Spain

After generations of exploitation, Indigenous people often respond negatively to the idea that their languages are data ready for the taking. By treating Indigenous knowledge as a commodity, speech and language technologists risk disenfranchising local knowledge authorities, reenacting the causes of language endangerment. Scholars in related fields have responded to calls for decolonisation, and we in the speech and language technology community need to follow suit, and explore what this means for our practices that involve Indigenous languages and the communities who own them. This paper reviews colonising discourses in speech and language technology, and suggests new ways of working with Indigenous communities, and seeks to open a discussion of a postcolonial approach to computational methods for supporting language vitality.

COLING 2020

Decolonising Speech and Language Technology

indigenous language

spoken language

endangered language

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.

technical paper

Recent high scores on pronoun translation using context-aware neural machine translation have suggested that current approaches work well. ContraPro is a notable example of a contrastive challenge set for English->German pronoun translation.

The high scores achieved by transformer models may suggest that they are able to effectively model the complicated set of inferences required to carry out pronoun translation. This entails the ability to determine which entities could be referred to, identify which entity a source-language pronoun refers to (if any), and access the target-language grammatical gender for that entity.

We first show through a series of targeted adversarial attacks that in fact current approaches are not able to model all of this information well. Inserting small amounts of distracting information is enough to strongly reduce scores, which should not be the case. We then create a new template test set ContraCAT, designed to individually assess the ability to handle the specific steps necessary for successful pronoun translation. Our analyses show that current approaches to 
context-aware NMT rely on a set of surface heuristics, which break down when translations require real reasoning. We also propose an approach for augmenting the training data, with some improvements.

ContraCAT: Contrastive Coreference Analytical Templates for Machine Translation

In this paper, we introduce a new annotated dataset which is aimed at supporting the development of NLP models to identify and categorize language that is patronizing or condescending towards vulnerable communities (e.g. refugees, homeless people, poor families). While the prevalence of such language in the general media has long been shown to have harmful effects, it differs from other types of harmful language, in that it is generally used unconsciously and with good intentions. We furthermore believe that the often subtle nature of patronizing and condescending language (PCL) presents an interesting technical challenge for the NLP community. Our analysis of the proposed dataset shows that identifying PCL is hard for standard NLP models, with language models such as BERT achieving the best results.

Don’t Patronize Me! An Annotated Dataset with Patronizing and Condescending Language towards Vulnerable Communities

Predicting users' opinions in their response to social events has important real-world applications, many of which with political and social impacts. Existing approaches derive a population's opinion on a going event from large scores of user-generated content. 
In certain scenarios, we may not be able to acquire such content and thus cannot infer opinions on those emerging events. To address this problem, we propose to explore opinion on unseen articles based on a user's fingerprinting: the prior reading and commenting history. This work presents a focused study on modeling and leveraging fingerprinting techniques to predict a user's future opinion to an unseen event or topic. We introduce a recurrent neural network-based model that integrates fingerprinting. 
We collect a large dataset that consists of event-comment pairs from six news websites. We evaluate the proposed model on this dataset. The results show substantial performance gains demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

Predicting Personal Opinion on Future Events with Fingerprints

Code-switching has long interested linguists, with computational work in particular focusing on speech and social media data (Sitaram et al., 2019). This paper contrasts these informal instances of code-switching to its appearance in more formal registers, by examining the mixture of languages in the Deutsches Textarchiv (DTA), a corpus of 1406 primarily German books from the 17th to 19th centuries. We automatically annotate and manually inspect spans of six embedded languages (Latin, French, English, Italian, Spanish, and Greek) in the corpus. We quantitatively analyze the differences between code-switching patterns in these books and those in more typically studied speech and social media corpora. Furthermore, we address the practical task of predicting code-switching from features of the matrix language alone in the DTA corpus. Such classifiers can help reduce errors when optical character recognition or speech transcription is applied to a large corpus with rare embedded languages.

Detecting de minimis Code-Switching in Historical German Books

Emotion detection in conversations (EDC) is to detect the emotion for each utterance in conversations that have multiple speakers.
Different from the traditional non-conversational emotion detection, the model for EDC should be context-sensitive (e.g., understanding the whole conversation rather than one utterance) and speaker-sensitive (e.g., understanding which utterance belongs to which speaker).
In this paper, we propose a transformer-based context- and speaker-sensitive model for EDC, namely HiTrans, which consists of two hierarchical transformers.
We utilize BERT as the low-level transformer to generate local utterance representations, and feed them into another high-level transformer so that utterance representations could be sensitive to the global context of the conversation.
Moreover, we exploit an auxiliary task to make our model speaker-sensitive, called pairwise utterance speaker verification (PUSV), which aims to classify whether two utterances belong to the same speaker.
We evaluate our model on three benchmark datasets, namely EmoryNLP, MELD and IEMOCAP. Results show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.

HiTrans: A Transformer-Based Context- and Speaker-Sensitive Model for Emotion Detection in Conversations

One of the remaining challenges for aspect term extraction in sentiment analysis resides in the extraction of phrase-level aspect terms, which is non-trivial to determine the boundaries of such terms. In this paper, we aim to address this issue by incorporating the span annotations of constituents of a sentence to leverage the syntactic information in neural network models. To this end, we first construct a constituency lattice structure based on the constituents of a constituency
tree. Then, we present two approaches to encoding the constituency lattice using BiLSTM-CRF and BERT as the base models, respectively. We experimented on two benchmark datasets to evaluate the two models, and the results confirm their superiority with respective 3.17 and 1.35 points gained in F1-Measure over the current state of the art. The improvements justify the effectiveness of the constituency lattice for aspect term extraction.

Constituency Lattice Encoding for Aspect Term Extraction

This paper brings together approaches from the fields of NLP and psychometric measurement to address the problem of predicting examinee proficiency from responses to short-answer questions (SAQs). While previous approaches train on manually labeled data to predict the human ratings assigned to SAQ responses, the approach presented here models examinee proficiency directly and does not require manually labeled data to train on. We use data from a large medical exam where experimental SAQ items are embedded alongside 106 scored multiple-choice questions (MCQs). First, the latent trait of examinee proficiency is measured using the scored MCQs and then a model is trained on the experimental SAQ responses as input, aiming to predict proficiency as its target variable. The predicted value is then used as a “score” for the SAQ response and evaluated in terms of its contribution to the precision of proficiency estimation.

Automated Prediction of Examinee Proficiency from Short-Answer Questions

In automatic speech translation (ST), traditional cascade approaches involving separate transcription and translation steps are giving ground to increasingly competitive and more robust direct solutions. In particular, by translating speech audio data without intermediate transcription, direct ST models are able to leverage and preserve essential information present in the input (e.g.speaker’s vocal characteristics) that is otherwise lost in the cascade framework. Although such ability proved to be useful for gender translation, direct ST is nonetheless affected by gender bias just like its cascade counterpart, as well as machine translation and numerous other natural language processing applications. Moreover, direct ST systems that exclusively rely on vocal biometric features as a gender cue can be unsuitable or even potentially problematic for certain users. Going beyond speech signals, in this paper we compare different approaches to inform direct ST models about the speaker’s gender and test their ability to handle gender translation from English into Italian and French. To this aim, we manually annotated large datasets with speak-ers’ gender information and used them for experiments reflecting different possible real-world scenarios. Our results show that gender-aware direct ST solutions can significantly outperform strong – but gender-unaware – direct ST models. In particular, the translation of gender-marked words can increase up to 30 points in accuracy while preserving overall translation quality.

Breeding Gender-aware Direct Speech Translation Systems

Advances in Question Answering (QA) research require additional datasets for new domains, languages, and types of questions, as well as for performance increases. Human creation of a QA dataset like SQuAD, however, is expensive. As an alternative, an unsupervised QA approach has been proposed so that QA training data can be generated automatically. However, the performance of unsupervised QA is much lower than that of supervised QA models. We identify two anomalies in the automatically generated questions and propose how they can be mitigated. We show our approach helps improve unsupervised QA significantly across a number of QA tasks.

Handling Anomalies of Synthetic Questions in Unsupervised Question Answering

Rumors are manufactured with no respect for accuracy, but can circulate quickly and widely by "word-of-post'' through social media conversations. Conversation tree encodes important information indicative of the credibility of rumor. Existing conversation-based techniques for rumor detection either just strictly follow tree edges or treat all the posts fully-connected during feature learning. In this paper, we propose a novel detection model based on tree transformer to better utilize user interactions in the dialogue where post-level self-attention plays the key role for aggregating the intra-/inter-subtree stances. Experimental results on the TWITTER and PHEME datasets show that the proposed approach consistently improves rumor detection performance.

Decolonising Speech and Language Technology

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