While Transformer-based text classifiers pre-trained on large volumes of text have yielded significant improvements on a wide range of computational linguistics tasks, their implementations have been unsuitable for live incremental processing thus far, operating only on the level of complete sentence inputs. We address the challenge of introducing methods for word-by-word left-to-right incremental processing to Transformers such as BERT, models without an intrinsic sense of linear order. We modify the training method and live decoding of non-incremental models to detect speech disfluencies with minimum latency and without pre-segmentation of dialogue acts. We experiment with several decoding methods to predict the rightward context of the word currently being processed using a GPT-2 language model and apply a BERT-based disfluency detector to sequences, including predicted words. We show our method of incrementalising Transformers maintains most of their high non-incremental performance while operating strictly incrementally. We also evaluate our models’ incremental performance to establish the trade-off between incremental performance and final performance, using different prediction strategies. We apply our system to incremental speech recognition results as they arrive into a live system and achieve state-of-the-art results in this setting.

We present a multi-task learning framework to enable the training of one universal incremental dialogue processing model with four tasks of disfluency detection, language modelling, part-of-speech tagging and utterance segmentation in a simple deep recurrent setting. We show that these tasks provide positive inductive biases to each other with optimal contribution of each one relying on the severity of the noise from the task. Our live multi-task model outperforms similar individual tasks, delivers competitive performance and is beneficial for future use in conversational agents in psychiatric treatment.

A multi-document summarizer finds the key topics from multiple textual sources and organizes information around them. In this paper we propose a summarization method for Persian text using paragraph vectors that can represent textual units of arbitrary lengths. We use these vectors to calculate the semantic relatedness between documents, cluster them to a number of predetermined groups, weight them based on their distance to the centroids and the intra-cluster homogeneity and take out the key paragraphs. We compare the final summaries with the gold-standard summaries of 21 digital topics using the ROUGE evaluation metric. Experimental results show the advantages of using paragraph vectors over earlier attempts at developing similar methods for a low resource language like Persian.