Ireland

This paper describes the motivation and development of speech synthesis systems for the purposes of language revitalization. By building speech synthesis systems for three Indigenous languages spoken in Canada, Kanien’kéha, Gitksan &amp; SENĆOŦEN, we re-evaluate the question of how much data is required to build low-resource speech synthesis systems featuring state-of-the-art neural models. For example, preliminary results with English data show that a FastSpeech2 model trained with 1 hour of training data can produce speech with comparable naturalness to a Tacotron2 model trained with 10 hours of data. Finally, we motivate future research in evaluation and classroom integration in the field of speech synthesis for language revitalization.

ACL 2022

Requirements and Motivations of Low-Resource Speech Synthesis for Language Revitalization

speech synthesis

language revitalization

low resource languages

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

This paper describes the motivation and development of speech synthesis systems for the purposes of language revitalization. By building speech synthesis systems for three Indigenous languages spoken in Canada, Kanien’kéha, Gitksan & SENĆOŦEN, we re-evaluate the question of how much data is required to build low-resource speech synthesis systems featuring state-of-the-art neural models. For example, preliminary results with English data show that a FastSpeech2 model trained with 1 hour of training data can produce speech with comparable naturalness to a Tacotron2 model trained with 10 hours of data. Finally, we motivate future research in evaluation and classroom integration in the field of speech synthesis for language revitalization.

findings / work in progress

We present Samanantar, the largest publicly available parallel corpora collection for Indic languages. The collection contains a total of 49.7 million sentence pairs between English and 11 Indic languages (from two language families). Specifically, we compile 12.4 million sentence pairs from existing, publicly-available parallel corpora, and additionally mine 37.4 million sentence pairs from the web, resulting in a 4x increase. We mine the parallel sentences from the web by combining many corpora, tools, and methods: (a) web-crawled monolingual corpora, (b) document OCR for extracting sentences from scanned documents, (c) multilingual representation models for aligning sentences, and (d) approximate nearest neighbor search for searching in a large collection of sentences. Human evaluation of samples from the newly mined corpora validate the high quality of the parallel sentences across 11 languages. Further, we extract 83.4 million sentence pairs between all 55 Indic language pairs from the English-centric parallel corpus using English as the pivot language. We trained multilingual NMT models spanning all these languages on Samanantar, which outperform existing models and baselines on publicly available benchmarks, such as FLORES, establishing the utility of Samanantar. Our data and models are available publicly at https://indicnlp.ai4bharat.org/samanantar/ and we hope they will help advance research in NMT and multilingual NLP for Indic languages.

Samanantar: The Largest Publicly Available Parallel Corpora Collection For 11 Indic Languages

The open-access dissemination of pretrained language models through online repositories has led to a democratization of state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) research. This also allows people outside of NLP to use such models and adapt them to specific use-cases. However, a certain amount of technical proficiency is still required which is an entry barrier for users who want to apply these models to a certain task but lack the necessary knowledge or resources. In this work, we aim to overcome this gap by providing a tool which allows researchers to leverage pretrained models without writing a single line of code. Built upon the parameter-efficient adapter modules for transfer learning, our AdapterHub Playground provides an intuitive interface, allowing the usage of adapters for prediction, training and analysis of textual data for a variety of NLP tasks. We present the tool's architecture and demonstrate its advantages with prototypical use-cases, where we show that predictive performance can easily be increased in a few-shot learning scenario. Finally, we evaluate its usability in a user study. We provide the code and a live interface at https://adapter-hub.github.io/playground/

AdapterHub Playground: Simple and Flexible Few-Shot Learning with Adapters

Open Information Extraction (OIE) is the task of extracting facts from sentences in the form of relations and their corresponding arguments in schema-free manner. Intrinsic performance of OIE systems is difficult to measure due to the incompleteness of existing OIE benchmarks: the ground truth extractions do not group all acceptable surface realizations of the same fact that can be extracted from a sentence. To measure performance of OIE systems more realistically, it is necessary to manually annotate complete facts (i.e., clusters of all acceptable surface realizations of the same fact) from input sentences. We propose AnnIE: an interactive annotation platform that facilitates such challenging annotation tasks and supports creation of complete fact-oriented OIE evaluation benchmarks. AnnIE is modular and flexible in order to support different use case scenarios (i.e., benchmarks covering different types of facts). We use AnnIE to build two complete OIE benchmarks: one with verb-mediated facts and another with facts encompassing named entities. Finally, we evaluate several OIE systems on our complete benchmarks created with AnnIE. Our results suggest that existing incomplete benchmarks are overly lenient, and that OIE systems are not as robust as previously reported. We publicly release AnnIE under non-restrictive license on https://github.com/nfriedri/annie-annotation-platform.

AnnIE: An Annotation Platform for Constructing Complete Open Information Extraction Benchmark

We introduce Dynatask: an open source system for setting up custom NLP tasks that aims to greatly lower the technical knowledge and effort required for hosting and evaluating state-of-the-art NLP models, as well as for conducting model in the loop data collection with crowdworkers. Dynatask is integrated with Dynabench, a research platform for rethinking benchmarking in AI that facilitates human and model in the loop data collection and evaluation. To create a task, users only need to write a short task configuration file from which the relevant web interfaces and model hosting infrastructure are automatically generated. The system is available at https://dynabench.org/ and the full library can be found at https://github.com/facebookresearch/dynabench.

Dynatask: A Framework for Creating Dynamic AI Benchmark Tasks

The Universal Knowledge Core (UKC) is a large multilingual lexical database with a focus on language diversity and covering over two thousand languages. The aim of the database, as well as its tools and data catalogue, is to make the abstract notion of linguistic diversity visually understandable for humans and formally exploitable by machines. The UKC website lets users explore millions of individual words and their meanings, but also phenomena of cross-lingual convergence and divergence, such as shared interlingual meanings, lexicon similarities, cognate clusters, or lexical gaps. The UKC LiveLanguage Catalogue, in turn, provides access to the underlying lexical data in a computer-processable form, ready to be reused in cross-lingual applications.

Language Diversity: Visible to Humans, Exploitable by Machines

We introduce TS-ANNO, an open-source web application for manual creation and for evaluation of parallel corpora for text simplification. TS-ANNO can be used for i) sentence–wise alignment, ii) rating alignment pairs (e.g., w.r.t. grammaticality, meaning preservation, ...), iii) annotating alignment pairs w.r.t. simplification transformations (e.g., lexical substitution, sentence splitting, ...), and iv) manual simplification of complex documents. For evaluation, TS-ANNO calculates inter-annotator agreement of alignments i) and annotations ii).

TS-ANNO: An Annotation Tool to Build, Annotate and Evaluate Text Simplification Corpora

Machine translation (MT) evaluation often focuses on accuracy and fluency, without paying much attention to translation style. This means that, even when considered accurate and fluent, MT output can still sound less natural than high quality human translations or text originally written in the target language. Machine translation output notably exhibits lower lexical diversity, and employs constructs that mirror those in the source sentence. In this work we propose a method for training MT systems to achieve a more natural style, i.e. mirroring the style of text originally written in the target language. Our method tags parallel training data according to the naturalness of the target side by contrasting language models trained on natural and translated data. Tagging data allows us to put greater emphasis on target sentences originally written in the target language. Automatic metrics show that the resulting models achieve lexical richness on par with human translations, mimicking a style much closer to sentences originally written in the target language. Furthermore, we find that their output is preferred by human experts when compared to the baseline translations.

A Natural Diet: Towards Improving Naturalness of Machine Translation Output

To create models that are robust across a wide range of test inputs, training datasets should include diverse examples that span numerous phenomena. Dynamic adversarial data collection (DADC), where annotators craft examples that challenge continually improving models, holds promise as an approach for generating such diverse training sets. Prior work has shown that running DADC over 1-3 rounds can help models fix some error types, but it does not necessarily lead to better generalization beyond adversarial test data. We argue that running DADC over many rounds maximizes its training-time benefits, as the different rounds can together cover many of the task-relevant phenomena. We present the first study of longer-term DADC, where we collect 20 rounds of NLI examples for a small set of premise paragraphs, with both adversarial and non-adversarial approaches. Models trained on DADC examples make 26% fewer errors on our expert-curated test set compared to models trained on non-adversarial data. Our analysis shows that DADC yields examples that are more difficult, more lexically and syntactically diverse, and contain fewer annotation artifacts compared to non-adversarial examples.

Analyzing Dynamic Adversarial Training Data in the Limit

This paper develops automatic song translation (AST) for tonal languages and addresses the unique challenge of aligning words' tones with the melody of a song in addition to conveying the original meaning. We propose three criteria for effective AST -- preserving meaning, singability, and intelligibility -- and design metrics for these criteria. We develop a new benchmark for English--Mandarin song translation and develop an unsupervised AST system, Guided AliGnment for Automatic Song Translation (GagaST), which combines pre-training with three decoding constraints. Both automatic and human evaluations show GagaST successfully balances semantics and singability.

Automatic Song Translation for Tonal Languages

We investigate the exploitation of self-supervised models for two Creole languages with few resources: Gwadloupéyen and Morisien. Automatic language processing tools are almost non-existent for these two languages. We propose to use about one hour of annotated data to design an automatic speech recognition system for each language. We evaluate how much data is needed to obtain a query-by-example system that is usable by linguists. Moreover, our experiments show that multilingual self-supervised models are not necessarily the most efficient for Creole languages.

Requirements and Motivations of Low-Resource Speech Synthesis for Language Revitalization

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Samanantar: The Largest Publicly Available Parallel Corpora Collection For 11 Indic Languages

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