Articles

AbstractThis paper concerns the problem of realizing consistent personalities in neural conversational modeling by using user generated question-answer pairs as training data. Using the framework of role play-based question answering, we collected single-turn question-answer pairs for particular characters from online users. Meta information was also collected such as emotion and …...

AbstractSemantic matching measures the dependencies between query and answer representations, it is an important criterion for evaluating whether the matching is successful. In fact, such matching does not examine each sentence individually, context information outside a sentence should be considered equally important to the syntactic context inside a sentence. We …...

AbstractExisting machine reading comprehension models are reported to be brittle for adversarially perturbed questions when optimizing only for accuracy, which led to the creation of new reading comprehension benchmarks, such as SQuAD 2.0 which contains such type of questions. However, despite the super-human accuracy of existing models on such datasets, …...

AbstractWord embeddings that consider context have attracted great attention for various natural language processing tasks in recent years. In this paper, we utilize contextualized word embeddings with the transformer encoder for sentence similarity modeling in the answer selection task. We present two different approaches (feature-based and fine-tuning-based) for answer selection. …...

AbstractRecently, multilingual question answering became a crucial research topic, and it is receiving increased interest in the NLP community. However, the unavailability of large-scale datasets makes it challenging to train multilingual QA systems with performance comparable to the English ones. In this work, we develop the Translate Align Retrieve (TAR) …...

AbstractIn this study, we propose a novel graph neural network called propagate-selector (PS), which propagates information over sentences to understand information that cannot be inferred when considering sentences in isolation. First, we design a graph structure in which each node represents an individual sentence, and some pairs of nodes are …...

AbstractThis study tackles unsupervised domain adaptation of reading comprehension (UDARC). Reading comprehension (RC) is a task to learn the capability for question answering with textual sources. State-of-the-art models on RC still do not have general linguistic intelligence; i.e., their accuracy worsens for out-domain datasets that are not used in the …...

AbstractTextual content is the most significant as well as substantially the big part of CQA (Community Question Answering) forums. Users gain reputation for contributing such content. Although linguistic quality is the very essence of textual information, that does not seem to be considered in estimating users’ reputation. As existing users’ …...

AbstractPrior work has demonstrated that question classification (QC), recognizing the problem domain of a question, can help answer it more accurately. However, developing strong QC algorithms has been hindered by the limited size and complexity of annotated data available. To address this, we present the largest challenge dataset for QC, …...

AbstractMachine Reading Comprehension (MRC) is the task of answering a question over a paragraph of text. While neural MRC systems gain popularity and achieve noticeable performance, issues are being raised with the methodology used to establish their performance, particularly concerning the data design of gold standards that are used to …...

AbstractModern Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology has evolved to identify the speech spoken by native speakers of a language very well. However, identification of the speech spoken by non-native speakers continues to be a major challenge for it. In this work, we first spell out the key requirements for creating …...

AbstractThe present article presents four experiments with two different methods for measuring dialect similarity in Norwegian: the Levenshtein method and the neural long short term memory (LSTM) autoencoder network, a machine learning algorithm. The visual output in the form of dialect maps is then compared with canonical maps found in …...

AbstractDatabases for studying speech rhythm and tempo exist for numerous languages. The present corpus was built to allow comparisons between Arabic speech rhythm and other languages. 10 Egyptian speakers (gender-balanced) produced speech in two different speaking styles (read and spontaneous). The design of the reading task replicates the methodology used …...

AbstractWe introduce a new resource, AlloVera, which provides mappings from 218 allophones to phonemes for 14 languages. Phonemes are contrastive phonological units, and allophones are their various concrete realizations, which are predictable from phonological context. While phonemic representations are language specific, phonetic representations (stated in terms of (allo)phones) are much …...

AbstractThe analysis of the structure of speech nearly always rests on the alignment of the speech recording with a phonetic transcription. Nowadays several tools can perform this speech segmentation automatically. However, none of them allows the automatic segmentation of Quebec French (QF hereafter), the acoustics and phonotactics of QF differing …...

AbstractPhonological segment borrowing is a process through which languages acquire new contrastive speech sounds as the result of borrowing new words from other languages. Despite the fact that phonological segment borrowing is documented in many of the world’s languages, to date there has been no large-scale quantitative study of the …...

AbstractThe research presented in this paper aims at enriching the manually morphosyntactically annotated part of National Corpus of Polish (NKJP1M) with a syntactic layer, i.e. dependency trees of sentences, and at converting both dependency trees and morphosyntactic annotations of particular tokens to Universal Dependencies. The dependency layer is built using …...

AbstractQuestion classification is an important component of Question Answering Systems responsible for identifying the type of an answer a particular question requires. For instance, “Who is the prime minister of the United Kingdom?” demands a name of a PERSON, while “When was the queen of the United Kingdom born?” entails …...

AbstractThis paper describes ODIL Syntax, a French treebank built on spontaneous speech transcripts. The syntactic structure of every speech turn is represented by constituent trees, through a procedure which combines an automatic annotation provided by a parser (here, the Stanford Parser) and a manual revision. ODIL Syntax respects the annotation …...

AbstractCurrent sentence boundary detectors split documents into sequentially ordered sentences by detecting their beginnings and ends. Sentences, however, are more deeply structured even on this side of constituent and dependency structure: they can consist of a main sentence and several subordinate clauses as well as further segments (e.g. inserts in …...