Helping deaf and hard-of-hearing people communicate more easily is the main goal of Automatic Sign Language Translation. Although most past research has focused on turning sign language into text, doing the reverse, turning spoken English into sign language animations, has been largely overlooked. That's because it involves multiple steps, such as understanding speech, translating it into sign-friendly grammar, and generating natural human motion. In this work, we introduce a complete pipeline that converts English speech into smooth, realistic 3D sign language animations. Our system starts with Whisper to translate spoken English into text. Then, we use a MarianMT machine translation model to translate that text into American Sign Language (ASL) gloss, a simplified version of sign language that captures meaning without grammar. This model performs well, reaching BLEU scores of 0.7714 and 0.8923. To make the gloss translation more accurate, we also use word embeddings such as Word2Vec and FastText to understand word meanings. Finally, we animate the translated gloss using a 3D keypoint-based motion system trained on Sign3D-WLASL, a dataset we created by extracting body, hand, and face key points from real ASL videos in the WLASL dataset. To support the gloss translation stage, we also built a new dataset called BookGlossCorpus-CG, which turns everyday English sentences from the BookCorpus dataset into ASL gloss using grammar rules. Our system stitches everything together by smoothly interpolating between signs to create natural, continuous animations. Unlike previous works like How2Sign and Phoenix-2014T that focus on recognition or use only one type of data, our pipeline brings together audio, text, and motion in a single framework that goes all the way from spoken English to lifelike 3D sign language animation.
Identifying parallel passages in biblical Hebrew is foundational in biblical scholarship for uncovering intertextual relationships. Traditional methods rely on manual comparison, which is labor-intensive and prone to human error. This study evaluates the potential of pre-trained transformer-based language models, including E5, AlephBERT, MPNet, and LaBSE, for detecting textual parallels in the Hebrew Bible. Focusing on known parallels between the books of Samuel/Kings and Chronicles, I assessed each model's capability to generate word embeddings that delineate parallel from non-parallel passages. Utilizing cosine similarity and Wasserstein Distance measures, I found that E5 and AlephBERT show significant promise, with E5 excelling in parallel detection and AlephBERT demonstrating stronger non-parallel differentiation. These findings indicate that pre-trained models can enhance the efficiency and accuracy of detecting intertextual parallels in ancient texts, suggesting broader applications for ancient language studies.
Effective human action recognition is widely used for cobots in Industry 4.0 to assist in assembly tasks. However, conventional skeleton-based methods often lose keypoint semantics, limiting their effectiveness in complex interactions. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to skeleton-based action recognition that enriches input representations by leveraging word embeddings to encode semantic information. Our method replaces one-hot encodings with semantic volumes, enabling the model to capture meaningful relationships between joints and objects. Through extensive experiments on multiple assembly datasets, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves classification performance, and enhances generalization capabilities by simultaneously supporting different skeleton types and object classes. Our findings highlight the potential of incorporating semantic information to enhance skeleton-based action recognition in dynamic and diverse environments.
We introduce a new approach, the ContrastiveTransformer, that produces acoustic word embeddings (AWEs) for the purpose of very low-resource keyword spotting. The ContrastiveTransformer, an encoder-only model, directly optimises the embedding space using normalised temperature-scaled cross entropy (NT-Xent) loss. We use this model to perform keyword spotting for radio broadcasts in Luganda and Bambara, the latter a severely under-resourced language. We compare our model to various existing AWE approaches, including those constructed from large pre-trained self-supervised models, a recurrent encoder which previously used the NT-Xent loss, and a DTW baseline. We demonstrate that the proposed contrastive transformer approach offers performance improvements over all considered existing approaches to very low-resource keyword spotting in both languages.
Measuring how semantics of words change over time improves our understanding of how cultures and perspectives change. Diachronic word embeddings help us quantify this shift, although previous studies leveraged substantial temporally annotated corpora. In this work, we use a corpus of 9.5 million Croatian news articles spanning the past 25 years and quantify semantic change using skip-gram word embeddings trained on five-year periods. Our analysis finds that word embeddings capture linguistic shifts of terms pertaining to major topics in this timespan (COVID-19, Croatia joining the European Union, technological advancements). We also find evidence that embeddings from post-2020 encode increased positivity in sentiment analysis tasks, contrasting studies reporting a decline in mental health over the same period.
The high cost of ownership of AI compute infrastructure and challenges of robust serving of large language models (LLMs) has led to a surge in managed Model-as-a-service deployments. Even when enterprises choose on-premises deployments, the compute infrastructure is typically shared across many teams in order to maximize the return on investment. In both scenarios the deployed models operate only on plaintext data, and so enterprise data owners must allow their data to appear in plaintext on a shared or multi-tenant compute infrastructure. This results in data owners with private or sensitive data being hesitant or restricted in what data they use with these types of deployments. In this work we introduce the Stained Glass Transform, a learned, stochastic, and sequence dependent transformation of the word embeddings of an LLM which information theoretically provides privacy to the input of the LLM while preserving the utility of model. We theoretically connect a particular class of Stained Glass Transforms to the theory of mutual information of Gaussian Mixture Models. We then calculate a-postiori privacy estimates, based on mutual information, and verify the privacy and utility of instances of transformed embeddings through token level metrics of privacy and standard LLM performance benchmarks.
Scientific recommender systems, such as Google Scholar and Web of Science, are essential tools for discovery. Search algorithms that power work through stigmergy, a collective intelligence mechanism that surfaces useful paths through repeated engagement. While generally effective, this ``rich-get-richer'' dynamic results in a small number of high-profile papers that dominate visibility. This essay argues argue that these algorithm over-reliance on popularity fosters intellectual homogeneity and exacerbates structural inequities, stifling innovative and diverse perspectives critical for scientific progress. We propose an overhaul of search platforms to incorporate user-specific calibration, allowing researchers to manually adjust the weights of factors like popularity, recency, and relevance. We also advise platform developers on how word embeddings and LLMs could be implemented in ways that increase user autonomy. While our suggestions are particularly pertinent to aligning recommender systems with scientific values, these ideas are broadly applicable to information access systems in general. Designing platforms that increase user autonomy is an important step toward more robust and dynamic information
We propose new static word embeddings optimised for sentence semantic representation. We first extract word embeddings from a pre-trained Sentence Transformer, and improve them with sentence-level principal component analysis, followed by either knowledge distillation or contrastive learning. During inference, we represent sentences by simply averaging word embeddings, which requires little computational cost. We evaluate models on both monolingual and cross-lingual tasks and show that our model substantially outperforms existing static models on sentence semantic tasks, and even rivals a basic Sentence Transformer model (SimCSE) on some data sets. Lastly, we perform a variety of analyses and show that our method successfully removes word embedding components that are irrelevant to sentence semantics, and adjusts the vector norms based on the influence of words on sentence semantics.
Bilingual Lexicon Induction (BLI) is generally based on common domain data to obtain monolingual word embedding, and by aligning the monolingual word embeddings to obtain the cross-lingual embeddings which are used to get the word translation pairs. In this paper, we propose a new task of BLI, which is to use the monolingual corpus of the general domain and target domain to extract domain-specific bilingual dictionaries. Motivated by the ability of Pre-trained models, we propose a method to get better word embeddings that build on the recent work on BLI. This way, we introduce the Code Switch(Qin et al., 2020) firstly in the cross-domain BLI task, which can match differit is yet to be seen whether these methods are suitable for bilingual lexicon extraction in professional fields. As we can see in table 1, the classic and efficient BLI approach, Muse and Vecmap, perform much worse on the Medical dataset than on the Wiki dataset. On one hand, the specialized domain data set is relatively smaller compared to the generic domain data set generally, and specialized words have a lower frequency, which will directly affect the translation quality of bilingual dictionaries. On the other hand, static word embeddings are widely used for BLI, however, in some specific fields, the meaning of words is greatly influenced by context, in this case, using only static word embeddings may lead to greater bias. ent strategies in different contexts, making the model more suitable for this task. Experimental results show that our method can improve performances over robust BLI baselines on three specific domains by averagely improving 0.78 points.
Models such as Word2Vec and GloVe construct word embeddings based on the co-occurrence probability $P(i,j)$ of words $i$ and $j$ in text corpora. The resulting vectors $W_i$ not only group semantically similar words but also exhibit a striking linear analogy structure -- for example, $W_{\text{king}} - W_{\text{man}} + W_{\text{woman}} \approx W_{\text{queen}}$ -- whose theoretical origin remains unclear. Previous observations indicate that this analogy structure: (i) already emerges in the top eigenvectors of the matrix $M(i,j) = P(i,j)/P(i)P(j)$, (ii) strengthens and then saturates as more eigenvectors of $M (i, j)$, which controls the dimension of the embeddings, are included, (iii) is enhanced when using $\log M(i,j)$ rather than $M(i,j)$, and (iv) persists even when all word pairs involved in a specific analogy relation (e.g., king-queen, man-woman) are removed from the corpus. To explain these phenomena, we introduce a theoretical generative model in which words are defined by binary semantic attributes, and co-occurrence probabilities are derived from attribute-based interactions. This model analytically reproduces the emergence of linear analogy structure and naturally accounts for properties (i)-(iv). It can be viewed as giving fine-grained resolution into the role of each additional embedding dimension. It is robust to various forms of noise and agrees well with co-occurrence statistics measured on Wikipedia and the analogy benchmark introduced by Mikolov et al.
Named Entity Recognition (NER) involves identifying and categorizing named entities within textual data. Despite its significance, NER research has often overlooked low-resource languages like Myanmar (Burmese), primarily due to the lack of publicly available annotated datasets. To address this, we introduce myNER, a novel word-level NER corpus featuring a 7-tag annotation scheme, enriched with Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging to provide additional syntactic information. Alongside the corpus, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of NER models, including Conditional Random Fields (CRF), Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM)-CRF, and their combinations with fastText embeddings in different settings. Our experiments reveal the effectiveness of contextualized word embeddings and the impact of joint training with POS tagging, demonstrating significant performance improvements across models. The traditional CRF joint-task model with fastText embeddings as a feature achieved the best result, with a 0.9818 accuracy and 0.9811 weighted F1 score with 0.7429 macro F1 score. BiLSTM-CRF with fine-tuned fastText embeddings gets the best result of 0.9791 accuracy and 0.9776 weighted F1 score with 0.7395 macro F1 score.
Accurate channel prediction is essential in massive multiple-input multiple-output (m-MIMO) systems to improve precoding effectiveness and reduce the overhead of channel state information (CSI) feedback. However, existing methods often suffer from accumulated prediction errors and poor generalization to dynamic wireless environments. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable modeling and generalization capabilities in tasks such as time series prediction, making them a promising solution. Nevertheless, a significant modality gap exists between the linguistic knowledge embedded in pretrained LLMs and the intrinsic characteristics of CSI, posing substantial challenges for their direct application to channel prediction. Moreover, the large parameter size of LLMs hinders their practical deployment in real-world communication systems with stringent latency constraints. To address these challenges, we propose a novel channel prediction framework based on semantically aligned large models, referred to as CSI-ALM, which bridges the modality gap between natural language and channel information. Specifically, we design a cross-modal fusion module that aligns CSI representations . Additionally, we maximize the cosine similarity between word embeddings and CSI embeddings to construct semantic cues. To reduce complexity and enable practical implementation, we further introduce a lightweight version of the proposed approach, called CSI-ALM-Light. This variant is derived via a knowledge distillation strategy based on attention matrices. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that CSI-ALM achieves a 1 dB gain over state-of-the-art deep learning methods. Moreover, under limited training data conditions, CSI-ALM-Light, with only 0.34M parameters, attains performance comparable to CSI-ALM and significantly outperforms conventional deep learning approaches.
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of various static word embeddings for Hungarian, including traditional models such as Word2Vec, FastText, as well as static embeddings derived from BERT-based models using different extraction methods. We evaluate these embeddings on both intrinsic and extrinsic tasks to provide a holistic view of their performance. For intrinsic evaluation, we employ a word analogy task, which assesses the embeddings ability to capture semantic and syntactic relationships. Our results indicate that traditional static embeddings, particularly FastText, excel in this task, achieving high accuracy and mean reciprocal rank (MRR) scores. Among the BERT-based models, the X2Static method for extracting static embeddings demonstrates superior performance compared to decontextualized and aggregate methods, approaching the effectiveness of traditional static embeddings. For extrinsic evaluation, we utilize a bidirectional LSTM model to perform Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging tasks. The results reveal that embeddings derived from dynamic models, especially those extracted using the X2Static method, outperform purely static embeddings. Notably, ELMo embeddings achieve the highest accuracy in both NER and POS tagging tasks, underscoring the benefits of contextualized representations even when used in a static form. Our findings highlight the continued relevance of static word embeddings in NLP applications and the potential of advanced extraction methods to enhance the utility of BERT-based models. This piece of research contributes to the understanding of embedding performance in the Hungarian language and provides valuable insights for future developments in the field. The training scripts, evaluation codes, restricted vocabulary, and extracted embeddings will be made publicly available to support further research and reproducibility.
Studies of morphological processing have shown that semantic transparency is crucial for word recognition. Its computational operationalization is still under discussion. Our primary objectives are to explore embedding-based measures of semantic transparency, and assess their impact on reading. First, we explored the geometry of complex words in semantic space. To do so, we conducted a t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding clustering analysis on 4,226 Malay prefixed words. Several clusters were observed for complex words varied by their prefix class. Then, we derived five simple measures, and investigated whether they were significant predictors of lexical decision latencies. Two sets of Linear Discriminant Analyses were run in which the prefix of a word is predicted from either word embeddings or shift vectors (i.e., a vector subtraction of the base word from the derived word). The accuracy with which the model predicts the prefix of a word indicates the degree of transparency of the prefix. Three further measures were obtained by comparing embeddings between each word and all other words containing the same prefix (i.e., centroid), between each word and the shift from their base word, and between each word and the predicted word of the Functional Representations of Affixes in Compositional Semantic Space model. In a series of Generalized Additive Mixed Models, all measures predicted decision latencies after accounting for word frequency, word length, and morphological family size. The model that included the correlation between each word and their centroid as a predictor provided the best fit to the data.
Hundreds of millions of people routinely take photos using their smartphones as point and shoot (PAS) cameras, yet very few would have the photography skills to compose a good shot of a scene. While traditional PAS cameras have built-in functions to ensure a photo is well focused and has the right brightness, they cannot tell the users how to compose the best shot of a scene. In this paper, we present a first of its kind smart point and shoot (SPAS) system to help users to take good photos. Our SPAS proposes to help users to compose a good shot of a scene by automatically guiding the users to adjust the camera pose live on the scene. We first constructed a large dataset containing 320K images with camera pose information from 4000 scenes. We then developed an innovative CLIP-based Composition Quality Assessment (CCQA) model to assign pseudo labels to these images. The CCQA introduces a unique learnable text embedding technique to learn continuous word embeddings capable of discerning subtle visual quality differences in the range covered by five levels of quality description words {bad, poor, fair, good, perfect}. And finally we have developed a camera pose adjustment model (CPAM) which first determines if the current view can be further improved and if so it outputs the adjust suggestion in the form of two camera pose adjustment angles. The two tasks of CPAM make decisions in a sequential manner and each involves different sets of training samples, we have developed a mixture-of-experts model with a gated loss function to train the CPAM in an end-to-end manner. We will present extensive results to demonstrate the performances of our SPAS system using publicly available image composition datasets.
The widespread propagation of misinformation on social media platforms poses a significantconcern, prompting substantial endeavors within the research community to develop robust detectionsolutions. Individuals often place unwavering trust in social networks, often without discerning the originsand authenticity of the information disseminated through these platforms. Hence, the identification of media-rich fake news necessitates an approach that adeptly leverages multimedia elements and effectively enhancesdetection accuracy. The ever-changing nature of cyberspace highlights the need for measures that mayeffectively resist the spread of media-rich fake news while protecting the integrity of information systems.This study introduces a robust approach for fake news detection, utilizing three publicly available datasets:WELFake, FakeNewsNet, and FakeNewsPrediction. We integrated FastText word embeddings with variousMachine Learning and Deep Learning methods, further refining these algorithms with regularization andhyperparameter optimization to mitigate overfitting and promote model generalization. Notably, a hybridmodel combining Convolutional Neural Networks and Long Short-Term Memory, enriched with FastTextembeddings, surpassed other techniques in classification performance across all datasets, registering accu-racy and F1-scores of 0.99, 0.97, and 0.99, respectively. Additionally, we utilized state-of-the-art transformer-based models such as BERT, XLNet, and RoBERTa, enhancing them through hyperparameter adjustments.These transformer models, surpassing traditional RNN-based frameworks, excel in managing syntacticnuances, thus aiding in semantic interpretation. In the concluding phase, explainable AI modeling wasemployed using Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation to gaindeeper insights into the model’s decision-making process.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated unprecedented language understanding and reasoning capabilities to capture diverse user preferences and advance personalized recommendations. Despite the growing interest in LLM-based recommendations, unique challenges are brought to the trustworthiness of LLM-based recommender systems (LLM-RS). Compared to unique user/item representations in conventional recommender systems, users and items share the textual representation (e.g., word embeddings) in LLM-based recommendations. Recent studies have revealed that LLMs are likely to inherit stereotypes that are embedded ubiquitously in word embeddings, due to their training on large-scale uncurated datasets. This leads to LLM-RS exhibiting stereotypical linguistic associations between users and items, causing a form of two-sided (i.e., user-to-item) recommendation fairness. However, there remains a lack of studies investigating the unfairness of LLM-RS due to intrinsic stereotypes, which can simultaneously involve user and item groups. To bridge this gap, this study reveals a new variant of fairness between stereotype groups containing both users and items, to quantify discrimination against stereotypes in LLM-RS. Moreover, in this paper, to mitigate stereotype-aware unfairness in textual user and item representations, we propose a novel framework named Mixture-of-Stereotypes (MoS). In particular, an insightful stereotype-wise routing strategy over multiple stereotype-relevant experts is designed, aiming to learn unbiased representations against different stereotypes in LLM-RS. Extensive experiments are conducted to analyze the influence of stereotype-aware fairness in LLM-RS and the effectiveness of our proposed methods, which consistently outperform competitive benchmarks under various fairness settings.
Telecom services are at the core of today's societies' everyday needs. The availability of numerous online forums and discussion platforms enables telecom providers to improve their services by exploring the views of their customers to learn about common issues that the customers face. Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools can be used to process the free text collected. One way of working with such data is to represent text as numerical vectors using one of many word embedding models based on neural networks. This research uses a novel dataset of telecom customers' reviews to perform an extensive study showing how different word embedding algorithms can affect the text classification process. Several state-of-the-art word embedding techniques are considered, including BERT, Word2Vec and Doc2Vec, coupled with several classification algorithms. The important issue of feature engineering and dimensionality reduction is addressed and several PCA-based approaches are explored. Moreover, the energy consumption used by the different word embeddings is investigated. The findings show that some word embedding models can lead to consistently better text classifiers in terms of precision, recall and F1-Score. In particular, for the more challenging classification tasks, BERT combined with PCA stood out with the highest performance metrics. Moreover, our proposed PCA approach of combining word vectors using the first principal component shows clear advantages in performance over the traditional approach of taking the average.
Language encodes societal beliefs about social groups through word patterns. While computational methods like word embeddings enable quantitative analysis of these patterns, studies have primarily examined gradual shifts in Western contexts. We present the first large-scale computational analysis of Chinese state-controlled media (1950-2019) to examine how revolutionary social transformations are reflected in official linguistic representations of social groups. Using diachronic word embeddings at multiple temporal resolutions, we find that Chinese representations differ significantly from Western counterparts, particularly regarding economic status, ethnicity, and gender. These representations show distinct evolutionary dynamics: while stereotypes of ethnicity, age, and body type remain remarkably stable across political upheavals, representations of gender and economic classes undergo dramatic shifts tracking historical transformations. This work advances our understanding of how officially sanctioned discourse encodes social structure through language while highlighting the importance of non-Western perspectives in computational social science.
Large language models (LLMs) represent words through contextual word embeddings encoding different language properties like semantics and syntax. Understanding these properties is crucial, especially for researchers investigating language model capabilities, employing embeddings for tasks related to text similarity, or evaluating the reasons behind token importance as measured through attribution methods. Applications for embedding exploration frequently involve dimensionality reduction techniques, which reduce high-dimensional vectors to two dimensions used as coordinates in a scatterplot. This data transformation step introduces uncertainty that can be propagated to the visual representation and influence users' interpretation of the data. To communicate such uncertainties, we present LayerFlow - a visual analytics workspace that displays embeddings in an interlinked projection design and communicates the transformation, representation, and interpretation uncertainty. In particular, to hint at potential data distortions and uncertainties, the workspace includes several visual components, such as convex hulls showing 2D and HD clusters, data point pairwise distances, cluster summaries, and projection quality metrics. We show the usability of the presented workspace through replication and expert case studies that highlight the need to communicate uncertainty through multiple visual components and different data perspectives.