arXiv subjects

Shammur Absar Chowdhury

Publications and source records attributed to Shammur Absar Chowdhury.

47 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Multilingual Word Error Rate Estimation: e-WER3

The success of the multilingual automatic speech recognition systems empowered many voice-driven applications. However, measuring the performance of such systems remains a major challenge, due to its dependency on manually transcribed speech data in both mono- and multilingual scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel multilingual framework -- eWER3 -- jointly trained on acoustic and lexical representation to estimate word error rate. We demonstrate the effectiveness of eWER3 to (i) predict WER without using any internal states from the ASR and (ii) use the multilingual shared latent space to push the performance of the close-related languages. We show our proposed multilingual model outperforms the previous monolingual word error rate estimation method (eWER2) by an absolute 9\% increase in Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC), with better overall estimation between the predicted and reference WER.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Textual Data Augmentation for Arabic-English Code-Switching Speech Recognition

The pervasiveness of intra-utterance code-switching (CS) in spoken content requires that speech recognition (ASR) systems handle mixed language. Designing a CS-ASR system has many challenges, mainly due to data scarcity, grammatical structure complexity, and domain mismatch. The most common method for addressing CS is to train an ASR system with the available transcribed CS speech, along with monolingual data. In this work, we propose a zero-shot learning methodology for CS-ASR by augmenting the monolingual data with artificially generating CS text. We based our approach on random lexical replacements and Equivalence Constraint (EC) while exploiting aligned translation pairs to generate random and grammatically valid CS content. Our empirical results show a 65.5% relative reduction in language model perplexity, and 7.7% in ASR WER on two ecologically valid CS test sets. The human evaluation of the generated text using EC suggests that more than 80% is of adequate quality.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

What can Speech and Language Tell us About the Working Alliance in Psychotherapy

We are interested in the problem of conversational analysis and its application to the health domain. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a structured approach in psychotherapy, allowing the therapist to help the patient to identify and modify the malicious thoughts, behavior, or actions. This cooperative effort can be evaluated using the Working Alliance Inventory Observer-rated Shortened - a 12 items inventory covering task, goal, and relationship - which has a relevant influence on therapeutic outcomes. In this work, we investigate the relation between this alliance inventory and the spoken conversations (sessions) between the patient and the psychotherapist. We have delivered eight weeks of e-therapy, collected their audio and video call sessions, and manually transcribed them. The spoken conversations have been annotated and evaluated with WAI ratings by professional therapists. We have investigated speech and language features and their association with WAI items. The feature types include turn dynamics, lexical entrainment, and conversational descriptors extracted from the speech and language signals. Our findings provide strong evidence that a subset of these features are strong indicators of working alliance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first and a novel study to exploit speech and language for characterising working alliance.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Emojis as Anchors to Detect Arabic Offensive Language and Hate Speech

We introduce a generic, language-independent method to collect a large percentage of offensive and hate tweets regardless of their topics or genres. We harness the extralinguistic information embedded in the emojis to collect a large number of offensive tweets. We apply the proposed method on Arabic tweets and compare it with English tweets - analysing key cultural differences. We observed a constant usage of these emojis to represent offensiveness throughout different timespans on Twitter. We manually annotate and publicly release the largest Arabic dataset for offensive, fine-grained hate speech, vulgar and violence content. Furthermore, we benchmark the dataset for detecting offensiveness and hate speech using different transformer architectures and perform in-depth linguistic analysis. We evaluate our models on external datasets - a Twitter dataset collected using a completely different method, and a multi-platform dataset containing comments from Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, for assessing generalization capability. Competitive results on these datasets suggest that the data collected using our method captures universal characteristics of offensive language. Our findings also highlight the common words used in offensive communications, common targets for hate speech, specific patterns in violence tweets; and pinpoint common classification errors that can be attributed to limitations of NLP models. We observe that even state-of-the-art transformer models may fail to take into account culture, background and context or understand nuances present in real-world data such as sarcasm.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

ArabGend: Gender Analysis and Inference on Arabic Twitter

Gender analysis of Twitter can reveal important socio-cultural differences between male and female users. There has been a significant effort to analyze and automatically infer gender in the past for most widely spoken languages' content, however, to our knowledge very limited work has been done for Arabic. In this paper, we perform an extensive analysis of differences between male and female users on the Arabic Twitter-sphere. We study differences in user engagement, topics of interest, and the gender gap in professions. Along with gender analysis, we also propose a method to infer gender by utilizing usernames, profile pictures, tweets, and networks of friends. In order to do so, we manually annotated gender and locations for ~166K Twitter accounts associated with ~92K user location, which we plan to make publicly available at http://anonymous.com. Our proposed gender inference method achieve an F1 score of 82.1%, which is 47.3% higher than majority baseline. In addition, we also developed a demo and made it publicly available.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

ArCovidVac: Analyzing Arabic Tweets About COVID-19 Vaccination

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the first global infodemic have changed our lives in many different ways. We relied on social media to get the latest information about the COVID-19 pandemic and at the same time to disseminate information. The content in social media consisted not only health related advises, plans, and informative news from policy makers, but also contains conspiracies and rumors. It became important to identify such information as soon as they are posted to make actionable decisions (e.g., debunking rumors, or taking certain measures for traveling). To address this challenge, we develop and publicly release the first largest manually annotated Arabic tweet dataset, ArCovidVac, for the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, covering many countries in the Arab region. The dataset is enriched with different layers of annotation, including, (i) Informativeness (more vs. less importance of the tweets); (ii) fine-grained tweet content types (e.g., advice, rumors, restriction, authenticate news/information); and (iii) stance towards vaccination (pro-vaccination, neutral, anti-vaccination). Further, we performed in-depth analysis of the data, exploring the popularity of different vaccines, trending hashtags, topics and presence of offensiveness in the tweets. We studied the data for individual types of tweets and temporal changes in stance towards vaccine. We benchmarked the ArCovidVac dataset using transformer architectures for informativeness, content types, and stance detection.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

A Review of Bangla Natural Language Processing Tasks and the Utility of Transformer Models

Bangla -- ranked as the 6th most widely spoken language across the world (https://www.ethnologue.com/guides/ethnologue200), with 230 million native speakers -- is still considered as a low-resource language in the natural language processing (NLP) community. With three decades of research, Bangla NLP (BNLP) is still lagging behind mainly due to the scarcity of resources and the challenges that come with it. There is sparse work in different areas of BNLP; however, a thorough survey reporting previous work and recent advances is yet to be done. In this study, we first provide a review of Bangla NLP tasks, resources, and tools available to the research community; we benchmark datasets collected from various platforms for nine NLP tasks using current state-of-the-art algorithms (i.e., transformer-based models). We provide comparative results for the studied NLP tasks by comparing monolingual vs. multilingual models of varying sizes. We report our results using both individual and consolidated datasets and provide data splits for future research. We reviewed a total of 108 papers and conducted 175 sets of experiments. Our results show promising performance using transformer-based models while highlighting the trade-off with computational costs. We hope that such a comprehensive survey will motivate the community to build on and further advance the research on Bangla NLP.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Towards One Model to Rule All: Multilingual Strategy for Dialectal Code-Switching Arabic ASR

With the advent of globalization, there is an increasing demand for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR), handling language and dialectal variation of spoken content. Recent studies show its efficacy over monolingual systems. In this study, we design a large multilingual end-to-end ASR using self-attention based conformer architecture. We trained the system using Arabic (Ar), English (En) and French (Fr) languages. We evaluate the system performance handling: (i) monolingual (Ar, En and Fr); (ii) multi-dialectal (Modern Standard Arabic, along with dialectal variation such as Egyptian and Moroccan); (iii) code-switching -- cross-lingual (Ar-En/Fr) and dialectal (MSA-Egyptian dialect) test cases, and compare with current state-of-the-art systems. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of different embedding/character representations including character vs word-piece; shared vs distinct input symbol per language. Our findings demonstrate the strength of such a model by outperforming state-of-the-art monolingual dialectal Arabic and code-switching Arabic ASR.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

QASR: QCRI Aljazeera Speech Resource -- A Large Scale Annotated Arabic Speech Corpus

We introduce the largest transcribed Arabic speech corpus, QASR, collected from the broadcast domain. This multi-dialect speech dataset contains 2,000 hours of speech sampled at 16kHz crawled from Aljazeera news channel. The dataset is released with lightly supervised transcriptions, aligned with the audio segments. Unlike previous datasets, QASR contains linguistically motivated segmentation, punctuation, speaker information among others. QASR is suitable for training and evaluating speech recognition systems, acoustics- and/or linguistics- based Arabic dialect identification, punctuation restoration, speaker identification, speaker linking, and potentially other NLP modules for spoken data. In addition to QASR transcription, we release a dataset of 130M words to aid in designing and training a better language model. We show that end-to-end automatic speech recognition trained on QASR reports a competitive word error rate compared to the previous MGB-2 corpus. We report baseline results for downstream natural language processing tasks such as named entity recognition using speech transcript. We also report the first baseline for Arabic punctuation restoration. We make the corpus available for the research community.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Sentiment Classification in Bangla Textual Content: A Comparative Study

Sentiment analysis has been widely used to understand our views on social and political agendas or user experiences over a product. It is one of the cores and well-researched areas in NLP. However, for low-resource languages, like Bangla, one of the prominent challenge is the lack of resources. Another important limitation, in the current literature for Bangla, is the absence of comparable results due to the lack of a well-defined train/test split. In this study, we explore several publicly available sentiment labeled datasets and designed classifiers using both classical and deep learning algorithms. In our study, the classical algorithms include SVM and Random Forest, and deep learning algorithms include CNN, FastText, and transformer-based models. We compare these models in terms of model performance and time-resource complexity. Our finding suggests transformer-based models, which have not been explored earlier for Bangla, outperform all other models. Furthermore, we created a weighted list of lexicon content based on the valence score per class. We then analyzed the content for high significance entries per class, in the datasets. For reproducibility, we make publicly available data splits and the ranked lexicon list. The presented results can be used for future studies as a benchmark.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2017

Depression Severity Estimation from Multiple Modalities

Depression is a major debilitating disorder which can affect people from all ages. With a continuous increase in the number of annual cases of depression, there is a need to develop automatic techniques for the detection of the presence and extent of depression. In this AVEC challenge we explore different modalities (speech, language and visual features extracted from face) to design and develop automatic methods for the detection of depression. In psychology literature, the PHQ-8 questionnaire is well established as a tool for measuring the severity of depression. In this paper we aim to automatically predict the PHQ-8 scores from features extracted from the different modalities. We show that visual features extracted from facial landmarks obtain the best performance in terms of estimating the PHQ-8 results with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 4.66 on the development set. Behavioral characteristics from speech provide an MAE of 4.73. Language features yield a slightly higher MAE of 5.17. When switching to the test set, our Turn Features derived from audio transcriptions achieve the best performance, scoring an MAE of 4.11 (corresponding to an RMSE of 4.94), which makes our system the winner of the AVEC 2017 depression sub-challenge.

cs.CV↗