Stefan Wermter


2023

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Visually Grounded Continual Language Learning with Selective Specialization
Kyra Ahrens | Lennart Bengtson | Jae Hee Lee | Stefan Wermter
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

A desirable trait of an artificial agent acting in the visual world is to continually learn a sequence of language-informed tasks while striking a balance between sufficiently specializing in each task and building a generalized knowledge for transfer. Selective specialization, i.e., a careful selection of model components to specialize in each task, is a strategy to provide control over this trade-off. However, the design of selection strategies requires insights on the role of each model component in learning rather specialized or generalizable representations, which poses a gap in current research. Thus, our aim with this work is to provide an extensive analysis of selection strategies for visually grounded continual language learning. Due to the lack of suitable benchmarks for this purpose, we introduce two novel diagnostic datasets that provide enough control and flexibility for a thorough model analysis. We assess various heuristics for module specialization strategies as well as quantifiable measures for two different types of model architectures. Finally, we design conceptually simple approaches based on our analysis that outperform common continual learning baselines. Our results demonstrate the need for further efforts towards better aligning continual learning algorithms with the learning behaviors of individual model parts.

2022

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Conversational Analysis of Daily Dialog Data using Polite Emotional Dialogue Acts
Chandrakant Bothe | Stefan Wermter
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Many socio-linguistic cues are used in conversational analysis, such as emotion, sentiment, and dialogue acts. One of the fundamental social cues is politeness, which linguistically possesses properties such as social manners useful in conversational analysis. This article presents findings of polite emotional dialogue act associations, where we can correlate the relationships between the socio-linguistic cues. We confirm our hypothesis that the utterances with the emotion classes Anger and Disgust are more likely to be impolite. At the same time, Happiness and Sadness are more likely to be polite. A less expectable phenomenon occurs with dialogue acts Inform and Commissive which contain more polite utterances than Question and Directive. Finally, we conclude on the future work of these findings to extend the learning of social behaviours using politeness.

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A Multimodal German Dataset for Automatic Lip Reading Systems and Transfer Learning
Gerald Schwiebert | Cornelius Weber | Leyuan Qu | Henrique Siqueira | Stefan Wermter
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Large datasets as required for deep learning of lip reading do not exist in many languages. In this paper we present the dataset GLips (German Lips) consisting of 250,000 publicly available videos of the faces of speakers of the Hessian Parliament, which was processed for word-level lip reading using an automatic pipeline. The format is similar to that of the English language LRW (Lip Reading in the Wild) dataset, with each video encoding one word of interest in a context of 1.16 seconds duration, which yields compatibility for studying transfer learning between both datasets. By training a deep neural network, we investigate whether lip reading has language-independent features, so that datasets of different languages can be used to improve lip reading models. We demonstrate learning from scratch and show that transfer learning from LRW to GLips and vice versa improves learning speed and performance, in particular for the validation set.

2020

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EDA: Enriching Emotional Dialogue Acts using an Ensemble of Neural Annotators
Chandrakant Bothe | Cornelius Weber | Sven Magg | Stefan Wermter
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

The recognition of emotion and dialogue acts enriches conversational analysis and help to build natural dialogue systems. Emotion interpretation makes us understand feelings and dialogue acts reflect the intentions and performative functions in the utterances. However, most of the textual and multi-modal conversational emotion corpora contain only emotion labels but not dialogue acts. To address this problem, we propose to use a pool of various recurrent neural models trained on a dialogue act corpus, with and without context. These neural models annotate the emotion corpora with dialogue act labels, and an ensemble annotator extracts the final dialogue act label. We annotated two accessible multi-modal emotion corpora: IEMOCAP and MELD. We analyzed the co-occurrence of emotion and dialogue act labels and discovered specific relations. For example, Accept/Agree dialogue acts often occur with the Joy emotion, Apology with Sadness, and Thanking with Joy. We make the Emotional Dialogue Acts (EDA) corpus publicly available to the research community for further study and analysis.

2019

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MoonGrad at SemEval-2019 Task 3: Ensemble BiRNNs for Contextual Emotion Detection in Dialogues
Chandrakant Bothe | Stefan Wermter
Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

When reading “I don’t want to talk to you any more”, we might interpret this as either an angry or a sad emotion in the absence of context. Often, the utterances are shorter, and given a short utterance like “Me too!”, it is difficult to interpret the emotion without context. The lack of prosodic or visual information makes it a challenging problem to detect such emotions only with text. However, using contextual information in the dialogue is gaining importance to provide a context-aware recognition of linguistic features such as emotion, dialogue act, sentiment etc. The SemEval 2019 Task 3 EmoContext competition provides a dataset of three-turn dialogues labeled with the three emotion classes, i.e. Happy, Sad and Angry, and in addition with Others as none of the aforementioned emotion classes. We develop an ensemble of the recurrent neural model with character- and word-level features as an input to solve this problem. The system performs quite well, achieving a microaveraged F1 score (F1μ) of 0.7212 for the three emotion classes.

2018

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A Context-based Approach for Dialogue Act Recognition using Simple Recurrent Neural Networks
Chandrakant Bothe | Cornelius Weber | Sven Magg | Stefan Wermter
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

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KT-Speech-Crawler: Automatic Dataset Construction for Speech Recognition from YouTube Videos
Egor Lakomkin | Sven Magg | Cornelius Weber | Stefan Wermter
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

We describe KT-Speech-Crawler: an approach for automatic dataset construction for speech recognition by crawling YouTube videos. We outline several filtering and post-processing steps, which extract samples that can be used for training end-to-end neural speech recognition systems. In our experiments, we demonstrate that a single-core version of the crawler can obtain around 150 hours of transcribed speech within a day, containing an estimated 3.5% word error rate in the transcriptions. Automatically collected samples contain reading and spontaneous speech recorded in various conditions including background noise and music, distant microphone recordings, and a variety of accents and reverberation. When training a deep neural network on speech recognition, we observed around 40% word error rate reduction on the Wall Street Journal dataset by integrating 200 hours of the collected samples into the training set.

2017

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GradAscent at EmoInt-2017: Character and Word Level Recurrent Neural Network Models for Tweet Emotion Intensity Detection
Egor Lakomkin | Chandrakant Bothe | Stefan Wermter
Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis

The WASSA 2017 EmoInt shared task has the goal to predict emotion intensity values of tweet messages. Given the text of a tweet and its emotion category (anger, joy, fear, and sadness), the participants were asked to build a system that assigns emotion intensity values. Emotion intensity estimation is a challenging problem given the short length of the tweets, the noisy structure of the text and the lack of annotated data. To solve this problem, we developed an ensemble of two neural models, processing input on the character. and word-level with a lexicon-driven system. The correlation scores across all four emotions are averaged to determine the bottom-line competition metric, and our system ranks place forth in full intensity range and third in 0.5-1 range of intensity among 23 systems at the time of writing (June 2017).

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Automatically augmenting an emotion dataset improves classification using audio
Egor Lakomkin | Cornelius Weber | Stefan Wermter
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers

In this work, we tackle a problem of speech emotion classification. One of the issues in the area of affective computation is that the amount of annotated data is very limited. On the other hand, the number of ways that the same emotion can be expressed verbally is enormous due to variability between speakers. This is one of the factors that limits performance and generalization. We propose a simple method that extracts audio samples from movies using textual sentiment analysis. As a result, it is possible to automatically construct a larger dataset of audio samples with positive, negative emotional and neutral speech. We show that pretraining recurrent neural network on such a dataset yields better results on the challenging EmotiW corpus. This experiment shows a potential benefit of combining textual sentiment analysis with vocal information.

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Reusing Neural Speech Representations for Auditory Emotion Recognition
Egor Lakomkin | Cornelius Weber | Sven Magg | Stefan Wermter
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Acoustic emotion recognition aims to categorize the affective state of the speaker and is still a difficult task for machine learning models. The difficulties come from the scarcity of training data, general subjectivity in emotion perception resulting in low annotator agreement, and the uncertainty about which features are the most relevant and robust ones for classification. In this paper, we will tackle the latter problem. Inspired by the recent success of transfer learning methods we propose a set of architectures which utilize neural representations inferred by training on large speech databases for the acoustic emotion recognition task. Our experiments on the IEMOCAP dataset show ~10% relative improvements in the accuracy and F1-score over the baseline recurrent neural network which is trained end-to-end for emotion recognition.

2002

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Selforganizing Classification on the Reuters News Corpus
Stefan Wermter | Chihli Hung
COLING 2002: The 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

1996

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Learning dialog act processing
Stefan Wermter | Matthias Lochel
COLING 1996 Volume 2: The 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

1992

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Learning a Scanning Understanding for “Real-world” Library Categorization
Stefan Wermter
Third Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing