Gender Prediction Based on Vietnamese Names with Machine Learning Techniques

As biological gender is one of the aspects of presenting individual human, much work has been done on gender classification based on people names. The proposals for English and Chinese languages are tremendous; still, there have been few works done for Vietnamese so far. We propose a new dataset for gender prediction based on Vietnamese names. This dataset comprises over 26,000 full names annotated with genders. This dataset is available on our website for research purposes. In addition, this paper describes six machine learning algorithms (Support Vector Machine, Multinomial Naive Bayes, Bernoulli Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Random Forrest and Logistic Regression) and a deep learning model (LSTM) with fastText word embedding for gender prediction on Vietnamese names. We create a dataset and investigate the impact of each name component on detecting gender. As a result, the best F1-score that we have achieved is up to 96\% on LSTM model and we generate a web API based on our trained model.

An Empirical Study for Vietnamese Constituency Parsing with Pre-training

In this work, we use a span-based approach for Vietnamese constituency parsing. Our method follows the self-attention encoder architecture and a chart decoder using a CKY-style inference algorithm. We present analyses of the experiment results of the comparison of our empirical method using pre-training models XLM-Roberta and PhoBERT on both Vietnamese datasets VietTreebank and NIIVTB1. The results show that our model with XLM-Roberta archived the significantly F1-score better than other pre-training models, VietTreebank at 81.19% and NIIVTB1 at 85.70%.

UIT-HSE at WNUT-2020 Task 2: Exploiting CT-BERT for Identifying COVID-19 Information on the Twitter Social Network

Recently, COVID-19 has affected a variety of real-life aspects of the world and led to dreadful consequences. More and more tweets about COVID-19 has been shared publicly on Twitter. However, the plurality of those Tweets are uninformative, which is challenging to build automatic systems to detect the informative ones for useful AI applications. In this paper, we present our results at the W-NUT 2020 Shared Task 2: Identification of Informative COVID-19 English Tweets. In particular, we propose our simple but effective approach using the transformer-based models based on COVID-Twitter-BERT (CT-BERT) with different fine-tuning techniques. As a result, we achieve the F1-Score of 90.94\% with the third place on the leaderboard of this task which attracted 56 submitted teams in total.

Empirical Study of Text Augmentation on Social Media Text in Vietnamese

In the text classification problem, the imbalance of labels in datasets affect the performance of the text-classification models. Practically, the data about user comments on social networking sites not altogether appeared - the administrators often only allow positive comments and hide negative comments. Thus, when collecting the data about user comments on the social network, the data is usually skewed about one label, which leads the dataset to become imbalanced and deteriorate the model's ability. The data augmentation techniques are applied to solve the imbalance problem between classes of the dataset, increasing the prediction model's accuracy. In this paper, we performed augmentation techniques on the VLSP2019 Hate Speech Detection on Vietnamese social texts and the UIT - VSFC: Vietnamese Students' Feedback Corpus for Sentiment Analysis. The result of augmentation increases by about 1.5% in the F1-macro score on both corpora.

A Vietnamese Dataset for Evaluating Machine Reading Comprehension

Over 97 million inhabitants speak Vietnamese as the native language in the world. However, there are few research studies on machine reading comprehension (MRC) in Vietnamese, the task of understanding a document or text, and answering questions related to it. Due to the lack of benchmark datasets for Vietnamese, we present the Vietnamese Question Answering Dataset (ViQuAD), a new dataset for the low-resource language as Vietnamese to evaluate MRC models. This dataset comprises over 23,000 human-generated question-answer pairs based on 5,109 passages of 174 Vietnamese articles from Wikipedia. In particular, we propose a new process of dataset creation for Vietnamese MRC. Our in-depth analyses illustrate that our dataset requires abilities beyond simple reasoning like word matching and demands complicate reasoning such as single-sentence and multiple-sentence inferences. Besides, we conduct experiments on state-of-the-art MRC methods in English and Chinese as the first experimental models on ViQuAD, which will be compared to further models. We also estimate human performances on the dataset and compare it to the experimental results of several powerful machine models. As a result, the substantial differences between humans and the best model performances on the dataset indicate that improvements can be explored on ViQuAD through future research. Our dataset is freely available to encourage the research community to overcome challenges in Vietnamese MRC.

A Simple and Efficient Ensemble Classifier Combining Multiple Neural Network Models on Social Media Datasets in Vietnamese

Text classification is a popular topic of natural language processing, which has currently attracted numerous research efforts worldwide. The significant increase of data in social media requires the vast attention of researchers to analyze such data. There are various studies in this field in many languages but limited to the Vietnamese language. Therefore, this study aims to classify Vietnamese texts on social media from three different Vietnamese benchmark datasets. Advanced deep learning models are used and optimized in this study, including CNN, LSTM, and their variants. We also implement the BERT, which has never been applied to the datasets. Our experiments find a suitable model for classification tasks on each specific dataset. To take advantage of single models, we propose an ensemble model, combining the highest-performance models. Our single models reach positive results on each dataset. Moreover, our ensemble model achieves the best performance on all three datasets. We reach 86.96% of F1- score for the HSD-VLSP dataset, 65.79% of F1-score for the UIT-VSMEC dataset, 92.79% and 89.70% for sentiments and topics on the UIT-VSFC dataset, respectively. Therefore, our models achieve better performances as compared to previous studies on these datasets.

An Experimental Study of Deep Neural Network Models for Vietnamese Multiple-Choice Reading Comprehension

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a challenging task in natural language processing that makes computers understanding natural language texts and answer questions based on those texts. There are many techniques for solving this problems, and word representation is a very important technique that impact most to the accuracy of machine reading comprehension problem in the popular languages like English and Chinese. However, few studies on MRC have been conducted in low-resource languages such as Vietnamese. In this paper, we conduct several experiments on neural network-based model to understand the impact of word representation to the Vietnamese multiple-choice machine reading comprehension. Our experiments include using the Co-match model on six different Vietnamese word embeddings and the BERT model for multiple-choice reading comprehension. On the ViMMRC corpus, the accuracy of BERT model is 61.28% on test set.

New Vietnamese Corpus for Machine ReadingComprehension of Health News Articles

Although over 95 million people in the world speak the Vietnamese language, there are not any large and qualified datasets for automatic reading comprehension. In addition, machine reading comprehension for the health domain offers great potential for practical applications; however, there is still very little machine reading comprehension research in this domain. In this study, we present ViNewsQA as a new corpus for the low-resource Vietnamese language to evaluate models of machine reading comprehension. The corpus comprises 10,138 human-generated question-answer pairs. Crowdworkers created the questions and answers based on a set of over 2,030 online Vietnamese news articles from the VnExpress news website, where the answers comprised spans extracted from the corresponding articles. In particular, we developed a process of creating a corpus for the Vietnamese language. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrated that our corpus requires abilities beyond simple reasoning such as word matching, as well as demanding difficult reasoning similar to inferences based on single-or-multiple-sentence information. We conducted experiments using state-of-the-art methods for machine reading comprehension to obtain the first baseline performance measures, which will be compared with further models' performances. We measured human performance based on the corpus and compared it with several strong neural models. Our experiments showed that the best model was BERT, which achieved an exact match score of 57.57% and F1-score of 76.90% on our corpus. The significant difference between humans and the best model (F1-score of 15.93%) on the test set of our corpus indicates that improvements in ViNewsQA can be explored in future research. Our corpus is freely available on our website in order to encourage the research community to make these improvements.

Vietnamese Word Segmentation with SVM: Ambiguity Reduction and Suffix Capture

In this paper, we approach Vietnamese word segmentation as a binary classification by using the Support Vector Machine classifier. We inherit features from prior works such as n-gram of syllables, n-gram of syllable types, and checking conjunction of adjacent syllables in the dictionary. We propose two novel ways to feature extraction, one to reduce the overlap ambiguity and the other to increase the ability to predict unknown words containing suffixes. Different from UETsegmenter and RDRsegmenter, two state-of-the-art Vietnamese word segmentation methods, we do not employ the longest matching algorithm as an initial processing step or any post-processing technique. According to experimental results on benchmark Vietnamese datasets, our proposed method obtained a better F1-score than the prior state-of-the-art methods UETsegmenter, and RDRsegmenter.

UIT-ViIC: A Dataset for the First Evaluation on Vietnamese Image Captioning

Image Captioning, the task of automatic generation of image captions, has attracted attentions from researchers in many fields of computer science, being computer vision, natural language processing and machine learning in recent years. This paper contributes to research on Image Captioning task in terms of extending dataset to a different language - Vietnamese. So far, there is no existed Image Captioning dataset for Vietnamese language, so this is the foremost fundamental step for developing Vietnamese Image Captioning. In this scope, we first build a dataset which contains manually written captions for images from Microsoft COCO dataset relating to sports played with balls, we called this dataset UIT-ViIC. UIT-ViIC consists of 19,250 Vietnamese captions for 3,850 images. Following that, we evaluate our dataset on deep neural network models and do comparisons with English dataset and two Vietnamese datasets built by different methods. UIT-ViIC is published on our lab website for research purposes.