Malta

SIGTYP’s Shared Task on Word Embedding Evaluation for Ancient and Historical Languages was proposed in two variants, constrained or unconstrained. Whereas the constrained variant disallowed any other data to train embeddings or models than the data provided, the unconstrained variant did not have these limits. We participated in the five tasks of the unconstrained variant and came out first. The tasks were the prediction of part-of-speech, lemmas and morphological features and filling masked words and masked characters on 16 historical languages. We decided to use a dependency parser and train the data using an underlying pretrained transformer model to predict part-of-speech tags, lemmas, and morphological features. For predicting masked words, we used multilingual distilBERT (with rather bad results). In order to predict masked characters, our language model is extremely small: it is a model of 5-gram frequencies, obtained by reading the available training data.

EACL 2024

UDParse @ SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task : Modern Language Models for
Historical Languages

historical languages

morphological features

pos tagging

lemmatisation

workshop paper

Welcome to the 18th 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 has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. 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. 
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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.

In this paper, we describe Allen AI’s submission to the constrained track of the SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task. Using only the data provided by the organizers, we pretrained a transformer-based multilingual model, then finetuned it on the Universal Dependencies (UD) annotations of a given language for a downstream task. Our systems achieved decent performance on the test set, beating the baseline in most language-task pairs, yet struggles with subtoken tags in multiword expressions as seen in Coptic and Ancient Hebrew. On the validation set, we obtained ≥70% F1- score on most language-task pairs. In addition, we also explored the cross-lingual capability of our trained models. This paper highlights our pretraining and finetuning process, and our findings from our internal evaluations.

Allen Institute for AI @ SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task on Word Embedding
Evaluation for Ancient and Historical Languages

This paper discusses the organisation and findings of the SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task on Word Embedding Evaluation for Ancient and Historical Languages. The shared task was split into the constrained and unconstrained tracks and involved solving either 3 or 5 problems for either 13 or 16 ancient and historical languages belonging to 4 language families, and making use of 6 different scripts. There were 14 registrations in total, of which 3 teams submitted to each track. Out of these 6 submissions, 2 systems were successful in the constrained setting and another 2 in the unconstrained setting, and 4 system description papers were submitted by different teams. The best average result for morphological feature prediction was about 96%, while the best average results for POS-tagging and lemmatisation were 96% and 94% respectively. At the word level, the winning team could not achieve a higher average accuracy across all 16 languages than 5.95%, which demonstrates the diﬀiculty of this problem. At the character level, the best average result over 16 languages 55.62%.

Findings of the SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task on Word Embedding
Evaluation for Ancient and Historical Languages

Visually Rich Form Understanding (VRFU) poses a complex research problem
due to the documents' highly structured nature and yet highly variable style and content. Current annotation schemes decompose form understanding and omit key hierarchical structure, making development and evaluation of end-to-end models difficult. In this paper, we propose a novel F1 metric to evaluate form parsers and describe a new content-agnostic, tree-based annotation scheme for VRFU: TreeForm. We provide methods to convert previous annotation schemes into TreeForm structures and evaluate TreeForm predictions using a modified version of the normalized tree-edit distance. We present initial baselines for our end-to-end performance metric and the TreeForm edit distance, averaged over the FUNSD and XFUND datasets, of 61.5 and 26.4 respectively. We hope that TreeForm encourages deeper research in annotating, modeling, and evaluating the complexities of form-like documents.

TreeForm: End-to-end Annotation and Evaluation for Form Document Parsing

We introduce a detailed annotation scheme for argument structure constructions (ASCs) along with a manually annotated ASC treebank. This treebank encompasses 10,204 sentences from both first (5,936) and second language English datasets (1,948 for written; 2,320 for spoken). We detail the annotation process and evaluate inter-annotation agreement for overall and each ASC category.

Annotation Scheme for English Argument Structure Constructions Treebank

In Emotion Detection within Natural Language Processing and related multimodal research, the growth of datasets and models has led to a challenge: disparities in emotion classification methods. The lack of commonly agreed upon conventions on the classification of emotions creates boundaries for model comparisons and dataset adaptation. In this paper, we compare the current classification methods in recent models and datasets and propose a valid method to combine different emotion categories. Our proposal arises from experiments across models, psychological theories, and human evaluations, and we examined the effect of proposed mapping on models.

A Mapping on Current Classifying Categories of Emotions Used in Multimodal Models for Emotion Recognition

In the realm of Machine Learning and Deep Learning, there is a need for high-quality annotated data to train and evaluate supervised models. An extensive number of annotation tools have been developed to facilitate the data labelling process. However, finding the right tool is a demanding task involving thorough searching and testing. Hence, to effectively navigate the multitude of tools, it becomes essential to ensure their findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR). This survey addresses the FAIRness of existing annotation software by evaluating 50 different tools against the FAIR principles for research software (FAIR4RS). The study indicates that while being accessible and interoperable, annotation tools are difficult to find and reuse. In addition, there is a need to establish community standards for annotation software development, documentation, and distribution.

Surveying the FAIRness of Annotation Tools: Difficult to find, difficult to reuse

Beyond enabling linguistic analyses, linguistic annotations may serve as training material for developing automatic language assessment models as well as for providing textual feedback to language learners. Yet these linguistic annotations in their original form are often not easily comprehensible for learners. In this paper, we explore the utilization of GPT-4, as an example of a large language model (LLM), to process linguistic annotations into clear and understandable feedback on their productions for language learners, specifically sign language learners.

Automatic Annotation Elaboration as Feedback to Sign Language Learners

The prevalence of social media presents a growing opportunity to collect and analyse examples of English varieties. Whilst usage of these varieties is often used only in spoken contexts or hard-to-access private messages, social media sites like Twitter provide a platform for users to communicate informally in a scrapeable format. Notably, Indian English (Hinglish), Singaporean English (Singlish), and African-American English (AAE) can be commonly found online. These varieties pose a challenge to existing natural language processing (NLP) tools as they often differ orthographically and syntactically from standard English for which the majority of these tools are built. NLP models trained on standard English texts produced biased outcomes for users of underrepresented varieties (Blodgett and O'Connor, 2017). Some research has aimed to overcome the inherent biases caused by unrepresentative data through techniques like data augmentation or adjusting training models. We aim to address the issue of bias at its root - the data itself. We curate a dataset of tweets from countries with high proportions of underserved English variety speakers, and propose an annotation framework of six categorical classifications along a pseudo-spectrum that measures the degree of standard English and that thereby indirectly aims to surface the manifestations of English varieties in these tweets.

Towards Better Inclusivity: A Diverse Tweet Corpus of English Varieties

Access to jurisprudence is of paramount importance for both law professionals (judges, lawyers, law students) and for the larger public. In Romania, the Superior Council of Magistracy holds a large database of jurisprudence from different courts in the country, which is updated daily. However, granting public access requires its anonymization. This paper presents the efforts behind building a corpus for the anonymization process. We present the annotation scheme, the manual annotation methods, and the platform used.

Building a corpus for the anonymization of Romanian jurisprudence

Recent developments in active learning algorithms for NLP tasks show promising results in terms of reducing labelling complexity. 
In this paper we extend this effort to imbalanced datasets; we bridge between the active learning approach of obtaining diverse and
informative examples, and the heuristic of class balancing used in imbalanced datasets. We develop a novel tune-free weighting technique that can
be applied to various existing active learning algorithms, adding a component of class balancing. 
We compare several active learning algorithms to their modified version on multiple public datasets
and show that when the classes are imbalanced, with manual annotation effort remaining equal the modified version significantly outperforms the original both in terms of the test metric and the number of obtained minority examples. Moreover, when the imbalance is mild or non-existent (classes are completely balanced), our technique does not harm the base algorithms.

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UDParse @ SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task : Modern Language Models for Historical Languages

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