DiffSED: Sound Event Detection with Denoising Diffusion

Sound Event Detection (SED) aims to predict the temporal boundaries of all the events of interest and their class labels, given an unconstrained audio sample. Taking either the splitand-classify (i.e., frame-level) strategy or the more principled event-level modeling approach, all existing methods consider the SED problem from the discriminative learning perspective. In this work, we reformulate the SED problem by taking a generative learning perspective. Specifically, we aim to generate sound temporal boundaries from noisy proposals in a denoising diffusion process, conditioned on a target audio sample. During training, our model learns to reverse the noising process by converting noisy latent queries to the groundtruth versions in the elegant Transformer decoder framework. Doing so enables the model generate accurate event boundaries from even noisy queries during inference. Extensive experiments on the Urban-SED and EPIC-Sounds datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing alternatives, with 40+% faster convergence in training.

Evaluation of Chinese-English Machine Translation of Emotion-Loaded Microblog Texts: A Human Annotated Dataset for the Quality Assessment of Emotion Translation

In this paper, we focus on how current Machine Translation (MT) tools perform on the translation of emotion-loaded texts by evaluating outputs from Google Translate according to a framework proposed in this paper. We propose this evaluation framework based on the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) and perform a detailed error analysis of the MT outputs. From our analysis, we observe that about 50% of the MT outputs fail to preserve the original emotion. After further analysis of the errors, we find that emotion carrying words and linguistic phenomena such as polysemous words, negation, abbreviation etc., are common causes for these translation errors.

Applications and Challenges of Sentiment Analysis in Real-life Scenarios

Sentiment analysis has benefited from the availability of lexicons and benchmark datasets created over decades of research. However, its applications to the real world are a driving force for research in SA. This chapter describes some of these applications and related challenges in real-life scenarios. In this chapter, we focus on five applications of SA: health, social policy, e-commerce, digital humanities and other areas of NLP. This chapter is intended to equip an NLP researcher with the `what', `why' and `how' of applications of SA: what is the application about, why it is important and challenging and how current research in SA deals with the application. We note that, while the use of deep learning techniques is a popular paradigm that spans these applications, challenges around privacy and selection bias of datasets is a recurring theme across several applications.

Harnessing Abstractive Summarization for Fact-Checked Claim Detection

Social media platforms have become new battlegrounds for anti-social elements, with misinformation being the weapon of choice. Fact-checking organizations try to debunk as many claims as possible while staying true to their journalistic processes but cannot cope with its rapid dissemination. We believe that the solution lies in partial automation of the fact-checking life cycle, saving human time for tasks which require high cognition. We propose a new workflow for efficiently detecting previously fact-checked claims that uses abstractive summarization to generate crisp queries. These queries can then be executed on a general-purpose retrieval system associated with a collection of previously fact-checked claims. We curate an abstractive text summarization dataset comprising noisy claims from Twitter and their gold summaries. It is shown that retrieval performance improves 2x by using popular out-of-the-box summarization models and 3x by fine-tuning them on the accompanying dataset compared to verbatim querying. Our approach achieves Recall@5 and MRR of 35% and 0.3, compared to baseline values of 10% and 0.1, respectively. Our dataset, code, and models are available publicly: https://github.com/varadhbhatnagar/FC-Claim-Det/

HiNER: A Large Hindi Named Entity Recognition Dataset

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a foundational NLP task that aims to provide class labels like Person, Location, Organisation, Time, and Number to words in free text. Named Entities can also be multi-word expressions where the additional I-O-B annotation information helps label them during the NER annotation process. While English and European languages have considerable annotated data for the NER task, Indian languages lack on that front -- both in terms of quantity and following annotation standards. This paper releases a significantly sized standard-abiding Hindi NER dataset containing 109,146 sentences and 2,220,856 tokens, annotated with 11 tags. We discuss the dataset statistics in all their essential detail and provide an in-depth analysis of the NER tag-set used with our data. The statistics of tag-set in our dataset show a healthy per-tag distribution, especially for prominent classes like Person, Location and Organisation. Since the proof of resource-effectiveness is in building models with the resource and testing the model on benchmark data and against the leader-board entries in shared tasks, we do the same with the aforesaid data. We use different language models to perform the sequence labelling task for NER and show the efficacy of our data by performing a comparative evaluation with models trained on another dataset available for the Hindi NER task. Our dataset helps achieve a weighted F1 score of 88.78 with all the tags and 92.22 when we collapse the tag-set, as discussed in the paper. To the best of our knowledge, no available dataset meets the standards of volume (amount) and variability (diversity), as far as Hindi NER is concerned. We fill this gap through this work, which we hope will significantly help NLP for Hindi. We release this dataset with our code and models at https://github.com/cfiltnlp/HiNER

PLOD: An Abbreviation Detection Dataset for Scientific Documents

The detection and extraction of abbreviations from unstructured texts can help to improve the performance of Natural Language Processing tasks, such as machine translation and information retrieval. However, in terms of publicly available datasets, there is not enough data for training deep-neural-networks-based models to the point of generalising well over data. This paper presents PLOD, a large-scale dataset for abbreviation detection and extraction that contains 160k+ segments automatically annotated with abbreviations and their long forms. We performed manual validation over a set of instances and a complete automatic validation for this dataset. We then used it to generate several baseline models for detecting abbreviations and long forms. The best models achieved an F1-score of 0.92 for abbreviations and 0.89 for detecting their corresponding long forms. We release this dataset along with our code and all the models publicly in https://github.com/surrey-nlp/PLOD-AbbreviationDetection

An Ensemble Approach to Acronym Extraction using Transformers

Acronyms are abbreviated units of a phrase constructed by using initial components of the phrase in a text. Automatic extraction of acronyms from a text can help various Natural Language Processing tasks like machine translation, information retrieval, and text summarisation. This paper discusses an ensemble approach for the task of Acronym Extraction, which utilises two different methods to extract acronyms and their corresponding long forms. The first method utilises a multilingual contextual language model and fine-tunes the model to perform the task. The second method relies on a convolutional neural network architecture to extract acronyms and append them to the output of the previous method. We also augment the official training dataset with additional training samples extracted from several open-access journals to help improve the task performance. Our dataset analysis also highlights the noise within the current task dataset. Our approach achieves the following macro-F1 scores on test data released with the task: Danish (0.74), English-Legal (0.72), English-Scientific (0.73), French (0.63), Persian (0.57), Spanish (0.65), Vietnamese (0.65). We release our code and models publicly.

Indian Language Wordnets and their Linkages with Princeton WordNet

Wordnets are rich lexico-semantic resources. Linked wordnets are extensions of wordnets, which link similar concepts in wordnets of different languages. Such resources are extremely useful in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, primarily those based on knowledge-based approaches. In such approaches, these resources are considered as gold standard/oracle. Thus, it is crucial that these resources hold correct information. Thereby, they are created by human experts. However, human experts in multiple languages are hard to come by. Thus, the community would benefit from sharing of such manually created resources. In this paper, we release mappings of 18 Indian language wordnets linked with Princeton WordNet. We believe that availability of such resources will have a direct impact on the progress in NLP for these languages.

Semi-automatic WordNet Linking using Word Embeddings

Wordnets are rich lexico-semantic resources. Linked wordnets are extensions of wordnets, which link similar concepts in wordnets of different languages. Such resources are extremely useful in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, primarily those based on knowledge-based approaches. In such approaches, these resources are considered as gold standard/oracle. Thus, it is crucial that these resources hold correct information. Thereby, they are created by human experts. However, manual maintenance of such resources is a tedious and costly affair. Thus techniques that can aid the experts are desirable. In this paper, we propose an approach to link wordnets. Given a synset of the source language, the approach returns a ranked list of potential candidate synsets in the target language from which the human expert can choose the correct one(s). Our technique is able to retrieve a winner synset in the top 10 ranked list for 60% of all synsets and 70% of noun synsets.