We introduce a dataset built around a large collection of TV (and movie) series. Those are filled with challenging multi-party dialogues. Moreover, TV series come with a very active fan base that allows the collection of metadata and accelerates annotation. With 16 TV and movie series, Bazinga! amounts to 400+ hours of speech and 8M+ tokens, including 500K+ tokens annotated with the speaker, addressee, and entity linking information. Along with the dataset, we also provide a baseline for speaker diarization, punctuation restoration, and person entity recognition. The results demonstrate the difficulty of the tasks and of transfer learning from models trained on mono-speaker audio or written text, which is more widely available. This work is a step towards better multi-party dialogue structuring and understanding. Bazinga! is available at hf.co/bazinga. Because (a large) part of Bazinga! is only partially annotated, we also expect this dataset to foster research towards self- or weakly-supervised learning methods.

Knowledge transfer between neural language models is a widely used technique that has proven to improve performance in a multitude of natural language tasks, in particular with the recent rise of large pre-trained language models like BERT. Similarly, high cross-lingual transfer has been shown to occur in multilingual language models. Hence, it is of great importance to better understand this phenomenon as well as its limits. While most studies about cross-lingual transfer focus on training on independent and identically distributed (i.e. i.i.d.) samples, in this paper we study cross-lingual transfer in a continual learning setting on two sequence labeling tasks: slot-filling and named entity recognition. We investigate this by training multilingual BERT on sequences of 9 languages, one language at a time, on the MultiATIS++ and MultiCoNER corpora. Our first findings are that forward transfer between languages is retained although forgetting is present. Additional experiments show that lost performance can be recovered with as little as a single training epoch even if forgetting was high, which can be explained by a progressive shift of model parameters towards a better multilingual initialization. We also find that commonly used metrics might be insufficient to assess continual learning performance.

The task of automatic misogyny identification and categorization has not received as much attention as other natural language tasks have, even though it is crucial for identifying hate speech in social Internet interactions. In this work, we address this sentence classification task from a representation learning perspective, using both a bidirectional LSTM and BERT optimized with the following metric learning loss functions: contrastive loss, triplet loss, center loss, congenerous cosine loss and additive angular margin loss. We set new state-of-the-art for the task with our fine-tuned BERT, whose sentence embeddings can be compared with a simple cosine distance, and we release all our code as open source for easy reproducibility. Moreover, we find that almost every loss function performs equally well in this setting, matching the regular cross entropy loss.

In this paper, we claim that the CAMOMILE collaborative annotation platform (developed in the framework of the eponymous CHIST-ERA project) eases the organization of multimedia technology benchmarks, automating most of the campaign technical workflow and enabling collaborative (hence faster and cheaper) annotation of the evaluation data. This is demonstrated through the successful organization of a new multimedia task at MediaEval 2015, Multimodal Person Discovery in Broadcast TV.

In this paper, we describe the organization and the implementation of the CAMOMILE collaborative annotation framework for multimodal, multimedia, multilingual (3M) data. Given the versatile nature of the analysis which can be performed on 3M data, the structure of the server was kept intentionally simple in order to preserve its genericity, relying on standard Web technologies. Layers of annotations, defined as data associated to a media fragment from the corpus, are stored in a database and can be managed through standard interfaces with authentication. Interfaces tailored specifically to the needed task can then be developed in an agile way, relying on simple but reliable services for the management of the centralized annotations. We then present our implementation of an active learning scenario for person annotation in video, relying on the CAMOMILE server; during a dry run experiment, the manual annotation of 716 speech segments was thus propagated to 3504 labeled tracks. The code of the CAMOMILE framework is distributed in open source.

We introduce a new dataset built around two TV series from different genres, The Big Bang Theory, a situation comedy and Game of Thrones, a fantasy drama. The dataset has multiple tracks extracted from diverse sources, including dialogue (manual and automatic transcripts, multilingual subtitles), crowd-sourced textual descriptions (brief episode summaries, longer episode outlines) and various metadata (speakers, shots, scenes). The paper describes the dataset and provide tools to reproduce it for research purposes provided one has legally acquired the DVD set of the series. Tools are also provided to temporally align a major subset of dialogue and description tracks, in order to combine complementary information present in these tracks for enhanced accessibility. For alignment, we consider tracks as comparable corpora and first apply an existing algorithm for aligning such corpora based on dynamic time warping and TFIDF-based similarity scores. We improve this baseline algorithm using contextual information, WordNet-based word similarity and scene location information. We report the performance of these algorithms on a manually aligned subset of the data. To highlight the interest of the database, we report a use case involving rich speech retrieval and propose other uses.