Julien Perez

Motivating Personality-aware Machine Translation

Language use is known to be influenced by personality traits as well as by sociodemographic characteristics such as age or mother tongue. As a result, it is possible to automatically identify these traits of the author from her texts. It has recently been shown that knowledge of such dimensions can improve performance in NLP tasks such as topic and sentiment modeling. We posit that machine translation is another application that should be personalized. In order to motivate this, we explore whether translation preserves demographic and psychometric traits. We show that, largely, both translation of the source training data into the target language, and the target test data into the source language has a detrimental effect on the accuracy of predicting author traits. We argue that this supports the need for personal and personality-aware machine translation models.

XRCE at SemEval-2016 Task 5: Feedbacked Ensemble Modeling on Syntactico-Semantic Knowledge for Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis.

This paper presents our contribution to the SemEval 2016 task 5: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. We have addressed Subtask 1 for the restaurant domain, in English and French, which implies opinion target expression detection, aspect category and polarity classification. We describe the different components of the system, based on composite models combining sophisticated linguistic features with Machine Learning algorithms, and report the results obtained for both languages.

Spectral decomposition method of dialog state tracking via collective matrix factorization

The task of dialog management is commonly decomposed into two sequential subtasks: dialog state tracking and dialog policy learning. In an end-to-end dialog system, the aim of dialog state tracking is to accurately estimate the true dialog state from noisy observations produced by the speech recognition and the natural language understanding modules. The state tracking task is primarily meant to support a dialog policy. From a probabilistic perspective, this is achieved by maintaining a posterior distribution over hidden dialog states composed of a set of context dependent variables. Once a dialog policy is learned, it strives to select an optimal dialog act given the estimated dialog state and a defined reward function. This paper introduces a novel method of dialog state tracking based on a bilinear algebric decomposition model that provides an efficient inference schema through collective matrix factorization. We evaluate the proposed approach on the second Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC-2) dataset and we show that the proposed tracker gives encouraging results compared to the state-of-the-art trackers that participated in this standard benchmark. Finally, we show that the prediction schema is computationally efficient in comparison to the previous approaches.