Computer Speech and Language最新文献

The existence of correlation among mental disorders is a well-known phenomenon. Multi-task learning (MTL) has been reported to yield enhanced detection performance of a targeted mental disorder by leveraging its correlation with other related mental disorders, mainly in textual and visual modalities. The validation of the same on audio modality is yet to be explored. In this study, we explore homogeneous and heterogeneous MTL paradigms for detecting two correlated mental disorders, namely major depressive disorder (MDD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), on a publicly available audio dataset. The detection of both disorders is interchangeably employed as an auxiliary task when the other is the main task. In addition, a few other tasks are employed as auxiliary tasks. The results show that both MTL paradigms, implemented using two considered deep-learning models, outperformed the corresponding single-task learning (STL). The best relative improvement in the detection performance of MDD and PTSD is found to be 29.9% and 28.8%, respectively. Furthermore, we analyzed the cross-corpus generalization of MTL using two distinct datasets that involve MDD/PTSD instances. The results indicate that the generalizability of MTL is significantly superior to that of STL. The best relative increment in the cross-corpus generalization performance of MDD and PTSD detection is found to be 25.0% and 56.5%, respectively.

Effective capturing of semantic dependencies within sentences is pivotal to support relation extraction. However, challenges such as feature sparsity, and the complexity of identifying the structure of target entity pairs brought by the traditional methods of feature extraction pose significant obstacles for relation extraction. Existing methods that rely on combined features or recurrent networks also face limitations, such as over-reliance on prior knowledge or the gradient vanishing problem. To address these limitations, we propose an Adaptive Feature Extraction (AFE) method, combining neural networks with feature engineering to capture high-order abstract and long-distance semantic dependencies. Our approach extracts atomic features from sentences, maps them into distributed representations, and categorizes these representations into multiple mixed features through adaptive combination, setting it apart from other methods. The proposed AFE-based model uses four different convolutional layers to facilitate feature learning and weighting from the adaptive feature representations, thereby enhancing the discriminative power of deep networks for relation extraction. Experimental results on the English datasets ACE05 English, SciERC, and the Chinese datasets ACE05 Chinese, and CLTC(SanWen) demonstrated the superiority of our method, the F1 scores were improved by 4.16%, 3.99%, 0.82%, and 1.60%, respectively. In summary, our AFE method provides a flexible, and effective solution to some challenges in cross-domain and cross-language relation extraction.

When processing noisy utterances with varying frequency bandwidths using an enhancement model, the effective bandwidth of the resulting enhanced speech often remains unchanged. However, high-frequency components are crucial for perceived audio quality, underscoring the need for noise-robust bandwidth extension capabilities in speech enhancement networks. In this study, we addressed this challenge by proposing a novel network architecture and loss function based on the CAUNet, which is a state-of-the-art speech enhancement method. We introduced a multi-scale loss and implemented a coordinate embedded upsampling block to facilitate bandwidth extension while maintaining the ability of speech enhancement. Additionally, we proposed a gradient loss function to promote the neural network’s convergence, leading to significant performance improvements. Our experimental results validate these modifications and clearly demonstrate the superiority of our approach over competing methods.

Paraphrase generation is an important method for augmenting text data, which has a crucial role in Natural Language Generation (NLG). However, existing methods lack the ability to capture the semantic representation of input sentences and the syntactic structure of exemplars, which can easily lead to problems such as redundant content, semantic inaccuracies, and poor diversity. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Syntax-Controlled Paraphrase Generator (SCPG), which utilizes attention networks and VAE-based hidden variables to model the semantics of input sentences and the syntax of exemplars. In addition, in order to achieve controllability of the target paraphrase structure, we propose a method for learning semantic and syntactic representations based on multi-task learning, and successfully integrate the two through a gating mechanism. Extensive experimental results show that SCPG achieves SOTA results in terms of both semantic consistency and syntactic controllability, and is able to make a better trade-off between preserving semantics and novelty of sentence structure.

Spelling error correction is the task of identifying and rectifying misspelled words in texts. It is a potential and active research topic in Natural Language Processing because of numerous applications in human language understanding. The phonetically or visually similar yet semantically distinct characters make it an arduous task in any language. Earlier efforts on spelling error correction in Bangla and resource-scarce Indic languages focused on rule-based, statistical, and machine learning-based methods which we found rather inefficient. In particular, machine learning-based approaches, which exhibit superior performance to rule-based and statistical methods, are ineffective as they correct each character regardless of its appropriateness. In this paper, we propose a novel detector-purificator-corrector framework, DPCSpell based on denoising transformers by addressing previous issues. In addition to that, we present a method for large-scale corpus creation from scratch which in turn resolves the resource limitation problem of any left-to-right scripted language. The empirical outcomes demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by attaining an exact match (EM) score of 94.78%, a precision score of 0.9487, a recall score of 0.9478, an f1 score of 0.948, an f0.5 score of 0.9483, and a modified accuracy (MA) score of 95.16% for Bangla spelling error correction. The models and corpus are publicly available at https://tinyurl.com/DPCSpell.

Manually annotating fine-grained slot-value labels for task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems is an expensive and time-consuming endeavour. This motivates research into slot-filling methods that operate with limited amounts of labelled data. Moreover, the majority of current work on ToD is based solely on text as the input modality, neglecting the additional challenges of imperfect automatic speech recognition (ASR) when working with spoken language. In this work, we propose a Knowledge-Aware Audio-Grounded generative slot filling framework, termed KA2G, that focuses on few-shot and zero-shot slot filling for ToD with speech input. KA2G achieves robust and data-efficient slot filling for speech-based ToD by (1) framing it as a text generation task, (2) grounding text generation additionally in the audio modality, and (3) conditioning on available external knowledge (e.g. a predefined list of possible slot values). We show that combining both modalities within the KA2G framework improves the robustness against ASR errors. Further, the knowledge-aware slot-value generator in KA2G, implemented via a pointer generator mechanism, particularly benefits few-shot and zero-shot learning. Experiments, conducted on the standard speech-based single-turn SLURP dataset and a multi-turn dataset extracted from a commercial ToD system, display strong and consistent gains over prior work, especially in few-shot and zero-shot setups.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) leverages large datasets of unlabeled speech to reach impressive performance with reduced amounts of annotated data. The high number of proposed approaches fostered the emergence of comprehensive benchmarks that evaluate their performance on a set of downstream tasks exploring various aspects of the speech signal. However, while the number of considered tasks has been growing, most proposals rely upon a single downstream architecture that maps the frozen SSL representations to the task labels. This study examines how benchmarking results are affected by changes in the probing head architecture. Interestingly, we found that altering the downstream architecture structure leads to significant fluctuations in the performance ranking of the evaluated models. Against common practices in speech SSL benchmarking, we evaluate larger-capacity probing heads, showing their impact on performance, inference costs, generalization, and multi-level feature exploitation.

A method for extracting relations from sentences by utilizing their dependency trees to identify key phrases is presented in this paper. Dependency trees are commonly used in natural language processing to represent the grammatical structure of a sentence, and this approach builds upon this representation to extract meaningful relations between phrases. Identifying key phrases is crucial in relation extraction as they often indicate the entities and actions involved in a relation. The method uses community detection algorithms on the dependency tree to identify groups of related words that form key phrases, such as subject-verb-object structures. The experiments on the Semeval-2010 task8 dataset and the TACRED dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing baseline methods.

Our work explores the differences between GRU-based and transformer-based approaches in the context of sentiment analysis on text dialog. In addition to the overall performance on the downstream task, we assess the knowledge transfer capabilities of the models by applying a thorough zero-shot analysis at task level, and on the cross-lingual performance between five European languages. The ability to generalize over different tasks and languages is of high importance, as the data needed for a particular application may be scarce or non existent. We perform evaluations on both known benchmark datasets and a novel synthetic dataset for dialog data, containing Romanian call-center conversations. We study the most appropriate combination of synthetic and real data for fine-tuning on the downstream task, enabling our models to perform in low-resource environments. We leverage the informative power of the conversational context, showing that appending the previous four utterances of the same speaker to the input sequence has the greatest benefit on the inference performance. The cross-lingual and cross-task evaluations have shown that the transformer-based models possess superior transfer abilities to the GRU model, especially in the zero-shot setting. Considering its prior intensive fine-tuning on multiple labeled datasets for various tasks, FLAN-T5 excels in the zero-shot task experiments, obtaining a zero-shot accuracy of 51.27% on the IEMOCAP dataset, alongside the classical BERT that obtained the highest zero-shot accuracy on the MELD dataset with 55.08%.