We show how to develop sampling-based alternating least squares (ALS) algorithms for decomposition of tensors into any tensor network (TN) format. Provided the TN format satisfies certain mild assumptions, resulting algorithms will have input sublinear per-iteration cost. Unlike most previous works on sampling-based ALS methods for tensor decomposition, the sampling in our framework is done according to the exact leverage score distribution of the design matrices in the ALS subproblems. We implement and test two tensor decomposition algorithms that use our sampling framework in a feature extraction experiment where we compare them against a number of other decomposition algorithms.

The most prominent tasks in emotion analysis are to assign emotions to texts and to understand how emotions manifest in language. An observation for NLP is that emotions can be communicated implicitly by referring to events, appealing to an empathetic, intersubjective understanding of events, even without explicitly mentioning an emotion name. In psychology, the class of emotion theories known as appraisal theories aims at explaining the link between events and emotions. Appraisals can be formalized as variables that measure a cognitive evaluation by people living through an event that they consider relevant. They include the assessment if an event is novel, if the person considers themselves to be responsible, if it is in line with the own goals, and many others. Such appraisals explain which emotions are developed based on an event, e.g., that a novel situation can induce surprise or one with uncertain consequences could evoke fear. We analyze the suitability of appraisal theories for emotion analysis in text with the goal of understanding if appraisal concepts can reliably be reconstructed by annotators, if they can be predicted by text classifiers, and if appraisal concepts help to identify emotion categories. To achieve that, we compile a corpus by asking people to textually describe events that triggered particular emotions and to disclose their appraisals. Then, we ask readers to reconstruct emotions and appraisals from the text. This setup allows us to measure if emotions and appraisals can be recovered purely from text and provides a human baseline. Our comparison of text classification methods to human annotators shows that both can reliably detect emotions and appraisals with similar performance. Therefore, appraisals constitute an alternative computational emotion analysis paradigm and further improve the categorization of emotions in text with joint models.

Killer whales have been caught on camera hunting and eating Great White Sharks for the first time, in an hour-long feeding frenzy. The extraordinary scenes were shot by both helicopter and drone pilots off the coast of South Africa, providing the first direct evidence of orcas preying on sharks. They reveal that the killer whales were attacking at least four sharks for about an hour, and that this unusual predatory behaviour might be spreading in the species. While a short drone video of the attack was released in June, a paper has been released this month analysing the clip plus all the footage taken from the helicopter. Scientists from the Marine Dynamics Academy studied the videos, and analysed drone and cage dive boat survey data before and after these predation events.

In a historic first, the House of Lords will host its first ever robot speaker next week. Ai-Da, a'realistic' robotic artist created and built in Britain, will speak at the House of Lords at the Palace of Westminster next Tuesday, October 11, at 3:30pm. Ai-Da has cameras in her eyes and is able to converse and answer questions using a specially designed AI language model. Addressing members of the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee, she will talk about whether creativity is under attack from AI and technology. She will also give evidence as part of an ongoing inquiry into the future of the creative industries, such as arts, design, fashion and music.

Speech is the fundamental mode of human communication, and its synthesis has long been a core priority in human-computer interaction research. In recent years, machines have managed to master the art of generating speech that is understandable by humans. But the linguistic content of an utterance encompasses only a part of its meaning. Affect, or expressivity, has the capacity to turn speech into a medium capable of conveying intimate thoughts, feelings, and emotions -- aspects that are essential for engaging and naturalistic interpersonal communication. While the goal of imparting expressivity to synthesised utterances has so far remained elusive, following recent advances in text-to-speech synthesis, a paradigm shift is well under way in the fields of affective speech synthesis and conversion as well. Deep learning, as the technology which underlies most of the recent advances in artificial intelligence, is spearheading these efforts. In the present overview, we outline ongoing trends and summarise state-of-the-art approaches in an attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of this exciting field.

The Multilingual Semantic Web has been in focus for over a decade. Multilingualism in Linked Data and RDF has shown substantial adoption, but this is unclear for ontologies since the last review 15 years ago. One of the design goals for OWL was internationalisation, with the aim that an ontology is usable across languages and cultures. Much research to improve on multilingual ontologies has taken place in the meantime, and presumably multilingual linked data could use multilingual ontologies. Therefore, this review seeks to (i) elucidate and compare the modelling options for multilingual ontologies, (ii) examine extant ontologies for their multilingualism, and (iii) evaluate ontology editors for their ability to manage a multilingual ontology. Nine different principal approaches for modelling multilinguality in ontologies were identified, which fall into either of the following approaches: using multilingual labels, linguistic models, or a mapping-based approach. They are compared on design by means of an ad hoc visualisation mode of modelling multilingual information for ontologies, shortcomings, and what issues they aim to solve. For the ontologies, we extracted production-level and accessible ontologies from BioPortal and the LOV repositories, which had, at best, 6.77% and 15.74% multilingual ontologies, respectively, where most of them have only partial translations and they all use a labels-based approach only. Based on a set of nine tool requirements for managing multilingual ontologies, the assessment of seven relevant ontology editors showed that there are significant gaps in tooling support, with VocBench 3 nearest of meeting them all. This stock-taking may function as a new baseline and motivate new research directions for multilingual ontologies.

Identifying semantically equivalent sentences is important for many cross-lingual and mono-lingual NLP tasks. Current approaches to semantic equivalence take a loose, sentence-level approach to "equivalence," despite previous evidence that fine-grained differences and implicit content have an effect on human understanding (Roth and Anthonio, 2021) and system performance (Briakou and Carpuat, 2021). In this work, we introduce a novel, more sensitive method of characterizing semantic equivalence that leverages Abstract Meaning Representation graph structures. We develop an approach, which can be used with either gold or automatic AMR annotations, and demonstrate that our solution is in fact finer-grained than existing corpus filtering methods and more accurate at predicting strictly equivalent sentences than existing semantic similarity metrics. We suggest that our finer-grained measure of semantic equivalence could limit the workload in the task of human post-edited machine translation and in human evaluation of sentence similarity.

We explore the idea of compressing the prompts used to condition language models, and show that compressed prompts can retain a substantive amount of information about the original prompt. For severely compressed prompts, while fine-grained information is lost, abstract information and general sentiments can be retained with surprisingly few parameters, which can be useful in the context of decode-time algorithms for controllability and toxicity reduction. We explore contrastive conditioning to steer language model generation towards desirable text and away from undesirable text, and find that some complex prompts can be effectively compressed into a single token to guide generation. We also show that compressed prompts are largely compositional, and can be constructed such that they can be used to control independent aspects of generated text.

We design general-purpose algorithms for addressing fairness issues There are many facets to fairness. An algorithm may be considered and mode collapse in generative modeling. More precisely, to design to be fair if its results are independent of some variables, particularly fair algorithms for as many sensitive variables as possible, including for sensitive variables. Fairness [18] can be measured in terms of variables we might not be aware of, we assume no prior knowledge separation, i.e., whether the probability of a given prediction, given of sensitive variables: our algorithms use unsupervised fairness the actual value, is the same for all values of a sensitive variable.

We propose a new framework to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems in resource-scarce environments using a generative adversarial network (GAN) operating on acoustic input features. The GAN is used to enhance the features of mismatched data prior to decoding, or can optionally be used to fine-tune the acoustic model. We achieve improvements that are comparable to multi-style training (MTR), but at a lower computational cost. With less than one hour of data, an ASR system trained on good quality data, and evaluated on mismatched audio is improved by between 11.5% and 19.7% relative word error rate (WER). Experiments demonstrate that the framework can be very useful in under-resourced environments where training data and computational resources are limited. The GAN does not require parallel training data, because it utilises a baseline acoustic model to provide an additional loss term that guides the generator to create acoustic features that are better classified by the baseline.