Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are instrumental across various applications, with their performance being critically tied to user satisfaction. Conventional evaluation metrics for ASR systems produce a singular aggregate score, which is insufficient for understanding specific system vulnerabilities. Therefore, we aim to address the limitations of the previous ASR evaluation methods by introducing the Korean Error Explainable Benchmark Dataset for ASR and Post-processing (KEBAP). KEBAP enables comprehensive analysis of ASR systems at both speech- and text levels, thereby facilitating a more balanced assessment encompassing speech recognition accuracy and user readability. KEBAP provides 37 newly defined speech-level resources incorporating diverse noise environments and speaker characteristics categories, also presenting 13 distinct text-level error types. This paper demonstrates detailed statistical analyses of colloquial noise categories and textual error types. Furthermore, we conduct extensive validation and analysis on commercially deployed ASR systems, providing valuable insights into their performance. As a more fine-grained and real-world-centric evaluation method, KEBAP contributes to identifying and mitigating potential weaknesses in ASR systems.

Korean morphological variations present unique opportunities and challenges in natural language processing (NLP), necessitating an advanced understanding of morpheme-based sentence construction. The complexity of morphological variations allows for diverse sentence forms based on the syntactic-semantic integration of functional morphemes (i.e., affixes) to lexical morphemes (i.e., roots). With this in mind, we propose a method - CHEF, replicating the morphological transformations inherent in sentences based on lexical and functional morpheme combinations through generative data augmentation. CHEF operates using a morpheme blender and a label discriminator, thereby enhancing the diversity of Korean sentence forms by capturing the properties of agglutination while maintaining label consistency. We conduct experiments on Korean multiple classification datasets, improving model performance in full- and few-shot settings. Our proposed method boosts performance beyond the preceding data augmentation methods without incurring external data usage. We demonstrate that our approach achieves comparable results yielded by augmentation techniques that use large language models (LLMs).

English is acknowledged worldwide as a mode of communication. However, due to the absence of realistic practicing scenarios, students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) typically have limited chances to converse and share feedback with others. In this paper, we propose PEEP-Talk, a real-world situational dialogue-based chatbot designed for English education. It also naturally switches to a new topic or situation in response to out-of-topic utterances, which are common among English beginners. Furthermore, PEEP-Talk provides feedback score on conversation and grammar error correction. We performed automatic and user evaluations to validate performance and education efficiency of our system. The results show that PEEP-Talk generates appropriate responses in various real-life situations while providing accurate feedback to learners. Moreover, we demonstrate a positive impact on English-speaking, grammar, and English learning anxiety, implying that PEEP-Talk can lower the barrier to learning natural conversation in effective ways.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language processing. However, their ability to establish causal relationships, particularly in the context of temporal interventions and language hallucinations, remains challenging. This paper presents CReTIHC, a novel dataset designed to test and enhance the causal reasoning abilities of LLMs. The dataset is constructed using a unique approach that incorporates elements of verbal hallucinations and temporal interventions through the reengineering of existing causal inference datasets. This transformation creates complex scenarios that push LLMs to critically evaluate the information presented and identify cause-and-effect relationships. The CReTIHC dataset serves as a pioneering tool for improving LLM’s causal inference capabilities, paving the way for a more nuanced understanding of causal relationships in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The whole dataset is publicly accessible at: (https://github.com/ChangwooChun/CReTIHC)

With the recent advance in neural machine translation demonstrating its importance, research on quality estimation (QE) has been steadily progressing. QE aims to automatically predict the quality of machine translation (MT) output without reference sentences. Despite its high utility in the real world, there remain several limitations concerning manual QE data creation: inevitably incurred non-trivial costs due to the need for translation experts, and issues with data scaling and language expansion. To tackle these limitations, we present QUAK, a Korean-English synthetic QE dataset generated in a fully automatic manner. This consists of three sub-QUAK datasets QUAK-M, QUAK-P, and QUAK-H, produced through three strategies that are relatively free from language constraints. Since each strategy requires no human effort, which facilitates scalability, we scale our data up to 1.58M for QUAK-P, H and 6.58M for QUAK-M. As an experiment, we quantitatively analyze word-level QE results in various ways while performing statistical analysis. Moreover, we show that datasets scaled in an efficient way also contribute to performance improvements by observing meaningful performance gains in QUAK-M, P when adding data up to 1.58M.

Rather than continuing the conversation based on personalized or implicit information, the existing conversation system generates dialogue by focusing only on the superficial content. To solve this problem, FoCus was recently released. FoCus is a persona-knowledge grounded dialogue generation dataset that leverages Wikipedia’s knowledge and personal persona, focusing on the landmarks provided by Google, enabling user-centered conversation. However, a closer empirical study is needed since research in the field is still in its early stages. Therefore, we fling two research questions about FoCus. “Is the FoCus whether for conversation or question answering?” to identify the structural problems of the dataset. “Does the FoCus model do real knowledge blending?” to closely demonstrate that the model acquires actual knowledge. As a result of the experiment, we present that the FoCus model could not correctly blend the knowledge according to the input dialogue and that the dataset design is unsuitable for the multi-turn conversation.

This paper presents KU X Upstage’s submission to the quality estimation (QE): critical error detection (CED) shared task in WMT22. We leverage the XLM-RoBERTa large model without utilizing any additional parallel data. To the best of our knowledge, we apply prompt-based fine-tuning to the QE task for the first time. To maximize the model’s language understanding capability, we reformulate the CED task to be similar to the masked language model objective, which is a pre-training strategy of the language model. We design intuitive templates and label words, and include auxiliary descriptions such as demonstration or Google Translate results in the input sequence. We further improve the performance through the template ensemble, and as a result of the shared task, our approach achieve the best performance for both English-German and Portuguese-English language pairs in an unconstrained setting.

Children with language disabilities face communication difficulties in daily life. They are often deprived of the opportunity to participate in social activities due to their difficulty in understanding or using natural language. In this regard, Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) can be a practical means of communication for children with language disabilities. In this study, we propose PicTalky, which is an AI-based AAC system that helps children with language developmental disabilities to improve their communication skills and language comprehension abilities. PicTalky can process both text and pictograms more accurately by connecting a series of neural-based NLP modules. Additionally, we perform quantitative and qualitative analyses on the modules of PicTalky. By using this service, it is expected that those suffering from language problems will be able to express their intentions or desires more easily and improve their quality of life. We have made the models freely available alongside a demonstration of the web interface. Furthermore, we implemented robotics AAC for the first time by applying PicTalky to the NAO robot.

In recent years, there has been an increasing need for the restoration and translation of historical languages. In this study, we attempt to translate historical records in ancient Korean language based on neural machine translation (NMT). Inspired by priming, a cognitive science theory that two different stimuli influence each other, we propose novel priming ancient-Korean NMT (AKNMT) using bilingual subword embedding initialization with structural property awareness in the ancient documents. Finally, we obtain state-of-the-art results in the AKNMT task. To the best of our knowledge, we confirm the possibility of developing a human-centric model that incorporates the concepts of cognitive science and analyzes the result from the perspective of interference and cognitive dissonance theory for the first time.

Automatic post-editing (APE) refers to a research field that aims to automatically correct errors included in the translation sentences derived by the machine translation system. This study has several limitations, considering the data acquisition, because there is no official dataset for most language pairs. Moreover, the amount of data is restricted even for language pairs in which official data has been released, such as WMT. To solve this problem and promote universal APE research regardless of APE data existence, this study proposes a method for automatically generating APE data based on a noising scheme from a parallel corpus. Particularly, we propose a human mimicking errors-based noising scheme that considers a practical correction process at the human level. We propose a precise inspection to attain high performance, and we derived the optimal noising schemes that show substantial effectiveness. Through these, we also demonstrate that depending on the type of noise, the noising scheme-based APE data generation may lead to inferior performance. In addition, we propose a dynamic noise injection strategy that enables the acquisition of a robust error correction capability and demonstrated its effectiveness by comparative analysis. This study enables obtaining a high performance APE model without human-generated data and can promote universal APE research for all language pairs targeting English.

Recent natural language understanding (NLU) research on the Korean language has been vigorously maturing with the advancements of pretrained language models and datasets. However, Korean pretrained language models still struggle to generate a short sentence with a given condition based on compositionality and commonsense reasoning (i.e., generative commonsense reasoning). The two major challenges are inadequate data resources to develop generative commonsense reasoning regarding Korean linguistic features and to evaluate language models which are necessary for natural language generation (NLG). To solve these problems, we propose a text-generation dataset for Korean generative commonsense reasoning and language model evaluation. In this work, a semi-automatic dataset construction approach filters out contents inexplicable to commonsense, ascertains quality, and reduces the cost of building the dataset. We also present an in-depth analysis of the generation results of language models with various evaluation metrics along with human-annotated scores. The whole dataset is publicly available at (https://aihub.or.kr/opendata/korea-university).

With the growing popularity of smart speakers, such as Amazon Alexa, speech is becoming one of the most important modes of human-computer interaction. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is arguably the most critical component of such systems, as errors in speech recognition propagate to the downstream components and drastically degrade the user experience. A simple and effective way to improve the speech recognition accuracy is to apply automatic post-processor to the recognition result. However, training a post-processor requires parallel corpora created by human annotators, which are expensive and not scalable. To alleviate this problem, we propose Back TranScription (BTS), a denoising-based method that can create such corpora without human labor. Using a raw corpus, BTS corrupts the text using Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Speech-to-Text (STT) systems. Then, a post-processing model can be trained to reconstruct the original text given the corrupted input. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that a post-processor trained using our approach is highly effective in fixing non-trivial speech recognition errors such as mishandling foreign words. We present the generated parallel corpus and post-processing platform to make our results publicly available.

In quality estimation (QE), the quality of translation can be predicted by referencing the source sentence and the machine translation (MT) output without access to the reference sentence. However, there exists a paradox in that constructing a dataset for creating a QE model requires non-trivial human labor and time, and it may even requires additional effort compared to the cost of constructing a parallel corpus. In this study, to address this paradox and utilize the various applications of QE, even in low-resource languages (LRLs), we propose a method for automatically constructing a pseudo-QE dataset without using human labor. We perform a comparative analysis on the pseudo-QE dataset using multilingual pre-trained language models. As we generate the pseudo dataset, we conduct experiments using various external machine translators as test sets to verify the accuracy of the results objectively. Also, the experimental results show that multilingual BART demonstrates the best performance, and we confirm the applicability of QE in LRLs using pseudo-QE dataset construction methods.