Recognition of Arabic-like scripts such as Persian and Urdu is more challenging than Latin-based scripts. This is due to the presence of a two-dimensional structure, context-dependent character shapes, spaces and overlaps, and placement of diacritics. Not much research exists for offline handwritten Urdu script which is the 10th most spoken language in the world. We present an attention based encoder-decoder model that learns to read Urdu in context. A novel localization penalty is introduced to encourage the model to attend only one location at a time when recognizing the next character. In addition, we comprehensively refine the only complete and publicly available handwritten Urdu dataset in terms of ground-truth annotations. We evaluate the model on both Urdu and Arabic datasets and show that contextual attention localization outperforms both simple attention and multi-directional LSTM models.
In this paper, we introduce a model-based omnifont Persian OCR system. The system uses a set of 8 primitive elements as structural features for recognition. First, the scanned document is preprocessed. After normalizing the preprocessed image, text rows and sub-words are separated and then thinned. After recognition of dots in sub-words, strokes are extracted and primitive elements of each sub-word are recognized using the strokes. Finally, the primitives are compared with a predefined set of character identification vectors in order to identify sub-word characters. The separation and recognition steps of the system are concurrent, eliminating unavoidable errors of independent separation of letters. The system has been tested on documents with 14 standard Persian fonts in 6 sizes. The achieved precision is 97.06%.
How can we better organize code in computational notebooks? Notebooks have become a popular tool among data scientists, as they seamlessly weave text and code together, supporting users to rapidly iterate and document code experiments. However, it is often challenging to organize code in notebooks, partially because there is a mismatch between the linear presentation of code and the non-linear process of exploratory data analysis. We present StickyLand, a notebook extension for empowering users to freely organize their code in non-linear ways. With sticky cells that are always shown on the screen, users can quickly access their notes, instantly observe experiment results, and easily build interactive dashboards that support complex visual analytics. Case studies highlight how our tool can enhance notebook users's productivity and identify opportunities for future notebook designs. StickyLand is available at https://github.com/xiaohk/stickyland.
For management, documents are categorized into a specific category, and to do these, most of the organizations use manual labor. In today's automation era, manual efforts on such a task are not justified, and to avoid this, we have so many software out there in the market. However, efficiency and minimal resource consumption is the focal point which is also creating a competition. The categorization of such documents into specified classes by machine provides excellent help. One of categorization technique is text classification using a Convolutional neural network(TextCNN). TextCNN uses multiple sizes of filters, as in the case of the inception layer introduced in Googlenet. The network provides good accuracy but causes high memory consumption due to a large number of trainable parameters. As a solution to this problem, we introduced a whole new architecture based on separable convolution. The idea of separable convolution already exists in the field of image classification but not yet introduces to text classification tasks. With the help of this architecture, we can achieve a drastic reduction in trainable parameters.
Brain Computer Interface (BCI) helps in processing and extraction of useful information from the acquired brain signals having applications in diverse fields such as military, medicine, neuroscience, and rehabilitation. BCI has been used to support paralytic patients having speech impediments with severe disabilities. To help paralytic patients communicate with ease, BCI based systems convert silent speech (thoughts) to text. However, these systems have an inconvenient graphical user interface, high latency, limited typing speed, and low accuracy rate. Apart from these limitations, the existing systems do not incorporate the inevitable factor of a patient's emotional states and sentiment analysis. The proposed system EmoWrite implements a dynamic keyboard with contextualized appearance of characters reducing the traversal time and improving the utilization of the screen space. The proposed system has been evaluated and compared with the existing systems for accuracy, convenience, sentimental analysis, and typing speed. This system results in 6.58 Words Per Minute (WPM) and 31.92 Characters Per Minute (CPM) with an accuracy of 90.36 percent. EmoWrite also gives remarkable results when it comes to the integration of emotional states. Its Information Transfer Rate (ITR) is also high as compared to other systems i.e., 87.55 bits per min with commands and 72.52 bits per min for letters. Furthermore, it provides easy to use interface with a latency of 2.685 sec.
West African Pidgin English is a language that is significantly spoken in West Africa, consisting of at least 75 million speakers. Nevertheless, proper machine translation systems and relevant NLP datasets for pidgin English are virtually absent. In this work, we develop techniques targeted at bridging the gap between Pidgin English and English in the context of natural language generation. %As a proof of concept, we explore the proposed techniques in the area of data-to-text generation. By building upon the previously released monolingual Pidgin English text and parallel English data-to-text corpus, we hope to build a system that can automatically generate Pidgin English descriptions from structured data. We first train a data-to-English text generation system, before employing techniques in unsupervised neural machine translation and self-training to establish the Pidgin-to-English cross-lingual alignment. The human evaluation performed on the generated Pidgin texts shows that, though still far from being practically usable, the pivoting + self-training technique improves both Pidgin text fluency and relevance.
We study text summarization from the viewpoint of maximum coverage problem. In graph theory, the task of text summarization is regarded as maximum coverage problem on bipartite graph with weighted nodes. In recent study, belief-propagation based algorithm for maximum coverage on unweighted graph was proposed using the idea of statistical mechanics. We generalize it to weighted graph for text summarization. Then we apply our algorithm to weighted biregular random graph for verification of maximum coverage performance. We also apply it to bipartite graph representing real document in open text dataset, and check the performance of text summarization. As a result, our algorithm exhibits better performance than greedy-type algorithm in some setting of text summarization.
To preserve anonymity and obfuscate their identity on online platforms users may morph their text and portray themselves as a different gender or demographic. Similarly, a chatbot may need to customize its communication style to improve engagement with its audience. This manner of changing the style of written text has gained significant attention in recent years. Yet these past research works largely cater to the transfer of single style attributes. The disadvantage of focusing on a single style alone is that this often results in target text where other existing style attributes behave unpredictably or are unfairly dominated by the new style. To counteract this behavior, it would be nice to have a style transfer mechanism that can transfer or control multiple styles simultaneously and fairly. Through such an approach, one could obtain obfuscated or written text incorporated with a desired degree of multiple soft styles such as female-quality, politeness, or formalness. In this work, we demonstrate that the transfer of multiple styles cannot be achieved by sequentially performing multiple single-style transfers. This is because each single style-transfer step often reverses or dominates over the style incorporated by a previous transfer step. We then propose a neural network architecture for fairly transferring multiple style attributes in a given text. We test our architecture on the Yelp data set to demonstrate our superior performance as compared to existing one-style transfer steps performed in a sequence.
Many online comments on social media platforms are hateful, humorous, or sarcastic. The sarcastic nature of these comments (especially the short ones) alters their actual implied sentiments, which leads to misinterpretations by the existing sentiment analysis models. A lot of research has already been done to detect sarcasm in the text using user-based, topical, and conversational information but not much work has been done to use inter-sentence contextual information for detecting the same. This paper proposes a new state-of-the-art deep learning architecture that uses a novel Bidirectional Inter-Sentence Contextual Attention mechanism (Bi-ISCA) to capture inter-sentence dependencies for detecting sarcasm in the user-generated short text using only the conversational context. The proposed deep learning model demonstrates the capability to capture explicit, implicit, and contextual incongruous words & phrases responsible for invoking sarcasm. Bi-ISCA generates state-of-the-art results on two widely used benchmark datasets for the sarcasm detection task (Reddit and Twitter). To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing state-of-the-art models use an inter-sentence contextual attention mechanism to detect sarcasm in the user-generated short text using only conversational context.
Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) has achieved impressive performance on various cross-modal downstream tasks. However, most existing methods can only learn from aligned image-caption data and rely heavily on expensive regional features, which greatly limits their scalability and performance. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end unified-modal pre-training framework, namely UNIMO-2, for joint learning on both aligned image-caption data and unaligned image-only and text-only corpus. We build a unified Transformer model to jointly learn visual representations, textual representations and semantic alignment between images and texts. In particular, we propose to conduct grounded learning on both images and texts via a sharing grounded space, which helps bridge unaligned images and texts, and align the visual and textual semantic spaces on different types of corpora. The experiments show that our grounded learning method can improve textual and visual semantic alignment for improving performance on various cross-modal tasks. Moreover, benefiting from effective joint modeling of different types of corpora, our model also achieves impressive performance on single-modal visual and textual tasks. Our code and models are public at the UNIMO project page https://unimo-ptm.github.io/.