Suzana Ilić

Angelina McMillan-Major, Zaid Alyafeai, Stella Biderman et al.

In recent years, large-scale data collection efforts have prioritized the amount of data collected in order to improve the modeling capabilities of large language models. This prioritization, however, has resulted in concerns with respect to the rights of data subjects represented in data collections, particularly when considering the difficulty in interrogating these collections due to insufficient documentation and tools for analysis. Mindful of these pitfalls, we present our methodology for a documentation-first, human-centered data collection project as part of the BigScience initiative. We identified a geographically diverse set of target language groups (Arabic, Basque, Chinese, Catalan, English, French, Indic languages, Indonesian, Niger-Congo languages, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese, as well as programming languages) for which to collect metadata on potential data sources. To structure this effort, we developed our online catalogue as a supporting tool for gathering metadata through organized public hackathons. We present our development process; analyses of the resulting resource metadata, including distributions over languages, regions, and resource types; and our lessons learned in this endeavor.

Anugraha Sinha, Naveen Kumar, Murukesh Mohanan et al.

In this work, we present a quantized deep neural network deployed on a low-power edge device, inferring learned motor-movements of a suspended robot in a defined space. This serves as the fundamental building block for the original setup, a robotic system for farms or greenhouses aimed at a wide range of agricultural tasks. Deep learning on edge devices and its implications could have a substantial impact on farming systems in the developing world, leading not only to sustainable food production and income, but also increased data privacy and autonomy.

Asir Saeed, Suzana Ilić, Eva Zangerle

Generative models for text have substantially contributed to tasks like machine translation and language modeling, using maximum likelihood optimization (MLE). However, for creative text generation, where multiple outputs are possible and originality and uniqueness are encouraged, MLE falls short. Methods optimized for MLE lead to outputs that can be generic, repetitive and incoherent. In this work, we use a Generative Adversarial Network framework to alleviate this problem. We evaluate our framework on poetry, lyrics and metaphor datasets, each with widely different characteristics, and report better performance of our objective function over other generative models.

Suzana Ilić, Reiichiro Nakano, Ivo Hajnal

In this work we explore a deep learning-based dialogue system that generates sarcastic and humorous responses from a conversation design perspective. We trained a seq2seq model on a carefully curated dataset of 3000 question-answering pairs, the core of our mean, grumpy, sarcastic chatbot. We show that end-to-end systems learn patterns very quickly from small datasets and thus, are able to transfer simple linguistic structures representing abstract concepts to unseen settings. We also deploy our LSTM-based encoder-decoder model in the browser, where users can directly interact with the chatbot. Human raters evaluated linguistic quality, creativity and human-like traits, revealing the system's strengths, limitations and potential for future research.

Suzana Ilić, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Jorge A. Balazs et al.

Predicting context-dependent and non-literal utterances like sarcastic and ironic expressions still remains a challenging task in NLP, as it goes beyond linguistic patterns, encompassing common sense and shared knowledge as crucial components. To capture complex morpho-syntactic features that can usually serve as indicators for irony or sarcasm across dynamic contexts, we propose a model that uses character-level vector representations of words, based on ELMo. We test our model on 7 different datasets derived from 3 different data sources, providing state-of-the-art performance in 6 of them, and otherwise offering competitive results.

Edison Marrese-Taylor, Suzana Ilic, Jorge A. Balazs et al.

In this paper we introduce our system for the task of Irony detection in English tweets, a part of SemEval 2018. We propose representation learning approach that relies on a multi-layered bidirectional LSTM, without using external features that provide additional semantic information. Although our model is able to outperform the baseline in the validation set, our results show limited generalization power over the test set. Given the limited size of the dataset, we think the usage of more pre-training schemes would greatly improve the obtained results.

Bernhard Kratzwald, Suzana Ilic, Mathias Kraus et al.

Emotions widely affect human decision-making. This fact is taken into account by affective computing with the goal of tailoring decision support to the emotional states of individuals. However, the accurate recognition of emotions within narrative documents presents a challenging undertaking due to the complexity and ambiguity of language. Performance improvements can be achieved through deep learning; yet, as demonstrated in this paper, the specific nature of this task requires the customization of recurrent neural networks with regard to bidirectional processing, dropout layers as a means of regularization, and weighted loss functions. In addition, we propose sent2affect, a tailored form of transfer learning for affective computing: here the network is pre-trained for a different task (i.e. sentiment analysis), while the output layer is subsequently tuned to the task of emotion recognition. The resulting performance is evaluated in a holistic setting across 6 benchmark datasets, where we find that both recurrent neural networks and transfer learning consistently outperform traditional machine learning. Altogether, the findings have considerable implications for the use of affective computing.