We introduce PersonaLM - Domain-distributed Span-Aggregated K-nearest N-gram retrieval augmentation to improve language modeling for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) personalization. PersonaLM leverages contextually similar n-gram word frequencies for recognizing rare word patterns associated with unseen domains. It aggregates the next-word probability distribution based on the relative importance of different domains to the input query. To achieve this, we propose a Span Aggregated Group-Contrastive Neural (SCAN) retriever that learns to rank external domains/users by utilizing a group-wise contrastive span loss that pulls together span representations belonging to the same group while pushing away spans from unrelated groups in the semantic space. We propose ASAP benchmark for ASR LM personalization that consists of three user-specific speech-to-text tasks for meetings, TED talks, and financial earnings calls. Extensive experiments show that PersonaLM significantly outperforms strong baselines with a 10-16% improvement in perplexity and a 5-8% reduction in Word Error Rates on popular Wikitext-103, UserLibri, and our ASAP dataset. We further demonstrate the usefulness of the SCAN retriever for improving user-personalized text generation and classification by retrieving relevant context for zero-shot prompting and few-shot fine-tuning of LLMs by 7-12% on the LAMP benchmark.

Financial prediction is complex due to the stochastic nature of the stock market. Semi-structured financial documents present comprehensive financial data in tabular formats, such as earnings, profit-loss statements, and balance sheets, and can often contain rich technical analysis along with a textual discussion of corporate history, and management analysis, compliance, and risks. Existing research focuses on the textual and audio modalities of financial disclosures from company conference calls to forecast stock volatility and price movement, but ignores the rich tabular data available in financial reports. Moreover, the economic realm is still plagued with a severe under-representation of various communities spanning diverse demographics, gender, and native speakers. In this work, we show that combining tabular data from financial semi-structured documents with text transcripts and audio recordings not only improves stock volatility and price movement prediction by 5-12% but also reduces gender bias caused due to audio-based neural networks by over 30%.

We introduce DocTime - a novel temporal dependency graph (TDG) parser that takes as input a text document and produces a temporal dependency graph. It outperforms previous BERT-based solutions by a relative 4-8% on three datasets from modeling the problem as a graph network with path-prediction loss to incorporate longer range dependencies. This work also demonstrates how the TDG graph can be used to improve the downstream tasks of temporal questions answering and NLI by a relative 4-10% with a new framework that incorporates the temporal dependency graph into the self-attention layer of Transformer models (Time-transformer). Finally, we develop and evaluate on a new temporal dependency graph dataset for the domain of contractual documents, which has not been previously explored in this setting.

We present DocInfer - a novel, end-to-end Document-level Natural Language Inference model that builds a hierarchical document graph enriched through inter-sentence relations (topical, entity-based, concept-based), performs paragraph pruning using the novel SubGraph Pooling layer, followed by optimal evidence selection based on REINFORCE algorithm to identify the most important context sentences for a given hypothesis. Our evidence selection mechanism allows it to transcend the input length limitation of modern BERT-like Transformer models while presenting the entire evidence together for inferential reasoning. We show this is an important property needed to reason on large documents where the evidence may be fragmented and located arbitrarily far from each other. Extensive experiments on popular corpora - DocNLI, ContractNLI, and ConTRoL datasets, and our new proposed dataset called CaseHoldNLI on the task of legal judicial reasoning, demonstrate significant performance gains of 8-12% over SOTA methods. Our ablation studies validate the impact of our model. Performance improvement of 3-6% on annotation-scarce downstream tasks of fact verification, multiple-choice QA, and contract clause retrieval demonstrates the usefulness of DocInfer beyond primary NLI tasks.

The #MeToo movement on social media platforms initiated discussions over several facets of sexual harassment in our society. Prior work by the NLP community for automated identification of the narratives related to sexual abuse disclosures barely explored this social phenomenon as an independent task. However, emotional attributes associated with textual conversations related to the #MeToo social movement are complexly intertwined with such narratives. We formulate the task of identifying narratives related to the sexual abuse disclosures in online posts as a joint modeling task that leverages their emotional attributes through multitask learning. Our results demonstrate that positive knowledge transfer via context-specific shared representations of a flexible cross-stitched parameter sharing model helps establish the inherent benefit of jointly modeling tasks related to sexual abuse disclosures with emotion classification from the text in homogeneous and heterogeneous settings. We show how for more domain-specific tasks related to sexual abuse disclosures such as sarcasm identification and dialogue act (refutation, justification, allegation) classification, homogeneous multitask learning is helpful, whereas for more general tasks such as stance and hate speech detection, heterogeneous multitask learning with emotion classification works better.

Risk prediction is an essential task in financial markets. Merger and Acquisition (M&A) calls provide key insights into the claims made by company executives about the restructuring of the financial firms. Extracting vocal and textual cues from M&A calls can help model the risk associated with such financial activities. To aid the analysis of M&A calls, we curate a dataset of conference call transcripts and their corresponding audio recordings for the time period ranging from 2016 to 2020. We introduce M3ANet, a baseline architecture that takes advantage of the multimodal multi-speaker input to forecast the financial risk associated with the M&A calls. Empirical results prove that the task is challenging, with the pro-posed architecture performing marginally better than strong BERT-based baselines. We release the M3A dataset and benchmark models to motivate future research on this challenging problem domain.

We present TIMERS - a TIME, Rhetorical and Syntactic-aware model for document-level temporal relation classification in the English language. Our proposed method leverages rhetorical discourse features and temporal arguments from semantic role labels, in addition to traditional local syntactic features, trained through a Gated Relational-GCN. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model outperforms previous methods by 5-18% on the TDDiscourse, TimeBank-Dense, and MATRES datasets due to our discourse-level modeling.

Natural language processing has recently made stock movement forecasting and volatility forecasting advances, leading to improved financial forecasting. Transcripts of companies’ earnings calls are well studied for risk modeling, offering unique investment insight into stock performance. However, vocal cues in the speech of company executives present an underexplored rich source of natural language data for estimating financial risk. Additionally, most existing approaches ignore the correlations between stocks. Building on existing work, we introduce a neural model for stock volatility prediction that accounts for stock interdependence via graph convolutions while fusing verbal, vocal, and financial features in a semi-supervised multi-task risk forecasting formulation. Our proposed model, VolTAGE, outperforms existing methods demonstrating the effectiveness of multimodal learning for volatility prediction.

The #MeToo movement is an ongoing prevalent phenomenon on social media aiming to demonstrate the frequency and widespread of sexual harassment by providing a platform to speak narrate personal experiences of such harassment. The aggregation and analysis of such disclosures pave the way to development of technology-based prevention of sexual harassment. We contend that the lack of specificity in generic sentence classification models may not be the best way to tackle text subtleties that intrinsically prevail in a classification task as complex as identifying disclosures of sexual harassment. We propose the Disclosure Language Model, a three part ULMFiT architecture, consisting of a Language model, a Medium-Specific (Twitter) model and a Task-Specific classifier to tackle this problem and create a manually annotated real-world dataset to test our technique on this, to show that using a Discourse Language Model often yields better classification performance over (i) Generic deep learning based sentence classification models (ii) existing models that rely on handcrafted stylistic features. An extensive comparison with state-of-the-art generic and specific models along with a detailed error analysis presents the case for our proposed methodology.

Suicide is a leading cause of death among youth and the use of social media to detect suicidal ideation is an active line of research. While it has been established that these users share a common set of properties, the current state-of-the-art approaches utilize only text-based (stylistic and semantic) cues. We contend that the use of information from networks in the form of condensed social graph embeddings and author profiling using features from historical data can be combined with an existing set of features to improve the performance. To that end, we experiment on a manually annotated dataset of tweets created using a three-phase strategy and propose SNAP-BATNET, a deep learning based model to extract text-based features and a novel Feature Stacking approach to combine other community-based information such as historical author profiling and graph embeddings that outperform the current state-of-the-art. We conduct a comprehensive quantitative analysis with baselines, both generic and specific, that presents the case for SNAP-BATNET, along with an error analysis that highlights the limitations and challenges faced paving the way to the future of AI-based suicide ideation detection.

The exponential rise of social media websites like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit in linguistically diverse geographical regions has led to hybridization of popular native languages with English in an effort to ease communication. The paper focuses on the classification of offensive tweets written in Hinglish language, which is a portmanteau of the Indic language Hindi with the Roman script. The paper introduces a novel tweet dataset, titled Hindi-English Offensive Tweet (HEOT) dataset, consisting of tweets in Hindi-English code switched language split into three classes: non-offensive, abusive and hate-speech. Further, we approach the problem of classification of the tweets in HEOT dataset using transfer learning wherein the proposed model employing Convolutional Neural Networks is pre-trained on tweets in English followed by retraining on Hinglish tweets.

The use of code-switched languages (e.g., Hinglish, which is derived by the blending of Hindi with the English language) is getting much popular on Twitter due to their ease of communication in native languages. However, spelling variations and absence of grammar rules introduce ambiguity and make it difficult to understand the text automatically. This paper presents the Multi-Input Multi-Channel Transfer Learning based model (MIMCT) to detect offensive (hate speech or abusive) Hinglish tweets from the proposed Hinglish Offensive Tweet (HOT) dataset using transfer learning coupled with multiple feature inputs. Specifically, it takes multiple primary word embedding along with secondary extracted features as inputs to train a multi-channel CNN-LSTM architecture that has been pre-trained on English tweets through transfer learning. The proposed MIMCT model outperforms the baseline supervised classification models, transfer learning based CNN and LSTM models to establish itself as the state of the art in the unexplored domain of Hinglish offensive text classification.

Social media-based text mining in healthcare has received special attention in recent times due to the enhanced accessibility of social media sites like Twitter. The increasing trend of spreading important information in distress can help patients reach out to prospective blood donors in a time bound manner. However such manual efforts are mostly inefficient due to the limited network of a user. In a novel step to solve this problem, we present an annotated Emergency Blood Donation Request (EBDR) dataset to classify tweets referring to the necessity of urgent blood donation requirement. Additionally, we also present an automated feature-based SVM classification technique that can help selective EBDR tweets reach relevant personals as well as medical authorities. Our experiments also present a quantitative evidence that linguistic along with handcrafted heuristics can act as the most representative set of signals this task with an accuracy of 97.89%.

The increasing suicide rates amongst youth and its high correlation with suicidal ideation expression on social media warrants a deeper investigation into models for the detection of suicidal intent in text such as tweets to enable prevention. However, the complexity of the natural language constructs makes this task very challenging. Deep Learning architectures such as LSTMs, CNNs, and RNNs show promise in sentence level classification problems. This work investigates the ability of deep learning architectures to build an accurate and robust model for suicidal ideation detection and compares their performance with standard baselines in text classification problems. The experimental results reveal the merit in C-LSTM based models as compared to other deep learning and machine learning based classification models for suicidal ideation detection.