Spain

In this poster we describe the systems we used when participating in the VarDial Evaluation Campaign organized as part of the 7th workshop on NLP for similar languages, varieties and dialects. The shared tasks we participated in were the second edition of the Romanian Dialect Identification (RDI) and the first edition of the Social Media Variety Geolocation (SMG). The submissions of our SUKI team used generative language models based on Naive Bayes and character n-grams.

COLING 2020

Experiments in Language Variety Geolocation and Dialect Identification

geolocation

dialect identification

language identification

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

poster

In this work we address the prediction of Swiss users’ geolocation, based on short messages collected from social media platforms such asTwitter and Jodel. The premise is that the language used varies with location. Thus, we acknowledge this as a dialect identification task, and choose the features based on linguistic rationalizations. At the same time, with the machine learning algorithms employed, we approach the regression problem posed from both a shallow and a deep learning perspective.

Combining Deep Learning and String Kernels for the Localization of Swiss German Tweets

We describe our approaches for the Social Media Geolocation (SMG) task at the VarDial Eval-uation Campaign 2020. The goal was to predict geographical location (latitudes and longitudes)given an input text. There were three subtasks corresponding to German-speaking Switzerland(CH), Germany and Austria (DE-AT), and Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro andSerbia (BCMS). We submitted solutions to all subtasks but focused our development efforts onthe CH subtask, where we achieved third place out of 16 submissions with a median distance of15.93 km and had the best result of 14 unconstrained systems. In the DE-AT subtask, we rankedsixth out of ten submissions (fourth of 8 unconstrained systems) and for BCMS we achievedfourth place out of 13 submissions (second of 11 unconstrained systems).

ZHAW-InIT - Social Media Geolocation at VarDial 2020

We applied word unigram models, character ngram models, and CNNs to the task of distinguishing tweets of two related dialects of Romanian (standard Romanian and Moldavian) for the VarDial 2020 RDI shared task. The main challenge of the task was to perform cross-genre text classification: specifically, the models must be trained using text from news articles, and be used to predict tweets. Our best model was a Naive Bayes model trained on character ngrams, with the most common ngrams filtered out. We also applied SVMs and CNNs, but while they yielded the best performance on an evaluation dataset of news article, their accuracy significantly dropped when they were used to predict tweets. Our best model reached an F1 score of 0.715 on the evaluation dataset of tweets, and 0.667 on the held-out test dataset. The model ended up in the third place in the shared task.

Discriminating between standard Romanian and Moldavian tweets using filtered character ngrams 


We describe the systems developed by the National Research Council Canada for the Uralic language identification shared task at the 2020 VarDial evaluation campaign. Although our official results were well below the baseline, we show in this poster that this was not due to the neural approach to language identification in general, but to a flaw in the function we used to sample data for training and evaluation purposes. Preliminary experiments conducted after the evaluation period suggest that our neural approach to language identification can achieve state-of-the-art results on this task, although further experimentation is required.

Challenges in Neural Language Identification: NRC at VarDial 2020

Analyzing a tweet can provide a general estimation of a tweet location while giving insight into the dialect of the user and other linguistic markers. Such linguistic attributes can be used to provide a regional approximation of tweet origins. In this paper, we present a neural regression model that can identify the linguistic intricacies of a tweet to predict the location of the user. The final model identifies the dialect embedded in the tweet and predicts the location of the tweet.

Geolocation of Tweets with a BiLSTM Regression Model

We participate in the FNS-Summarisation 2020 shared task to be held at FNP 2020 workshop at COLING 2020. Based on Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs), we build an extractive automatic financial summarisation system for the specific task. In this system, we first analyze the long report data to select the important narrative parts and generate an intermediate document. Next, we build the kernel Matrix L for the intermediate document, which represents the quality of its sentences. On the basis of L, we then can use the DPPs sampling algorithm to choose those sentences with high quality and diversity as the final summary sentences.

Extractive Financial Narrative Summarisation based on DPPs

The work proposes a combination of linguistic features with features derived from pre-trained BERT for training a supervised classifier for the task of Causality Detection. The Linguistic features help to inject knowledge about the semantic and syntactic structure of the input sentences. Experiments on the FinCausal Shared Task1 datasets indicate that the combination of Linguistic features with BERT improves overall performance for causality detection. The proposed system achieves a weighted average F1 score of 0.952 on the post-evaluation dataset.

A Knowledge Induced Neural Net for Causality Detection

This poster describes a system for causality extraction from financial documents submitted as part of the FinCausal 2020 Workshop. The proposed system achieved a weighted-averaged F1 score of more than 95% for the official blind test set during the post-evaluation phase and exact clauses match for 83% of the documents.

Span-based Causality Extraction for Financial Documents

Companies provide annual reports to their shareholders at the end of the financial year that describes their operations and financial conditions. The average length of these reports is 80, and it may extend up to 250 pages long. In this paper, we propose our methodology PoinT-5 (the combination of Pointer Network and T-5 (Test-to-text transfer Transformer) algorithms) that we used in the Financial Narrative Summarisation (FNS) 2020 task. The proposed method uses Pointer networks to extract important narrative sentences from the report, and then T-5 is used to paraphrase extracted sentences into a concise yet informative sentence. We evaluate our method using ROUGE-N (1,2), L,and SU4. The proposed method achieves the highest precision scores in all the metrics and highest F1 scores in ROUGE 1,and LCS and only solution to cross MUSE solution baseline in ROUGE-LCS metrics.


Pointer Network and T-5 based Financial Narrative
Summarisation


This paper describes the systems proposed to solve the FNS 2020 Shared Task on summarizing financial reports. We present an extractive approach that implements a statistical model comprised of different features that measure the relevance of the sentences using a combination of statistical and machine learning methods. 


Experiments in Language Variety Geolocation and Dialect Identification

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Combining Deep Learning and String Kernels for the Localization of Swiss German Tweets

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Discriminating between standard Romanian and Moldavian tweets using filtered character ngrams

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Experiments in Language Variety Geolocation and Dialect Identification

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Next from COLING 2020

Combining Deep Learning and String Kernels for the Localization of Swiss German Tweets

Similar lecture

Discriminating between standard Romanian and Moldavian tweets using filtered character ngrams

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads