Abstract

n generation of emotional speech, there are deviations in the speech production features when compared to neutral (non-emotional) speech. The objective of this study is to capture the deviations in features related to the excitation component of speech and to develop a system for automatic recognition of emotions based on these deviations. The emotions considered in this study are anger, happiness, sadness and neutral state. The study shows that there are useful features in the deviations of the excitation features, which can be exploited to develop an emotion recognition system. The excitation features used in this study are the instantaneous fundamental frequency (), the strength of excitation, the energy of excitation and the ratio of the high-frequency to low-frequency band energy (). A hierarchical binary decision tree approach is used to develop an emotion recognition system with neutral speech …

Abstract

This paper presents a Bayesian multilingual topic model for learning language-independent document embeddings. Our model learns to represent the documents in the form of Gaussian distributions, thereby encoding the uncertainty in its covariance. We propagate the learned uncertainties through linear classifiers for zero-shot cross-lingual topic identification. Our experiments on 5 language Europarl and Reuters (MLDoc) corpora show that the proposed model outperforms multi-lingual word embedding and BiLSTM sentence encoder based systems with significant margins in the majority of the transfer directions. Moreover, our system trained under a single day on a single GPU with much lower amounts of data performs competitively as compared to the state-of-the-art universal BiLSTM sentence encoder trained on 93 languages. Our experimental analysis shows that the amount of parallel data improves the overall performance of embeddings. Nonetheless, exploiting the uncertainties is always beneficial.

Abstract

This paper presents the Question Answering (QA) system for a low resource language like ‘Telugu’ named ‘AVADHAN’. This work started with preparing a pre-tagged data set for Telugu Question Classification (QC). We also explained the ambiguities and complexities involved in the data set. AVADHAN exhibits the comparisons between Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) classifiers for achieving the plausible answers. After performing various experiments the overall accuracies obtained, for both ‘exact match’ and ‘partial match’ based approaches, were for SVM (31.6%, 68.5%), LR (31%, 66.6%) and for MLP (30%, 67%) respectively

Abstract

Similar question retrieval is a challenge due to lexical gap between query and candidates in archive and is very different from traditional IR methods for duplicate detection, paraphrase identification and semantic equivalence. This tutorial covers recent deep learning techniques which overcome feature engineering issues with existing approaches based on translation models and latent topics. Hands-on proposal thus will introduce each concept from end user (e.g., questionanswer pairs) and technique (e.g., attention) perspectives, present state of the art methods and a walkthrough of programs executed on Jupyter notebook using real-world datasets demonstrating principles introduced

Abstract

The advent of social media has immensely proliferated the amount of opinions and arguments voiced on the internet. These virtual debates often present cases of aggression. While research has been focused largely on analyzing aggression and stance in isolation from each other, this work is the first attempt to gain an extensive and fine-grained understanding of patterns of aggression and figurative language use when voicing opinion. We present a Hindi-English code-mixed dataset of opinion on the politico-social issue of ‘2016 India banknote demonetisation‘ and annotate it across multiple dimensions such as aggression, hate speech, emotion arousal and figurative language usage (such as sarcasm/irony, metaphors/similes, puns/word-play)

Abstract

Ellipsis resolution has been identified as an important step to improve the accuracy of mainstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as information retrieval, event extraction, dialog systems, etc. Previous computational work on ellipsis resolution has focused on one type of ellipsis, namely Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) and a few other related phenomenon. We extend the study of ellipsis by presenting the No(oun)El(lipsis) corpus - an annotated corpus for noun ellipsis and closely related phenomenon using the first hundred movies of Cornell Movie Dialogs Dataset. The annotations are carried out in a standoff annotation scheme that encodes the position of the licensor, the antecedent boundary, and Part-of-Speech (POS) tags of the licensor and antecedent modifier. Our corpus has 946 instances of exophoric and endophoric noun ellipsis, making it the biggest resource of noun ellipsis in English, to the best of our knowledge. We present a statistical study of our corpus with novel insights on the distribution of noun ellipsis, its licensors and antecedents. Finally, we perform the tasks of detection and resolution of noun ellipsis with different classifiers trained on our corpus and report baseline results.

Abstract

Treebanks are an essential resource for syntactic parsing. The available Paninian dependency treebank(s) for Telugu is annotated only with inter-chunk dependency relations and not all words of a sentence are part of the parse tree. In this paper, we automatically annotate the intra-chunk dependencies in the treebank using a Shift-Reduce parser based on Context Free Grammar rules for Telugu chunks. We also propose a few additional intra-chunk dependency relations for Telugu apart from the ones used in Hindi treebank. Annotating intra-chunk dependencies finally provides a complete parse tree for every sentence in the treebank. Having a fully expanded treebank is crucial for developing end to end parsers which produce complete trees. We present a fully expanded dependency treebank for Telugu consisting of 3220 sentences. In this paper, we also convert the treebank annotated with Anncorra part-of-speech tagset to the latest BIS tagset. The BIS tagset is a hierarchical tagset adopted as a unified part-of-speech standard across all Indian Languages. The final treebank is made publicly available

Abstract

ISO-TimeML is an international standard for multilingual event annotation, detection, categorization and linking. In this paper, we present the Hindi TimeBank, an ISO-TimeML annotated reference corpus for the detection and classification of events, states and time expressions, and the links between them. Based on contemporary developments in Hindi event recognition, we propose languageindependent and language-specific deviations from the ISO-TimeML guidelines, but preserve the schema. These deviations include the inclusion of annotator confidence, and an independent mechanism of identifying and annotating states (such as copulars and existentials) With this paper, we present an open-source corpus, the Hindi TimeBank. The Hindi TimeBank is a 1,000 article dataset, with over 25,000 events, 3,500 states and 2,000 time expressions. We analyze the dataset in detail and provide a class-wise distribution of events, states and time expressions. Our guidelines and dataset are backed by high average inter-annotator agreement scores.

Abstract

In this paper, we provide the basic guidelines towards the detection and linguistic analysis of events in Kannada. Kannada is a morphologically rich, resource poor Dravidian language spoken in southern India. As most information retrieval and extraction tasks are resource intensive, very little work has been done on Kannada NLP, with almost no efforts in discourse analysis and dataset creation for representing events or other semantic annotations in the text. In this paper, we linguistically analyze what constitutes an event in this language, the challenges faced with discourse level annotation and representation due to the rich derivational morphology of the language that allows free word order, numerous multi-word expressions, adverbial participle constructions and constraints on subject-verb relations. Therefore, this paper is one of the first attempts at a large scale discourse level annotation for Kannada, which can be used for mantic annotation and corpus development for other tasks in the language

Abstract

Conversational and task-oriented dialogue systems aim to interact with the user using natural responses through multi-modal interfaces, such as text or speech. These desired responses are in the form of full-length natural answers generated over facts retrieved from a knowledge source. While the task of generating natural answers to questions from an answer span has been widely studied, there has been little research on natural sentence generation over spoken content. We propose a novel system to generate full length natural language answers from spoken questions and factoid answers. The spoken sequence is compactly represented as a confusion network extracted from a pre-trained Automatic Speech Recognizer. This is the first attempt towards generating full-length natural answers from a graph input(confusion network) to the best of our knowledge. We release a large-scale dataset of 259,788 samples of spoken questions, their factoid answers and corresponding full-length textual answers. Following our proposed approach, we achieve comparable performance with best ASR hypothesis.