The integration of multimodality in natural language processing (NLP) tasks seeks to exploit the complementary information contained in two or more modalities, such as text, audio and video. This paper investigates the integration of often under-researched audio features with text, using the task of argumentation mining (AM) as a case study. We take a previously reported dataset and present an audio-enhanced version (the Multimodal USElecDeb60To16 dataset). We report the performance of two text models based on BERT and GloVe embeddings, one audio model (based on CNN and Bi-LSTM) and multimodal combinations, on a dataset of 28,850 utterances. The results show that multimodal models do not outperform text-based models when using the full dataset. However, we show that audio features add value in fully supervised scenarios with limited data. We find that when data is scarce (e.g. with 10% of the original dataset) multimodal models yield improved performance, whereas text models based on BERT considerably decrease performance. Finally, we conduct a study with artificially generated voices and an ablation study to investigate the importance of different audio features in the audio models.

Summarizing Interactive Digital Narratives (IDN) presents some unique challenges to existing text summarization models especially around capturing interactive elements in addition to important plot points. In this paper, we describe the first IDN dataset (IDN-Sum) designed specifically for training and testing IDN text summarization algorithms. Our dataset is generated using random playthroughs of 8 IDN episodes, taken from 2 different IDN games, and consists of 10,000 documents. Playthrough documents are annotated through automatic alignment with fan-sourced summaries using a commonly used alignment algorithm. We also report and discuss results from experiments applying common baseline extractive text summarization algorithms to this dataset. Qualitative analysis of the results reveals shortcomings in common annotation approaches and evaluation methods when applied to narrative and interactive narrative datasets. The dataset is released as open source for future researchers to train and test their own approaches for IDN text.

This work describes the classification system proposed for the Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych) Shared Task 2022. We propose the use of multitask learning approach with bidirectional long-short term memory (Bi-LSTM) model for predicting changes in user’s mood and their suicidal risk level. The two classification tasks have been solved independently or in an augmented way previously, where the output of one task is leveraged for learning another task, however this work proposes an ‘all-in-one’ framework that jointly learns the related mental health tasks. The experimental results suggest that the proposed multi-task framework outperforms the remaining single-task frameworks submitted to the challenge and evaluated via timeline based and coverage based performance metrics shared by the organisers. We also assess the potential of using various types of feature embedding schemes that could prove useful in initialising the Bi-LSTM model for better multitask learning in the mental health domain.

Argumentation mining aims at extracting, analysing and modelling people’s arguments, but large, high-quality annotated datasets are limited, and no multimodal datasets exist for this task. In this paper, we present M-Arg, a multimodal argument mining dataset with a corpus of US 2020 presidential debates, annotated through crowd-sourced annotations. This dataset allows models to be trained to extract arguments from natural dialogue such as debates using information like the intonation and rhythm of the speaker. Our dataset contains 7 hours of annotated US presidential debates, 6527 utterances and 4104 relation labels, and we report results from different baseline models, namely a text-only model, an audio-only model and multimodal models that extract features from both text and audio. With accuracy reaching 0.86 in multimodal models, we find that audio features provide added value with respect to text-only models.