18,174 research outputs found
Break it Down for Me: A Study in Automated Lyric Annotation
Comprehending lyrics, as found in songs and poems, can pose a challenge to
human and machine readers alike. This motivates the need for systems that can
understand the ambiguity and jargon found in such creative texts, and provide
commentary to aid readers in reaching the correct interpretation. We introduce
the task of automated lyric annotation (ALA). Like text simplification, a goal
of ALA is to rephrase the original text in a more easily understandable manner.
However, in ALA the system must often include additional information to clarify
niche terminology and abstract concepts. To stimulate research on this task, we
release a large collection of crowdsourced annotations for song lyrics. We
analyze the performance of translation and retrieval models on this task,
measuring performance with both automated and human evaluation. We find that
each model captures a unique type of information important to the task.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of EMNLP 201
Do (and say) as I say: Linguistic adaptation in human-computer dialogs
© Theodora Koulouri, Stanislao Lauria, and Robert D. Macredie. This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.There is strong research evidence showing that people naturally align to each otherâs vocabulary, sentence structure, and acoustic features in dialog, yet little is known about how the alignment mechanism operates in the interaction between users and computer systems let alone how it may be exploited to improve the efficiency of the interaction. This article provides an account of lexical alignment in humanâcomputer dialogs, based on empirical data collected in a simulated humanâcomputer interaction scenario. The results indicate that alignment is present, resulting in the gradual reduction and stabilization of the vocabulary-in-use, and that it is also reciprocal. Further, the results suggest that when system and user errors occur, the development of alignment is temporarily disrupted and users tend to introduce novel words to the dialog. The results also indicate that alignment in humanâcomputer interaction may have a strong strategic component and is used as a resource to compensate for less optimal (visually impoverished) interaction conditions. Moreover, lower alignment is associated with less successful interaction, as measured by user perceptions. The article distills the results of the study into design recommendations for humanâcomputer dialog systems and uses them to outline a model of dialog management that supports and exploits alignment through mechanisms for in-use adaptation of the systemâs grammar and lexicon
Augmenting Librispeech with French Translations: A Multimodal Corpus for Direct Speech Translation Evaluation
Recent works in spoken language translation (SLT) have attempted to build
end-to-end speech-to-text translation without using source language
transcription during learning or decoding. However, while large quantities of
parallel texts (such as Europarl, OpenSubtitles) are available for training
machine translation systems, there are no large (100h) and open source parallel
corpora that include speech in a source language aligned to text in a target
language. This paper tries to fill this gap by augmenting an existing
(monolingual) corpus: LibriSpeech. This corpus, used for automatic speech
recognition, is derived from read audiobooks from the LibriVox project, and has
been carefully segmented and aligned. After gathering French e-books
corresponding to the English audio-books from LibriSpeech, we align speech
segments at the sentence level with their respective translations and obtain
236h of usable parallel data. This paper presents the details of the processing
as well as a manual evaluation conducted on a small subset of the corpus. This
evaluation shows that the automatic alignments scores are reasonably correlated
with the human judgments of the bilingual alignment quality. We believe that
this corpus (which is made available online) is useful for replicable
experiments in direct speech translation or more general spoken language
translation experiments.Comment: LREC 2018, Japa
A Corpus of Sentence-level Revisions in Academic Writing: A Step towards Understanding Statement Strength in Communication
The strength with which a statement is made can have a significant impact on
the audience. For example, international relations can be strained by how the
media in one country describes an event in another; and papers can be rejected
because they overstate or understate their findings. It is thus important to
understand the effects of statement strength. A first step is to be able to
distinguish between strong and weak statements. However, even this problem is
understudied, partly due to a lack of data. Since strength is inherently
relative, revisions of texts that make claims are a natural source of data on
strength differences. In this paper, we introduce a corpus of sentence-level
revisions from academic writing. We also describe insights gained from our
annotation efforts for this task.Comment: 6 pages, to appear in Proceedings of ACL 2014 (short paper
Answering Complex Questions by Joining Multi-Document Evidence with Quasi Knowledge Graphs
Direct answering of questions that involve multiple entities and relations is a challenge for text-based QA. This problem is most pronounced when answers can be found only by joining evidence from multiple documents. Curated knowledge graphs (KGs) may yield good answers, but are limited by their inherent incompleteness and potential staleness. This paper presents QUEST, a method that can answer complex questions directly from textual sources on-the-fly, by computing similarity joins over partial results from different documents. Our method is completely unsupervised, avoiding training-data bottlenecks and being able to cope with rapidly evolving ad hoc topics and formulation style in user questions. QUEST builds a noisy quasi KG with node and edge weights, consisting of dynamically retrieved entity names and relational phrases. It augments this graph with types and semantic alignments, and computes the best answers by an algorithm for Group Steiner Trees. We evaluate QUEST on benchmarks of complex questions, and show that it substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines
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