Token-Level Supervised Contrastive Learning for Punctuation Restoration

• DOI: 10.21437/interspeech.2021-661
• Publication Date: 2021-08-27T05:59:39Z
• Authors: Qiushi Huang; Tom Ko; H. Lilian Tang; Xubo Liu; Bo Wu
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Machine Learning; Computer Science - Computation and Language; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology; Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

Punctuation is critical in understanding natural language text. Currently, most automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems do not generate punctuation, which affects the performance of downstream tasks, such as intent detection and slot filling. This gives rise to the need for punctuation restoration. Recent work in punctuation restoration heavily utilizes pre-trained language models without considering data imbalance when predicting punctuation classes. In this work, we address this problem by proposing a token-level supervised contrastive learning method that aims at maximizing the distance of representation of different punctuation marks in the embedding space. The result shows that training with token-level supervised contrastive learning obtains up to 3.2% absolute F1 improvement on the test set.<br/>5 pages, 3 figures, Accepted by INTERSPEECH 2021<br/>