Creating a Hybrid Rule and Neural Network Based Semantic Tagger using Silver Standard Data: the PyMUSAS framework for Multilingual Semantic Annotation

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) has been widely evaluated using the semantic frameworks of WordNet, BabelNet, and the Oxford Dictionary of English. However, for the UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS) framework, no open extensive evaluation has been performed beyond lexical coverage or single language evaluation. In this work, we perform the largest semantic tagging evaluation of the rule based system that uses the lexical resources in the USAS framework covering five different languages using four existing datasets and one novel Chinese dataset. We create a new silver labelled English dataset, to overcome the lack of manually tagged training data, that we train and evaluate various mono and multilingual neural models in both mono and cross-lingual evaluation setups with comparisons to their rule based counterparts, and show how a rule based system can be enhanced with a neural network model. The resulting neural network models, including the data they were trained on, the Chinese evaluation dataset, and all of the code have been released as open resources.

Disentangled Generation Network for Enlarged License Plate Recognition and A Unified Dataset

License plate recognition plays a critical role in many practical applications, but license plates of large vehicles are difficult to be recognized due to the factors of low resolution, contamination, low illumination, and occlusion, to name a few. To overcome the above factors, the transportation management department generally introduces the enlarged license plate behind the rear of a vehicle. However, enlarged license plates have high diversity as they are non-standard in position, size, and style. Furthermore, the background regions contain a variety of noisy information which greatly disturbs the recognition of license plate characters. Existing works have not studied this challenging problem. In this work, we first address the enlarged license plate recognition problem and contribute a dataset containing 9342 images, which cover most of the challenges of real scenes. However, the created data are still insufficient to train deep methods of enlarged license plate recognition, and building large-scale training data is very time-consuming and high labor cost. To handle this problem, we propose a novel task-level disentanglement generation framework based on the Disentangled Generation Network (DGNet), which disentangles the generation into the text generation and background generation in an end-to-end manner to effectively ensure diversity and integrity, for robust enlarged license plate recognition. Extensive experiments on the created dataset are conducted, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in three representative text recognition frameworks.