In the recent years end to end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have achieved promising results given sufficient resources. Even for languages where not a lot of labelled data is available, state of the art E2E ASR systems can be developed by pretraining on huge amounts of high resource languages and finetune on low resource languages. For a lot of low resource languages the current approaches are still challenging, since in many cases labelled data is not available in open domain. In this paper we present an approach to create labelled data for Maithili, Bhojpuri and Dogri by utilising pseudo labels from text to speech for forced alignment. The created data was inspected for quality and then further used to train a transformer based wav2vec 2.0 ASR model. All data and models are available in open domain.
Vision-language (VL) pre-training has recently received considerable attention. However, most existing end-to-end pre-training approaches either only aim to tackle VL tasks such as image-text retrieval, visual question answering (VQA) and image captioning that test high-level understanding of images, or only target region-level understanding for tasks such as phrase grounding and object detection. We present FIBER (Fusion-In-the-Backbone-based transformER), a new VL model architecture that can seamlessly handle both these types of tasks. Instead of having dedicated transformer layers for fusion after the uni-modal backbones, FIBER pushes multimodal fusion deep into the model by inserting cross-attention into the image and text backbones, bringing gains in terms of memory and performance. In addition, unlike previous work that is either only pre-trained on image-text data or on fine-grained data with box-level annotations, we present a two-stage pre-training strategy that uses both these kinds of data efficiently: (i) coarse-grained pre-training based on image-text data; followed by (ii) fine-grained pre-training based on image-text-box data. We conduct comprehensive experiments on a wide range of VL tasks, ranging from VQA, image captioning, and retrieval, to phrase grounding, referring expression comprehension, and object detection. Using deep multimodal fusion coupled with the two-stage pre-training, FIBER provides consistent performance improvements over strong baselines across all tasks, often outperforming methods using magnitudes more data. Code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/FIBER.
Recently has there been a growing interest in the creation of text generation systems from a discourse coherence perspective, e.g., modeling the interdependence between sentences. Still, recent BERT-based evaluation metrics cannot recognize coherence and fail to punish incoherent elements in system outputs. In this work, we introduce DiscoScore, a discourse metric with multiple variants, which uses BERT to model discourse coherence from different perspectives, driven by Centering theory. Our experiments encompass 16 non-discourse and discourse metrics, including DiscoScore and popular coherence models, evaluated on summarization and document-level machine translation (MT). We find that (i) the majority of BERT-based metrics correlate much worse with human rated coherence than early discourse metrics, invented a decade ago; (ii) the recent state-of-the-art BARTScore is weak when operated at system level -- which is particularly problematic as systems are typically compared in this manner. DiscoScore, in contrast, achieves strong system-level correlation with human ratings, not only in coherence but also in factual consistency and other aspects, and surpasses BARTScore by over 10 correlation points on average. Further, aiming to understand DiscoScore, we provide justifications to the importance of discourse coherence for evaluation metrics, and explain the superiority of one variant over another. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/AIPHES/DiscoScore}.
We present CLIP-NeRF, a multi-modal 3D object manipulation method for neural radiance fields (NeRF). By leveraging the joint language-image embedding space of the recent Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model, we propose a unified framework that allows manipulating NeRF in a user-friendly way, using either a short text prompt or an exemplar image. Specifically, to combine the novel view synthesis capability of NeRF and the controllable manipulation ability of latent representations from generative models, we introduce a disentangled conditional NeRF architecture that allows individual control over both shape and appearance. This is achieved by performing the shape conditioning via applying a learned deformation field to the positional encoding and deferring color conditioning to the volumetric rendering stage. To bridge this disentangled latent representation to the CLIP embedding, we design two code mappers that take a CLIP embedding as input and update the latent codes to reflect the targeted editing. The mappers are trained with a CLIP-based matching loss to ensure the manipulation accuracy. Furthermore, we propose an inverse optimization method that accurately projects an input image to the latent codes for manipulation to enable editing on real images. We evaluate our approach by extensive experiments on a variety of text prompts and exemplar images and also provide an intuitive interface for interactive editing. Our implementation is available at https://cassiepython.github.io/clipnerf/
The meaningful use of electronic health records (EHR) continues to progress in the digital era with clinical decision support systems augmented by artificial intelligence. A priority in improving provider experience is to overcome information overload and reduce the cognitive burden so fewer medical errors and cognitive biases are introduced during patient care. One major type of medical error is diagnostic error due to systematic or predictable errors in judgment that rely on heuristics. The potential for clinical natural language processing (cNLP) to model diagnostic reasoning in humans with forward reasoning from data to diagnosis and potentially reduce the cognitive burden and medical error has not been investigated. Existing tasks to advance the science in cNLP have largely focused on information extraction and named entity recognition through classification tasks. We introduce a novel suite of tasks coined as Diagnostic Reasoning Benchmarks, DR.BENCH, as a new benchmark for developing and evaluating cNLP models with clinical diagnostic reasoning ability. The suite includes six tasks from ten publicly available datasets addressing clinical text understanding, medical knowledge reasoning, and diagnosis generation. DR.BENCH is the first clinical suite of tasks designed to be a natural language generation framework to evaluate pre-trained language models. Experiments with state-of-the-art pre-trained generative language models using large general domain models and models that were continually trained on a medical corpus demonstrate opportunities for improvement when evaluated in DR. BENCH. We share DR. BENCH as a publicly available GitLab repository with a systematic approach to load and evaluate models for the cNLP community.
The task of Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) is aiming to detect and correct spelling errors that can be found in the text. While manually annotating a high-quality dataset is expensive and time-consuming, thus the scale of the training dataset is usually very small (e.g., SIGHAN15 only contains 2339 samples for training), therefore supervised-learning based models usually suffer the data sparsity limitation and over-fitting issue, especially in the era of big language models. In this paper, we are dedicated to investigating the \textbf{unsupervised} paradigm to address the CSC problem and we propose a framework named \textbf{uChecker} to conduct unsupervised spelling error detection and correction. Masked pretrained language models such as BERT are introduced as the backbone model considering their powerful language diagnosis capability. Benefiting from the various and flexible MASKing operations, we propose a Confusionset-guided masking strategy to fine-train the masked language model to further improve the performance of unsupervised detection and correction. Experimental results on standard datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model uChecker in terms of character-level and sentence-level Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1-Measure on tasks of spelling error detection and correction respectively.
Contrastive Language-Image pre-training (CLIP) learns rich representations via readily available supervisions of natural language. It could improve general performance on downstream vision tasks, including but not limited to zero-shot, long tail, segmentation, retrieval, caption and video. However, to the best of our knowledge, the visual interpretability of CLIP has not been studied yet. To provide visual explanations of its predictions, we propose the Image-Text Similarity Map (ITSM). Based on it, we surprisingly find that CLIP prefers the background regions than the foregrounds, and presenting erroneous visualization against human understanding. Experimentally, we find the devil is in the pooling part, where inappropriate pooling methods lead to a phenomenon called semantic shift. To correct and boost the visualization results, we propose the Masked Max Pooling, with attention map from the self-supervised image encoder. Meanwhile, interpretability task and recognition task require different representations. To address the problem, we propose the dual projections to cater this requirement. We integrate above methods as Interpretable Contrastive Language-Image pre-training (ICLIP). And experiments suggest ICLIP greatly improves the interpretability. For example, the nontrivial improvements are $32.85\%$ and $49.10\%$, respectively, on VOC 2012 dataset.
Leveraging quantum effects in metrology such as entanglement and coherence allows one to measure parameters with enhanced sensitivity. However, time-dependent noise can disrupt such Heisenberg-limited amplification. We propose a quantum-metrology method based on the quantum-signal-processing framework to overcome these realistic noise-induced limitations in practical quantum metrology. Our algorithm separates the gate parameter $\varphi$~(single-qubit Z phase) that is susceptible to time-dependent error from the target gate parameter $\theta$~(swap-angle between |10> and |01> states) that is largely free of time-dependent error. Our method achieves an accuracy of $10^{-4}$ radians in standard deviation for learning $\theta$ in superconducting-qubit experiments, outperforming existing alternative schemes by two orders of magnitude. We also demonstrate the increased robustness in learning time-dependent gate parameters through fast Fourier transformation and sequential phase difference. We show both theoretically and numerically that there is an interesting transition of the optimal metrology variance scaling as a function of circuit depth $d$ from the pre-asymptotic regime $d \ll 1/\theta$ to Heisenberg limit $d \to \infty$. Remarkably, in the pre-asymptotic regime our method's estimation variance on time-sensitive parameter $\varphi$ scales faster than the asymptotic Heisenberg limit as a function of depth, $\text{Var}(\hat{\varphi})\approx 1/d^4$. Our work is the first quantum-signal-processing algorithm that demonstrates practical application in laboratory quantum computers.
This study presents our approach on the automatic Vietnamese image captioning for healthcare domain in text processing tasks of Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP) Challenge 2021, as shown in Figure 1. In recent years, image captioning often employs a convolutional neural network-based architecture as an encoder and a long short-term memory (LSTM) as a decoder to generate sentences. These models perform remarkably well in different datasets. Our proposed model also has an encoder and a decoder, but we instead use a Swin Transformer in the encoder, and a LSTM combined with an attention module in the decoder. The study presents our training experiments and techniques used during the competition. Our model achieves a BLEU4 score of 0.293 on the vietCap4H dataset, and the score is ranked the 3$^{rd}$ place on the private leaderboard. Our code can be found at \url{https://git.io/JDdJm}.
Large pre-trained language models have repeatedly shown their ability to produce fluent text. Yet even when starting from a prompt, generation can continue in many plausible directions. Current decoding methods with the goal of controlling generation, e.g., to ensure specific words are included, either require additional models or fine-tuning, or work poorly when the task at hand is semantically unconstrained, e.g., story generation. In this work, we present a plug-and-play decoding method for controlled language generation that is so simple and intuitive, it can be described in a single sentence: given a topic or keyword, we add a shift to the probability distribution over our vocabulary towards semantically similar words. We show how annealing this distribution can be used to impose hard constraints on language generation, something no other plug-and-play method is currently able to do with SOTA language generators. Despite the simplicity of this approach, we see it works incredibly well in practice: decoding from GPT-2 leads to diverse and fluent sentences while guaranteeing the appearance of given guide words. We perform two user studies, revealing that (1) our method outperforms competing methods in human evaluations; and (2) forcing the guide words to appear in the generated text has no impact on the fluency of the generated text.