Cross-lingual speech emotion recognition is an important task for practical applications. The performance of automatic speech emotion recognition systems degrades in cross-corpus scenarios, particularly in scenarios involving multiple languages or a previously unseen language such as Urdu for which limited or no data is available. In this study, we investigate the problem of cross-lingual emotion recognition for Urdu language and contribute URDU---the first ever spontaneous Urdu-language speech emotion database. Evaluations are performed using three different Western languages against Urdu and experimental results on different possible scenarios suggest various interesting aspects for designing more adaptive emotion recognition system for such limited languages. In results, selecting training instances of multiple languages can deliver comparable results to baseline and augmentation a fraction of testing language data while training can help to boost accuracy for speech emotion recognition. URDU data is publicly available for further research.
In recent studies, it has been shown that Multilingual language models underperform their monolingual counterparts. It is also a well-known fact that training and maintaining monolingual models for each language is a costly and time-consuming process. Roman Urdu is a resource-starved language used popularly on social media platforms and chat apps. In this research, we propose a novel dataset of scraped tweets containing 54M tokens and 3M sentences. Additionally, we also propose RUBERT a bilingual Roman Urdu model created by additional pretraining of English BERT. We compare its performance wit…
This paper shows that pretraining multilingual language models at scale leads to significant performance gains for a wide range of cross-lingual transfer tasks. We train a Transformer-based masked language model on one hundred languages, using more than two terabytes of filtered CommonCrawl data. Our model, dubbed XLM-R, significantly outperforms multilingual BERT (mBERT) on a variety of cross-lingual benchmarks, including +14.6% average accuracy on XNLI, +13% average F1 score on MLQA, and +2.4% F1 score on NER. XLM-R performs particularly well on low-resource languages, improving 15.7% in XNL…
Natural Language Processing systems are heavily dependent on the availability of annotated data to train practical models. Primarily, models are trained on English datasets. In recent times, significant advances have been made in multilingual understanding due to the steeply increasing necessity of working in different languages. One of the points that stands out is that since there are now so many pre-trained multilingual models, we can utilize them for cross-lingual understanding tasks. Using cross-lingual understanding and Natural Language Inference, it is possible to train models whose app…
Facebook AI（Facebook人工智能）；New York University（纽约大学）
State-of-the-art natural language processing systems rely on supervision in the form of annotated data to learn competent models. These models are generally trained on data in a single language (usually English), and cannot be directly used beyond that language. Since collecting data in every language is not realistic, there has been a growing interest in cross-lingual language understanding (XLU) and low-resource cross-language transfer. In this work, we construct an evaluation set for XLU by extending the development and test sets of the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference Corpus (MultiNL…
University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Cross-lingual transfer between a high-resource language and its dialects or closely related language varieties should be facilitated by their similarity. However, current approaches that operate in the embedding space do not take surface similarity into account. This work presents a simple yet effective strategy to imrove cross-lingual transfer between closely related varieties. We propose to augment the data of the high-resource source language with character-level noise to make the model more robust towards spelling variations. Our strategy shows consistent improvements over several language…
Cross-Lingual Mental Health Ontologies for Indian Languages: Bridging Patient Expression and Clinical Understanding through Explainable AI and Human-in-the-Loop Validation
University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；University of Kansas（堪萨斯大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；IIT Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad（国际信息技术研究所海得拉巴分校）；Indian Institute of Technology - Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）
We present sentence aligned parallel corpora across 10 Indian Languages - Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, Urdu, Bengali, Oriya, Marathi, Punjabi, and English - many of which are categorized as low resource. The corpora are compiled from online sources which have content shared across languages. The corpora presented significantly extends present resources that are either not large enough or are restricted to a specific domain (such as health). We also provide a separate test corpus compiled from an independent online source that can be independently used for validating the performan…
Pretrained language models are now of widespread use in Natural Language Processing. Despite their success, applying them to Low Resource languages is still a huge challenge. Although Multilingual models hold great promise, applying them to specific low-resource languages e.g. Roman Urdu can be excessive. In this paper, we show how the code-switching property of languages may be used to perform cross-lingual transfer learning from a corresponding high resource language. We also show how this transfer learning technique termed Bilingual Language Modeling can be used to produce better performing…
National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, FAST（国家计算机与新兴科学大学FAST校区）
Code-switching is a common phenomenon among people with diverse lingual background and is widely used on the internet for communication purposes. In this paper, we present a Recurrent Neural Network combined with the Attention Model for Language Identification in Code-Switched Data in English and low resource Roman Urdu. The attention model enables the architecture to learn the important features of the languages hence classifying the code switched data. We demonstrated our approach by comparing the results with state of the art models i.e. Hidden Markov Models, Conditional Random Field and Bi…
In recent years, low-resource Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) has made significant progress, with models getting remarkable performance on various language datasets. However, none of these models have been customized for the Urdu language. This work explores the semi-automated creation of the Urdu Question Answering Dataset (UQuAD1.0) by combining machine-translated SQuAD with human-generated samples derived from Wikipedia articles and Urdu RC worksheets from Cambridge O-level books. UQuAD1.0 is a large-scale Urdu dataset intended for extractive machine reading comprehension tasks consisti…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
The design of widespread vision-and-language datasets and pre-trained encoders directly adopts, or draws inspiration from, the concepts and images of ImageNet. While one can hardly overestimate how much this benchmark contributed to progress in computer vision, it is mostly derived from lexical databases and image queries in English, resulting in source material with a North American or Western European bias. Therefore, we devise a new protocol to construct an ImageNet-style hierarchy representative of more languages and cultures. In particular, we let the selection of both concepts and images…
While natural language processing systems often focus on a single language, multilingual transfer learning has the potential to improve performance, especially for low-resource languages. We introduce XLDA, cross-lingual data augmentation, a method that replaces a segment of the input text with its translation in another language. XLDA enhances performance of all 14 tested languages of the cross-lingual natural language inference (XNLI) benchmark. With improvements of up to $4.8\%$, training with XLDA achieves state-of-the-art performance for Greek, Turkish, and Urdu. XLDA is in contrast to, a…
MMA-ASIA: A Multilingual and Multimodal Alignment Framework for Culturally-Grounded Evaluation
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore（新加坡科技研究局）；Indian Institute of Technology Delhi（印度理工学院德里分校）；Alibaba DAMO Academy（阿里巴巴达摩院）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（上海财经大学）；Inner Mongolia University（内蒙古大学）；Kyoto University（京都大学）；Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学）；Korea University（韩国大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
