Nearly everyone has a CV (or at least a career and/or education history).

Nearly every non-sole trader business recruits people.

Most people want to progress from the job they are in – over 60% of people are always at least passively looking for a job.

CV-to-Job Spec matching technologies are generally underperforming right now, but there is plenty of data available for machine learning solutions to improve performance. This would improve the quality and objectivity of recruitment, reduce the number of irrelevant applications recruiters receive, reduce the likelihood that a good candidate is overlooked, save time and lead to faster filling of open positions, and enhance the candidate experience.

One challenge is that job seekers are reluctant to provide structured data about themselves, and prefer to 'throw' a CV over to the recruiter and then 'throw' their CV over to the next recruiter at the next company and so on. Because of this, the data from a job seeker is often not in structured form. Similarly, a lot of the data the recruiter gives about the job is also unstructured – provided in a number of paragraphs of text. Yet all the key information is available to match someone. The job description specifies key skills in the text, the ideal candidate, the soft skills, the must-haves, the skills that are beneficial but not essential, and so on.

This project will involve researching a 'matching solution' that takes all of the above into consideration – the unstructured data needs to be parsed using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, the key components extracted, and fed into a machine learning algorithm to determine how close someone is for a job and what the key differences are. This could help people see what skills they need to acquire in order to progress (their 'skills delta'), and that data could eventually feed into a training system to suggest courses (college, university or other).

A wide range of Information Extraction methods (including knowledge-engineering and supervised learning methods) will be explored to tackle parsing of unstructured CV and job specification data, and both shallow-learning and deep-learning methods will be considered for the 'matching' component of the matching solution.

Investigation of some or all of the following questions will drive the methodology, by providing deeper insights that go beyond simple matching of keywords.

1. Is the job they are applying for a natural progression from their current role, a side step, or a bit left-field?

2. How successful were similar people in applying for similar jobs and how long did they stay in those jobs for?

3. How likely is someone to be hired for a particular job (based on empirical data)?

4. Does someone's location help or hinder their application? What about their school, or their previous places of work?

5. Is the job seeker a 'job hopper' or a contractor?

The field of automatic speech recognition (ASR) has seen significant advancements in recent years due to a combination of the development of more advanced deep neural network models as well as the computational power necessary to train them. One area that still presents a significant challenge is in the transcription of meetings involving multiple speakers in real world settings, which are often noisy, reverberant and where the number of speakers and their location changes. Not only is the conversational environment challenging, but also the fact that recording of voices in these settings poses issues.

Multiple microphones or microphone arrays are commonly used, but these may be situated a fair distance away from the speakers which in turn leads to a degraded signal to noise ratio. For this reason meeting transcription tends to require additional stages of processing, many of which are not required for simpler ASR tasks. One of these stages is the preprocessing of audio data, often involving a combination of signal processing and machine learning techniques to denoise and beamform the audio from microphone arrays. As no device is capturing audio from the speaker alone, speaker diarisation needs to be included in the systems which also then makes it possible to adapt ASR models to the specific acoustic conditions and the speaker in their present location.

Speech in meetings has additional complexities – it is conversational and thereby language complexity is increased. This also has implications on the acoustics, speakers talk concurrently and give backchannel signals. The speaking style is much more varied and is adjusted according to the conversational situation. It is also influenced by the conversation partners and the topic and location of the meeting. All of these qualities require a meeting transcription system to be highly adaptive and flexible.

The main focus of this project is on improving ASR technology for doctor-patient meetings in a healthcare setting. The challenges for these types of meetings are unique. For example, the environment where recordings take place may have hard surfaces leading to very reverberant speech signals. One can also not assume that recording microphones are in fixed places or even well located in relation to the speakers. While moving speakers occur in other meeting scenarios, one can expect this to be present more often here. The impulse response of a particular acoustic environment not only changes from room to room but also varies depending on where within the room speakers are in relation to microphones.

Beyond acoustic challenges large amounts of data for doctor's speech might be available, whereas data from individual patients will be sparse. This poses a challenge for commonly used adaptation techniques in ASR, in particular if speakers with non-standard speech are present – something that can be expected in health settings. Overall the type and content of language is expected to be very specific to the healthcare domain. All of these unique attributes have an impact on ASR performance and can severely reduce the accuracy of outputs.

The aim for this project will be to improve upon existing ASR technology by examining some of the areas outlined. Particular areas of interest for advancing this technology will be on improving microphone array recording techniques and adaptation methods that address the specific properties found in real recordings. It is expected that any techniques developed will have to be highly adaptive to the recording settings. Further exploration will include investigation into the suitability of standard ASR metrics for assessing performance for users.

The need to look after one's mental health and wellbeing is ever increasing. Recent events such as the Covid-19 pandemic have resulted in almost everyone being subjected to a lockdown, with many people reporting increased feelings of anxiety, depression, and isolation. Speech has been found to be a key method of identifying and examining a range of different mental health concerns, but as of yet little research has been conducted on how to integrate such knowledge into everyday life. A lacuna exists between the number of mental health and wellbeing apps and virtual 'chatbots' available, and the speech features that have the potential to aid in the diagnosis and monitoring of such conditions.

This project investigates the efficacy of a spoken language virtual agent, designed to prompt users to record them talking about how they're feeling over an extended period of time. This serves two purposes; firstly, the virtual agent acts as an interactive tool aiding in alleviating feelings of loneliness and allowing people an ear for talking therapy, without the need for another human to converse with. Secondly, machine learning techniques will track features of the user's speech, such as phoneme rate and duration and acoustic features, in order to monitor the state of the user's mental wellbeing over a set amount of time. This provides a snapshot of a user's mental peaks and troughs, and in turn helps to train the AI to detect such changes.

This project will address multiple research questions, such as how people from different age groups would interact with such a virtual agent, and how their needs would differ in regard to what they are hoping to get out of such an interaction. Secondly, this project serves as a study into how much time a person would be required to interact with such a virtual agent in order to collect enough data to properly analyse and further train the AI with. Thirdly, this project offers an opportunity to investigate how such virtual agents could be used as a tool to combat loneliness across different age groups, attempting to combat early signs of mental health concerns brought about by feelings of isolation.

Many Natural Language Processing tasks are being successfully completed by sophisticated models which learn complex representations from gigantic text or task-specific datasets. However, a subset of NLP tasks which involve simple human reasoning remain intractable. We hypothesise that this is because the current class of state-of-the-art models are not adequate for learning either relational or common-sense reasoning problems.

We believe there is a two-fold deficiency. Firstly, the structure of the models is not adequate for the task of reasoning, as they fail to impose sensible priors on reasoning such as pairwise commutativity or feature order invariance. Secondly, the data presented to these models is often insufficient for them to learn the disentangled, grounded functions which represent common sense-reasoning. Furthermore, a high degree of bias has been found in many existing datasets designed for reasoning tasks, indicating that current models may be predicting correct answers from unintended hints within the questions.

For the purposes of this project, we would define common-sense reasoning as the ability to:

• Reason about relations between objects, both in single and multiple-step problems.

• Achieve near human-level performance in 'common-sense' reasoning problems.

• Ground task understanding with reference to the scene in which a question is asked, allowing for informed inference.

Goals

• We aim to target real-world multi- and mono-modal relational reasoning tasks with models designed to capture the properties of relational reasoning. From this, we will investigate the possibility of extracting structured knowledge such as relational graphs or linguistic information for accuracy improvement on commonsense inference tasks such as VQA.

• To investigate novel ways of allowing AI to learn object properties, such as using reinforcement learning in a physics engine to learn affordances, the properties of an object which define what actions can be performed on it.

• Construct our own dataset to aid with the task of scene-grounded commonsense reasoning, which may include textual, visual, video, and physics information for the purpose of training a model which can learn object affordances and representations.

Research questions

• Can existing models for reasoning, which operate on synthetic data, be transferred to real world datasets and achieve acceptable accuracy?

• Can features or models extracted from explicit reasoning tasks improve the accuracy of state-of-the-art models for multimodal commonsense tasks by augmenting the knowledge base to draw from?

• What tasks and corresponding datasets would enable models to learn efficient, disentangled commonsense properties and relations which humans intuitively obtain? Are we able to create a useful and tractable task and dataset which advanced the field?

Multimodal communication is prominent on social platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr. Every second, people express their views, opinions, feelings, emotions, and sentiments through different combinations of text, images, and videos. This provides an opportunity to create better language models that can exploit multimodal information. The purpose of this project is to understand the language from a multimodal perspective by modeling intra-modal and cross-modal interactions. The modes of our interest are text, visual, and acoustic.

The integration of visual and/or acoustic features to NLP systems has recently proved to be beneficial in several tasks such as sentiment analysis (Rahman, Wasifur, et al., 2019; Kumar, Akshi, et al., 2019, Tsai, Yao-Hung Hubert, et al. 2019), sarcasm detection (Cai, Yitao, et al., 2019; Castro, Santiago, et al., 2019), summarisation (Tiwari, Akanksha, et al., 2018), paraphrasing (Chu, Chenhui, et al., 2018), and crisis events classification (Abavisani, Mahdi, et al, 2020).

In this Ph.D. project, we will study and develop multimodal fusion methods and their integration in different stages of model architectures, such as neural networks and transformer models (Devlin, Jacob, et al., 2018). Moreover, we aim to evaluate these methods’ performance on sentiment analysis, social media analysis tasks such as abusive behavior analysis (Breitfeller, Luke, et al., 2019; Chowdhury, Arijit Ghosh, et al., 2019), and other NLP tasks.

References

• Abavisani, Mahdi, et al. "Multimodal Categorization of Crisis Events in Social Media." arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.04917 (2020).

• Breitfeller, Luke, et al. "Finding Microaggressions in the Wild: A Case for Locating Elusive Phenomena in Social Media Posts." Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

• Cai, Yitao, Huiyu Cai, and Xiaojun Wan. "Multi-Modal Sarcasm Detection in Twitter with Hierarchical Fusion Model." Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2019.

• Castro, Santiago, et al. "Towards Multimodal Sarcasm Detection (An Obviously Perfect Paper)." arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.01815 (2019).

• Rahman, Wasifur, et al. "M-BERT: Injecting Multimodal Information in the BERT Structure." arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.05787 (2019).

• Chowdhury, Arijit Ghosh, et al. "# YouToo? detection of personal recollections of sexual harassment on social media." Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2019.

• Chu, Chenhui, Mayu Otani, and Yuta Nakashima. "iParaphrasing: Extracting visually grounded paraphrases via an image." arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.04284 (2018).

• Devlin, Jacob, et al. "Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding." arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04805 (2018).

• Kumar, Akshi, and Geetanjali Garg. "Sentiment analysis of multimodal twitter data." Multimedia Tools and Applications 78.17 (2019): 24103-24119.

• Tiwari, Akanksha, Christian Von Der Weth, and Mohan S. Kankanhalli. "Multimodal Multiplatform Social Media Event Summarization." ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMM) 14.2s (2018): 1-23.

• Tsai, Yao-Hung Hubert, et al. "Multimodal transformer for unaligned multimodal language sequences." arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.00295 (2019).

Modern approaches to Natural Language Processing are often developed under the assumption that all textual resources should be static, as coherent and unambiguous as possible, inherently global in meaning (independent of local factors) and ordered. From this perspective, dialogue is a challenging type of input, as it violates most of these assumptions.

As an interactive exchange between a narrow group of individuals, dialogue is highly personalised and contextualised. Its primary task is efficient communication on a small scale, and so the evolution of these communication channels happens rapidly and much more locally, when compared to written texts of a given language. Contemporary NLP approaches which are not sufficiently flexible to handle this phenomenon. Despite Dialogue Modeling being a self-standing task within NLP, most NLP methods expect correct grammar and logic in the texts they are applied to. They become inefficient when applied to language typical of dialogue. A paradigm shift in how one approaches interpreting dialogue is required.

Accommodation describes the phenomenon that people will attune their speech to the discourse situation in the most suitable, "optimal" way (Giles and Ogay 2007). It has been extensively studied in the field of socio-linguistics. According to Giles and Ogay (2007), individuals will amend their accent, vocabulary, facial expressions and other verbal and non-verbal features of interaction in order to become similar to their conversational partners. The benefits of doing so can include sounding more convincing, signifying certain attributes (e.g. membership to a specific social group), or minimising the "distance in rank" between speakers. Similarly, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Lee (2011) show that within a conversation, a participant will tend to mimic the linguistic style of other participants. By conducting an experiment on movie scripts they showed that this mimicry is something automatic for humans, a reflex that is not only a tool for "gaining social rank", and therefore is an inherent characteristic of dialogue.

Accommodation is one of the prisms through which we can look at conversational behaviour. It highlights that the addressee and the situation between her and the speaker is crucial to interpreting the exchange. It can be argued that a framework which is centred around these findings may enhance the performance of dialogue interpretation systems.

The aim of this project is to examine how the developments in the understanding of conversations can be introduced into various approaches to Natural Language Processing – how we can systematise and generalise them. As a case study, the task of translating subtitles for scripted entertainment from English to other languages will be considered. Only recently, novel approaches to Machine Translation started going beyond translating isolated sentences – by incorporating document-wide aspects into the process. However, document-level Machine Translation applied to dialogue has been underexplored in literature (Maruf, Saleh and Haffari 2019).

Within the context of MT, if an automatic translator could be made to preserve the accommodation aspects present in dialogues, the resulting translation could be more dynamic and natural as the contextual information and aspects of the mimicry of style between participants can remain approximately preserved.

Bibliography

• Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C. and Lee, L. (2011) 'Chameleons in imagined conversations: A new approach to understanding coordination of linguistic style in dialogs'. Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics Workshop at ACL 2011, pp. 76-87.

• Maruf, S., Saleh, F. and Haffari, G. (2019) 'A Survey on Document-level Machine Translation: Methods and Evaluation', pp. 1-29.

• Ogay, T. and Giles, H. (2007) 'Communication Accommodation Theory', B.B Whaley & W.Samters (Eds.), Explaining communication: Contemporary theories.

This project is aimed at individuals who have had trauma or surgery to their vocal apparatus, eg laryngectomy, tracheoectomy, glossectomy, who are unable to talk in a conventional manner but who have full motor control of the rest of their body. Previous research in 'silent speech recognition' and 'direct speech synthesis' has used a wide variety of specialised/bespoke sensors to generate speech in real-time from residual articulatory movements. However, such solutions are expensive (due to the requirement for specialised/bespoke equipment) and intrusive (due to the need to install the necessary sensors). As an alternative, it would be of great interest to investigate the potential for using a conventional keyboard as a readily-available and cheap alternative to specialised/bespoke sensors, ie. a solution based on text-to-speech synthesis (TTS).

Of course, there are fundamental problems with using contemporary TTS as a communications aid:

1. the conversion from typed input to speech output is non real-time and delayed,

2. even a trained touch-typist would be unable to enter text fast enough for a normal conversational speech rate,

3. the output is typically non-personalised,

4. it is not possible to control the prosody in real-time, and

5. it is not possible to control the affect in real-time.

These limitations mean that existing TTS users are unable to intervene/join-in a conversation, unable to keep up with information rate of exchanges, unable to express themselves effectively (ie their individuality and their communicative intent) and suffer a loss of empathic/social relations as a consequence.

So, what is needed is a solution that overcomes these limitations, and it is proposed that they could be addressed by investigating/inventing a novel end-to-end TTS architecture that facilitates:

• Simultaneous real-time input/output (ie sound is produced immediately a key is pressed).

• Conversational speech rates by embedding a suitable prediction mechanism (ie the spoken equivalent of autocorrect).

• Configurable output that allows a user to 'dial-up' appropriate individualised vocal characteristics

• Real-time control of prosody, e.g. using special keys or additional sensors.

• Realtime control of affect, e.g. by analysing the acoustics of key-presses or facial expressions from a webcam.

Deep neural network models have achieved state-of-the-art results in different Natural Language Processing tasks in recent years. Their superior performance comes at the cost of understanding how they work and how their output results can be justified. It is still challenging to interpret the intermediate representations and explain the inner workings of neural network models. The lack of justification for deep neural network models decisions is considered one of the main reasons that deep learning models are not widely used in some critical domains such as health and law. Therefore, there is a need for designing more interpretable and explainable deep neural networks models while reducing their computing requirements.

Research goals

This PhD research project aims to make deep neural network models for NLP more interpretable and explainable. As a first step, we will investigate these models' architecture and how each component works. Next, we will try different approaches to reduce the computational complexity of these models and improve their interpretability while achieving similar accuracy and performance. In addition, the research project will investigate how models interpretations can help in designing more data-efficient models. Furthermore, we will investigate designing novel evaluation methods for deep neural networks interpretation's quality.

Research questions

• Which components of deep neural networks do affect the model's decisions?

• How does the interpretability of deep learning models for NLP vary from task to task?

• Can different pre-training approaches be more computationally efficient?

• Can interpretability help in designing more data-efficient deep learning models for NLP?

• How models interpretations can be evaluated?

My research project seeks to combine a well-established subfield of NLP, summarisation, with the growing area of Argument Mining (AM). In essence, AM involves automatic analysis of texts involving argument (language that uses reasoning to persuade) in order to identify its underlying components. These components can then be used in the generation of a textual summary that allows human readers to quickly grasp important points about a discussion.

As an illustrative problem for argument summarisation, we can think of a media company that wishes to report on recent parliamentary debates around a controversial issue. If the volume of debates is large, a summary would clearly be useful. An ideal system which solved this problem would be able to identify the key opposing stances in the debate and summarise the arguments for each.

The difficulties inherent in this task are numerous. Principal among them is the fact that the key units of analysis in argumentative conversation rarely correspond to surface-level features like words, and inferring these latent structures is a non-trivial problem [1].

Within a machine learning framework, this can be restated as the problem of choosing the most appropriate output representation for a supervised machine learning model. One commonly-used representation for argumentative text is the Toulmin model [2], which identifies six distinct Argument Discourse Units (ADUs) and defines relations between them. Many existing systems use only a subset of these units, since distinctions between some different types of unit are difficult to identify in practice.

To give an example of these challenges, one ADU that is commonly annotated in such tasks is the Backing unit, used to give evidence to a Claim. Though the presence of such units may be indicated by the presence of certain words or phrases ("To illustrate this...", "Consider...", "As an example..."), in many cases, such explicit indicators are lacking, and the relation of the Backing unit to a Claim unit may merely be implied by the juxtaposition of Backing and Claim in adjacent sentences (see eg the examples in [3]).

In such cases, it may be impossible to identify the relation between two argument components on the basis of the text alone, and some sort of world knowledge may be required to do this. This could be encoded implicitly, using a pre-trained language model such as BERT, or explicitly, using a knowledge graph [4].

Since we are also addressing the task of summarising an argument, we also expect to have to address the problems involved in the automatic generation of textual summaries. These include diversity, coverage and balance – in other words, producing summaries which do not repeat themselves, attempt to cover as much of the original text as possible, and give equal weight to different parts of the text with equal importance [5].

In conclusion, the problem of automatically summarising argumentative text is one which includes many open sub-questions we intend to address, including how to best represent argument components, how to learn them from textual data, and how to use these to generate a useful summary.

References

1. Lawrence, John, and Chris Reed. "Argument mining: A survey." Computational Linguistics 45.4 (2020): 765-818. (see section 3.1 on text segmentation).

2. Toulmin, Stephen E. The uses of argument. Cambridge university press, 2003.

3. El Baff, Roxanne, et al. "Computational argumentation synthesis as a language modeling task." Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Natural Language Generation. 2019.

4. Fromm, Michael, Evgeniy Faerman, and Thomas Seidl. "TACAM: topic and context aware argument mining." 2019 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI). IEEE, 2019.

5. Li, Liangda, et al. "Enhancing diversity, coverage and balance for summarization through structure learning." Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World Wide Web. 2009.

Human-machine interaction relying on robust far-field automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a topic of wide interest to both academia and industry. The constantly growing use of digital home/personal assistants is one such example.

In far-field scenarios, for which the recording microphone is in considerable distance to the user, not only the target speech signal is picked up by the microphone, but also noise, reverberation and possibly competing speakers. While large research efforts were made to increase ASR performance in acoustically challenging conditions with high noise and reverberation, the conversational aspect adds more challenges to the acoustic and language modelling. If more than one speaker is present in the conversation, tracking the target speaker or separation of the audio signal into separate audio sources from overlapping speech will pose further challenges to ASR. Another layer of complexity is introduced by the recording equipment, such as the number of microphones and their positioning since these can have significant influence on the recorded signal used for ASR.

Deep machine learning in ASR applications significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in recent years. They are widely explored to implement various components of the ASR system such as front-end signal enhancement, acoustic models or the language model independently or jointly either in hybrid or end-to-end (E2E) scenarios.

This project aims at increasing ASR robustness in the challenging acoustic far-field scenario described above. For this, methods from the area of signal processing for signal enhancement and separation will be applied to improve ASR performance as well as novel methods acoustic and language modeling will be developed. By this, ASR performance will be increased for adverse conditions with noise and reverberation, and particularly in environments with competing speech signals. To achieve this goal, different techniques from the signal processing area, the machine-learning area and combinations of both are applied, and in the technical challenges associated with implementation of such systems, particularly in smaller, low power devices such as smart speakers or hearing aids. Additionally, novel techniques involving the usage of semantic information to improve performance will be explored.

Technical documents, such as academic research papers, often contain content that is incomprehensible to a non-specialist audience. This can make it difficult for those without specific knowledge of the subject area to digest and understand ideas that such a piece of work conveys, even at a high-level.

Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks such as text simplification, text summarisation and style transfer all revolve around the adaptation of their input data (eg a body of text) to fit a particular purpose, whilst preserving the essence of its core content. Methods used for such tasks could feasibly be used to summarise and explain the key ideas from technical documents in a format that is more digestible to a non-specialist audience. However, the style in which such ideas should be presented, and the degree to which technical content should be simplified, is highly dependent on the audience itself. People naturally adapt the manner we communicate to better suit our audience, but this is something that, historically, has seldom been taken into account in many NLG tasks. However, some more recent works have experimented with the incorporation of extra-textual information relating to the audience, such as gender [6] or grade-level information [1], with promising results.

This project will involve the research and application of automatic data-to-text NLG techniques that are able to adapt to a given audience. This could, for example, involve leveraging such audience information to provide a personalised output. These are to be used for the transformation of existing technical documents in an effort to make their content more suitable to a different audience or domain. As input data typically used for the aforementioned tasks is often significantly shorter than such technical documents, techniques for handling large documents will also be investigated.

Research questions

How can we expand on existing research [1, 6] into leveraging audience meta-information when performing the aforementioned data-to-text NLG tasks? How can such information be taken into account to better evaluate the performance of models?

How can we adapt current methods of evaluation for the given NLG tasks to allow them to perform at document-level? Do new methods of evaluation need to be developed?

How can we expand upon alternative approaches to NLG tasks (eg deep reinforcement l earning [3], unsupervised l earning [4]) to allow them to perform on entire/multiple documents? Can existing/novel techniques for handling large/multiple documents (eg hierarchical attention mechanisms [2, 5]) be applied to allow for good performance at document-level?

References

• Scarton, C., Madhyastha, P., & Specia, L. (2020). Deciding When, How and for Whom to Simplify. Proceedings of the 2020 Conference of the the 24th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

• Yang, Z., Yang, D., Dyer, C., He, X., Smola, A., & Hovy, E. (2016). Hierarchical Attention Networks for Document Classification. Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, 1480–1489.

• Zhang, X., & Lapata, M. (2017). Sentence Simplification with Deep Reinforcement Learning. Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 584–594.

• Surya, S., Mishra, A., Laha, A., Jain, P., & Sankaranarayanan, K. (2019). Unsupervised Neural Text Simplification. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2058–2068.

• Miculicich, L., Ram, D., Pappas, N., & Henderson, J. (n.d.). Document-Level Neural Machine Translation with Hierarchical Attention Networks. Association for Computational Linguistics.

• Chen, G., Zheng, Y., & Du, Y. (2020). Listener’s Social Identity Matters in Personalised Response Generation.

Computational methods for natural language processing (NLP) require representing sequences of language as vectors, or embeddings. Modern representational approaches generate contextualised word embeddings, where how the word is represented depends on the context it appears in. The embeddings generated by state-of-the-art language representation models such as BERT and ELMo have pushed performance on a variety of NLP tasks, however there are still areas that these embeddings perform poorly in.

One of these areas is handling multi-word expressions (MWEs), which are phrases that are semantically or syntactically idiosyncratic.

These are wide-ranging in human language, estimated to comprise half of a speaker's lexicon, and thus are an important area for research. Examples include "kick the bucket", "by and large" and "car park".

In particular, state-of-the-art contextualised word embeddings have been shown to perform poorly at capturing the idiomaticity of MWEs, where the meaning of the expression is not deducible from the meanings of the individual words (non-compositionality). As an example of this, the meaning of "eager beaver" (an enthusiastic person) is not deducible from the meaning of "beaver".

This inability is detrimental to the performance of NLP models on downstream tasks. In machine translation, for example, idiomatic phrases may be translated literally and thus the wrong meaning conveyed.

The aim of this project is to investigate methods of developing embeddings that better deal with the idiomaticity of MWEs, particularly in a cross-domain setting, ie across different genres of text (for example medical and legal).

The novel embedding methods developed in this project would be evaluated both intrinsically and extrinsically.

Intrinsically, we wish to demonstrate an improvement of the ability of the model to deal with idiomaticity. This would be done using eg a dataset of sentences labelled as idiomatic or not to test the ability of a model to detect idiomaticity.

We then wish to show that an increase in intrinsic performance leads to an improved performance on downstream NLP tasks in a cross-domain setting (ie extrinsic evaluation). The evaluation method would depend on the task at hand, for example using the BLEU score for evaluation of cross-domain machine translation.

Aside from looking at how we can improve model performance on certain tasks, we also want to investigate how the developed methods can be used to boost the interpretability of models. This means helping understand why models give the outputs that they do. It is hoped that by the explicit treatment of MWEs will allow for a better understanding of the decisions made by models.

Research questions

• Can novel embedding methods be developed that better handle idiomatic multiword expressions, particularly in a cross-domain setting?

• How does the use of these novel embedding methods affect the performance of models on downstream NLP tasks?

• Can the interpretability of NLP models be improved through the explicit handling of multiword expressions?

The detection of medical conditions using speech processing techniques is a rapidly emerging field, focusing on the development of non-invasive diagnostic strategies for conditions ranging from dementia, to depression and anxiety, to even Covid-19. One of the largest issues facing medical speech classification that seldom impacts other areas of speech technology (at least in English) in the scarcity of data available. Many of the largest corpora looking at dementia, for example, contain only tens of thousands of words. In addition, these datasets usually contain very few speakers. Limited speakers to train a model creates a new risk of overfitting to idiosyncratic, dialectal, or accentual features of the participants which in turn can gravely impact the efficacy of the classifier depending on the language features of the test subject.

Accent variation can have a large impact on speech technologies, the traditional approach to counter this impact is to use a colossal corpus or accent independent models, either selected by the user or dictated based on geography which are specifically trained on individuals with a similar accent. Unfortunately, this approach depends on a rich dataset from which to train said models, where in the case of medical classification systems, simply does not exist.

This project aims to explore approaches for reducing the impact of accent and language variation on onset cognitive impairment detection systems. This approach will explore the impact of accents both on the construction of cognitive impairment detection classifiers, and on the compilation and initial processing and feature extraction of the datasets. Whilst large elements of this feature extraction will expand over the process of compiling a literature review, one such example may be to investigate bilingual features.

Is it possible that dementia has a consistently detrimental impact on second language production that is distinctly different from the broken language you find in an early learner of the language?

For example, we know individuals make the largest amount of speech production errors on phones which are more similar between their L1 and L2, particularly when learning the language, do we see a loss in ability to maintain phonetic distinctions as someone's cognitive state declines and are the features different to the inverse process of an L2 language learner and thus classifiable. This project aims to develop normalisation strategies and new feature extraction methods for limiting the impact of accents and language variation on medical speech classification systems.

The importance of this research stems from the growing enthusiasm to implement onset cognitive impairment detection systems into the medical industry. Issues here arise where the tools may only be effective on certain demographics of individuals creating significant concern over potential inadvertent segregation created by the technologies. Tools from facial recognition systems to credit scoring systems have all previously and presently seen substantial criticism for their impact on certain demographics of individuals where the systems either perform poorly or adversely impact certain groups of people. It remains vital that medical speech technology is non-discriminatory and provides universally stable efficacy across as many demographics of people as possible.

Background information

Spoken-language based interactions between a human being and an artificial device (such as a social robot) are very popular in recent years. Multi-modal speech-enabled artefacts are seen in many fields, such as entertainment, education, and healthcare, but the user experience of spoken interaction with such devices is not very satisfactory. For example, these devices sometimes fail to understand what the command means, or fail to provide a relevant answer to questions; people do not know how to make their commands more understandable to artificial devices; and the spoken interaction is limited to a rigid style and lacks rich interactive behaviours.

General problem

Users' dissatisfaction is partly caused by limited language abilities of social agents, like inaccurate automatic speech recognition (ASR). Apart from that, it is hypothesised the dissatisfaction is also caused by the mismatched abilities between humans and artificial devices. Due to limited cognitive abilities, such agents cannot take perceptions of others into consideration, nor react to situation accordingly, which resulted in unsuccessful communicative interaction.

Research goal

Communicative interaction efficiency involves multiple factors across disciplines such as languages, psychology, and artificial intelligence. However, the role of influential factors and the mechanism of how those factors interact with each other are unknown. Here the project aims to develop a unified framework which can characterise communicative interaction efficiency. It will investigate factors and strategies that make a spoken-language based interaction effective. Based on understandings of the nature of spoken language interaction between humans and artificial devices, the next objective is to maximise affordance of speech-enabled artefacts, and to achieve more effective communicative interaction between a human being and an artificial device.

Research questions

Preliminary questions so far would appear to be as follows.

1. Definition of effectiveness: What makes a spoken-language based interaction effective in human-human interaction? Is it the same for interaction between a human and an artificial device? If so, in what way?

2. Affordance of speech-enabled artefacts: What affects affordance of speech-enabled artefacts? How would it affect communicative interaction effectiveness? For example, some people may argue naturalness is about making speech-enabled artefacts like humans, with human-like voices and appearances. Is naturalness helpful to maximise usability of speech-enabled artefacts? If natural voice or appearance is not correlated with artificial devices' limited language and cognitive abilities, would it cause `uncanny valley' effect?

3. Short-term and long-term interaction: Do people's expectations of speech-enabled artefacts change over time? How would it change the way artificial devices interact with people?

4. Modelling: Can the communicative interaction effectiveness be modelled? What are different levels of communicative interaction effectiveness? How could those levels be applied to speech-enabled artefacts?

Potential impact

It is hoped the result of this project provides a general guideline for communicative interaction between a human being and an artificial device. It is anticipated such guideline serves as a starting point when people design or improve multi-modal speech-enabled artefacts.

The effectiveness of data-driven Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) depends on the availability of suitable training data. In most cases, this takes the form of labelled data, where speech clips (or a numerical representation of them) are matched to their corresponding words or phonetic symbols. Creating labelled training data is an expensive and time-consuming process. For some languages, such as native British and American English, there is ample data for building ASR systems. For many other languages, however, a large volume of accessible training data does not exist. How can the quality of ASR for under-resourced languages be improved?

Techniques for conducting ASR typically fall into two categories: parametric and non-parametric. Parametric ASR methods use data to train a model. This can be thought of as a 'black box' function, which takes speech as input and outputs the corresponding text, ideally with a high degree of accuracy. Once trained, the model is used without further reference to the training data. The training data is summarised by the model, but some of the information it contains is lost in the process, and it cannot be reinterpreted in the presence of additional data. Parametric models, such as deep learning-based neural networks, are usually trained from scratch for the specific task they will be used for, which makes them extremely effective, but means they cannot be easily generalised to other languages. They are often not easy to interpret, and they are usually not as effective when data is scarce because they have a lot of parameters, and determining the values of many parameters requires a lot of data.

Non-parametric approaches, such as Gaussian processes, instead use the training data directly. In this case, the labelled training data are available at the decision-making stage. This preserves all of the information in the training data, and requires fewer assumptions to be made when predicting text from speech. It also, at least in principle, allows sensible decision-making even with limited data. The downside is that it is not easily scalable, meaning that the computational power and data storage requirements increase rapidly as the amount of data increases. Large quantities of training data therefore become unfeasible.

The two approaches, parametric and non-parametric, have different strengths. When large amounts of data are available, capturing most of the information from a large data set is better than capturing all of the information from a smaller training data set, so that the parametric approach may perform better. When training data is scarce, the non-parametric approach may perform better, since all of the limited training information is preserved.

The objective of this project is to explore and evaluate approaches inspired by both parametric and non-parametric methods for multi-lingual automatic speech recognition.

The automated annotation of real life multi-talker conversations requires systems to perform high quality speech transcription as well as accurate speaker-attribution. These two tasks correspond with two well studied concepts in the domain of speech technology: automatic speech recognition (ASR) and diarization, respectively. The latter concerns segmenting speech by talkers and effectively resolving the problem of ‘Who spoke when?’. Recent advances in ASR systems have shown significant improvements in word error rate (WER) over the past decade, with state of the art systems achieving scores similar to human level performance on common ASR benchmarks. Despite this, even highly sophisticated systems struggle with the more challenging task of ASR in a multi-talker context, where there is typically a significant amount of overlapping speech. The main issues associated with multi-talker situations are: the irregular distances between the recording device and each talker; the variable, often unknown, number of distinct talkers; the high spontaneity of conversational speech, which renders it grammatically dissimilar to written language; and, most importantly, overlapping speech segments which occur due to talkers speaking simultaneously. The culmination of these complications is why the task of multi-talker ASR is typically considered one of the most challenging problems in the domain today. This is particularly the case for recording configurations which use only a single distant microphone (SDM), since techniques utilising the geometry between microphone arrays and speakers, such as beamforming, cannot be used. For ASR to be freely applied in more challenging real life scenarios, like general conversations or outside environments, without the need for specific microphone configurations, significant improvements are still required.

Previous literature has demonstrated that combining the two distinct tasks of ASR and diarization into a single multi-task end-to-end framework can achieve state of the art performance in certain relevant benchmarks whilst only requiring a SDM recording configuration. This is because knowing when an active talker’s turn has ended and knowing the talker is information which significantly influences the probability distribution of the following word, thus benefiting the ASR component of the system. Likewise, information pertaining to who the active talker is, and when the conversation is likely to transition to a different active talker, is intrinsic to the verbal content of the conversation. It therefore seems intuitive that leveraging this mutually beneficial information, solving the conventionally independent tasks simultaneously, improves the overall system performance.

With the increasing popularity of augmented reality/smart wearable devices and the introduction of audio-visual datasets which include real life events recorded egocentrically, a new avenue of research in the domain has been presented. This project hopes to focus on exploring methods of exploiting the visual component of this multi-modal data in a similar manner to the aforementioned speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition (SA-ASR) multi-task system. For example, the aggregate gaze of conversation participants is often representative of who the overall party is attending to, and therefore who is most likely speaking. This information would likely benefit the diarization component of a SA-ASR system, thus indirectly improving the accuracy of the ASR component. To conclude, the aims of this project are to explore methods of supplementing conventional speaker attribution and ASR systems, which rely exclusively on audio, with pertinent features extracted from corresponding visual data.

An issue present in the transgender community is that of voice-based dysphoria. In other words, a profound, constant state of unease or dissatisfaction with the way one's voice sounds. Individuals looking to alleviate such discomfort benefit from regular speech therapy sessions provided by a trained speech therapist. In the UK, this would usually take place as a part of the NHS at one of seven adult gender identity clinics. However, not only are these sessions not typically long or frequent enough, there are also a number of issues surrounding the accessing of such care, including long wait times.

Through discussions with both speech therapists and members of the transgender community, this project aims to explore how well the current needs of the transgender community are being met with regards to speech/voice therapy, as well as which voice analysis and training methods are currently being used during such sessions and how these methods could be adapted for a digital system.

There are a number of interesting directions in which I hope to take this research. Firstly, the project will investigate various signal analysis metrics and features - or, put simply, how computers store and understand human voices - and look at how to derive meaningful user feedback using this information. In addition, the project will also be looking into related fields such as atypical speech, which investigates support systems and detection methods for vocal impairments, such as those found with sufferers of Parkinson's disease. The project will also be investigating existing automatic gender classification systems from user's speech and their development through the ages, including looking at how adapting this work can help alleviate dysphoria of transgender individuals. 

Eventually, this work will culminate in the development of a system which will be capable of supporting higher-frequency, professional quality voice training for members of the transgender community. 

Speech and natural language data will often contain many long-range dependencies, where there is some statistical correlation between words or speech that are spatially distant [1]. For example, in conversational data, the interactions between multiple speakers can produce sequences of utterances that are logically connected and reference information from far in the past. As a consequence, systems that have a greater capacity to model and learn these relationships will show greater predictive performance.

Despite this, the majority of the current Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are designed to model speech as an independent set of utterances, where information from surrounding segments of speech is not utilised by the model. Of course, in many real-world scenarios, these segments of speech are highly interrelated, and the previously processed data can be used to form a useful prior on which to condition future transcription. While previous work has investigated the incorporation of context from surrounding utterances [2,3], doing so effectively with both linguistic and acoustic data remains an open problem. Indeed, many of the current architectures used for modelling sequential data are limited in their ability to utilise very long-distance dependencies [3].

This project aims to investigate approaches that enable automatic speech recognition systems to incorporate information from a much broader context. Ideally, in scenarios such as work-related meetings,  ASR systems should be able to utilise relevant information from across the entire discourse to aid transcription. Additionally, an element of this work can look at what sorts of long-range dependencies are present in long-format speech datasets, and how well these are modelled by our current speech recognition systems.

1. Ebeling, Werner, and Thorsten Pöschel. "Entropy and long-range correlations in literary English." EPL (Europhysics Letters) 26, no. 4 (1994): 241.

2. G. Sun, C. Zhang and P. C. Woodland, "Transformer Language Models with LSTM-Based Cross-Utterance Information Representation" ICASSP (2021)

3. Hori, Takaaki, Niko Moritz, Chiori Hori and Jonathan Le Roux. “Advanced Long-context End-to-end Speech Recognition Using Context-expanded Transformers.” Interspeech (2021).

4. Urvashi Khandelwal, He He, Peng Qi, and Dan Jurafsky. “Sharp Nearby, Fuzzy Far Away: How Neural Language Models Use Context.” ACL (2018)

The spread of misinformation on social media significantly impacts the democratic processes, disease control and economy. However, the amount of social media posts exhausted the fact-checking resources and brought a new major challenge to government responses worldwide. An artificial intelligence (AI) based automatic misinformation detection algorithm is required to minimise the human fact-checking efforts and enable large-scale misinformation detection and analysis.

This project aims to develop a knowledge-based machine learning model (i.e. an algorithm that is trained to recognise patterns in the data) to detect misinformation on social media. Misinformation detection and debunking often require extensive domain knowledge and investigation. The traditional style-based classification method, which is based on the set of style features extracted from the text, can not provide valid evidence of its detection. Our proposed model will incorporate knowledge from professional fact-checkers in order to provide evidence/explanation to justify the model predictions. The knowledge includes professional debunking articles and verified information from trusted sources (e.g. government policy documents or fact-checking websites). In addition, this project also will explore the knowledge inference approach (i.e. acquiring new knowledge from existing facts) to extend the existing knowledge in order to detect unseen misinformation that the professional fact-checkers have not yet debunked. The approaches are based on the latest advances in the AI landscape. This translates into three objectives:

• Objective 1: Develop an automatic knowledge graph building algorithm to build such data structure from professional debunking articles. The knowledge graph is a well-established way to store and represent knowledge. The project will experiment with text semantic triple extraction methods to build a misinformation knowledge graph from the text.

• Objective 2: Create a novel misinformation detection model using a knowledge graph. The main activity for achieving this objective is to explore the method to incorporate the knowledge graph into the misinformation classification model.

• Objective 3: Build an explainable knowledge graph inference model to automatically predict the missing relations between the entities. The predictions will be used to detect unknown misinformation (using the outcome model of Object 2).

Another potential avenue that will be explored is a multimodal approach to misinformation detection. This means analysing the multiple representations of the information contained within the misinformation posts, such as textual and visual. Many of said posts contain multiple modalities and that could be essential for machine learning models to make correct predictions.

The detection results will be evaluated on the COVID-19 misinformation data created during the EU WeVerify project, using standard metrics such as F1 measure. A qualitative user-based evaluation will also be carried out with journalist and fact-checker users of the InVID-WeVerify verification plugin.

A new generation of network-connected microcontrollers are fast becoming the ubiquitous equivalents of yesterday’s embedded computation devices. Instead of hiding anonymously in the control systems of TVs, central heating systems and cars, these devices now play an increasing role in user interfaces. Smart speakers like Google Home are dominated by ARM-based microprocessors, yet a multitude of Internet of Things (IoT) applications (driven by tight constraints on power and cost) rely on much smaller computational cores. While the IoT has been gaining increasing attention over the past decade as a term to describe the connection of microcontrollers to the internet, the small size and power of the devices gives rise to privacy concerns that cannot be solved using traditional techniques. Simply connecting these devices to a network makes them vulnerable to cyberattacks, and the low power of the devices means cloud services are often relied upon for data aggregation, storage and computation. Increasingly in the media we can see stories of privacy concerns surrounding smart speakers, such as security bugs allowing access to voice history from Alexa devices.

This project addresses the extent to which voice control interfaces running on IoT devices can enhance privacy by reducing reliance on the cloud. We will do this by surveying, prototyping and measuring processing capabilities and architectural options for IoT-based voice control in the context of smart homes.

Open source technologies are a prerequisite of verifiable security; migrating IoT infrastructure to open source ones would progress us towards alleviating privacy concerns through transparency. Secondly, local in-house processing that doesn’t transmit data to the cloud would mitigate large numbers of privacy issues. With speech signals carrying rich information relating to the user’s gender, emotions, health, intent and characteristics, it is essential that signals received by voice control devices remain private. We will initially deploy an open source Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system that processes speech data locally on the device (and/or gateway or hub), instead of sending it to cloud services. ASR is the task of finding out what has been said, and is a widely studied field with state-of-the-art benchmarks published which we can use to evaluate the relative performance of our ASR system.

Edge computing and federated learning are key fields relating to our aim of eliminating the transmission of sensitive data over networks. Edge computing refers to processing data locally on users’ devices, and federated learning relates to training machine learning models on devices that are controlled by a central server. We will train a model to recognise commands within the domain of smart home control, however training an ASR model from scratch requires huge amounts of data and collecting it is a time-consuming and costly process. Instead we can use transfer learning approaches to fine-tune a pretrained model on a small amount of data collected from our domain. For example, speaker adaptation could be employed to fine-tune the speech recognition model using samples of the users’ voice.

Whilst chatbots and dialogue systems of the form seen in everyday life (Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s automatic helpdesk, to name a few) are often viewed as task-oriented and transactional, and therefore engaged with solely to achieve an end-goal such as a product return or answer a query, real human communication is rich in social features and unavoidable pragmatic considerations. Consequently, in order to achieve human-like language competency in a conversational setting, these conversational agents require an “understanding” of social intelligence such as pragmatics, empathy, and humour, in order to better integrate into daily life and be interacted with more naturally. 

Although social intelligence and pragmatic competence may not be essential for purely task-oriented dialogue systems, there is still potential for these areas to benefit from developments in the field. For example, within the aforementioned customer service helpdesks, improved social intelligence could result in better responses to customers exhibiting a range of emotions (such as frustration when returning an item), as well as build a rapport with the customer base, leading to increased brand loyalty. On the other hand, dialogue agents exhibiting social intelligence have more clear applications in other domains such as in mental health services for talking therapy, and in the videogames industry for creating more personalised and interactive dialogue trees for narrative progression.

Building upon previous work in empathetic dialogue systems, this project aims to develop a novel high-quality annotated dataset of conversational humour using theories from the domains of linguistics and social/cognitive psychology, to then aid in the development of novel computational models that enable a conversational agent to be aware of context and generate appropriate humorous responses. The aim of these generated responses is, therefore, to incorporate humour, but also to be aware of the conversational pragmatics that govern when is and is not an appropriate time to incorporate said humour in order to avoid the law of diminishing returns or being insensitive. In aiming for such outcomes, the development of anthropomorphic conversational agents within dialogue systems moves away from the focus on omniscience in digital assistants and towards social competence.

Bibliography

• Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press.

• Pamulapati, V., Purigilla, G., & Mamidi, R. (2020). A Novel Annotation Schema for Conversational Humour: Capturing the cultural nuances in Kanyasulkam. The 14th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, Barcelona, B , 34-47. https://aclanthology.org/2020.law-1.4/ 

• Schanke, S., Burtch, G., & Ray, G. (2021). Estimating the Impact of "Humanizing" Customer Service Chatbots. Information Systems Research, 32(3), 736-751. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2021.1015 

• Skantze, G. (2021). Turn-taking in Conversational Systems and Human-Robot Interaction: A Review. Computer Speech & Language, 67, 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csl.2020.101178 

• Veale, T., (2003). Metaphor and Metonymy: The Cognitive Trump-Cards of Linguistic Humour. International Linguistic Cognitive Conference, La Rioja

• Xie, Y., Li, J., & Pu, P. (2021). Uncertainty and Surprisal Jointly Deliver the Punchline: Exploiting Incongruity-Based Features for Humour Recognition. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing , Online, 2, 33-39. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-short.6 

Observed speech signals are the outcome of a complex process governed by intrinsic and extrinsic factors. The combination of such factors is a highly non-linear process, most of the factors are not directly observable, or the relation between them. To give an example the speech signal is normally considered to have content, intonation, and speaker attributes combined with environmental factors. Each of these, however, breaks into several sub-factors, e.g. content is influenced by coarticulation, socio-economic factors, speech type, etc. While learning of factors was attempted in many ways over decades the scope and structure of factorial relationships were usually considered to be simple, and often assessed in discreet space. Recent years have seen attempts in embedding space that allow much richer factorisations. This is often loosely referred to as disentanglement [1], [2] as no relationship model is required or included in the factor separation. One of the challenges for factorising speech representations is that the concept of factorization is not well-defined across domains such as the image domain and the speech domain [3].

In this project, the objective is to learn mappings that allow to encode relationships between separated factors. Such relationships may be linear or in hierarchical form or maybe encoded in terms of a graph of a formal group of mathematical operations. It is, however, important that such relationship encodings remain simple in structure. Formulating such relationships can serve as a new way to express objective functions and allow us to extract richer information about the relationship between these factors. One can imagine both supervised and unsupervised learning approaches. 

Early examples of such models were published in [4] where the simple separation is used to separate different values for speaker and content. The work [5] shows the simple separation technique to separate different speaker embeddings. However, the work was restricted to two-speaker scenarios. Increasing the number of sources (eg. speakers) will make the factorisation process more complex in terms of modelling and it will be difficult to keep the simple relationship between the separated factors. The goal of this work is to propose different ways to factorise the speech signal Into latent space factors while maintaining a simple relationship between them and later reuse them in various speech technology tasks.

1. Hsu, Wei-Ning et al. "Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled and Interpretable Representations from Sequential Data." NIPS (2017).

2. Jennifer Williams. 2021. End-to-end signal factorization for speech: identity, content, and style. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'20). Article 746, 5212-5213.

3. Jennifer Williams, "Learning disentangled speech representations".

4. Yanpei Shi, "Improving the Robustness of Speaker Recognition in Noise and Multi-Speaker Conditions Using Deep Neural Networks".

5. Shi, Yanpei and Thomas Hain. "Supervised Speaker Embedding De-Mixing in Two-Speaker Environment." 2021 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT) (2021): 758-765.

Multi-word expressions (MWEs) - phrases whose meaning as a whole is greater than the sum of their parts - occur frequently in language, and make up around half of the lexicon of native speakers. Idioms in particular present significant challenges for language learners and for computational linguists. While the meaning of a phrase like car thief can be understood from its constituent words, an unfamiliar idiom like one-armed bandit or green thumbs is completely opaque without further explanation.

Deep neural network models, which underpin state-of-the-art natural language processing, construct their representations of phrases by converting individual words to mathematical vectors (known as word embeddings), and then combining these vectors together. This means that they struggle to accurately handle idiomatic expressions which change the meaning of their constituent words - a red herring is not a fish, and no animals are harmed when it is raining cats and dogs.

This limits the usefulness of these models when performing all manner of natural language processing (NLP) tasks; imagine translating “It’s all Greek to me” into Greek one word at a time while preserving its meaning, identifying the sentiment behind a review which describes your product as being as useful as a chocolate teapot, or captioning a picture of a zebra crossing, while unfamiliar with those phrases.

The aim of this project is to enhance the capabilities of neural network models to understand idiomatic expressions by finding ways to provide them with world knowledge, indications of which words go together in a phrase, or the ability to identify when the presence of an unexpected word might indicate an idiomatic usage.

Our jumping-off point will be to explore how various groups of human readers (including native speakers and language learners) process familiar and novel multi-word expressions, whether they are able to work out their meaning and how much contextual information is required to do so. 

This will provide insight into the challenges faced by humans dealing with MWEs and the strategies they employ to do so. We can then examine neural network models and understand where the challenges they experience differ from or resemble our own.

This should enable us to take inspiration from human techniques to enhance the structure and training of our models, before evaluating how much our changes improve model performance on NLP tasks. All of this will hopefully bring us closer to our goal of making idioms less of a pain in the neck!

Nowadays, voice-controlled applications are used for casual information retrieval or as smart home devices, and users cherish how fast and easy it is to access information. However, these conversational agents behave like question & answer systems that only provide the user with turn-taking exchanges. Speech is continuous, variable, context-dependent and rich in linguistic and paralinguistic information, so why should we settle for such simple voice-user interfaces if we can achieve more complex interactions?

Perhaps now, after a decade since the release of Apple’s Siri, people have become accustomed to two practices: (i) using wake words like “Hey Siri” or “Alexa” to initiate a dialogue and (ii) waiting for a short period of time until the voice-enabled device replies back. These adaptations are clear indicators that existing human-machine interactions (HMI) are far from “conversational”. Breaking from this rigid dialogue scheme may be possible if one processes dialogue incrementally, which means that the user’s utterance would be processed word-by-word instead of waiting for the user to end their sentence. Therefore, this project’s main research focus is on incremental dialogue architectures that allow for real-time processing, so voice-enabled artefacts would be able to (i) plan what to say to the user in advance (i.e., or as the user speaks) and (ii) reply back to the user as soon as they finish speaking. Additionally, this project’s key contribution may involve coupling an incremental dialogue system with an effort-based model. This is because we display regulatory behaviour in everyday speech and, as humans, we take into account what the speaker and the listener(s) share in common to adjust that communicative effort.

Furthermore, during a conversation, humans use a variety of multimodal cues to signal that they have finished speaking or to express their willingness to speak next, amongst other things. Currently, most voice-enabled systems are restricted to a single vocal mode of communication (i.e., virtual agents can’t understand and employ these multimodal features to enhance the HMIs). However, embodied systems (such as social robots or talking head avatars) are able to engage in physical, face-to-face interactions because they are ‘situated’ in a particular environment. They are capable of using cues such as gaze, nodding gestures or facial expressions to show continued attention towards the user, and to convey a certain attitude. Thus, such embodied systems prove to be an interesting experimental platform for conversational dialogue modelling.

Therefore, this project aims to apply incremental, effort-based dialogue architectures to multimodal embodied systems to (i) achieve continuous interactions, (ii) investigate if these systems can learn and adapt to the user (i.e., build a rapport), and (iii) display proper behaviours towards the addressee of the utterance.

The implementation of enriched, multimodal dialogue architectures will be advantageous as these will enhance the current human-robot interactions and maximise their usability. Moving towards more conversational interaction styles has a range of useful applications. For instance, despite their flaws, Siri and Alexa are still very popular technologies, with millions of sales every year. The potential of improving current spoken language interfaces and achieving interactive behaviours is quite promising, so one day we will be able to engage with these voice-enabled devices in a more conversational way.

The field of natural language processing has recently achieved success in various areas such as search retrieval, email filtering and text completion. Most people in society use these tools everyday when doing a web search, deleting a spam email or writing a message. Nevertheless, even the newest artificial intelligent models such as GPT-3 struggle with understanding numerical data; this can result in pitfalls like incorrect predictions or factually inaccurate outputs when the input data contains numerical values. This project aims to develop techniques to improve arithmetic reasoning in the interpretation of natural language.

First of all, it is important to make the distinction between computers that, in general, can perform very elaborate mathematics and models that focus on written language. Behind a powerful mathematics code lies a well-versed mathematician who programs it. We do not claim that computers cannot do maths, but we want them to be able to use it without having a human whispering what to do. For instance, in school, when students understand how to multiply two numbers, say 82 and 85, it is expected that they will be equally as good at finding the product of 82  and 109. However, GPT-3 correctly answers the former question but fails at the latter. Clearly, the current tools used when working with natural language are not successful at arithmetic reasoning. Evidence suggests that this correlates to information seen when trained, but the systems are too complex to verify this. In other words, they lack various reasoning skills including arithmetic ones, and they may not understand numbers as well as they understand common words.

To tackle the problem, the initial stage of the research is to explore the existing maths question datasets to identify their limitations. The focus is on worded problems like “Alice and Brinda equally share 8 sweets. Brinda buys 2 and gives 1 to Alice. How many sweets does Brinda now have?”. A key step would be to design evaluation sets that measure different aspects of arithmetic reasoning, for example, by developing contrast sets i.e. using similar questions with different wording. For example, “What is 7 times 6?” and “Give the product of 6 and 7”. With worded problems, altering the numbers or the words used in the problem could highlight whether the model struggles more with the context of the problem or the maths itself.

A further investigation could be to explore how arithmetic reasoning capabilities are coupled with the underlying understanding of the language. A method to better understand this phenomenon would be to use multilinguality to test whether language is key for arithmetic reasoning in existing models or whether they can perform maths language agnostically.  For instance, would German’s use of terms like “Viereck, Fünfeck, …” meaning “four-corner, five-corner, …” for the nomenclature of polygons make the maths problems more understandable in German than other languages?

Moreover, a curriculum learning approach could be employed by having different questions with different levels of difficulty. The easiest set could solely focus on using the most basic operation i.e. addition. More difficult questions may involve operations like division but also more difficult number sets like negatives and decimals.

In addition, we will design optimal prompting techniques for enhancing few-shot arithmetic reasoning. Few-shot learning is the idea of showing the model only a few instances of a specific problem to see  if it generalises to unseen examples given previous knowledge. If the model can add integers, could it do the same for decimals given only a few examples?

Overall, this research aims at improving arithmetic reasoning of technological tools based on teaching principles. In turn it would aid other applications such as fact-checking, summarising tables or even helping the teaching of maths.

Current state-of-the-art NLP technologies are underpinned by complex pre-trained neural network architectures (Rogers et al., 2021) that pose two main challenges: (1) they require large and expensive computational resources for training and inference; and (2) they need large amounts of data that usually entails expensive expert annotation for downstream tasks.

Mass mainstream adoption of such systems with large carbon footprints would have serious environmental implications, making this technology unsustainable in the long term. It is estimated that training a large Transformer network (Vaswani et al., 2017) with architecture search produces 5 times more CO2 emissions compared to driving a car for a lifetime (Strubell et al., 2019; Schwartz et al., 2020). Moreover, the cost for developing and experimenting with large deep learning models in NLP introduces inherent inequalities between those that can afford it and those that cannot, both in the academic community and in industry.

Given the importance of these challenges, this project has two main objectives: (1) to develop lightweight pre-trained language models (Sanh et al., 2019; Shen et al., 2021; Yamaguchi et al., 2021) that have substantially smaller computing resource requirements for training and inference; and (2) to investigate data efficiency when fine-tuning pre-trained transformer models (Touvron et al., 2021). 

References

• Anna Rogers, Olga Kovaleva, and Anna Rumshisky. 2021. A Primer in BERTology: What We Know About How BERT Works. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 8:842–866.

• Victor Sanh, Lysandre Debut, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf. 2019. DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter. CoRR, abs/1910.01108.

• Roy Schwartz, Jesse Dodge, Noah A. Smith, and Oren Etzioni. 2020. Green AI. Commun. ACM, 63(12):54–63.

• Sheng Shen, Alexei Baevski, Ari Morcos, Kurt Keutzer, Michael Auli, and Douwe Kiela. 2021. Reservoir Transformers. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4294–4309, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.

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