Conversational Speech Synthesis (CSS) aims to align synthesized speech with the emotional and stylistic context of user-agent interactions to achieve empathy. Current generative CSS models face interpretability limitations due to insufficient emotional perception and redundant discrete speech coding. To address the above issues, we present Chain-Talker, a three-stage framework mimicking human cognition: Emotion Understanding derives context-aware emotion descriptors from dialogue history; Semantic Understanding generates compact semantic codes via serialized prediction; and Empathetic Rendering synthesizes expressive speech by integrating both components. To support emotion modeling, we develop CSS-EmCap, an LLM-driven automated pipeline for generating precise conversational speech emotion captions. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that Chain-Talker produces more expressive and empathetic speech than existing methods, with CSS-EmCap contributing to reliable emotion modeling. The code and demos are available at: https://github.com/AI-S2-Lab/Chain-Talker.

“噪声环境下语音情感识别(Speech Emotion Recognition,SER)旨在从带有背景噪声的语音信号中挖掘情感特征并自动预测说话人的情感状态。尽管这项技术在英语、汉语等语言方面取得了迅速的进展,但对于像蒙古语这样的小语种,在噪声环境下的语音情感识别研究仍处于起步阶段,缺乏相关数据集和方法的研究。为了推动蒙古语语音情感识别的发展,本研究首先构建了一个单说话人语音情感识别数据集。之后为了实现噪声环境下准确的蒙古语语音情感识别,我们提出了一种基于文本-语音双模态的带噪蒙古语语音情感识别基线模型 MonSER。文本信息为噪声语音信号提供额外的语义信息。具体来说,我们的模型首先对带噪语音信号进行频谱特征提取,之后使用多语种预训练模型 XLMBert 对语音信号对应的蒙古文文本信息进行编码。随后将上述提取的双模态信息进行融合,并输入分类器进行情感类别的预测。我们利用该数据集进行模型训练并测试模型的有效性。实验结果表明,我们的双模态模型在多种噪声环境下的蒙古语语音情感识别准确率明显优于只以语音为输入的单模态语音情感识别系统。同时,为了模拟实际场景中文本可能缺失的情况,我们提出了两种文本 mask 策略,该文本实验也进一步验证了文本语音双模态的有效性。”

Stance detection aims to identify the attitude from an opinion towards a certain target. Despite the significant progress on this task, it is extremely time-consuming and budget-unfriendly to collect sufficient high-quality labeled data for every new target under fully-supervised learning, whereas unlabeled data can be collected easier. Therefore, this paper is devoted to few-shot stance detection and investigating how to achieve satisfactory results in semi-supervised settings. As a target-oriented task, the core idea of semi-supervised few-shot stance detection is to make better use of target-relevant information from labeled and unlabeled data. Therefore, we develop a novel target-aware semi-supervised framework. Specifically, we propose a target-aware contrastive learning objective to learn more distinguishable representations for different targets. Such an objective can be easily applied with or without unlabeled data. Furthermore, to thoroughly exploit the unlabeled data and facilitate the model to learn target-relevant stance features in the opinion content, we explore a simple but effective target-aware consistency regularization combined with a self-training strategy. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmark datasets in the few-shot setting.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment classification task. Most recent efforts adopt pre-trained model to classify the sentences with aspects. However, the aspect sentiment bias from pre-trained model brings some noise to the ABSA task. Besides, traditional methods using cross-entropy loss are hard to find the potential associations between sentiment polarities. In this work, we analyze the ABSA task from a novel cognition perspective: humans can often judge the sentiment of an aspect even if they do not know what the aspect is. Moreover, it is easier to distinguish positive and negative sentiments than others for human beings because positive and negative are two opposite sentiments. To this end, we propose a no-aspect differential sentiment (NADS) framework for the ABSA task. We first design a no-aspect template by replacing the aspect with a special unbiased character to eliminate the sentiment bias and obtain a stronger representation. To better get the benefits from the template, we adopt contrastive learning between the no-aspect template and the original sentence. Then we propose a differential sentiment loss instead of the cross-entropy loss to better classify the sentiments by distinguishing the different distances between sentiments. Our proposed model is a general framework and can be combined with almost all traditional ABSA methods. Experiments on SemEval 2014 show that our framework is still able to predict the sentiment of the aspect even we don’t konw what the aspect is. Moreover, our NADS framework boosts three typical ABSA methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Open-domain question answering (OpenQA) aims to answer questions based on a number of unlabeled paragraphs. Existing approaches always follow the distantly supervised setup where some of the paragraphs are wrong-labeled (noisy), and mainly utilize the paragraph-question relevance to denoise. However, the paragraph-paragraph relevance, which may aggregate the evidence among relevant paragraphs, can also be utilized to discover more useful paragraphs. Moreover, current approaches mainly focus on the positive paragraphs which are known to contain the answer during training. This will affect the generalization ability of the model and make it be disturbed by the similar but irrelevant (distracting) paragraphs during testing. In this paper, we first introduce a ranking model leveraging the paragraph-question and the paragraph-paragraph relevance to compute a confidence score for each paragraph. Furthermore, based on the scores, we design a modified weighted sampling strategy for training to mitigate the influence of the noisy and distracting paragraphs. Experiments on three public datasets (Quasar-T, SearchQA and TriviaQA) show that our model advances the state of the art.

In this paper, we first utilize the word embedding that focuses on sub-word units to the Mongolian Phrase Break (PB) prediction task by using Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) model. Mongolian is an agglutinative language. Each root can be followed by several suffixes to form probably millions of words, but the existing Mongolian corpus is not enough to build a robust entire word embedding, thus it suffers a serious data sparse problem and brings a great difficulty for Mongolian PB prediction. To solve this problem, we look at sub-word units in Mongolian word, and encode their information to a meaningful representation, then fed it to LSTM to decode the best corresponding PB label. Experimental results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms traditional CRF model using manually features and obtains 7.49% F-Measure gain.

Deep neural networks for machine comprehension typically utilizes only word or character embeddings without explicitly taking advantage of structured linguistic information such as constituency trees and dependency trees. In this paper, we propose structural embedding of syntactic trees (SEST), an algorithm framework to utilize structured information and encode them into vector representations that can boost the performance of algorithms for the machine comprehension. We evaluate our approach using a state-of-the-art neural attention model on the SQuAD dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can accurately identify the syntactic boundaries of the sentences and extract answers that are syntactically coherent over the baseline methods.