Recent progress in natural language processing has led to Transformer architectures becoming the predominant model used for natural language tasks. However, in many real- world datasets, additional modalities are included which the Transformer does not directly leverage. We present Multimodal- Toolkit, an open-source Python package to incorporate text and tabular (categorical and numerical) data with Transformers for downstream applications. Our toolkit integrates well with Hugging Face’s existing API such as tokenization and the model hub which allows easy download of different pre-trained models.

Wav2vec 2.0 is a state-of-the-art speech recognition model which maps speech audio waveforms into latent representations. The largest version of wav2vec 2.0 contains 317 million parameters. Hence, the inference latency of wav2vec 2.0 will be a bottleneck in production, leading to high costs and a significant environmental footprint. To improve wav2vec’s applicability to a production setting, we explore multiple model compression methods borrowed from the domain of large language models. Using a teacher-student approach, we distilled the knowledge from the original wav2vec 2.0 model into a student model, which is 2 times faster, 4.8 times smaller than the original model. More importantly, the student model is 2 times more energy efficient than the original model in terms of CO2 emission. This increase in performance is accomplished with only a 7% degradation in word error rate (WER). Our quantized model is 3.6 times smaller than the original model, with only a 0.1% degradation in WER. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that compresses wav2vec 2.0.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown considerable success, especially in the realistic generation of images. In this work, we apply similar techniques for the generation of text. We propose a novel approach to handle the discrete nature of text, during training, using word embeddings. Our method is agnostic to vocabulary size and achieves competitive results relative to methods with various discrete gradient estimators.

This paper presents three hybrid models that directly combine latent Dirichlet allocation and word embedding for distinguishing between speakers with and without Alzheimer’s disease from transcripts of picture descriptions. Two of our models get F-scores over the current state-of-the-art using automatic methods on the DementiaBank dataset.