Roccabruna G., Cervone A. and Riccardi G. Multifunctional ISO standard Dialogue Act tagging in Italian (Article) 2020. (Links | BibTeX | Tags: Discourse, Natural Language Processing) Tammewar A., Cervone A. and Riccardi G. Emotion Carrier Recognition from Personal Narratives (Article) 2020. (Links | BibTeX | Tags: Affective Computing, Natural Language Processing) Cervone A. and Riccardi G. Is This Dialogue Coherent ? Learning From Dialogue Acts and Entities (Article) 2020. (Links | BibTeX | Tags: Conversational and Interactive Systems , Discourse, Natural Language Processing) Tammewar A., Cervone A.,Eva-Maria Messner, Riccardi G. Annotation of Emotion Carriers in Personal Narratives (Proceeding) 2020. (Links | BibTeX | Tags: Affective Computing, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation) Coman C. A., Yoshino K., Murase Y., Nakamura S., Riccardi G. An Incremental Turn-Taking Model For Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (Conference) 2019. (Links | BibTeX | Tags: Conversational and Interactive Systems , Natural Language Processing) Tammewar A., Cervone A., Messner E., Riccardi G. Modeling user context for valence prediction from narratives (Conference) 2019. (Links | BibTeX | Tags: Affective Computing, Natural Language Processing) Gobbi J., Stepanov E. A. and Riccardi G. Concept Tagging for Natural Language Understanding: Two Decadelong Algorithm Development (Conference) 2018. (BibTeX | Tags: Conversational and Interactive Systems , Natural Language Processing) Cervone A., Tortoreto G., Mezza S., Gambi E. and Riccardi G Roving Mind: a balancing act between open–domain and engaging dialogue systems (Conference) 2017. (Links | BibTeX | Tags: Conversational and Interactive Systems , Interactive Systems, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Singla K., Stepanov A. E., Bayer A. O., Riccardi G. and Carenini G. Automatic Community Creation for Abstractive Spoken Summarization (Conference) EMNLP 2017 Workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization, Copenhagen, 2017, 2017. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Cervone A., Stepanov E. A., Celli F., and Riccardi G. Irony Detection: from the Twittersphere to the News Space (Conference) 2017. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Affective Computing, Natural Language Processing) Schenk N., Chiarcos C., Donandt K., Rönnqvist S., Stepanov A. E. and Riccardi G. Do We Really Need All Those Rich Linguistic Features? A Neural Network-Based Approach to Implicit Sense Labeling (Proceeding) Proc. CoNLL, Berlin, 2016, 2016. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Discourse, Natural Language Processing) Riccardi G., Stepanov A. E. and Chowdhury S. Discourse Connective Detection in Spoken Conversations (Proceeding) Proc. ICASSP, Shanghai, 2016, 2016. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Discourse, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Stepanov E., Favre B., Alam F., Chowdhury S., Singla K., Trione J., Bechet F. and Riccardi G. Automatic Summarization of Call-Center Conversations (Conference) 2015. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Stepanov E. and Riccardi G. Sentiment Polarity Classification with Low-level Discourse-based Features (Conference) 2015. (Links | BibTeX | Tags: Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation) Celli F., Ghosh A., Alam F. and Riccardi G. Information Processing and Management, Nov 2015, 2015. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation) Stepanov E., Bayer A. O., Riccardi G., The UniTN Discourse Parser in CoNLL 2015 Shared Task (Conference) 2015. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Discourse, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing) Chowdhury A, Danieli M. and Riccardi G. Annotating and Categorizing Competition in Overlap Speech (Conference) 2015. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Discourse, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation) Celli F. and Riccardi G. and Ghosh A. CorEA: Italian News Corpus with Emotions and Agreement (Conference) 2014. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Affective Computing, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation) Bayer A. O. and Riccardi G. Semantic Language Models for Automatic Speech Recognition (Conference) 2014. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Language Modeling, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Ghosh S., Johansson R., Riccardi G. and Tonelli S. Shallow Discourse Parsing with Conditional Random Fields (Conference) 2014. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Discourse, Natural Language Processing) Ghosh A. and Riccardi G. Recognizing Human Activities from Smartphone Signals (Conference) 2014. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Discourse, Natural Language Processing) Stepanov E. and Riccardi G. Towards Cross-Domain PDTB-Style Discourse Parsing (Conference) 2014. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation) Stepanov E., Riccardi G. and Bayer A. O. The Development of the Multilingual LUNA Corpus for Spoken Language System Porting (Conference) 2014. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing, Statistical Machine Translation) Stepanov E. and Riccardi G. Comparative Evaluation of Argument Extraction Algorithms in Discourse Relation Parsing (Conference) 2013. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Alam F. ,Stepanov E. and Riccardi G. Personality Traits Recognition on Social Network - Facebook (Conference) 2013. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Affective Computing, Natural Language Processing) Ghosh S., Johansson R., Riccardi G. and Tonelli S. Improving the Recall of a Discourse Parser by Constraint-Based Postprocessing (Conference) 2012. (BibTeX | Tags: Discourse, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing) Ghosh S., Riccardi G. and Johansson R. Global Features for Shallow Discourse Parsing (Conference) 2012. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing) Moschitti A., Chu-Carroll J., Patwardhan S., Fan J. and Riccardi G. Using Syntacting and Semantic Structural Kernels for Classifying Definition Questions in Jeopardy! (Conference) 2011. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Conversational and Interactive Systems , Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation) Stepanov E. and Riccardi G. Detecting General Opinions from Customer Surveys (Conference) 2011. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Conversational and Interactive Systems , Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing) Quarteroni S., Ivanov A. V. and Riccardi G. Simultaneous Dialog Act Segmentation and Classification from Human-Human Spoken Conversations (Conference) 2011. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation, Speech Processing) Ghosh S., Tonelli S., Riccardi G. and Johansson R. End-to-End Discourse Parser Evaluation (Conference) 2011. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Discourse, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation) Sara Tonelli S., Riccardi G., Prasad R. and Joshi A. Annotation of Discourse Relations for Conversational Spoken Dialogs (Conference) 2010. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Discourse, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation) Nguyen T. T., Moschitti A. and Riccardi G. Kernel-based Reranking for Named-Entity Extraction (Conference) 2010. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation) Ivanov A. V., Riccardi G., Ghosh S.,Tonelli S. and Stepanov E. Acoustic Correlates of Meaning Structure in Conversational Speech (Conference) 2010. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Baggia P., Cutugno F., Danieli M., Pieraccini R. The Multisite 2009 EVALITA Spoken Dialog System Evaluation (Conference) 2009. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation) Rodríguez K. J., Dipper S., Götze M., Poesio P., Riccardi G., Raymond C., Wisniewska J. Standoff Coordination for Multi-Tool Annotation in a Dialogue Corpus (Conference) 2009. (BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation) Nguyen T. T., Moschitti A. and Riccardi G. Convolution Kernels on Constituent, Dependency and Sequential Structures for Relation Extraction (Conference) 2009. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing) Dinarelli M., Moschitti A. and Riccardi G. Concept Segmentation and Labeling for Conversational Speech (Conference) 2009. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Quarteroni S., Riccardi G. and Dinarelli M. What's in an Ontology for Spoken Language Understanding (Conference) 2009. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Quarteroni S., Dinarelli M. and Riccardi G. Ontology-Based Grounding of Spoken Language Understanding (Conference) 2009. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Dinarelli M., Moschitti A. and Riccardi G. Re-Ranking Models Based on Small Training Data for Spoken Language Understanding (Conference) 2009. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Dinarelli M., Quarteroni S., Tonelli S., Moschitti A. and Riccardi G. Annotating Spoken Dialogs: from Speech Segments to Dialog Acts and Frame Semantics (Conference) 2009. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation) Dinarelli M., Moschitti A. and Riccardi G. Re-Ranking Models For Spoken Language Understanding (Conference) 2009. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Bisazza A., Dinarelli M., Quarteroni S., Tonelli S., Moschitti A., Riccardi G. Semantic Annotations For Conversational Speech: from speech transcriptions to predicate argument structures (Conference) 2008. (BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing) Rodríguez K., Raymond C. and Riccardi G. Active Annotation in the LUNA Italian Corpus of Spontaneous Dialogues (Conference) 2008. (BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation) Coppola B., Moschitti A., Tonelli S., Riccardi G. Automatic FrameNet-Based Annotation of Conversational Speech (Conference) 2008. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing) Raymond C. and Riccardi G. Learning with Noisy Supervision for Spoken Language Understanding (Conference) 2008. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Dinarelli M., Moschitti A., Riccardi G. Joint Generative And Discriminative Models For Spoken Language Understanding (Conference) 2008. (BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) De Mori R., Bechet F., Hakkani-Tur D., McTear M., Riccardi G. and Tur G. Spoken Language Understanding (Article) IEEE Signal Processing Magazine vol. 25, pp.50-58 ,2008, 2008. (BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Raymond C., Riccardi G., Rodríguez K. J. and Wisniewska J. The LUNA Corpus: an Annotation Scheme for a Multi-domain Multi-lingual Dialogue Corpus (Conference) 2007. (BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation) Raymond C., Riccardi G. Generative and Discriminative Algorithms for Spoken Language Understanding (Conference) 2007. (BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Moschitti A., Riccardi G. and Raymond C. Spoken Language Understanding with Kernels for Syntactic/Semantic Structures (Conference) 2007. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Gupta N., Tur G., Hakkani-Tur D., Bangalore S., Riccardi G. and Rahim M. The AT&T Spoken Language Understanding System (Article) IEEE Trans. on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, volume 14, Issue 1, pp. 213-22, 2006, 2006. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Coppola B., Moschitti A., Riccardi G. Shallow Semantic Parsing for Spoken Language Understanding (Conference) 2006. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Hakkani-Tur D., Riccardi G. and Tur G. An Active Approach to spoken Language Processing (Article) ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp 1-31, 2006, 2006. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing) Topkara M., Riccardi G., Hakkani-Tur D., Atallah M. J. Natural Language Watermarking: Research Challenges and Applications (Conference) 2006. (Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Natural Language Processing) Karahan M., Hakkani-Tur D., Riccardi G. and Tur G. Combining Classifiers for Spoken Language Understanding (Conference) 2005. (BibTeX | Tags: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing)2020
title = {Multifunctional ISO standard Dialogue Act tagging in Italian },
author = {Roccabruna G., Cervone A. and Riccardi G.},
editor = {Seventh Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2020},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Clicit20-ISODAItalian.pdf},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-11-02},
keywords = {Discourse, Natural Language Processing}
}
title = {Emotion Carrier Recognition from Personal Narratives },
author = {Tammewar A., Cervone A. and Riccardi G.},
editor = {arXiv.org, 2020},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/2008.07481.pdf},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-08-17},
keywords = {Affective Computing, Natural Language Processing}
}
title = {Is This Dialogue Coherent ? Learning From Dialogue Acts and Entities},
author = {Cervone A. and Riccardi G.},
editor = {SIGDial, Idaho*, 2020},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/SIGDIAL20-DialogueCoherence.pdf},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-06-01},
keywords = {Conversational and Interactive Systems , Discourse, Natural Language Processing}
}
title = {Annotation of Emotion Carriers in Personal Narratives},
author = {Tammewar A., Cervone A.,Eva-Maria Messner, Riccardi G.},
editor = {Proc. Language Resources and Evaluation Conference , Marseille*, 2020},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/LREC20-EmotionCarriers.pdf},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-05-11},
keywords = {Affective Computing, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation}
}
2019
title = {An Incremental Turn-Taking Model For Task-Oriented Dialog Systems},
author = {Coman C. A., Yoshino K., Murase Y., Nakamura S., Riccardi G.},
editor = {INTERSPEECH, Graz},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/IS19-Incremental-SLU.pdf},
year = {2019},
date = {2019-01-01},
keywords = {Conversational and Interactive Systems , Natural Language Processing}
}
title = {Modeling user context for valence prediction from narratives},
author = {Tammewar A., Cervone A., Messner E., Riccardi G.},
editor = {INTERSPEECH, Graz},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/IS19-ValencePredictionNarratives.pdf},
year = {2019},
date = {2019-01-01},
keywords = {Affective Computing, Natural Language Processing}
}
2018
title = {Concept Tagging for Natural Language Understanding: Two Decadelong Algorithm Development},
author = {Gobbi J., Stepanov E. A. and Riccardi G.},
editor = {Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics , Turin},
year = {2018},
date = {2018-01-01},
keywords = {Conversational and Interactive Systems , Natural Language Processing}
}
2017
title = {Roving Mind: a balancing act between open–domain and engaging dialogue systems},
author = {Cervone A., Tortoreto G., Mezza S., Gambi E. and Riccardi G},
editor = {1st Alexa Prize Conference, Las Vegas},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/AMZ17Conf-RovingMIndPaper.pdf},
year = {2017},
date = {2017-01-01},
keywords = {Conversational and Interactive Systems , Interactive Systems, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
title = {Automatic Community Creation for Abstractive Spoken Summarization},
author = {Singla K., Stepanov A. E., Bayer A. O., Riccardi G. and Carenini G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2017_NewSum_Singla_etal.pdf},
year = {2017},
date = {2017-01-01},
publisher = {EMNLP 2017 Workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization, Copenhagen, 2017},
abstract = {Summarization of spoken conversations is a challenging task, since it requires deep understanding of dialogs. Abstractive summarization techniques rely on linking the summary sentences to sets of original conversation sentences, i.e. communities. Unfortunately, such linking information is rarely available or requires trained annotators. We propose and experiment automatic community creation using cosine similarity on different levels of representation: raw text, WordNet SynSet IDs, and word embeddings. We show that the abstractive summarization systems with automatic communities significantly outperform previously published results on both English and Italian corpora.},
keywords = {Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
title = {Irony Detection: from the Twittersphere to the News Space},
author = {Cervone A., Stepanov E. A., Celli F., and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Clicit17-IronyDetection.pdf},
year = {2017},
date = {2017-01-01},
journal = {Proc. Fourth Conference on Computational Linguistics , Rome, 2017},
abstract = {Automatic detection of irony is one of the hot topics for sentiment analysis, as it changes the polarity of text. Most of the work has been focused on the detection of figurative language in Twitter data due to relative ease of obtaining annotated data, thanks to the use of hashtags to signal irony. However, irony is present generally in natural language conversations and in particular in online public fora. In this paper, we present a comparative evaluation of irony detection from Italian news fora and Twitter posts. Since irony is not a very frequent phenomenon, its automatic detection suffers from data imbalance and feature sparseness problems. We experiment with different representations of text – bag-of-words, writing style, and word embeddings to address the feature sparseness; and balancing techniques to address the data imbalance.},
keywords = {Affective Computing, Natural Language Processing}
}
2016
title = {Do We Really Need All Those Rich Linguistic Features? A Neural Network-Based Approach to Implicit Sense Labeling},
author = {Schenk N., Chiarcos C., Donandt K., Rönnqvist S., Stepanov A. E. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/CoNLL16-FrankfurtUNITNDiscourseParser.pdf},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-11-01},
publisher = {Proc. CoNLL, Berlin, 2016},
abstract = {We describe our contribution to the CoNLL 2016 Shared Task on shallow discourse parsing.1 Our system extends the two best parsers from previous year’s competition by integration of a novel implicit sense labeling component. It is grounded on a highly generic, language-independent feedforward neural network architecture incorporating weighted word embeddings for argument spans which obviates the need for (traditional) hand-crafted features.
Despite its simplicity, our system overall outperforms all results from 2015 on 5 out of 6 evaluation sets for English and achieves an absolute improvement in F1-score of 3.2% on the PDTB test section for non-explicit sense classification.},
keywords = {Discourse, Natural Language Processing}
}
Despite its simplicity, our system overall outperforms all results from 2015 on 5 out of 6 evaluation sets for English and achieves an absolute improvement in F1-score of 3.2% on the PDTB test section for non-explicit sense classification.
title = {Discourse Connective Detection in Spoken Conversations},
author = {Riccardi G., Stepanov A. E. and Chowdhury S.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/ICASSP16-DiscourseConnective.pdf},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-11-01},
publisher = {Proc. ICASSP, Shanghai, 2016},
abstract = {Discourse parsing is an important task in Language Understanding with applications to human-human and human-machine communication modeling. However, most of the research has focused on written text, and parsers heavily rely on syntactic parsers that themselves have low performance on dialog data. In our work, we address the problem of analyzing the semantic relations between discourse units in human-human spoken conversations. In particular, in this paper we focus on the detection of discourse connectives which are the predicate of such relations. The discourse relations are drawn from the Penn Discourse Treebank annotation model and adapted to a domain-specific Italian human-human spoken conversations. We study the relevance of lexical and acoustic context in predicting discourse connectives. We observe that both lexical and acoustic context have mixed effect on the prediction of specific connectives. While the oracle of using lexical and acoustic contextual feature combinations is F1 = 68.53, the lexical context alone significantly outperforms the baseline by more than 10 points with F1 = 64.93.},
keywords = {Discourse, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
2015
title = {Automatic Summarization of Call-Center Conversations},
author = {Stepanov E., Favre B., Alam F., Chowdhury S., Singla K., Trione J., Bechet F. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ASRU15-SpeechSummarizationDemo.pdf},
year = {2015},
date = {2015-12-13},
journal = {IEEE ASRU, Scottsdale, 2015. ( Demo )},
abstract = {This paper presents the SENSEI approach to automatic summarization which represents spoken conversation in terms of factual descriptors and abstractive synopses that are useful for quality assurance supervision in call centers. We demonstrate a browser-based graphical system that automatically produces these summary descriptors and synopses.
Index Terms— Summarization, Speech Processing},
keywords = {Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
Index Terms— Summarization, Speech Processing
title = {Sentiment Polarity Classification with Low-level Discourse-based Features},
author = {Stepanov E. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/AI-IA15-DiscourseConnect4SenntimentClassification.pdf},
year = {2015},
date = {2015-12-03},
journal = {Proc. CLIC-it, Trento, 2015},
keywords = {Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation}
}
title = {In the mood for Sharing Contents: Emotions, personality and interaction styles in the diffusion of news},
author = {Celli F., Ghosh A., Alam F. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/IPM15-MoodSharing.pdf},
year = {2015},
date = {2015-11-01},
journal = {Information Processing and Management, Nov 2015},
abstract = {In this paper, we analyze the influence of Twitter users in sharing news articles that may affect the readers’ mood. We collected data of more than 2000 Twitter users who shared news articles from Corriere.it, a daily newspaper that provides mood metadata annotated by readers on a voluntary basis. We automatically annotated personality types and communication styles of Twitter users and analyzed the correlations between personality, communication style, Twitter metadata (such as followig and folllowers) and the type of mood associated to the articles they shared. We also run a feature selection task, to find the best predictors of positive and negative mood sharing, and a classification task. We automatically predicted positive and negative mood sharers with 61.7% F1-measure.},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation}
}
title = {The UniTN Discourse Parser in CoNLL 2015 Shared Task},
author = {Stepanov E., Bayer A. O., Riccardi G.,},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/CoNLL15-UNITNDiscourseParser.pdf},
year = {2015},
date = {2015-07-30},
journal = {Proc. CoNLL, Bejiing, 2015. Runner-up Discurse Parsing Shared-Task},
abstract = {Penn Discourse Treebank style discourse parsing is a composite task of identifying discourse relations (explicit or nonexplicit), their connective and argument spans, and assigning a sense to these relations from the hierarchy of senses. In this paper we describe University of Trento parser submitted to CoNLL 2015 Shared Task on Shallow Discourse Parsing. The span detection tasks for explicit relations are cast as token-level sequence labeling.
The argument span decisions are conditioned on relations’ being intra- or intersentential.
Non-explicit relation detection and sense assignment tasks are cast as classification. In the end-to-end closedtrack evaluation, the parser ranked second with a global F-measure of 0.2184},
keywords = {Discourse, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing}
}
The argument span decisions are conditioned on relations’ being intra- or intersentential.
Non-explicit relation detection and sense assignment tasks are cast as classification. In the end-to-end closedtrack evaluation, the parser ranked second with a global F-measure of 0.2184
title = {Annotating and Categorizing Competition in Overlap Speech},
author = {Chowdhury A, Danieli M. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ICASSP15-OverlapClassification.pdf},
year = {2015},
date = {2015-04-19},
journal = {Proc. ICASSP, Brisbane, 2015.},
abstract = {Overlapping speech is a common and relevant phenomenon in human conversations, reflecting many aspects of discourse dynamics. In this paper, we focus on the pragmatic role of overlaps in turn-in-progress, where it can be categorized as competitive or non-competitive. Previous studies on these
two categories have mostly relied on controlled scenarios and small datasets. In our study, we focus on call center data, with customers and operators engaged in problem-solving tasks. We propose and evaluate an annotation scheme for these two overlap categories in the context of spontaneous and in-vivo human conversations. We analyze the distinctive predictive characteristics of a very large set of high-dimensional acoustic feature. We obtained a significant improvement in classification results as well as significant reduction in the feature set size.},
keywords = {Discourse, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation}
}
two categories have mostly relied on controlled scenarios and small datasets. In our study, we focus on call center data, with customers and operators engaged in problem-solving tasks. We propose and evaluate an annotation scheme for these two overlap categories in the context of spontaneous and in-vivo human conversations. We analyze the distinctive predictive characteristics of a very large set of high-dimensional acoustic feature. We obtained a significant improvement in classification results as well as significant reduction in the feature set size.2014
title = {CorEA: Italian News Corpus with Emotions and Agreement},
author = {Celli F. and Riccardi G. and Ghosh A.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/AI-IA14-CoreaAgreementDisagreement-1.pdf},
year = {2014},
date = {2014-11-01},
journal = {Conferenza di Linguistica Computazionale, Pisa, 2014},
abstract = {In this paper, we describe an Italian corpus of news blogs, including bloggers’ emotion tags, and annotations of agreement relations amongst blogger- comment pairs. The main contributions of this work are: the formalization of the agreement relation, the design of guide- lines for its annotation, the quantitative analysis of the annotators’ agreement.},
keywords = {Affective Computing, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation}
}
title = {Semantic Language Models for Automatic Speech Recognition},
author = {Bayer A. O. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/SLT14-SemanticSLM.pdf},
year = {2014},
date = {2014-10-01},
journal = {IEEE/ACL Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, Lake Tahoe, 2014},
abstract = {We are interested in the problem of semantics-aware train- ing of language models (LMs) for Automatic Speech Recog- nition (ASR). Traditional language modeling research have ignored semantic constraints and focused on limited size his- tories of words. Semantic structures may provide information to capture lexically realized long-range dependencies as well as the linguistic scene of a speech utterance. In this paper, we present a novel semantic LM (SELM) that is based on the the- ory of frame semantics. Frame semantics analyzes meaning of words by considering their role in the semantic frames they occur and by considering their syntactic properties. We show that by integrating semantic frames and target words into re- current neural network LMs we can gain significant improve- ments in perplexity and word error rates. We have evaluated the semantic LM on the publicly available ASR baselines on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) corpus. SELMs achieve 50% and 64% relative reduction in perplexity compared to n-gram models by using frames and target words respectively. In ad- dition, 12% and 7% relative improvements in word error rates are achieved by SELMs on the Nov’92 and},
keywords = {Language Modeling, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
title = {Shallow Discourse Parsing with Conditional Random Fields},
author = {Ghosh S., Johansson R., Riccardi G. and Tonelli S.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/I11-1120.pdf},
year = {2014},
date = {2014-01-01},
journal = {International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 2011},
abstract = {Parsing discourse is a challenging natural language processing task. In this paper we take a data driven approach to identify arguments of explicit discourse connectives. In contrast to previous work we do not make any assumptions on the span of arguments and consider parsing as a token-level sequence labeling task. We design the argument segmentation task as a cascade of decisions based on conditional random fields (CRFs). We train the CRFs on lexical, syntactic and semantic features extracted from the Penn Discourse Treebank and evaluate feature combinations on the commonly used test split. We show that the best combination of features includes syntactic and semantic features. The comparative error analysis investigates the performance variability over connective types and argument positions.},
keywords = {Discourse, Natural Language Processing}
}
title = {Recognizing Human Activities from Smartphone Signals},
author = {Ghosh A. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ACMM14-RecognizingHumanActivitiesSensor-Signals.pdf},
year = {2014},
date = {2014-01-01},
journal = {ACM International Conference on Multimedia, Orlando, 2014},
abstract = {In context-aware computing, Human Activity Recognition (HAR) aims to understand the current activity of users from their connected sensors. Smartphones with their various sensors are opening a new frontier in building human-centered applications for understanding users’ personal and world contexts. While in-lab and controlled activity recognition systems have yielded very good results, they do not perform well under in-the-wild scenarios. The objective of this paper is to 1) Investigate how audio signal can complement and improve other on-board sensors (accelerometer and gyroscope) for activity recognition; 2) Design and evaluate the fusion of such multiple signal streams to optimize performance and sampling rate. We show that fusion of these signal streams, including audio, achieves high performance even at very low sampling rates; 3) Evaluate the performance of the multistream human activity recognition under different real enduser activity conditions.},
keywords = {Discourse, Natural Language Processing}
}
title = {Towards Cross-Domain PDTB-Style Discourse Parsing},
author = {Stepanov E. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/EACL14-PDTBCrossDomain.pdf},
year = {2014},
date = {2014-01-01},
journal = {EACL Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis, Gothenburg, 2014},
abstract = {Discourse relation parsing is an important task with the goal of understanding text beyond the sentence boundaries. With the availability of annotated corpora (Penn Discourse Treebank) statistical discourse parsers were developed. In the literature it was shown that the discourse parsing subtasks of discourse connective detection and relation sense classification do not generalize well across domains. The biomedical domain is of particular interest due to the availability of Biomedical Discourse Relation Bank (BioDRB). In this paper we present cross-domain evaluation of PDTB trained discourse relation parser and evaluate feature-level domain adaptation techniques on the argument span extraction subtask. We demonstrate that the subtask generalizes well across domains.},
keywords = {Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation}
}
title = {The Development of the Multilingual LUNA Corpus for Spoken Language System Porting},
author = {Stepanov E., Riccardi G. and Bayer A. O.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/LREC14-MultilingualLUNACorpusPorting.pdf},
year = {2014},
date = {2014-01-01},
journal = {LREC , Reykjavik, 2014},
abstract = {The development of annotated corpora is a critical process in the development of speech applications for multiple target languages. While the technology to develop a monolingual speech application has reached satisfactory results (in terms of performance and effort), porting an existing application from a source language to a target language is still a very expensive task. In this paper we address the problem of creating multilingual aligned corpora and its evaluation in the context of a spoken language understanding (SLU) porting task. We discuss the challenges of the manual creation of multilingual corpora, as well as present the algorithms for the creation of multilingual SLU via Statistical Machine Translation (SMT).},
keywords = {Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing, Statistical Machine Translation}
}
2013
title = {Comparative Evaluation of Argument Extraction Algorithms in Discourse Relation Parsing},
author = {Stepanov E. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IWPT13-DiscourseParsing.pdf},
year = {2013},
date = {2013-01-01},
journal = {International Conference on Parsing Technologies, Nara, 2013},
abstract = {Discourse relation parsing is an important task with the goal of understanding text beyond the sentence boundaries. One of the subtasks of discourse parsing is the extraction of argument spans of discourse relations. A relation can be either intra-sentential – to have both arguments in the same sentence – or inter-sentential – to have arguments span over different sentences. There are two approaches to the task. In the first approach the parser decision is not conditioned on whether the relation is intra- or intersentential. In the second approach relations are parsed separately for each class. The paper evaluates the two approaches to argument span extraction on Penn Discourse Treebank explicit relations; and the problem is cast as token-level sequence labeling. We show that processing intra- and inter-sentential relations separately, reduces the task complexity and significantly outperforms the single model approach.},
keywords = {Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
title = {Personality Traits Recognition on Social Network - Facebook},
author = {Alam F. ,Stepanov E. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/WCPR13-PersonalityTraitFacebook.pdf},
year = {2013},
date = {2013-01-01},
journal = {ICWSM, Workshop on Computational Personality Recognition, Boston, 2013},
abstract = {For the natural and social interaction it is necessary to understand human behavior. Personality is one of the fundamental aspects, by which we can understand behavioral dispositions. It is evident that there is a strong correlation between users’ personality and the way they behave on online social network (e.g., Facebook). This paper presents automatic recognition of Big-5 personality traits on social network (Facebook) using users’ status text. For the automatic recognition we studied different classification methods such as SMO (Sequential Minimal Optimization for Support Vector Machine), Bayesian Logistic Regression (BLR) and Multinomial Naïve Bayes (MNB) sparse modeling. Performance of the systems had been measured using macro-averaged precision, recall and F1; weighted average accuracy (WA) and un-weighted average accuracy (UA). Our comparative study shows that MNB performs better than BLR and SMO for personality traits recognition on the social network data.},
keywords = {Affective Computing, Natural Language Processing}
}
2012
title = {Improving the Recall of a Discourse Parser by Constraint-Based Postprocessing},
author = {Ghosh S., Johansson R., Riccardi G. and Tonelli S.},
year = {2012},
date = {2012-01-01},
journal = {LREC Istanbul, 2012},
keywords = {Discourse, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing}
}
title = {Global Features for Shallow Discourse Parsing},
author = {Ghosh S., Riccardi G. and Johansson R.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/SigDial12-DParsing.pdf},
year = {2012},
date = {2012-01-01},
journal = {SIGDial, Seoul, 2012},
abstract = {A coherently related group of sentences may be referred to as a discourse. In this paper we address the problem of parsing coherence relations as defined in the Penn Discourse Tree Bank (PDTB). A good model for discourse structure analysis needs to account both for local dependencies at the token-level and for global dependencies and statistics. We present techniques on using inter-sentential or sentence-level (global), data-driven, nongrammatical features in the task of parsing discourse. The parser model follows up previous approach based on using tokenlevel (local) features with conditional random fields for shallow discourse parsing, which is lacking in structural knowledge of discourse. The parser adopts a twostage approach where first the local constraints are applied and then global constraints are used on a reduced weighted search space (n-best). In the latter stage we experiment with different rerankers trained on the first stage n-best parses, which are generated using lexico-syntactic local features. The two-stage parser yields significant improvements over the best performing model of discourse parser on the PDTB corpus.},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing}
}
2011
title = {Using Syntacting and Semantic Structural Kernels for Classifying Definition Questions in Jeopardy!},
author = {Moschitti A., Chu-Carroll J., Patwardhan S., Fan J. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/EMNLP11-QuesClassJeopardy.pdf},
year = {2011},
date = {2011-01-01},
journal = {EMNLP, Edinburgh, 2011},
abstract = {The last decade has seen many interesting applications of Question Answering (QA) technology. The Jeopardy! quiz show is certainly one of the most fascinating, from the viewpoints of both its broad domain and the complexity of its language. In this paper, we study kernel methods applied to syntactic/semantic structures for accurate classification of Jeopardy! definition questions. Our extensive empirical analysis shows that our classification models largely improve on classifiers based on word-language models. Such classifiers are also used in the state-of-the-art QA pipeline constituting Watson, the IBM Jeopardy! system. Our experiments measuring their impact on Watson show enhancements in QA accuracy and a consequent increase in the amount of money earned in game-based evaluation.},
keywords = {Conversational and Interactive Systems , Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation}
}
title = {Detecting General Opinions from Customer Surveys},
author = {Stepanov E. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ICDM11-OpinionDetection.pdf},
year = {2011},
date = {2011-01-01},
journal = {IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, SENTIRE Workshop, Vancouver, 2011},
abstract = {Questionnaire-based surveys and on-line product reviews resemble each other in that they both have user comments and satisfaction ratings. Since a comment might be a general opinion about a product or only one or a set of its attributes, in which case the text might not reflect the rating; surveys and reviews share the problem of pairing freetext comments with these ratings. To train accurate models for automatic evaluation of products from free-text, it is important to distinguish these two kinds of opinions. In this paper we present experiments on detecting general opinions that target a product as a whole; thus, reflect the user sentiments better. The task is different from subjectivity detection, since the goal is to detect generality of an opinion regardless of the rest of the documents being opinionated or not. The task complements feature-based opinion analysis and opinion polarity classification, since it can be applied as a preceding step to both tasks. We show that when used as a classification feature user ratings are not useful in the general opinion detection task. However, they are effective in predicting the polarity of a comment once it is identified as a general opinion.},
keywords = {Conversational and Interactive Systems , Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing}
}
title = {Simultaneous Dialog Act Segmentation and Classification from Human-Human Spoken Conversations},
author = {Quarteroni S., Ivanov A. V. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ICASSP11-DASegmcClass.pdf},
year = {2011},
date = {2011-01-01},
journal = {ICASSP, Prague, 2011},
abstract = {An accurate identification dialog acts (DAs), which represent the illocutionary aspect of communication, is essential to support the understanding of human conversations. This requires 1) the segmentation of human-human dialogs into turns, 2) the intra-turn segmentation into DA boundaries and 3) the classification of each segment according to a DA tag. This process is particularly challenging when both segmentation and tagging are automated and utterance hypotheses derive from the erroneous results of ASR. In this paper, we use Conditional Random Fields to learn models for simultaneous segmentation and labeling of DAs from whole human-human spoken dialogs. We identify the best performing lexical feature combinations on the LUNA and SWITCHBOARD human-human dialog corpora and compare performances to those of discriminative D classifiers based on manually segmented utterances. Additionally, we assess our models’ robustness to recognition errors, showing that DA identification is robust in the presence of high word error rates.},
keywords = {Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation, Speech Processing}
}
title = {End-to-End Discourse Parser Evaluation},
author = {Ghosh S., Tonelli S., Riccardi G. and Johansson R.},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6061347&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D6061347},
year = {2011},
date = {2011-01-01},
journal = {IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing, Menlo Park, USA, 2011},
abstract = {We are interested in the problem of discourse parsing of textual documents. We present a novel end-to-end discourse parser that, given a plain text document in input, identifies the discourse relations in the text, assigns them a semantic label and detects discourse arguments spans. The parsing architecture is based on a cascade of decisions supported by Conditional Random Fields (CRF). We train and evaluate three different parsers using the PDTB corpus. The three system versions are compared to evaluate their robustness with respect to deep/shallow and automatically extracted syntactic features.},
keywords = {Discourse, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation}
}
2010
title = {Annotation of Discourse Relations for Conversational Spoken Dialogs},
author = {Sara Tonelli S., Riccardi G., Prasad R. and Joshi A.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/LREC10-DialoguePDTBAnnotation.pdf},
year = {2010},
date = {2010-01-01},
journal = {LREC Valletta, 2010},
abstract = {In this paper, we make a qualitative and quantitative analysis of discourse relations within the LUNA conversational spoken dialog corpus. In particular, we describe the adaptation of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) annotation scheme to the LUNA dialogs. We discuss similarities and differences between our approach and the PDTB paradigm and point out the peculiarities of spontaneous dialogs w.r.t. written text, which motivated some changes in the sense hierarchy. Then, we present corpus statistics about the discourse relations within a representative set of annotated dialogs.},
keywords = {Discourse, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation}
}
title = {Kernel-based Reranking for Named-Entity Extraction},
author = {Nguyen T. T., Moschitti A. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Coling10-KernelNE.pdf},
year = {2010},
date = {2010-01-01},
journal = {COLING, Bejing, 2010},
abstract = {We present novel kernels based on structured and unstructured features for reranking the N-best hypotheses of conditional random fields (CRFs) applied to entity extraction. The former features are generated by a polynomial kernel encoding entity features whereas tree kernels are used to model dependencies amongst tagged candidate examples. The experiments on two standard corpora in two languages, i.e. the Italian EVALITA 2009 and the English CoNLL 2003 datasets, show a large improvement on CRFs in F-measure, i.e. from 80.34% to 84.33% and from 84.86% to 88.16%, respectively. Our analysis reveals that both kernels provide a comparable improvement over the CRFs baseline. Additionally, their combination improves CRFs much more than the sum of the individual contributions, suggesting an interesting kernel synergy.},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation}
}
title = {Acoustic Correlates of Meaning Structure in Conversational Speech},
author = {Ivanov A. V., Riccardi G., Ghosh S.,Tonelli S. and Stepanov E.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IS10-AcousticSemanticCorrelates.pdf},
year = {2010},
date = {2010-01-01},
journal = {INTERSPEECH, Makuhari, 2010},
abstract = {We are interested in the problem of extracting meaning structures from spoken utterances in human communication. In Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) systems, parsing of meaning structures is carried over the word hypotheses generated by the Automatic Speech Recognizer (ASR). This approach suffers from high word error rates and ad-hoc conceptual representations. In contrast, in this paper we aim at discovering meaning components from direct measurements of acoustic and non-verbal linguistic features. The meaning structures are taken from the frame semantics model proposed in FrameNet, a consistent and extendable semantic structure resource covering a large set of domains. We give a quantitative analysis of meaning structures in terms of speech features across human–human dialogs from the manually annotated LUNA corpus. We show that the acoustic correlations between pitch, formant trajectories, intensity and harmonicity and meaning features are statistically significant over the whole corpus as well as relevant in classifying the target words evoked by a semantic frame. Index Terms: spoken language understanding, spoken dialog, frame semantics, speech mining, acoustic features.},
keywords = {Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
2009
title = {The Multisite 2009 EVALITA Spoken Dialog System Evaluation},
author = {Baggia P., Cutugno F., Danieli M., Pieraccini R.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/EVALITA09-MultisiteSDSEvaluation.pdf},
year = {2009},
date = {2009-01-01},
journal = {AI*IA EVALITA Workshop, Brescia, 2009},
abstract = {This document presents the coordination and the evaluation procedures for the Spoken Dialogue System Task in EVALITA 2009. Three institutions participated into the competition, University of Trento, University of Naples and Loquendo. EVALITA participants were asked to develop a SDS application operating in the sales force domain, they were provided with a preliminary list of scenarios indicating system accounting modalities and a possible list of subtasks that should made possible. The three systems were hosted on a server at Trento, 19 volunteers called all of them. The calls have been recorded, transcribed and annotated. The evaluation work, based on scripting run on the annotations, has been mainly focused on assessing performance at the dialogue, task, and concept levels. Detailed results indicating the systems performances are reported in the paper. This document presents the coordination and the evaluation procedures for the Spoken Dialogue System Task in EVALITA 2009. Three institutions participated into the competition, University of Trento, University of Naples and Loquendo SpA.},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation}
}
title = {Standoff Coordination for Multi-Tool Annotation in a Dialogue Corpus},
author = {Rodríguez K. J., Dipper S., Götze M., Poesio P., Riccardi G., Raymond C., Wisniewska J.},
year = {2009},
date = {2009-01-01},
journal = {ACL LAW Workshop, Prague, 2007},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation}
}
title = {Convolution Kernels on Constituent, Dependency and Sequential Structures for Relation Extraction},
author = {Nguyen T. T., Moschitti A. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/EMNLP09-ConKernel.pdf},
year = {2009},
date = {2009-01-01},
journal = {EMNLP, Singapore, 2009},
abstract = {This paper explores the use of innovative kernels based on syntactic and semantic structures for a target relation extraction task. Syntax is derived from constituent and dependency parse trees whereas semantics concerns to entity types and lexical sequences. We investigate the effectiveness of such representations in the automated relation extraction from texts. We process the above data by means of Support Vector Machines along with the syntactic tree, the partial tree and the word sequence kernels. Our study on the ACE 2004 corpus illustrates that the combination of the above kernels achieves high effectiveness and significantly improves the current state-of-the-art.},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing}
}
title = {Concept Segmentation and Labeling for Conversational Speech},
author = {Dinarelli M., Moschitti A. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IS09-RR.pdf},
year = {2009},
date = {2009-01-01},
journal = {INTERSPEECH, Brighton, 2009},
abstract = {Spoken Language Understanding performs automatic concept labeling and segmentation of speech utterances. For this task, many approaches have been proposed based on both generative and discriminative models. While all these methods have shown remarkable accuracy on manual transcription of spoken utterances, robustness to noisy automatic transcription is still an open issue. In this paper we study algorithms for Spoken Language Understanding combining complementary learning models: Stochastic Finite State Transducers produce a list of hypotheses, which are re-ranked using a discriminative algorithm based on kernel methods. Our experiments on two different spoken dialog corpora, MEDIA and LUNA, show that the combined generative-discriminative model reaches the state-ofthe-art such as Conditional Random Fields (CRF) on manual transcriptions, and it is robust to noisy automatic transcriptions, outperforming, in some cases, the state-of-the-art.},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
title = {What's in an Ontology for Spoken Language Understanding},
author = {Quarteroni S., Riccardi G. and Dinarelli M.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IS09-Ontology.pdf},
year = {2009},
date = {2009-01-01},
journal = {INTERSPEECH, Brighton, 2009},
abstract = {Current Spoken Language Understanding systems rely either on hand-written semantic grammars or on flat attribute-value sequence labeling. In both approaches, concepts and their relations (when modeled at all) are domain-specific, thus making it difficult to expand or port the domain model. To address this issue, we introduce: 1) a domain model based on an ontology where concepts are classified into either predicative or argumentative; 2) the modeling of relations between such concept classes in terms of classical relations as defined in lexical semantics. We study and analyze our approach on a corpus of customer care data, where we evaluate the coverage and relevance of the ontology for the interpretation of speech utterances.},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
title = {Ontology-Based Grounding of Spoken Language Understanding},
author = {Quarteroni S., Dinarelli M. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ASRU09-OntologyGrounding.pdf},
year = {2009},
date = {2009-01-01},
journal = {IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, Merano, 2009},
abstract = {Current Spoken Language Understanding models rely on either hand-written semantic grammars or flat attributevalue sequence labeling. In most cases, no relations between concepts are modeled, and both concepts and relations are domain-specific, making it difficult to expand or port the domain model. In contrast, we expand our previous work on a domain model based on an ontology where concepts follow the predicateargument semantics and domain-independent classical relations are defined on such concepts. We conduct a thorough study on a spoken dialog corpus collected within a customer care problemsolving domain, and we evaluate the coverage and impact of the ontology for the interpretation, grounding and},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
title = {Re-Ranking Models Based on Small Training Data for Spoken Language Understanding},
author = {Dinarelli M., Moschitti A. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IS09-RR3.pdf},
year = {2009},
date = {2009-01-01},
journal = {EMNLP, Singapore, 2009},
abstract = {Spoken Language Understanding performs automatic concept labeling and segmentation of speech utterances. For this task, many approaches have been proposed based on both generative and discriminative models. While all these methods have shown remarkable accuracy on manual transcription of spoken utterances, robustness to noisy automatic transcription is still an open issue. In this paper we study algorithms for Spoken Language Understanding combining complementary learning models: Stochastic Finite State Transducers produce a list of hypotheses, which are re-ranked using a discriminative algorithm based on kernel methods. Our experiments on two different spoken dialog corpora, MEDIA and LUNA, show that the combined generative-discriminative model reaches the state-ofthe-art such as Conditional Random Fields (CRF) on manual transcriptions, and it is robust to noisy automatic transcriptions, outperforming, in some cases, the state-of-the-art.},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
title = {Annotating Spoken Dialogs: from Speech Segments to Dialog Acts and Frame Semantics},
author = {Dinarelli M., Quarteroni S., Tonelli S., Moschitti A. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/EACL09-LUNACorpusAnnotation.pdf},
year = {2009},
date = {2009-01-01},
journal = {EACL Workshop on Semantic Representation of Spoken Language -Athens, 2009},
abstract = {We are interested in extracting semantic structures from spoken utterances generated within conversational systems. Current Spoken Language Understanding systems rely either on hand-written semantic grammars or on flat attribute-value sequence labeling. While the former approach is known to be limited in coverage and robustness, the latter lacks detailed relations amongst attribute-value pairs. In this paper, we describe and analyze the human annotation process of rich semantic structures in order to train semantic statistical parsers. We have annotated spoken conversations from both a human-machine and a human-human spoken dialog corpus. Given a sentence of the transcribed corpora, domain concepts and other linguistic features are annotated, ranging from e.g. part-of-speech tagging and constituent chunking, to more advanced annotations, such as syntactic, dialog act and predicate argument structure. In particular, the two latter annotation layers appear to be promising for the design of complex dialog systems. Statistics and mutual information estimates amongst such features are reported and compared across corpora.},
keywords = {Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation}
}
title = {Re-Ranking Models For Spoken Language Understanding},
author = {Dinarelli M., Moschitti A. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/EACL09-RR.pdf},
year = {2009},
date = {2009-01-01},
journal = {EACL Conference, Athens, 2009},
abstract = {Spoken Language Understanding aims at mapping a natural language spoken sentence into a semantic representation. In the last decade two main approaches have been pursued: generative and discriminative models. The former is more robust to overfitting whereas the latter is more robust to many irrelevant features. Additionally, the way in which these approaches encode prior knowledge is very different and their relative performance changes based on the task. In this paper we describe a machine learning framework where both models are used: a generative model produces a list of ranked hypotheses whereas a discriminative model based on structure kernels and Support Vector Machines, re-ranks such list. We tested our approach on the MEDIA corpus (human-machine dialogs) and on a new corpus (human-machine and humanhuman dialogs) produced in the European LUNA project. The results show a large improvement on the state-of-the-art in concept segmentation and labeling.},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
2008
title = {Semantic Annotations For Conversational Speech: from speech transcriptions to predicate argument structures},
author = {Bisazza A., Dinarelli M., Quarteroni S., Tonelli S., Moschitti A., Riccardi G.},
year = {2008},
date = {2008-01-01},
journal = {IEEE/ACL Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, Goa, 2008},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing}
}
title = {Active Annotation in the LUNA Italian Corpus of Spontaneous Dialogues},
author = {Rodríguez K., Raymond C. and Riccardi G.},
year = {2008},
date = {2008-01-01},
journal = {Proc. Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Marrakech, 2008},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation}
}
title = {Automatic FrameNet-Based Annotation of Conversational Speech},
author = {Coppola B., Moschitti A., Tonelli S., Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/SLT08-FramenetParser.pdf},
year = {2008},
date = {2008-01-01},
journal = {IEEE/ACL Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, Goa, 2008},
abstract = {Current Spoken Language Understanding technology is based on a simple concept annotation of word sequences, where the interdependencies between concepts and their compositional semantics are neglected. This prevents an effective handling of language phenomena, with a consequential limitation on the design of more complex dialog systems. In this paper, we argue that shallow semantic representation as formulated in the Berkeley FrameNet Project may be useful to improve the capability of managing more complex dialogs. To prove this, the first step is to show that a FrameNet parser of sufficient accuracy can be designed for conversational speech. We show that exploiting a small set of FrameNetbased manual annotations, it is possible to design an effective semantic parser. Our experiments on an Italian spoken dialog corpus, created within the LUNA project, show that our approach is able to automatically annotate unseen dialog turns with a high accuracy.},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing}
}
title = {Learning with Noisy Supervision for Spoken Language Understanding},
author = {Raymond C. and Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ICASSP08-NoisySupervisionSLU.pdf},
year = {2008},
date = {2008-01-01},
journal = {Proc. IEEE ICASSP, Las Vegas,2008},
abstract = {Data-driven Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) systems need semantically annotated data which are expensive, time consuming and prone to human errors. Active learning has been successfully applied to automatic speech recognition and utterance classification. In general, corpora annotation for SLU involves such tasks as sentence segmentation, chunking or frame labeling and predicate-argument annotation. In such cases human annotations are subject to errors increasing with the annotation complexity. We investigate two alternative noise-robust active learning strategies that are either data-intensive or supervision-intensive. The strategies detect likely erroneous examples and improve significantly the SLU performance for a given labeling cost. We apply uncertainty based active learning with conditional random fields on the concept segmentation task for SLU. We perform annotation experiments on two databases, namely ATIS (English) and Media (French). We show that our noise-robust algorithm could improve the accuracy up to 6% (absolute) depending on the noise level and the labeling cost.},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
title = {Joint Generative And Discriminative Models For Spoken Language Understanding},
author = {Dinarelli M., Moschitti A., Riccardi G.},
year = {2008},
date = {2008-01-01},
journal = {IEEE/ACL Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, Goa, 2008},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
title = {Spoken Language Understanding},
author = {De Mori R., Bechet F., Hakkani-Tur D., McTear M., Riccardi G. and Tur G.},
year = {2008},
date = {2008-01-01},
journal = {IEEE Signal Processing Magazine vol. 25, pp.50-58 ,2008},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
2007
title = {The LUNA Corpus: an Annotation Scheme for a Multi-domain Multi-lingual Dialogue Corpus},
author = {Raymond C., Riccardi G., Rodríguez K. J. and Wisniewska J.},
year = {2007},
date = {2007-01-01},
journal = {11th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (DECALOG'07), Rovereto, 2007},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Signal Annotation and Interpretation}
}
title = {Generative and Discriminative Algorithms for Spoken Language Understanding},
author = {Raymond C., Riccardi G.},
year = {2007},
date = {2007-01-01},
journal = {INTERSPEECH, Antwerp, 2007},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
title = {Spoken Language Understanding with Kernels for Syntactic/Semantic Structures},
author = {Moschitti A., Riccardi G. and Raymond C.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ASRU07-SLUKernels.pdf},
year = {2007},
date = {2007-01-01},
journal = {IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, Kyoto, 2007},
abstract = {Automatic concept segmentation and labeling are the fundamental problems of Spoken Language Understanding in dialog systems. Such tasks are usually approached by using generative or discriminative models based on n-grams. As the uncertainty or ambiguity of the spoken input to dialog system increase, we expect to need dependencies beyond n-gram statistics. In this paper, a general purpose statistical syntactic parser is used to detect syntactic/semantic dependencies between concepts in order to increase the accuracy of sentence segmentation and concept labeling. The main novelty of the approach is the use of new tree kernel functions which encode syntactic/semantic structures in discriminative learning models. We experimented with Support Vector Machines and the above kernels on the standard ATIS dataset. The proposed algorithm automatically parses natural language text with offthe-shelf statistical parser and labels the syntactic (sub)trees with concept labels. The results show that the proposed model is very accurate and competitive with respect to state-of-theart models when combined with n-gram based models.},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
2006
title = {The AT&T Spoken Language Understanding System},
author = {Gupta N., Tur G., Hakkani-Tur D., Bangalore S., Riccardi G. and Rahim M.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IEEE-SAP-2005-SLU.pdf},
year = {2006},
date = {2006-01-01},
journal = {IEEE Trans. on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, volume 14, Issue 1, pp. 213-22, 2006},
abstract = {Spoken language understanding (SLU) aims at extracting meaning from natural language speech. Over the past decade, a variety of practical goal-oriented spoken dialog systems have been built for limited domains. SLU in these systems ranges from understanding predetermined phrases through fixed grammars, extracting some predefined named entities, extracting users’ intents for call classification, to combinations of users’ intents and named entities. In this paper, we present the SLU system of VoiceTone ® (a service provided by AT&T where AT&T develops, deploys and hosts spoken dialog applications for enterprise customers). The SLU system includes extracting both intents and the named entities from the users’ utterances. For intent determination, we use statistical classifiers trained from labeled data, and for named entity extraction we use rule-based fixed grammars. The focus of our work is to exploit data and to use machine learning techniques to create scalable SLU systems which can be quickly deployed for new domains with minimal human intervention. These objectives are achieved by 1) using the predicate-argument representation of semantic content of an utterance; 2) extending statistical classifiers to seamlessly integrate hand crafted classification rules with the rules learned from data; and 3) developing an active learning framework to minimize the human labeling effort for quickly building the classifier models and adapting them to changes. We present an evaluation of this system using two deployed applications of VoiceTone},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
title = {Shallow Semantic Parsing for Spoken Language Understanding},
author = {Coppola B., Moschitti A., Riccardi G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/NAACL09-ShallowSemanticParsingFrameNet.pdf},
year = {2006},
date = {2006-01-01},
journal = {NAACL, Boulder, Colorado, 2009},
abstract = {Most Spoken Dialog Systems are based on speech grammars and frame/slot semantics. The semantic descriptions of input utterances are usually defined ad-hoc with no ability to generalize beyond the target application domain or to learn from annotated corpora. The approach we propose in this paper exploits machine learning of frame semantics, borrowing its theoretical model from computational linguistics. While traditional automatic Semantic Role Labeling approaches on written texts may not perform as well on spoken dialogs, we show successful experiments on such porting. Hence, we design and evaluate automatic FrameNet-based parsers both for English written texts and for Italian dialog utterances. The results show that disfluencies of dialog data do not severely hurt performance. Also, a small set of FrameNet-like manual annotations is enough for realizing accurate Semantic Role Labeling on the target domains of typical Dialog Systems.},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
title = {An Active Approach to spoken Language Processing},
author = {Hakkani-Tur D., Riccardi G. and Tur G.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/acm-tslp-06.pdf},
year = {2006},
date = {2006-01-01},
journal = {ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp 1-31, 2006},
abstract = {State of the art data-driven speech and language processing systems require a large amount of human intervention ranging from data annotation to system prototyping. In the traditional supervised passive approach, the system is trained on a given number of annotated data samples and evaluated using a separate test set. Then more data is collected arbitrarily, annotated, and the whole cycle is repeated. In this article, we propose the active approach where the system itself selects its own training data, evaluates itself and re-trains when necessary. We first employ active learning which aims to automatically select the examples that are likely to be the most informative for a given task. We use active learning for both selecting the examples to label and the examples to re-label in order to correct labeling errors. Furthermore, the system automatically evaluates itself using active evaluation to keep track of the unexpected events and decides on-demand to label more examples. The active approach enables dynamic adaptation of spoken language processing systems to unseen or unexpected events for nonstationary input while reducing the manual annotation effort significantly. We have evaluated the active approach with the AT&T spoken dialog system used for customer care applications. In this article, we present our results for both automatic speech recognition and spoken language understanding. Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.2.7 [Artificial Intelligence]: Natural Language Processing—Speech recognition and synthesis; I.5.1 [Pattern Recognition]: Models—Statistical General Terms: Algorithms, Languages, Performance Additional Key Words and Phrases: Passive learning, active learning, adaptive learning, unsupervised learning, active evaluation, spoken language understanding, automatic speech recognition, spoken dialog systems, speech and language processing},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}
title = {Natural Language Watermarking: Research Challenges and Applications},
author = {Topkara M., Riccardi G., Hakkani-Tur D., Atallah M. J.},
url = {https://sisl.disi.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/SPIE06.pdf},
year = {2006},
date = {2006-01-01},
journal = {SPIE Conference, San Diego, January, 2006},
abstract = {This paper gives an overview of the research and implementation challenges we encountered in building an endto-end natural language processing based watermarking system. With natural language watermarking, we mean embedding the watermark into a text document, using the natural language components as the carrier, in such a way that the modifications are imperceptible to the readers and the embedded information is robust against possible attacks. Of particular interest is using the structure of the sentences in natural language text in order to insert the watermark. We evaluated the quality of the watermarked text using an objective evaluation metric, the BLEU score. BLEU scoring is commonly used in the statistical machine translation community. Our current system prototype achieves 0.45 BLEU score on a scale [0,1].},
keywords = {Natural Language Processing}
}
2005
title = {Combining Classifiers for Spoken Language Understanding},
author = {Karahan M., Hakkani-Tur D., Riccardi G. and Tur G.},
year = {2005},
date = {2005-01-01},
journal = {IEEE ASRU, U.S. Virgin Islands, Dec., 2003},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing}
}