United Arab Emirates

This paper presents the system developed by the NGU_CNLP team for addressing the shared task on Propaganda Detection in Arabic at WANLP 2022. The team participated in the shared tasks&#39; two sub-tasks which are: 1) Propaganda technique identification in text and 2) Propaganda technique span identification. In the first sub-task, the goal is to detect all employed propaganda techniques in some given piece of text out of a possible 17 different techniques or to detect that no propaganda technique is being used in that piece of text. As such, this first sub-task is a multi-label classification problem with a pool of 18 possible labels. Subtask 2 extends sub-task 1, by requiring the identification of the exact text span in which a propaganda technique was employed, making it a sequence labeling problem. For task 1, a combination of a data augmentation strategy coupled with an enabled transformer-based model comprised our classification model. This classification model ranked first amongst the 14 systems participating in this subtask. For sub-task two, a transfer learning model was adopted. The system ranked third among the 3 different models that participated in this subtask.

EMNLP 2022

NGU_CNLP atWANLP 2022 Shared Task: Propaganda Detection in Arabic

propaganda_detection

arabic_nlp

transformers

This paper presents the system developed by the NGU_CNLP team for addressing the shared task on Propaganda Detection in Arabic at WANLP 2022. The team participated in the shared tasks' two sub-tasks which are: 1) Propaganda technique identification in text and 2) Propaganda technique span identification. In the first sub-task, the goal is to detect all employed propaganda techniques in some given piece of text out of a possible 17 different techniques or to detect that no propaganda technique is being used in that piece of text. As such, this first sub-task is a multi-label classification problem with a pool of 18 possible labels. Subtask 2 extends sub-task 1, by requiring the identification of the exact text span in which a propaganda technique was employed, making it a sequence labeling problem. For task 1, a combination of a data augmentation strategy coupled with an enabled transformer-based model comprised our classification model. This classification model ranked first amongst the 14 systems participating in this subtask. For sub-task two, a transfer learning model was adopted. The system ranked third among the 3 different models that participated in this subtask.

workshop paper

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Transliteration is an important task in natural language processing (NLP) which aims to convert a name in the source language to the target language without changing its pronunciation. Particularly, transliteration from English to Arabic is highly needed in many applications, especially in countries (e.g., United Arab Emirates (UAE)) whose most citizens are foreigners but the official language is Arabic. In such a task-oriented scenario, namely transliterating the English names to the corresponding Arabic ones, the performance of the transliteration model is highly important. However, most existing neural approaches mainly apply a universal transliteration model with advanced encoders and decoders to the task, where limited attention is paid to leveraging the phonemic association between English and Arabic to further improve model performance. In this paper, we focus on transliteration of people's names from English to Arabic for the general public. In doing so, we collect a corpus named EANames by extracting high quality name pairs from online resources which better represent the names in the general public than linked Wikipedia entries that are always names of famous people). We propose a model for English-Arabic transliteration, where a memory module modeling the phonemic association between English and Arabic is used to guide the transliteration process. We run experiments on the collected data and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for English-Arabic transliteration.

Improving English-Arabic Transliteration with Phonemic Memories

Microaggressions are subtle manifestations of bias (Breitfeller et al., 2019). These demonstrations of bias can often be classified as a subset of abusive language. However, not as much focus has been placed on the recognition of these instances. In this study, we introduce an unsupervised method to detect microaggressions in natural language expressions. The algorithm relies on pre-trained word-embeddings, leveraging the bias encoded in the model in order to detect microaggressions in unseen textual instances. We test the method on a dataset of
racial and gender-based microaggressions, reporting promising results.

Leveraging Bias in Pre-trained Word Embeddings for Unsupervised Microaggression Detection

The major component of a news item that aids in giving a quick peek at the article's theme is the headline. The process of creating a headline involves summarizing an article to produce a summary that is sufficient in terms of clarity and consistency. Although many different types of research have been done in the domain of headline generation, it is still difficult to create an effective machine-generated title. Additionally, those methods do not work well for morphologically rich languages like Amharic. We proposed a neural headline generation model using transformers and different types of embedding techniques.

Transformer Based Amharic Headline Generation using Sub-word2Vec Representation

Building a question answering (QA) model with less annotation costs can be achieved by utilizing active learning (AL) training strategy. It selects the most informative unlabeled training data to update the model effectively. Acquisition functions for AL are used to determine how informative each training example is, such as uncertainty or diversity based sampling. In this work, we propose a perturbation-based active learning acquisition strategy and demonstrate it is more effective than existing commonly used strategies for the QA task.

Perturbation-based Active Learning for Question Answering

Identification of hate speech (HS) on social media platforms has become a Sisyphean task with the increment of web data availability and the human knack for discovering loopholes in the existing HS detection algorithms.This study conducts a comparative analysis of the merits of using two transformer approaches for HS detection: BART and RoBERTa. By considering popular benchmark data sets, we show that the BART outperforms RoBERTa for the monolingual classification of both finding hate and non-hate as well as classifying hate speech into categories.

Short Comparative Analysis on Pretrained BART and RoBERTa in
Detecting Hate Speech on YouTube and Reddit Platforms

These days, many people use social media as a source of information and medium of communication due to its easy to access, fast to disseminate and low cost platform. However, it also enables the wide propagation of fake news which causes economic, political, and social crises to the society. As a result, many researchers have been working towards detecting fake news. Most of the researches concerned on linguistic analysis of news content to identify its credibility, however fake news is also written intentionally to mislead users by mimicking true news. Beside this, Amharic is one of the under-resourced language that suffer from the benefits of fake news detection. To overcome the problem of fake news using content feature and under-resourced language, this study uses a feature fusion of linguistic and social context feature of the publisher information to detect Amharic fake news. The fusion-based experiment shows at least 94.13% and at most 98.7% relative error reduction over the content-based approaches.

Amharic Fake News Detection on Social Media Using Feature Fusion

The main goal of this work is to develop bi-directional machine translation between Amharic and Kistanigna. Due to an increase in the number of language users, to address the issues of the endangered of the Kistanigna language and to increases the content of the language in web, it is essential to develop machine translation between Kistanigna and Amharic language. In this study the translation is implemented using neural machine translation. We conduct the experiments using LSTM, Bi-LSTM, LSTM + attention, CNN + attention and Transformer encoder-decoder model. We considered training time, memory usage, and BLEU score when proposing an optimal model. Finally, we suggested the morpheme-based bidirectional machine translation using Transformer with BLEU scores of 21.31 and 22.40 for Amharic-Kistanigna and Kistanigna-Amharic translation respectively. The major weakness of the study is unavailability of enough dataset to conduct an extensive experiment. As a result, there is a need to prepare parallel corpora for conducting similar research.


Amharic-Kistangigna Bi-directional Machine Translation using Deep Learning

Lexical ambiguity is a pervasive feature of natural language, and a major difficulty in understanding language is selecting the intended meaning when more than one are possible. Despite this difficulty, many studies have found a processing advantage for words with multiple related meanings. There are mixed results for words with multiple unrelated meanings. Our work investigates whether contextualized word embeddings are able to capture human-like distinctions between senses and meanings and whether they can predict human behavior. We reanalyze data from previous experiments and find that our method does replicate the polyseme advantage and homonym disadvantage previously reported. Additionally, our contin- uous predictors are superior to binary distinctions derived from lexicographic resources.

Contextual Embeddings Can Distinguish Homonymy from Polysemy in a Human-Like Way

Garden path sentences (i.e. “the horse raced past the barn fell”) are sentences that readers initially incorrectly parse, requiring partial or total re-analysis of the sentence structure. Given human difficulty in parsing garden paths, we aim to compare transformer language models’ performance on these sentences. We assess a BERT question-answering model’s performance on comprehension questions based on garden path and control sentences. We then further investigate the semantic roles assigned to arguments of verbs in garden path and control sentences by utilizing a probe task to directly assess which semantic role(s) BERT assigns. We find that BERT has relatively low performance in question answering based on garden path contexts, and the model incorrectly assigns semantic roles, aligning for the most part with human performance.

The BERT Walked Down the Garden Path Assigned Semantic Roles

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have become a very natural human-machine interaction in which it allows users to speak entries rather than punching numbers on a keypad. This study presents an ASR system for Amharic language that is one of the Ethiopian Languages. The current attempts on speech recognition systems require thousands of hours of transcribed speech dataset to reach adequate accuracy. However, the large majority of under-resourced spoken languages in general, Ethiopic languages in particular, have a very limited amount of labeled speech dataset. Thus, in this study, a self-supervised Transformer based Wave2Vec 2.0 approach has been conducted to build an ASR system. In order to pretrain the proposed model in an unsupervised approach, a total of more than 200 hours unlabeled speech have been collected. In addition, a total of 30 minutes of labeled speech dataset has been prepared. Then, a Wave2Vec model that is initialized with weighted parameters has been pre-trained on the unlabeled speech 
dataset. Then the pretrained model has been fine-tuned using a small amount of labeled speech dataset. A standard Word Error Rate (WER) evaluation metric has been used to evaluate the fine-tuned multilingual ASR model and it has 
shown a clear significant result.

NGU_CNLP atWANLP 2022 Shared Task: Propaganda Detection in Arabic

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NGU_CNLP atWANLP 2022 Shared Task: Propaganda Detection in Arabic

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Improving English-Arabic Transliteration with Phonemic Memories

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