pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Syntax-driven Approach for Semantic Role Labeling
Authors: Yuanhe Tian, Han Qin, Fei Xia, Yan Song
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: POS, Semantic Role Labeling, Sentence

As an important task to analyze the semantic structure of a sentence, semantic role labeling (SRL) aims to locate the semantic role (e.g., agent) of noun phrases with respect to a given predicate and thus plays an important role in downstream tasks such as dialogue systems. To achieve a better performance in SRL, a model is always required to have a good understanding of the context information. Although one can use advanced text encoder (e.g., BERT) to capture the context information, extra resources are also required to further improve the model performance. Considering that there are correlations between the syntactic structure and the semantic structure of the sentence, many previous studies leverage auto-generated syntactic knowledge, especially the dependencies, to enhance the modeling of context information through graph-based architectures, where limited attention is paid to other types of auto-generated knowledge. In this paper, we propose map memories to enhance SRL by encoding different types of auto-generated syntactic knowledge (i.e., POS tags, syntactic constituencies, and word dependencies) obtained from off-the-shelf toolkits. Experimental results on two English benchmark datasets for span-style SRL (i.e., CoNLL-2005 and CoNLL-2012) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art results on CoNLL-2005.
HerBERT Based Language Model Detects Quantifiers and Their Semantic Properties in Polish
Authors: Marcin Woliński, Bartłomiej Nitoń, Witold Kieraś, Jakub Szymanik
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

The paper presents a tool for automatic marking up of quantifying expressions, their semantic features, and scopes. We explore the idea of using a BERT based neural model for the task (in this case HerBERT, a model trained specifically for Polish, is used). The tool is trained on a recent manually annotated Corpus of Polish Quantificational Expressions (Szymanik and Kieraś, 2022). We discuss how it performs against human annotation and present results of automatic annotation of 300 million sub-corpus of National Corpus of Polish. Our results show that language models can effectively recognise semantic category of quantification as well as identify key semantic properties of quantifiers, like monotonicity. Furthermore, the algorithm we have developed can be used for building semantically annotated quantifier corpora for other languages.
Lexical Resource Mapping via Translations
Authors: Hongchang Bao, Bradley Hauer, Grzegorz Kondrak
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Translation, Word Sense Disambiguation

Aligning lexical resources that associate words with concepts in multiple languages increases the total amount of semantic information that can be leveraged for various NLP tasks. We present a translation-based approach to mapping concepts across diverse resources. Our methods depend only on multilingual lexicalization information. When applied to align WordNet/BabelNet to CLICS and OmegaWiki, our methods achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, without any dependence on other sources of semantic knowledge. Since each word-concept pair corresponds to a unique sense of the word, we also demonstrate that the mapping task can be framed as word sense disambiguation. To facilitate future work, we release a set of high-precision WordNet-CLICS alignments, produced by combining three different mapping methods.
Leveraging Hashtag Networks for Multimodal Popularity Prediction of Instagram Posts
Authors: Yu Yun Liao
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Binary Classification

With the increasing commercial and social importance of Instagram in recent years, more researchers begin to take multimodal approaches to predict popular content on Instagram. However, existing popularity prediction approaches often reduce hashtags to simple features such as hashtag length or number of hashtags in a post, ignoring the structural and textual information that entangles between hashtags. In this paper, we propose a multimodal framework using post captions, image, hashtag network, and topic model to predict popular influencer posts in Taiwan. Specifically, the hashtag network is constructed as a homogenous graph using the co-occurrence relationship between hashtags, and we extract its structural information with GraphSAGE and semantic information with BERTopic. Finally, the prediction process is defined as a binary classification task (popular/unpopular) using neural networks. Our results show that the proposed framework incorporating hashtag network outperforms all baselines and unimodal models, while information captured from the hashtag network and topic model appears to be complementary.
Did that happen? Predicting Social Media Posts that are Indicative of what happened in a scene: A case study of a TV show
Authors: Anietie Andy, Reno Kriz, Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Derry Tanti Wijaya, Chris Callison-Burch
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

While popular Television (TV) shows are airing, some users interested in these shows publish social media posts about the show. Analyzing social media posts related to a TV show can be beneficial for gaining insights about what happened during scenes of the show. This is a challenging task partly because a significant number of social media posts associated with a TV show or event may not clearly describe what happened during the event. In this work, we propose a method to predict social media posts (associated with scenes of a TV show) that are indicative of what transpired during the scenes of the show. We evaluate our method on social media (Twitter) posts associated with an episode of a popular TV show, Game of Thrones. We show that for each of the identified scenes, with high AUC’s, our method can predict posts that are indicative of what happened in a scene from those that are not-indicative. Based on Twitters policy, we will make the Tweeter ID’s of the Twitter posts used for this work publicly available.
HashSet - A Dataset For Hashtag Segmentation
Authors: Prashant Kodali, Akshala Bhatnagar, Naman Ahuja, Manish Shrivastava, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Segmentation, Specificity

Hashtag segmentation is the task of breaking a hashtag into its constituent tokens. Hashtags often encode the essence of user-generated posts, along with information like topic and sentiment, which are useful in downstream tasks. Hashtags prioritize brevity and are written in unique ways - transliterating and mixing languages, spelling variations, creative named entities. Benchmark datasets used for the hashtag segmentation task - STAN, BOUN - are small and extracted from a single set of tweets. However, datasets should reflect the variations in writing styles of hashtags and account for domain and language specificity, failing which the results will misrepresent model performance. We argue that model performance should be assessed on a wider variety of hashtags, and datasets should be carefully curated. To this end, we propose HashSet, a dataset comprising of: a) 1.9k manually annotated dataset; b) 3.3M loosely supervised dataset. HashSet dataset is sampled from a different set of tweets when compared to existing datasets and provides an alternate distribution of hashtags to build and validate hashtag segmentation models. We analyze the performance of SOTA models for Hashtag Segmentation, and show that the proposed dataset provides an alternate set of hashtags to train and assess models.
Using Convolution Neural Network with BERT for Stance Detection in Vietnamese
Authors: Oanh Tran, Anh Cong Phung, Bach Xuan Ngo
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Stance Detection, Word Embeddings

Stance detection is the task of automatically eliciting stance information towards a specific claim made by a primary author. While most studies have been done for high-resource languages, this work is dedicated to a low-resource language, namely Vietnamese. In this paper, we propose an architecture using transformers to detect stances in Vietnamese claims. This architecture exploits BERT to extract contextual word embeddings instead of using traditional word2vec models. Then, these embeddings are fed into CNN networks to extract local features to train the stance detection model. We performed extensive comparison experiments to show the effectiveness of the proposed method on a public dataset1 Experimental results show that this proposed model outperforms the previous methods by a large margin. It yielded an accuracy score of 75.57% averaged on four labels. This sets a new SOTA result for future research on this interesting problem in Vietnamese.
Annotation-Scheme Reconstruction for “Fake News” and Japanese Fake News Dataset
Authors: Taichi Murayama, Shohei Hisada, Makoto Uehara, Shoko Wakamiya, Eiji Aramaki
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Fake News Detection

Fake news provokes many societal problems; therefore, there has been extensive research on fake news detection tasks to counter it. Many fake news datasets were constructed as resources to facilitate this task. Contemporary research focuses almost exclusively on the factuality aspect of the news. However, this aspect alone is insufficient to explain “fake news,” which is a complex phenomenon that involves a wide range of issues. To fully understand the nature of each instance of fake news, it is important to observe it from various perspectives, such as the intention of the false news disseminator, the harmfulness of the news to our society, and the target of the news. We propose a novel annotation scheme with fine-grained labeling based on detailed investigations of existing fake news datasets to capture these various aspects of fake news. Using the annotation scheme, we construct and publish the first Japanese fake news dataset. The annotation scheme is expected to provide an in-depth understanding of fake news. We plan to build datasets for both Japanese and other languages using our scheme. Our Japanese dataset is published at https://hkefka385.github.io/dataset/fakenews-japanese/.
Construction of Responsive Utterance Corpus for Attentive Listening Response Production
Authors: Koichiro Ito, Masaki Murata, Tomohiro Ohno, Shigeki Matsubara
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Diversity, Response Generation

In Japan, the number of single-person households, particularly among the elderly, is increasing. Consequently, opportunities for people to narrate are being reduced. To address this issue, conversational agents, e.g., communication robots and smart speakers, are expected to play the role of the listener. To realize these agents, this paper describes the collection of conversational responses by listeners that demonstrate attentive listening attitudes toward narrative speakers, and a method to annotate existing narrative speech with responsive utterances is proposed. To summarize, 148,962 responsive utterances by 11 listeners were collected in a narrative corpus comprising 13,234 utterance units. The collected responsive utterances were analyzed in terms of response frequency, diversity, coverage, and naturalness. These results demonstrated that diverse and natural responsive utterances were collected by the proposed method in an efficient and comprehensive manner. To demonstrate the practical use of the collected responsive utterances, an experiment was conducted, in which response generation timings were detected in narratives.
Speak: A Toolkit Using Amazon Mechanical Turk to Collect and Validate Speech Audio Recordings
Authors: Christopher Song, David Harwath, Tuka Alhanai, James Glass
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

We present Speak, a toolkit that allows researchers to crowdsource speech audio recordings using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Speak allows MTurk workers to submit speech recordings in response to a task prompt and stimulus (e.g. image, text excerpt, audio file) defined by researchers, a functionality that is not natively offered by MTurk at the time of writing this paper. Importantly, the toolkit employs numerous measures to ensure that speech recordings collected are of adequate quality, in order to avoid accepting unusable data and prevent abuse/fraud. Speak has demonstrated utility, having collected over 600,000 recordings to date. The toolkit is open-source and available for download.
A Romanization System and WebMAUS Aligner for Arabic Varieties
Authors: Jalal Al-Tamimi, Florian Schiel, Ghada Khattab, Navdeep Sokhey, Djegdjiga Amazouz, Abdulrahman Dallak, Hajar Moussa
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

This paper presents the results of an ongoing collaboration to develop an Arabic variety-independent romanization system that aims to homogenize and simplify the romanization of the Arabic script, and introduces an Arabic variety-independent WebMAUS service offering a free to use forced-alignment service fully integrated within the WebMAUS services. We present the rationale for developing such a system, highlighting the need for a detailed romanization system with graphemes corresponding to the phonemic short and long vowels/consonants in Arabic varieties. We describe how the acoustic model was created, followed by several hands-on recipes for applying the forced alignment webservice either online or programatically. Finally, we discuss some of the issues we faced during the development of the system.
BehanceCC: A ChitChat Detection Dataset For Livestreaming Video Transcripts
Authors: Viet Lai, Amir Pouran Ben Veyseh, Franck Dernoncourt, Thien Nguyen
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

Livestreaming videos have become an effective broadcasting method for both video sharing and educational purposes. However, livestreaming videos contain a considerable amount of off-topic content (i.e., up to 50%) which introduces significant noises and data load to downstream applications. This paper presents BehanceCC, a new human-annotated benchmark dataset for off-topic detection (also called chitchat detection) in livestreaming video transcripts. In addition to describing the challenges of the dataset, our extensive experiments of various baselines reveal the complexity of chitchat detection for livestreaming videos and suggest potential future research directions for this task. The dataset will be made publicly available to foster research in this area.
Adversarial Speech Generation and Natural Speech Recovery for Speech Content Protection
Authors: Sheng Li, Jiyi Li, Qianying Liu, Zhuo Gong
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

With the advent of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and increasing privacy concerns, the sharing of speech data is faced with significant challenges. Protecting the sensitive content of speech is the same important as the voiceprint. This paper proposes an effective speech content protection method by constructing a frame-by-frame adversarial speech generation system. We revisited the adversarial examples generating method in the recent machine learning field and selected the phonetic state sequence of sensitive speech for the adversarial examples generation. We build an adversarial speech collection. Moreover, based on the speech collection, we proposed a neural network-based frame-by-frame mapping method to recover the speech content by converting from the adversarial speech to the human speech. Experiment shows our proposed method can encode and recover any sensitive audio, and our method is easy to be conducted with publicly available resources of speech recognition technology.
A new European Portuguese corpus for the study of Psychosis through speech analysis
Authors: Maria Forjó, Daniel Neto, Alberto Abad, HSofia Pinto, Joaquim Gago
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

Psychosis is a clinical syndrome characterized by the presence of symptoms such as hallucinations, thought disorder and disorganized speech. Several studies have used machine learning, combined with speech and natural language processing methods to aid in the diagnosis process of this disease. This paper describes the creation of the first European Portuguese corpus for the identification of the presence of speech characteristics of psychosis, which contains samples of 92 participants, 56 controls and 36 individuals diagnosed with psychosis and medicated. The corpus was used in a set of experiments that allowed identifying the most promising feature set to perform the classification: the combination of acoustic and speech metric features. Several classifiers were implemented to study which ones entailed the best performance depending on the task and feature set. The most promising results obtained for the entire corpus were achieved when identifying individuals with a Multi-Layer Perceptron classifier and reached an 87.5% accuracy. Focusing on the gender dependent results, the overall best results were 90.9% and 82.9% accuracy, for female and male subjects respectively. Lastly, the experiments performed lead us to conjecture that spontaneous speech presents more identifiable characteristics than read speech to differentiate healthy and patients diagnosed with psychosis.
Investigating Inter- and Intra-speaker Voice Conversion using Audiobooks
Authors: Aghilas Sini, Damien Lolive, Nelly Barbot, Pierre Alain
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis, Voice Conversion

Audiobook readers play with their voices to emphasize some text passages, highlight discourse changes or significant events, or in order to make listening easier and entertaining. A dialog is a central passage in audiobooks where the reader applies significant voice transformation, mainly prosodic modifications, to realize character properties and changes. However, these intra-speaker modifications are hard to reproduce with simple text-to-speech synthesis. The manner of vocalizing characters involved in a given story depends on the text style and differs from one speaker to another. In this work, this problem is investigated through the prism of voice conversion. We propose to explore modifying the narrator’s voice to fit the context of the story, such as the character who is speaking, using voice conversion. To this end, two complementary experiments are designed: the first one aims to assess the quality of our Phonetic PosteriorGrams (PPG)-based voice conversion system using parallel data. Subjective evaluations with naive raters are conducted to estimate the quality of the signal generated and the speaker similarity. The second experiment applies an intra-speaker voice conversion, considering narration passages and direct speech passages as two distinct speakers. Data are then nonparallel and the dissimilarity between character and narrator is subjectively measured.
Multilingual Transfer Learning for Children Automatic Speech Recognition
Authors: Thomas Rolland, Alberto Abad, Catia Cucchiarini, Helmer Strik
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Transfer Learning

Despite recent advances in automatic speech recognition (ASR), the recognition of children’s speech still remains a significant challenge. This is mainly due to the high acoustic variability and the limited amount of available training data. The latter problem is particularly evident in languages other than English, which are usually less-resourced. In the current paper, we address children ASR in a number of less-resourced languages by combining several small-sized children speech corpora from these languages. In particular, we address the following research question: Does a novel two-step training strategy in which multilingual learning is followed by language-specific transfer learning outperform conventional single language/task training for children speech, as well as multilingual and transfer learning alone? Based on previous experimental results with English, we hypothesize that multilingual learning provides a better generalization of the underlying characteristics of children’s speech. Our results provide a positive answer to our research question, by showing that using transfer learning on top of a multilingual model for an unseen language outperforms conventional single language-specific learning.
BehanceQA: A New Dataset for Identifying Question-Answer Pairs in Video Transcripts
Authors: Amir Pouran Ben Veyseh, Viet Lai, Franck Dernoncourt, Thien Nguyen
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Retrieval

Question-Answer (QA) is one of the effective methods for storing knowledge which can be used for future retrieval. As such, identifying mentions of questions and their answers in text is necessary for a knowledge construction and retrieval systems. In the literature, QA identification has been well studied in the NLP community. However, most of the prior works are restricted to formal written documents such as papers or websites. As such, Questions and Answers that are presented in informal/noisy documents have not been adequately studied. One of the domains that can significantly benefit from QA identification is the domain of livestreaming video transcripts that involve abundant QA pairs to provide valuable knowledge for future users and services. Since video transcripts are often transcribed automatically for scale, they are prone to errors. Combined with the informal nature of discussion in a video, prior QA identification systems might not be able to perform well in this domain. To enable comprehensive research in this domain, we present a large-scale QA identification dataset annotated by human over transcripts of 500 hours of streamed videos. We employ Behance.net to collect the videos and their automatically obtained transcripts. Furthermore, we conduct extensive analysis on the annotated dataset to understand the complexity of QA identification for livestreaming video transcripts. Our experiments show that the annotated dataset presents unique challenges for existing methods and more research is necessary to explore more effective methods. The dataset and the models developed in this work will be publicly released for future research.
Bidirectional Skeleton-Based Isolated Sign Recognition using Graph Convolutional Networks
Authors: Konstantinos M. Dafnis, Evgenia Chroni, Carol Neidle, Dimitri Metaxas
Date: 2022-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

To improve computer-based recognition from video of isolated signs from American Sign Language (ASL), we propose a new skeleton-based method that involves explicit detection of the start and end frames of signs, trained on the ASLLVD dataset; it uses linguistically relevant parameters based on the skeleton input. Our method employs a bidirectional learning approach within a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) framework. We apply this method to the WLASL dataset, but with corrections to the gloss labeling to ensure consistency in the labels assigned to different signs; it is important to have a 1-1 correspondence between signs and text-based gloss labels. We achieve a success rate of 77.43% for top-1 and 94.54% for top-5 using this modified WLASL dataset. Our method, which does not require multi-modal data input, outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches on the same modified WLASL dataset, demonstrating the importance of both attention to the start and end frames of signs and the use of bidirectional data streams in the GCNs for isolated sign recognition.