ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning Thesaurus Relations from Distributional Features (2016)

In distributional semantics words are represented by aggregated context features. The similarity of words can be computed by comparing their feature vectors. Thus, we can predict whether two words are synonymous or similar with respect to some other semantic relation. We will show on six different datasets of pairs of similar and non-similar words that a supervised learning algorithm on feature vectors representing pairs of words outperforms cosine similarity between vectors representing single words. We compared different methods to construct a feature vector representing a pair of words. We show that simple methods like pairwise addition or multiplication give better results than a recently proposed method that combines different types of features. The semantic relation we consider is relatedness of terms in thesauri for intellectual document classification. Thus our findings can directly be applied for the maintenance and extension of such thesauri. To the best of our knowledge this relation was not considered before in the field of distributional semantics.
Factuality Annotation and Learning in Spanish Texts (2016)

We present a proposal for the annotation of factuality of event mentions in Spanish texts and a free available annotated corpus. Our factuality model aims to capture a pragmatic notion of factuality, trying to reflect a casual reader judgements about the realis / irrealis status of mentioned events. Also, some learning experiments (SVM and CRF) have been held, showing encouraging results.
NNBlocks: A Deep Learning Framework for Computational Linguistics Neural Network Models (2016)

Lately, with the success of Deep Learning techniques in some computational linguistics tasks, many researchers want to explore new models for their linguistics applications. These models tend to be very different from what standard Neural Networks look like, limiting the possibility to use standard Neural Networks frameworks. This work presents NNBlocks, a new framework written in Python to build and train Neural Networks that are not constrained by a specific kind of architecture, making it possible to use it in computational linguistics.
Automatic identification of Mild Cognitive Impairment through the analysis of Italian spontaneous speech productions (2016)

This paper presents some preliminary results of the OPLON project. It aimed at identifying early linguistic symptoms of cognitive decline in the elderly. This pilot study was conducted on a corpus composed of spontaneous speech sample collected from 39 subjects, who underwent a neuropsychological screening for visuo-spatial abilities, memory, language, executive functions and attention. A rich set of linguistic features was extracted from the digitalised utterances (at phonetic, suprasegmental, lexical, morphological and syntactic levels) and the statistical significance in pinpointing the pathological process was measured. Our results show remarkable trends for what concerns both the linguistic traits selection and the automatic classifiers building.
On the Use of a Serious Game for Recording a Speech Corpus of People with Intellectual Disabilities (2016)

This paper describes the recording of a speech corpus focused on prosody of people with intellectual disabilities. To do this, a video game is used with the aim of improving the user`s motivation. Moreover, the player`s profiles and the sentences recorded during the game sessions are described. With the purpose of identifying the main prosodic troubles of people with intellectual disabilities, some prosodic features are extracted from recordings, like fundamental frequency, energy and pauses. After that, a comparison is made between the recordings of people with intellectual disabilities and people without intellectual disabilities. This comparison shows that pauses are the best discriminative feature between these groups. To check this, a study has been done using machine learning techniques, with a classification rate superior to 80{\%}.
Building Language Resources for Exploring Autism Spectrum Disorders (2016)

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental condition that would benefit from low-cost and reliable improvements to screening and diagnosis. Human language technologies (HLTs) provide one possible route to automating a series of subjective decisions that currently inform {\textquotedblleft}Gold Standard{\textquotedblright} diagnosis based on clinical judgment. In this paper, we describe a new resource to support this goal, comprised of 100 20-minute semi-structured English language samples labeled with child age, sex, IQ, autism symptom severity, and diagnostic classification. We assess the feasibility of digitizing and processing sensitive clinical samples for data sharing, and identify areas of difficulty. Using the methods described here, we propose to join forces with researchers and clinicians throughout the world to establish an international repository of annotated language samples from individuals with ASD and related disorders. This project has the potential to improve the lives of individuals with ASD and their families by identifying linguistic features that could improve remote screening, inform personalized intervention, and promote advancements in clinically-oriented HLTs.
Vocal Pathologies Detection and Mispronounced Phonemes Identification: Case of Arabic Continuous Speech (2016)

We propose in this work a novel acoustic phonetic study for Arabic people suffering from language disabilities and non-native learners of Arabic language to classify Arabic continuous speech to pathological or healthy and to identify phonemes that pose pronunciation problems (case of pathological speeches). The main idea can be summarized in comparing between the phonetic model reference to Arabic spoken language and that proper to concerned speaker. For this task, we use techniques of automatic speech processing like forced alignment and artificial neural network (ANN) (Basheer, 2000). Based on a test corpus containing 100 speech sequences, recorded by different speakers (healthy/pathological speeches and native/foreign speakers), we attain 97{\%} as classification rate. Algorithms used in identifying phonemes that pose pronunciation problems show high efficiency: we attain an identification rate of 100{\%}.
Wikipedia Titles As Noun Tag Predictors (2016)

In this paper, we investigate a covert labeling cue, namely the probability that a title (by example of the Wikipedia titles) is a noun. If this probability is very large, any list such as or comparable to the Wikipedia titles can be used as a reliable word-class (or part-of-speech tag) predictor or noun lexicon. This may be especially useful in the case of Low Resource Languages (LRL) where labeled data is lacking and putatively for Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as Word Sense Disambiguation, Sentiment Analysis and Machine Translation. Profitting from the ease of digital publication on the web as opposed to print, LRL speaker communities produce resources such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary, which can be used for an assessment. We provide statistical evidence for a strong noun bias for the Wikipedia titles from 2 corpora (English, Persian) and a dictionary (Japanese) and for a typologically balanced set of 17 languages including LRLs. Additionally, we conduct a small experiment on predicting noun tags for out-of-vocabulary items in part-of-speech tagging for English.
Japanese Word\textemdashColor Associations with and without Contexts (2016)

Although some words carry strong associations with specific colors (e.g., the word danger is associated with the color red), few studies have investigated these relationships. This may be due to the relative rarity of databases that contain large quantities of such information. Additionally, these resources are often limited to particular languages, such as English. Moreover, the existing resources often do not consider the possible contexts of words in assessing the associations between a word and a color. As a result, the influence of context on word{\textemdash}color associations is not fully understood. In this study, we constructed a novel language resource for word{\textemdash}color associations. The resource has two characteristics: First, our resource is the first to include Japanese word{\textemdash}color associations, which were collected via crowdsourcing. Second, the word{\textemdash}color associations in the resource are linked to contexts. We show that word{\textemdash}color associations depend on language and that associations with certain colors are affected by context information.
The VU Sound Corpus: Adding More Fine-grained Annotations to the Freesound Database (2016)

This paper presents a collection of annotations (tags or keywords) for a set of 2,133 environmental sounds taken from the Freesound database (www.freesound.org). The annotations are acquired through an open-ended crowd-labeling task, in which participants were asked to provide keywords for each of three sounds. The main goal of this study is to find out (i) whether it is feasible to collect keywords for a large collection of sounds through crowdsourcing, and (ii) how people talk about sounds, and what information they can infer from hearing a sound in isolation. Our main finding is that it is not only feasible to perform crowd-labeling for a large collection of sounds, it is also very useful to highlight different aspects of the sounds that authors may fail to mention. Our data is freely available, and can be used to ground semantic models, improve search in audio databases, and to study the language of sound.
Crowdsourcing a Large Dataset of Domain-Specific Context-Sensitive Semantic Verb Relations (2016)

We present a new large dataset of 12403 context-sensitive verb relations manually annotated via crowdsourcing. These relations capture fine-grained semantic information between verb-centric propositions, such as temporal or entailment relations. We propose a novel semantic verb relation scheme and design a multi-step annotation approach for scaling-up the annotations using crowdsourcing. We employ several quality measures and report on agreement scores. The resulting dataset is available under a permissive CreativeCommons license at www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/data/verb-relations/. It represents a valuable resource for various applications, such as automatic information consolidation or automatic summarization.
Acquiring Opposition Relations among Italian Verb Senses using Crowdsourcing (2016)

We describe an experiment for the acquisition of opposition relations among Italian verb senses, based on a crowdsourcing methodology. The goal of the experiment is to discuss whether the types of opposition we distinguish (i.e. complementarity, antonymy, converseness and reversiveness) are actually perceived by the crowd. In particular, we collect data for Italian by using the crowdsourcing platform CrowdFlower. We ask annotators to judge the type of opposition existing among pairs of sentences -previously judged as opposite- that differ only for a verb: the verb in the first sentence is opposite of the verb in second sentence. Data corroborate the hypothesis that some opposition relations exclude each other, while others interact, being recognized as compatible by the contributors.
Crowdsourcing a Multi-lingual Speech Corpus: Recording, Transcription and Annotation of the CrowdIS Corpora (2016)

We announce the release of the CROWDED CORPUS: a pair of speech corpora collected via crowdsourcing, containing a native speaker corpus of English (CROWDED{\_}ENGLISH), and a corpus of German/English bilinguals (CROWDED{\_}BILINGUAL). Release 1 of the CROWDED CORPUS contains 1000 recordings amounting to 33,400 tokens collected from 80 speakers and is freely available to other researchers. We recruited participants via the Crowdee application for Android. Recruits were prompted to respond to business-topic questions of the type found in language learning oral tests. We then used the CrowdFlower web application to pass these recordings to crowdworkers for transcription and annotation of errors and sentence boundaries. Finally, the sentences were tagged and parsed using standard natural language processing tools. We propose that crowdsourcing is a valid and economical method for corpus collection, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this approach.
The REAL Corpus: A Crowd-Sourced Corpus of Human Generated and Evaluated Spatial References to Real-World Urban Scenes (2016)

Our interest is in people`s capacity to efficiently and effectively describe geographic objects in urban scenes. The broader ambition is to develop spatial models capable of equivalent functionality able to construct such referring expressions. To that end we present a newly crowd-sourced data set of natural language references to objects anchored in complex urban scenes (In short: The REAL Corpus {\textemdash} Referring Expressions Anchored Language). The REAL corpus contains a collection of images of real-world urban scenes together with verbal descriptions of target objects generated by humans, paired with data on how successful other people were able to identify the same object based on these descriptions. In total, the corpus contains 32 images with on average 27 descriptions per image and 3 verifications for each description. In addition, the corpus is annotated with a variety of linguistically motivated features. The paper highlights issues posed by collecting data using crowd-sourcing with an unrestricted input format, as well as using real-world urban scenes.
Introducing the Weighted Trustability Evaluator for Crowdsourcing Exemplified by Speaker Likability Classification (2016)

Crowdsourcing is an arising collaborative approach applicable among many other applications to the area of language and speech processing. In fact, the use of crowdsourcing was already applied in the field of speech processing with promising results. However, only few studies investigated the use of crowdsourcing in computational paralinguistics. In this contribution, we propose a novel evaluator for crowdsourced-based ratings termed Weighted Trustability Evaluator (WTE) which is computed from the rater-dependent consistency over the test questions. We further investigate the reliability of crowdsourced annotations as compared to the ones obtained with traditional labelling procedures, such as constrained listening experiments in laboratories or in controlled environments. This comparison includes an in-depth analysis of obtainable classification performances. The experiments were conducted on the Speaker Likability Database (SLD) already used in the INTERSPEECH Challenge 2012, and the results lend further weight to the assumption that crowdsourcing can be applied as a reliable annotation source for computational paralinguistics given a sufficient number of raters and suited measurements of their reliability.
Comparison of Emotional Understanding in Modality-Controlled Environments using Multimodal Online Emotional Communication Corpus (2016)

In online computer-mediated communication, speakers were considered to have experienced difficulties in catching their partner`s emotions and in conveying their own emotions. To explain why online emotional communication is so difficult and to investigate how this problem should be solved, multimodal online emotional communication corpus was constructed by recording approximately 100 speakers' emotional expressions and reactions in a modality-controlled environment. Speakers communicated over the Internet using video chat, voice chat or text chat; their face-to-face conversations were used for comparison purposes. The corpora incorporated emotional labels by evaluating the speaker`s dynamic emotional states and the measurements of the speaker`s facial expression, vocal expression and autonomic nervous system activity. For the initial study of this project, which used a large-scale emotional communication corpus, the accuracy of online emotional understanding was assessed to demonstrate the emotional labels evaluated by the speakers and to summarize the speaker`s answers on the questionnaire regarding the difference between an online chat and face-to-face conversations in which they actually participated. The results revealed that speakers have difficulty communicating their emotions in online communication environments, regardless of the type of communication modality and that inaccurate emotional understanding occurs more frequently in online computer-mediated communication than in face-to-face communication.
Laughter in French Spontaneous Conversational Dialogs (2016)

This paper presents a quantitative description of laughter in height 1-hour French spontaneous conversations. The paper includes the raw figures for laughter as well as more details concerning inter-individual variability. It firstly describes to what extent the amount of laughter and their durations varies from speaker to speaker in all dialogs. In a second suite of analyses, this paper compares our corpus with previous analyzed corpora. In a final set of experiments, it presents some facts about overlapping laughs. This paper have quantified these all effects in free-style conversations, for the first time.
AVAB-DBS: an Audio-Visual Affect Bursts Database for Synthesis (2016)

It has been shown that adding expressivity and emotional expressions to an agent`s communication systems would improve the interaction quality between this agent and a human user. In this paper we present a multimodal database of affect bursts, which are very short non-verbal expressions with facial, vocal, and gestural components that are highly synchronized and triggered by an identifiable event. This database contains motion capture and audio data of affect bursts representing disgust, startle and surprise recorded at three different levels of arousal each. This database is to be used for synthesis purposes in order to generate affect bursts of these emotions on a continuous arousal level scale.
Construction of Japanese Audio-Visual Emotion Database and Its Application in Emotion Recognition (2016)

Emotional aspects play a vital role in making human communication a rich and dynamic experience. As we introduce more automated system in our daily lives, it becomes increasingly important to incorporate emotion to provide as natural an interaction as possible. To achieve said incorporation, rich sets of labeled emotional data is prerequisite. However, in Japanese, existing emotion database is still limited to unimodal and bimodal corpora. Since emotion is not only expressed through speech, but also visually at the same time, it is essential to include multiple modalities in an observation. In this paper, we present the first audio-visual emotion corpora in Japanese, collected from 14 native speakers. The corpus contains 100 minutes of annotated and transcribed material. We performed preliminary emotion recognition experiments on the corpus and achieved an accuracy of 61.42{\%} for five classes of emotion.
Evaluating Context Selection Strategies to Build Emotive Vector Space Models (2016)

In this paper we compare different context selection approaches to improve the creation of Emotive Vector Space Models (VSMs). The system is based on the results of an existing approach that showed the possibility to create and update VSMs by exploiting crowdsourcing and human annotation. Here, we introduce a method to manipulate the contexts of the VSMs under the assumption that the emotive connotation of a target word is a function of both its syntagmatic and paradigmatic association with the various emotions. To study the differences among the proposed spaces and to confirm the reliability of the system, we report on two experiments: in the first one we validated the best candidates extracted from each model, and in the second one we compared the models' performance on a random sample of target words. Both experiments have been implemented as crowdsourcing tasks.
Simultaneous Sentence Boundary Detection and Alignment with Pivot-based Machine Translation Generated Lexicons (2016)

Sentence alignment is a task that consists in aligning the parallel sentences in a translated article pair. This paper describes a method to perform sentence boundary detection and alignment simultaneously, which significantly improves the alignment accuracy on languages like Chinese with uncertain sentence boundaries. It relies on the definition of hard (certain) and soft (uncertain) punctuation delimiters, the latter being possibly ignored to optimize the alignment result. The alignment method is used in combination with lexicons automatically generated from the input article pairs using pivot-based MT, achieving better coverage of the input words with fewer entries than pre-existing dictionaries. Pivot-based MT makes it possible to build dictionaries for language pairs that have scarce parallel data. The alignment method is implemented in a tool that will be freely available in the near future.
That`ll Do Fine!: A Coarse Lexical Resource for English-Hindi MT, Using Polylingual Topic Models (2016)

Parallel corpora are often injected with bilingual lexical resources for improved Indian language machine translation (MT). In absence of such lexical resources, multilingual topic models have been used to create coarse lexical resources in the past, using a Cartesian product approach. Our results show that for morphologically rich languages like Hindi, the Cartesian product approach is detrimental for MT. We then present a novel {\textquoteleft}sentential' approach to use this coarse lexical resource from a multilingual topic model. Our coarse lexical resource when injected with a parallel corpus outperforms a system trained using parallel corpus and a good quality lexical resource. As demonstrated by the quality of our coarse lexical resource and its benefit to MT, we believe that our sentential approach to create such a resource will help MT for resource-constrained languages.
ASPEC: Asian Scientific Paper Excerpt Corpus (2016)

In this paper, we describe the details of the ASPEC (Asian Scientific Paper Excerpt Corpus), which is the first large-size parallel corpus of scientific paper domain. ASPEC was constructed in the Japanese-Chinese machine translation project conducted between 2006 and 2010 using the Special Coordination Funds for Promoting Science and Technology. It consists of a Japanese-English scientific paper abstract corpus of approximately 3 million parallel sentences (ASPEC-JE) and a Chinese-Japanese scientific paper excerpt corpus of approximately 0.68 million parallel sentences (ASPEC-JC). ASPEC is used as the official dataset for the machine translation evaluation workshop WAT (Workshop on Asian Translation).
Domain Adaptation in MT Using Titles in Wikipedia as a Parallel Corpus: Resources and Evaluation (2016)

This paper presents how an state-of-the-art SMT system is enriched by using an extra in-domain parallel corpora extracted from Wikipedia. We collect corpora from parallel titles and from parallel fragments in comparable articles from Wikipedia. We carried out an evaluation with a double objective: evaluating the quality of the extracted data and evaluating the improvement due to the domain-adaptation. We think this can be very useful for languages with limited amount of parallel corpora, where in-domain data is crucial to improve the performance of MT sytems. The experiments on the Spanish-English language pair improve a baseline trained with the Europarl corpus in more than 2 points of BLEU when translating in the Computer Science domain.