We are proposing a novel framework for author diarization, i.e. attributing comments in online discussions to individual authors. We consider an innovative approach that merges pre-trained neural representations of writing style with author-conditional encoder-decoder diarization, enhanced by a Conditional Random Field with Viterbi decoding for alignment refinement. Additionally, we introduce two new large-scale German language datasets, one for authorship verification and the other for author diarization. We evaluate the performance of our diarization framework on these datasets, offering insights into the strengths and limitations of this approach.

This work presents an ensemble system based on various uni-modal and bi-modal model architectures developed for the SemEval 2022 Task 5: MAMI-Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification. The challenge organizers provide an English meme dataset to develop and train systems for identifying and classifying misogynous memes. More precisely, the competition is separated into two sub-tasks: sub-task A asks for a binary decision as to whether a meme expresses misogyny, while sub-task B is to classify misogynous memes into the potentially overlapping sub-categories of stereotype, shaming, objectification, and violence. For our submission, we implement a new model fusion network and employ an ensemble learning approach for better performance. With this structure, we achieve a 0.755 macro-average F1-score (11th) in sub-task A and a 0.709 weighted-average F1-score (10th) in sub-task B.

Traditional computational authorship attribution describes a classification task in a closed-set scenario. Given a finite set of candidate authors and corresponding labeled texts, the objective is to determine which of the authors has written another set of anonymous or disputed texts. In this work, we propose a probabilistic autoencoding framework to deal with this supervised classification task. Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have had tremendous success in learning latent representations. However, existing VAEs are currently still bound by limitations imposed by the assumed Gaussianity of the underlying probability distributions in the latent space. In this work, we are extending a VAE with an embedded Gaussian mixture model to a Student-t mixture model, which allows for an independent control of the “heaviness” of the respective tails of the implied probability densities. Experiments over an Amazon review dataset indicate superior performance of the proposed method.

Text instructions are among the most widely used media for learning and teaching. Hence, to create assistance systems that are capable of supporting humans autonomously in new tasks, it would be immensely productive, if machines were enabled to extract task knowledge from such text instructions. In this paper, we, therefore, focus on information extraction (IE) from the instructional text in repair manuals. This brings with it the multiple challenges of information extraction from the situated and technical language in relatively long and often complex instructions. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a semi-structured dataset of repair manuals. The dataset is annotated in a large category of devices, with information that we consider most valuable for an automated repair assistant, including the required tools and the disassembled parts at each step of the repair progress. We then propose methods that can serve as baselines for this IE task: an unsupervised method based on a bags-of-n-grams similarity for extracting the needed tools in each repair step, and a deep-learning-based sequence labeling model for extracting the identity of disassembled parts. These baseline methods are integrated into a semi-automatic web-based annotator application that is also available along with the dataset.

When repairing a device, humans employ a series of tools that corresponds to the arrangement of the device components. Such sequences of tool usage can be learned from repair manuals, so that at each step, having observed the previously applied tools, a sequential model can predict the next required tool. In this paper, we improve the tool prediction performance of such methods by additionally taking the hierarchical relationships among the tools into account. To this aim, we build a taxonomy of tools with hyponymy and hypernymy relations from the data by decomposing all multi-word expressions of tool names. We then develop a sequential model that performs a binary prediction for each node in the taxonomy. The evaluation of the method on a dataset of repair manuals shows that encoding the tools with the constructed taxonomy and using a top-down beam search for decoding increases the prediction accuracy and yields an interpretable taxonomy as a potentially valuable byproduct.

Humans use a variety of approaches to reference objects in the external world, including verbal descriptions, hand and head gestures, eye gaze or any combination of them. The amount of useful information from each modality, however, may vary depending on the specific person and on several other factors. For this reason, it is important to learn the correct combination of inputs for inferring the best-fitting reference. In this paper, we investigate appropriate speaker-dependent and independent fusion strategies in a multimodal reference resolution task. We show that without any change in the modality models, only through an optimized fusion technique, it is possible to reduce the error rate of the system on a reference resolution task by more than 50%.

Audiovisual speech recognition (AVSR) systems have been proven superior over audio-only speech recognizers in noisy environments by incorporating features of the visual modality. In order to develop reliable AVSR systems, appropriate simultaneously recorded speech and video data is needed. In this paper, we will introduce a corpus (WAPUSK20) that consists of audiovisual data of 20 speakers uttering 100 sentences each with four channels of audio and a stereoscopic video. The latter is intended to support more accurate lip tracking and the development of stereo data based normalization techniques for greater robustness of the recognition results. The sentence design has been adopted from the GRID corpus that has been widely used for AVSR experiments. Recordings have been made under acoustically realistic conditions in a usual office room. Affordable hardware equipment has been used, such as a pre-calibrated stereo camera and standard PC components. The software written to create this corpus was designed in MATLAB with help of hardware specific software provided by the hardware manufacturers and freely available open source software.