pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
WiCE: Real-World Entailment for Claims in Wikipedia
Authors: Ryo Kamoi, Tanya Goyal, Juan Diego Rodriguez, Greg Durrett
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Natural Language Inference, Question Answering, Retrieval, Sentence

Textual entailment models are increasingly applied in settings like fact-checking, presupposition verification in question answering, or summary evaluation. However, these represent a significant domain shift from existing entailment datasets, and models underperform as a result. We propose WiCE, a new fine-grained textual entailment dataset built on natural claim and evidence pairs extracted from Wikipedia. In addition to standard claim-level entailment, WiCE provides entailment judgments over sub-sentence units of the claim, and a minimal subset of evidence sentences that support each subclaim. To support this, we propose an automatic claim decomposition strategy using GPT-3.5 which we show is also effective at improving entailment models' performance on multiple datasets at test time. Finally, we show that real claims in our dataset involve challenging verification and retrieval problems that existing models fail to address.
NLP Workbench: Efficient and Extensible Integration of State-of-the-art Text Mining Tools
Authors: Peiran Yao, Matej Kosmajac, Abeer Waheed, Kostyantyn Guzhva, Natalie Hervieux, Denilson Barbosa
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Linking, Relation Extraction, Semantic Parsing, Sentiment Analysis

NLP Workbench is a web-based platform for text mining that allows non-expert users to obtain semantic understanding of large-scale corpora using state-of-the-art text mining models. The platform is built upon latest pre-trained models and open source systems from academia that provide semantic analysis functionalities, including but not limited to entity linking, sentiment analysis, semantic parsing, and relation extraction. Its extensible design enables researchers and developers to smoothly replace an existing model or integrate a new one. To improve efficiency, we employ a microservice architecture that facilitates allocation of acceleration hardware and parallelization of computation. This paper presents the architecture of NLP Workbench and discusses the challenges we faced in designing it. We also discuss diverse use cases of NLP Workbench and the benefits of using it over other approaches. The platform is under active development, with its source code released under the MIT license. A website and a short video demonstrating our platform are also available.
Letz Translate: Low-Resource Machine Translation for Luxembourgish
Authors: Yewei Song, Saad Ezzini, Jacques Klein, Tegawende Bissyande, Clément Lefebvre, Anne Goujon
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Machine Translation, Translation

Natural language processing of Low-Resource Languages (LRL) is often challenged by the lack of data. Therefore, achieving accurate machine translation (MT) in a low-resource environment is a real problem that requires practical solutions. Research in multilingual models have shown that some LRLs can be handled with such models. However, their large size and computational needs make their use in constrained environments (e.g., mobile/IoT devices or limited/old servers) impractical. In this paper, we address this problem by leveraging the power of large multilingual MT models using knowledge distillation. Knowledge distillation can transfer knowledge from a large and complex teacher model to a simpler and smaller student model without losing much in performance. We also make use of high-resource languages that are related or share the same linguistic root as the target LRL. For our evaluation, we consider Luxembourgish as the LRL that shares some roots and properties with German. We build multiple resource-efficient models based on German, knowledge distillation from the multilingual No Language Left Behind (NLLB) model, and pseudo-translation. We find that our efficient models are more than 30\% faster and perform only 4\% lower compared to the large state-of-the-art NLLB model.
Matching-based Term Semantics Pre-training for Spoken Patient Query Understanding
Authors: Zefa Hu, Xiuyi Chen, Haoran Wu, Minglun Han, Ziyi Ni, Jing Shi, Shuang Xu, Bo Xu
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: slot-filling, Slot Filling

Medical Slot Filling (MSF) task aims to convert medical queries into structured information, playing an essential role in diagnosis dialogue systems. However, the lack of sufficient term semantics learning makes existing approaches hard to capture semantically identical but colloquial expressions of terms in medical conversations. In this work, we formalize MSF into a matching problem and propose a Term Semantics Pre-trained Matching Network (TSPMN) that takes both terms and queries as input to model their semantic interaction. To learn term semantics better, we further design two self-supervised objectives, including Contrastive Term Discrimination (CTD) and Matching-based Mask Term Modeling (MMTM). CTD determines whether it is the masked term in the dialogue for each given term, while MMTM directly predicts the masked ones. Experimental results on two Chinese benchmarks show that TSPMN outperforms strong baselines, especially in few-shot settings.
Document Provenance and Authentication through Authorship Classification
Authors: Muhammad Tayyab Zamir, Muhammad Asif Ayub, Jebran Khan, Muhammad Jawad Ikram, Nasir Ahmad, Kashif Ahmad
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Style analysis, which is relatively a less explored topic, enables several interesting applications. For instance, it allows authors to adjust their writing style to produce a more coherent document in collaboration. Similarly, style analysis can also be used for document provenance and authentication as a primary step. In this paper, we propose an ensemble-based text-processing framework for the classification of single and multi-authored documents, which is one of the key tasks in style analysis. The proposed framework incorporates several state-of-the-art text classification algorithms including classical Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, transformers, and deep learning algorithms both individually and in merit-based late fusion. For the merit-based late fusion, we employed several weight optimization and selection methods to assign merit-based weights to the individual text classification algorithms. We also analyze the impact of the characters on the task that are usually excluded in NLP applications during pre-processing by conducting experiments on both clean and un-clean data. The proposed framework is evaluated on a large-scale benchmark dataset, significantly improving performance over the existing solutions.
Denoising-based UNMT is more robust to word-order divergence than MASS-based UNMT
Authors: Tamali Banerjee, Rudra Murthy V, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Translation

We aim to investigate whether UNMT approaches with self-supervised pre-training are robust to word-order divergence between language pairs. We achieve this by comparing two models pre-trained with the same self-supervised pre-training objective. The first model is trained on language pairs with different word-orders, and the second model is trained on the same language pairs with source language re-ordered to match the word-order of the target language. Ideally, UNMT approaches which are robust to word-order divergence should exhibit no visible performance difference between the two configurations. In this paper, we investigate two such self-supervised pre-training based UNMT approaches, namely Masked Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-Training, (MASS) (which does not have shuffling noise) and Denoising AutoEncoder (DAE), (which has shuffling noise). We experiment with five English$\rightarrow$Indic language pairs, i.e., en-hi, en-bn, en-gu, en-kn, and en-ta) where word-order of the source language is SVO (Subject-Verb-Object), and the word-order of the target languages is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb). We observed that for these language pairs, DAE-based UNMT approach consistently outperforms MASS in terms of translation accuracies. Moreover, bridging the word-order gap using reordering improves the translation accuracy of MASS-based UNMT models, while it cannot improve the translation accuracy of DAE-based UNMT models. This observation indicates that DAE-based UNMT is more robust to word-order divergence than MASS-based UNMT. Word-shuffling noise in DAE approach could be the possible reason for the approach being robust to word-order divergence.
CTRLStruct: Dialogue Structure Learning for Open-Domain Response Generation
Authors: Congchi Yin, Piji Li, Zhaochun Ren
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Dialogue Generation, Response Generation, Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding

Dialogue structure discovery is essential in dialogue generation. Well-structured topic flow can leverage background information and predict future topics to help generate controllable and explainable responses. However, most previous work focused on dialogue structure learning in task-oriented dialogue other than open-domain dialogue which is more complicated and challenging. In this paper, we present a new framework CTRLStruct for dialogue structure learning to effectively explore topic-level dialogue clusters as well as their transitions with unlabelled information. Precisely, dialogue utterances encoded by bi-directional Transformer are further trained through a special designed contrastive learning task to improve representation. Then we perform clustering to utterance-level representations and form topic-level clusters that can be considered as vertices in dialogue structure graph. The edges in the graph indicating transition probability between vertices are calculated by mimicking expert behavior in datasets. Finally, dialogue structure graph is integrated into dialogue model to perform controlled response generation. Experiments on two popular open-domain dialogue datasets show our model can generate more coherent responses compared to some excellent dialogue models, as well as outperform some typical sentence embedding methods in dialogue utterance representation. Code is available in GitHub.
LiteG2P: A fast, light and high accuracy model for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion
Authors: Chunfeng Wang, Peisong Huang, Yuxiang Zou, Haoyu Zhang, Shichao Liu, Xiang Yin, Zejun Ma
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

As a key component of automated speech recognition (ASR) and the front-end in text-to-speech (TTS), grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) plays the role of converting letters to their corresponding pronunciations. Existing methods are either slow or poor in performance, and are limited in application scenarios, particularly in the process of on-device inference. In this paper, we integrate the advantages of both expert knowledge and connectionist temporal classification (CTC) based neural network and propose a novel method named LiteG2P which is fast, light and theoretically parallel. With the carefully leading design, LiteG2P can be applied both on cloud and on device. Experimental results on the CMU dataset show that the performance of the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art CTC based method with 10 times fewer parameters, and even comparable to the state-of-the-art Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model with less parameters and 33 times less computation.
Adopting the Multi-answer Questioning Task with an Auxiliary Metric for Extreme Multi-label Text Classification Utilizing the Label Hierarchy
Authors: Li Wang, Ying Wah Teh, Mohammed Ali Al-Garadi
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Extreme Multi-Label Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Multi Label Text Classification, Multi-Label Text Classification, text-classification, Text Classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Extreme multi-label text classification utilizes the label hierarchy to partition extreme labels into multiple label groups, turning the task into simple multi-group multi-label classification tasks. Current research encodes labels as a vector with fixed length which needs establish multiple classifiers for different label groups. The problem is how to build only one classifier without sacrificing the label relationship in the hierarchy. This paper adopts the multi-answer questioning task for extreme multi-label classification. This paper also proposes an auxiliary classification evaluation metric. This study adopts the proposed method and the evaluation metric to the legal domain. The utilization of legal Berts and the study on task distribution are discussed. The experiment results show that the proposed hierarchy and multi-answer questioning task can do extreme multi-label classification for EURLEX dataset. And in minor/fine-tuning the multi-label classification task, the domain adapted BERT models could not show apparent advantages in this experiment. The method is also theoretically applicable to zero-shot learning.
Google USM: Scaling Automatic Speech Recognition Beyond 100 Languages
Authors: Yu Zhang, Wei Han, James Qin, Yongqiang Wang, Ankur Bapna, Zhehuai Chen, Nanxin Chen, Bo Li, Vera Axelrod, Gary Wang, Zhong Meng, Ke Hu, Andrew Rosenberg, Rohit Prabhavalkar, Daniel S. Park, Parisa Haghani, Jason Riesa, Ginger Perng, Hagen Soltau, Trevor Strohman, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Tara Sainath, Pedro Moreno, Chung-Cheng Chiu, Johan Schalkwyk, Françoise Beaufays, Yonghui Wu
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Quantization, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Text, Speech-to-Text Translation

We introduce the Universal Speech Model (USM), a single large model that performs automatic speech recognition (ASR) across 100+ languages. This is achieved by pre-training the encoder of the model on a large unlabeled multilingual dataset of 12 million (M) hours spanning over 300 languages, and fine-tuning on a smaller labeled dataset. We use multilingual pre-training with random-projection quantization and speech-text modality matching to achieve state-of-the-art performance on downstream multilingual ASR and speech-to-text translation tasks. We also demonstrate that despite using a labeled training set 1/7-th the size of that used for the Whisper model, our model exhibits comparable or better performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain speech recognition tasks across many languages.
Leveraging Large Text Corpora for End-to-End Speech Summarization
Authors: Kohei Matsuura, Takanori Ashihara, Takafumi Moriya, Tomohiro Tanaka, Atsunori Ogawa, Marc Delcroix, Ryo Masumura
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Text Summarization, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

End-to-end speech summarization (E2E SSum) is a technique to directly generate summary sentences from speech. Compared with the cascade approach, which combines automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text summarization models, the E2E approach is more promising because it mitigates ASR errors, incorporates nonverbal information, and simplifies the overall system. However, since collecting a large amount of paired data (i.e., speech and summary) is difficult, the training data is usually insufficient to train a robust E2E SSum system. In this paper, we present two novel methods that leverage a large amount of external text summarization data for E2E SSum training. The first technique is to utilize a text-to-speech (TTS) system to generate synthesized speech, which is used for E2E SSum training with the text summary. The second is a TTS-free method that directly inputs phoneme sequence instead of synthesized speech to the E2E SSum model. Experiments show that our proposed TTS- and phoneme-based methods improve several metrics on the How2 dataset. In particular, our best system outperforms a previous state-of-the-art one by a large margin (i.e., METEOR score improvements of more than 6 points). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use external language resources for E2E SSum. Moreover, we report a detailed analysis of the How2 dataset to confirm the validity of our proposed E2E SSum system.
Rethinking the Reasonability of the Test Set for Simultaneous Machine Translation
Authors: Mengge Liu, Wen Zhang, Xiang Li, Jian Luan, Bin Wang, Yuhang Guo, Shuoying Chen
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

Simultaneous machine translation (SimulMT) models start translation before the end of the source sentence, making the translation monotonically aligned with the source sentence. However, the general full-sentence translation test set is acquired by offline translation of the entire source sentence, which is not designed for SimulMT evaluation, making us rethink whether this will underestimate the performance of SimulMT models. In this paper, we manually annotate a monotonic test set based on the MuST-C English-Chinese test set, denoted as SiMuST-C. Our human evaluation confirms the acceptability of our annotated test set. Evaluations on three different SimulMT models verify that the underestimation problem can be alleviated on our test set. Further experiments show that finetuning on an automatically extracted monotonic training set improves SimulMT models by up to 3 BLEU points.
Interactive Text Generation
Authors: Felix Faltings, Michel Galley, Baolin Peng, Kianté Brantley, Weixin Cai, Yizhe Zhang, Jianfeng Gao, Bill Dolan
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Imitation Learning, Text Generation

Users interact with text, image, code, or other editors on a daily basis. However, machine learning models are rarely trained in the settings that reflect the interactivity between users and their editor. This is understandable as training AI models with real users is not only slow and costly, but what these models learn may be specific to user interface design choices. Unfortunately, this means most of the research on text, code, and image generation has focused on non-interactive settings, whereby the model is expected to get everything right without accounting for any input from a user who may be willing to help. We introduce a new Interactive Text Generation task that allows training generation models interactively without the costs of involving real users, by using user simulators that provide edits that guide the model towards a given target text. We train our interactive models using Imitation Learning, and our experiments against competitive non-interactive generation models show that models trained interactively are superior to their non-interactive counterparts, even when all models are given the same budget of user inputs or edits.
UDAPDR: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via LLM Prompting and Distillation of Rerankers
Authors: Jon Saad-Falcon, Omar Khattab, Keshav Santhanam, Radu Florian, Martin Franz, Salim Roukos, Avirup Sil, Md Arafat Sultan, Christopher Potts
Date: 2023-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Information Retrieval, Reranking, Retrieval, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Many information retrieval tasks require large labeled datasets for fine-tuning. However, such datasets are often unavailable, and their utility for real-world applications can diminish quickly due to domain shifts. To address this challenge, we develop and motivate a method for using large language models (LLMs) to generate large numbers of synthetic queries cheaply. The method begins by generating a small number of synthetic queries using an expensive LLM. After that, a much less expensive one is used to create large numbers of synthetic queries, which are used to fine-tune a family of reranker models. These rerankers are then distilled into a single efficient retriever for use in the target domain. We show that this technique boosts zero-shot accuracy in long-tail domains and achieves substantially lower latency than standard reranking methods.
Synthetic Cross-accent Data Augmentation for Automatic Speech Recognition
Authors: Philipp Klumpp, Pooja Chitkara, Leda Sari, Prashant Serai, JiLong Wu, Irina-Elena Veliche, Rongqing Huang, Qing He
Date: 2023-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Data Augmentation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

The awareness for biased ASR datasets or models has increased notably in recent years. Even for English, despite a vast amount of available training data, systems perform worse for non-native speakers. In this work, we improve an accent-conversion model (ACM) which transforms native US-English speech into accented pronunciation. We include phonetic knowledge in the ACM training to provide accurate feedback about how well certain pronunciation patterns were recovered in the synthesized waveform. Furthermore, we investigate the feasibility of learned accent representations instead of static embeddings. Generated data was then used to train two state-of-the-art ASR systems. We evaluated our approach on native and non-native English datasets and found that synthetically accented data helped the ASR to better understand speech from seen accents. This observation did not translate to unseen accents, and it was not observed for a model that had been pre-trained exclusively with native speech.
Building High-accuracy Multilingual ASR with Gated Language Experts and Curriculum Training
Authors: Eric Sun, Jinyu Li, Yuxuan Hu, Yimeng Zhu, Long Zhou, Jian Xue, Peidong Wang, Linquan Liu, Shujie Liu, Edward Lin, Yifan Gong
Date: 2023-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Identification

We propose gated language experts and curriculum training to enhance multilingual transformer transducer models without requiring language identification (LID) input from users during inference. Our method incorporates a gating mechanism and LID loss, enabling transformer experts to learn language-specific information. By combining gated transformer experts with shared transformer layers, we construct multilingual transformer blocks and utilize linear experts to effectively regularize the joint network. The curriculum training scheme leverages LID to guide the gated experts in improving their respective language performance. Experimental results on a bilingual task involving English and Spanish demonstrate significant improvements, with average relative word error reductions of 12.5% and 7.3% compared to the baseline bilingual and monolingual models, respectively. Notably, our method achieves performance comparable to the upper-bound model trained and inferred with oracle LID. Extending our approach to trilingual, quadrilingual, and pentalingual models reveals similar advantages to those observed in the bilingual models, highlighting its ease of extension to multiple languages.
ParrotTTS: Text-to-Speech synthesis by exploiting self-supervised representations
Authors: Neil Shah, Saiteja Kosgi, Vishal Tambrahalli, Neha Sahipjohn, Niranjan Pedanekar, Vineet Gandhi
Date: 2023-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

We present ParrotTTS, a modularized text-to-speech synthesis model leveraging disentangled self-supervised speech representations. It can train a multi-speaker variant effectively using transcripts from a single speaker. ParrotTTS adapts to a new language in low resource setup and generalizes to languages not seen while training the self-supervised backbone. Moreover, without training on bilingual or parallel examples, ParrotTTS can transfer voices across languages while preserving the speaker specific characteristics, e.g., synthesizing fluent Hindi speech using a French speaker's voice and accent. We present extensive results in monolingual and multi-lingual scenarios. ParrotTTS outperforms state-of-the-art multi-lingual TTS models using only a fraction of paired data as latter.