Text is by far the most ubiquitous source of knowledge and information and should be made easily accessible to as many people as possible; however, texts often contain complex words that hinder reading comprehension and accessibility. Therefore, suggesting simpler alternatives for complex words without compromising meaning would help convey the information to a broader audience. This paper proposes mTLS, a multilingual controllable Transformer-based Lexical Simplification (LS) system fined-tuned with the T5 model. The novelty of this work lies in the use of language-specific prefixes, control tokens, and candidates extracted from pre-trained masked language models to learn simpler alternatives for complex words. The evaluation results on three well-known LS datasets -- LexMTurk, BenchLS, and NNSEval -- show that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models like LSBert and ConLS. Moreover, further evaluation of our approach on the part of the recent TSAR-2022 multilingual LS shared-task dataset shows that our model performs competitively when compared with the participating systems for English LS and even outperforms the GPT-3 model on several metrics. Moreover, our model obtains performance gains also for Spanish and Portuguese.
This paper presents FOOCTTS, an automatic pipeline for a football commentator that generates speech with background crowd noise. The application gets the text from the user, applies text pre-processing such as vowelization, followed by the commentator's speech synthesizer. Our pipeline included Arabic automatic speech recognition for data labeling, CTC segmentation, transcription vowelization to match speech, and fine-tuning the TTS. Our system is capable of generating speech with its acoustic environment within limited 15 minutes of football commentator recording. Our prototype is generalizable and can be easily applied to different domains and languages.
Gesture synthesis has gained significant attention as a critical research area, focusing on producing contextually appropriate and natural gestures corresponding to speech or textual input. Although deep learning-based approaches have achieved remarkable progress, they often overlook the rich semantic information present in the text, leading to less expressive and meaningful gestures. We propose GesGPT, a novel approach to gesture generation that leverages the semantic analysis capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT. By capitalizing on the strengths of LLMs for text analysis, we design prompts to extract gesture-related information from textual input. Our method entails developing prompt principles that transform gesture generation into an intention classification problem based on GPT, and utilizing a curated gesture library and integration module to produce semantically rich co-speech gestures. Experimental results demonstrate that GesGPT effectively generates contextually appropriate and expressive gestures, offering a new perspective on semantic co-speech gesture generation.
Recently, end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) models have made great strides and exhibit excellent performance in general speech recognition. However, there remain several challenging scenarios that E2E models are not competent in, such as code-switching and named entity recognition (NER). Data augmentation is a common and effective practice for these two scenarios. However, the current data augmentation methods mainly rely on audio splicing and text-to-speech (TTS) models, which might result in discontinuous, unrealistic, and less diversified speech. To mitigate these potential issues, we propose a novel data augmentation method by applying the text-based speech editing model. The augmented speech from speech editing systems is more coherent and diversified, also more akin to real speech. The experimental results on code-switching and NER tasks show that our proposed method can significantly outperform the audio splicing and neural TTS based data augmentation systems.
Among the remarkable emergent capabilities of large language models (LMs) is free-text rationalization; beyond a certain scale, large LMs are capable of generating seemingly useful rationalizations, which in turn, can dramatically enhance their performances on leaderboards. This phenomenon raises a question: can machine generated rationales also be useful for humans, especially when lay humans try to answer questions based on those machine rationales? We observe that human utility of existing rationales is far from satisfactory, and expensive to estimate with human studies. Existing metrics like task performance of the LM generating the rationales, or similarity between generated and gold rationales are not good indicators of their human utility. While we observe that certain properties of rationales like conciseness and novelty are correlated with their human utility, estimating them without human involvement is challenging. We show that, by estimating a rationale's helpfulness in answering similar unseen instances, we can measure its human utility to a better extent. We also translate this finding into an automated score, GEN-U, that we propose, which can help improve LMs' ability to generate rationales with better human utility, while maintaining most of its task performance. Lastly, we release all code and collected data with this project.
Recent advances in vision-language pre-training have enabled machines to perform better in multimodal object discrimination (e.g., image-text semantic alignment) and image synthesis (e.g., text-to-image generation). On the other hand, fine-tuning pre-trained models with discriminative or generative capabilities such as CLIP and Stable Diffusion on domain-specific datasets has shown to be effective in various tasks by adapting to specific domains. However, few studies have explored the possibility of learning both discriminative and generative capabilities and leveraging their synergistic effects to create a powerful and personalized multimodal model during fine-tuning. This paper presents UniDiff, a unified multi-modal model that integrates image-text contrastive learning (ITC), text-conditioned image synthesis learning (IS), and reciprocal semantic consistency modeling (RSC). UniDiff effectively learns aligned semantics and mitigates the issue of semantic collapse during fine-tuning on small datasets by leveraging RSC on visual features from CLIP and diffusion models, without altering the pre-trained model's basic architecture. UniDiff demonstrates versatility in both multi-modal understanding and generative tasks. Experimental results on three datasets (Fashion-man, Fashion-woman, and E-commercial Product) showcase substantial enhancements in vision-language retrieval and text-to-image generation, illustrating the advantages of combining discriminative and generative fine-tuning. The proposed UniDiff model establishes a robust pipeline for personalized modeling and serves as a benchmark for future comparisons in the field.
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is a technology that converts spoken words into text, facilitating interaction between humans and machines. One of the most common applications of ASR is Speech-To-Text (STT) technology, which simplifies user workflows by transcribing spoken words into text. In the medical field, STT has the potential to significantly reduce the workload of clinicians who rely on typists to transcribe their voice recordings. However, developing an STT model for the medical domain is challenging due to the lack of sufficient speech and text datasets. To address this issue, we propose a medical-domain text correction method that modifies the output text of a general STT system using the Vision Language Pre-training (VLP) method. VLP combines textual and visual information to correct text based on image knowledge. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method offers quantitatively and clinically significant improvements in STT performance in the medical field. We further show that multi-modal understanding of image and text information outperforms single-modal understanding using only text information.
Social media has drastically reshaped the world that allows billions of people to engage in such interactive environments to conveniently create and share content with the public. Among them, text data (e.g., tweets, blogs) maintains the basic yet important social activities and generates a rich source of user-oriented information. While those explicit sensitive user data like credentials has been significantly protected by all means, personal private attribute (e.g., age, gender, location) disclosure due to inference attacks is somehow challenging to avoid, especially when powerful natural language processing (NLP) techniques have been effectively deployed to automate attribute inferences from implicit text data. This puts users' attribute privacy at risk. To address this challenge, in this paper, we leverage the inherent vulnerability of machine learning to adversarial attacks, and design a novel text-space Adversarial attack for Social Good, called Adv4SG. In other words, we cast the problem of protecting personal attribute privacy as an adversarial attack formulation problem over the social media text data to defend against NLP-based attribute inference attacks. More specifically, Adv4SG proceeds with a sequence of word perturbations under given constraints such that the probed attribute cannot be identified correctly. Different from the prior works, we advance Adv4SG by considering social media property, and introducing cost-effective mechanisms to expedite attribute obfuscation over text data under the black-box setting. Extensive experiments on real-world social media datasets have demonstrated that our method can effectively degrade the inference accuracy with less computational cost over different attribute settings, which substantially helps mitigate the impacts of inference attacks and thus achieve high performance in user attribute privacy protection.
Every Scene Text Recognition (STR) task consists of text localization \& text recognition as the prominent sub-tasks. However, in real-world applications with fixed camera positions such as equipment monitor reading, image-based data entry, and printed document data extraction, the underlying data tends to be regular scene text. Hence, in these tasks, the use of generic, bulky models comes up with significant disadvantages compared to customized, efficient models in terms of model deployability, data privacy \& model reliability. Therefore, this paper introduces the underlying concepts, theory, implementation, and experiment results to develop models, which are highly specialized for the task itself, to achieve not only the SOTA performance but also to have minimal model weights, shorter inference time, and high model reliability. We introduce a novel deep learning architecture (GeoTRNet), trained to identify digits in a regular scene image, only using the geometrical features present, mimicking human perception over text recognition. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ACRA-FL/GeoTRNet
Recently, Neural Topic Models (NTM), inspired by variational autoencoders, have attracted a lot of research interest; however, these methods have limited applications in the real world due to the challenge of incorporating human knowledge. This work presents a semi-supervised neural topic modeling method, vONTSS, which uses von Mises-Fisher (vMF) based variational autoencoders and optimal transport. When a few keywords per topic are provided, vONTSS in the semi-supervised setting generates potential topics and optimizes topic-keyword quality and topic classification. Experiments show that vONTSS outperforms existing semi-supervised topic modeling methods in classification accuracy and diversity. vONTSS also supports unsupervised topic modeling. Quantitative and qualitative experiments show that vONTSS in the unsupervised setting outperforms recent NTMs on multiple aspects: vONTSS discovers highly clustered and coherent topics on benchmark datasets. It is also much faster than the state-of-the-art weakly supervised text classification method while achieving similar classification performance. We further prove the equivalence of optimal transport loss and cross-entropy loss at the global minimum.