-Quoc Nguyen-Son, Seira Hidano, Kazuhide Fukushima, Shinsaku Kiyomoto
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Text, Classification

There are two cases describing how a classifier processes input text, namely, misclassification and correct classification. In terms of misclassified texts, a classifier handles the texts with both incorrect predictions and adversarial texts, which are generated to fool the classifier, which is called a victim. Both types are misunderstood by the victim, but they can still be recognized by other classifiers. This induces large gaps in predicted probabilities between the victim and the other classifiers. In contrast, text correctly classified by the victim is often successfully predicted by the others and induces small gaps. In this paper, we propose an ensemble model based on similarity estimation of predicted probabilities (SEPP) to exploit the large gaps in the misclassified predictions in contrast to small gaps in the correct classification. SEPP then corrects the incorrect predictions of the misclassified texts. We demonstrate the resilience of SEPP in defending and detecting adversarial texts through different types of victim classifiers, classification tasks, and adversarial attacks.
Anatomy of OntoGUM--Adapting GUM to the OntoNotes Scheme to Evaluate Robustness of SOTA Coreference Algorithms
Authors: YIlun Zhu, Sameer Pradhan, Amir Zeldes
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution

SOTA coreference resolution produces increasingly impressive scores on the OntoNotes benchmark. However lack of comparable data following the same scheme for more genres makes it difficult to evaluate generalizability to open domain data. Zhu et al. (2021) introduced the creation of the OntoGUM corpus for evaluating geralizability of the latest neural LM-based end-to-end systems. This paper covers details of the mapping process which is a set of deterministic rules applied to the rich syntactic and discourse annotations manually annotated in the GUM corpus. Out-of-domain evaluation across 12 genres shows nearly 15-20% degradation for both deterministic and deep learning systems, indicating a lack of generalizability or covert overfitting in existing coreference resolution models.
Dealing with Disagreements: Looking Beyond the Majority Vote in Subjective Annotations
Authors: Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Mark Díaz, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification

Majority voting and averaging are common approaches employed to resolve annotator disagreements and derive single ground truth labels from multiple annotations. However, annotators may systematically disagree with one another, often reflecting their individual biases and values, especially in the case of subjective tasks such as detecting affect, aggression, and hate speech. Annotator disagreements may capture important nuances in such tasks that are often ignored while aggregating annotations to a single ground truth. In order to address this, we investigate the efficacy of multi-annotator models. In particular, our multi-task based approach treats predicting each annotators' judgements as separate subtasks, while sharing a common learned representation of the task. We show that this approach yields same or better performance than aggregating labels in the data prior to training across seven different binary classification tasks. Our approach also provides a way to estimate uncertainty in predictions, which we demonstrate better correlate with annotation disagreements than traditional methods. Being able to model uncertainty is especially useful in deployment scenarios where knowing when not to make a prediction is important.
On Releasing Annotator-Level Labels and Information in Datasets
Authors: Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Mark Díaz
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (LAW, DMR) 2021 11

A common practice in building NLP datasets, especially using crowd-sourced annotations, involves obtaining multiple annotator judgements on the same data instances, which are then flattened to produce a single "ground truth" label or score, through majority voting, averaging, or adjudication. While these approaches may be appropriate in certain annotation tasks, such aggregations overlook the socially constructed nature of human perceptions that annotations for relatively more subjective tasks are meant to capture. In particular, systematic disagreements between annotators owing to their socio-cultural backgrounds and/or lived experiences are often obfuscated through such aggregations. In this paper, we empirically demonstrate that label aggregation may introduce representational biases of individual and group perspectives. Based on this finding, we propose a set of recommendations for increased utility and transparency of datasets for downstream use cases.
Doubly-Trained Adversarial Data Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Weiting Tan, Shuoyang Ding, Huda Khayrallah, Philipp Koehn
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: AMTA 2022 9
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Machine Translation, NMT, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Translation

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are known to suffer from noisy inputs. To make models robust, we generate adversarial augmentation samples that attack the model and preserve the source-side semantic meaning at the same time. To generate such samples, we propose a doubly-trained architecture that pairs two NMT models of opposite translation directions with a joint loss function, which combines the target-side attack and the source-side semantic similarity constraint. The results from our experiments across three different language pairs and two evaluation metrics show that these adversarial samples improve the model robustness.
Are you doing what I say? On modalities alignment in ALFRED
Authors: Ting-Rui Chiang, Yi-Ting Yeh, Ta-Chung Chi, Yau-Shian Wang
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00

ALFRED is a recently proposed benchmark that requires a model to complete tasks in simulated house environments specified by instructions in natural language. We hypothesize that key to success is accurately aligning the text modality with visual inputs. Motivated by this, we inspect how well existing models can align these modalities using our proposed intrinsic metric, boundary adherence score (BAS). The results show the previous models are indeed failing to perform proper alignment. To address this issue, we introduce approaches aimed at improving model alignment and demonstrate how improved alignment, improves end task performance.
Learned Construction Grammars Converge Across Registers Given Increased Exposure
Authors: Jonathan Dunn, Harish Tayyar Madabushi
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CoNLL (EMNLP) 2021 11

This paper measures the impact of increased exposure on whether learned construction grammars converge onto shared representations when trained on data from different registers. Register influences the frequency of constructions, with some structures common in formal but not informal usage. We expect that a grammar induction algorithm exposed to different registers will acquire different constructions. To what degree does increased exposure lead to the convergence of register-specific grammars? The experiments in this paper simulate language learning in 12 languages (half Germanic and half Romance) with corpora representing three registers (Twitter, Wikipedia, Web). These simulations are repeated with increasing amounts of exposure, from 100k to 2 million words, to measure the impact of exposure on the convergence of grammars. The results show that increased exposure does lead to converging grammars across all languages. In addition, a shared core of register-universal constructions remains constant across increasing amounts of exposure.
Generalizing to New Domains by Mapping Natural Language to Lifted LTL
Authors: Eric Hsiung, Hiloni Mehta, Junchi Chu, Xinyu Liu, Roma Patel, Stefanie Tellex, George Konidaris
Date: 2021-10-11 00:00:00

Recent work on using natural language to specify commands to robots has grounded that language to LTL. However, mapping natural language task specifications to LTL task specifications using language models require probability distributions over finite vocabulary. Existing state-of-the-art methods have extended this finite vocabulary to include unseen terms from the input sequence to improve output generalization. However, novel out-of-vocabulary atomic propositions cannot be generated using these methods. To overcome this, we introduce an intermediate contextual query representation which can be learned from single positive task specification examples, associating a contextual query with an LTL template. We demonstrate that this intermediate representation allows for generalization over unseen object references, assuming accurate groundings are available. We compare our method of mapping natural language task specifications to intermediate contextual queries against state-of-the-art CopyNet models capable of translating natural language to LTL, by evaluating whether correct LTL for manipulation and navigation task specifications can be output, and show that our method outperforms the CopyNet model on unseen object references. We demonstrate that the grounded LTL our method outputs can be used for planning in a simulated OO-MDP environment. Finally, we discuss some common failure modes encountered when translating natural language task specifications to grounded LTL.
SRU++: Pioneering Fast Recurrence with Attention for Speech Recognition
Authors: Jing Pan, Tao Lei, Kwangyoun Kim, Kyu Han, Shinji Watanabe
Date: 2021-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Translation

The Transformer architecture has been well adopted as a dominant architecture in most sequence transduction tasks including automatic speech recognition (ASR), since its attention mechanism excels in capturing long-range dependencies. While models built solely upon attention can be better parallelized than regular RNN, a novel network architecture, SRU++, was recently proposed. By combining the fast recurrence and attention mechanism, SRU++ exhibits strong capability in sequence modeling and achieves near-state-of-the-art results in various language modeling and machine translation tasks with improved compute efficiency. In this work, we present the advantages of applying SRU++ in ASR tasks by comparing with Conformer across multiple ASR benchmarks and study how the benefits can be generalized to long-form speech inputs. On the popular LibriSpeech benchmark, our SRU++ model achieves 2.0% / 4.7% WER on test-clean / test-other, showing competitive performances compared with the state-of-the-art Conformer encoder under the same set-up. Specifically, SRU++ can surpass Conformer on long-form speech input with a large margin, based on our analysis.