Georgios Sidiropoulos

Patrick Jonk, Vincent de Vries, Rombout Wever et al.

Occurrence reporting is a commonly used method in safety management systems to obtain insight in the prevalence of hazards and accident scenarios. In support of safety data analysis, reports are often categorized according to a taxonomy. However, the processing of the reports can require significant effort from safety analysts and a common problem is interrater variability in labeling processes. Also, in some cases, reports are not processed according to a taxonomy, or the taxonomy does not fully cover the contents of the documents. This paper explores various Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to support the analysis of aviation safety occurrence reports. In particular, the problems studied are the automatic labeling of reports using a classification model, extracting the latent topics in a collection of texts using a topic model and the automatic generation of probable cause texts. Experimental results showed that (i) under the right conditions the labeling of occurrence reports can be effectively automated with a transformer-based classifier, (ii) topic modeling can be useful for finding the topics present in a collection of reports, and (iii) using a summarization model can be a promising direction for generating probable cause texts.

Georgios Sidiropoulos, Evangelos Kanoulas

Speech-based open-domain question answering (QA over a large corpus of text passages with spoken questions) has emerged as an important task due to the increasing number of users interacting with QA systems via speech interfaces. Passage retrieval is a key task in speech-based open-domain QA. So far, previous works adopted pipelines consisting of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model that transcribes the spoken question before feeding it to a dense text retriever. Such pipelines have several limitations. The need for an ASR model limits the applicability to low-resource languages and specialized domains with no annotated speech data. Furthermore, the ASR model propagates its errors to the retriever. In this work, we try to alleviate these limitations by proposing an ASR-free, end-to-end trained multimodal dense retriever that can work directly on spoken questions. Our experimental results showed that, on shorter questions, our retriever is a promising alternative to the \textit{ASR and Retriever} pipeline, achieving better retrieval performance in cases where ASR would have mistranscribed important words in the question or have produced a transcription with a high word error rate.