The COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on various areas of human life. Hence, the coronavirus pandemic and its consequences are being actively discussed on social media. However, not all social media posts are truthful. Many of them spread fake news that cause panic among readers, misinform people and thus exacerbate the effect of the pandemic. In this paper, we present our results at the [email protected] Shared Task: COVID-19 Fake News Detection in English. In particular, we propose our approach using the transformer-based ensemble of COVID-Twitter-BERT (CT-BERT) models. We describe the models used, the ways of text preprocessing and adding extra data. As a result, our best model achieved the weighted F1-score of 98.69 on the test set (the first place in the leaderboard) of this shared task that attracted 166 submitted teams in total.
Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) is a technique used to represent a piece of text as a vector in the space of concepts, such as Articles found in Wikipedia. We propose a methodology to incorporate knowledge of Inter-relatedness between Wikipedia Articles to the vectors obtained from ESA using a technique called Retrofitting to improve the performance of subsequent tasks that use ESA to form vector embeddings. Especially we use an undirected Graph to represent this knowledge with nodes as Articles and edges as inter relations between two Articles. Here, we also emphasize how the ESA step could be seen as a predominantly bottom-up approach using a corpus to come up with vector representations and the incorporation of top-down knowledge which is the relations between Articles to further improve it. We test our hypothesis on several smaller subsets of the Wikipedia corpus and show that our proposed methodology leads to decent improvements in performance measures including Spearman's Rank correlation coefficient in most cases.
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has shown promise in learning representations of audio that are useful for automatic speech recognition (ASR). But, training SSL models like wav2vec~2.0 requires a two-stage pipeline. In this paper we demonstrate a single-stage training of ASR models that can utilize both unlabeled and labeled data. During training, we alternately minimize two losses: an unsupervised masked Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC) loss and the supervised audio-to-text alignment loss Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC). We show that this joint training method directly optimizes performance for the downstream ASR task using unsupervised data while achieving similar word error rates to wav2vec~2.0 on the Librispeech 100-hour dataset. Finally, we postulate that solving the contrastive task is a regularization for the supervised CTC loss.
Automatic lyrics generation has received attention from both music and AI communities for years. Early rule-based approaches have~---due to increases in computational power and evolution in data-driven models---~mostly been replaced with deep-learning-based systems. Many existing approaches, however, either rely heavily on prior knowledge in music and lyrics writing or oversimplify the task by largely discarding melodic information and its relationship with the text. We propose an end-to-end melody-conditioned lyrics generation system based on Sequence Generative Adversarial Networks (SeqGAN), which generates a line of lyrics given the corresponding melody as the input. Furthermore, we investigate the performance of the generator with an additional input condition: the theme or overarching topic of the lyrics to be generated. We show that the input conditions have no negative impact on the evaluation metrics while enabling the network to produce more meaningful results.
Companies provide annual reports to their shareholders at the end of the financial year that describes their operations and financial conditions. The average length of these reports is 80, and it may extend up to 250 pages long. In this paper, we propose our methodology PoinT-5 (the combination of Pointer Network and T-5 (Test-to-text transfer Transformer) algorithms) that we used in the Financial Narrative Summarisation (FNS) 2020 task. The proposed method uses pointer networks to extract important narrative sentences from the report, and then T-5 is used to paraphrase extracted sentences into a concise yet informative sentence. We evaluate our method using ROUGE-N (1,2), L, and SU4. The proposed method achieves the highest precision scores in all the metrics and highest F1 scores in ROUGE1, and LCS and the only solution to cross the MUSE solution baseline in ROUGE-LCS metrics.
It is challenging to perform lifelong language learning (LLL) on a stream of different tasks without any performance degradation comparing to the multi-task counterparts. To address this issue, we present Lifelong Language Knowledge Distillation (L2KD), a simple but efficient method that can be easily applied to existing LLL architectures in order to mitigate the degradation. Specifically, when the LLL model is trained on a new task, we assign a teacher model to first learn the new task, and pass the knowledge to the LLL model via knowledge distillation. Therefore, the LLL model can better adapt to the new task while keeping the previously learned knowledge. Experiments show that the proposed L2KD consistently improves previous state-of-the-art models, and the degradation comparing to multi-task models in LLL tasks is well mitigated for both sequence generation and text classification tasks.
It has been demonstrated that hidden representation learned by a deep model can encode private information of the input, hence can be exploited to recover such information with reasonable accuracy. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach called Differentially Private Neural Representation (DPNR) to preserve the privacy of the extracted representation from text. DPNR utilises Differential Privacy (DP) to provide a formal privacy guarantee. Further, we show that masking words via dropout can further enhance privacy. To maintain utility of the learned representation, we integrate DP-noisy representation into a robust training process to derive a robust target model, which also helps for model fairness over various demographic variables. Experimental results on benchmark datasets under various parameter settings demonstrate that DPNR largely reduces privacy leakage without significantly sacrificing the main task performance.
In this paper we present Bardo Composer, a system to generate background music for tabletop role-playing games. Bardo Composer uses a speech recognition system to translate player speech into text, which is classified according to a model of emotion. Bardo Composer then uses Stochastic Bi-Objective Beam Search, a variant of Stochastic Beam Search that we introduce in this paper, with a neural model to generate musical pieces conveying the desired emotion. We performed a user study with 116 participants to evaluate whether people are able to correctly identify the emotion conveyed in the pieces generated by the system. In our study we used pieces generated for Call of the Wild, a Dungeons and Dragons campaign available on YouTube. Our results show that human subjects could correctly identify the emotion of the generated music pieces as accurately as they were able to identify the emotion of pieces written by humans.
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