Abstract

In this paper, we model the similar question retrieval task as a binary classification problem. We propose a novel approach of “1D-Siamese LSTM for cQA (1D-SLcQA)” to find the semantic similarity between a new question and existing question(s). In 1D-SLcQA, we use a combination of twin LSTM networks and a contrastive loss function to effectively memorize the long term dependencies i.e., capture semantic similarity even when the length of the answers/questions is very large (200 words). The similarity of the questions is modeled using a single network with (1D) (feature) convolution between feature vectors learned from twin LSTM layers. Experiments on large scale real world Yahoo Answers dataset show that 1D-SLcQA outperform the state of the art approach of Siamese cQA approach (SCQA).

Abstract

Humor is an essential characteristic of language. It has been a topic of research in linguistics and philosophy from historical times. In computer science, computational humor, as a part of Natural Language Processing, is a growing area of research. Social Media is rapidly growing as a platform for communication but processing of social media, owing to its semantic perplexity, is still a challenge. These two facts lead us to present a novel dataset for humor classification which captures diversity in humor on web resources. The large size of this dataset is to meet the data requirements for modern machine learning algorithms. This paper also deals with creating a model for detecting and analyzing humor in social media text extracted from eclectic sources on the Internet.

Abstract

Keywords of a document are a representative of its content, and it helps to have meaningful words to facilitate search and organization of documents. Hence, finding methods that can automatically identify keywords in a document is very important as manual processes for this is very cumbersome and error-prone. If this task is accomplished for song lyrics, it has varied applications such as recommendation systems and digital music library management. This work proposes and compares methods to identify keywords from lyrics of Bollywood songs. We use a collection of lyrics of 1055 Bollywood songs, all written in the Devanagari script. Experiments include looking at the spatial distribution of the terms, their occurrence in a certain context or position, and using WordNet to generate keywords not present in the document. Validation was done by human annotators by providing a score to each method based on the results obtained on a subset of the data. We also used Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Latent Semantic Indexing to validate the results, as further explained in the paper.

Abstract

Many methods have been developed for various sentence classification tasks for English, which usually exploit linguistic resources like parsers or rely on the large amount of annotated or unannotated data, making it difficult to adapt them to other languages. In this paper, we present an evaluation of popular deep learning methods for sentence classification on the morphologically rich Indian languages, specifically, Hindi and Telugu. For this purpose, we also created a question classification dataset for Hindi, by translating the TREC-UIUC dataset. We show that character based input can enhance the performance of current classification systems for morphologically rich languages. Finally, we show that our multiInput-CNN variant is able to perform better than our baselines in two out of three tasks in Hindi and Telugu, while giving comparable results for others.

Abstract

The paper presents the development of a phonetically balanced read speech corpus of code-mixed Hindi-English. Phonetic balance in the corpus has been created by selecting sentences that contained triphones lower in frequency than a predefined threshold. The assumption with a compulsory inclusion of such rare units was that the high frequency triphones will inevitably be included. Using this metric, the Pearson’s correlation coefficient of the phonetically balanced corpus with a large code-mixed reference corpus was recorded to be 0.996. The data for corpus creation has been extracted from selected sections of Hindi newspapers. These sections contain frequent English insertions in a matrix of Hindi sentence. Statistics on the phone and triphone distribution have been presented, to graphically display the phonetic likeness between the reference corpus and the corpus sampled through our method.

Abstract

In order for our computer systems to be more human-like, with a higher emotional quotient, they need to be able to process and understand intrinsic human language phenomena like humour. In this paper, we consider a subtype of humour - puns, which are a common type of wordplay-based jokes. In particular, we consider code-mixed puns which have become increasingly mainstream on social media, in informal conversations and advertisements and aim to build a system which can automatically identify the pun location and recover the target of such puns. We first study and classify code-mixed puns into two categories namely intra-sentential and intra-word, and then propose a four-step algorithm to recover the pun targets for puns belonging to the intra-sentential category. Our algorithm uses language models, and phonetic similarity-based features to get the desired results. We test our approach on a small set of code-mixed punning advertisements, and observe that our system is successfully able to recover the targets for 67% of the puns.

Abstract

Spelling correction is a well-known task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Automatic spelling correction is important for many NLP applications like web search engines, text summarization, sentiment analysis etc. Most approaches use parallel data of noisy and correct word mappings from different sources as training data for automatic spelling correction. Indic languages are resourcescarce and do not have such parallel data due to low volume of queries and nonexistence of such prior implementations. In this paper, we show how to build an automatic spelling corrector for resourcescarce languages. We propose a sequenceto-sequence deep learning model which trains end-to-end. We perform experiments on synthetic datasets created for Indic languages, Hindi and Telugu, by incorporating the spelling mistakes committed at character level. A comparative evaluation shows that our model is competitive with the existing spell checking and correction techniques for Indic languages.

Abstract

Discrete labeling problems are often solvedby formulating them as an integer program,and relaxing the integrality constraint to acontinuous domain. While the continuous re-laxation is closely related to the original in-teger program, its optimal solution is oftenfractional. Thus, the success of a relaxationdepends crucially on the availability of an ac-curate rounding procedure. The problem ofidentifying an accurate rounding procedurehas mainly been tackled in the theoreticalcomputer science community through math-ematical analysis of the worst-case. However,this approach is both onerous and ignores thedistribution of the data encountered in prac-tice. We present a novel interpretation ofrounding procedures as sampling from a la-tent variable model, which opens the door tothe use of powerful machine learning formu-lations in their design. Inspired by the recentsuccess of deep latent variable models we pa-rameterize rounding procedures as a neuralnetwork, which lends itself to efficient opti-mization via back-propagation. By minimiz-ing the expected value of the objective of thediscrete labeling problem over training sam-ples, we learn a rounding procedure that ismore suited to the task at hand. Using bothsynthetic and real world data sets, we demon-strate that our approach can outperform thestate-of-the-art hand-designed rounding pro-cedures

Abstract

Our goal is to spot words in silent speech videos withoutexplicitly recognizing the spoken words, where the lip mo-tion of the speaker is clearly visible and audio is absent. Ex-isting work in this domain has mainly focused on recogniz-ing a fixed set of words in word-segmented lip videos, whichlimits the applicability of the learned model due to limitedvocabulary and high dependency on the model’s recogni-tion performance.Our contribution is two-fold: 1) we develop a pipelinefor recognition-free retrieval, and show its performanceagainst recognition-based retrieval on a large-scale datasetand another set of out-of-vocabulary words. 2) We intro-duce a query expansion technique using pseudo-relevantfeedback and propose a novel re-ranking method based onmaximizing the correlation between spatio-temporal land-marks of the query and the top retrieval candidates. Ourword spotting method achieves 35% higher mean aver-age precision over recognition-based method on large-scaleLRW dataset. Finally, we demonstrate the application of themethod by word spotting in a popular speech video (“Thegreat dictator” by Charlie Chaplin) where we show that theword retrieval can be used to understand what was spokenperhaps in the silent movies

Abstract

The accuracy of information retrieval systems is often measured using complex loss functions such as the average precision (AP) or the normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG). Given a set of positive and negative samples, the parameters of a retrieval system can be estimated by minimizing these loss functions. However, the non-differentiability and non-decomposability of these loss functions does not allow for simple gradient based optimization algorithms. This issue is generally circumvented by either optimizing a structured hinge-loss upper bound to the loss function or by using asymptotic methods like the direct-loss minimization framework. Yet, the high computational complexity of loss-augmented inference, which is necessary for both the frameworks, prohibits its use in large training data sets. To alleviate this deficiency, we present a novel quicksort flavored algorithm for a large class of non-decomposable loss functions. We provide a complete characterization of the loss functions that are amenable to our algorithm, and show that it includes both AP and NDCG based loss functions. Furthermore, we prove that no comparison based algorithm can improve upon the computational complexity of our approach asymptotically. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in the context of optimizing the structured hinge loss upper bound of AP and NDCG loss for learning models for a variety of vision tasks. We show that our approach provides significantly better results than simpler decomposable loss functions, while requiring a comparable training time.