We present an analysis pipeline and best practice guidelines for building and curating corpora of everyday conversation in diverse languages. Surveying language documentation corpora and other resources that cover 67 languages and varieties from 28 phyla, we describe the compilation and curation process, specify minimal properties of a unified format for interactional data, and develop methods for quality control that take into account turn-taking and timing. Two case studies show the broad utility of conversational data for (i) charting human interactional infrastructure and (ii) tracing challenges and opportunities for current ASR solutions. Linguistically diverse conversational corpora can provide new insights for the language sciences and stronger empirical foundations for language technology.
For conversational large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) tasks, up to about two thousand hours of audio is commonly used to train state of the art models. Collection of labeled conversational audio however, is prohibitively expensive, laborious and error-prone. Furthermore, academic corpora like Fisher English (2004) or Switchboard (1992) are inadequate to train models with sufficient accuracy in the unbounded space of conversational speech. These corpora are also timeworn due to dated acoustic telephony features and the rapid advancement of colloquial vocabulary and idiomatic…
Center of Language and Speech Processing（语言与语音处理中心）；Human Language Technology Center of Excellence, Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学人类语言技术卓越中心）
Dialog acts can be interpreted as the atomic units of a conversation, more fine-grained than utterances, characterized by a specific communicative function. The ability to structure a conversational transcript as a sequence of dialog acts -- dialog act recognition, including the segmentation -- is critical for understanding dialog. We apply two pre-trained transformer models, XLNet and Longformer, to this task in English and achieve strong results on Switchboard Dialog Act and Meeting Recorder Dialog Act corpora with dialog act segmentation error rates (DSER) of 8.4% and 14.2%. To understand t…
Transformer-based models have demonstrated their effectiveness in automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks and even shown superior performance over the conventional hybrid framework. The main idea of Transformers is to capture the long-range global context within an utterance by self-attention layers. However, for scenarios like conversational speech, such utterance-level modeling will neglect contextual dependencies that span across utterances. In this paper, we propose to explicitly model the inter-sentential information in a Transformer based end-to-end architecture for conversational speec…
Leveraging context information is an intuitive idea to improve performance on conversational automatic speech recognition(ASR). Previous works usually adopt recognized hypotheses of historical utterances as preceding context, which may bias the current recognized hypothesis due to the inevitable historicalrecognition errors. To avoid this problem, we propose an audio-textual cross-modal representation extractor to learn contextual representations directly from preceding speech. Specifically, it consists of two modal-related encoders, extracting high-level latent features from speech and the co…
Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is an established component within a conversational AI or digital assistant system, and it is responsible for producing semantic understanding of a user request. We propose a scalable and automatic approach for improving NLU in a large-scale conversational AI system by leveraging implicit user feedback, with an insight that user interaction data and dialog context have rich information embedded from which user satisfaction and intention can be inferred. In particular, we propose a general domain-agnostic framework for curating new supervision data for impro…
OphIn-500K: Curating Web-Scale Visual Instructions for Scaling Ophthalmic Multimodal Large Language Models
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Clemson University（克莱姆森大学）；Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；University of Notre Dame（诺特丹大学）；Florida State University（佛罗里达州立大学）；Rice University（里德大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；Mayo Clinic（梅奥诊所）
Dialogue Act (DA) tagging is crucial for spoken language understanding systems, as it provides a general representation of speakers' intents, not bound to a particular dialogue system. Unfortunately, publicly available data sets with DA annotation are all based on different annotation schemes and thus incompatible with each other. Moreover, their schemes often do not cover all aspects necessary for open-domain human-machine interaction. In this paper, we propose a methodology to map several publicly available corpora to a subset of the ISO standard, in order to create a large task-independent …
School of Informatics（信息学院）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Conversational agents are gaining popularity with the increasing ubiquity of smart devices. However, training agents in a data driven manner is challenging due to a lack of suitable corpora. This paper presents a novel method for gathering topical, unstructured conversational data in an efficient way: self-dialogues through crowd-sourcing. Alongside this paper, we include a corpus of 3.6 million words across 23 topics. We argue the utility of the corpus by comparing self-dialogues with standard two-party conversations as well as data from other corpora.
Efficient ASR Training with Conversations that Never Happened
Dept. of Telecommunications and Artificial Intelligence, Budapest University of Technology and Economics（电信与人工智能系，布达佩斯技术与经济大学）；SpeechTex Ltd.（SpeechTex公司）；ELTE Research Centre for Linguistics（ELTE语言研究所）
For companies with customer service, mapping intents inside their conversational data is crucial in building applications based on natural language understanding (NLU). Nevertheless, there is no established automated technique to gather the intents from noisy online chats or voice transcripts. Simple clustering approaches are not suited to intent-sparse dialogues. To solve this intent-landscape task, we propose an unsupervised pipeline that extracts the intents and the taxonomy of intents from real-world dialogues. Our pipeline mines intent-span candidates with an extractive Question-Answering…
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University（京都大学信息学研究生院）
Acoustic-to-word (A2W) end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have attracted attention because of an extremely simplified architecture and fast decoding. To alleviate data sparseness issues due to infrequent words, the combination with an acoustic-to-character (A2C) model is investigated. Moreover, the A2C model can be used to recover out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words that are not covered by the A2W model, but this requires accurate detection of OOV words. A2W models learn contexts with both acoustic and transcripts; therefore they tend to falsely recognize OOV words as words in the…
Norwegian Computing Center（挪威计算中心）；Universidad Central del Ecuador（厄瓜多尔中央大学）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；imec（比利时微电子研究中心）；Université catholique de Louvain（鲁汶天主教大学）
Neural conversational models require substantial amounts of dialogue data for their parameter estimation and are therefore usually learned on large corpora such as chat forums or movie subtitles. These corpora are, however, often challenging to work with, notably due to their frequent lack of turn segmentation and the presence of multiple references external to the dialogue itself. This paper shows that these challenges can be mitigated by adding a weighting model into the architecture. The weighting model, which is itself estimated from dialogue data, associates each training example to a num…
Center for Language Technologies (CeLT), De La Salle University（德拉萨大学语言技术中心）
Response generation is a task in natural language processing (NLP) where a model is trained to respond to human statements. Conversational response generators take this one step further with the ability to respond within the context of previous responses. While there are existing techniques for training such models, they all require an abundance of conversational data which are not always available for low-resource languages. In this research, we make three contributions. First, we released the first Filipino conversational dataset collected from a popular Philippine online forum, which we nam…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Recognizing emotions in conversations is a challenging task due to the presence of contextual dependencies governed by self- and inter-personal influences. Recent approaches have focused on modeling these dependencies primarily via supervised learning. However, purely supervised strategies demand large amounts of annotated data, which is lacking in most of the available corpora in this task. To tackle this challenge, we look at transfer learning approaches as a viable alternative. Given the large amount of available conversational data, we investigate whether generative conversational models c…
Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models are competitive with hybrid models for automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks when large amounts of training data are available. However, data sparsity and domain adaptation are more problematic for seq2seq models than their hybrid counterparts. We examine corpora of five languages from the IARPA MATERIAL program where the transcribed data is conversational telephone speech (CTS) and evaluation data is broadcast news (BN). We show that there is a sizable initial gap in such a data condition between hybrid and seq2seq models, and the hybrid model is able …
We propose a method of curating high-quality comparable training data for low-resource languages with monolingual annotators. Our method involves using a carefully selected set of images as a pivot between the source and target languages by getting captions for such images in both languages independently. Human evaluations on the English-Hindi comparable corpora created with our method show that 81.1% of the pairs are acceptable translations, and only 2.47% of the pairs are not translations at all. We further establish the potential of the dataset collected through our approach by experimentin…
The recognition of emotion and dialogue acts enriches conversational analysis and help to build natural dialogue systems. Emotion interpretation makes us understand feelings and dialogue acts reflect the intentions and performative functions in the utterances. However, most of the textual and multi-modal conversational emotion corpora contain only emotion labels but not dialogue acts. To address this problem, we propose to use a pool of various recurrent neural models trained on a dialogue act corpus, with and without context. These neural models annotate the emotion corpora with dialogue act …
Neural language models (LM) trained on diverse corpora are known to work well on previously seen entities, however, updating these models with dynamically changing entities such as place names, song titles and shopping items requires re-training from scratch and collecting full sentences containing these entities. We aim to address this issue, by introducing entity-aware language models (EALM), where we integrate entity models trained on catalogues of entities into the pre-trained LMs. Our combined language model adaptively adds information from the entity models into the pre-trained LM depend…
Real-world text classification tasks often require many labeled training examples that are expensive to obtain. Recent advancements in machine teaching, specifically the data programming paradigm, facilitate the creation of training data sets quickly via a general framework for building weak models, also known as labeling functions, and denoising them through ensemble learning techniques. We present a fast, simple data programming method for augmenting text data sets by generating neighborhood-based weak models with minimal supervision. Furthermore, our method employs an iterative procedure to…
In spoken question answering, QA systems are designed to answer questions from contiguous text spans within the related speech transcripts. However, the most natural way that human seek or test their knowledge is via human conversations. Therefore, we propose a new Spoken Conversational Question Answering task (SCQA), aiming at enabling QA systems to model complex dialogues flow given the speech utterances and text corpora. In this task, our main objective is to build a QA system to deal with conversational questions both in spoken and text forms, and to explore the plausibility of providing m…
In order to build dialogue systems to tackle the ambitious task of holding social conversations, we argue that we need a data driven approach that includes insight into human conversational chit chat, and which incorporates different natural language processing modules. Our strategy is to analyze and index large corpora of social media data, including Twitter conversations, online debates, dialogues between friends, and blog posts, and then to couple this data retrieval with modules that perform tasks such as sentiment and style analysis, topic modeling, and summarization. We aim for personal …
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）；Mila - Quebec AI Institute（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；PolyAI Limited（PolyAI有限公司）
In task-oriented dialogue (ToD), a user holds a conversation with an artificial agent to complete a concrete task. Although this technology represents one of the central objectives of AI and has been the focus of ever more intense research and development efforts, it is currently limited to a few narrow domains (e.g., food ordering, ticket booking) and a handful of languages (e.g., English, Chinese). This work provides an extensive overview of existing methods and resources in multilingual ToD as an entry point to this exciting and emerging field. We find that the most critical factor preventi…
We present three enhancements to existing encoder-decoder models for open-domain conversational agents, aimed at effectively modeling coherence and promoting output diversity: (1) We introduce a measure of coherence as the GloVe embedding similarity between the dialogue context and the generated response, (2) we filter our training corpora based on the measure of coherence to obtain topically coherent and lexically diverse context-response pairs, (3) we then train a response generator using a conditional variational autoencoder model that incorporates the measure of coherence as a latent varia…
AstroLLaMA-Chat: Scaling AstroLLaMA with Conversational and Diverse Datasets
European Space Agency (ESA), European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC)（欧洲航天局欧洲空间天文学中心）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Aspia Space（Aspia Space公司）
Fine PT-PT Web: A High-Quality 41 Billion Tokens Data Collection of the European Portuguese Web
NOVA School of Science and Technology（NOVA科学与技术学院）；NOVA LINCS；Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia（科学技术基金会）；Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学高等技术学院）；Instituto de Telecomunicações（电信研究院）
Impact of enriched meaning representations for language generation in dialogue tasks: A comprehensive exploration of the relevance of tasks, corpora and metrics
University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)（巴斯克大学（UPV/EHU））
Few-Shot Query Intent Detection via Relation-Aware Prompt Learning
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Shenzhen MSU-BIT University（深圳MSU-BIT大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
We investigate the task of building open domain, conversational dialogue systems based on large dialogue corpora using generative models. Generative models produce system responses that are autonomously generated word-by-word, opening up the possibility for realistic, flexible interactions. In support of this goal, we extend the recently proposed hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder neural network to the dialogue domain, and demonstrate that this model is competitive with state-of-the-art neural language models and back-off n-gram models. We investigate the limitations of this and similar ap…
Aligning parallel sentences in multilingual corpora is essential to curating data for downstream applications such as Machine Translation. In this work, we present OneAligner, an alignment model specially designed for sentence retrieval tasks. This model is able to train on only one language pair and transfers, in a cross-lingual fashion, to low-resource language pairs with negligible degradation in performance. When trained with all language pairs of a large-scale parallel multilingual corpus (OPUS-100), this model achieves the state-of-the-art result on the Tateoba dataset, outperforming an …
The scarcity and class imbalance of training data are known issues in current rumor detection tasks. We propose a straight-forward and general-purpose data augmentation technique which is beneficial to early rumor detection relying on event propagation patterns. The key idea is to exploit massive unlabeled event data sets on social media to augment limited labeled rumor source tweets. This work is based on rumor spreading patterns revealed by recent rumor studies and semantic relatedness between labeled and unlabeled data. A state-of-the-art neural language model (NLM) and large credibility-fo…
