Spain

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are increasingly powerful and more accurate, but also more numerous with several options existing currently as a service (e.g. Google, IBM, and Microsoft). Currently the most stringent standards for such systems are set within the context of their use in, and for, Conversational AI technology. These systems are expected to operate incrementally in real-time, be responsive, stable, and robust to the pervasive yet peculiar characteristics of conversational speech such as disfluencies and overlaps. In this paper we evaluate the most popular of such systems with metrics and experiments designed with these standards in mind. We also evaluate the speaker diarization (SD) capabilities of the same systems which will be particularly important for dialogue systems designed to handle multi-party interaction. We found that Microsoft has the leading incremental ASR system which preserves disfluent materials and IBM has the leading incremental SD system in addition to the ASR that is most robust to speech overlaps. Google strikes a balance between the two but none of these systems are yet suitable to reliably handle natural spontaneous conversations in real-time.

COLING 2020

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Incremental Speech Recognition and Diarization for Conversational AI

speaker diarization

incremental

speech recognition

AIAI 2020 (16th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations) should be held in Halkidiki, Greece. Due to current Covid-19 situation the conference will be held virtually. Underline will host a repository of video talks and preserve them for the future. Videos will be released on Underline one day after the conference.

AIAI 2020

technical paper

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

We conduct a linguistic analysis of recent metaphor recognition systems. We show that their performance, although reaching high F-scores, has considerable gaps from a linguistic perspective. First, they perform substantially worse on unconventional metaphors than on conventional ones. Second, they struggle with handling rarer word types. Thus, a large part of the systems’ success is due to optimising the disambiguation of conventionalised, metaphoric word senses for specific words instead of modelling general properties of metaphors. As a positive result, the systems show increasing capabilities to recognise metaphoric readings of unseen words if synonyms or morphological variations of these words have been seen before.

An analysis of language models for metaphor recognition

In community-edited resources such as wikiHow, sentences are subject to revisions on a daily basis. Recent work has shown that resulting improvements over time can be modelled computationally, assuming that each revision contributes to the improvement. We take a closer look at a subset of such revisions, for which we attempt to improve a computational model and validate in how far the assumption that ‘revised means better’ actually holds. The subset of revisions considered here are noun substitutions, which often involve interesting semantic relations, including synonymy, antonymy and hypernymy. Despite the high semantic relatedness, we find that a supervised classifier can distinguish the revised version of a sentence from an original version with an accuracy close to 70%, when taking context into account. In a human annotation study, we observe that annotators identify the revised sentence as the ‘better version’ with similar performance. Our analysis reveals a fair agreement among annotators when a revision improves fluency. In contrast, noun substitutions that involve common lexical-semantic relationships are often perceived as being equally good or tend to cause disagreements. While these findings are also reflected in classification scores, a comparison of results shows that our model fails in cases where humans can resort to factual knowledge or intuitions about the required level of specificity.

What can we learn from noun substitions in revision histories?

"Classifiers trained on auxiliary probing tasks are a popular tool to analyze the representations learned by neural sentence encoders such as BERT and ELMo. While many authors are aware of the difficulty to distinguish between ``extracting the linguistic structure encoded in the representations'' and ``learning the probing task,'' the validity of probing methods calls for further research. Using a neighboring word identity prediction task, we show that the token embeddings learned by neural sentence encoders contain a significant amount of information about the exact linear context of the token, and hypothesize that, with such information, learning standard probing tasks may be feasible even without additional linguistic structure.
We develop this hypothesis into a framework in which analysis efforts can be scrutinized and argue that, with current models and baselines, conclusions that representations contain linguistic structure are not well-founded. Current probing methodology, such as restricting the classifier's expressiveness or using strong baselines, can help to better estimate the complexity of learning, but not build a foundation for speculations about the nature of the linguistic structure encoded in the learned representations."

Classifier Probes May Just Learn from Linear Context Features

In this presentation, I will talk about a novel sentiment classification model for the problem of learning a sequence of sentiment classification tasks. After each sentiment classification task is learned, its knowledge is retained to help future task learning. Following this setting, we explore attention neural networks and propose a Bayes-enhance Lifelong Attention Network. Experimental results on product reviews from Amazon show its effectiveness.

Bayes-enhanced Lifelong Attention Networks for Sentiment Classification

While state-of-the-art models that rely upon massively multilingual pretrained encoders achieve sample efficiency in downstream applications, they still require abundant amounts of unlabelled text. Nevertheless, most of the world's languages lack such resources. Hence, we investigate a more radical form of unsupervised knowledge transfer in the absence of linguistic data. In particular, for the first time we pretrain neural networks via emergent communication from referential games. Our key assumption is that grounding communication on images---as a crude approximation of real-world environments---inductively biases the model towards learning natural languages. On the one hand, we show that this substantially benefits machine translation in few-shot settings. On the other hand, this also provides an extrinsic evaluation protocol to probe the properties of emergent languages \textit{ex vitro}. Intuitively, the closer they are to natural languages, the higher the gains from pretraining on them should be. For instance, in this work we measure the influence of communication success and maximum sequence length on downstream performances. Finally, we introduce a customised adapter layer and annealing strategies for the regulariser of maximum-a-posteriori inference during fine-tuning. These turn out to be crucial to facilitate knowledge transfer and prevent catastrophic forgetting. Compared to a recurrent baseline, our method yields gains of $59.0\%$$\sim$$147.6\%$ in BLEU score with only $500$ NMT training instances and $65.1\%$$\sim$$196.7\%$ with $1,000$ NMT training instances across four language pairs. These proof-of-concept results reveal the potential of emergent communication pretraining for both natural language processing tasks in resource-poor settings and extrinsic evaluation of artificial languages.

Emergent Communication Pretraining for Few-Shot Machine Translation

Popular approaches to natural language processing create word embeddings based on textual co-occurrence patterns, but often ignore embodied, sensory aspects of language. Here, we intro- duce the Python package comp-syn, which provides grounded word embeddings based on the perceptually uniform color distributions of Google Image search results. We demonstrate that comp-syn significantly enriches models of distributional semantics. In particular, we show that (1) comp-syn predicts human judgments of word concreteness with greater accuracy and in a more interpretable fashion than word2vec using low-dimensional word–color embeddings, and (2) comp-syn performs comparably to word2vec on a metaphorical vs. literal word- pair classification task. comp-syn is open-source on PyPi and is compatible with mainstream machine-learning Python packages. Our package release includes word–color embeddings for over 40,000 English words, each associated with crowd-sourced word concreteness judgments.


comp-syn: Perceptually Grounded Word Embeddings with Color

Emotion lexicons provide information about associations between words and emotions. They have proven useful in analyses of reviews, literary texts, and posts on social media, among other things. We evaluate the feasibility of deriving emotion lexicons cross-lingually for over 350 languages, many of them resource-poor, from existing emotion lexicons in resource-rich languages. For this, we start out from very small corpora to induce cross-lingually aligned vector spaces. Our study empirically analyses the effectiveness of the induced emotion lexicons by measuring translation precision and correlations with existing emotion lexicons, along with measurements on a downstream task of sentence emotion prediction.

Cross-Lingual Emotion Lexicon Induction using Representation Alignment in Low-Resource Settings

We describe an approach to statistical parsing with Tree-Wrapping Grammars (TWG). TWG is a tree-rewriting formalism which includes the tree-combination operations of substitution, sister-adjunction and tree-wrapping substitution. TWGs can be extracted from constituency treebanks and aim at representing long distance dependencies (LDDs) in a linguistically adequate way. We present a parsing algorithm for TWGs based on neural supertagging and A∗ parsing. We extract a TWG for English from the treebanks for Role and Reference Grammar and discuss first parsing results with this grammar.

Statistical Parsing of Tree Wrapping Grammars

This paper introduces DaN+, a new multi-domain corpus and annotation guidelines for Danish nested named entities (NEs) and lexical normalization to support research on cross-lingual cross-domain learning for a less-resourced language. We empirically assess three strategies to model the two-layer Named Entity Recognition (NER) task. We compare transfer capabilities from German versus in-language annotation from scratch. We examine language-specific versus multilingual BERT, and study the effect of lexical normalization on NER. 
Our results show that
1) the most robust strategy is multi-task learning which is rivaled by multi-label decoding, 
2) BERT-based NER models are sensitive to domain shifts, and 
3) in-language BERT and lexical normalization are the most beneficial on the least canonical data.
Our results also show that an out-of-domain setup remains challenging, while performance on news plateaus quickly. This highlights the importance of cross-domain evaluation of cross-lingual transfer.

DaN+: Danish Nested Named Entities and Lexical Normalization

Recently, domain-general recurrent neural networks, 
without explicit linguistic inductive biases, 
have been shown to successfully reproduce a range 
of human language behaviours, 
such as accurately predicting number agreement 
between nouns and verbs. 
We show that such networks will also learn number agreement 
within unnatural sentence structures, i.e. structures that 
are not found within any natural languages and 
which humans struggle to process. 
These results suggest that the models are learning 
from their input in a manner that is substantially 
different from human language acquisition, 
and we undertake an analysis of how the learned 
knowledge is stored in the weights of the network. 
We find that while the model has an effective understanding 
of singular versus plural for individual sentences, 
there is a lack of a unified concept of number agreement 
connecting these processes across the full range of inputs. 
Moreover, the weights handling natural and unnatural structures 
overlap substantially, in a way that underlines the 
non-human-like nature of the knowledge learned by the network.

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An analysis of language models for metaphor recognition

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Α Benchmarking of IBM, Google and Wit Automatic Speech Recognition Systems

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