Croatia

Machine learning drives forward the development in many areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Until now, many NLP systems and research are focusing on high-resource languages, i.e. languages for which many data resources exist. Recently, so-called low-resource languages increasingly come into focus. In this context, multi-lingual language models, which are trained on related languages to a target low-resource language, may enable NLP tasks on this low-resource language. In this work, we investigate the use of multi-lingual models for Named Entity Recognition (NER) for low-resource languages. We consider the West Slavic language family and the low-resource languages Upper Sorbian and Kashubian. Three RoBERTa models were trained from scratch, two mono-lingual models for
Czech and Polish, and one bi-lingual model for Czech and Polish. These models were
evaluated on the NER downstream task for Czech, Polish, Upper Sorbian, and Kashubian, and compared to existing state-of-the-art models such as RobeCzech, HerBERT, and XLM-R. The results indicate that the mono-lingual models perform better on the language they were trained on, and both the mono-lingual and
language family models outperform the large multi-lingual model in downstream tasks. Overall, the study shows that low-resource West Slavic languages can benefit from closely related languages and their models.


EACL 2023

Named Entity Recognition for Low-Resource Languages – Profiting from Language Families

language families

low-resource languages

transfer learning

workshop paper

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Recently, open-domain question answering systems have begun to rely heavily on annotated datasets to train neural passage retrievers. However, manually annotating such datasets is both difficult and time-consuming, which limits their availability for less popular languages. In this work, we experiment with several methods for automatically collecting weakly labeled datasets and show how they affect the performance of the neural passage retrieval models. As a result of our work, we publish the MAUPQA dataset, consisting of nearly 400,000 question-passage pairs for Polish, as well as the HerBERT-QA neural retriever.

MAUPQA: Massive Automatically-created Polish Question Answering Dataset

Pre-trained Transformer-based models have become immensely popular amongst NLP practitioners. We present TrelBERT -- the first Polish language model suited for application in the social media domain. TrelBERT is based on an existing general-domain model and adapted to the language of social media by pre-training it further on a large collection of Twitter data. We demonstrate its usefulness by evaluating it in the downstream task of cyberbullying detection, in which it achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming larger monolingual models trained on general-domain corpora, as well as multilingual in-domain models, by a large margin. We make the model publicly available. We also release a new dataset for the problem of harmful speech detection.

TrelBERT: A pre-trained encoder for Polish Twitter

This paper introduces Cro-FiReDa, a sentiment-annotated dataset for Croatian in the domain of movie reviews. The dataset, which contains over 10,000 sentences, has been annotated at the sentence level. In addition to presenting the overall annotation process, we also present benchmark results based on the transformer-based fine-tuning approach.

Croatian Film Review Dataset (Cro-FiReDa): A Sentiment AnnotatedDataset of Film Reviews

This paper investigates whether adding data of typologically closer languages improves the performance of transformer-based models for three different downstream tasks, namely Part-of-Speech tagging, Named Entity Recognition, and Sentiment Analysis, compared to a monolingual and plain multilingual language model. For the presented pilot study, we performed experiments for the use case of Slovene, a low(er)-resourced language belonging to the Slavic language group. The experiments were carried out in a controlled setting, where a monolingual model for Slovene was compared to combined language models containing Slovene, trained with the same amount of Slovene data. The experimental results show that adding typologically closer languages indeed improves the performance of the Slovene language model, and even succeeds in outperforming the large multilingual XLM-RoBERTa model for NER and PoS-tagging. We also reveal that, contrary to intuition, distant or unrelated languages also combine admirably with Slovene, often out-performing XLM-R as well. All the bilingual models used in the experiments are publicly available.

Too Many Cooks Spoil the Model: Are Bilingual Models for Slovene Better than a Large Multilingual Model?

This work examines a case study that investigates (1) the achievability of extracting typological features from Polish texts, and (2) their contrastive power to discriminate between machine-translated texts from English. The findings indicate potential for a proposed method that deals with the explainable prediction of the source language of translated texts.

Machine-Translated Texts from English to Polish Show a Potential for Typological Explanations in Source Language Identification

Transfer learning is one of the prevailing approaches towards training language-specific BERT models. However, some languages have uncommon features that may prove to be challenging to more domain-general models but not domain-specific models. Comparing the performance of BERTić, a Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian model, and Multilingual BERT on a Named-Entity Recognition (NER) task and Masked Language Modelling (MLM) task based around a rare phenomenon of indeclinable female foreign names in Serbian reveals how the different training approaches impacts their performance. Multilingual BERT is shown to perform better than BERTić in the NER task, but BERTić greatly exceeds in the MLM task. Thus, there are applications both for domain-general training and domain-specific training depending on the tasks at hand.

Comparing domain-specific and domain-general BERT variants for inferred real-world knowledge through rare grammatical features in Serbian

Word embeddings and pre-trained language models have achieved great performance in many tasks due to their ability to capture both syntactic and semantic information in their representations. The vector space representations
have also been used to identify figurative language shifts such as metaphors, however, the more recent contextualized models have mostly been evaluated via their performance on down-stream tasks. In this article, we evaluate static
and contextualized word embeddings in terms of their representation and unsupervised identification of relation-level (ADJ-NOUN, NOUN-NOUN) metaphors in Slovene on a set of 24 literal and 24 metaphorical phrases. Our experiments show very promising results for both embedding methods, however, the performance in contextual embeddings notably depends on the layer involved and the input provided to the model.

Dispersing the clouds of doubt: can cosine similarity of word embeddings help identify relation-level metaphors in Slovene?

This presentation is about my research on the possibilities to control automatic text simplification with special tokens that allow modifying the length, paraphrasing degree, syntactic complexity, and the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) grade level of the output texts, i.e. the level of language proficiency a non-native speaker would need to understand them. The project is focused on Russian texts and aims to continue and broaden the existing research on controlled Russian text simplification. It is done by exploring available datasets for monolingual Russian machine translation (paraphrasing and simplification), experimenting with various model architectures, and adding control tokens that have not been used on Russian texts previously.

Automatic text simplification of Russian texts using control tokens

Sentiment analysis is often used to examine how different actors are portrayed in the media, and analysis of news headlines is of particular interest due to their attention-grabbing role. We address the task of entity-level sentiment analysis from Croatian news headlines. We frame the task as targeted sentiment analysis (TSA), explicitly differentiating between sentiment toward a named entity and the overall tone of the headline. We describe SToNe, a new dataset for this task with sentiment and tone labels. We implement several neural benchmark models, utilizing single- and multi-task training, and show that TSA can benefit from tone information. Finally, we gauge the difficulty of this task by leveraging dataset cartography.

Target Two Birds with One SToNe: Entity-level Sentiment and Tone Analysis in Croatian News Headlines

In the light of recent developments in NLP, the problem of understanding and interpreting large language models has gained a lot of urgency. Methods developed to study this area are subject to considerable scrutiny. In this work, we take a closer look at one such method, the structural probe introduced by Hewitt and Manning (2019). We run a series of experiments involving multiple languages, focusing principally on the group of Slavic languages. We show that probing results can be seen as a reflection of linguistic classification, and conclude that multilingual BERT learns facts about languages and their groups.

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Named Entity Recognition for Low-Resource Languages – Profiting from Language Families

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MAUPQA: Massive Automatically-created Polish Question Answering Dataset

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