SANTM: Efficient Self-attention-driven Network for Text Matching

Self-attention mechanisms have recently been embraced for a broad range of text-matching applications. Self-attention model takes only one sentence as an input with no extra information, i.e., one can utilize the final hidden state or pooling. However, text-matching problems can be interpreted either in symmetrical or asymmetrical scopes. For instance, paraphrase detection is an asymmetrical task, while textual entailment classification and question-answer matching are considered asymmetrical tasks. In this article, we leverage attractive properties of self-attention mechanism and proposes an attention-based network that incorporates three key components for inter-sequence attention: global pointwise features, preceding attentive features, and contextual features while updating the rest of the components. Our model follows evaluation on two benchmark datasets cover tasks of textual entailment and question-answer matching. The proposed efficient Self-attention-driven Network for Text Matching outperforms the state of the art on the Stanford Natural Language Inference and WikiQA datasets with much fewer parameters.

Towards Developing Uniform Lexicon Based Sorting Algorithm for Three Prominent Indo-Aryan Languages

Three different Indic/Indo-Aryan languages - Bengali, Hindi and Nepali have been explored here in character level to find out similarities and dissimilarities. Having shared the same root, the Sanskrit, Indic languages bear common characteristics. That is why computer and language scientists can take the opportunity to develop common Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques or algorithms. Bearing the concept in mind, we compare and analyze these three languages character by character. As an application of the hypothesis, we also developed a uniform sorting algorithm in two steps, first for the Bengali and Nepali languages only and then extended it for Hindi in the second step. Our thorough investigation with more than 30,000 words from each language suggests that, the algorithm maintains total accuracy as set by the local language authorities of the respective languages and good efficiency.

Part-of-Speech (POS) Tagging Using Deep Learning-Based Approaches on the Designed Khasi POS Corpus

Part-of-speech (POS) tagging is one of the research challenging fields in natural language processing (NLP). It requires good knowledge of a particular language with large amounts of data or corpora for feature engineering, which can lead to achieving a good performance of the tagger. Our main contribution in this research work is the designed Khasi POS corpus. Till date, there has been no form of any kind of Khasi corpus developed or formally developed. In the present designed Khasi POS corpus, each word is tagged manually using the designed tagset. Methods of deep learning have been used to experiment with our designed Khasi POS corpus. The POS tagger based on BiLSTM, combinations of BiLSTM with CRF, and character-based embedding with BiLSTM are presented. The main challenges of understanding and handling Natural Language toward Computational linguistics to encounter are anticipated. In the presently designed corpus, we have tried to solve the problems of ambiguities of words concerning their context usage, and also the orthography problems that arise in the designed POS corpus. The designed Khasi corpus size is around 96,100 tokens and consists of 6,616 distinct words. Initially, while running the first few sets of data of around 41,000 tokens in our experiment the taggers are found to yield considerably accurate results. When the Khasi corpus size has been increased to 96,100 tokens, we see an increase in accuracy rate and the analyses are more pertinent. As results, accuracy of 96.81% is achieved for the BiLSTM method, 96.98% for BiLSTM with CRF technique, and 95.86% for character-based with LSTM. Concerning substantial research from the NLP perspectives for Khasi, we also present some of the recently existing POS taggers and other NLP works on the Khasi language for comparative purposes.

Efficient Channel Attention Based Encoder–Decoder Approach for Image Captioning in Hindi

Image captioning refers to the process of generating a textual description that describes objects and activities present in a given image. It connects two fields of artificial intelligence, computer vision, and natural language processing. Computer vision and natural language processing deal with image understanding and language modeling, respectively. In the existing literature, most of the works have been carried out for image captioning in the English language. This article presents a novel method for image captioning in the Hindi language using encoder–decoder based deep learning architecture with efficient channel attention. The key contribution of this work is the deployment of an efficient channel attention mechanism with bahdanau attention and a gated recurrent unit for developing an image captioning model in the Hindi language. Color images usually consist of three channels, namely red, green, and blue. The channel attention mechanism focuses on an image’s important channel while performing the convolution, which is basically to assign higher importance to specific channels over others. The channel attention mechanism has been shown to have great potential for improving the efficiency of deep convolution neural networks (CNNs). The proposed encoder–decoder architecture utilizes the recently introduced ECA-NET CNN to integrate the channel attention mechanism. Hindi is the fourth most spoken language globally, widely spoken in India and South Asia; it is India’s official language. By translating the well-known MSCOCO dataset from English to Hindi, a dataset for image captioning in Hindi is manually created. The efficiency of the proposed method is compared with other baselines in terms of Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) scores, and the results obtained illustrate that the method proposed outperforms other baselines. The proposed method has attained improvements of 0.59%, 2.51%, 4.38%, and 3.30% in terms of BLEU-1, BLEU-2, BLEU-3, and BLEU-4 scores, respectively, with respect to the state-of-the-art. Qualities of the generated captions are further assessed manually in terms of adequacy and fluency to illustrate the proposed method’s efficacy.

Model Transformation Development Using Automated Requirements Analysis, Metamodel Matching, and Transformation by Example

In this article, we address how the production of model transformations (MT) can be accelerated by automation of transformation synthesis from requirements, examples, and metamodels. We introduce a synthesis process based on metamodel matching, correspondence patterns between metamodels, and completeness and consistency analysis of matches. We describe how the limitations of metamodel matching can be addressed by combining matching with automated requirements analysis and model transformation by example (MTBE) techniques. We show that in practical examples a large percentage of required transformation functionality can usually be constructed automatically, thus potentially reducing development effort. We also evaluate the efficiency of synthesised transformations. Our novel contributions are: The concept of correspondence patterns between metamodels of a transformation. Requirements analysis of transformations using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). Symbolic MTBE using “predictive specification” to infer transformations from examples. Transformation generation in multiple MT languages and in Java, from an abstract intermediate language.

Transparent Aspect-Level Sentiment Analysis Based on Dependency Syntax Analysis and Its Application on COVID-19

Aspect-level sentiment analysis identifies fine-grained emotion for target words. There are three major issues in current models of aspect-level sentiment analysis. First, few models consider the natural language semantic characteristics of the texts. Second, many models consider the location characteristics of the target words, but ignore the relationships among the target words and among the overall sentences. Third, many models lack transparency in data collection, data processing, and results generating in sentiment analysis. In order to resolve these issues, we propose an aspect-level sentiment analysis model that combines a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network and a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based on Dependency syntax analysis (Bi-LSTM-DGCN). Our model integrates the dependency syntax analysis of the texts, and explicitly considers the natural language semantic characteristics of the texts. It further fuses the target words and overall sentences. Extensive experiments are conducted on four benchmark datasets, i.e., Restaurant14, Laptop, Restaurant16, and Twitter. The experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms other models like Target-Dependent LSTM (TD-LSTM), Attention-based LSTM with Aspect Embedding (ATAE-LSTM), LSTM+SynATT+TarRep and Convolution over a Dependency Tree (CDT). Our model is further applied to aspect-level sentiment analysis on “government” and “lockdown” of 1,658,250 tweets about “#COVID-19” that we collected from March 1, 2020 to July 1, 2020. The experimental results show that Twitter users’ positive and negative sentiments fluctuated over time. Through the transparency analysis in data collection, data processing, and results generating, we discuss the reasons for the evolution of users’ emotions over time based on the tweets and on our models.

A Computational Look at Oral History Archives

Computational technologies have revolutionized the archival sciences field, prompting new approaches to process the extensive data in these collections. Automatic speech recognition and natural language processing create unique possibilities for analysis of oral history (OH) interviews, where otherwise the transcription and analysis of the full recording would be too time consuming. However, many oral historians note the loss of aural information when converting the speech into text, pointing out the relevance of subjective cues for a full understanding of the interviewee narrative. In this article, we explore various computational technologies for social signal processing and their potential application space in OH archives, as well as neighboring domains where qualitative studies is a frequently used method. We also highlight the latest developments in key technologies for multimedia archiving practices such as natural language processing and automatic speech recognition. We discuss the analysis of both visual (body language and facial expressions), and non-visual cues (paralinguistics, breathing, and heart rate), stating the specific challenges introduced by the characteristics of OH collections. We argue that applying social signal processing to OH archives will have a wider influence than solely OH practices, bringing benefits for various fields from humanities to computer sciences, as well as to archival sciences. Looking at human emotions and somatic reactions on extensive interview collections would give scholars from multiple fields the opportunity to focus on feelings, mood, culture, and subjective experiences expressed in these interviews on a larger scale.

I3rab: A New Arabic Dependency Treebank Based on Arabic Grammatical Theory

Treebanks are valuable linguistic resources that include the syntactic structure of a language sentence in addition to part-of-speech tags and morphological features. They are mainly utilized in modeling statistical parsers. Although the statistical natural language parser has recently become more accurate for languages such as English, those for the Arabic language still have low accuracy. The purpose of this article is to construct a new Arabic dependency treebank based on the traditional Arabic grammatical theory and the characteristics of the Arabic language, to investigate their effects on the accuracy of statistical parsers. The proposed Arabic dependency treebank, called I3rab, contrasts with existing Arabic dependency treebanks in two main concepts. The first concept is the approach of determining the main word of the sentence, and the second concept is the representation of the joined and covert pronouns. To evaluate I3rab, we compared its performance against a subset of Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank that shares a comparable level of details. The conducted experiments show that the percentage improvement reached up to 10.24% in UAS and 18.42% in LAS.