Dominican Republic

While End-2-End Text-to-Speech (TTS) has made significant progresses over the past few years, these systems still lack intuitive user controls over prosody. For instance, generating speech with fine-grained prosody control (prosodic prominence, contextually appropriate emotions) is still an open challenge.
In this paper, we investigate whether we can control prosody directly from the input text, in order to code information related to contrastive focus which emphasizes a specific word that is contrary to the presuppositions of the interlocutor. We build and share a specific dataset for this purpose and show that it allows to train a TTS system were this fine-grained prosodic feature can be correctly conveyed using control tokens. 
Our evaluation compares synthetic and natural utterances and shows that prosodic patterns of contrastive focus (variations of Fo, Intensity and Duration) can be learnt accurately. Such a milestone is important to allow, for example, smart speakers to be programmatically controlled in terms of output prosody.

EMNLP 2021

Controlling Prosody in End-to-End TTS: A Case Study on Contrastive Focus Generation

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

workshop paper

Recent coreference resolution models rely heavily on span representations to find coreference links between word spans. As the number of spans is O(n2) in the length of text and the number of potential links is O(n4), various pruning techniques are necessary to make this approach computationally feasible. We propose instead to consider coreference links between individual words rather than word spans and then reconstruct the word spans. This reduces the complexity of the coreference model to O(n2) and allows it to consider all potential mentions without pruning any of them out. We also demonstrate that, with these changes, SpanBERT for coreference resolution will be significantly outperformed by RoBERTa. While being highly efficient, our model performs competitively with recent coreference resolution systems on the OntoNotes benchmark.

Word-Level Coreference Resolution

ET is a suite designed to support linguistic research and natural language processing tasks using corpora annotated in the CoNLL-U format. These goals are achieved by two integrated environments -- Interrogatório, an environment for querying and editing annotated corpora, and Julgamento, an environment for assessing their quality. ET is open-source, built on different Python Web technologies and has Web demonstrations available on-line. ET has been intensively used in our research group for over two years, being the chosen framework for several linguistic and NLP-related studies conducted by its researchers.

ET: A Workstation for Querying, Editing and Evaluating Annotated Corpora

We introduce COMBO – a fully neural NLP system for accurate part-of-speech tagging, morphological analysis, lemmatisation, and (enhanced) dependency parsing. It predicts categorical morphosyntactic features whilst also exposes their vector representations, extracted from hidden layers. COMBO is an easy to install Python package with automatically downloadable pre-trained models for over 40 languages.
It maintains a balance between efficiency and quality. As it is an end-to-end system and its modules are jointly trained, its training is competitively fast. As its models are optimised for accuracy, they achieve often better prediction quality than SOTA. 
The COMBO library is available at: https://gitlab.clarin-pl.eu/syntactic-tools/combo.

COMBO: State-of-the-Art Morphosyntactic Analysis

Timely responses from policy makers to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic rely on a comprehensive grasp of events, their causes, and their impacts. These events are reported at such a speed and scale as to be overwhelming. In this paper, we present ExcavatorCovid, a machine reading system that ingests open source text documents (e.g., news and scientific publications), extracts COVID-19 related events and relations between them, and builds a Temporal and Causal Analysis Graph (TCAG). Excavator will help government agencies alleviate the information overload, understand likely downstream effects of political and economic decisions and events related to the pandemic, and respond in a timely manner to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. We expect the utility of Excavator to outlive the COVID-19 pandemic: analysts and decision makers will be empowered by Excavator to better understand and solve complex problems in the future. A demonstration video is available at https://vimeo.com/528619007.

ExcavatorCovid: Extracting Events and Relations from Text Corpora for Temporal and Causal Analysis for COVID-19

Data augmentation aims at expanding training data with clean text using noising schemes to improve the performance of grammatical error correction (GEC). In practice, there are a great number of real error patterns in the manually annotated training data. We argue that these real error patterns can be introduced into clean text to effectively generate more real and high quality synthetic data, which is not fully explored by previous studies. Moreover, we also find that linguistic knowledge can be incorporated into data augmentation for generating more representative and more diverse synthetic data. In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation method that fully considers the real error patterns and the linguistic knowledge for the GEC task. We conduct extensive experiments on public data sets and the experimental results show that our method outperforms several strong baselines with far less external unlabeled clean text data, highlighting its extraordinary effectiveness in the GEC task that lacks large-scale labeled training data.

Data Augmentation of Incorporating Real Error Patterns and Linguistic Knowledge for Grammatical Error Correction

Language models are trained only on text despite the fact that humans learn their first language in a highly interactive and multimodal environment where the first set of learned words are largely concrete, denoting physical entities and embodied states. To enrich language models with some of this missing experience, we leverage two sources of information: (1) the Lancaster Sensorimotor norms, which provide ratings (means and standard deviations) for over 40,000 English words along several dimensions of embodiment, and which capture the extent to which something is experienced across 11 different sensory modalities, and (2) vectors from coefficients of binary classifiers trained on images for the BERT vocabulary. We pre-trained the ELECTRA model and fine-tuned the RoBERTa model with these two sources of information then evaluate using the established GLUE benchmark and the Visual Dialog benchmark. We find that enriching language models with the Lancaster norms and image vectors improves results in both tasks, with some implications for robust language models that capture holistic linguistic meaning in a language learning context.

Enriching Language Models with Visually-grounded Word Vectors and the Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms

Language grounding aims at linking the symbolic representation of language (e.g., words) into the rich perceptual knowledge of the outside world. The general approach is to embed both textual and visual information into a common space -the grounded space- confined by an explicit relationship. We argue that since concrete and abstract words are processed differently in the brain, such approaches sacrifice the abstract knowledge obtained from textual statistics in the process of acquiring perceptual information. The focus of this paper is to solve this issue by implicitly grounding the word embeddings. Rather than learning two mappings into a joint space, our approach integrates modalities by implicit alignment. This is achieved by learning a reversible mapping between the textual and the grounded space by means of multi-task training. Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations show that our way of visual grounding is highly beneficial for both abstract and concrete words. Our embeddings are correlated with human judgments and outperform previous works using pretrained word embeddings on a wide range of benchmarks.

Learning Zero-Shot Multifaceted Visually Grounded Word Embeddings via Multi-Task Training

Reading order detection is the cornerstone to understanding visually-rich documents (e.g., receipts and forms). Unfortunately, no existing work took advantage of advanced deep learning models because it is too laborious to annotate a large enough dataset. We observe that the reading order of WORD documents is embedded in their XML metadata; meanwhile, it is easy to convert WORD documents to PDFs or images. Therefore, in an automated manner, we construct ReadingBank, a benchmark dataset that contains reading order, text, and layout information for 500,000 document images covering a wide spectrum of document types. This first-ever large-scale dataset unleashes the power of deep neural networks for reading order detection. Specifically, our proposed LayoutReader captures the text and layout information for reading order prediction using the seq2seq model. It performs almost perfectly in reading order detection and significantly improves both open-source and commercial OCR engines in ordering text lines in their results in our experiments. The dataset and models are publicly available at https: //aka.ms/layoutreader.

LayoutReader: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Reading Order Detection

Visual Dialog is assumed to require the dialog history to generate correct responses during a dialog. However, it is not clear from previous work how dialog history is needed for visual dialog. In this paper we define what it means for visual questions to require dialog history and we propose a methodology for identifying them. We release a subset of the Guesswhat?! questions for which their dialog history completely changes their responses.
We propose a novel interpretable representation that visually grounds dialog history: the Region under Discussion. It constrains the image's spatial features according to a semantic representation of the history inspired by the information structure notion of Question under Discussion. We evaluate the architecture on task-specific multimodal models and the visual transformer model LXMERT and show that there is still room for improvement.

Region under Discussion for visual dialog

This paper introduces a novel approach to learn visually grounded meaning representations of words as low-dimensional node embeddings on an underlying graph hierarchy.
The lower level of the hierarchy models modality-specific word representations through dedicated but communicating graphs, while the higher level puts these representations together on a single graph to learn a representation jointly from both modalities. 
The topology of each graph models similarity relations among words, and is estimated jointly with the graph embedding.
The assumption underlying this model is that words sharing similar meaning correspond to communities in an underlying similarity graph in a low-dimensional space.
We named this model Hierarchical Multi-Modal Similarity Graph Embedding (HM-SGE).
Experimental results validate the ability of HM-SGE to simulate human similarity judgements and concept categorization, outperforming the state of the art.

Controlling Prosody in End-to-End TTS: A Case Study on Contrastive Focus Generation

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Word-Level Coreference Resolution

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