pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Pop Quiz! Do Pre-trained Code Models Possess Knowledge of Correct API Names?
Authors: Terry Yue Zhuo, Xiaoning Du, Zhenchang Xing, Jiamou Sun, Haowei Quan, Li Li, Liming Zhu
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Knowledge Probing

Recent breakthroughs in pre-trained code models, such as CodeBERT and Codex, have shown their superior performance in various downstream tasks. The correctness and unambiguity of API usage among these code models are crucial for achieving desirable program functionalities, requiring them to learn various API fully qualified names structurally and semantically. Recent studies reveal that even state-of-the-art pre-trained code models struggle with suggesting the correct APIs during code generation. However, the reasons for such poor API usage performance are barely investigated. To address this challenge, we propose using knowledge probing as a means of interpreting code models, which uses cloze-style tests to measure the knowledge stored in models. Our comprehensive study examines a code model's capability of understanding API fully qualified names from two different perspectives: API call and API import. Specifically, we reveal that current code models struggle with understanding API names, with pre-training strategies significantly affecting the quality of API name learning. We demonstrate that natural language context can assist code models in locating Python API names and generalize Python API name knowledge to unseen data. Our findings provide insights into the limitations and capabilities of current pre-trained code models, and suggest that incorporating API structure into the pre-training process can improve automated API usage and code representations. This work provides significance for advancing code intelligence practices and direction for future studies. All experiment results, data and source code used in this work are available at \url{https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7902072}.
The Dynamical Principles of Storytelling
Authors: Isidoros Doxas, James Meiss, Steven Bottone, Tom Strelich, Andrew Plummer, Adrienne Breland, Simon Dennis, Kathy Garvin-Doxas, Michael Klymkowsky
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00

When considering the opening part of 1800 short stories, we find that the first dozen paragraphs of the average narrative follow an action principle as defined in arXiv:2309.06600. When the order of the paragraphs is shuffled, the average no longer exhibits this property. The findings show that there is a preferential direction we take in semantic space when starting a story, possibly related to a common Western storytelling tradition as implied by Aristotle in Poetics.
Spoken Humanoid Embodied Conversational Agents in Mobile Serious Games: A Usability Assessment
Authors: Danai Korre, Judy Robertson
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00

This paper presents an empirical investigation of the extent to which spoken Humanoid Embodied Conversational Agents (HECAs) can foster usability in mobile serious game (MSG) applications. The aim of the research is to assess the impact of multiple agents and illusion of humanness on the quality of the interaction. The experiment investigates two styles of agent presentation: an agent of high human-likeness (HECA) and an agent of low human-likeness (text). The purpose of the experiment is to assess whether and how agents of high humanlikeness can evoke the illusion of humanness and affect usability. Agents of high human-likeness were designed by following the ECA design model that is a proposed guide for ECA development. The results of the experiment with 90 participants show that users prefer to interact with the HECAs. The difference between the two versions is statistically significant with a large effect size (d=1.01), with many of the participants justifying their choice by saying that the human-like characteristics of the HECA made the version more appealing. This research provides key information on the potential effect of HECAs on serious games, which can provide insight into the design of future mobile serious games.
Echotune: A Modular Extractor Leveraging the Variable-Length Nature of Speech in ASR Tasks
Authors: Sizhou Chen, Songyang Gao, Sen Fang
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

The Transformer architecture has proven to be highly effective for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tasks, becoming a foundational component for a plethora of research in the domain. Historically, many approaches have leaned on fixed-length attention windows, which becomes problematic for varied speech samples in duration and complexity, leading to data over-smoothing and neglect of essential long-term connectivity. Addressing this limitation, we introduce Echo-MSA, a nimble module equipped with a variable-length attention mechanism that accommodates a range of speech sample complexities and durations. This module offers the flexibility to extract speech features across various granularities, spanning from frames and phonemes to words and discourse. The proposed design captures the variable length feature of speech and addresses the limitations of fixed-length attention. Our evaluation leverages a parallel attention architecture complemented by a dynamic gating mechanism that amalgamates traditional attention with the Echo-MSA module output. Empirical evidence from our study reveals that integrating Echo-MSA into the primary model's training regime significantly enhances the word error rate (WER) performance, all while preserving the intrinsic stability of the original model.
PROGrasp: Pragmatic Human-Robot Communication for Object Grasping
Authors: Gi-Cheon Kang, Junghyun Kim, Jaein Kim, Byoung-Tak Zhang
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Discovery, Visual Grounding

Interactive Object Grasping (IOG) is the task of identifying and grasping the desired object via human-robot natural language interaction. Current IOG systems assume that a human user initially specifies the target object's category (e.g., bottle). Inspired by pragmatics, where humans often convey their intentions by relying on context to achieve goals, we introduce a new IOG task, Pragmatic-IOG, and the corresponding dataset, Intention-oriented Multi-modal Dialogue (IM-Dial). In our proposed task scenario, an intention-oriented utterance (e.g., "I am thirsty") is initially given to the robot. The robot should then identify the target object by interacting with a human user. Based on the task setup, we propose a new robotic system that can interpret the user's intention and pick up the target object, Pragmatic Object Grasping (PROGrasp). PROGrasp performs Pragmatic-IOG by incorporating modules for visual grounding, question asking, object grasping, and most importantly, answer interpretation for pragmatic inference. Experimental results show that PROGrasp is effective in offline (i.e., target object discovery) and online (i.e., IOG with a physical robot arm) settings. Code and data are available at https://github.com/gicheonkang/prograsp.
The complementary roles of non-verbal cues for Robust Pronunciation Assessment
Authors: Yassine El Kheir, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Ahmed Ali
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00

Research on pronunciation assessment systems focuses on utilizing phonetic and phonological aspects of non-native (L2) speech, often neglecting the rich layer of information hidden within the non-verbal cues. In this study, we proposed a novel pronunciation assessment framework, IntraVerbalPA. % The framework innovatively incorporates both fine-grained frame- and abstract utterance-level non-verbal cues, alongside the conventional speech and phoneme representations. Additionally, we introduce ''Goodness of phonemic-duration'' metric to effectively model duration distribution within the framework. Our results validate the effectiveness of the proposed IntraVerbalPA framework and its individual components, yielding performance that either matches or outperforms existing research works.
Explaining Speech Classification Models via Word-Level Audio Segments and Paralinguistic Features
Authors: Eliana Pastor, Alkis Koudounas, Giuseppe Attanasio, Dirk Hovy, Elena Baralis
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Spoken Language Understanding

Recent advances in eXplainable AI (XAI) have provided new insights into how models for vision, language, and tabular data operate. However, few approaches exist for understanding speech models. Existing work focuses on a few spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks, and explanations are difficult to interpret for most users. We introduce a new approach to explain speech classification models. We generate easy-to-interpret explanations via input perturbation on two information levels. 1) Word-level explanations reveal how each word-related audio segment impacts the outcome. 2) Paralinguistic features (e.g., prosody and background noise) answer the counterfactual: ``What would the model prediction be if we edited the audio signal in this way?'' We validate our approach by explaining two state-of-the-art SLU models on two speech classification tasks in English and Italian. Our findings demonstrate that the explanations are faithful to the model's inner workings and plausible to humans. Our method and findings pave the way for future research on interpreting speech models.
PerPLM: Personalized Fine-tuning of Pretrained Language Models via Writer-specific Intermediate Learning and Prompts
Authors: Daisuke Oba, Naoki Yoshinaga, Masashi Toyoda
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling

The meanings of words and phrases depend not only on where they are used (contexts) but also on who use them (writers). Pretrained language models (PLMs) are powerful tools for capturing context, but they are typically pretrained and fine-tuned for universal use across different writers. This study aims to improve the accuracy of text understanding tasks by personalizing the fine-tuning of PLMs for specific writers. We focus on a general setting where only the plain text from target writers are available for personalization. To avoid the cost of fine-tuning and storing multiple copies of PLMs for different users, we exhaustively explore using writer-specific prompts to personalize a unified PLM. Since the design and evaluation of these prompts is an underdeveloped area, we introduce and compare different types of prompts that are possible in our setting. To maximize the potential of prompt-based personalized fine-tuning, we propose a personalized intermediate learning based on masked language modeling to extract task-independent traits of writers' text. Our experiments, using multiple tasks, datasets, and PLMs, reveal the nature of different prompts and the effectiveness of our intermediate learning approach.
L1-aware Multilingual Mispronunciation Detection Framework
Authors: Yassine El Kheir, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Ahmed Ali
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Phoneme Recognition

The phonological discrepancies between a speaker's native (L1) and the non-native language (L2) serves as a major factor for mispronunciation. This paper introduces a novel multilingual MDD architecture, L1-MultiMDD, enriched with L1-aware speech representation. An end-to-end speech encoder is trained on the input signal and its corresponding reference phoneme sequence. First, an attention mechanism is deployed to align the input audio with the reference phoneme sequence. Afterwards, the L1-L2-speech embedding are extracted from an auxiliary model, pretrained in a multi-task setup identifying L1 and L2 language, and are infused with the primary network. Finally, the L1-MultiMDD is then optimized for a unified multilingual phoneme recognition task using connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss for the target languages: English, Arabic, and Mandarin. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed L1-MultiMDD framework on both seen -- L2-ARTIC, LATIC, and AraVoiceL2v2; and unseen -- EpaDB and Speechocean762 datasets. The consistent gains in PER, and false rejection rate (FRR) across all target languages confirm our approach's robustness, efficacy, and generalizability.
CoLLD: Contrastive Layer-to-layer Distillation for Compressing Multilingual Pre-trained Speech Encoders
Authors: Heng-Jui Chang, Ning Dong, Ruslan Mavlyutov, Sravya Popuri, Yu-An Chung
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Text, Speech-to-Text Translation, Translation

Large-scale self-supervised pre-trained speech encoders outperform conventional approaches in speech recognition and translation tasks. Due to the high cost of developing these large models, building new encoders for new tasks and deploying them to on-device applications are infeasible. Prior studies propose model compression methods to address this issue, but those works focus on smaller models and less realistic tasks. Thus, we propose Contrastive Layer-to-layer Distillation (CoLLD), a novel knowledge distillation method to compress pre-trained speech encoders by leveraging masked prediction and contrastive learning to train student models to copy the behavior of a large teacher model. CoLLD outperforms prior methods and closes the gap between small and large models on multilingual speech-to-text translation and recognition benchmarks.
A Conversation is Worth A Thousand Recommendations: A Survey of Holistic Conversational Recommender Systems
Authors: Chuang Li, Hengchang Hu, Yan Zhang, Min-Yen Kan, Haizhou Li
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Recommendation Systems, Survey

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) generate recommendations through an interactive process. However, not all CRS approaches use human conversations as their source of interaction data; the majority of prior CRS work simulates interactions by exchanging entity-level information. As a result, claims of prior CRS work do not generalise to real-world settings where conversations take unexpected turns, or where conversational and intent understanding is not perfect. To tackle this challenge, the research community has started to examine holistic CRS, which are trained using conversational data collected from real-world scenarios. Despite their emergence, such holistic approaches are under-explored. We present a comprehensive survey of holistic CRS methods by summarizing the literature in a structured manner. Our survey recognises holistic CRS approaches as having three components: 1) a backbone language model, the optional use of 2) external knowledge, and/or 3) external guidance. We also give a detailed analysis of CRS datasets and evaluation methods in real application scenarios. We offer our insight as to the current challenges of holistic CRS and possible future trends.
Aligning Speakers: Evaluating and Visualizing Text-based Diarization Using Efficient Multiple Sequence Alignment (Extended Version)
Authors: Chen Gong, Peilin Wu, Jinho D. Choi
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple Sequence Alignment, speaker-diarization, Speaker Diarization

This paper presents a novel evaluation approach to text-based speaker diarization (SD), tackling the limitations of traditional metrics that do not account for any contextual information in text. Two new metrics are proposed, Text-based Diarization Error Rate and Diarization F1, which perform utterance- and word-level evaluations by aligning tokens in reference and hypothesis transcripts. Our metrics encompass more types of errors compared to existing ones, allowing us to make a more comprehensive analysis in SD. To align tokens, a multiple sequence alignment algorithm is introduced that supports multiple sequences in the reference while handling high-dimensional alignment to the hypothesis using dynamic programming. Our work is packaged into two tools, align4d providing an API for our alignment algorithm and TranscribeView for visualizing and evaluating SD errors, which can greatly aid in the creation of high-quality data, fostering the advancement of dialogue systems.
Automatic Data Visualization Generation from Chinese Natural Language Questions
Authors: Yan Ge, Victor Junqiu Wei, Yuanfeng Song, Jason Chen Zhang, Raymond Chi-Wing Wong
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Visualization, Representation Learning

Data visualization has emerged as an effective tool for getting insights from massive datasets. Due to the hardness of manipulating the programming languages of data visualization, automatic data visualization generation from natural languages (Text-to-Vis) is becoming increasingly popular. Despite the plethora of research effort on the English Text-to-Vis, studies have yet to be conducted on data visualization generation from questions in Chinese. Motivated by this, we propose a Chinese Text-to-Vis dataset in the paper and demonstrate our first attempt to tackle this problem. Our model integrates multilingual BERT as the encoder, boosts the cross-lingual ability, and infuses the $n$-gram information into our word representation learning. Our experimental results show that our dataset is challenging and deserves further research.
Incorporating Class-based Language Model for Named Entity Recognition in Factorized Neural Transducer
Authors: Peng Wang, Yifan Yang, Zheng Liang, Tian Tan, Shiliang Zhang, Xie Chen
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Despite advancements of end-to-end (E2E) models in speech recognition, named entity recognition (NER) is still challenging but critical for semantic understanding. Previous studies mainly focus on various rule-based or attention-based contextual biasing algorithms. However, their performance might be sensitive to the biasing weight or degraded by excessive attention to the named entity list, along with a risk of false triggering. Inspired by the success of the class-based language model (LM) in NER in conventional hybrid systems and the effective decoupling of acoustic and linguistic information in the factorized neural Transducer (FNT), we propose C-FNT, a novel E2E model that incorporates class-based LMs into FNT. In C-FNT, the LM score of named entities can be associated with the name class instead of its surface form. The experimental results show that our proposed C-FNT significantly reduces error in named entities without hurting performance in general word recognition.
Dynamic MOdularized Reasoning for Compositional Structured Explanation Generation
Authors: Xiyan Fu, Anette Frank
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Explanation Generation

Despite the success of neural models in solving reasoning tasks, their compositional generalization capabilities remain unclear. In this work, we propose a new setting of the structured explanation generation task to facilitate compositional reasoning research. Previous works found that symbolic methods achieve superior compositionality by using pre-defined inference rules for iterative reasoning. But these approaches rely on brittle symbolic transfers and are restricted to well-defined tasks. Hence, we propose a dynamic modularized reasoning model, MORSE, to improve the compositional generalization of neural models. MORSE factorizes the inference process into a combination of modules, where each module represents a functional unit. Specifically, we adopt modularized self-attention to dynamically select and route inputs to dedicated heads, which specializes them to specific functions. We conduct experiments for increasing lengths and shapes of reasoning trees on two benchmarks to test MORSE's compositional generalization abilities, and find it outperforms competitive baselines. Model ablation and deeper analyses show the effectiveness of dynamic reasoning modules and their generalization abilities.
Zero-shot Audio Topic Reranking using Large Language Models
Authors: Mengjie Qian, Rao Ma, Adian Liusie, Erfan Loweimi, Kate M. Knill, Mark J. F. Gales
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Information Retrieval, Reranking, Retrieval

Multimodal Video Search by Examples (MVSE) investigates using video clips as the query term for information retrieval, rather than the more traditional text query. This enables far richer search modalities such as images, speaker, content, topic, and emotion. A key element for this process is highly rapid and flexible search to support large archives, which in MVSE is facilitated by representing video attributes with embeddings. This work aims to compensate for any performance loss from this rapid archive search by examining reranking approaches. In particular, zero-shot reranking methods using large language models (LLMs) are investigated as these are applicable to any video archive audio content. Performance is evaluated for topic-based retrieval on a publicly available video archive, the BBC Rewind corpus. Results demonstrate that reranking significantly improves retrieval ranking without requiring any task-specific in-domain training data. Furthermore, three sources of information (ASR transcriptions, automatic summaries and synopses) as input for LLM reranking were compared. To gain a deeper understanding and further insights into the performance differences and limitations of these text sources, we employ a fact-checking approach to analyse the information consistency among them.
Revisiting Supertagging for Faster HPSG Pasing
Authors: Olga Zamaraeva, Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: token-classification, Token Classification

We present new supertaggers trained on English grammar-based treebanks and test the effects of the best tagger on parsing speed and accuracy. The treebanks are produced automatically by large manually built grammars and feature high-quality annotation based on a well-developed linguistic theory (HPSG). The English Resource Grammar treebanks include diverse and challenging test datasets, beyond the usual WSJ section 23 and Wikipedia data. HPSG supertagging has previously relied on MaxEnt-based models. We use SVM and neural CRF- and BERT-based methods and show that both SVM and neural supertaggers achieve considerably higher accuracy compared to the baseline and lead to an increase not only in the parsing speed but also the parser accuracy with respect to gold dependency structures. Our fine-tuned BERT-based tagger achieves 97.26\% accuracy on 950 sentences from WSJ23 and 93.88% on the out-of-domain technical essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar (cb). We present experiments with integrating the best supertagger into an HPSG parser and observe a speedup of a factor of 3 with respect to the system which uses no tagging at all, as well as large recall gains and an overall precision gain. We also compare our system to an existing integrated tagger and show that although the well-integrated tagger remains the fastest, our experimental system can be more accurate. Finally, we hope that the diverse and difficult datasets we used for evaluation will gain more popularity in the field: we show that results can differ depending on the dataset, even if it is an in-domain one. We contribute the complete datasets reformatted for Huggingface token classification.