Abstract

Following approaches for understanding lexical meaning de- veloped by Y¯aska, Patanjali and Bhartrihari from Indian linguistic tra- ditions and extending approaches developed by Leibniz and Brentano in the modern times, a framework of formal ontology of language was devel- oped. This framework proposes that meaning of words are in-formed by intrinsic and extrinsic ontological structures. The paper aims to capture such intrinsic and extrinsic meanings of words for two major Indian lan- guages, namely, Hindi and Telugu. Parts-of-speech have been rendered into sense-types and sense-classes. Using them we have developed a gold- standard annotated lexical resource to support semantic understanding of a language. The resource has collection of Hindi and Telugu lexicons, which has been manually annotated by native speakers of the languages following our annotation guidelines. Further, the resource was utilised to derive adverbial sense-class distribution of verbs and k¯araka-verb sense- type distribution. Different corpora (news, novels) were compared using verb sense-types distribution. Word Embedding was used as an aid for the enrichment of the resource. This is a work in progress that aims at lexical coverage of language extensively

Abstract

Prediction of trust relations between users of social networks is critical for finding credible information. Inferring trust is challenging, since userspecified trust relations are highly sparse and power-law distributed. In this paper, we explore utilizing community memberships for trust prediction in a principled manner. We also propose a novel method to model homophily that complements existing work. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that mathematically formulates an insight based on community memberships for unsupervised trust prediction. We propose and model the hypothesis that a user is more likely to develop a trust relation within the user’s community than outside it. Unlike existing work, our approach for encoding homophily directly links user-user similarities with the pair-wise trust model. We derive mathematical factors that model our hypothesis relating community memberships to trust relations and the homophily effect. Along with low-rank matrix factorization, they are combined into chTrust, the proposed multi-faceted optimization framework. Our experiments on the standard Ciao and Epinions datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms multiple unsupervised trust prediction baselines for all test user pairs as well as the low-degree segment, across evaluation setting

Abstract

Event detection is a key aspect of story development which is composed of multiple narrative layers. Most of the narratives are template-based and follow a narration theory. In this paper, we demonstrate a narrative from events detected in the international relations domain along with classification of events using our novel mediation ontology. We also introduce a novel method of classifying events through the mediation ontology. Our methodology involves action classification based on the verb categorization of Beth Levin, its arguments determined by universal dependencies and word2vec. The selected feature space is a result of mapping language entities to ontological entities where we obtain substantially good results. The narration also presents interactions of international actors over various topics as well as other visualizations.

Abstract

The domain of cultural mapping deals with capturing and representing knowledge regarding diverse tangible and intangible aspects of cultural heritage, which involve hybrid data sets from incompatible sources with different terminologies and representational schemas. The complex schema integration problem in this domain can be addressed efficiently by use of formal ontologies which provide universal schema to represent data from heterogeneous sources. The paper describes an abstraction over the CIDOC CRM (ISO 21127:2014) ontology for the purpose of the cultural mapping of villages of India and discuss with case studies how cultural information in context of Indian villages can be captured, preserved and new relationships between cultural entities visualized using this ontology.

Abstract

The task of fact-checking has been formalised as the assessment of the truthfulness of a claim. Be it a political proclamation or a technological development, verification of a new tidbit of information before its propagation to the general public is of utmost importance. Failing to do so leads to the spread of misinformation, which is a devious tool. Fact-checking is commonly performed by journalists, manually looking up information pertaining to the statement in question. This is a drawn out and tedious process with a chance of the concerned person not covering the domain exhaustively. Some of this effort is reduced by the use of knowledge bases created over a period of time. In this work under Task 2 (Factuality) of the CLEF 2018 CheckThat! Lab, we detail a neural network based methodology which models the textual data of a claim based on various representations of its words and characters. An affixed attention mechanism allows us to encapsulate linguistic features common in false claims. We achieve an accuracy of 39.57% on the task dataset.

Abstract

Fricatives are produced by creating a turbulence in the air– flow by passing it through a stricture in the vocal tract cavity. Fricatives are characterized by their noise–like behavior, which makes it difficult to analyze. Difference in the place of articulation leads to different classes of fricatives. Identification of fricative segment boundaries in speech helps in improving the performance of several applications. The present study attempts towards the identification and classification of fricative segments in continuous speech, based on the statistical behavior of instantaneous spectral characteristics. The proposed method uses parameters such as the dominant resonance frequencies, the center of gravity along with the statistical moments of the spectrum obtained using the zero time windowing (ZTW) method. The ZTW spectra exhibits a high temporal resolution and therefore gives accurate segment boundaries in speech. The proposed algorithm is tested on the TIMIT dataset for English language. A high identification rate of 97.5% is achieved for segment boundaries of the sibilant fricative class. Voiced nonsibilants show a lower identification rate than their voiceless counterparts due to their vowel–like spectral characteristics. A high classification rate of 93.2% is achieved be

Abstract

This paper describes the BUT ‘Jilebi’ team’s speech recognition systems created for the 2018 low resource speech recognition challenge for Indian languages. We investigate modifications of multilingual time-delay neural network (TDNN) architectures with transfer learning and compare them to bi-directional residual memory networks (BRMN) and bi-directional LSTM. Our best submission based on system combination achieved word error rates of 13.92% (Tamil), 14.71% (Telugu) and 14.06% (Gujarati). We present the details of submitted systems and also the post-evaluation analysis done for lexicon discovery using unsupervised word segmentation.

Abstract

We show an effective way of adding context information to shallow neural language models. We propose to use Subspace Multinomial Model (SMM) for context modeling and we add the extracted i-vectors in a computationally efficient way. By adding this information, we shrink the gap between shallow feed-forward network and an LSTM from 65 to 31 points of perplexity on the Wikitext-2 corpus (in the case of neural 5-gram model). Furthermore, we show that SMM i-vectors are suitable for domain adaptation and a very small amount of adaptation data (e.g. endmost 5 % of a Wikipedia article) brings a substantial improvement. Our proposed changes are compatible with most optimization techniques used for shallow feedforward LMs.

Abstract

Graph grammars, being a natural extension of string grammars as well as tree grammars, are highly expressive as well as powerful enough to capture the generative structure of a wide variety of scenarios - both simple and complex. But, unfortunately, we do not find many instances which leverage this power graph grammars provide us. Most of the graph grammars available so far are either toy grammars or limited to addressing highly specialized problems. In this paper, we present Vaiśeṣika Graph Grammar (VGG) system, which is as wide as any graph grammar can get i.e., a grammar for reality as theorized in Vaiśeṣika - the foundational ontology found in Indian analytic tradition. This paper extends the work presented in [1]. In [1], the generative as well as the interpretation rules of this system were presented. Here, apart from briefly discussing some of these rules, we also present a parser for such a system which makes it extremely powerful in terms of its ability to classify an input graph as a valid Vaiśeṣika graph or an invalid one which, in itself, is an immensely significant breakthrough for any ontological application. Apart from that, we also present a verification mechanism to verify the interpretations of graphs generated by the generative rules. This is done, at least statistically, if not formally, to give a statistical proof of the soundness of the system (that every generated graph has at least one Vaiśeṣika

Abstract

With neural networks rapidly becoming deeper, there emerges a need for compact models. One popular approach for this is to train small student networks to mimic larger and deeper teacher models, rather than directly learn from the training data. We propose a novel technique to train studentteacher networks without directly providing label information to the student. However, our main contribution is to learn how to learn from the teacher by a unique strategy - having the student compete with a discriminator.