Abstract

Language identification (LID) is vital frontend for spoken dialogue systems operating in diverse linguistic settings to reduce recognition and understanding errors. Existing LID systems which use low-level signal information for classification do not scale well due to exponential growth of parameters as the classes increase. They also suffer performance degradation due to the inherent variabilities of speech signal. In the proposed approach, we model the language-specific phonotactic information in speech using recurrent neural network for developing an LID system. The input speech signal is tokenized to phone sequences by using a common language-independent phone recognizer with varying phonetic coverage. We establish a causal relationship between phonetic coverage and LID performance. The phonotactics in the observed phone sequences are modeled using statistical and recurrent neural network language models to predict language-specific symbol from a universal phonetic inventory. Proposed approach is robust, computationally light weight and highly scalable. Experiments show that the convex combination of statistical and recurrent neural network language model (RNNLM) based phonotactic models significantly outperform a strong baseline system of Deep Neural Network (DNN) which is shown to surpass the performance of i-vector based approach for LID. The proposed approach outperforms the baseline models in terms of mean F1 score over 176 languages. Further we provide significant information-theoretic evidence to analyze the mechanism of the proposed approach.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose efficient and less resource-intensive strategies for parsing of code-mixed data. These strategies are not constrained by in-domain annotations, rather they leverage pre-existing monolingual annotated resources for training. We show that these methods can produce significantly better results as compared to an informed baseline. Due to lack of an evaluation set for code-mixed structures, we also present a data set of 450 Hindi and English code-mixed tweets of Hindi multilingual speakers for evaluation.

Abstract

With the advent of word representations, word similarity tasks are becoming increasing popular as an evaluation metric for the quality of the representations. In this paper, we present manually annotated monolingual word similarity datasets of six Indian languages – Urdu, Telugu, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Gujarati. These languages are most spoken Indian languages worldwide after Hindi and Bengali. For the construction of these datasets, our approach relies on translation and re-annotation of word similarity datasets of English. We also present baseline scores for word representation models using state-of-the-art techniques for Urdu, Telugu and Marathi by evaluating them on newly created word similarity datasets.

Abstract

Trivia is any fact about an entity which is interesting due to its unusualness, uniqueness or unexpectedness. Trivia could be successfully employed to promote user engagement in various product experiences featuring the given entity. A Knowledge Graph (KG) is a semantic network which encodes various facts about entities and their relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called DBpedia Trivia Miner (DTM) to automatically mine trivia for entities of a given domain in KGs. The essence of DTM lies in learning an Interestingness Model (IM), for a given domain, from human annotated training data provided in the form of interesting facts from the KG. The IM thus learnt is applied to extract trivia for other entities of the same domain in the KG. We propose two different approaches for learning the IM - a) A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based approach and b) Fusion Based CNN (F-CNN) approach which combines both hand-crafted and CNN features. Experiments across two different domains - Bollywood Actors and Music Artists reveal that CNN automatically learns features which are relevant to the task and shows competitive performance relative to hand-crafted feature based baselines whereas FCNN significantly improves the performance over the baseline approaches which use hand-crafted features alone. Overall, DTM achieves an F1 score of 0.81 and 0.65 in Bollywood Actors and Music Artists domains respectively.

Abstract

In this paper, we report our participation in the Task 2: Triple Scoring of WSDM Cup challenge 2017. In this task, we were provided with triples of "type-like" relations which were given human-annotated relevance scores ranging from 0 to 7, with 7 being the "most relevant" and 0 being the "least relevant". The task focuses on two such relations: profession and nationality. We built a system which could automatically predict the relevance scores for unseen triples. Our model is primarily a supervised machine learning based one in which we use well-designed features which are used to a make a Logistic Ordinal Regression based classification model. The proposed system achieves an overall accuracy score of 0.73 and Kendall’s tau score of 0.36.

Abstract

We describe the system submitted to IBEREVAL-2017 for stance and gender detection in tweets on Catalan Independence [1]. We developed a supervised system using Support Vector Machines with radial basis function kernel to identify the stance and gender of the tweeter using various character level and word level features. Our system achieves a macro-average of F-score(FAVOR) and F-score(AGAINST) of 0.46 for stance detection in both Spanish and Catalan and an accuracy of 64.85% and 44.59% for Gender detection in Spanish and Catalan respectively.

Abstract

Sampark is machine translation system providing translations among nine pairs of Indian languages. Machine translation system is a class of natural language processing applications that is far more complex and highly compute intensive in nature. As the load on the deployed system increases, optimization becomes a challenge. Caching is one of the available options to improve the performance of a software system with increasing load which exhibit the characteristics of locality of reference. Sampark MT system being a natural language processing application exhibits this characteristic.Memcachedis a well-known, simple, in-memory caching solution that has been applied to improve the performance of several distributed web applications in the past. This paper describes how memcached has been applied to improve the performance of Sampark machine translation service which is deployed on a large cluster of machines. By applying distributed caching to MT system the performance of the system has improved upto 40%

Abstract

This paper describes the International Institute of Information Technology of Hyderabad’s submission to the task Classification Of Spanish Election Tweets (COSET) as a part of IBEREVAL-2017[1]. The task is to classify Spanish election tweets into political, policy, personal, campaign and other issues. Our system uses Support Vector Machines with radial basis function kernel to classify tweets. We dwell upon the character and word level features along with the word embeddings and train the classification model with them and present the results. Our best run achieves a F1-macro score of 0.6054 on the test corpus for first phase and 0.8509 for the second phase.

Abstract

Sentiment analysis (SA) using code-mixed data from social media has several applications in opinion mining ranging from customer satisfaction to social campaign analysis in multilingual societies. Advances in this area are impeded by the lack of a suitable annotated dataset. We introduce a Hindi-English (Hi-En) code-mixed dataset for sentiment analysis and perform empirical analysis comparing the suitability and performance of various state-of-the-art SA methods in social media. In this paper, we introduce learning sub-word level representations in our LSTM (Subword-LSTM) architecture instead of character-level or word-level representations. This linguistic prior in our architecture enables us to learn the information about sentiment value of important morphemes. This also seems to work well in highly noisy text containing misspellings as shown in our experiments which is demonstrated in morpheme-level feature maps learned by our model. Also, we hypothesize that encoding this linguistic prior in the Subword-LSTM architecture leads to the superior performance. Our system attains accuracy 4-5% greater than traditional approaches on our dataset, and also outperforms the available system for sentiment analysis in Hi-En code-mixed text by 18%.

Abstract

n this study, the problem of shallow parsing of Hindi-English code-mixed social media text (CSMT) has been addressed. We have annotated the data, developed a language identifier, a normalizer, a part-of-speech tagger and a shallow parser. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to attempt shallow parsing on CSMT. The pipeline developed has been made available to the research community with the goal of enabling better text analysis of Hindi English CSMT. The pipeline is accessible at this http URL.