Recent progress in deep learning has led to the development of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems which perform remarkably well. Most research has been around recurrent networks as well as complex gated layers which make the overall solution complex and difficult to scale. In this paper, we present an Efficient And Scalable TExt Recognizer (EASTER) to perform optical character recognition on both machine printed and handwritten text. Our model utilises 1-D convolutional layers without any recurrence which enables parallel training with considerably less volume of data. We experimented with multiple variations of our architecture and one of the smallest variant (depth and number of parameter wise) performs comparably to RNN based complex choices. Our 20-layered deepest variant outperforms RNN architectures with a good margin on benchmarking datasets like IIIT-5k and SVT. We also showcase improvements over the current best results on offline handwritten text recognition task. We also present data generation pipelines with augmentation setup to generate synthetic datasets for both handwritten and machine printed text.
In recent years, thanks to breakthroughs in neural network techniques especially attentive deep learning models, natural language processing has made many impressive achievements. However, automated legal word processing is still a difficult branch of natural language processing. Legal sentences are often long and contain complicated legal terminologies. Hence, models that work well on general documents still face challenges in dealing with legal documents. We have verified the existence of this problem with our experiments in this work. In this dissertation, we selectively present the main achievements in improving attentive neural networks in automatic legal document processing. Language models tend to grow larger and larger, though, without expert knowledge, these models can still fail in domain adaptation, especially for specialized fields like law.
We study the problem of building text classifiers with little or no training data, commonly known as zero and few-shot text classification. In recent years, an approach based on neural textual entailment models has been found to give strong results on a diverse range of tasks. In this work, we show that with proper pre-training, Siamese Networks that embed texts and labels offer a competitive alternative. These models allow for a large reduction in inference cost: constant in the number of labels rather than linear. Furthermore, we introduce label tuning, a simple and computationally efficient approach that allows to adapt the models in a few-shot setup by only changing the label embeddings. While giving lower performance than model fine-tuning, this approach has the architectural advantage that a single encoder can be shared by many different tasks.
At present, multi-oriented text detection methods based on deep neural network have achieved promising performances on various benchmarks. Nevertheless, there are still some difficulties for arbitrary shape text detection, especially for a simple and proper representation of arbitrary shape text instances. In this paper, a pixel-based text detector is proposed to facilitate the representation and prediction of text instances with arbitrary shapes in a simple manner. Firstly, to alleviate the effect of the target vertex sorting and achieve the direct regression of arbitrary shape text instances, the starting-point-independent coordinates regression loss is proposed. Furthermore, to predict more accurate text instances, the text instance accuracy loss is proposed as an assistant task to refine the predicted coordinates under the guidance of IoU. To evaluate the effectiveness of our detector, extensive experiments have been carried on public benchmarks. On the ICDAR 2015 Incidental Scene Text benchmark, our method achieves 86.5% of F-measure, and we obtain 84.8% of F-measure on Total-Text benchmark. The results show that our method can reach state-of-the-art performance.
Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have become a popular approach to conditional generation, due to their promising results and support for cross-modal synthesis. A key desideratum in conditional synthesis is to achieve high correspondence between the conditioning input and generated output. Most existing methods learn such relationships implicitly, by incorporating the prior into the variational lower bound. In this work, we take a different route -- we enhance input-output connections by maximizing their mutual information using contrastive learning. To this end, we introduce a Conditional Discrete Contrastive Diffusion (CDCD) loss and design two contrastive diffusion mechanisms to effectively incorporate it into the denoising process. We formulate CDCD by connecting it with the conventional variational objectives. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in evaluations with three diverse, multimodal conditional synthesis tasks: dance-to-music generation, text-to-image synthesis, and class-conditioned image synthesis. On each, we achieve state-of-the-art or higher synthesis quality and improve the input-output correspondence. Furthermore, the proposed approach improves the convergence of diffusion models, reducing the number of required diffusion steps by more than 35% on two benchmarks, significantly increasing the inference speed.
This datasheet describes the Pile, a 825 GiB dataset of human-authored text compiled by EleutherAI for use in large-scale language modeling. The Pile is comprised of 22 different text sources, ranging from original scrapes done for this project, to text data made available by the data owners, to third-party scrapes available online.
We present a novel approach incorporating transformer-based language models into infectious disease modelling. Text-derived features are quantified by tracking high-density clusters of sentence-level representations of Reddit posts within specific US states' COVID-19 subreddits. We benchmark these clustered embedding features against features extracted from other high-quality datasets. In a threshold-classification task, we show that they outperform all other feature types at predicting upward trend signals, a significant result for infectious disease modelling in areas where epidemiological data is unreliable. Subsequently, in a time-series forecasting task we fully utilise the predictive power of the caseload and compare the relative strengths of using different supplementary datasets as covariate feature sets in a transformer-based time-series model.
Pre-trained large language models have shown successful progress in many language understanding benchmarks. This work explores the capability of these models to predict actionable plans in real-world environments. Given a text instruction, we show that language priors encoded in pre-trained language models allow us to infer fine-grained subgoal sequences. In contrast to recent methods which make strong assumptions about subgoal supervision, our experiments show that language models can infer detailed subgoal sequences from few training sequences without any fine-tuning. We further propose a simple strategy to re-rank language model predictions based on interaction and feedback from the environment. Combined with pre-trained navigation and visual reasoning components, our approach demonstrates competitive performance on subgoal prediction and task completion in the ALFRED benchmark compared to prior methods that assume more subgoal supervision.
End-to-end automatic speech recognition suffers from adaptation to unknown target domain speech despite being trained with a large amount of paired audio--text data. Recent studies estimate a linguistic bias of the model as the internal language model (LM). To effectively adapt to the target domain, the internal LM is subtracted from the posterior during inference and fused with an external target-domain LM. However, this fusion complicates the inference and the estimation of the internal LM may not always be accurate. In this paper, we propose a simple external LM fusion method for domain adaptation, which considers the internal LM estimation in its training. We directly model the residual factor of the external and internal LMs, namely the residual LM. To stably train the residual LM, we propose smoothing the estimated internal LM and optimizing it with a combination of cross-entropy and mean-squared-error losses, which consider the statistical behaviors of the internal LM in the target domain data. We experimentally confirmed that the proposed residual LM performs better than the internal LM estimation in most of the cross-domain and intra-domain scenarios.
Extracting biographical information from online documents is a popular research topic among the information extraction (IE) community. Various natural language processing (NLP) techniques such as text classification, text summarisation and relation extraction are commonly used to achieve this. Among these techniques, RE is the most common since it can be directly used to build biographical knowledge graphs. RE is usually framed as a supervised machine learning (ML) problem, where ML models are trained on annotated datasets. However, there are few annotated datasets for RE since the annotation process can be costly and time-consuming. To address this, we developed Biographical, the first semi-supervised dataset for RE. The dataset, which is aimed towards digital humanities (DH) and historical research, is automatically compiled by aligning sentences from Wikipedia articles with matching structured data from sources including Pantheon and Wikidata. By exploiting the structure of Wikipedia articles and robust named entity recognition (NER), we match information with relatively high precision in order to compile annotated relation pairs for ten different relations that are important in the DH domain. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the dataset by training a state-of-the-art neural model to classify relation pairs, and evaluate it on a manually annotated gold standard set. Biographical is primarily aimed at training neural models for RE within the domain of digital humanities and history, but as we discuss at the end of this paper, it can be useful for other purposes as well.