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

Sentiment analysis deals with the task of determining the polarity of a document or sentence and has received a lot of attention in recent years for the English language. With the rapid growth of social media these days, a lot of data is available in regional languages besides English. Telugu is one such regional language with abundant data available in social media, but it’s hard to find a labelled data of sentences for Telugu Sentiment Analysis. In this paper, we describe an effort to build a gold-standard annotated corpus of Telugu sentences to support Telugu Sentiment Analysis. The corpus, named ACTSA (Annotated Corpus for Telugu Sentiment Analysis) has a collection of Telugu sentences taken from different sources which were then pre-processed and manually annotated by native Telugu speakers using our annotation guidelines. In total, we have annotated 5457 sentences, which makes our corpus the largest resource currently available. The corpus and the annotation guidelines are made 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

As a discipline of Natural Language Processing, Sentiment Analysis is used to extract and analyze subjective information present in natural language data. The task of Sentiment Analysis has acquired wide commercial uses including social media monitoring tasks, survey responses, review systems, etc. Languages like English have several resources which aid in the task of Sentiment Analysis. SentiWord-Net and Subjectivity WordList are examples of such tools and resources. With more data being available in native vernacular, language-specific SentiWordNet (s) have become essential. For resource poor languages, creating such SentiWordNet (s) is a difficult task to achieve. One solution is to use available resources in English and translate the final source lexicon to target lexicon via machine translation. Machine translation systems for the English-Odia language pair have not yet been developed. In this paper, we discuss a method to create a SentiWordNet for Odia, which is resource-poor, by only using resources which are currently available for Indian languages. The lexicon created, would serve as a tool for Sentiment Analysis related task specific to Odia data.

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

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

In this paper, we look at domain independent keyword identification for natural language queries using statistical methods. We took queries supplemented by only their dependency tags (Stanford Parser) and part-of-speech tags (Stanford POS tagger) and labeled the keywords. We then delexicalised the training data, and used the Conditional Random Fields algorithm to learn these labels. We used the queries created by [1] in the course management domain for training, and tested our model on the queries of three domains: course management, library and the GeoQueries250 dataset and report fairly high accuracies of 90.65%, 83.19% and 97.13% respectively, making our model a truly domain independent and highly accurate keyword identifier.

Abstract

Code-Mixing (CM) is a very commonly observed mode of communication in a multilingual configuration. The trends of using this newly emerging language has its effect as a culling option especially in platforms like social media. This becomes particularly important in the context of technology and health, where expressing the upcoming advancements is difficult in native language. Despite the change of such language dynamics, current dialog systems cannot handle a switch between languages across sentences and mixing within a sentence. Everyday conversations are fabricated in this mixed language and analyzing dialog acts in this language is very essential in further advancements of making interaction with personal assistants more natural. The problem is further compounded with crossing the script barriers in code-mixing. In this paper we take the first step towards understanding code-mixing in dialog …

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.