Predictive models make mistakes and have biases. To combat both, we need to understand their predictions.Explainable AI (XAI) provides insights into models for vision, language, and tabular data. However, only a few approaches exist for speech classification models. Previous works focus on a selection of spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks, and most users find their explanations challenging to interpret.We propose a novel approach to explain speech classification models. It provides two types of insights. (i) Word-level. We measure the impact of each audio segment aligned with a word on the outcome. (ii) Paralinguistic. We evaluate how non-linguistic features (e.g., prosody and background noise) affect the outcome if perturbed.We validate our approach by explaining two state-of-the-art SLU models on two tasks in English and Italian. We test their plausibility with human subject ratings. Our results show that the explanations correctly represent the model’s inner workings and are plausible to humans.

Italy exhibits rich linguistic diversity across its territory due to the distinct regional languages spoken in different areas. Recent advances in self-supervised learning provide new opportunities to analyze Italy’s linguistic varieties using speech data alone. This includes the potential to leverage representations learned from large amounts of data to better examine nuances between closely related linguistic varieties. In this study, we focus on automatically identifying the geographic region of origin of speech samples drawn from Italy’s diverse language varieties. We leverage self-supervised learning models to tackle this task and analyze differences and similarities between Italy’s regional languages. In doing so, we also seek to uncover new insights into the relationships among these diverse yet closely related varieties, which may help linguists understand their interconnected evolution and regional development over time and space. To improve the discriminative ability of learned representations, we evaluate several supervised contrastive learning objectives, both as pre-training steps and additional fine-tuning objectives. Experimental evidence shows that pre-trained self-supervised models can effectively identify regions from speech recording. Additionally, incorporating contrastive objectives during fine-tuning improves classification accuracy and yields embeddings that distinctly separate regional varieties, demonstrating the value of combining self-supervised pre-training and contrastive learning for this task.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently obtained strong performance on complex reasoning tasks. However, their capabilities in specialized domains like law remain relatively unexplored. We present CLUEDO, a system to tackle a novel legal reasoning task that involves determining if a provided answer correctly addresses a legal question derived from U.S. civil procedure cases. CLUEDO utilizes multiple collaborator models that are trained using multiple-choice prompting to choose the right label and generate explanations. These collaborators are overseen by a final “detective” model that identifies the most accurate answer in a zero-shot manner. Our approach achieves an F1 macro score of 0.74 on the development set and 0.76 on the test set, outperforming individual models. Unlike the powerful GPT-4, CLUEDO provides more stable predictions thanks to the ensemble approach. Our results showcase the promise of tailored frameworks to enhance legal reasoning capabilities in LLMs.

In Natural Language Generation (NLG), contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) face several challenges, such as generating fluent yet inaccurate outputs and reliance on fluency-centric metrics. This often leads to neural networks exhibiting “hallucinations.” The SHROOM challenge focuses on automatically identifying these hallucinations in the generated text. To tackle these issues, we introduce two key components, a data augmentation pipeline incorporating LLM-assisted pseudo-labelling and sentence rephrasing, and a voting ensemble from three models pre-trained on Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks and fine-tuned on diverse datasets.

The use of Natural Language Processing techniques in the legal domain has become established for supporting attorneys and domain experts in content retrieval and decision-making. However, understanding the legal text poses relevant challenges in the recognition of domain-specific entities and the adaptation and explanation of predictive models. This paper addresses the Legal Entity Name Recognition (L-NER) and Court judgment Prediction (CPJ) and Explanation (CJPE) tasks. The L-NER solution explores the use of various transformer-based models, including an entity-aware method attending domain-specific entities. The CJPE proposed method relies on hierarchical BERT-based classifiers combined with local input attribution explainers. We propose a broad comparison of eXplainable AI methodologies along with a novel approach based on NER. For the L-NER task, the experimental results remark on the importance of domain-specific pre-training. For CJP our lightweight solution shows performance in line with existing approaches, and our NER-boosted explanations show promising CJPE results in terms of the conciseness of the prediction explanations.