ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Event Extraction in Video Transcripts (2022)

Event extraction (EE) is one of the fundamental tasks for information extraction whose goal is to identify mentions of events and their participants in text. Due to its importance, different methods and datasets have been introduced for EE. However, existing EE datasets are limited to formally written documents such as news articles or scientific papers. As such, the challenges of EE in informal and noisy texts are not adequately studied. In particular, video transcripts constitute an important domain that can benefit tremendously from EE systems (e.g., video retrieval), but has not been studied in EE literature due to the lack of necessary datasets. To address this limitation, we propose the first large-scale EE dataset obtained for transcripts of streamed videos on the video hosting platform Behance to promote future research in this area. In addition, we extensively evaluate existing state-of-the-art EE methods on our new dataset. We demonstrate that such systems cannot achieve adequate performance on the proposed dataset, revealing challenges and opportunities for further research effort.
Recycle Your Wav2Vec2 Codebook: A Speech Perceiver for Keyword Spotting (2022)

Speech information in a pretrained wav2vec2.0 model is usually leveraged through its encoder, which has at least 95M parameters, being not so suitable for small footprint Keyword Spotting. In this work, we show an efficient way of profiting from wav2vec2.0`s linguistic knowledge, by recycling the phonetic information encoded in its latent codebook, which has been typically thrown away after pretraining. We do so by transferring the codebook as weights for the latent bottleneck of a Keyword Spotting Perceiver, thus initializing such model with phonetic embeddings already. The Perceiver design relies on cross-attention between these embeddings and input data to generate better representations. Our method delivers accuracy gains compared to random initialization, at no latency costs. Plus, we show that the phonetic embeddings can easily be downsampled with k-means clustering, speeding up inference in 3.5 times at only slight accuracy penalties.
Improving Code-switched ASR with Linguistic Information (2022)

This paper seeks to improve the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems operating on code-switched speech. Code-switching refers to the alternation of languages within a conversation, a phenomenon that is of increasing importance considering the rapid rise in the number of bilingual speakers in the world. It is particularly challenging for ASR owing to the relative scarcity of code-switching speech and text data, even when the individual languages are themselves well-resourced. This paper proposes to overcome this challenge by applying linguistic theories in order to generate more realistic code-switching text, necessary for language modelling in ASR. Working with English-Spanish code-switching, we find that Equivalence Constraint theory and part-of-speech labelling are particularly helpful for text generation, and bring 2{\%} improvement to ASR performance.
Language-specific Effects on Automatic Speech Recognition Errors for World Englishes (2022)

Despite recent advancements in automated speech recognition (ASR) technologies, reports of unequal performance across speakers of different demographic groups abound. At the same time, the focus on performance metrics such as the Word Error Rate (WER) in prior studies limit the specificity and scope of recommendations that can be offered for system engineering to overcome these challenges. The current study bridges this gap by investigating the performance of Otter`s automatic captioning system on native and non-native English speakers of different language background through a linguistic analysis of segment-level errors. By examining language-specific error profiles for vowels and consonants motivated by linguistic theory, we find that certain categories of errors can be predicted from the phonological structure of a speaker`s native language.
A Transformer-based Threshold-Free Framework for Multi-Intent NLU (2022)

Multi-intent natural language understanding (NLU) has recently gained attention. It detects multiple intents in an utterance, which is better suited to real-world scenarios. However, the state-of-the-art joint NLU models mainly detect multiple intents on threshold-based strategy, resulting in one main issue: the model is extremely sensitive to the threshold settings. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based Threshold-Free Multi-intent NLU model (TFMN) with multi-task learning (MTL). Specifically, we first leverage multiple layers of a transformer-based encoder to generate multi-grain representations. Then we exploit the information of the number of multiple intents in each utterance without additional manual annotations and propose an auxiliary detection task: Intent Number detection (IND). Furthermore, we propose a threshold-free intent multi-intent classifier that utilizes the output of IND task and detects the multiple intents without depending on the threshold. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model achieves superior results on two public multi-intent datasets.
Unsupervised Multi-scale Expressive Speaking Style Modeling with Hierarchical Context Information for Audiobook Speech Synthesis (2022)

Naturalness and expressiveness are crucial for audiobook speech synthesis, but now are limited by the averaged global-scale speaking style representation. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised multi-scale context-sensitive text-to-speech model for audiobooks. A multi-scale hierarchical context encoder is specially designed to predict both global-scale context style embedding and local-scale context style embedding from a wider context of input text in a hierarchical manner. Likewise, a multi-scale reference encoder is introduced to extract reference style embeddings at both global and local scales from the reference speech, which is used to guide the prediction of speaking styles. On top of these, a bi-reference attention mechanism is used to align both local-scale reference style embedding sequence and local-scale context style embedding sequence with corresponding phoneme embedding sequence. Both objective and subjective experiment results on a real-world multi-speaker Mandarin novel audio dataset demonstrate the excellent performance of our proposed method over all baselines in terms of naturalness and expressiveness of the synthesized speech.
Incorporating Instructional Prompts into a Unified Generative Framework for Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling (2022)

The joint multiple Intent Detection (ID) and Slot Filling (SF) is a significant challenge in spoken language understanding. Because the slots in an utterance may relate to multi-intents, most existing approaches focus on utilizing task-specific components to capture the relations between intents and slots. The customized networks restrict models from modeling commonalities between tasks and generalization for broader applications. To address the above issue, we propose a Unified Generative framework (UGEN) based on a prompt-based paradigm, and formulate the task as a question-answering problem. Specifically, we design 5-type templates as instructional prompts, and each template includes a question that acts as the driver to teach UGEN to grasp the paradigm, options that list the candidate intents or slots to reduce the answer search space, and the context denotes original utterance. Through the instructional prompts, UGEN is guided to understand intents, slots, and their implicit correlations. On two popular multi-intent benchmark datasets, experimental results demonstrate that UGEN achieves new SOTA performances on full-data and surpasses the baselines by a large margin on 5-shot (28.1{\%}) and 10-shot (23{\%}) scenarios, which verify that UGEN is robust and effective.
Adaptive Unsupervised Self-training for Disfluency Detection (2022)

Supervised methods have achieved remarkable results in disfluency detection. However, in real-world scenarios, human-annotated data is difficult to obtain. Recent works try to handle disfluency detection with unsupervised self-training, which can exploit existing large-scale unlabeled data efficiently. However, their self-training-based methods suffer from the problems of selection bias and error accumulation. To tackle these problems, we propose an adaptive unsupervised self-training method for disfluency detection. Specifically, we re-weight the importance of each training example according to its grammatical feature and prediction confidence. Experiments on the Switchboard dataset show that our method improves 2.3 points over the current SOTA unsupervised method. Moreover, our method is competitive with the SOTA supervised method.
Patterns of Text Readability in Human and Predicted Eye Movements (2022)

It has been shown that multilingual transformer models are able to predict human reading behavior when fine-tuned on small amounts of eye tracking data. As the cumulated prediction results do not provide insights into the linguistic cues that the model acquires to predict reading behavior, we conduct a deeper analysis of the predictions from the perspective of readability. We try to disentangle the three-fold relationship between human eye movements, the capability of language models to predict these eye movement patterns, and sentence-level readability measures for English. We compare a range of model configurations to multiple baselines. We show that the models exhibit difficulties with function words and that pre-training only provides limited advantages for linguistic generalization.
(In)Alienable Possession in Mandarin Relative Clauses (2022)

Inalienable possession differs from alienable possession in that, in the former {--} e.g., kinships and part-whole relations {--} there is an intrinsic semantic dependency between the possessor and possessum. This paper reports two studies that used acceptability-judgment tasks to investigate whether native Mandarin speakers experienced different levels of interpretational costs while resolving different types of possessive relations, i.e., inalienable possessions (kinship terms and body parts) and alienable ones, expressed within relative clauses. The results show that sentences received higher acceptability ratings when body parts were the possessum as compared to sentences with alienable possessum, indicating that the inherent semantic dependency facilitates the resolution. However, inalienable kinship terms received the lowest acceptability ratings. We argue that this was because the kinship terms, which had the [+human] feature and appeared at the beginning of the experimental sentences, tended to be interpreted as the subject in shallow processing; these features contradicted the semantic-syntactic requirements of the experimental sentences.
Do Age of Acquisition and Orthographic Transparency Have the Same Effects in Different Modalities? (2022)

This paper is intended to study the effects of age of acquisition (AoA) and orthographic transparency on word retrieval in Persian, which is an understudied language. A naming task (both pictures and words) and a recall task (both pictures and words) were used to explore how lexical retrieval and verbal memory are affected by AoA and transparency. Seventy two native speakers of Persian were recruited to participate in two experiments. The results showed that early acquired words are processed faster than late acquired words only when pictures were used as stimuli. Transparency of the words was not an influential factor. However, in the recall experiment a three-way interaction was observed: early acquired pictures and words were processed faster than late acquired stimuli except the words in the transparent condition. The findings speak to the fact that language-specific properties of languages are very important.
CAT ManyNames: A New Dataset for Object Naming in Catalan (2022)

Object Naming is an important task within the field of Language and Vision that consists of generating a correct and appropriate name for an object given an image. The ManyNames dataset uses real-world human annotated images with multiple labels, instead of just one. In this work, we describe the adaptation of this dataset (originally in English) to Catalan, by (i) machine-translating the English labels and (ii) collecting human annotations for a subset of the original corpus and comparing both resources. Analyses reveal divergences in the lexical variation of the two sets showing potential problems of directly translated resources, particularly when there is no resource to a proper context, which in this case is conveyed by the image. The analysis also points to the impact of cultural factors in the naming task, which should be accounted for in future cross-lingual naming tasks.
Finetuning Latin BERT for Word Sense Disambiguation on the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (2022)

The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL) is a comprehensive monolingual dictionary that records contextualized meanings and usages of Latin words in antique sources at an unprecedented scale. We created a new dataset based on a subset of sense representations in the TLL, with which we finetuned the Latin-BERT neural language model (Bamman and Burns, 2020) on a supervised Word Sense Disambiguation task. We observe that the contextualized BERT representations finetuned on TLL data score better than static embeddings used in a bidirectional LSTM classifier on the same dataset, and that our per-lemma BERT models achieve higher and more robust performance than reported by Bamman and Burns (2020) based on data from a bilingual Latin dictionary. We demonstrate the differences in sense organizational principles between these two lexical resources, and report about our dataset construction and improved evaluation methodology.
Putting WordNet`s Dictionary Examples in the Context of Definition Modelling: An Empirical Analysis (2022)

Definition modeling is the task to generate a valid definition for a given input term. This relatively novel task has been approached either with no context (i.e., given a word embedding alone) and, more recently, as word-in-context modeling. Despite their success, most works make little to no distinction between resources and their specific features (e.g., type and style of definitions, or quality of examples) when used for training. Given the high diversity lexicographic resources exhibit in terms of topic coverage, style and formal structure, it is desirable for downstream definition modeling to better understand which of them are better suited for the task. In this paper, we propose an empirical evaluation of the well-known lexical database WordNet, and specifically, its dictionary examples. We evaluate them both directly, by matching them against criteria for good dictionary writing, and indirectly, in the task of definition modeling. Our results suggest that WordNet`s dictionary examples could be improved by extending them in length, and incorporating prototypicality.
Exploring Nominal Coercion in Semantic Spaces with Static and Contextualized Word Embeddings (2022)

The distinction between mass nouns and count nouns has a long history in formal semantics, and linguists have been trying to identify the semantic properties defining the two classes. However, they also recognized that both can undergo meaning shifts and be used in contexts of a different type, via nominal coercion. In this paper, we present an approach to measure the meaning shift in count-mass coercion in English that makes use of static and contextualized word embedding distance. Our results show that the coercion shifts are detected only by a small subset of the traditional word embedding models, and that the shifts detected by the contextualized embedding of BERT are more pronounced for mass nouns.
A Frame-Based Model of Inherent Polysemy, Copredication and Argument Coercion (2022)

The paper presents a frame-based model of inherently polysemous nouns (such as {\textquoteleft}book', which denotes both a physical object and an informational content) in which the meaning facets are directly accessible via attributes and which also takes into account the semantic relations between the facets. Predication over meaning facets (as in {\textquoteleft}memorize the book') is then modeled as targeting the value of the corresponding facet attribute while coercion (as in {\textquoteleft}finish the book') is modeled via specific patterns that enrich the predication. We use a compositional framework whose basic components are lexicalized syntactic trees paired with semantic frames and in which frame unification is triggered by tree composition. The approach is applied to a variety of combinations of predications over meaning facets and coercions.
VISCOSE - a Kanji Dictionary Enriched with VISual, COmpositional, and SEmantic Information (2022)

In this paper, we present a novel approach for building kanji dictionaries by enriching the lexical data of 3,500 kanji with images, structural decompositions, and semantically based cross-media mappings from the textual to the visual dimension. Our kanji dictionary is part of a Web-based contextual language learning environment based on augmented browsing technology. We display our multimodal kanji information as kanji cards in the Web browser, offering a versatile representation that can be integrated into other advanced creative language learning applications, such as memorization puzzles, creative storytelling assignments, or educational games.
Compositionality as an Analogical Process: Introducing ANNE (2022)

Usage-based constructionist approaches consider language a structured inventory of constructions, form-meaning pairings of different schematicity and complexity, and claim that the more a linguistic pattern is encountered, the more it becomes accessible to speakers. However, when an expression is unavailable, what processes underlie the interpretation? While traditional answers rely on the principle of compositionality, for which the meaning is built word-by-word and incrementally, usage-based theories argue that novel utterances are created based on previously experienced ones through analogy, mapping an existing structural pattern onto a novel instance. Starting from this theoretical perspective, we propose here a computational implementation of these assumptions. As the principle of compositionality has been used to generate distributional representations of phrases, we propose a neural network simulating the construction of phrasal embedding as an analogical process. Our framework, inspired by word2vec and computer vision techniques, was evaluated on tasks of generalization from existing vectors.
KOJAK: A New Corpus for Studying German Discourse Particle ja (2022)

In German, ja can be used as a discourse particle to indicate that a proposition, according to the speaker, is believed by both the speaker and audience. We use this observation to create KoJaK, a distantly-labeled English dataset derived from Europarl for studying when a speaker believes a statement to be common ground. This corpus is then analyzed to identify lexical choices in English that correspond with German ja. Finally, we perform experiments on the dataset to predict if an English clause corresponds to a German clause containing ja and achieve an F-measure of 75.3{\%} on a balanced test corpus.
Improving Topic Segmentation by Injecting Discourse Dependencies (2022)

Recent neural supervised topic segmentation models achieve distinguished superior effectiveness over unsupervised methods, with the availability of large-scale training corpora sampled from Wikipedia. These models may, however, suffer from limited robustness and transferability caused by exploiting simple linguistic cues for prediction, but overlooking more important inter-sentential topical consistency. To address this issue, we present a discourse-aware neural topic segmentation model with the injection of above-sentence discourse dependency structures to encourage the model make topic boundary prediction based more on the topical consistency between sentences. Our empirical study on English evaluation datasets shows that injecting above-sentence discourse structures to a neural topic segmenter with our proposed strategy can substantially improve its performances on intra-domain and out-of-domain data, with little increase of model`s complexity.
Evaluating How Users Game and Display Conversation with Human-Like Agents (2022)

Recently, with the advent of high-performance generative language models, artificial agents that communicate directly with the users have become more human-like. This development allows users to perform a diverse range of trials with the agents, and the responses are sometimes displayed online by users who share or show-off their experiences. In this study, we explore dialogues with a social chatbot uploaded to an online community, with the aim of understanding how users game human-like agents and display their conversations. Having done this, we assert that user postings can be investigated from two aspects, namely conversation topic and purpose of testing, and suggest a categorization scheme for the analysis. We analyze 639 dialogues to develop an annotation protocol for the evaluation, and measure the agreement to demonstrate the validity. We find that the dialogue content does not necessarily reflect the purpose of testing, and also that users come up with creative strategies to game the agent without being penalized.
Evaluating Discourse Cohesion in Pre-trained Language Models (2022)

Large pre-trained neural models have achieved remarkable success in natural language process (NLP), inspiring a growing body of research analyzing their ability from different aspects. In this paper, we propose a test suite to evaluate the cohesive ability of pre-trained language models. The test suite contains multiple cohesion phenomena between adjacent and non-adjacent sentences. We try to compare different pre-trained language models on these phenomena and analyze the experimental results,hoping more attention can be given to discourse cohesion in the future. The built discourse cohesion test suite will be publicly available at \url{https://github.com/probe2/discourse_cohesion}.
Easy-First Bottom-Up Discourse Parsing via Sequence Labelling (2022)

We propose a novel unconstrained bottom-up approach for rhetorical discourse parsing based on sequence labelling of adjacent pairs of discourse units (DUs), based on the framework of Koto et al. (2021). We describe the unique training requirements of an unconstrained parser, and explore two different training procedures: (1) fixed left-to-right; and (2) random order in tree construction. Additionally, we introduce a novel dynamic oracle for unconstrained bottom-up parsing. Our proposed parser achieves competitive results for bottom-up rhetorical discourse parsing.
Using Translation Process Data to Explore Explicitation and Implicitation through Discourse Connectives (2022)

We look into English-German translation process data to analyse explicitation and implicitation phenomena of discourse connectives. For this, we use the database CRITT TPR-DB which contains translation process data with various features that elicit online translation behaviour. We explore the English-German part of the data for discourse connectives that are either omitted or inserted in the target, as well as cases when changing a weak signal to strong one, or the other way around. We determine several features that have an impact on cognitive effort during translation for explicitation and implicitation. Our results show that cognitive load caused by implicitation and explicitation may depend on the discourse connectives used, as well as on the strength and the type of the relations the connectives convey.