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Speech disfluencies have been hypothesized to occur before words that are less predictable and therefore more cognitively demanding. In this paper, we revisit this hypothesis by using OpenAI&#39;s GPT-2 to calculate predictability of words as language model perplexity. Using the Switchboard corpus, we find that 51% of disfluencies occur at the highest, second highest, or within one token of the highest perplexity, and this distribution is not random. We also show that disfluencies precede words with significantly higher perplexity than fluent contexts. Based on our results, we offer new evidence that disfluencies are more likely to occur before less predictable words.

COLING 2020

Speech Disfluencies occur at Higher Perplexities

switchboard

disfluency

spoken language

speech

language model

gpt-2

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
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ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

Speech disfluencies have been hypothesized to occur before words that are less predictable and therefore more cognitively demanding. In this paper, we revisit this hypothesis by using OpenAI's GPT-2 to calculate predictability of words as language model perplexity. Using the Switchboard corpus, we find that 51% of disfluencies occur at the highest, second highest, or within one token of the highest perplexity, and this distribution is not random. We also show that disfluencies precede words with significantly higher perplexity than fluent contexts. Based on our results, we offer new evidence that disfluencies are more likely to occur before less predictable words.

poster

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

Language transfer can facilitate learning L2 words whose form and meaning are similar to L1 words, or hinder speakers when the languages differ. L2 idioms introduce another layer of challenge, as language transfer could occur on the literal or figurative level of meaning. Thus, the mechanics of language transfer for idiom processing shed light on how literal and figurative meaning is stored in the bilingual lexicon. Three factors appear to influence how language transfer affects idiom comprehension: bilingual fluency, processing of literal-figurative vs. figurative cognate idioms (idioms with the same wording and meaning in both languages, or the same meaning only), and comprehension of literal vs. figurative meaning of a given idiom. To examine the relationship between these factors, this study investigated English-Spanish bilinguals’ reaction time on a lexical decision task examining literal-figurative and figurative cognate idioms. The results suggest that fluency increases processing speed rather than slow it down due to language transfer, and that language transfer from L1 to L2 occurs on the level of figurative meaning in L1-dominant bilinguals.

Bilingual Lexical Access and Cognate Idiom Comprehension

We report ongoing research on linking elements in German compounds, with a focus on noun-noun compounds in which the first constituent is ending in schwa. We present a corpus of about 3000 nouns ending in schwa, annotated for various phonological and morpho-syntactic features, and critically, the dominant linking strategy. The corpus analysis is complemented by an unsuccessful attempt to train neural networks and by a pilot experiment asking native speakers to indicate their preferred linking strategy for nonce words. While neither the corpus study nor the experiment offer a clear picture, the results nevertheless provide interesting insights into the intricacies of German compounding. Overall, we find a predominance of the paradigmatic linking element -n. At the same time, the results show that -n is not a default strategy.

Schwa-deletion in German noun-noun compounds

Existing dictionaries may help collocation translation by suggesting associated words in the form of collocations, thesaurus, and example sentences. We propose to enhance them with task-driven word associations, illustrating the need by a few scenarios and outlining a possible approach based on word embedding. An example is given, using pre-trained word embedding, while more extensive investigation with more refined methods and resources is underway.

Translating Collocations: The Need for Task-driven Word Associations

The HSemID system, submitted to the CogALex VI Shared Task is a hybrid system relying mainly on metric clusters measured in large web corpora, complemented by a vector space model using cosine similarity to detect semantic associations. Although the system reached ra-ther weak results for the subcategories of synonyms, antonyms and hypernyms, with some dif-ferences from one language to another, it is able to measure general semantic associations (as being random or not-random) with an F1 score close to 0.80. The results strongly suggest that idiomatic constructions play a fundamental role in semantic associations. Further experiments are necessary in order to fine-tune the model to the subcategories of synonyms, antonyms, hy-pernyms and to explain surprising differences across languages.

Extracting Meaning by Idiomaticity: the Hsemid System

We describe our submission to the CogALex-VI shared task on the identification of multilingual paradigmatic relations building on XLM-RoBERTa (XLM-R), a robustly optimized and multi-lingual BERT model. In spite of several experiments with data augmentation, data addition and ensemble methods with a Siamese Triple Net, XLM-R with a linear classifier adapted to this specific task performed best in testing and achieved the best results in the final evaluation of the shared task, even for a previously unseen language.

Transrelation: A Robust Multilingual Language Model for Multilingual Relation Identification

This paper presents a bidirectional transformer based approach for recognising semantic relationships between a pair of words as proposed by CogALex VI shared task in 2020. The system presented here works by employing BERT embeddings of the words and passing the same over tuned neural network to produce a learning model for the pair of words and their relationships. Afterwards the very same model is used for the relationship between unknown words from the test set. CogALex VI provided Subtask 1 as the identification of relationship of three specific categories amongst English pair of words and the presented system opts to work on that. The resulted relationships of the unknown words are analysed here which shows a balanced performance in overall characteristics with some scope for improvement.

Bidirectional Transformer based Identification of Semantic Relations

This paper proposes an iterative inference algorithm for multi-hop explanation regeneration, that retrieves relevant factual evidence in the form of text snippets, given a natural language question and its answer. Combining multiple sources of evidence or facts for multi-hop reasoning becomes increasingly hard when the number of sources needed to make an inference grows. Our algorithm copes with this by decomposing the selection of facts from a corpus autoregressively, conditioning the next iteration on previously selected facts. This allows us to use a pairwise learning-to-rank loss. We validate our method on datasets of the TextGraphs 2019 and 2020 Shared Tasks for explanation regeneration. Existing work on this task either evaluates facts in isolation or artificially limits the possible chains of facts, thus limiting multi-hop inference. We demonstrate that our algorithm, when used with a pre-trained transformer model, outperforms the previous state-of-the-art in terms of precision, training time and inference efficiency.

Autoregressive Reasoning over Chains of Facts with Transformers

In this work, we describe the system developed by a group of undergraduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology, for the Shared Task at TextGraphs-14 on Multi-Hop Inference Explanation Regeneration (Jansen and Ustalov, 2020). The shared task required participants to develop methods to reconstruct gold explanations for elementary science questions from the WorldTree Corpus (Xie et al., 2020). Although our research was not funded by any organization and all the models were trained on freely available tools like Google Colab which restricted our computational capabilities, we have managed to achieve noteworthy results placing ourselves in 4th place with a MAP score of 0.49021 in the evaluation leaderboard and 0.5062 MAP score on the post-evaluation-phase leaderboard using RoBERTa. We incorporated some of the methods proposed in the previous edition of Textgraphs-13 (Chia et al., 2019), which proved to be very effective, improved upon them, and built a model on top of it using powerful state-of-the-art pre-trained language models like RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019), BART (Lewis et al., 2020), SciBERT (Beltagy et al., 2019) among others. Further optimization of our work can be done with the availability of better computational resources.

Leveraging Pre-trained Language Models for Explanation Regeneration

Explanation regeneration is the task of generating simple sentence explanations for
complex scientific phenomena related question answers. This poster describes our system submission to the Textgraphs 2020 workshop shared task which is based on multiple components: a BERT baseline ranking, an Integer Linear Program (ILP) based re-scoring, and a regression model for re-ranking the explanation facts. Our system achieved a Mean Average Precision (MAP) score of 0.36592.

Explanation Regeneration via Multi-Hop ILP Inference over Knowledge Base

Explainable question answering for science questions is a challenging task that requires multi-hop inference over a large set of fact sentences. To counter the limitations of methods that view each query-document pair in isolation, we propose the LSTM-Interleaved Transformer which incorporates cross-document interactions for improved multi-hop ranking. The LIT architecture can leverage prior ranking positions in the re-ranking setting. Our model is competitive on the current leaderboard for the TextGraphs 2020 shared task, achieving a test-set MAP of 0.5607, and would have gained third place had we submitted before the competition deadline. Our code implementation is made available at https://github.com/mdda/worldtree_corpus/tree/textgraphs_2020

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