arXiv subjects

Mohammad Omar Khursheed

Publications and source records attributed to Mohammad Omar Khursheed.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Two Centuries of Sexism in British Parliament: A Computational Analysis of Women's Representation in the Hansard Corpus

The language a legislature uses to debate women's rights, even in favour of them, encodes systematic patterns of sexism that persist across two centuries. In this work, we analyse 6,531 speeches over 200 years of UK parliamentary debate (Hansard, 1803-2005) by using large language models to classify a speaker's perspective towards women's suffrage and political representation, as well as analyse sexist speech in parliament from the lens of the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory. We also release this parliamentary dataset, an organized and metadata-enriched version of the publicly available Hansard Corpus optimized for computational social science research, with 6.7 million speeches across 1.2 million debates, with 89% gender-matching for speeches by MPs from the House of Commons. We find that 54% of speeches opposing women's representation contain sexist content, compared to 21% of speeches that are for the cause, and that the two sides use fundamentally different types of sexism: anti-suffrage rhetoric combines hostile and benevolent framing, while pro-suffrage sexism is overwhelmingly benevolent. Female MPs support women's political rights at 93% compared to 70% for male MPs, a gap that closes only after enfranchisement. Our findings are evidence that benevolent and hostile sexism are used in different rhetorical contexts in a manner consistent with the theory of Ambivalent Sexism.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

(Mis)generalization of Helpful-only Fine-tuning

Helpful-only models, that is, models that are trained to always follow user intent, are valuable for dangerous capability evaluations and other areas of AI R&D where refusals would be an obstacle. Little is known about the generalization properties of helpful-only training: helpful-only models refuse less than their harmless counterparts, but previous work has not studied other dimensions of their alignment. We study the shortcomings of existing helpful-only models. We find that some show emergent misalignment, others have residual refusal behaviors, and most show poor steerability, sycophancy, and incoherent character. We show that simple anti-refusal training can cause many of these issues. None of these problems are necessary consequences of helpful-only training, though: we show that synthetic document fine-tuning and adding character-related questions to SFT and RL can mitigate them.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Small-footprint slimmable networks for keyword spotting

In this work, we present Slimmable Neural Networks applied to the problem of small-footprint keyword spotting. We show that slimmable neural networks allow us to create super-nets from Convolutioanl Neural Networks and Transformers, from which sub-networks of different sizes can be extracted. We demonstrate the usefulness of these models on in-house Alexa data and Google Speech Commands, and focus our efforts on models for the on-device use case, limiting ourselves to less than 250k parameters. We show that slimmable models can match (and in some cases, outperform) models trained from scratch. Slimmable neural networks are therefore a class of models particularly useful when the same functionality is to be replicated at different memory and compute budgets, with different accuracy requirements.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2022

Latency Control for Keyword Spotting

Conversational agents commonly utilize keyword spotting (KWS) to initiate voice interaction with the user. For user experience and privacy considerations, existing approaches to KWS largely focus on accuracy, which can often come at the expense of introduced latency. To address this tradeoff, we propose a novel approach to control KWS model latency and which generalizes to any loss function without explicit knowledge of the keyword endpoint. Through a single, tunable hyperparameter, our approach enables one to balance detection latency and accuracy for the targeted application. Empirically, we show that our approach gives superior performance under latency constraints when compared to existing methods. Namely, we make a substantial 25\% relative false accepts improvement for a fixed latency target when compared to the baseline state-of-the-art. We also show that when our approach is used in conjunction with a max-pooling loss, we are able to improve relative false accepts by 25 % at a fixed latency when compared to cross entropy loss.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2021

Tiny-CRNN: Streaming Wakeword Detection In A Low Footprint Setting

In this work, we propose Tiny-CRNN (Tiny Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network) models applied to the problem of wakeword detection, and augment them with scaled dot product attention. We find that, compared to Convolutional Neural Network models, False Accepts in a 250k parameter budget can be reduced by 25% with a 10% reduction in parameter size by using models based on the Tiny-CRNN architecture, and we can get up to 32% reduction in False Accepts at a 50k parameter budget with 75% reduction in parameter size compared to word-level Dense Neural Network models. We discuss solutions to the challenging problem of performing inference on streaming audio with this architecture, as well as differences in start-end index errors and latency in comparison to CNN, DNN, and DNN-HMM models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Small Footprint Convolutional Recurrent Networks for Streaming Wakeword Detection

In this work, we propose small footprint Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network models applied to the problem of wakeword detection and augment them with scaled dot product attention. We find that false accepts compared to Convolutional Neural Network models in a 250k parameter budget can be reduced by 25% with a 10% reduction in parameter size by using CRNNs, and we can get up to 32% improvement at a 50k parameter budget with 75% reduction in parameter size compared to word-level Dense Neural Network models. We discuss solutions to the challenging problem of performing inference on streaming audio with CRNNs, as well as differences in start-end index errors and latency in comparison to CNN, DNN, and DNN-HMM models.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2020

Analyzing Gender Bias within Narrative Tropes

Popular media reflects and reinforces societal biases through the use of tropes, which are narrative elements, such as archetypal characters and plot arcs, that occur frequently across media. In this paper, we specifically investigate gender bias within a large collection of tropes. To enable our study, we crawl tvtropes.org, an online user-created repository that contains 30K tropes associated with 1.9M examples of their occurrences across film, television, and literature. We automatically score the "genderedness" of each trope in our TVTROPES dataset, which enables an analysis of (1) highly-gendered topics within tropes, (2) the relationship between gender bias and popular reception, and (3) how the gender of a work's creator correlates with the types of tropes that they use.

cs.CL↗