Mexico

This paper aims to assess the role of multiword compound adverbs in distinguishing Brazilian Portuguese (PT-BR) from European Portuguese (PT-PT). Two key factors underpin this focus: Firstly, multiword expressions often provide less ambiguity compared to single words, even when their meaning is idiomatic (non-compositional). Secondly, despite constituting a significant portion of lexicons in many languages, they are frequently overlooked in Natural Language Processing, possibly due to their heterogeneous nature and lexical range.
For this study, a large lexicon of Portuguese multiword adverbs (3,665) annotated with diatopic information regarding language variety was utilized. 
The paper investigates the distribution of this category in a corpus consisting in excerpts from journalistic texts sourced from the DSL (Dialect and Similar Language) corpus, representing Brazilian (PT-BR) and European Portuguese (PT-PT), respectively, each partition containing 18,000 sentences.
Results indicate a substantial similarity between the two varieties, with a considerable overlap in the lexicon of multiword adverbs. Additionally, specific adverbs unique to each language variety were identified. 
Lexical entries recognized in the corpus represent 18.2% (PT-BR) to 19.5% (PT-PT) of the lexicon, and approximately 5,700 matches in each partition. While many of the matches are spurious due to ambiguity with otherwise non-idiomatic, free strings, occurrences of adverbs marked as exclusive to one variety in texts from the other variety are rare.

NAACL 2024

The Role of Adverbs in Language Variety Identification: The case of Portuguese Multiword Adverbs

european

brazilian

multi-word adverbs

portuguese

language variety

workshop paper

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
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Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Spanish is an official language in 20 countries; in 19 of them, it arrived by means of overseas colonisation. Its close contact with several coexistent languages and the rich regional and cultural diversity has produced varieties which divert from each other. We study these divergences in a data-based approach and according to their qualitative and quantitative effects in word embeddings. We generate embeddings for Spanish in 24 countries and examine the topology of the spaces. Due to the similarities between varieties —in contrast to what happens to different languages in bilingual topological studies— we first scrutinise the behaviour of three isomorphism measures in (quasi-)isomorphic settings: relational similarity, Eigenvalue similarity and Gromov-Hausdorff distance. We then use the most trustworthy measure to quantify the divergences among varieties. Finally, we use the departures from isomorphism to build relational trees for the Spanish varieties by hierarchical clustering.

When Elote, Choclo and Mazorca are not the same. Isomorphism-based Perspective to the Spanish Varieties Divergences

The paper presents new causal commonsense reasoning datasets for South Slavic dialects, based on the Choice of Plausible Alternatives (COPA) dataset. The dialectal datasets are built by translating by native dialect speakers from the English original and the corresponding standard translation. Three dialects are covered -- the Cerkno dialect of Slovenian, the Chakavian dialect of Croatian and the Torlak dialect of Serbian. The datasets are the first resource for evaluation of large language models on South Slavic dialects, as well as among the first commonsense reasoning datasets on dialects overall. The paper describes specific challenges met during the translation process. A comparison of the dialectal datasets with their standard language counterparts shows a varying level of character-level, word-level and lexicon-level deviation of dialectal text from the standard datasets. The observed differences are well reproduced in initial zero-shot and 10-shot experiments, where the Slovenian Cerkno dialect and the Croatian Chakavian dialect show significantly lower results than the Torlak dialect. These results show also for the dialectal datasets to be significantly more challenging than the standard datasets. Finally, in-context learning on just 10 examples shows to improve the results dramatically, especially for the dialects with the lowest results.

DIALECT-COPA: Extending the Standard Translations of the COPA Causal Commonsense Reasoning Dataset to South Slavic Dialects

This paper presents a new textual resource for Norwegian and its dialects. The NoMusic corpus contains Norwegian translations of the xSID dataset, an evaluation dataset for spoken language understanding (slot and intent detection). The translations cover Norwegian Bokmål, as well as eight dialects from three of the four major Norwegian dialect areas. To our knowledge, this is the first multi-parallel resource for written Norwegian dialects, and the first evaluation dataset for slot and intent detection focusing on non-standard Norwegian varieties. In this paper, we describe the annotation process and provide some analyses on the types of linguistic variation that can be found in the dataset.

NoMusic - The Norwegian Multi-Dialectal Slot and Intent Detection Corpus

The VLP team participated in the DSL-ML shared task of the VarDial 2024 workshop which aims to distinguish texts in similar languages. This paper presents our approach to solving the problem and discusses our experimental and official results. We propose to integrate semantics-aware word embeddings which are learned from ConceptNet into a bidirectional long short-term memory network. This approach achieves good performance – our sys- tem is ranked in the top two or three of the best performing teams for the task.

Improving Multi-label Classification of Similar Languages by Semantics-Aware Word Embeddings

This report presents gmnlp's participation to the Dialect-Copa shared task at VarDial 2024~\cite{chifu-etal-2024-vardial}, which focuses on evaluating the commonsense reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) on South Slavic micro-dialects. The task aims to assess how well LLMs can handle non-standard dialectal varieties, as their performance on standard languages is already well-established. We propose an approach that combines the strengths of different types of language models and leverages data augmentation techniques to improve task performance on three South Slavic dialects: Chakavian, Cherkano, and Torlak. We conduct experiments using a language-family-focused encoder-based model (BERTić) and a domain-agnostic multilingual model (AYA-101). Our results demonstrate that the proposed data augmentation techniques lead to substantial performance gains across all three test datasets in the open-source model category. This work highlights the practical utility of data augmentation and the potential of LLMs in handling non-standard dialectal varieties, contributing to the broader goal of advancing natural language understanding in low-resource and dialectal settings.

Data-Augmentation based Dialectal Adaptation for LLMs

The paper presents the JSI and W\"{u}NLP systems submitted to the DIALECT-COPA shared task on causal commonsense reasoning in dialectal texts. Jointly, we compare LLM-based zero-shot and few-shot in-context inference (JSI team), and task-specific few-shot fine-tuning, in English and respective standard language, with zero-shot cross-lingual transfer (ZS-XLT) to the test dialects (W\"{u}NLP team). Given the very strong zero-shot and especially few-shot in-context learning (ICL) performance, we further investigate whether task semantics, or language/dialect semantics explain the strong performance, showing that a significant part of the improvement indeed stems from learning the language or dialect semantics from the in-context examples, with only a minor contribution from understanding the nature of the task. The higher importance of the dialect semantics to the task semantics is further shown by the finding that the in-context learning with only a few dialectal instances achieves comparable results to the supervised fine-tuning approach on hundreds of instances in standard language.

JSI and W\"{u}NLP at the DIALECT-COPA Shared Task: In-Context Learning From Just a Few Dialectal Examples Gets You Quite Far

We identify and analyse three sociolinguistic indicators of radicalisation within online extremist forums: hostility, longevity and social connectivity. We develop models to predict the maximum degree of each indicator measured over an individual's lifetime, based on a minimal number of initial interactions. Drawing on data from two diverse extremist communities, our results demonstrate that NLP methods are effective at prioritising at-risk users. This work offers practical insights for intervention strategies and policy development, and highlights an important but under-studied research direction.

Investigating radicalisation indicators in online extremist communities

The automated detection of conspiracy theories online typically relies on supervised learning. However, creating respective training data requires expertise, time and mental resilience, given the often harmful content. Moreover, available datasets are predominantly in English and often keyword-based, introducing a token-level bias into the models. 
Our work addresses the task of detecting conspiracy theories in German Telegram messages. We compare the performance of supervised fine-tuning approaches using BERT-like models with prompt-based approaches using Llama2, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 which require little or no additional training data. We use a dataset of ~4,000 messages collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, without the use of keyword filters.

Our findings demonstrate that both approaches can be leveraged effectively: For supervised fine-tuning, we report an F1 score of $\sim\!\! 0.8$ for the positive class, making our model comparable to recent models trained on keyword-focused English corpora. We demonstrate our model's adaptability to intra-domain temporal shifts, achieving F1 scores of ~0.7. Among prompting variants, the best model is GPT-4, achieving an F1 score of ~0.8 for the positive class in a zero-shot setting and equipped with a custom conspiracy theory definition.

Detection of Conspiracy Theories Beyond Keyword Bias in German-Language Telegram Using Large Language Models

Nigerians have a notable online presence and actively discuss political and topical matters. This was particularly evident throughout the 2023 general election, where Twitter was used for campaigning, fact-checking and verification, and even positive and negative discourse. However, little or none has been done in the detection of abusive language and hate speech in Nigeria. In this paper, we curated \textit{code-switched} Twitter data directed at three musketeers of the governorship election on the most populous and economically vibrant state in Nigeria; Lagos state, with the view to detect offensive speech in political discussions. We developed EkoHate---an abusive language and hate speech dataset for political discussions between the three candidates and their followers using a binary (normal vs offensive) and fine-grained four-label annotation scheme. We analysed our dataset and provided an empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art methods across both supervised and cross-lingual transfer learning settings. In the supervised setting, our evaluation results in both binary and four-label annotation schemes show that we can achieve 95.1 and 70.3 F1 points respectively. Furthermore, we show that our dataset adequately transfers very well to three publicly available offensive datasets (OLID, HateUS2020, and FountaHate), generalizing to political discussions in other regions like the US.

EkoHate: Abusive Language and Hate Speech Detection for Code-switched Political Discussions on Nigerian Twitter

Abusive language detection has drawn increasing interest in recent years. However, a less systematically explored obstacle is label imbalance, i.e., the amount of abusive data is much lower than non-abusive data, leading to performance issues. The aim of this work is to conduct a comprehensive comparative study of popular methods for addressing the class imbalance issue. We explore 10 well-known approaches on 8 datasets with distinct characteristics: binary or multi-class, moderately or largely imbalanced, focusing on various types of abuse, etc. Additionally, we pro-
pose two novel methods specialized for abuse detection: AbusiveLexiconAug and ExternalDataAug, which enrich the training data using abusive lexicons and external abusive datasets, respectively. We conclude that: 1) our AbusiveLexiconAug approach, random oversampling, and focal loss are the most versatile methods on various datasets; 2) focal loss tends to yield peak model performance; 3) oversampling and focal loss provide promising results for binary datasets and small multi-class sets, while undersampling and weighted cross-entropy are more suitable for large multi-class sets; 4) most methods are sensitive to hyperparameters, yet our suggested choice of hyperparameters provides a good starting point.

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The Role of Adverbs in Language Variety Identification: The case of Portuguese Multiword Adverbs

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When Elote, Choclo and Mazorca are not the same. Isomorphism-based Perspective to the Spanish Varieties Divergences

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