We propose a new unsupervised method for lexical substitution using pre-trained language models. Compared to previous approaches that use the generative capability of language models to predict substitutes, our method retrieves substitutes based on the similarity of contextualised and decontextualised word embeddings, i.e. the average contextual representation of a word in multiple contexts. We conduct experiments in English and Italian, and show that our method substantially outperforms strong baselines and establishes a new state-of-the-art without any explicit supervision or fine-tuning. We further show that our method performs particularly well at predicting low-frequency substitutes, and also generates a diverse list of substitute candidates, reducing morphophonetic or morphosyntactic biases induced by article–noun agreement in English and Italian.

Unsupervised Lexical Substitution with Decontextualised Embeddings

We propose a new approach for learning contextualised cross-lingual word embeddings based on a small parallel corpus (e.g. a few hundred sentence pairs). Our method obtains word embeddings via an LSTM encoder-decoder model that simultaneously translates and reconstructs an input sentence. Through sharing model parameters among different languages, our model jointly trains the word embeddings in a common cross-lingual space. We also propose to combine word and subword embeddings to make use of orthographic similarities across different languages. We base our experiments on real-world data from endangered languages, namely Yongning Na, Shipibo-Konibo, and Griko. Our experiments on bilingual lexicon induction and word alignment tasks show that our model outperforms existing methods by a large margin for most language pairs. These results demonstrate that, contrary to common belief, an encoder-decoder translation model is beneficial for learning cross-lingual representations even in extremely low-resource conditions. Furthermore, our model also works well on high-resource conditions, achieving state-of-the-art performance on a German-English word-alignment task.

Learning Contextualised Cross-lingual Word Embeddings and Alignments for Extremely Low-Resource Languages Using Parallel Corpora

We propose a simple method for nominal coordination boundary identification. As the main strength of our method, it can identify the coordination boundary without training on labeled data, and can be applied even if coordination structure annotations are not available. Our system employs pre-trained word embeddings to measure the similarities of words and detects the span of coordination, assuming that conjuncts share syntactic and semantic similarities. We demonstrate that our method yields good results in identifying coordinated noun phrases in the GENIA corpus and is comparable to a recent supervised method for the case when the coordinator conjoins simple noun phrases.

Coordination Boundary Identification without Labeled Data for Compound Terms Disambiguation

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OS18 - Lexicon and Semantics

technical paper

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### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!<br><br><br>

To gain access to this event page you are required to register.<br> Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.



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W13: The 1st Workshop on Multi-lingual Representation Learning (MRL)

workshop paper

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

Access is given only to EMNLP upon registration, if you have not registered please do so [here](https://2021.emnlp.org/registration).

Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

POSTER11: Semantics 2

poster

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

Takashi Wada

3

6

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Unsupervised Lexical Substitution with Decontextualised Embeddings

Learning Contextualised Cross-lingual Word Embeddings and Alignments for Extremely Low-Resource Languages Using Parallel Corpora

Coordination Boundary Identification without Labeled Data for Compound Terms Disambiguation

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