LARD: Large-scale Artificial Disfluency Generation

Tatiana Passali, Thanassis Mavropoulos, Grigorios Tsoumakas, Georgios Meditskos and Stefanos Vrochidis. "LARD: Large-scale Artificial Disfluency Generation". In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, European Language Resources Association, 2022.

Tatiana Passali, Thanassis Mavropoulos, Grigorios Tsoumakas, Georgios Meditskos and Stefanos Vrochidis

Disfluency Detection, Data Augmentation, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing

Disfluency detection is a critical task in real-time dialogue systems. However, despite its importance, it remains a relatively unexplored field, mainly due to the lack of appropriate datasets. At the same time, existing datasets suffer from various issues, including class imbalance issues, which can significantly affect the performance of the model on rare classes, as it is demonstrated in this paper. To this end, we propose LARD, a method for generating complex and realistic artificial disfluencies with little effort. The proposed method can handle three of the most common types of disfluencies: repetitions, replacements, and restarts. In addition, we release a new large-scale dataset with disfluencies that can be used on four different tasks: disfluency detection, classification, extraction, and correction. Experimental results on the LARD dataset demonstrate that the data produced by the proposed method can be effectively used for detecting and removing disfluencies, while also addressing limitations of existing datasets.