Petra Galuščáková

Peter Røysland Aarnes, Vinay Setty, Petra Galuščáková

This paper describes IAI group's participation for automated check-worthiness estimation for claims, within the framework of the 2024 CheckThat! Lab "Task 1: Check-Worthiness Estimation". The task involves the automated detection of check-worthy claims in English, Dutch, and Arabic political debates and Twitter data. We utilized various pre-trained generative decoder and encoder transformer models, employing methods such as few-shot chain-of-thought reasoning, fine-tuning, data augmentation, and transfer learning from one language to another. Despite variable success in terms of performance, our models achieved notable placements on the organizer's leaderboard: ninth-best in English, third-best in Dutch, and the top placement in Arabic, utilizing multilingual datasets for enhancing the generalizability of check-worthiness detection. Despite a significant drop in performance on the unlabeled test dataset compared to the development test dataset, our findings contribute to the ongoing efforts in claim detection research, highlighting the challenges and potential of language-specific adaptations in claim verification systems.

Nolwenn Bernard, Ivica Kostric, Weronika Łajewska et al.

Personal knowledge graphs (PKGs) offer individuals a way to store and consolidate their fragmented personal data in a central place, improving service personalization while maintaining full user control. Despite their potential, practical PKG implementations with user-friendly interfaces remain scarce. This work addresses this gap by proposing a complete solution to represent, manage, and interface with PKGs. Our approach includes (1) a user-facing PKG Client, enabling end-users to administer their personal data easily via natural language statements, and (2) a service-oriented PKG API. To tackle the complexity of representing these statements within a PKG, we present an RDF-based PKG vocabulary that supports this, along with properties for access rights and provenance.

Sirina Håland, Trond Karlsen Strøm, Petra Galuščáková

Although the amount of available spoken content is steadily increasing, extracting information and knowledge from speech recordings remains challenging. Beyond enhancing traditional information retrieval methods such as speech search and keyword spotting, novel approaches for navigating and searching spoken content need to be explored and developed. In this paper, we propose a novel navigational method for speech archives that leverages recent advances in language and multimodal generative models. We demonstrate our approach with a Web application that organizes data into a structured format using interactive mind maps and image generation tools. The system is implemented using the TED-LIUM~3 dataset, which comprises over 2,000 speech transcripts and audio files of TED Talks. Initial user tests using a System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire indicate the application's potential to simplify the exploration of large speech collections.

Petra Galuščáková, Douglas W. Oard, Suraj Nair

Two key assumptions shape the usual view of ranked retrieval: (1) that the searcher can choose words for their query that might appear in the documents that they wish to see, and (2) that ranking retrieved documents will suffice because the searcher will be able to recognize those which they wished to find. When the documents to be searched are in a language not known by the searcher, neither assumption is true. In such cases, Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) is needed. This chapter reviews the state of the art for CLIR and outlines some open research questions.

Yanda Chen, Chris Kedzie, Suraj Nair et al.

This paper proposes an approach to cross-language sentence selection in a low-resource setting. It uses data augmentation and negative sampling techniques on noisy parallel sentence data to directly learn a cross-lingual embedding-based query relevance model. Results show that this approach performs as well as or better than multiple state-of-the-art machine translation + monolingual retrieval systems trained on the same parallel data. Moreover, when a rationale training secondary objective is applied to encourage the model to match word alignment hints from a phrase-based statistical machine translation model, consistent improvements are seen across three language pairs (English-Somali, English-Swahili and English-Tagalog) over a variety of state-of-the-art baselines.

David Wan, Chris Kedzie, Faisal Ladhak et al.

Typical ASR systems segment the input audio into utterances using purely acoustic information, which may not resemble the sentence-like units that are expected by conventional machine translation (MT) systems for Spoken Language Translation. In this work, we propose a model for correcting the acoustic segmentation of ASR models for low-resource languages to improve performance on downstream tasks. We propose the use of subtitles as a proxy dataset for correcting ASR acoustic segmentation, creating synthetic acoustic utterances by modeling common error modes. We train a neural tagging model for correcting ASR acoustic segmentation and show that it improves downstream performance on MT and audio-document cross-language information retrieval (CLIR).