End-to-End Chinese Speaker Identification

Dian Yu, Ben Zhou, Dong Yu


Abstract
Speaker identification (SI) in texts aims to identify the speaker(s) for each utterance in texts. Previous studies divide SI into several sub-tasks (e.g., quote extraction, named entity recognition, gender identification, and coreference resolution). However, we are still far from solving these sub-tasks, making SI systems that rely on them seriously suffer from error propagation. End-to-end SI systems, on the other hand, are not limited by individual modules, but suffer from insufficient training data from the existing small-scale datasets. To make large end-to-end models possible, we design a new annotation guideline that regards SI as span extraction from the local context, and we annotate by far the largest SI dataset for Chinese named CSI based on eighteen novels. Viewing SI as a span selection task also introduces the possibility of applying existing storng extractive machine reading comprehension (MRC) baselines. Surprisingly, simply using such a baseline without human-annotated character names and carefully designed rules, we can already achieve performance comparable or better than those of previous state-of-the-art SI methods on all public SI datasets for Chinese. Furthermore, we show that our dataset can serve as additional training data for existing benchmarks, which leads to further gains (up to 6.5% in accuracy). Finally, using CSI as a clean source, we design an effective self-training paradigm to continuously leverage hundreds of unlabeled novels.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-main.165
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2274–2285
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.165
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.165
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dian Yu, Ben Zhou, and Dong Yu. 2022. End-to-End Chinese Speaker Identification. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 2274–2285, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
End-to-End Chinese Speaker Identification (Yu et al., NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.165.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.165.mp4
Code
 yudiandoris/csi