ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Scaling Language Data Import/Export with a Data Transformer Interface (2020)

This paper focuses on the technical improvement of Elpis, a language technology which assists people in the process of transcription, particularly for low-resource language documentation situations. To provide better support for the diversity of file formats encountered by people working to document the world`s languages, a Data Transformer interface has been developed to abstract the complexities of designing individual data import scripts. This work took place as part of a larger project of code quality improvement and the publication of template code that can be used for development of other language technologies.
Fully Convolutional ASR for Less-Resourced Endangered Languages (2020)

The application of deep learning to automatic speech recognition (ASR) has yielded dramatic accuracy increases for languages with abundant training data, but languages with limited training resources have yet to see accuracy improvements on this scale. In this paper, we compare a fully convolutional approach for acoustic modelling in ASR with a variety of established acoustic modeling approaches. We evaluate our method on Seneca, a low-resource endangered language spoken in North America. Our method yields word error rates up to 40{\%} lower than those reported using both standard GMM-HMM approaches and established deep neural methods, with a substantial reduction in training time. These results show particular promise for languages like Seneca that are both endangered and lack extensive documentation.
Cross-Lingual Machine Speech Chain for Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, and Bataks Speech Recognition and Synthesis (2020)

Even though over seven hundred ethnic languages are spoken in Indonesia, the available technology remains limited that could support communication within indigenous communities as well as with people outside the villages. As a result, indigenous communities still face isolation due to cultural barriers; languages continue to disappear. To accelerate communication, speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) technology is one approach that can overcome language barriers. However, S2ST systems require machine translation (MT), speech recognition (ASR), and synthesis (TTS) that rely heavily on supervised training and a broad set of language resources that can be difficult to collect from ethnic communities. Recently, a machine speech chain mechanism was proposed to enable ASR and TTS to assist each other in semi-supervised learning. The framework was initially implemented only for monolingual languages. In this study, we focus on developing speech recognition and synthesis for these Indonesian ethnic languages: Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, and Bataks. We first separately train ASR and TTS of standard Indonesian in supervised training. We then develop ASR and TTS of ethnic languages by utilizing Indonesian ASR and TTS in a cross-lingual machine speech chain framework with only text or only speech data removing the need for paired speech-text data of those ethnic languages.
Automatic Myanmar Image Captioning using CNN and LSTM-Based Language Model (2020)

An image captioning system involves modules on computer vision as well as natural language processing. Computer vision module is for detecting salient objects or extracting features of images and Natural Language Processing (NLP) module is for generating correct syntactic and semantic image captions. Although many image caption datasets such as Flickr8k, Flickr30k and MSCOCO are publicly available, most of the datasets are captioned in English language. There is no image caption corpus for Myanmar language. Myanmar image caption corpus is manually built as part of the Flickr8k dataset in this current work. Furthermore, a generative merge model based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) is applied especially for Myanmar image captioning. Next, two conventional feature extraction models Visual Geometry Group (VGG) OxfordNet 16-layer and 19-layer are compared. The performance of this system is evaluated on Myanmar image caption corpus using BLEU scores and 10-fold cross validation.
Phoneme Boundary Analysis using Multiway Geometric Properties of Waveform Trajectories (2020)

Automatic phoneme segmentation is an important problem in speech processing. It helps in improving the recognition quality by providing a proper segmentation information for phonemes or phonetic units. Inappropriate segmentation may lead to recognition falloff. The problem is essential not only for recognition but also for annotation purpose also. In general, segmentation algorithms rely on training large data sets where data is observed to find the patterns among them. But this process is not straight forward for languages that are under resourced because of less availability of datasets. In this paper, we propose a method that uses geometrical properties of waveform trajectory where intra signal variations are studied and used for segmentation. The method does not rely on large datasets for training. The geometric properties are extracted as linear structural changes in a raw waveform. The methods and findings of the study are presented.
Natural Language Processing Chains Inside a Cross-lingual Event-Centric Knowledge Pipeline for European Union Under-resourced Languages (2020)

This article presents the strategy for developing a platform containing Language Processing Chains for European Union languages, consisting of Tokenization to Parsing, also including Named Entity recognition and with addition of Sentiment Analysis. These chains are part of the first step of an event-centric knowledge processing pipeline whose aim is to process multilingual media information about major events that can cause an impact in Europe and the rest of the world. Due to the differences in terms of availability of language resources for each language, we have built this strategy in three steps, starting with processing chains for the well-resourced languages and finishing with the development of new modules for the under-resourced ones. In order to classify all European Union official languages in terms of resources, we have analysed the size of annotated corpora as well as the existence of pre-trained models in mainstream Language Processing tools, and we have combined this information with the proposed classification published at META-NET whitepaper series.
Component Analysis of Adjectives in Luxembourgish for Detecting Sentiments (2020)

The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of Luxembourgish adjectives in expressing sentiments in user comments written at the web presence of rtl.lu (RTL is the abbreviation for Radio Television Letzebuerg). Alongside many textual features or representations,adjectives could be used in order to detect sentiment, even on a sentence or comment level. In fact, they are also by themselves one of the best ways to describe a sentiment, despite the fact that other word classes such as nouns, verbs, adverbs or conjunctions can also be utilized for this purpose. The empirical part of this study focuses on a list of adjectives that were extracted from an annotated corpus. The corpus contains the part of speech tags of individual words and sentiment annotation on the adjective, sentence and comment level. Suffixes of Luxembourgish adjectives like -esch, -eg, -lech, -al, -el, -iv, -ent, -los, -barand the prefixon- were explicitly investigated, especially by paying attention to their role in regards to building a model by applying classical machine learning techniques. We also considered the interaction of adjectives with other grammatical means, especially other part of speeches, e.g. negations, which can completely reverse the meaning, thus the sentiment of an utterance.
Acoustic-Phonetic Approach for ASR of Less Resourced Languages Using Monolingual and Cross-Lingual Information (2020)

The exploration of speech processing for endangered languages has substantially increased in the past epoch of time. In this paper, we present the acoustic-phonetic approach for automatic speech recognition (ASR) using monolingual and cross-lingual information with application to under-resourced Indian languages, Punjabi, Nepali and Hindi. The challenging task while developing the ASR was the collection of the acoustic corpus for under-resourced languages. We have described here, in brief, the strategies used for designing the corpus and also highlighted the issues pertaining while collecting data for these languages. The bootstrap GMM-UBM based approach is used, which integrates pronunciation lexicon, language model and acoustic-phonetic model. Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients were used for extracting the acoustic signal features for training in monolingual and cross-lingual settings. The experimental result shows the overall performance of ASR for cross-lingual and monolingual. The phone substitution plays a key role in the cross-lingual as well as monolingual recognition. The result obtained by cross-lingual recognition compared with other baseline system and it has been found that the performance of the recognition system is based on phonemic units . The recognition rate of cross-lingual generally declines as compared with the monolingual.
An Annotation Framework for Luxembourgish Sentiment Analysis (2020)

The aim of this paper is to present a framework developed for crowdsourcing sentiment annotation for the low-resource language Luxembourgish. Our tool is easily accessible through a web interface and facilitates sentence-level annotation of several annotators in parallel. In the heart of our framework is an XML database, which serves as central part linking several components. The corpus in the database consists of news articles and user comments. One of the components is LuNa, a tool for linguistic preprocessing of the data set. It tokenizes the text, splits it into sentences and assigns POS-tags to the tokens. After that, the preprocessed text is stored in XML format into the database. The Sentiment Annotation Tool, which is a browser-based tool, then enables the annotation of split sentences from the database. The Sentiment Engine, a separate module, is trained with this material in order to annotate the whole data set and analyze the sentiment of the comments over time and in relationship to the news articles. The gained knowledge can again be used to improve the sentiment classification on the one hand and on the other hand to understand the sentiment phenomenon from the linguistic point of view.
A Sentiment Analysis Dataset for Code-Mixed Malayalam-English (2020)

There is an increasing demand for sentiment analysis of text from social media which are mostly code-mixed. Systems trained on monolingual data fail for code-mixed data due to the complexity of mixing at different levels of the text. However, very few resources are available for code-mixed data to create models specific for this data. Although much research in multilingual and cross-lingual sentiment analysis has used semi-supervised or unsupervised methods, supervised methods still performs better. Only a few datasets for popular languages such as English-Spanish, English-Hindi, and English-Chinese are available. There are no resources available for Malayalam-English code-mixed data. This paper presents a new gold standard corpus for sentiment analysis of code-mixed text in Malayalam-English annotated by voluntary annotators. This gold standard corpus obtained a Krippendorff`s alpha above 0.8 for the dataset. We use this new corpus to provide the benchmark for sentiment analysis in Malayalam-English code-mixed texts.
Speech-Emotion Detection in an Indonesian Movie (2020)

The growing demand to develop an automatic emotion recognition system for the Human-Computer Interaction field had pushed some research in speech emotion detection. Although it is growing, there is still little research about automatic speech emotion detection in Bahasa Indonesia. Another issue is the lack of standard corpus for this research area in Bahasa Indonesia. This study proposed several approaches to detect speech-emotion in the dialogs of an Indonesian movie by classifying them into 4 different emotion classes i.e. happiness, sadness, anger, and neutral. There are two different speech data representations used in this study i.e. statistical and temporal/sequence representations. This study used Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) variation, word embedding, and also the hybrid of three to perform the classification task. The best accuracies given by one-vs-rest scenario for each emotion class with speech-transcript pairs using hybrid of non-temporal and embedding approach are 1) happiness: 76.31{\%}; 2) sadness: 86.46{\%}; 3) anger: 82.14{\%}; and 4) neutral: 68.51{\%}. The multiclass classification resulted in 64.66{\%} of precision, 66.79{\%} of recall, and 64.83{\%} of F1-score.
Macsen: A Voice Assistant for Speakers of a Lesser Resourced Language (2020)

This paper reports on the development of a voice assistant mobile app for speakers of a lesser resourced language {--} Welsh. An assistant with a smaller set of effective but useful skills is both desirable and urgent for the wider Welsh speaking community. Descriptions of the app`s skills, architecture, design decisions and user interface is provided before elaborating on the most recent research and activities in open source speech technology for Welsh. The paper reports on the progress to date on crowdsourcing Welsh speech data in Mozilla Common Voice and of its suitability for training Mozilla`s DeepSpeech speech recognition for a voice assistant application according to conventional and transfer learning methods. We demonstrate that with smaller datasets of speech data, transfer learning and a domain specific language model, acceptable speech recognition is achievable that facilitates, as confirmed by beta users, a practical and useful voice assistant for Welsh speakers. We hope that this work informs and serves as a model to researchers and developers in other lesser-resourced linguistic communities and helps bring into being voice assistant apps for their languages.
Corpus Creation for Sentiment Analysis in Code-Mixed Tamil-English Text (2020)

Understanding the sentiment of a comment from a video or an image is an essential task in many applications. Sentiment analysis of a text can be useful for various decision-making processes. One such application is to analyse the popular sentiments of videos on social media based on viewer comments. However, comments from social media do not follow strict rules of grammar, and they contain mixing of more than one language, often written in non-native scripts. Non-availability of annotated code-mixed data for a low-resourced language like Tamil also adds difficulty to this problem. To overcome this, we created a gold standard Tamil-English code-switched, sentiment-annotated corpus containing 15,744 comment posts from YouTube. In this paper, we describe the process of creating the corpus and assigning polarities. We present inter-annotator agreement and show the results of sentiment analysis trained on this corpus as a benchmark.
Gender Detection from Human Voice Using Tensor Analysis (2020)

Speech-based communication is one of the most preferred modes of communication for humans. The human voice contains several important information and clues that help in interpreting the voice message. The gender of the speaker can be accurately guessed by a person based on the received voice of a speaker. The knowledge of the speaker`s gender can be a great aid to design accurate speech recognition systems. GMM based classifier is a popular choice used for gender detection. In this paper, we propose a Tensor-based approach for detecting the gender of a speaker and discuss its implementation details for low resourceful languages. Experiments were conducted using the TIMIT and SHRUTI dataset. An average gender detection accuracy of 91{\%} is recorded. Analysis of the results with the proposed method is presented in this paper.
Data-Driven Parametric Text Normalization: Rapidly Scaling Finite-State Transduction Verbalizers to New Languages (2020)

This paper presents a methodology for rapidly generating FST-based verbalizers for ASR and TTS systems by efficiently sourcing language-specific data. We describe a questionnaire which collects the necessary data to bootstrap the number grammar induction system and parameterize the verbalizer templates described in Ritchie et al. (2019), and a machine-readable data store which allows the data collected through the questionnaire to be supplemented by additional data from other sources. This system allows us to rapidly scale technologies such as ASR and TTS to more languages, including low-resource languages.
Lenition and Fortition of Stop Codas in Romanian (2020)

The present paper aims at providing a first study of lenition- and fortition-type phenomena in coda position in Romanian, a language that can be considered as less-resourced. Our data show that there are two contexts for devoicing in Romanian: before a voiceless obstruent, which means that there is regressive voicelessness assimilation in the language, and before pause, which means that there is a tendency towards final devoicing proper. The data also show that non-canonical voicing is an instance of voicing assimilation, as it is observed mainly before voiced consonants (voiced obstruents and sonorants alike). Two conclusions can be drawn from our analyses. First, from a phonetic point of view, the two devoicing phenomena exhibit the same behavior regarding place of articulation of the coda, while voicing assimilation displays the reverse tendency. In particular, alveolars, which tend to devoice the most, also voice the least. Second, the two assimilation processes have similarities that could distinguish them from final devoicing as such. Final devoicing seems to be sensitive to speech style and gender of the speaker, while assimilation processes do not. This may indicate that the two kinds of processes are phonologized at two different degrees in the language, assimilation being more accepted and generalized than final devoicing.
Adapting a Welsh Terminology Tool to Develop a Cornish Dictionary (2020)

Cornish and Welsh are closely related Celtic languages and this paper provides a brief description of a recent project to publish an online bilingual English/Cornish dictionary, the Gerlyver Kernewek, based on similar work previously undertaken for Welsh. Both languages are endangered, Cornish critically so, but both can benefit from the use of language technology. Welsh has previous experience of using language technologies for language revitalization, and this is now being used to help the Cornish language create new tools and resources, including lexicographical ones, helping a dispersed team of language specialists and editors, many of them in a voluntary capacity, to work collaboratively online. Details are given of the Maes T dictionary writing and publication platform, originally developed for Welsh, and of some of the adaptations that had to be made to accommodate the specific needs of Cornish, including their use of Middle and Late varieties due to its development as a revived language.
Multiple Segmentations of Thai Sentences for Neural Machine Translation (2020)

Thai is a low-resource language, so it is often the case that data is not available in sufficient quantities to train an Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model which perform to a high level of quality. In addition, the Thai script does not use white spaces to delimit the boundaries between words, which adds more complexity when building sequence to sequence models. In this work, we explore how to augment a set of English{--}Thai parallel data by replicating sentence-pairs with different word segmentation methods on Thai, as training data for NMT model training. Using different merge operations of Byte Pair Encoding, different segmentations of Thai sentences can be obtained. The experiments show that combining these datasets, performance is improved for NMT models trained with a dataset that has been split using a supervised splitting tool.
Automatic Extraction of Verb Paradigms in Regional Languages: the case of the Linguistic Crescent varieties (2020)

Language documentation is crucial for endangered varieties all over the world. Verb conjugation is a key aspect of this documentation for Romance varieties such as those spoken in central France, in the area of the Linguistic Crescent, which extends overs significant portions of the old provinces of Marche and Bourbonnais. We present a first methodological experiment using automatic speech processing tools for the extraction of verbal paradigms collected and recorded during fieldworks sessions made in situ. In order to prove the feasibility of the approach, we test it with different protocols, on good quality data, and we offer possible ways of extension for this research.
FST Morphology for the Endangered Skolt Sami Language (2020)

We present advances in the development of a FST-based morphological analyzer and generator for Skolt Sami. Like other minority Uralic languages, Skolt Sami exhibits a rich morphology, on the one hand, and there is little golden standard material for it, on the other. This makes NLP approaches for its study difficult without a solid morphological analysis. The language is severely endangered and the work presented in this paper forms a part of a greater whole in its revitalization efforts. Furthermore, we intersperse our description with facilitation and description practices not well documented in the infrastructure. Currently, the analyzer covers over 30,000 Skolt Sami words in 148 inflectional paradigms and over 12 derivational forms.
Voted-Perceptron Approach for Kazakh Morphological Disambiguation (2020)

This paper presents an approach of voted perceptron for morphological disambiguation for the case of Kazakh language. Guided by the intuition that the feature value from the correct path of analyses must be higher than the feature value of non-correct path of analyses, we propose the voted perceptron algorithm with Viterbi decoding manner for disambiguation. The approach can use arbitrary features to learn the feature vector for a sequence of analyses, which plays a vital role for disambiguation. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms other statistical and rule-based models. Moreover, we manually annotated a new morphological disambiguation corpus for Kazakh language.
DNN-Based Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition for Wolaytta using Oromo Speech (2020)

It is known that Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is very useful for human-computer interaction in all the human languages. However, due to its requirement for a big speech corpus, which is very expensive, it has not been developed for most of the languages. Multilingual ASR (MLASR) has been suggested to share existing speech corpora among related languages to develop an ASR for languages which do not have the required speech corpora. Literature shows that phonetic relatedness goes across language families. We have, therefore, conducted experiments on MLASR taking two language families: one as source (Oromo from Cushitic) and the other as target (Wolaytta from Omotic). Using Oromo Deep Neural Network (DNN) based acoustic model, Wolaytta pronunciation dictionary and language model we have achieved Word Error Rate (WER) of 48.34{\%} for Wolaytta. Moreover, our experiments show that adding only 30 minutes of speech data from the target language (Wolaytta) to the whole training data (22.8 hours) of the source language (Oromo) results in a relative WER reduction of 32.77{\%}. Our results show the possibility of developing ASR system for a language, if we have pronunciation dictionary and language model, using an existing speech corpus of another language irrespective of their language family.