Seminar "Selected Topics in Human Language Technology and Pattern Recognition"

Registration for the seminar

Registration for the seminar is only possible online via the central registration page.

Prerequisites for participation in the seminar

• Bachelor students: Einführung in das wissenschaftliche Arbeiten (Proseminar)
• Master students: Bachelor degree
• Attendance of the lectures Statistical Classification and Machine Learning, Automatic Speech Recognition, and/or Statistical Methods in Natural Language Processing, or evidence of equivalent knowledge is highly recommended.
• For successful participants of the above lectures, seminar participation is guaranteed.
  

Seminar format and important dates

• Proposals: initial proposals will be accepted up until the start of the semester (April 1, 2019) by email to the seminar topic's supervisor. At this time, participants must arrange an appointment with the relevant supervisor. Revised proposals will be accepted up until two weeks after the start of the semester.
• Article: PDF must be submitted until June 1, 2019 by email to the seminar topic's supervisor.
  
• Presentation slides: PDF must be submitted at least 1 week prior to the trial presentation date by email to the seminar topic's supervisor.
  
• Trial presentations: at least 2 weeks prior to the actual presentation date; refer to the topics section.
• Seminar presentations: date will be announced during lecture period.
• Final (possibly corrected) articles and presentation slides: PDF must be submitted 4 weeks after the presentation date at the latest by email to the seminar topic's supervisor.
• Compulsory attendance: in order to pass, participants must attend all presentation sessions.
• Ethical Guidelines:The Computer Science Department of RWTH Aachen University has adopted ethical guidelines for the authoring of academic work, such as seminar reports. Each student has to comply with these guidelines. In this regard, you, as a seminar attendant, have to sign a declaration of compliance, in which you assert that your work complies with the guidelines, that all references used are properly cited, and that the report was done autonomously by yourself. We ask you do download the guidelines and submit the declaration together with your seminar report and talk to your supervisor. You also find a German version of the guidelines and a German version of the declaration you may use as well.

Note: failure to meet deadlines, absence without permission from compulsory sessions (presentations and preliminary meeting as announced by email to each participating student), or dropping out of the seminar after more than 3 weeks after the preliminary meeting/topic distribution results in the grade 5.0/not appeared.

The deadline for de-registration from the seminar is Thursday, March 21, 2019, 23:59h. After this deadline, seminar participation is confirmed and will be graded.

Topics, relevant references and participants

• Automatic Speech Recognition;
• Machine Translation;
• Pattern Recognition.

2. Speaker Separation
   
   
   1. Deep Clustering (He; Supervisor: Tobias Menne)
      Presentation: Thu, July 11, 2019, 10h
      Initial References:
      
      • J. R. Hershey, Z. Chen, J. Le Roux, S. Watanabee: "Deep Clustering: Discriminative Embeddings for Segmentation and Separation," in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Shanghai, China, Mar. 2016.
      • Z. Chen, Y. Luo, N. Mesgarani: "Deep Attractor Network for Single-Microhpone Speaker Separation," in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), New Orleans, LA, Mar. 2017
   
   
   2. Permutation-Invariant Training (Khadjavian; Supervisor: Tobias Menne)
      Presentation: Thu, July 11, 2019, 11h
      Initial References:
      
      • D. Yu, M. Kolbaek, Z.-H. Tan, J. Jensen: "Permutation Invariant Training of Deep Models for Speaker-Independent Multi-Talker Speech Separation," in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), New Orleans, LA, Mar. 2017, arXiv:1607.00325.
      • Y. Qian, X. Chang, D. Yu: "Single-Channel Multi-talker Speech Recognition with permutation Invariant Training", submitted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, arXiv:1707.06527, July 2017.
   
   
3. Speaker Identification
   
   
   1. Speaker Recognition (Feng; Supervisor: Weiyue Wang)
      Presentation: Thu, July 11, 2019, 12h
      Initial References:
      
      • Y. Lei, N. Scheffer, L. Ferrer,M. McLaren: "A Novel Scheme for Speaker Recognition Using a Phonetically-Aware Deep Neural Network," in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Florence, Italy, May 2014.
      • F. Richardson, D. Reynolds, N. Dehak: "Deep Neural Network Approaches to Speaker and Language Recognition," in IEEE Signal Processing Letters Vol. 22, No. 10, pp. 1671-1675, Oct. 2015.

12. Text Summarization
    
    
    1. Extractive Text Summarization (Jogbhat; Supervisor: Jan Rosendahl)
       Presentation: Tue, July 16, 2019, 10h
       Initial References:
       
       • Mehdi M. Allahyari, S. Pouriyeh, M. Assefi, S. Safaei, E. D. Trippe, J. B. Gutierrez, K. Kochut: "Text Summarization Techniques: A Brief Survey," arXiv:1707.02268, Jul. 2017.
       • J.-M. Torres-Moreno: Automatic Text Summarization, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, Sept. 2014, 348 pages. (available within RWTH Aachen Network).
    
    

6. Sentiment Analysis
   
   
   1. Emotion detection (Kreuzberg; Supervisor: Wei Zhou)
      Presentation: Tue, July 16, 2019, 11h
      Initial References:
      
      • G. Trigeorgis, F. Ringeval, R. Brueckner, E. Marchi, M. A. Nicolaou, B. Schuller, S. Zafeiriou: "Adieu features? End-to-end speech emotion recognition using a deep convolutional recurrent network," in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 5200-5204, Shanghai, China, Mar. 2016.
      • S. Ghosh, E. Laksana, L. P. Morency, S. Scherer: "Representation Learning for Speech Emotion Recognition," in Proc. 17th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), pp. 3603-3607, Sept. 2016.
   
   
   3. Document/Sentence Level Sentiment Analysis (Bachschi; Supervisor: Yunsu Kim)
      Presentation: Wed, July 17, 2019, 14h
      Initial References:
      
      • Z. Yang, D. Yang, C. Dyer, X. He, A. Smola, E. Hovy: "Hierarchical Attention Networks for Document Classification", in Proc. 15th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT), San Diego, CA, Jun. 2016.
      • X. Wang, W. Jiang, Z. Luo: "Combination of Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Network for Sentiment Analysis of Short Texts," in Proc. 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), Osaka, Japan, Dec. 2016.
   
   
7. Language Identification
   
   
   1. State-of-the-Art Language Identification (Bobes; Supervisor: Markus Kitza)
      Presentation: Wed, July 17, 2019, 15h
      Initial References:
      
      • D. Snyder, D. Garcia-Romero, A. McCree, G. Sell, D. Povey, S. Khudanpur: "Spoken Language Recognition using X-vectors," in Odyssey 2018 The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop, Les Sables d'Olonne, France, pp. 105-111, June 2018.
      • J. A. V. Lopez, N. Brummer, N. Dehak: "End-to-End versus Embedding Neural Networks for Language Recognition in Mismatched Conditions," in Odyssey 2018 The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop, Les Sables d'Olonne, France, pp. 112-119, June 2018
   
   
   2. Fusion based Native Language Identification (Täuber; Supervisor: Markus Kitza)
      Presentation: Wed, July 17, 2019, 16h
      Initial References:
      
      • S. Malmasi, K. Evanini, A. Cahill, J. Tetreault, R. Pugh, C. Hamill, D. Napolitano, Y. Qian: "A Report on the 2017 Native Language Identification Shared Task," in Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, Copenhagen, Denmark, pp. 62-75, Sept. 2017.
      • S. Malmasi, M. Dras: "Native Language Identification using Stacked Generalization," arXiv:1703.06541, March 2017.
   
   

4. Puncutation Generation
   
   
   1. Text-based Punctuation Generation (Brinkmann; Supervisor: Christoph Lüscher)
      Presentation: Wed, July 17, 2019, 17h
      Initial References:
      
      • Q. Chen, J. Wu, T. Su: "Investigating context influence in character Level LSTM methods for Japanese Auto Punctuation".
      • J. Llombart, A. Miguel, A. Ortega, E. Lleida: "Wide Residual Networks 1D for Automatic Text Punctuation", IberSPEECH2018.
      
      

9. Speech-to-Text Translation
   
   
   2. Unsupervised Speech-to-Text Translation (Niu; Supervisor: Parnia Bahar)
      Presentation: Thu, July 18, 2019, 10h
      Initial References:
      
      • Y.-A. Chung, W.-H. Weng, S. Tong, J. Glass: "Towards Unsupervised Speech-to-Text Translation," in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Brighton, GB, May 2019, arXiv:1811.01307.
      • Y. Jia, M. Johnson, W. Macherey, R. J. Weiss, Y. Cao, C.-C. Chiu, N. Ari, S. Laurenzo, Y. Wu: "Leveraging Weakly Supervised Data to Improve End-to-End Speech-to-Text Translation," in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Brighton, GB, May 2019, arXiv:1811.02050.
   
   

5. Natural Language Understanding
   
   
   4. Cross-lingual sentence embedding (Peeva; Supervisor: Yunsu Kim)
      Presentation: Thu, July 18, 2019, 11h
      Initial References:
      
      • M. Artetxe, H. Schwenk: "Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-lingual Transfer and Beyond," arXiv:1812.10464, Dec. 2018.
      • G. Lample, A. Conneau: "Cross-lingual Language Model Pre-training," arXiv:1901.07291, Jan. 2019.
   
   

11. Constituency Parsing
    
    
    1. Neural Network-based Parsing (Roytburg; Supervisor: Parnia Bahar)
       Presentation: Thu, July 18, 2019, 12h
       Initial References:
       
       • A. Vaswani, N. Shazeer, N. Parmar, J. Uszkoreit, L. Jones, A. N. Gomez, L. Kaiser, I. Polosukhin: "Attention Is All You Need," in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30, Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), Long Beach, CA, Dec. 2017, arXiv:1706.03762.
       • C. Dyer, A. Kuncoro, M. Ballesteros, N. A. Smith: "Recurrent neural network grammars," in Proc. 15th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT), San Diego, CA, Jun. 2016, arXiv:1602.03762.
       • M.-T. Luong, Q. V. Le, I. Sutskever, O. Vinyals, L. Kaiser: "Multi-task Sequence to Sequence Learning," arXiv:1511.06114, Nov. 2015.
    
    




Guidelines for the article and presentation

The roughly 20-page article together with the slides (between 20 & 30) for the presentation should be prepared in LaTeX format. Presentations will consist of 30 to 40 minutes presentation time & 15 minutes discussion time. Document templates for both the article and the presentation slides are provided below along with links to LaTeX documentation available online. The article and the slides should be prepared in LaTeX format and submitted electronically in pdf format. Other formats will not be accepted.

• Online LaTeX-Documentation:
• LaTeX: "A document preparation system"
• LaTeX help 1.1
• The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX
  
• LaTeX 2e for authors
• Document Templates:
• Article Template (51kB),  contains the template and all necessary files in tar format (or here 10kB in zip format).
• New Presentation Slide Template, a zip file containing the template and all necessary graphics as well as the institute’s style template. Note: We deactivated the RWTH and i6 logos in this version of the template since the seminar content is produced by students outside of i6.
• Guidelines for articles and presentation slides:
             General:

• The aim of the seminar for the participants is to learn the following:
• to tackle a topic and to expand knowledge
• to critically analyze the literature
  
• to hold a presentation
  
• Take notice of references to other topics in the seminar and discuss topics with one another!
  
• Take care to stay within your own topic. To this end participants should be aware of the other topics in the seminar. If applicable, cross-reference other articles and presentations.
  
             Specific:

• Important: As part of the introduction, a slide should outline the most important literature used for the presentation. In addition, the presentation should clearly indicate which literature the particular elements of the presentation refer to.
  
• Take notice of references to other topics in the seminar and discuss topics with one another!
  
• Participants are expected to seek out additional literature on their topic. Assistance with the literature search is available at the faculty’s library. Access to literature is naturally also available at the Lehrstuhl Informatik 6 library.
• Notation/Mathematical Formulas: consistent, correct notation is essential. When necessary, differing notation from various literature sources is to be modified or standardized in order to be clear and consistent. The lectures held by the Lehrstuhl Informatik 6 should provide a guide as to what appropriate notation should look like.
  
• Tables must have titles (appearing above the table).
• Figures must have captions (appearing below the figure).
  
• The use of English is recommended and mandatory for the presentation slides. Nevertheless the article and oral presentation might be German.
  
• In the case that no adequate translation of an English technical term is available, the term should be used unchanged.
• Completeness: acknowledge all literature and sources.
  
• Referencing must conform to the standard described in the article template.
• Examples should be used to illustrate points.
• Examples should be as complex as necessary but as simple as possible.
• Slides should be used as presentation aids and not to replace the role of the presenter; specifically, slides should:
• illustrate important points and relationships;
• remind the audience (and the presenter) of important aspects and considerations;
  
• give the audience an overview of the presentation.
  
• Slides should not contain chunks of text or complicated sentences; rather they should consist of succinct words and terms.
• Use illustrations where appropriate - a picture says a thousand words!
• Abbreviations should be defined at the first usage in the manner demonstrated in the following example: "[...] at the Rheinisch-Westfälischen Technischen Hochschule (RWTH) there are [...]".
  
• Take care to stay within your own topic. To this end participants should be aware of the other topics in the seminar. If applicable, cross-reference other articles and presentations.
• Usage of fonts, typefaces and colors in presentation slides must be consistent and appropriate. Such means should serve to clarify points or relationships, not be applied needlessly or at random.
  
• Care should be taken when selecting fonts for presentation slides (also within diagrams) to ensure legibility on a projector even for those seated far from the screen.

Contact

Inquiries should be directed to the respective supervisors or to:

Dr. Ralf Schlüter
RWTH Aachen University
Lehrstuhl Informatik 6
Ahornstr. 55
52074 Aachen

Room 6107
Tel: 0241 80 21630

E-Mail: schlueter@cs.rwth-aachen.de

Last modified: 2019-07-17 09:57:54 Disclaimer.