Recent studies have revealed that language model distillation can become less effective when there is a significant capacity gap between the teacher and the student models. In order to bridge the gap, teacher assistant-based distillation has been introduced, in which the selection of the teacher assistant plays a crucial role in transferring knowledge from the teacher to the student. However, existing approaches for teacher assistant-based distillation require numerous trials to find the optimal teacher assistant.In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Minimal Distillation Schedule (MiniDisc), which enables the scheduling of an optimal teacher assistant in just one trial for extreme model compression (e.g, to 5% scale). In particular, we empirically show that the performance of the student is positively correlated with the scale-performance tradeoff of the teacher assistant. We then introduce a new 𝜆-tradeoff metric that quantifies the optimality of the teacher assistant without the need for trial distillation to the student. By employing a sandwich framework, MiniDisc can select the optimal teacher assistant with the best 𝜆-tradeoff.We extensively evaluate MiniDisc through a series of experiments on the GLUE benchmark. The results demonstrate that our approach achieved an improved efficiency compared to various state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, we showcase the scalability of MiniDisc by applying it to a language model with billions of parameters.

Recently, contrastive learning has begun to gain popularity in multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA). However, most of existing MSA methods based on contrastive learning lacks more detailed learning of the distribution of sample pairs with different sentiment intensity differences in the contrastive learning representation space. In addition, limited research has been conducted on the fusion of each modality representation obtained by contrastive learning training.In this paper, we propose a novel framework for multimodal sentiment analysis based on Contrastive Learning Guided by Sentiment Intensity (CLGSI). Firstly, the proposed contrastive learning guided by sentiment intensity selects positive and negative sample pairs based on the difference in sentiment intensity and assigns corresponding weights accordingly.Subsequently, we propose a new multimodal representation fusion mechanism, called Global-Local-Fine-Knowledge (GLFK), which extracts common features between different modalities’ representations. At the same time, each unimodal encoder output is separately processed by a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) to extract specific features of each modality. Finally, joint learning of the common and specific features is used to predict sentiment intensity. The effectiveness of CLGSI is assessed on two English datasets, MOSI and MOSEI, as well as one Chinese dataset, SIMS. We achieve competitive experimental results, which attest to the strong generalization performance of our approach. The code for our approach will be released in https://github.com/AZYoung233/CLGSI

Bargaining is an important and unique part of negotiation between humans. As LLM-driven agents learn to negotiate and act like real humans, how to evaluate agents’ bargaining abilities remains an open problem.For the first time, we formally described the Bargaining task as an asymmetric incomplete information game, defining the gains of the Buyer and Seller in multiple bargaining processes. It allows us to quantitatively assess an agent’s performance in the Bargain task.We collected a real product price dataset, AmazonHistoryPrice, and conducted evaluations of various LLM agents’ bargaining abilities. We find that playing a Buyer is much harder than a Seller, and increasing model size can not effectively improve the Buyer’s performance.To address the challenge, we propose a novel approach called OG-Narrator that integrates a deterministic Offer Generator to control the price range of Buyer’s offers, and an LLM Narrator to create natural language sentences for generated offers.Experimental results show that OG-Narrator improves the buyer’s deal rates from 26.67% to 88.88% and brings a ten times multiplication of profits on all baselines, even a model that has not been aligned.

Finetuning pretrained language models (LMs) have enabled appealing performance on a diverse array of tasks. The intriguing task-agnostic property has driven a shifted focus from task-specific to task-agnostic distillation of LMs. While task-agnostic, compute-efficient, performance-preserved LMs can be yielded by task-agnostic distillation, previous studies mainly sit in distillation of either encoder-only LMs (e.g., BERT) or decoder-only ones (e.g., GPT) yet largely neglect that distillation of encoder-decoder LMs (e.g., T5) can posit very distinguished behaviors. Frustratingly, we discover that existing task-agnostic distillation methods can fail to handle the distillation of encoder-decoder LMs. To the demand, we explore a few paths and uncover a path named as MiniEnD that successfully tackles the distillation of encoder-decoder LMs in a task-agnostic fashion. We examine MiniEnD on language understanding and abstractive summarization. The results showcase that MiniEnD is generally effective and is competitive compared to other alternatives. We further scale MiniEnD up to distillation of 3B encoder-decoder language models with interpolated distillation. The results imply the opportunities and challenges in distilling large language models (e.g., LLaMA).

We present Expert-Token-Routing, a unified generalist framework that facilitates seamless integration of multiple expert LLMs. Our framework represents expert LLMs as special expert tokens within the vocabulary of a meta LLM. The meta LLM can route to an expert LLM like generating new tokens. Expert-Token-Routing not only supports learning the implicit expertise of expert LLMs from existing instruction dataset but also allows for dynamic extension of new expert LLMs in a plug-and-play manner. It also conceals the detailed collaboration process from the user’s perspective, facilitating interaction as though it were a singular LLM. Our framework outperforms various existing multi-LLM collaboration paradigms across benchmarks that incorporate six diverse expert domains, demonstrating effectiveness and robustness in building generalist LLM system via synergizing multiple expert LLMs.

This report provide a detailed description of the method that we proposed in the TRAC-2024 Offline Harm Potential dentification which encloses two sub-tasks. The investigation utilized a rich dataset comprised of social media comments in several Indian languages, annotated with precision by expert judges to capture the nuanced implications for offline context harm. The objective assigned to the participants was to design algorithms capable of accurately assessing the likelihood of harm in given situations and identifying the most likely target(s) of offline harm. Our approach ranked second in two separate tracks, with F1 values of 0.73 and 0.96 respectively. Our method principally involved selecting pretrained models for finetuning, incorporating contrastive learning techniques, and culminating in an ensemble approach for the test set.

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a challenging task, in which the labels of texts can be organized into a category hierarchy. To deal with the HTC problem, many existing works focus on utilizing the parent-child relationships that are explicitly shown in the hierarchy. However, texts with a category hierarchy also have some latent relevancy among labels in the same level of the hierarchy. We refer to these labels as peer labels, from which the peer effects are originally utilized in our work to improve the classification performance. To fully explore the peer-label relationship, we develop a PeerHTC method. This method innovatively measures the latent relevancy of peer labels through several metrics and then encodes the relevancy with a Graph Convolutional Neural Network. We also propose a sample importance learning method to ameliorate the side effects raised by modelling the peer label relevancy. Our experiments on several standard datasets demonstrate the evidence of peer labels and the superiority of PeerHTC over other state-of-the-art HTC methods in terms of classification accuracy.

Pretrained language models (LMs) have shown compelling performance on various downstream tasks, but unfortunately they require a tremendous amount of inference compute. Knowledge distillation finds a path to compress LMs to small ones with a teacher-student paradigm. However, when the capacity gap between the teacher and the student is large, a curse of capacity gap appears, invoking a deficiency in distilling LMs. While a few studies have been carried out to fill the gap, the curse is not yet well tackled. In this paper, we aim at lifting the curse of capacity gap via enlarging the capacity of the student without notably increasing the inference compute. Largely motivated by sparse activation regime of mixture of experts (MoE), we propose a mixture of minimal experts (MiniMoE), which imposes extra parameters to the student but introduces almost no additional inference compute. Experimental results on GLUE and CoNLL demonstrate the curse of capacity gap is lifted by the magic of MiniMoE to a large extent. MiniMoE also achieves the state-of-the-art performance at small FLOPs compared with a range of competitive baselines. With a compression rate as much as ~50×, MiniMoE preserves ~95% GLUE score of the teacher.

While transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) have dominated a number of NLP applications, these models are heavy to deploy and expensive to use. Therefore, effectively compressing large-scale PLMs becomes an increasingly important problem. Quantization, which represents high-precision tensors with low-bit fix-point format, is a viable solution. However, most existing quantization methods are task-specific, requiring customized training and quantization with a large number of trainable parameters on each individual task. Inspired by the observation that the over-parameterization nature of PLMs makes it possible to freeze most of the parameters during the fine-tuning stage, in this work, we propose a novel “quantize before fine-tuning” framework, PreQuant, that differs from both quantization-aware training and post-training quantization. {pasted macro ‘OUR’} is compatible with various quantization strategies, with outlier-aware parameter-efficient fine-tuning incorporated to correct the induced quantization error. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PreQuant on the GLUE benchmark using BERT, RoBERTa, and T5. We also provide an empirical investigation into the workflow of PreQuant, which sheds light on its efficacy.

Existing sentence ordering approaches generally employ encoder-decoder frameworks with the pointer net to recover the coherence by recurrently predicting each sentence step-by-step. Such an autoregressive manner only leverages unilateral dependencies during decoding and cannot fully explore the semantic dependency between sentences for ordering. To overcome these limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Non-Autoregressive Ordering Network, dubbed NAON, which explores bilateral dependencies between sentences and predicts the sentence for each position in parallel. We claim that the non-autoregressive manner is not just applicable but also particularly suitable to the sentence ordering task because of two peculiar characteristics of the task: 1) each generation target is in deterministic length, and 2) the sentences and positions should match exclusively. Furthermore, to address the repetition issue of the naive non-autoregressive Transformer, we introduce an exclusive loss to constrain the exclusiveness between positions and sentences. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, we conduct extensive experiments on several common-used datasets and the experimental results show that our method outperforms all the autoregressive approaches and yields competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-arts. The codes are available at: https://github.com/steven640pixel/nonautoregressive-sentence-ordering.

Most biomedical pretrained language models are monolingual and cannot handle the growing cross-lingual requirements. The scarcity of non-English domain corpora, not to mention parallel data, poses a significant hurdle in training multilingual biomedical models. Since knowledge forms the core of domain-specific corpora and can be translated into various languages accurately, we propose a model called KBioXLM, which transforms the multilingual pretrained model XLM-R into the biomedical domain using a knowledge-anchored approach. We achieve a biomedical multilingual corpus by incorporating three granularity knowledge alignments (entity, fact, and passage levels) into monolingual corpora. Then we design three corresponding training tasks (entity masking, relation masking, and passage relation prediction) and continue training on top of the XLM-R model to enhance its domain cross-lingual ability. To validate the effectiveness of our model, we translate the English benchmarks of multiple tasks into Chinese. Experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms monolingual and multilingual pretrained models in cross-lingual zero-shot and few-shot scenarios, achieving improvements of up to 10+ points.

Existing MWP solvers employ sequence or binary tree to present the solution expression and decode it from given problem description. However, such structures fail to handle the variants that can be derived via mathematical manipulation, e.g., (a₁+a₂)*a₃ and a₁ * a₃+a₂ * a₃ can both be possible valid solutions for a same problem but formulated as different expression sequences or trees. The multiple solution variants depicting different possible solving procedures for the same input problem would raise two issues: 1) making it hard for the model to learn the mapping function between the input and output spaces effectively, and 2) wrongly indicating wrong when evaluating a valid expression variant. To address these issues, we introduce a unified tree structure to present a solution expression, where the elements are permutable and identical for all the expression variants. We propose a novel non-autoregressive solver, named MWP-NAS, to parse the problem and deduce the solution expression based on the unified tree. For evaluating the possible expression variants, we design a path-based metric to evaluate the partial accuracy of expressions of a unified tree. The results from extensive experiments conducted on Math23K and MAWPS demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed MWP-NAS. The codes and checkpoints are available at: https://github.com/mengqunhan/MWP-NAS.

An attractive blog headline on social media platforms can immediately grab readers and trigger more clicks. However, a good headline shall not only contract the main content but also be eye-catchy with domain platform features, which are decided by the website’s users and objectives. With effective headlines, bloggers can obtain more site traffic and profits, while readers can have easier access to topics of interest. In this paper, we propose a disentanglement-based headline generation model: MediaHG (Social Media Headline Generation), which can balance the content and contextual features. Specifically, we first devise a sample module for various document views and generate the corresponding headline candidates. Then, we incorporate contrastive learning and auxiliary multi-task to choose the best domain-suitable headline, according to the disentangled budgets. Besides, our separated processing gains more flexible adaptation for other headline generation tasks with special domain features. Our model is built from the content and headlines of 70k hot posts collected from REDBook, a Chinese social media platform for daily sharing. Experimental results with language metrics ROUGE and human evaluation show the improvement in the headline generation task for the platform.

Sounding source localization is a challenging cross-modal task due to the difficulty of cross-modal alignment. Although supervised cross-modal methods achieve encouraging performance, heavy manual annotations are expensive and inefficient. Thus it is valuable and meaningful to develop unsupervised solutions. In this paper, we propose an **U**nsupervised **S**ounding **P**ixel **L**earning (USPL) approach which enables a pixel-level sounding source localization in unsupervised paradigm. We first design a mask augmentation based multi-instance contrastive learning to realize unsupervised cross-modal coarse localization, which aligns audio-visual features to obtain coarse sounding maps. Secondly, we present an *Unsupervised Sounding Map Refinement (SMR)* module which employs the visual semantic affinity learning to explore inter-pixel relations of adjacent coordinate features. It contributes to recovering the boundary of coarse sounding maps and obtaining fine sounding maps. Finally, a *Sounding Pixel Segmentation (SPS)* module is presented to realize audio-supervised semantic segmentation. Extensive experiments are performed on the AVSBench-S4 and VGGSound datasets, exhibiting encouraging results compared with previous SOTA methods.

Synonym and antonym practice are the most common practices in our early childhood. It correlated our known words to a better place deep in our intuition. At the beginning of life for a machine, we would like to treat the machine as a baby and built a similar training for it as well to present a qualified performance. In this paper, we present an ensemble model for sentence logistics classification, which outperforms the state-of-art methods. Our approach essentially builds on two models including ERNIE-M and DeBERTaV3. With cross validation and random seeds tuning, we select the top performance models for the last soft ensemble and make them vote for the final answer, achieving the top 6 performance.

Detecting sarcasm and verbal irony from people’s subjective statements is crucial to understanding their intended meanings and real sentiments and positions in social scenarios. This paper describes the X-PuDu system that participated in SemEval-2022 Task 6, iSarcasmEval - Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic, which aims at detecting intended sarcasm in various settings of natural language understanding. Our solution finetunes pre-trained language models, such as ERNIE-M and DeBERTa, under the multilingual settings to recognize the irony from Arabic and English texts. Our system ranked second out of 43, and ninth out of 32 in Task A: one-sentence detection in English and Arabic; fifth out of 22 in Task B: binary multi-label classification in English; first out of 16, and fifth out of 13 in Task C: sentence-pair detection in English and Arabic.

Sentiment analysis is a classical problem of natural language processing. SemEval 2022 sets a problem on the structured sentiment analysis in task 10, which is also a study-worthy topic in research area. In this paper, we propose a method which can predict structured sentiment information on multiple languages with limited data. The ERNIE-M pretrained language model is employed as a lingual feature extractor which works well on multiple language processing, followed by a graph parser as a opinion extractor. The method can predict structured sentiment information with high interpretability. We apply data augmentation as the given datasets are so small. Furthermore, we use K-fold cross-validation and DeBERTaV3 pretrained model as extra English embedding generator to train multiple models as our ensemble strategies. Experimental results show that the proposed model has considerable performance on both monolingual and cross-lingual tasks.

Text matching is a fundamental research problem in natural language understanding. Interaction-based approaches treat the text pair as a single sequence and encode it through cross encoders, while representation-based models encode the text pair independently with siamese or dual encoders. Interaction-based models require dense computations and thus are impractical in real-world applications. Representation-based models have become the mainstream paradigm for efficient text matching. However, these models suffer from severe performance degradation due to the lack of interactions between the pair of texts. To remedy this, we propose a Virtual InteRacTion mechanism (VIRT) for improving representation-based text matching while maintaining its efficiency. In particular, we introduce an interactive knowledge distillation module that is only applied during training. It enables deep interaction between texts by effectively transferring knowledge from the interaction-based model. A light interaction strategy is designed to fully leverage the learned interactive knowledge. Experimental results on six text matching benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our method over several state-of-the-art representation-based models. We further show that VIRT can be integrated into existing methods as plugins to lift their performances.

Existing works on rumor resolution have shown great potential in recognizing word appearance and user participation. However, they ignore the intrinsic propagation mechanisms of rumors and present poor adaptive ability when unprecedented news emerges. To exploit the fine-grained rumor diffusion patterns and generalize rumor resolution methods, we formulate a predecessor task to identify triggering posts, and then exploit their characteristics to facilitate rumor verification. We design a tree-structured annotation interface and extend PHEME dataset with labels on the message level. Data analysis shows that triggers play a critical role in verifying rumors and present similar lingual patterns across irrelevant events. We propose a graph-based model considering the direction and interaction of information flow to implement role-aware rumor resolution. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model and progressive scheme.

A phone call is still one of the primary preferred channels for seniors to express their needs, ask questions, and inform potential problems to their health insurance plans. Alignment Healthis a next-generation, consumer-centric organization that is providing a variety of Medicare Advantage Products for seniors. We combine our proprietary technology platform, AVA, and our high-touch clinical model to provide seniors with care as it should be: high quality, low cost, and accompanied by a vastly improved consumer experience. Our members have the ability to connect with our member services and concierge teams 24/7 for a wide variety of ever-changing reasons through different channels, such as phone, email, and messages. We strive to provide an excellent member experience and ensure our members are getting the help and information they need at every touch —ideally, even before they reach us. This requires ongoing monitoring of reasons for contacting us, ensuring agents are equipped with the right tools and information to serve members, and coming up with proactive strategies to eliminate the need for the call when possible. We developed an NLP-based dynamic call reason tagging and reporting pipeline with an optimized human-in-the-loop approach to enable accurate call reason reporting and monitoring with the ability to see high-level trends as well as drill down into more granular sub-reasons. Our system produces 96.4% precision and 30%-50% better recall in tagging calls with proper reasons. We have also consistently achieved a 60+ Net Promoter Score (NPS) score, which illustrates high consumer satisfaction.

Modelling prosody variation is critical for synthesizing natural and expressive speech in end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) systems. In this paper, a cross-utterance conditional VAE (CUC-VAE) is proposed to estimate a posterior probability distribution of the latent prosody features for each phoneme by conditioning on acoustic features, speaker information, and text features obtained from both past and future sentences. At inference time, instead of the standard Gaussian distribution used by VAE, CUC-VAE allows sampling from an utterance-specific prior distribution conditioned on cross-utterance information, which allows the prosody features generated by the TTS system to be related to the context and is more similar to how humans naturally produce prosody. The performance of CUC-VAE is evaluated via a qualitative listening test for naturalness, intelligibility and quantitative measurements, including word error rates and the standard deviation of prosody attributes. Experimental results on LJ-Speech and LibriTTS data show that the proposed CUC-VAE TTS system improves naturalness and prosody diversity with clear margins.

Recently, retrieval models based on dense representations are dominant in passage retrieval tasks, due to their outstanding ability in terms of capturing semantics of input text compared to the traditional sparse vector space models. A common practice of dense retrieval models is to exploit a dual-encoder architecture to represent a query and a passage independently. Though efficient, such a structure loses interaction between the query-passage pair, resulting in inferior accuracy. To enhance the performance of dense retrieval models without loss of efficiency, we propose a GNN-encoder model in which query (passage) information is fused into passage (query) representations via graph neural networks that are constructed by queries and their top retrieved passages. By this means, we maintain a dual-encoder structure, and retain some interaction information between query-passage pairs in their representations, which enables us to achieve both efficiency and efficacy in passage retrieval. Evaluation results indicate that our method significantly outperforms the existing models on MSMARCO, Natural Questions and TriviaQA datasets, and achieves the new state-of-the-art on these datasets.

Sentiment analysis has attracted increasing attention in e-commerce. The sentiment polarities underlying user reviews are of great value for business intelligence. Aspect category sentiment analysis (ACSA) and review rating prediction (RP) are two essential tasks to detect the fine-to-coarse sentiment polarities. ACSA and RP are highly correlated and usually employed jointly in real-world e-commerce scenarios. While most public datasets are constructed for ACSA and RP separately, which may limit the further exploitation of both tasks. To address the problem and advance related researches, we present a large-scale Chinese restaurant review dataset ASAP including 46, 730 genuine reviews from a leading online-to-offline (O2O) e-commerce platform in China. Besides a 5-star scale rating, each review is manually annotated according to its sentiment polarities towards 18 pre-defined aspect categories. We hope the release of the dataset could shed some light on the field of sentiment analysis. Moreover, we propose an intuitive yet effective joint model for ACSA and RP. Experimental results demonstrate that the joint model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both tasks.

We consider the problem of scaling automated suggested replies for a commercial email application to multiple languages. Faced with increased compute requirements and low language resources for language expansion, we build a single universal model for improving the quality and reducing run-time costs of our production system. However, restricted data movement across regional centers prevents joint training across languages. To this end, we propose a multi-lingual multi-task continual learning framework, with auxiliary tasks and language adapters to train universal language representation across regions. The experimental results show positive cross-lingual transfer across languages while reducing catastrophic forgetting across regions. Our online results on real user traffic show significant CTR and Char-saved gain as well as 65% training cost reduction compared with per-language models. As a consequence, we have scaled the feature in multiple languages including low-resource markets.

Clinical trials often require that patients meet eligibility criteria (e.g., have specific conditions) to ensure the safety and the effectiveness of studies. However, retrieving eligible patients for a trial from the electronic health record (EHR) database remains a challenging task for clinicians since it requires not only medical knowledge about eligibility criteria, but also an adequate understanding of structured query language (SQL). In this paper, we introduce a new dataset that includes the first-of-its-kind eligibility-criteria corpus and the corresponding queries for criteria-to-sql (Criteria2SQL), a task translating the eligibility criteria to executable SQL queries. Compared to existing datasets, the queries in the dataset here are derived from the eligibility criteria of clinical trials and include Order-sensitive, Counting-based, and Boolean-type cases which are not seen before. In addition to the dataset, we propose a novel neural semantic parser as a strong baseline model. Extensive experiments show that the proposed parser outperforms existing state-of-the-art general-purpose text-to-sql models while highlighting the challenges presented by the new dataset. The uniqueness and the diversity of the dataset leave a lot of research opportunities for future improvement.

Cross-domain sentiment classification aims to predict sentiment polarity on a target domain utilizing a classifier learned from a source domain. Most existing adversarial learning methods focus on aligning the global marginal distribution by fooling a domain discriminator, without taking category-specific decision boundaries into consideration, which can lead to the mismatch of category-level features. In this work, we propose an adversarial category alignment network (ACAN), which attempts to enhance category consistency between the source domain and the target domain. Specifically, we increase the discrepancy of two polarity classifiers to provide diverse views, locating ambiguous features near the decision boundaries. Then the generator learns to create better features away from the category boundaries by minimizing this discrepancy. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance and produce more discriminative features.

Multiple emotions with different intensities are often evoked by events described in documents. Oftentimes, such event information is hidden and needs to be discovered from texts. Unveiling the hidden event information can help to understand how the emotions are evoked and provide explainable results. However, existing studies often ignore the latent event information. In this paper, we proposed a novel interpretable relevant emotion ranking model with the event information incorporated into a deep learning architecture using the event-driven attentions. Moreover, corpus-level event embeddings and document-level event distributions are introduced respectively to consider the global events in corpus and the document-specific events simultaneously. Experimental results on three real-world corpora show that the proposed approach performs remarkably better than the state-of-the-art emotion detection approaches and multi-label approaches. Moreover, interpretable results can be obtained to shed light on the events which trigger certain emotions.

Existing neural models usually predict the tag of the current token independent of the neighboring tags. The popular LSTM-CRF model considers the tag dependencies between every two consecutive tags. However, it is hard for existing neural models to take longer distance dependencies between tags into consideration. The scalability is mainly limited by the complex model structures and the cost of dynamic programming during training. In our work, we first design a new model called “high order LSTM” to predict multiple tags for the current token which contains not only the current tag but also the previous several tags. We call the number of tags in one prediction as “order”. Then we propose a new method called Multi-Order BiLSTM (MO-BiLSTM) which combines low order and high order LSTMs together. MO-BiLSTM keeps the scalability to high order models with a pruning technique. We evaluate MO-BiLSTM on all-phrase chunking and NER datasets. Experiment results show that MO-BiLSTM achieves the state-of-the-art result in chunking and highly competitive results in two NER datasets.

Text might contain or invoke multiple emotions with varying intensities. As such, emotion detection, to predict multiple emotions associated with a given text, can be cast into a multi-label classification problem. We would like to go one step further so that a ranked list of relevant emotions are generated where top ranked emotions are more intensely associated with text compared to lower ranked emotions, whereas the rankings of irrelevant emotions are not important. A novel framework of relevant emotion ranking is proposed to tackle the problem. In the framework, the objective loss function is designed elaborately so that both emotion prediction and rankings of only relevant emotions can be achieved. Moreover, we observe that some emotions co-occur more often while other emotions rarely co-exist. Such information is incorporated into the framework as constraints to improve the accuracy of emotion detection. Experimental results on two real-world corpora show that the proposed framework can effectively deal with emotion detection and performs remarkably better than the state-of-the-art emotion detection approaches and multi-label learning methods.

Text might express or evoke multiple emotions with varying intensities. As such, it is crucial to predict and rank multiple relevant emotions by their intensities. Moreover, as emotions might be evoked by hidden topics, it is important to unveil and incorporate such topical information to understand how the emotions are evoked. We proposed a novel interpretable neural network approach for relevant emotion ranking. Specifically, motivated by transfer learning, the neural network is initialized to make the hidden layer approximate the behavior of topic models. Moreover, a novel error function is defined to optimize the whole neural network for relevant emotion ranking. Experimental results on three real-world corpora show that the proposed approach performs remarkably better than the state-of-the-art emotion detection approaches and multi-label learning methods. Moreover, the extracted emotion-associated topic words indeed represent emotion-evoking events and are in line with our common-sense knowledge.

Knowledge embedding, which projects triples in a given knowledge base to d-dimensional vectors, has attracted considerable research efforts recently. Most existing approaches treat the given knowledge base as a set of triplets, each of whose representation is then learned separately. However, as a fact, triples are connected and depend on each other. In this paper, we propose a graph aware knowledge embedding method (GAKE), which formulates knowledge base as a directed graph, and learns representations for any vertices or edges by leveraging the graph’s structural information. We introduce three types of graph context for embedding: neighbor context, path context, and edge context, each reflects properties of knowledge from different perspectives. We also design an attention mechanism to learn representative power of different vertices or edges. To validate our method, we conduct several experiments on two tasks. Experimental results suggest that our method outperforms several state-of-art knowledge embedding models.

Zara, or ‘Zara the Supergirl’ is a virtual robot, that can exhibit empathy while interacting with an user, with the aid of its built in facial and emotion recognition, sentiment analysis, and speech module. At the end of the 5-10 minute conversation, Zara can give a personality analysis of the user based on all the user utterances. We have also implemented a real-time emotion recognition, using a CNN model that detects emotion from raw audio without feature extraction, and have achieved an average of 65.7% accuracy on six different emotion classes, which is an impressive 4.5% improvement from the conventional feature based SVM classification. Also, we have described a CNN based sentiment analysis module trained using out-of-domain data, that recognizes sentiment from the speech recognition transcript, which has a 74.8 F-measure when tested on human-machine dialogues.