Entity matching, also known as user identity linkage, is a critical task in data integration. While established techniques primarily focus on large-scale networks, there are several applications where small networks pose challenges due to limited training data and sparsity. This study addresses entity matching in the field of criminology, where small networks are common and the number of known matching nodes is restricted. To support this research, we exploit a multimodal dataset, collected as part of a security-related project, consisting of an intercepted telephone calls network (i.e., ROXSD data) and a network of social forum interactions (i.e., ROXHOOD data) collected in a simulated environment, although following real investigation scenario. To improve accuracy and efficiency, we propose a novel approach for entity matching across these two small networks using node attributes. Existing techniques often merely focus on topology consistency between two networks and overlook valuable information, such as network node attributes, making them vulnerable to structural changes. Inspired by the remarkable success of deep learning, we present UGC-DeepLink, an end-to-end semi-supervised learning framework that leverages user-generated content. UGC-DeepLink encodes network nodes into vector representations, capturing both local and global network structures to align anchor nodes using deep neural networks. A dual learning paradigm and the policy gradient method transfer knowledge and update the linkage. Additionally, node attributes, such as call contents and forum exchanged texts, enhance the ranking of matching nodes. Experimental results on ROXSD and ROXHOOD demonstrate that UGC-DeepLink surpasses baselines and state-of-the-art methods in terms of identity-match ranking. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/erichoang/UGC-DeepLink.

With 24 official EU and many additional languages, multilingualism in Europe and an inclusive Digital Single Market can only be enabled through Language Technologies (LTs). European LT business is dominated by hundreds of SMEs and a few large players. Many are world-class, with technologies that outperform the global players. However, European LT business is also fragmented – by nation states, languages, verticals and sectors, significantly holding back its impact. The European Language Grid (ELG) project addresses this fragmentation by establishing the ELG as the primary platform for LT in Europe. The ELG is a scalable cloud platform, providing, in an easy-to-integrate way, access to hundreds of commercial and non-commercial LTs for all European languages, including running tools and services as well as data sets and resources. Once fully operational, it will enable the commercial and non-commercial European LT community to deposit and upload their technologies and data sets into the ELG, to deploy them through the grid, and to connect with other resources. The ELG will boost the Multilingual Digital Single Market towards a thriving European LT community, creating new jobs and opportunities. Furthermore, the ELG project organises two open calls for up to 20 pilot projects. It also sets up 32 national competence centres and the European LT Council for outreach and coordination purposes.

Discriminative language modeling (DLM) aims to choose the most accurate word sequence by reranking the alternatives output by the automatic speech recognizer (ASR). The conventional (supervised) way of training a DLM requires a large amount of acoustic recordings together with their manual reference transcriptions. These transcriptions are used to determine the target ranks of the ASR outputs, but may be hard to obtain. Previous studies make use of the existing transcribed data to build a confusion model which boosts the training set by generating artificial data: a process known as semi-supervised training. In this study we concentrate on the unsupervised setting where no manual transcriptions are available at all. We propose three ways to determine a sequence that could serve as the missing reference text and two approaches which use this information to (i) determine the ranks of the ASR outputs in order to train the discriminative model directly, and (ii) build a confusion model in order to generate artificial training examples. We compare our techniques with the supervised and the semi-supervised setups. Using the reranking variant of the WER-sensitive perceptron algorithm, we obtain word error rate improvements up to half of those of the supervised case.

Semi-supervised discriminative language modeling uses simulated N-best lists instead of real ASR outputs as its training examples. In this study we apply two techniques in which artificial examples are generated using a WFST and an MT system trained on pairs of reference text and ASR output. We compare the performance of these techniques with the structured prediction and ranking variants of the WER-sensitive perceptron algorithm, and contrast with the supervised case where real ASR outputs are given as input. Choosing Turkish statistical morphs as n-gram features, we analyze the similarities between the hypotheses of these three setups and the number of utilized features. We show that the MT-based system yields the lowest WER, not only because the examples generated by this technique are more effective, but also because the ranking perceptron generalizes better with this setup. When trained on a combination of artificial WFST and MT data, the structured perceptron performs as well on an unseen test set as it does when trained on real ASR output.

Discriminative language modeling (DLM) is a feature-based approach that is used as an error-correcting step after hypothesis generation in automatic speech recognition (ASR). We formulate this both as a classification and a ranking problem and employ the perceptron, the margin infused relaxed algorithm (MIRA) and the support vector machine (SVM). To decrease training complexity, we try count-based thresholding for feature selection and data sampling from the list of hypotheses. On a Turkish morphology based feature set we examine the use of first and higher order$n$-grams and present an extensive analysis on the complexity and accuracy of the models with an emphasis on statistical significance. We find that we can save significantly from computation by feature selection and data sampling, without significant loss in accuracy. Using the MIRA or SVM does not lead to any further improvement over the perceptron but the use of ranking as opposed to classification leads to a 0.4% reduction in word error rate (WER) which is statistically significant.

We present our work on semi-supervised learning of discriminative language models where the negative examples for sentences in a text corpus are generated using confusion models for Turkish at various granularities, specifically, word, sub-word, syllable and phone levels. We experiment with different language models and various sampling strategies to select competing hypotheses for training with a variant of the perceptron algorithm. We find that morph-based confusion models with a sample selection strategy aiming to match the error distribution of the baseline ASR system gives the best performance. We also observe that substituting half of the supervised training examples with those obtained in a semi-supervised manner gives similar results.

Discriminative language modeling (DLM) has been shown to improve the accuracy of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, but it requires large amounts of both acoustic and text data for training. One way to overcome this is to use simulated hypotheses instead of real hypotheses for training, which is called semisupervised training. In this study, we compare six different perceptron algorithms with the semi-supervised training approach. We formulate the DLM both as a structured prediction and a reranking problem, optimizing different criteria in each. We find that ranking variants achieve similar or better word error rate (WER) reduction with respect to structured perceptrons when used with real, simulated, or a combination of such data.