11,798 research outputs found
Adapting Sequence to Sequence models for Text Normalization in Social Media
Social media offer an abundant source of valuable raw data, however informal
writing can quickly become a bottleneck for many natural language processing
(NLP) tasks. Off-the-shelf tools are usually trained on formal text and cannot
explicitly handle noise found in short online posts. Moreover, the variety of
frequently occurring linguistic variations presents several challenges, even
for humans who might not be able to comprehend the meaning of such posts,
especially when they contain slang and abbreviations. Text Normalization aims
to transform online user-generated text to a canonical form. Current text
normalization systems rely on string or phonetic similarity and classification
models that work on a local fashion. We argue that processing contextual
information is crucial for this task and introduce a social media text
normalization hybrid word-character attention-based encoder-decoder model that
can serve as a pre-processing step for NLP applications to adapt to noisy text
in social media. Our character-based component is trained on synthetic
adversarial examples that are designed to capture errors commonly found in
online user-generated text. Experiments show that our model surpasses neural
architectures designed for text normalization and achieves comparable
performance with state-of-the-art related work.Comment: Accepted at the 13th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social
Media (ICWSM 2019
SALSA-TEXT : self attentive latent space based adversarial text generation
Inspired by the success of self attention mechanism and Transformer
architecture in sequence transduction and image generation applications, we
propose novel self attention-based architectures to improve the performance of
adversarial latent code- based schemes in text generation. Adversarial latent
code-based text generation has recently gained a lot of attention due to their
promising results. In this paper, we take a step to fortify the architectures
used in these setups, specifically AAE and ARAE. We benchmark two latent
code-based methods (AAE and ARAE) designed based on adversarial setups. In our
experiments, the Google sentence compression dataset is utilized to compare our
method with these methods using various objective and subjective measures. The
experiments demonstrate the proposed (self) attention-based models outperform
the state-of-the-art in adversarial code-based text generation.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, under review at ICLR 201
Benefits of data augmentation for NMT-based text normalization of user-generated content
One of the most persistent characteristics of written user-generated content (UGC) is the use of non-standard words. This characteristic contributes to an increased difficulty to automatically process and analyze UGC. Text normalization is the task of transforming lexical variants to their canonical forms and is often used as a pre-processing step for conventional NLP tasks in order to overcome the performance drop that NLP systems experience when applied to UGC. In this work, we follow a Neural Machine Translation approach to text normalization. To train such an encoder-decoder model, large parallel training corpora of sentence pairs are required. However, obtaining large data sets with UGC and their normalized version is not trivial, especially for languages other than English. In this paper, we explore how to overcome this data bottleneck for Dutch, a low-resource language. We start off with a publicly available tiny parallel Dutch data set comprising three UGC genres and compare two different approaches. The first is to manually normalize and add training data, a money and time-consuming task. The second approach is a set of data augmentation techniques which increase data size by converting existing resources into synthesized non-standard forms. Our results reveal that a combination of both approaches leads to the best results
Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesis
A text-to-speech synthesis system typically consists of multiple stages, such
as a text analysis frontend, an acoustic model and an audio synthesis module.
Building these components often requires extensive domain expertise and may
contain brittle design choices. In this paper, we present Tacotron, an
end-to-end generative text-to-speech model that synthesizes speech directly
from characters. Given pairs, the model can be trained completely
from scratch with random initialization. We present several key techniques to
make the sequence-to-sequence framework perform well for this challenging task.
Tacotron achieves a 3.82 subjective 5-scale mean opinion score on US English,
outperforming a production parametric system in terms of naturalness. In
addition, since Tacotron generates speech at the frame level, it's
substantially faster than sample-level autoregressive methods.Comment: Submitted to Interspeech 2017. v2 changed paper title to be
consistent with our conference submission (no content change other than typo
fixes
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