Abstract

The paper presents an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for code-mixed read speech in Hindi-English, developed upon the extrapolation of monolingual training resources. A monolingual Hindi acoustic model, mixed with code-mixed speech data has been implemented to train a neural network based speech recognition framework. The testing corpus also follows a similar structure: containing data from both monolingual and code-mixed speech. The shared phonetic transcription, captured in WX notation has been exploited to harness the commonality between the pooled phonesets of Hindi and English. The experiments have been conducted in two separate formulations of a trigram based language model 1) In the first experiment, the language model contains no out-of-vocabulary words, as the test utterances are included in the training of the language model. The word error rate in this case has been obtained to be 10.63 %. 2) In the second experiment, the testing utterances have been excluded from the training language model. The word error rate in this case has been obtained to be 41.66 %.

Abstract

Code-Mixing (CM) is a natural phenomenon observed in many multilingual societies and is becoming the preferred medium of expression and communication in online and social media fora. In spite of this, current Question Answering (QA) systems do not support CM and are only designed to work with a single interaction language. This assumption makes it inconvenient for multi-lingual users to interact naturally with the QA system especially in scenarios where they do not know the right word in the target language. In this paper, we present WebShodh - an end-end web-based Factoid QA system for CM languages. We demonstrate our system with two CM language pairs: Hinglish (Matrix language: Hindi, Embedded language: English) and Tenglish (Matrix language: Telugu, Embedded language: English). Lack of language resources such as annotated corpora, POS taggers or parsers for CM languages poses a huge challenge for automated processing and analysis. In view of this resource scarcity, we only assume the existence of bi-lingual dictionaries from the matrix languages to English and use it for lexically translating the question into English. Later, we use this loosely translated question for our downstream analysis such as Answer Type(AType) prediction, answer retrieval and ranking. Evaluation of our system reveals that we achieve an MRR of 0.37 and 0.32 for Hinglish and Tenglish respectively. We hosted this system online and plan to leverage it for collecting more CM questions and answers data for further improvement.

Abstract

This paper presents DILTON, a system which solves simple arithmetic word problems. DILTON first predicts the operation that is to be performed (’-’,’+’,’*’,’/’) through a deep neural network based model and then uses it to generate the answer. DILTON divides the question into two parts - world state and query as shown in Figure 1. The world state and the query are processed separately in two different networks and finally the networks are merged to predict the final operation. DILTON learns to predict operations with 8.81 % in a corpus of primary school questions. With simple similarity between the contexts of quantities appearing in the problem and the question text, we are able to identify 92.25 % of relevant quantities and solve 81% of the questions. Our code and data is publicly available

Abstract

Word embeddings are being used for several linguistic problems and NLP tasks. Improvements in solutions to such problems are great because of the recent breakthroughs in vector representation of words and research in vector space models. However, vector embeddings of phrases keeping semantics intact with words has been challenging. We propose a novel methodology using Siamese deep neural networks to embed multi-word units and fine-tune the current state-of-the-art word embeddings keeping both in the same vector space. We show several semantic relations between words and phrases using the embeddings generated by our system and evaluate that the similarity of words and their corresponding paraphrases are maximized using the modified embeddings.

Abstract

Transfer learning algorithms can be used when sufficient amount of training data is available in the source domain and limited training data is available in the target domain. The transfer of knowledge from one domain to another requires similarity between two domains. In many resource-poor languages, it is rare to find labeled training data in both the source and target domains. Active learning algorithms, which query more labels from an oracle, can be used effectively in training the source domain when an oracle is available in the source domain but not available in the target domain. Active learning strategies are subjective as they are designed by humans. It can be time consuming to design a strategy and it can vary from one human to other. To tackle all these problems, we design a learning algorithm that connects transfer learning and active learning with the well-known multi-armed bandit problem by querying …

Abstract

The furtherance of social media led people to share the reviews in various ways such as video, audio and text. Recently, the performance of sentiment classification is achieved success using neural networks. In this paper, neural network approach is presented to detect the sentiment from audio and text models. For audio, features like Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) are used to build Deep Neural Network (DNN) and Deep Neural Network Attention Mechanism (DNNAM) classifiers. From the results, it is noticed that DNNAM gives better results compared to DNN because the DNN is a frame based one where as the DNNAM is an utterance level classification thereby efficiently use the context. Additionally, textual features are extracted from the transcript of the audio input using Word2vec model. Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM-RNN) classifiers are used to develop a sentiment model. From the experiments it is noticed the LSTM-RNN outperforms the SVM as the LSTM-RNN is able to memorize long temporal context. The performance is also significantly improved by combining both the audio and text modalities.

Abstract

The popularity of digital currencies, especially cryptocurrencies, has been continuously growing since the appearance of Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s security lies in a proof-of-work scheme, which requires high computational resources at the miners. Despite advances in mobile technology, existing cryptocurrencies cannot be maintained by mobile devices due to their low processing capabilities. Mobile devices can only accommodate mobile applications (wallets) that allow users to exchange credits of cryptocurrencies. In this work, we propose LocalCoin, an alternative cryptocurrency that requires minimal computational resources, produces low data traffic and works with off-the-shelf mobile devices. LocalCoin replaces the computational hardness that is at the root of Bitcoin’s security with the social hardness of ensuring that all witnesses to a transaction are colluders. Localcoin features (i) a lightweight proof-of-work scheme and (ii) a distributed blockchain. We analyze LocalCoin for double spending for passive and active attacks and prove that under the assumption of sufficient number of users and properly selected tuning parameters the probability of double spending is close to zero. Extensive simulations on real mobility traces, realistic urban settings, and random geometric graphs show that the probability of success of one transaction converges to 1 and the probability of the success of a double spending attempt converges to 0.

Abstract

This paper explores Thompson sampling in the context of mechanism design for stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems. The setting is that of an MAB problem where the reward distribution of each arm consists of a stochastic component as well as a strategic component. Many existing MAB mechanisms use upper confidence bound (UCB) based algorithms for learning the parameters of the reward distribution. The randomized nature of Thompson sampling introduces certain unique, non-trivial challenges for mechanism design, which we address in this paper through a rigorous regret analysis. We first propose a MAB mechanism with deterministic payment rule, namely, TSM-D. We show that in TSMD, the variance of agent utilities asymptotically approaches zero. However, the game theoretic properties satisfied by TSM-D (incentive compatibility and individual rationality with high probability) are rather weak. As our main contribution, we then propose the mechanism TSM-R, with randomized payment rule, and prove that TSM-R satisfies appropriate, adequate notions of incentive compatibility and individual rationality. For TSM-R, we also establish a theoretical upper bound on the variance in utilities of the agents. We further show, using simulations, that the variance in social welfare incurred by TSM-D or TSM-R is much lower when compared to that of existing UCB based mechanisms. We believe this paper establishes Thompson sampling as an attractive approach to be used in MAB mechanism design.

Abstract

Automatic categorization of computer science research papers using just the abstracts, is a hard problem to solve. This is due to the short text length of the abstracts. Also, abstracts are a general discussion of the topic with few domain specific terms. These reasons make it hard to generate good representations of abstracts which in turn leads to poor categorization performance. To address this challenge, external Knowledge Bases (KB) like Wikipedia, Freebase etc. can be used to enrich the representations for abstracts, which can aid in the categorization task. In this work, we propose a novel method for enhancing classification performance of research papers into ACM computer science categories using knowledge extracted from related Wikipedia articles and Freebase entities. We use state-of-the-art representation learning methods for feature representation of documents, followed by learning to rank method for classification. Given the abstracts of research papers from the Citation Network Dataset containing 0.24 M papers, our method of using KB, outperforms a baseline method and the stateof-the-art deep learning method in classification task by 13.25% and 5.41% respectively, in terms of accuracy. We have also open-sourced the implementation of the project4.

Abstract

We describe our submission at TAC 2017 for extracting entities and relations of interest from drug labels. We employ an end-to-end relation extraction system which jointly extracts both entities and relations. The task of end-to-end relation extraction consists of identifying boundaries of entity mentions, entity types of these mentions and appropriate semantic relation for each pair of mentions. Based on our earlier work (Pawar et al., 2017), a single neural network model (“All Word Pairs” model ie AWP-NN) is trained to assign an appropriate label to each word pair in a given sentence for performing end-to-end relation extraction. Moreover, we build an ensemble of multiple AWPNN models to achieve better performance than the individual models. We achieved 73.18% and 24.79% F-measures for entity and relation extraction, respectively.