Textless spoken language processing is an exciting area of research that promises to extend applicability of the standard NLP toolset onto spoken language and languages with few or no textual resources. Here, we introduce textless-lib, a PyTorch-based library aimed to facilitate research in the area. We describe the building blocks that the library provides and demonstrate its usability by discuss three different use-case examples: (i) speaker probing, (ii) speech resynthesis and compression, and (iii) speech continuation. We believe that textless-lib substantially simplifies research the textless setting and will be handful not only for speech researchers but also for the NLP community at large.

The paper presents a visual interface for manual annotation of language resources for derivational morphology. The interface is web-based and created using relatively simple programming techniques, and yet it rapidly facilitates and speeds up the annotation process, especially in languages with rich derivational morphology. As such, it can reduce the cost of the process. After introducing manual annotation tasks in derivational morphology, the paper describes the new visual interface and a case study that compares the current annotation method to the annotation using the interface. In addition, it also demonstrates the opportunity to use the interface for manual annotation of syntactic trees. The source codes are freely available under the MIT License on GitHub.

We introduce a neural Turkish NLP toolkit called TurkishDelightNLP that performs computational linguistic analyses from morphological level to semantic level that involves tasks such as stemming, morphological segmentation, morphological tagging, part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing, and semantic parsing, as well as high-level NLP tasks such as named entity recognition. We publicly share the open-source Turkish NLP toolkit through a web interface that allows an input text to be analysed in real-time, as well as the open source implementation of the components provided in the toolkit, an API, and several annotated datasets such as word similarity test set to evaluate word embeddings and UCCA-based semantic annotation in Turkish. This will be the first open-source Turkish NLP toolkit that involves a range of NLP tasks in all levels. We believe that it will be useful for other researchers in Turkish NLP and will be also beneficial for other high-level NLP tasks in Turkish.

The current workflow for Information Extraction (IE) analysts involves the definition of the entities/relations of interest and a training corpus with annotated examples. In this demonstration we introduce a new workflow where the analyst directly verbalizes the entities/relations, which are then used by a Textual Entailment model to perform zero-shot IE. We present the design and implementation of a toolkit with a user interface, as well as experiments on four IE tasks that show that the system achieves very good performance at zero-shot learning using only 5–15 minutes per type of a user’s effort. Our demonstration system is open-sourced at https://github.com/BBN-E/ZS4IE. A demonstration video is available at https://vimeo.com/676138340.

This paper presents a conversational AI platform called Flowstorm. Flowstorm is an open-source SaaS project suitable for creating, running, and analyzing conversational applications. Thanks to the fast and fully automated build process, the dialogues created within the platform can be executed in seconds. Furthermore, we propose a novel dialogue architecture that uses a combination of tree structures with generative models. The tree structures are also used for training NLU models suitable for specific dialogue scenarios. However, the generative models are globally used across applications and extend the functionality of the dialogue trees. Moreover, the platform functionality benefits from out-of-the-box components, such as the one responsible for extracting data from utterances or working with crawled data. Additionally, it can be extended using a custom code directly in the platform. One of the essential features of the platform is the possibility to reuse the created assets across applications. There is a library of prepared assets where each developer can contribute. All of the features are available through a user-friendly visual editor.

The recent growth of black-box machine-learning methods in data analysis has increased the demand for explanation methods and tools to understand their behaviour and assist human-ML model cooperation. In this paper, we demonstrate ContrXT, a novel approach that uses natural language explanations to help users to comprehend how a back-box model works. ContrXT provides time contrastive (t-contrast) explanations by computing the differences in the classification logic of two different trained models and then reasoning on their symbolic representations through Binary Decision Diagrams. ContrXT is publicly available at ContrXT.ai as a python pip package.

We introduce RESIN-11, a new schema-guided event extraction&prediction framework that can be applied to a large variety of newsworthy scenarios. The framework consists of two parts: (1) an open-domain end-to-end multimedia multilingual information extraction system with weak-supervision and zero-shot learningbased techniques. (2) schema matching and schema-guided event prediction based on our curated schema library. We build a demo website based on our dockerized system and schema library publicly available for installation (https://github.com/RESIN-KAIROS/RESIN-11). We also include a video demonstrating the system.

We propose a system that assists a user in constructing transparent information extraction models, consisting of patterns (or rules) written in a declarative language, through program synthesis. Users of our system can specify their requirements through the use of examples,which are collected with a search interface. The rule-synthesis system proposes rule candidates and the results of applying them on a textual corpus; the user has the option to accept the candidate, request another option, or adjust the examples provided to the system. Through an interactive evaluation, we show that our approach generates high-precision rules even in a 1-shot setting. On a second evaluation on a widely-used relation extraction dataset (TACRED), our method generates rules that outperform considerably manually written patterns. Our code, demo, and documentation is available at https://clulab.github.io/odinsynth.

Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) are widely used in colleges and universities. Typically SET results are summarized for instructors in a static PDF report. The report often includes summary statistics for quantitative ratings and an unsorted list of open-ended student comments. The lack of organization and summarization of the raw comments hinders those interpreting the reports from fully utilizing informative feedback, making accurate inferences, and designing appropriate instructional improvements. In this work, we introduce a novel system, SETSUM, that leverages sentiment analysis, aspect extraction, summarization, and visualization techniques to provide organized illustrations of SET findings to instructors and other reviewers. Ten university professors from diverse departments serve as evaluators of the system and all agree that SETSUM help them interpret SET results more efficiently; and 6 out of 10 instructors prefer our system over the standard static PDF report (while the remaining 4 would like to have both). This demonstrates that our work holds the potential of reforming the SET reporting conventions in the future.

We introduce an open-domain topic classification system that accepts user-defined taxonomy in real time. Users will be able to classify a text snippet with respect to any candidate labels they want, and get instant response from our web interface. To obtain such flexibility, we build the backend model in a zero-shot way. By training on a new dataset constructed from Wikipedia, our label-aware text classifier can effectively utilize implicit knowledge in the pretrained language model to handle labels it has never seen before. We evaluate our model across four datasets from various domains with different label sets. Experiments show that the model significantly improves over existing zero-shot baselines in open-domain scenarios, and performs competitively with weakly-supervised models trained on in-domain data.

SentSpace is a modular framework for streamlined evaluation of text. SentSpacecharacterizes textual input using diverse lexical, syntactic, and semantic features derivedfrom corpora and psycholinguistic experiments. Core sentence features fall into three primaryfeature spaces: 1) Lexical, 2) Contextual, and 3) Embeddings. To aid in the analysis of computed features, SentSpace provides a web interface for interactive visualization and comparison with text from large corpora. The modular design of SentSpace allows researchersto easily integrate their own feature computation into the pipeline while benefiting from acommon framework for evaluation and visualization. In this manuscript we will describe thedesign of SentSpace, its core feature spaces, and demonstrate an example use case by comparing human-written and machine-generated (GPT2-XL) sentences to each other. We findthat while GPT2-XL-generated text appears fluent at the surface level, psycholinguistic normsand measures of syntactic processing reveal key differences between text produced by humansand machines. Thus, SentSpace provides a broad set of cognitively motivated linguisticfeatures for evaluation of text within natural language processing, cognitive science, as wellas the social sciences.

PaddleSpeech is an open-source all-in-one speech toolkit. It aims at facilitating the development and research of speech processing technologies by providing an easy-to-use command-line interface and a simple code structure. This paper describes the design philosophy and core architecture of PaddleSpeech to support several essential speech-to-text and text-to-speech tasks. PaddleSpeech achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance on various speech datasets and implements the most popular methods. It also provides recipes and pretrained models to quickly reproduce the experimental results in this paper. PaddleSpeech is publicly avaiable at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleSpeech.

We introduce DadmaTools, an open-source Python Natural Language Processing toolkit for the Persian language. The toolkit is a neural pipeline based on spaCy for several text processing tasks, including normalization, tokenization, lemmatization, part-of-speech, dependency parsing, constituency parsing, chunking, and ezafe detecting. DadmaTools relies on fine-tuning of ParsBERT using the PerDT dataset for most of the tasks. Dataset module and embedding module are included in DadmaTools that support different Persian datasets, embeddings, and commonly used functions for them. Our evaluations show that DadmaTools can attain state-of-the-art performance on multiple NLP tasks. The source code is freely available at https://github.com/Dadmatech/DadmaTools.

This paper presents FAMIE, a comprehensive and efficient active learning (AL) toolkit for multilingual information extraction. FAMIE is designed to address a fundamental problem in existing AL frameworks where annotators need to wait for a long time between annotation batches due to the time-consuming nature of model training and data selection at each AL iteration. This hinders the engagement, productivity, and efficiency of annotators. Based on the idea of using a small proxy network for fast data selection, we introduce a novel knowledge distillation mechanism to synchronize the proxy network with the main large model (i.e., BERT-based) to ensure the appropriateness of the selected annotation examples for the main model. Our AL framework can support multiple languages. The experiments demonstrate the advantages of FAMIE in terms of competitive performance and time efficiency for sequence labeling with AL. We publicly release our code (https://github.com/nlp-uoregon/famie) and demo website (http://nlp.uoregon.edu:9000/). A demo video for FAMIE is provided at: https://youtu.be/I2i8n_jAyrY