With the advent of generative adversarial networks, synthesizing images from textual descriptions has recently become an active research area. It is a flexible and intuitive way for conditional image generation with significant progress in the last years regarding visual realism, diversity, and semantic alignment. However, the field still faces several challenges that require further research efforts such as enabling the generation of high-resolution images with multiple objects, and developing suitable and reliable evaluation metrics that correlate with human judgement. In this review, we contextualize the state of the art of adversarial text-to-image synthesis models, their development since their inception five years ago, and propose a taxonomy based on the level of supervision. We critically examine current strategies to evaluate text-to-image synthesis models, highlight shortcomings, and identify new areas of research, ranging from the development of better datasets and evaluation metrics to possible improvements in architectural design and model training. This review complements previous surveys on generative adversarial networks with a focus on text-to-image synthesis which we believe will help researchers to further advance the field.
Finding word boundaries in continuous speech is challenging as there is little or no equivalent of a 'space' delimiter between words. Popular Bayesian non-parametric models for text segmentation use a Dirichlet process to jointly segment sentences and build a lexicon of word types. We introduce DP-Parse, which uses similar principles but only relies on an instance lexicon of word tokens, avoiding the clustering errors that arise with a lexicon of word types. On the Zero Resource Speech Benchmark 2017, our model sets a new speech segmentation state-of-the-art in 5 languages. The algorithm monotonically improves with better input representations, achieving yet higher scores when fed with weakly supervised inputs. Despite lacking a type lexicon, DP-Parse can be pipelined to a language model and learn semantic and syntactic representations as assessed by a new spoken word embedding benchmark.
Causal relationships form the basis for reasoning and decision-making in Artificial Intelligence systems. To exploit the large volume of textual data available today, the automatic discovery of causal relationships from text has emerged as a significant challenge in recent years. Existing approaches in this realm are limited to the extraction of low-level relations among individual events. To overcome the limitations of the existing approaches, in this paper, we propose a method for automatic inference of causal relationships from human written language at conceptual level. To this end, we leverage the characteristics of hierarchy of concepts and linguistic variables created from text, and represent the extracted causal relationships in the form of a Causal Bayesian Network. Our experiments demonstrate superiority of our approach over the existing approaches in inferring complex causal reasoning from the text.
Accurate and explainable health event predictions are becoming crucial for healthcare providers to develop care plans for patients. The availability of electronic health records (EHR) has enabled machine learning advances in providing these predictions. However, many deep learning based methods are not satisfactory in solving several key challenges: 1) effectively utilizing disease domain knowledge; 2) collaboratively learning representations of patients and diseases; and 3) incorporating unstructured text. To address these issues, we propose a collaborative graph learning model to explore patient-disease interactions and medical domain knowledge. Our solution is able to capture structural features of both patients and diseases. The proposed model also utilizes unstructured text data by employing an attention regulation strategy and then integrates attentive text features into a sequential learning process. We conduct extensive experiments on two important healthcare problems to show the competitive prediction performance of the proposed method compared with various state-of-the-art models. We also confirm the effectiveness of learned representations and model interpretability by a set of ablation and case studies.
Vision-and-Language (V+L) pre-training models have achieved tremendous success in recent years on various multi-modal benchmarks. However, the majority of existing models require pre-training on a large set of parallel image-text data, which is costly to collect, compared to image-only or text-only data. In this paper, we explore unsupervised Vision-and-Language pre-training (UVLP) to learn the cross-modal representation from non-parallel image and text datasets. We found two key factors that lead to good unsupervised V+L pre-training without parallel data: (i) joint image-and-text input (ii) overall image-text alignment (even for non-parallel data). Accordingly, we propose a novel unsupervised V+L pre-training curriculum for non-parallel texts and images. We first construct a weakly aligned image-text corpus via a retrieval-based approach, then apply a set of multi-granular alignment pre-training tasks, including region-to-tag, region-to-phrase, and image-to-sentence alignment, to bridge the gap between the two modalities. A comprehensive ablation study shows each granularity is helpful to learn a stronger pre-trained model. We adapt our pre-trained model to a set of V+L downstream tasks, including VQA, NLVR2, Visual Entailment, and RefCOCO+. Our model achieves the state-of-art performance in all these tasks under the unsupervised setting.
We propose SpeechPainter, a model for filling in gaps of up to one second in speech samples by leveraging an auxiliary textual input. We demonstrate that the model performs speech inpainting with the appropriate content, while maintaining speaker identity, prosody and recording environment conditions, and generalizing to unseen speakers. Our approach significantly outperforms baselines constructed using adaptive TTS, as judged by human raters in side-by-side preference and MOS tests.
Scientific extreme summarization (TLDR) aims to form ultra-short summaries of scientific papers. Previous efforts on curating scientific TLDR datasets failed to scale up due to the heavy human annotation and domain expertise required. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach to automatically extracting TLDR summaries for scientific papers from their citation texts. Based on the proposed approach, we create a new benchmark CiteSum without human annotation, which is around 30 times larger than the previous human-curated dataset SciTLDR. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of CiteSum, examining its data characteristics and establishing strong baselines. We further demonstrate the usefulness of CiteSum by adapting models pre-trained on CiteSum (named CITES) to new tasks and domains with limited supervision. For scientific extreme summarization, CITES outperforms most fully-supervised methods on SciTLDR without any fine-tuning and obtains state-of-the-art results with only 128 examples. For news extreme summarization, CITES achieves significant gains on XSum over its base model (not pre-trained on CiteSum), e.g., +7.2 ROUGE-1 zero-shot performance and state-of-the-art few-shot performance. For news headline generation, CITES performs the best among unsupervised and zero-shot methods on Gigaword.
End-to-end (E2E) models are becoming increasingly popular for spoken language understanding (SLU) systems and are beginning to achieve competitive performance to pipeline-based approaches. However, recent work has shown that these models struggle to generalize to new phrasings for the same intent indicating that models cannot understand the semantic content of the given utterance. In this work, we incorporated language models pre-trained on unlabeled text data inside E2E-SLU frameworks to build strong semantic representations. Incorporating both semantic and acoustic information can increase the inference time, leading to high latency when deployed for applications like voice assistants. We developed a 2-pass SLU system that makes low latency prediction using acoustic information from the few seconds of the audio in the first pass and makes higher quality prediction in the second pass by combining semantic and acoustic representations. We take inspiration from prior work on 2-pass end-to-end speech recognition systems that attends on both audio and first-pass hypothesis using a deliberation network. The proposed 2-pass SLU system outperforms the acoustic-based SLU model on the Fluent Speech Commands Challenge Set and SLURP dataset and reduces latency, thus improving user experience. Our code and models are publicly available as part of the ESPnet-SLU toolkit.
Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is crucial in facilitating preventive care and delay progression. Speech based automatic AD screening systems provide a non-intrusive and more scalable alternative to other clinical screening techniques. Scarcity of such specialist data leads to uncertainty in both model selection and feature learning when developing such systems. To this end, this paper investigates the use of feature and model combination approaches to improve the robustness of domain fine-tuning of BERT and Roberta pre-trained text encoders on limited data, before the resulting embedding features being fed into an ensemble of backend classifiers to produce the final AD detection decision via majority voting. Experiments conducted on the ADReSS20 Challenge dataset suggest consistent performance improvements were obtained using model and feature combination in system development. State-of-the-art AD detection accuracies of 91.67 percent and 93.75 percent were obtained using manual and ASR speech transcripts respectively on the ADReSS20 test set consisting of 48 elderly speakers.
Training speech translation (ST) models requires large and high-quality datasets. MuST-C is one of the most widely used ST benchmark datasets. It contains around 400 hours of speech-transcript-translation data for each of the eight translation directions. This dataset passes several quality-control filters during creation. However, we find that MuST-C still suffers from three major quality issues: audio-text misalignment, inaccurate translation, and unnecessary speaker's name. What are the impacts of these data quality issues for model development and evaluation? In this paper, we propose an automatic method to fix or filter the above quality issues, using English-German (En-De) translation as an example. Our experiments show that ST models perform better on clean test sets, and the rank of proposed models remains consistent across different test sets. Besides, simply removing misaligned data points from the training set does not lead to a better ST model.