论文检索

Sreyan Ghosh, Manan Suri, Purva Chiniya, Utkarsh Tyagi, Sonal Kumar, Dinesh Manocha

The tremendous growth of social media users interacting in online conversations has led to significant growth in hate speech affecting people from various demographics. Most of the prior works focus on detecting explicit hate speech, which is overt and leverages hateful phrases, with very little work focusing on detecting hate speech that is implicit or denotes hatred through indirect or coded language. In this paper, we present CoSyn, a context synergized neural network that explicitly incorporates user- and conversational-context for detecting implicit hate speech in online conversations. CoSyn introduces novel ways to encode these external contexts and employs a novel context interaction mechanism that clearly captures the interplay between them, making independent assessments of the amounts of information to be retrieved from these noisy contexts. Additionally, it carries out all these operations in the hyperbolic space to account for the scale-free dynamics of social media. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CoSyn on 6 hate speech datasets and show that CoSyn outperforms all our baselines in detecting implicit hate speech with absolute improvements in the range of 1.24% - 57.8%. We make our code available.

Nam Nguyen, Thang Phan, Duc-Vu Nguyen, Kiet Nguyen

English and Chinese, known as resource-rich languages, have witnessed the strong development of transformer-based language models for natural language processing tasks. Although Vietnam has approximately 100M people speaking Vietnamese, several pre-trained models, e.g., PhoBERT, ViBERT, and vELECTRA, performed well on general Vietnamese NLP tasks, including POS tagging and named entity recognition. These pre-trained language models are still limited to Vietnamese social media tasks. In this paper, we present the first monolingual pre-trained language model for Vietnamese social media texts, ViSoBERT, which is pre-trained on a large-scale corpus of high-quality and diverse Vietnamese social media texts using XLM-R architecture. Moreover, we explored our pre-trained model on five important natural language downstream tasks on Vietnamese social media texts: emotion recognition, hate speech detection, sentiment analysis, spam reviews detection, and hate speech spans detection. Our experiments demonstrate that ViSoBERT, with far fewer parameters, surpasses the previous state-of-the-art models on multiple Vietnamese social media tasks. Our ViSoBERT model is available only for research purposes. Disclaimer: This paper contains actual comments on social networks that might be construed as abusive, offensive, or obscene.

Seonmin Koo, Chanjun Park, Jinsung Kim, Jaehyung Seo, Sugyeong Eo, Hyeonseok Moon, Heuiseok Lim

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are instrumental across various applications, with their performance being critically tied to user satisfaction. Conventional evaluation metrics for ASR systems produce a singular aggregate score, which is insufficient for understanding specific system vulnerabilities. Therefore, we aim to address the limitations of the previous ASR evaluation methods by introducing the Korean Error Explainable Benchmark Dataset for ASR and Post-processing (KEBAP). KEBAP enables comprehensive analysis of ASR systems at both speech- and text levels, thereby facilitating a more balanced assessment encompassing speech recognition accuracy and user readability. KEBAP provides 37 newly defined speech-level resources incorporating diverse noise environments and speaker characteristics categories, also presenting 13 distinct text-level error types. This paper demonstrates detailed statistical analyses of colloquial noise categories and textual error types. Furthermore, we conduct extensive validation and analysis on commercially deployed ASR systems, providing valuable insights into their performance. As a more fine-grained and real-world-centric evaluation method, KEBAP contributes to identifying and mitigating potential weaknesses in ASR systems.

Gopendra Singh, Soumitra Ghosh, Atul Verma, Chetna Painkra, Asif Ekbal

Due to its growing impact on public opinion, hate speech on social media has garnered increased attention. While automated methods for identifying hate speech have been presented in the past, they have mostly been limited to analyzing textual content. The interpretability of such models has received very little attention, despite the social and legal consequences of erroneous predictions. In this work, we present a novel problem of Distress Identification and Cause Extraction (DICE) from multimodal online posts. We develop a multi-task deep framework for the simultaneous detection of distress content and identify connected causal phrases from the text using emotional information. The emotional information is incorporated into the training process using a zero-shot strategy, and a novel mechanism is devised to fuse the features from the multimodal inputs. Furthermore, we introduce the first-of-its-kind Distress and Cause annotated Multimodal (DCaM) dataset of 20,764 social media posts. We thoroughly evaluate our proposed method by comparing it to several existing benchmarks. Empirical assessment and comprehensive qualitative analysis demonstrate that our proposed method works well on distress detection and cause extraction tasks, improving F1 and ROS scores by 1.95% and 3%, respectively, relative to the best-performing baseline. The code and the dataset can be accessed from the following link: https://www.iitp.ac.in/~ai-nlp-ml/resources.html\#DICE.

Seongho Joo, Hyukhun Koh, Kyomin Jung

With the rapid advancement in deep generative models, recent neural Text-To-Speech(TTS) models have succeeded in synthesizing human-like speech. There have been some efforts to generate speech with various prosody beyond monotonous prosody patterns. However, previous works have several limitations. First, typical TTS models depend on the scaled sampling temperature for boosting the diversity of prosody. Speech samples generated at high sampling temperatures often lack perceptual prosodic diversity, which can adversely affect the naturalness of the speech. Second, the diversity among samples is neglected since the sampling procedure often focuses on a single speech sample rather than multiple ones. In this paper, we propose DPP-TTS: a text-to-speech model based on Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) with a prosody diversifying module. Our TTS model is capable of generating speech samples that simultaneously consider perceptual diversity in each sample and among multiple samples. We demonstrate that DPP-TTS generates speech samples with more diversified prosody than baselines in the side-by-side comparison test considering the naturalness of speech at the same time.

Zishan Guo, Linhao Yu, Minghui Xu, Renren Jin, Deyi Xiong

Spoken texts (either manual or automatic transcriptions from automatic speech recognition (ASR)) often contain disfluencies and grammatical errors, which pose tremendous challenges to downstream tasks. Converting spoken into written language is hence desirable. Unfortunately, the availability of datasets for this is limited. To address this issue, we present CS2W, a Chinese Spoken-to-Written style conversion dataset comprising 7,237 spoken sentences extracted from transcribed conversational texts. Four types of conversion problems are covered in CS2W: disfluencies, grammatical errors, ASR transcription errors, and colloquial words. Our annotation convention, data, and code are publicly available at https://github.com/guozishan/CS2W.

James A. Michaelov, Catherine Arnett, Tyler A. Chang, Benjamin K. Bergen

Abstract grammatical knowledge—of parts of speech and grammatical patterns—is key to the capacity for linguistic generalization in humans. But how abstract is grammatical knowledge in large language models? In the human literature, compelling evidence for grammatical abstraction comes from structural priming. A sentence that shares the same grammatical structure as a preceding sentence is processed and produced more readily. Because confounds exist when using stimuli in a single language, evidence of abstraction is even more compelling from crosslingual structural priming, where use of a syntactic structure in one language primes an analogous structure in another language. We measure crosslingual structural priming in large language models, comparing model behavior to human experimental results from eight crosslingual experiments covering six languages, and four monolingual structural priming experiments in three non-English languages. We find evidence for abstract monolingual and crosslingual grammatical representations in the models that function similarly to those found in humans. These results demonstrate that grammatical representations in multilingual language models are not only similar across languages, but they can causally influence text produced in different languages.

Silvia Casola, Soda Marem Lo, Valerio Basile, Simona Frenda, Alessandra Teresa Cignarella, Viviana Patti, Cristina Bosco

Research in the field of NLP has recently focused on the variability that people show in selecting labels when performing an annotation task. Exploiting disagreements in annotations has been shown to offer advantages for accurate modelling and fair evaluation. In this paper, we propose a strongly perspectivist model for supervised classification of natural language utterances. Our approach combines the predictions of several perspective-aware models using key information of their individual confidence to capture the subjectivity encoded in the annotation of linguistic phenomena. We validate our method through experiments on two case studies, irony and hate speech detection, in in-domain and cross-domain settings. The results show that confidence-based ensembling of perspective-aware models seems beneficial for classification performance in all scenarios. In addition, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with automatically extracted perspectives from annotations when the annotators’ metadata are not available.

Robin Algayres, Yossi Adi, Tu Anh Nguyen, Jade Copet, Gabriel Synnaeve, Benoit Sagot, Emmanuel Dupoux

In NLP, text language models based on words or subwords are known to outperform their character-based counterparts. Yet, in the speech community, the standard input of spoken LMs are 20ms or 40ms-long discrete units (shorter than a phoneme). Taking inspiration from word-based LM, we introduce a Generative Spoken Language Model (GSLM) based on word-size continuous-valued audio tokens that can generate diverse and expressive language output. This is obtained by replacing lookup table for lexical types with a Lexical Embedding function, the cross entropy loss by a contrastive loss, and multinomial sampling by k-NN sampling. The resulting model is the first generative language model based on word-size continuous tokens. Its performance is on par with discrete unit GSLMs regarding generation quality as measured by automatic metrics and subjective human judgements. Moreover, it is five times more memory efficient thanks to its large 200ms units. In addition, the embeddings before and after the Lexical Embedder are phonetically and semantically interpretable.

Dayoon Ko, Sangho Lee, Gunhee Kim

As short-form funny videos on social networks are gaining popularity, it becomes demanding for AI models to understand them for better communication with humans. Unfortunately, previous video humor datasets target specific domains such as speeches or sitcoms, and mostly focus on verbal cues. We curate a user-generated dataset of 10K multimodal funny videos from YouTube, called ExFunTube. Using a video filtering pipeline with GPT-3.5, we verify both verbal and visual elements contributing to humor. After filtering, we annotate each video with timestamps and text explanations for funny moments. Our ExFunTube is unique over existing datasets in that our videos cover a wide range of domains with various types of humor that necessitate a multimodal understanding of the content. Also, we develop a zero-shot video-to-text prompting to maximize video humor understanding of large language models (LLMs). With three different evaluation methods using automatic scores, rationale quality experiments, and human evaluations, we show that our prompting significantly improves LLMs’ ability for humor explanation.

Nikhil Anand, Joshua Tan, Maria Minakova

Modern ML systems ingest data aggregated from diverse sources, such as synthetic, human-annotated, and live customer traffic. Understanding which examples are important to the performance of a learning algorithm is crucial for efficient model training. Recently, a growing body of literature has given rise to various “influence scores,” which use training artifacts such as model confidence or checkpointed gradients to identify important subsets of data. However, these methods have primarily been developed in computer vision settings, and it remains unclear how well they generalize to language-based tasks using pretrained models. In this paper, we explore the applicability of influence scores in language classification tasks. We evaluate a diverse subset of these scores on the SNLI dataset by quantifying accuracy changes in response to pruning training data through random and influence-score-based sampling. We then stress-test one of the scores – “variance of gradients” (VoG) from Agarwal and Hooker (2022) – in an NLU model stack that was exposed to dynamic user speech patterns in a voice assistant type of setting. Our experiments demonstrate that in many cases, encoder-based language models can be fine-tuned on roughly 50% of the original data without degradation in performance metrics. Along the way, we summarize lessons learned from applying out-of-the-box implementations of influence scores, quantify the effects of noisy and class-imbalanced data, and offer recommendations on score-based sampling for better accuracy and training efficiency.

Xiang Li, Jinglu Wang, Xiaohao Xu, Muqiao Yang, Fan Yang, Yizhou Zhao, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj

Linguistic communication is prevalent in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Speech (spoken language) serves as a convenient yet potentially ambiguous form due to noise and accents, exposing a gap compared to text. In this study, we investigate the prominent HCI task, Referring Video Object Segmentation (R-VOS), which aims to segment and track objects using linguistic references. While text input is well-investigated, speech input is under-explored. Our objective is to bridge the gap between speech and text, enabling the adaptation of existing text-input R-VOS models to accommodate noisy speech input effectively. Specifically, we propose a method to align the semantic spaces between speech and text by incorporating two key modules: 1) Noise-Aware Semantic Adjustment (NSA) for clear semantics extraction from noisy speech; and 2) Semantic Jitter Suppression (SJS) enabling R-VOS models to tolerate noisy queries. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the challenging AVOS benchmarks reveal that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Ramon Ruiz-Dolz, Javier Iranzo-Sánchez

In this paper, we describe VivesDebate-Speech, a corpus of spoken argumentation created to leverage audio features for argument mining tasks. The creation of this corpus represents an important contribution to the intersection of speech processing and argument mining communities, and one of the most complete publicly available resources in this topic. Moreover, we have performed a set of first-of-their-kind experiments which show an improvement when integrating audio features into the argument mining pipeline. The provided results can be used as a baseline for future research.

Victoria Lin, Louis-Philippe Morency, Eli Ben-Michael

As language technologies gain prominence in real-world settings, it is important to understand *how* changes to language affect reader perceptions. This can be formalized as the *causal effect* of varying a linguistic attribute (e.g., sentiment) on a reader’s response to the text. In this paper, we introduce Text-Transport, a method for estimation of causal effects from natural language under any text distribution. Current approaches for valid causal effect estimation require strong assumptions about the data, meaning the data from which one *can* estimate valid causal effects often is not representative of the actual target domain of interest. To address this issue, we leverage the notion of distribution shift to describe an estimator that *transports* causal effects between domains, bypassing the need for strong assumptions in the target domain. We derive statistical guarantees on the uncertainty of this estimator, and we report empirical results and analyses that support the validity of Text-Transport across data settings. Finally, we use Text-Transport to study a realistic setting—hate speech on social media—in which causal effects do shift significantly between text domains, demonstrating the necessity of transport when conducting causal inference on natural language.

Pengyu Wang, Linyang Li, Ke Ren, Botian Jiang, Dong Zhang, Xipeng Qiu

Widely applied large language models (LLMs) can generate human-like content, raising concerns about the abuse of LLMs. Therefore, it is important to build strong AI-generated text (AIGT) detectors. Current works only consider document-level AIGT detection, therefore, in this paper, we first introduce a sentence-level detection challenge by synthesizing a dataset that contains documents that are polished with LLMs, that is, the documents contain sentences written by humans and sentences modified by LLMs. Then we propose Sequence X (Check) GPT, a novel method that utilizes log probability lists from white-box LLMs as features for sentence-level AIGT detection. These features are composed like waves in speech processing and cannot be studied by LLMs. Therefore, we build SeqXGPT based on convolution and self-attention networks. We test it in both sentence and document-level detection challenges. Experimental results show that previous methods struggle in solving sentence-level AIGT detection, while our method not only significantly surpasses baseline methods in both sentence and document-level detection challenges but also exhibits strong generalization capabilities.

Jon Gauthier, Roger Levy

Listeners recognize and integrate words in rapid and noisy everyday speech by combining expectations about upcoming content with incremental sensory evidence. We present a computational model of word recognition which formalizes this perceptual process in Bayesian decision theory. We fit this model to explain scalp EEG signals recorded as subjects passively listened to a fictional story, revealing both the dynamics of the online auditory word recognition process and the neural correlates of the recognition and integration of words. The model reveals distinct neural processing of words depending on whether or not they can be quickly recognized. While all words trigger a neural response characteristic of probabilistic integration — voltage modulations predicted by a word’s surprisal in context — these modulations are amplified for words which require more than roughly 150 ms of input to be recognized. We observe no difference in the latency of these neural responses according to words’ recognition times. Our results support a two-part model of speech comprehension, combining an eager and rapid process of word recognition with a temporally independent process of word integration. However, we also developed alternative models of the scalp EEG signal not incorporating word recognition dynamics which showed similar performance improvements. We discuss potential future modeling steps which may help to separate these hypotheses.

Jihyung Moon, Dong-Ho Lee, Hyundong Cho, Woojeong Jin, Chan Park, Minwoo Kim, Jonathan May, Jay Pujara, Sungjoon Park

Toxic language, such as hate speech, can deter users from participating in online communities and enjoying popular platforms. Previous approaches to detecting toxic language and norm violations have been primarily concerned with conversations from online forums and social media, such as Reddit and Twitter. These approaches are less effective when applied to conversations on live-streaming platforms, such as Twitch and YouTube Live, as each comment is only visible for a limited time and lacks a thread structure that establishes its relationship with other comments. In this work, we share the first NLP study dedicated to detecting norm violations in conversations on live-streaming platforms. We define norm violation categories in live-stream chats and annotate 4,583 moderated comments from Twitch. We articulate several facets of live-stream data that differ from other forums, and demonstrate that existing models perform poorly in this setting. By conducting a user study, we identify the informational context humans use in live-stream moderation, and train models leveraging context to identify norm violations. Our results show that appropriate contextual information can boost moderation performance by 35%.

Yiyuan Li, Rakesh Menon, Sayan Ghosh, Shashank Srivastava

Generalized quantifiers (e.g., \textit{few}, \textit{most}) are used to indicate the proportions predicates satisfy (for example, \textit{some} apples are red). One way to interpret quantifier semantics is to explicitly bind these satisfactions with percentage scopes (e.g., 30%-40% of apples are red). This approach can be helpful for tasks like logic formalization and surface-form quantitative reasoning (Gordon and Schubert, 2010; Roy et al., 2015). However, it remains unclear if recent foundation models (Bommasani et al., 2021) possess this ability due to the absence of direct training signals. To explore this, we introduce QuRe, a crowd-sourced dataset of human-annotated generalized quantifiers in Wikipedia sentences featuring percentage-equipped predicates. We explore quantifier comprehension using PRESQUE, a framework that combines natural language inference and the Rational Speech Acts framework. Experimental results on the HVD dataset (Herbelot and Vecchi, 2015) and QuRe demonstrate PRESQUE’s superiority over a literal listener baseline, showing a 20% relative improvement in F1 in predicting percentage scopes for quantifiers, even with no additional training.

Yahan Yang, Elior Sulem, Insup Lee, Dan Roth

BabyBERTa, a language model trained on small-scale child-directed speech while none of the words are unmasked during training, has been shown to achieve a level of grammaticality comparable to that of RoBERTa-base, which is trained on 6,000 times more words and 15 times more parameters. Relying on this promising result, we explore in this paper the performance of BabyBERTa-based models in downstream tasks, focusing on Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) and two Extractive Question Answering tasks, with the aim of building more efficient systems that rely on less data and smaller models. We investigate the influence of these models both alone and as a starting point to larger pre-trained models, separately examining the contribution of the pre-training data, the vocabulary, and the masking policy on the downstream task performance. Our results show that BabyBERTa trained with unmasking-removal policy is a much stronger starting point for downstream tasks compared to the use of RoBERTa masking policy when 10M words are used for training and that this tendency persists, although to a lesser extent, when adding more training data.

Pan Li, Ping Li, Kai Zhang

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is one of the compound tasks of fine-grained aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), aiming at extracting the triplets of aspect terms, corresponding opinion terms and the associated sentiment orientation. Recent efforts in exploiting span-level semantic interaction shown superior performance on ASTE task. However, most of the existing span-based approaches suffer from enumerating all possible spans, since it can introduce too much noise in sentiment triplet extraction. To ease this burden, we propose a dual-channel span generation method to coherently constrain the search space of span candidates. Specifically, we leverage the syntactic relations among aspect/opinion terms and the associated part-of-speech characteristics in those terms to generate span candidates, which reduces span enumeration by nearly half. Besides, feature representations are learned from syntactic and part-of-speech correlation among terms, which renders span representation fruitful linguistic information. Extensive experiments on two versions of public datasets demonstrate both the effectiveness of our design and the superiority on ASTE/ATE/OTE tasks.