Dominican Republic

Error correction is widely used in automatic speech recognition (ASR) to post-process the generated sentence, and can further reduce the word error rate (WER). Although multiple candidates are generated by an ASR system through beam search, current error correction approaches can only correct one sentence at a time, failing to leverage the voting effect from multiple candidates to better detect and correct error tokens. In this work, we propose FastCorrect 2, an error correction model that takes multiple ASR candidates as input for better correction accuracy. FastCorrect 2 adopts non-autoregressive generation for fast inference, which consists of an encoder that processes multiple source sentences and a decoder that generates the target sentence in parallel from the adjusted source sentence, where the adjustment is based on the predicted duration of each source token. However, there are some issues when handling multiple source sentences. First, it is non-trivial to leverage the voting effect from multiple source sentences since they usually vary in length. Thus, we propose a novel alignment algorithm to maximize the degree of token alignment among multiple sentences in terms of token and pronunciation similarity. Second, the decoder can only take one adjusted source sentence as input, while there are multiple source sentences. Thus, we develop a candidate predictor to detect the most suitable candidate for the decoder. Experiments on our inhouse dataset and AISHELL-1 show that FastCorrect 2 can further reduce the WER over the previous correction model with single candidate by 3.2% and 2.6%, demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging multiple candidates in ASR error correction. FastCorrect 2 achieves better performance than the cascaded re-scoring and correction pipeline and can serve as a unified post-processing module for ASR.

EMNLP 2021

FastCorrect 2: Fast Error Correction on Multiple Candidates for Automatic Speech Recognition

technical paper

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

In this paper we propose QACE, a new metric based on Question Answering for Caption Evaluation to evaluate image captioning based on Question Generation(QG) and Question Answering(QA) systems.
QACE generates questions on the evaluated caption and check its content by asking the questions on either the reference caption or the source image. We first develop QACE_Ref that compares the answers of the evaluated caption to its reference, and report competitive results with the state-of-the-art metrics. To go further, we propose QACE_Img, that asks the questions directly on the image, instead of reference. A Visual-QA system is necessary for QACE_Img. Unfortunately, the standard VQA models are actually framed a classification among only few thousands categories. Instead, we propose Visual-T5, an abstractive VQA system. The resulting metric, QACE_Img is multi-modal, reference-less and explainable. Our experiments show that QACE_Img compares favorably w.r.t. other reference-less metrics.

QACE: Asking Questions to Evaluate an Image Caption

Despite significant progress has been achieved in text summarization, factual inconsistency in generated summaries still severely limits its practical applications. Among the key factors to ensure factual consistency, a reliable automatic evaluation metric is the first and the most crucial one. However, existing metrics either neglect the intrinsic cause of the factual inconsistency or rely on auxiliary tasks, leading to an unsatisfied correlation with human judgments or increasing the inconvenience of usage in practice. In light of these challenges, we propose a novel metric to evaluate the factual consistency in text summarization via counterfactual estimation, which formulates the causal relationship among the source document, the generated summary, and the language prior. We remove the effect of language prior, which can cause factual inconsistency, from the total causal effect on the generated summary, and provides a simple yet effective way to evaluate consistency without relying on other auxiliary tasks. We conduct a series of experiments on three public abstractive text summarization datasets, and demonstrate the advantages of the proposed metric in both improving the correlation with human judgments and the convenience of usage. The source code is available at https://github.com/xieyxclack/factual_coco.

Factual Consistency Evaluation for Text Summarization via Counterfactual Estimation

In a typical customer service chat scenario, customers contact a support center to ask for help or raise complaints, and human agents try to solve the issues. In most cases, at the end of the conversation, agents are asked to write a short summary emphasizing the problem and the proposed solution, usually for the benefit of other agents that may have to deal with the same customer or issue. The goal of the present article is advancing the automation of this task. We introduce the first large scale, high quality, customer care dialog summarization dataset with close to 6500 human annotated summaries. The data is based on real-world customer support dialogs and includes both extractive and abstractive summaries. We also introduce a new unsupervised, extractive summarization method specific to dialogs.

TWEETSUMM - A Dialog Summarization Dataset for Customer Service

Neural abstractive summarization models have drastically improved in the recent years. However, the summaries generated by these models generally suffer from issues such as: not capturing the critical facts in source documents, and containing facts that are inconsistent with the source documents. In this work, we present a general framework to train abstractive summarization models to alleviate such issues. We first train a sequence-to-sequence model to summarize documents, and then further train this model in a Reinforcement Learning setting with question-answering based rewards. We evaluate the summaries generated by the this framework using multiple automatic measures and human judgements. The experimental results show that the question-answering rewards can be used as a general framework to improve neural abstractive summarization. Particularly, the results from human evaluations show that the summaries generated by our approach is preferred over 30% of the time over the summaries generated by general abstractive summarization models.

Using Question Answering Rewards to Improve Abstractive Summarization

Unlike well-structured text, such as news reports and encyclopedia articles, dialogue content often comes from two or more interlocutors, exchanging information with each other.
In such a scenario, the topic of a conversation can vary upon progression and the key information for a certain topic is often scattered across multiple utterances of different speakers, which poses challenges to abstractly summarize dialogues.
To capture the various topic information of a conversation and outline salient facts for the captured topics, this work proposes two topic-aware contrastive learning objectives, namely coherence detection and sub-summary generation objectives, which are expected to implicitly model the topic change and handle information scattering challenges for the dialogue summarization task.
The proposed contrastive objectives are framed as auxiliary tasks for the primary dialogue summarization task, united via an alternative parameter updating strategy.
Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed simple method significantly outperforms strong baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art performance.
The code and trained models are publicly available via \href{https://github.com/Junpliu/ConDigSum}.

Topic-Aware Contrastive Learning for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization

Although abstractive summarization models have achieved impressive results on document summarization tasks, their performance on dialogue modeling is much less satisfactory due to the crude and straight methods for dialogue encoding. To address this question, we propose a novel end-to-end Transformer-based model FinDS for abstractive dialogue summarization that leverages Finer-grain universal Dialogue semantic Structures to model dialogue and generates better summaries. Experiments on the SAMsum dataset show that FinDS outperforms various dialogue summarization approaches and achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) ROUGE results. Finally, we apply FinDS to a more complex scenario, showing the robustness of our model. We also release our source code.

A Finer-grain Universal Dialogue Semantic Structures based Model For Abstractive Dialogue Summarization

One of the most challenging aspects of current single-document news summarization
is that the summary often contains `extrinsic hallucinations', i.e., facts that are not present in the source document, which are often derived via world knowledge.
This causes summarisation systems to act more like open-ended language models tending to hallucinate facts that are erroneous.
In this paper, we mitigate this problem with the help of multiple supplementary resource documents assisting the task.
We present a new dataset MiraNews and benchmark existing summarisation models. 
In contrast to multi-document summarization, which addresses multiple events from several source documents, we still aim at generating a summary for a single document.
We show via data analysis that it's not only the models which are to blame: more than 27% of facts mentioned in the gold summaries of MiraNews are better grounded on assisting documents than in the main source articles. 
An error analysis of generated summaries from pretrained models fine-tuned on MIRANEWS reveals that this has an even bigger effects on models:
assisted summarisation reduces 55% of hallucinations when compared to single-document summarisation models trained on the main article only.

MiRANews: Dataset and Benchmarks for Multi-Resource-Assisted News Summarization

This paper explores the effect of using multitask learning for abstractive summarization in the context of small training corpora. In particular, we incorporate four different tasks (extractive summarization, language modeling, concept detection, and paraphrase detection) both individually and in combination, with the goal of enhancing the target task of abstractive summarization via multitask learning. We show that for many task combinations, a model trained in a multitask setting outperforms a model trained only for abstractive summarization, with no additional summarization data introduced. Additionally, we do a comprehensive search and find that certain tasks (e.g. paraphrase detection) consistently benefit abstractive summarization, not only when combined with other tasks but also when using different architectures and training corpora.

Exploring Multitask Learning for Low-Resource Abstractive Summarization

This paper explores three simple data manipulation techniques (synthesis, augmentation, curriculum) for improving abstractive summarization models without the need for any additional data. We introduce a method of data synthesis with paraphrasing, a data augmentation technique with sample mixing, and curriculum learning with two new difficulty metrics based on specificity and abstractiveness. We conduct experiments to show that these three techniques can help improve abstractive summarization across two summarization models and two different small datasets. Furthermore, we show that these techniques can improve performance when applied in isolation and when combined.

Mitigating Data Scarceness through Data Synthesis, Augmentation and Curriculum for Abstractive Summarization

With the continuous upgrading of the summarization systems driven by deep neural networks, researchers have higher requirements on the quality of the generated summaries, which should be not only fluent and informative but also factually correct. As a result, the field of factual evaluation has developed rapidly recently. Despite its initial progress in evaluating generated summaries, the meta-evaluation methodologies of factuality metrics are limited in their opacity, leading to the insufficient understanding of factuality metrics’ relative advantages and their applicability. In this paper, we present an adversarial meta-evaluation methodology that allows us to (i) diagnose the fine-grained strengths and weaknesses of 6 existing top-performing metrics over 24 diagnostic test datasets, (ii) search for directions for further improvement by data augmentation. Our observations from this work motivate us to propose several calls for future research. We make all codes, diagnostic test datasets, trained factuality models available: https://github.com/zide05/AdvFact.

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