Cecilia Alm


2022

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Teaching Interactively to Learn Emotions in Natural Language
Rajesh Titung | Cecilia Alm
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Bridging Human--Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing

Motivated by prior literature, we provide a proof of concept simulation study for an understudied interactive machine learning method, machine teaching (MT), for the text-based emotion prediction task. We compare this method experimentally against a more well-studied technique, active learning (AL). Results show the strengths of both approaches over more resource-intensive offline supervised learning. Additionally, applying AL and MT to fine-tune a pre-trained model offers further efficiency gain. We end by recommending research directions which aim to empower users in the learning process.

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Multimodal Modeling of Task-Mediated Confusion
Camille Mince | Skye Rhomberg | Cecilia Alm | Reynold Bailey | Alex Ororbia
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Student Research Workshop

In order to build more human-like cognitive agents, systems capable of detecting various human emotions must be designed to respond appropriately. Confusion, the combination of an emotional and cognitive state, is under-explored. In this paper, we build upon prior work to develop models that detect confusion from three modalities: video (facial features), audio (prosodic features), and text (transcribed speech features). Our research improves the data collection process by allowing for continuous (as opposed to discrete) annotation of confusion levels. We also craft models based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) given their ability to predict sequential data. In our experiments, we find that text and video modalities are the most important in predicting confusion while the explored audio features are relatively unimportant predictors of confusion in our data.

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Using BERT Embeddings to Model Word Importance in Conversational Transcripts for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users
Akhter Al Amin | Saad Hassan | Cecilia Alm | Matt Huenerfauth
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Deaf and hard of hearing individuals regularly rely on captioning while watching live TV. Live TV captioning is evaluated by regulatory agencies using various caption evaluation metrics. However, caption evaluation metrics are often not informed by preferences of DHH users or how meaningful the captions are. There is a need to construct caption evaluation metrics that take the relative importance of words in transcript into account. We conducted correlation analysis between two types of word embeddings and human-annotated labelled word-importance scores in existing corpus. We found that normalized contextualized word embeddings generated using BERT correlated better with manually annotated importance scores than word2vec-based word embeddings. We make available a pairing of word embeddings and their human-annotated importance scores. We also provide proof-of-concept utility by training word importance models, achieving an F1-score of 0.57 in the 6-class word importance classification task.