Abstract

The main focus of this paper is towards the development of a large vocabulary Telugu speech database. Telugu is a low resource language where there exists no standardized database for building the speech recognition system (ASR). The database consists of neutral speech samples collected from 100 speakers for building the Telugu ASR system and it was named as IIIT-H Telugu speech corpus. The speech and text corpus design and the procedure followed for the collection of the database have been discussed in detail. The preliminary ASR system results for the models built in this database are reported. The architectural choices of deep neural networks (DNNs) play a crucial role in improving the performance of ASR systems. ASR trained with hybrid DNNs (DNNHMM) with more hidden layers have shown better performance over the conventional GMMs (GMM-HMM). Kaldi tool kit is used for building the acoustic models required for the ASR system.

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

This paper describes an end to end dialog system created using sequence to sequence learning and memory networks for Telugu, a low-resource language. We automatically generate dialog data for Telugu in the tourist domain, using a knowledge base that provides tourist place, type, tour time, etc. Using this data, we train a sequence to sequence model to learn system responses in the dialog. In order to add the query prediction for information retrieval (through API calls), we train a memory network. We also handle cases requiring updation of API calls and querying for additional information. Using the combination of sequence to sequence learning and memory network, we successfully create an end to end dialog system for Telugu.

Abstract

We present a language independent, unsupervised method for building word embeddings using morphological expansion of text. Our model handles the problem of data sparsity and yields improved word embeddings by relying on training word embeddings on artificially generated sentences. We evaluate our method using small sized training sets on eleven test sets for the word similarity task across seven languages. Further, for English, we evaluated the impacts of our approach using a large training set on three standard test sets. Our method improved results across all languages.

Abstract

We present a language independent, unsupervised approach for transforming word embeddings from source language to target language using a transformation matrix. Our model handles the problem of data scarcity which is faced by many languages in the world and yields improved word embeddings for words in the target language by relying on transformed embeddings of words of the source language. We initially evaluate our approach via word similarity tasks on a similar language pair - Hindi as source and Urdu as the target language, while we also evaluate our method on French and German as target languages and English as source language. Our approach improves the current state of the art results - by 13% for French and 19% for German. For Urdu, we saw an increment of 16% over our initial baseline score. We further explore the prospects of our approach by applying it on multiple models of the same language and transferring words between the two models, thus solving the problem of missing words in a model. We evaluate this on word similarity and word analogy tasks.

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 learned from text corpus can be improved by injecting knowledge from external resources, while at the same time also specializing them for similarity or relatedness. These knowledge resources (like WordNet, Paraphrase Database) may not exist for all languages. In this work we introduce a method to inject word embeddings of a language with knowledge resource of another language by leveraging bilingual embeddings. First we improve word embeddings of German, Italian, French and Spanish using resources of English and test them on variety of word similarity tasks. Then we demonstrate the utility of our method by creating improved embeddings for Urdu and Telugu languages using Hindi WordNet, beating the previously established baseline for Urdu.

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

We present a simple, fast and unsupervised approach for exploiting morphological regularities present in high dimensional vector spaces. We propose a novel method for generating embeddings of words from their morphological variants using morphological transformation operators. We evaluate this approach on MSR word analogy test set (Mikolov et al.,2013d) with an accuracy of 85% which is 12% higher than the previous best known system.

Abstract

Recent improvement in usage of digital media has led people to share their opinions about specific entity through audio. In this paper, an approach to detect the sentiment of an online spoken reviews based on relative prosody features is presented. Most of the existing systems for audio based sentiment analysis use conventional audio features, but they are not problem specific features to extract the sentiment. In this work, relative prosody features are extracted from normal and stressed regions of audio signal to detect the sentiment. Stressed regions are identified using the strength of excitation. Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) classifiers are used to build the sentiment models. MOUD database is used for the proposed study. Experimental results show that, the rate of detecting the sentiment is improved with relative prosody features compared with the prosody and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) because the relative prosody features has more sentiment specific discrimination compared to prosody features.