Web debates play an important role in enabling broad participation of constituencies in social, political and economic decision-taking. However, it is challenging to organize, structure, and navigate a vast number of diverse argumentations and comments collected from many participants over a long time period. In this paper we demonstrate Common Round, a next generation platform for large-scale web debates, which provides functions for eliciting the semantic content and structures from the contributions of participants. In particular, Common Round applies language technologies for the extraction of semantic essence from textual input, aggregation of the formulated opinions and arguments. The platform also provides a cross-lingual access to debates using machine translation.

In this research we investigate the impact of mismatches in the density and type of error between training and test data on a neural system correcting preposition and determiner errors. We use synthetically produced training data to control error density and type, and “real” error data for testing. Our results show it is possible to combine error types, although prepositions and determiners behave differently in terms of how much error should be artificially introduced into the training data in order to get the best results.

Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (g2p) is necessary for text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition systems. Most g2p systems are monolingual: they require language-specific data or handcrafting of rules. Such systems are difficult to extend to low resource languages, for which data and handcrafted rules are not available. As an alternative, we present a neural sequence-to-sequence approach to g2p which is trained on spelling–pronunciation pairs in hundreds of languages. The system shares a single encoder and decoder across all languages, allowing it to utilize the intrinsic similarities between different writing systems. We show an 11% improvement in phoneme error rate over an approach based on adapting high-resource monolingual g2p models to low-resource languages. Our model is also much more compact relative to previous approaches.