Multimodal Embeddings from Language Models

Word embeddings such as ELMo have recently been shown to model word semantics with greater efficacy through contextualized learning on large-scale language corpora, resulting in significant improvement in state of the art across many natural language tasks. In this work we integrate acoustic information into contextualized lexical embeddings through the addition of multimodal inputs to a pretrained bidirectional language model. The language model is trained on spoken language that includes text and audio modalities. The resulting representations from this model are multimodal and contain paralinguistic information which can modify word meanings and provide affective information. We show that these multimodal embeddings can be used to improve over previous state of the art multimodal models in emotion recognition on the CMU-MOSEI dataset

A Survey on Dialogue Summarization: Recent Advances and New Frontiers

With the development of dialogue systems and natural language generation techniques, the resurgence of dialogue summarization has attracted significant research attentions, which aims to condense the original dialogue into a shorter version covering salient information. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive survey for this task. To this end, we take the first step and present a thorough review of this research field. In detail, we provide an overview of publicly available research datasets, summarize existing works according to the domain of input dialogue as well as organize leaderboards under unified metrics. Furthermore, we discuss some future directions and give our thoughts. We hope that this first survey of dialogue summarization can provide the community with a quick access and a general picture to this task and motivate future researches

Improving Online Forums Summarization via Unifying Hierarchical Attention Networks with Convolutional Neural Networks

Online discussion forums are prevalent and easily accessible, thus allowing people to share ideas and opinions by posting messages in the discussion threads. Forum threads that significantly grow in length can become difficult for participants, both newcomers and existing, to grasp main ideas. This study aims to create an automatic text summarizer for online forums to mitigate this problem. We present a framework based on hierarchical attention networks, unifying Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to build sentence and thread representations for the forum summarization. In this scheme, Bi-LSTM derives a representation that comprises information of the whole sentence and whole thread; whereas, CNN recognizes high-level patterns of dominant units with respect to the sentence and thread context. The attention mechanism is applied on top of CNN to further highlight the high-level representations that capture any important units contributing to a desirable summary. Extensive performance evaluation based on three datasets, two of which are real-life online forums and one is news dataset, reveals that the proposed model outperforms several competitive baselines.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figure