Croatia

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.

EACL 2023

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

serbian

under-resourced languages

morphology

bertology

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.

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.

Is German secretly a Slavic language? What BERT probing can tell us about language groups

Despite the rapid recent progress in creating accurate and compact in-context learners, most recent work focuses on in-context learning (ICL) for tasks in English. However, the ability to interact with users of languages outside English presents a great potential for broadening the applicability of language technologies to non-English speakers.
In this work, we collect the infrastructure necessary for training and evaluation of ICL in a selection of Slavic languages: Czech, Polish, and Russian. We link a diverse set of datasets and cast these into a unified instructional format through a set of transformations and newly-crafted templates written purely in target languages. Using the newly-curated dataset, we evaluate a set of the most recent in-context learners and compare their results to the supervised baselines. Finally, we train, evaluate and publish a set of in-context learning models that we train on the collected resources and compare their performance to previous work.
We find that ICL models tuned in English are also able to learn some tasks from non-English contexts, but multilingual instruction fine-tuning consistently improves the ICL ability. We also find that the massive multitask training can be outperformed by single-task training in the target language, uncovering the potential for specializing in-context learners to the language(s) of their application.

Resources and Few-shot Learners for In-context Learning in Slavic Languages

This paper focuses on Named Entity Recognition for South-Slavic languages using pre-trained multilingual neural network models. We investigate whether the performance of the models for a target language can be improved by using data from closely related languages. The results show that this is not the case for the Slovene language, while for Croatian and Serbian, the results are better in selected cross-lingual settings. The most significant performance improvement is observed for the Serbian language, which has the smallest corpora, showing the potential of the method in less-resourced settings.

Analysis of Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition in South-Slavic Languages

Radiology reports are vital elements of directing patient care. They are usually delivered in free text form, which makes them prone to errors, such as omission in reporting radiological findings and using difficult-to-comprehend mental shortcuts. Although structured reporting is the recommended method, its adoption continues to be limited. Radiologists find structured reports too limiting and burdensome. In this paper, we propose the model, which is meant to preserve the benefits of free text, while moving towards a structured report. The model automatically parametrizes Polish radiology reports based on language models. The models are trained on a large dataset of 1200 chest computed tomography (CT) reports annotated by multiple medical experts reports with 44 observation tags. Experimental analysis shows that models based on language models are able to achieve satisfactory results despite being pre-trained on general domain corpora. Overall, the model achieves an F1 score of 81% and is able to successfully parametrize the most common radiological observations, allowing for potential adaptation in clinical practice. Our model is publicly available at {github.com/AleksanderObuchowski/PLRadIE.

Information Extraction from Polish Radiology Reports using Language Models

Can BERT eat RuCoLA? Topological Data Analysis to Explain

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental NLP tasks with a wide range of practical applications. The performance of state-of-the-art NER methods depends on high quality manually anotated datasets which still do not exist for some languages. In this work we aim to remedy this situation in Slovak by introducing WikiGoldSK, the first sizable human labelled Slovak NER dataset. 
We benchmark it by evaluating state-of-the-art multilingual Pretrained Language Models and comparing it to the existing silver-standard Slovak NER dataset.
We also conduct few-shot experiments and show that training on a sliver-standard dataset yields better results. To enable future work that can be based on Slovak NER, we release the dataset, code, as well as the trained models publicly under permissible licensing terms at https://github.com/NaiveNeuron/WikiGoldSK.

WikiGoldSK: Annotated Dataset, Baselines and Few-Shot Learning Experiments for Slovak Named Entity Recognition

Pre-trained language models have been known to perpetuate biases from the underlying datasets to downstream tasks. However, these findings are predominantly based on monolingual language models for English, whereas there are few investigative studies of biases encoded in language models for languages beyond English. In this paper, we fill this gap by analysing gender bias in West Slavic language models. We introduce the first template-based dataset in Czech, Polish, and Slovak for measuring gender bias towards male, female and non-binary subjects. We complete the sentences using both mono- and multilingual language models and assess their suitability for the masked language modelling objective. Next, we measure gender bias encoded in West Slavic language models by quantifying the toxicity and genderness of the generated words. We find that these language models produce hurtful completions that depend on the subject's gender. Perhaps surprisingly, Czech, Slovak, and Polish language models produce more hurtful completions with men as subjects, which, upon inspection, we find is due to completions being related to violence, death, and sickness.

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

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

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