Modern text-to-speech (TTS) systems use deep learning to synthesize speech increasingly approaching human quality, but they require a database of high quality audio-text sentence pairs for training. Malayalam, the official language of the Indian state of Kerala and spoken by 35+ million people, is a low resource language in terms of available corpora for TTS systems. In this paper, we present IMaSC, a Malayalam text and speech corpora containing approximately 50 hours of recorded speech. With 8 speakers and a total of 34,473 text-audio pairs, IMaSC is larger than every other publicly available alternative. We evaluated the database by using it to train TTS models for each speaker based on a modern deep learning architecture. Via subjective evaluation, we show that our models perform significantly better in terms of naturalness compared to previous studies and publicly available models, with an average mean opinion score of 4.50, indicating that the synthesized speech is close to human quality.
Video-text retrieval has been a crucial and fundamental task in multi-modal research. The development of video-text retrieval has been considerably promoted by large-scale multi-modal contrastive pre-training, which primarily focuses on coarse-grained or fine-grained contrast. However, cross-grained contrast, which is the contrast between coarse-grained representations and fine-grained representations, has rarely been explored in prior research. Compared with fine-grained or coarse-grained contrasts, cross-grained contrast calculate the correlation between coarse-grained features and each fine-grained feature, and is able to filter out the unnecessary fine-grained features guided by the coarse-grained feature during similarity calculation, thus improving the accuracy of retrieval. To this end, this paper presents a novel multi-grained contrastive model, namely X-CLIP, for video-text retrieval. However, another challenge lies in the similarity aggregation problem, which aims to aggregate fine-grained and cross-grained similarity matrices to instance-level similarity. To address this challenge, we propose the Attention Over Similarity Matrix (AOSM) module to make the model focus on the contrast between essential frames and words, thus lowering the impact of unnecessary frames and words on retrieval results. With multi-grained contrast and the proposed AOSM module, X-CLIP achieves outstanding performance on five widely-used video-text retrieval datasets, including MSR-VTT (49.3 R@1), MSVD (50.4 R@1), LSMDC (26.1 R@1), DiDeMo (47.8 R@1) and ActivityNet (46.2 R@1). It outperforms the previous state-of-theart by +6.3%, +6.6%, +11.1%, +6.7%, +3.8% relative improvements on these benchmarks, demonstrating the superiority of multi-grained contrast and AOSM.
The simplest way to obtain continuous interpolation between two points in high dimensional space is to draw a line between them. While previous works focused on the general connectivity between model parameters, we explored linear interpolation for parameters of pre-trained models after fine-tuning. Surprisingly, we could perform linear interpolation without a performance drop in intermediate points for fine-tuned models. For controllable text generation, such interpolation could be seen as moving a model towards or against the desired text attribute (e.g., positive sentiment), which could be used as grounds for further methods for controllable text generation without inference speed overhead.
Prompt-based or in-context learning has achieved high zero-shot performance on many natural language generation (NLG) tasks. Here we explore the performance of prompt-based learning for simultaneously controlling the personality and the semantic accuracy of an NLG for task-oriented dialogue. We experiment with prompt-based learning on the PERSONAGE restaurant recommendation corpus to generate semantically and stylistically-controlled text for 5 different Big-5 personality types: agreeable, disagreeable, conscientious, unconscientious, and extravert. We test two different classes of discrete prompts to generate utterances for a particular personality style: (1) prompts that demonstrate generating directly from a meaning representation that includes a personality specification; and (2) prompts that rely on first converting the meaning representation to a textual pseudo-reference, and then using the pseudo-reference in a textual style transfer (TST) prompt. In each case, we show that we can vastly improve performance by over-generating outputs and ranking them, testing several ranking functions based on automatic metrics for semantic accuracy, personality-match, and fluency. We also test whether NLG personality demonstrations from the restaurant domain can be used with meaning representations for the video game domain to generate personality stylized utterances about video games. Our findings show that the TST prompts produces the highest semantic accuracy (78.46% for restaurants and 87.6% for video games) and personality accuracy (100% for restaurants and 97% for video games). Our results on transferring personality style to video game utterances are surprisingly good. To our knowledge, there is no previous work testing the application of prompt-based learning to simultaneously controlling both style and semantic accuracy in NLG.
As global digitization continues to grow, technology becomes more affordable and easier to use, and social media platforms thrive, becoming the new means of spreading information and news. Communities are built around sharing and discussing current events. Within these communities, users are enabled to share their opinions about each event. Using Sentiment Analysis to understand the polarity of each message belonging to an event, as well as the entire event, can help to better understand the general and individual feelings of significant trends and the dynamics on online social networks. In this context, we propose a new ensemble architecture, EDSA-Ensemble (Event Detection Sentiment Analysis Ensemble), that uses Event Detection and Sentiment Analysis to improve the detection of the polarity for current events from Social Media. For Event Detection, we use techniques based on Information Diffusion taking into account both the time span and the topics. To detect the polarity of each event, we preprocess the text and employ several Machine and Deep Learning models to create an ensemble model. The preprocessing step includes several word representation models, i.e., raw frequency, TFIDF, Word2Vec, and Transformers. The proposed EDSA-Ensemble architecture improves the event sentiment classification over the individual Machine and Deep Learning models.
Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is information describing threat vectors, vulnerabilities, and attacks and is often used as training data for AI-based cyber defense systems such as Cybersecurity Knowledge Graphs (CKG). There is a strong need to develop community-accessible datasets to train existing AI-based cybersecurity pipelines to efficiently and accurately extract meaningful insights from CTI. We have created an initial unstructured CTI corpus from a variety of open sources that we are using to train and test cybersecurity entity models using the spaCy framework and exploring self-learning methods to automatically recognize cybersecurity entities. We also describe methods to apply cybersecurity domain entity linking with existing world knowledge from Wikidata. Our future work will survey and test spaCy NLP tools and create methods for continuous integration of new information extracted from text.
Clause recommendation is the problem of recommending a clause to a legal contract, given the context of the contract in question and the clause type to which the clause should belong. With not much prior work being done toward the generation of legal contracts, this problem was proposed as a first step toward the bigger problem of contract generation. As an open-ended text generation problem, the distinguishing characteristics of this problem lie in the nature of legal language as a sublanguage and the considerable similarity of textual content within the clauses of a specific type. This similarity aspect in legal clauses drives us to investigate the importance of similar contracts' representation for recommending clauses. In our work, we experiment with generating clauses for 15 commonly occurring clause types in contracts expanding upon the previous work on this problem and analyzing clause recommendations in varying settings using information derived from similar contracts.
With the development of machine learning, datasets for models are getting increasingly larger. This leads to increased data annotation costs and training time, which undoubtedly hinders the development of machine learning. To solve this problem, zero-shot learning is gaining considerable attention. With zero-shot learning, objects can be recognized or classified, even without having been seen before. Nevertheless, the accuracy of this method is still low, thus limiting its practical application. To solve this problem, we propose a video-text matching model, which can learn from handcrafted features. Our model can be used alone to predict the action classes and can also be added to any other model to improve its accuracy. Moreover, our model can be continuously optimized to improve its accuracy. We only need to manually annotate some features, which incurs some labor costs; in many situations, the costs are worth it. The results with UCF101 and HMDB51 show that our model achieves the best accuracy and also improves the accuracies of other models.
Precise localization is critical for autonomous vehicles. We present a self-supervised learning method that employs Transformers for the first time for the task of outdoor localization using LiDAR data. We propose a pre-text task that reorganizes the slices of a $360^\circ$ LiDAR scan to leverage its axial properties. Our model, called Slice Transformer, employs multi-head attention while systematically processing the slices. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first instance of leveraging multi-head attention for outdoor point clouds. We additionally introduce the Perth-WA dataset, which provides a large-scale LiDAR map of Perth city in Western Australia, covering $\sim$4km$^2$ area. Localization annotations are provided for Perth-WA. The proposed localization method is thoroughly evaluated on Perth-WA and Appollo-SouthBay datasets. We also establish the efficacy of our self-supervised learning approach for the common downstream task of object classification using ModelNet40 and ScanNN datasets. The code and Perth-WA data will be publicly released.
Video-language pre-training has advanced the performance of various downstream video-language tasks. However, most previous methods directly inherit or adapt typical image-language pre-training paradigms to video-language pre-training, thus not fully exploiting the unique characteristic of video, i.e., temporal. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Temporal-Aware video-language pre-training framework, HiTeA, with two novel pre-training tasks for modeling cross-modal alignment between moments and texts as well as the temporal relations of video-text pairs. Specifically, we propose a cross-modal moment exploration task to explore moments in videos, which results in detailed video moment representation. Besides, the inherent temporal relations are captured by aligning video-text pairs as a whole in different time resolutions with multi-modal temporal relation exploration task. Furthermore, we introduce the shuffling test to evaluate the temporal reliance of datasets and video-language pre-training models. We achieve state-of-the-art results on 15 well-established video-language understanding and generation tasks, especially on temporal-oriented datasets (e.g., SSv2-Template and SSv2-Label) with 8.6% and 11.1% improvement respectively. HiTeA also demonstrates strong generalization ability when directly transferred to downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner. Models and demo will be available on ModelScope.