Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What Does the Indian Parliament Discuss? An Exploratory Analysis of the Question Hour in the Lok Sabha

The TCPD-IPD dataset is a collection of questions and answers discussed in the Lower House of the Parliament of India during the Question Hour between 1999 and 2019. Although it is difficult to analyze such a huge collection manually, modern text analysis tools can provide a powerful means to navigate it. In this paper, we perform an exploratory analysis of the dataset. In particular, we present insightful corpus-level statistics and perform a more detailed analysis of three subsets of the dataset. In the latter analysis, the focus is on understanding the temporal evolution of topics using a dynamic topic model. We observe that the parliamentary conversation indeed mirrors the political and socio-economic tensions of each period.
ExpertNeurons at FinCausal 2022 Task 2: Causality Extraction for Financial Documents

In this paper describes the approach which we have built for causality extraction from the financial documents that we have submitted for FinCausal 2022 task 2. We proving a solution with intelligent pre-processing and post-processing to detect the number of cause and effect in a financial document and extract them. Our given approach achieved 90% as F1 score(weighted-average) for the official blind evaluation dataset.
Don’t Burst Blindly: For a Better Use of Natural Language Processing to Fight Opinion Bubbles in News Recommendations

Online news consumption plays an important role in shaping the political opinions of citizens. The news is often served by recommendation algorithms, which adapt content to users’ preferences. Such algorithms can lead to political polarization as the societal effects of the recommended content and recommendation design are disregarded. We posit that biases appear, at least in part, due to a weak entanglement between natural language processing and recommender systems, both processes yet at work in the diffusion and personalization of online information. We assume that both diversity and acceptability of recommended content would benefit from such a synergy. We discuss the limitations of current approaches as well as promising leads of opinion-mining integration for the political news recommendation process.
Pre-trained Models or Feature Engineering: The Case of Dialectal Arabic

The usage of social media platforms has resulted in the proliferation of work on Arabic Natural Language Processing (ANLP), including the development of resources. There is also an increased interest in processing Arabic dialects and a number of models and algorithms have been utilised for the purpose of Dialectal Arabic Natural Language Processing (DANLP). In this paper, we conduct a comparison study between some of the most well-known and most commonly used methods in NLP in order to test their performance on different corpora and two NLP tasks: Dialect Identification and Sentiment Analysis. In particular, we compare three general classes of models: a) traditional Machine Learning models with features, b) classic Deep Learning architectures (LSTMs) with pre-trained word embeddings and lastly c) different Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) models such as (Multilingual-BERT, Ara-BERT, and Twitter-Arabic-BERT). The results of the comparison show that using feature-based classification can still compete with BERT models in these dialectal Arabic contexts. The use of transformer models have the ability to outperform traditional Machine Learning approaches, depending on the type of text they have been trained on, in contrast to classic Deep Learning models like LSTMs which do not perform well on the tasks
Less Text, More Visuals: Evaluating the Onboarding Phase in a GWAP for NLP

Games-with-a-purpose find attracting players a challenge. To improve player recruitment, we explored two game design elements that can increase player engagement during the onboarding phase; a narrative and a tutorial. In a qualitative study with 12 players of linguistic and language learning games, we examined the effect of presentation format on players’ engagement. Our reflexive thematic analysis found that in the onboarding phase of a GWAP for NLP, presenting players with visuals is expected and pre- senting too much text overwhelms them. Furthermore, players found that the instructions they were presented with lacked linguistic context. Additionally, the tutorial and game interface required refinement as the feedback is unsupportive and the graphics were not clear.
Beyond Explanation: A Case for Exploratory Text Visualizations of Non-Aggregated, Annotated Datasets

This paper presents an overview of text visualization techniques relevant for data perspectivism, aiming to facilitate analysis of annotated datasets for the datasets’ creators and stakeholders. Data perspectivism advocates for publishing non-aggregated, annotated text data, recognizing that for highly subjective tasks, such as bias detection and hate speech detection, disagreements among annotators may indicate conflicting yet equally valid interpretations of a text. While the publication of non-aggregated, annotated data makes different interpretations of text corpora available, barriers still exist to investigating patterns and outliers in annotations of the text. Techniques from text visualization can overcome these barriers, facilitating intuitive data analysis for NLP researchers and practitioners, as well as stakeholders in NLP systems, who may not have data science or computing skills. In this paper we discuss challenges with current dataset creation practices and annotation platforms, followed by a discussion of text visualization techniques that enable open-ended, multi-faceted, and iterative analysis of annotated data.
Holography for Cosmology

We propose a holographic description of four-dimensional single-scalar inflationary universes, and show how cosmological observables, such as the primordial power spectrum, are encoded in the correlation functions of a three-dimensional quantum field theory (QFT). The holographic description correctly reproduces standard inflationary predictions in the regime where a perturbative quantization of fluctuations is justified. In the opposite regime, wherein gravity is strongly coupled at early times, we propose a holographic description in terms of perturbative large N QFT. Initiating a holographic phenomenological approach, we show that models containing only two parameters, N and a dimensionful coupling constant, are capable of satisfying the current observational constraints.
Leveraging Sub Label Dependencies in Code Mixed Indian Languages for Part-Of-Speech Tagging using Conditional Random Fields.

Code-mixed text sequences often lead to challenges in the task of correct identification of Part-Of-Speech tags. However, lexical dependencies created while alternating between multiple languages can be leveraged to improve the performance of such tasks. Indian languages with rich morphological structure and highly inflected nature provide such an opportunity. In this work, we exploit these sub-label dependencies using conditional random fields (CRFs) by defining feature extraction functions on three distinct language pairs (Hindi-English, Bengali-English, and Telugu-English). Our results demonstrate a significant increase in the tagging performance if the feature extraction functions employ the rich inner structure of such languages.
Automatic Speech Recognition for Irish: the ABAIR-ÉIST System

This paper describes ÉIST, automatic speech recogniser for Irish, developed as part of the ongoing ABAIR initiative, combining (1) acoustic models, (2) pronunciation lexicons and (3) language models into a hybrid system. A priority for now is a system that can deal with the multiple diverse native-speaker dialects. Consequently, (1) was built using predominately native-speaker speech, which included earlier recordings used for synthesis development as well as more diverse recordings obtained using the MíleGlór platform. The pronunciation variation across the dialects is a particular challenge in the development of (2) and is explored by testing both Trans-dialect and Multi-dialect letter-to-sound rules. Two approaches to language modelling (3) are used in the hybrid system, a simple n-gram model and recurrent neural network lattice rescoring, the latter garnering impressive performance improvements. The system is evaluated using a test set that is comprised of both native and non-native speakers, which allows for some inferences to be made on the performance of the system on both cohorts.
ISL-LEX v.1: An Online Lexical Resource of Israeli Sign Language

This paper describes a new online lexical resource and interactive tool for Israeli Sign Language, ISL-LEX v.1. The dataset contains 961 non-compound ISL signs with the following information: subjective frequency ratings from native signers, iconicity ratings from native and non-native signers (presented separately), and phonological properties in six domains. The selection of signs was also designed to reflect a broad distinction between those signs acquired early in childhood and those acquired later. ISL-LEX is an online interface built using the SIGN-LEX visualization (Caselli et al. 2022), and is intended for use by researchers, educators, and students. It is therefore offered in two text-based versions, English and Hebrew, with video instructions in ISL.
aiXplain at Arabic Hate Speech 2022: An Ensemble Based Approach to Detecting Offensive Tweets

Abusive speech on online platforms has a detrimental effect on users’ mental health. This warrants the need for innovative solutions that automatically moderate content, especially on online platforms such as Twitter where a user’s anonymity is loosely controlled. This paper outlines aiXplain Inc.’s ensemble based approach to detecting offensive speech in the Arabic language based on OSACT5’s shared sub-task A. Additionally, this paper highlights multiple challenges that may hinder progress on detecting abusive speech and provides potential avenues and techniques that may lead to significant progress.
The Financial Document Structure Extraction Shared Task (FinTOC 2022)

This paper describes the FinTOC-2022 Shared Task on the structure extraction from financial documents, its participants results and their findings. This shared task was organized as part of The 4th Financial Narrative Processing Workshop (FNP 2022), held jointly at The 13th Edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2022), Marseille, France (El-Haj et al., 2022). This shared task aimed to stimulate research in systems for extracting table-of-contents (TOC) from investment documents (such as financial prospectuses) by detecting the document titles and organizing them hierarchically into a TOC. For the forth edition of this shared task, three subtasks were presented to the participants: one with English documents, one with French documents and the other one with Spanish documents. This year, we proposed a different and revised dataset for English and French compared to the previous editions of FinTOC and a new dataset for Spanish documents was added. The task attracted 6 submissions for each language from 4 teams, and the most successful methods make use of textual, structural and visual features extracted from the documents and propose classification models for detecting titles and TOCs for all of the subtasks.
Open corpora and toolkit for assessing text readability in French

Measuring the linguistic complexity or assessing the readability of spoken or written productions has been the concern of several researchers in pedagogy and (foreign) language teaching for decades. Researchers study for example the children’s language development or the second language (L2) learning with tasks such as age or reader’s level recommendation, or text simplification. Despite the interest for the topic, open datasets and toolkits for processing French are scarce. Our contributions are: (1) three open corpora for supporting research on readability assessment in French, (2) a dataset analysis with traditional formulas and an unsupervised measure, (3) a toolkit dedicated for French processing which includes the implementation of statistical formulas, a pseudo-perplexity measure, and state-of-the-art classifiers based on SVM and fine-tuned BERT for predicting readability levels, and (4) an evaluation of the toolkit on the three data sets.
The place of ISO-Space in Text2Story multilayer annotation scheme

Reasoning about spatial information is fundamental in natural language to fully understand relationships between entities and/or between events. However, the complexity underlying such reasoning makes it hard to represent formally spatial information. Despite the growing interest on this topic, and the development of some frameworks, many problems persist regarding, for instance, the coverage of a wide variety of linguistic constructions and of languages. In this paper, we present a proposal of integrating ISO-Space into a ISO-based multilayer annotation scheme, designed to annotate news in European Portuguese. This scheme already enables annotation at three levels, temporal, referential and thematic, by combining postulates from ISO 24617-1, 4 and 9. Since the corpus comprises news articles, and spatial information is relevant within this kind of texts, a more detailed account of space was required. The main objective of this paper is to discuss the process of integrating ISO-Space with the existing layers of our annotation scheme, assessing the compatibility of the aforementioned parts of ISO 24617, and the problems posed by the harmonization of the four layers and by some specifications of ISO-Space.
Creating Mexican Spanish Language Resources through the Social Service Program

This work presents the path toward the creation of eight Spoken Language Resources under the umbrella of the Mexican Social Service national program. This program asks undergraduate students to donate time and work for the benefit of their society as a requirement to receive their degree. The program has thousands of options for the students who enroll. We show how we created a program which has resulted in the creation of open language resources which now are freely available in different repositories. We estimate that this exercise is equivalent to a budget of more than half a million US dollars. However, since the program is based on retribution from the students to their communities there has not been a necessity of a financial budget.
Creation of Polish Online News Corpus for Political Polarization Studies

In this paper we describe a Polish news corpus as an attempt to create a filtered, organized and representative set of texts coming from contemporary online press articles from two major Polish TV news providers: commercial TVN24 and state-owned TVP Info. The process consists of web scraping, data cleaning and formatting. A random sample was selected from prepared data to perform a classification task. The random forest achieved the best prediction results out of all considered models. We believe that this dataset is a valuable contribution to existing Polish language corpora as online news are considered to be formal and relatively mistake-free, therefore, a reliable source of correct written language, unlike other online platforms such as blogs or social media. Furthermore, to our knowledge, such corpus from this period of time has not been created before. In the future we would like to expand this dataset with articles coming from other online news providers, repeat the classification task on a bigger scale, utilizing other algorithms. Our data analysis outcomes might be a relevant basis to improve research on a political polarization and propaganda techniques in media.
Debating Europe: A Multilingual Multi-Target Stance Classification Dataset of Online Debates

We present a new dataset of online debates in English, annotated with stance. The dataset was scraped from the “Debating Europe” platform, where users exchange opinions over different subjects related to the European Union. The dataset is composed of 2600 comments pertaining to 18 debates related to the “European Green Deal”, in a conversational setting. After presenting the dataset and the annotated sub-part, we pre-train a model for a multilingual stance classification over the X-stance dataset before fine-tuning it over our dataset, and vice-versa. The fine-tuned models are shown to improve stance classification performance on each of the datasets, even though they have different languages, topics and targets. Subsequently, we propose to enhance the performances over “Debating Europe” with an interaction-aware model, taking advantage of the online debate structure of the platform. We also propose a semi-supervised self-training method to take advantage of the imbalanced and unlabeled data from the whole website, leading to a final improvement of accuracy by 3.4% over a Vanilla XLM-R model.
HindiWSD: A package for word sense disambiguation in Hinglish & Hindi

A lot of commendable work has been done, especially in high resource languages such as English, Spanish, French, etc. However, work done for Indic languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, etc is relatively less due to difficulty in finding relevant datasets, and the complexity of these languages. With the advent of IndoWordnet, we can explore important tasks such as word sense disambiguation, word similarity, and cross-lingual information retrieval, and carry out effective research regarding the same. In this paper, we worked on improving word sense disambiguation for 20 of the most common ambiguous Hindi words by making use of knowledge-based methods. We also came up with “hindiwsd”, an easy-to-use framework developed in Python that acts as a pipeline for transliteration of Hinglish code-mixed text followed by spell correction, POS tagging, and word sense disambiguation of Hindi text. We also curated a dataset of these 20 most used ambiguous Hindi words. This dataset was then used to enhance a modified Lesk’s algorithm and more accurately carry out word sense disambiguation. We achieved an accuracy of about 71% using our customized Lesk’s algorithm which was an improvement to the accuracy of about 34% using the original Lesk’s algorithm on the test set.
Extending the SSJ Universal Dependencies Treebank for Slovenian: Was It Worth It?

This paper presents the creation and evaluation of a new version of the reference SSJ Universal Dependencies Treebank for Slovenian, which has been substantially improved and extended to almost double the original size. The process was based on the initial revision and documentation of the language-specific UD annotation guidelines for Slovenian and the corresponding modification of the original SSJ annotations, followed by a two-stage annotation campaign, in which two new subsets have been added, the previously unreleased sentences from the ssj500k corpus and the Slovenian subset of the ELEXIS parallel corpus. The annotation campaign resulted in an extended version of the SSJ UD treebank with 5,435 newly added sentences comprising of 126,427 tokens. To evaluate the potential benefits of this data increase for Slovenian dependency parsing, we compared the performance of the classla-stanza dependency parser trained on the old and the new SSJ data when evaluated on the new SSJ test set and its subsets. Our results show an increase of LAS performance in general, especially for previously under-represented syntactic phenomena, such as lists, elliptical constructions and appositions, but also confirm the distinct nature of the two newly added subsets and the diversification of the SSJ treebank as a whole.
Parity violation in two-photon J=0-to-1 transitions: Analysis of systematic errors

We present an analysis of systematic sources of uncertainty in a recently proposed scheme for measurement of nuclear-spin-dependent atomic parity violation using two-photon J=0-to-1 transitions driven by collinear photons of the same frequency in the presence of a static magnetic field. Two important sources of uncertainty are considered: misalignment of applied fields, and stray electric and magnetic fields. The parity-violating signal can be discriminated from systematic effects using a combination of field reversals and analysis of the Zeeman structure of the transition.
Building a Biomedical Full-Text Part-of-Speech Corpus Semi-Automatically

This paper presents a method for semi-automatically building a corpus of full-text English-language biomedical articles annotated with part-of-speech tags. The outcomes are a semi-automatic procedure to create a large silver standard corpus of 5 million sentences drawn from a large corpus of full-text biomedical articles annotated for part-of-speech, and a robust, easy-to-use software tool that assists the investigation of differences in two tagged datasets. The method to build the corpus uses two part-of-speech taggers designed to tag biomedical abstracts followed by a human dispute settlement when the two taggers differ on the tagging of a token. The dispute resolution aspect is facilitated by the software tool which organizes and presents the disputed tags. The corpus and all of the software that has been implemented for this study are made publicly available.
A Measure of the Smiling Synchrony in the Conversational Face-to-face Interaction Corpus PACO-CHEESE

The smiling synchrony of the French audio-video conversational corpora “PACO” and “Cheese! ” is investigated. The two corpora merged altogether last 6 hours and are made of 25 face-to-face dyadic interactions annotated following the 5 levels Smiling Intensity Scale proposed by Gironzetti et al. (2016). After introducing new indicators for characterizing synchrony phenomena, we find that almost all the 25 interactions of PACO-CHEESE show a strong and significant smiling synchrony behavior. We investigate in a second step the evolution of the synchrony parameters throughout the interaction. No effect is found and it appears rather that the smiling synchrony is present at the very start of the interaction and remains unchanged throughout the conversation.
Vapour-Phase Selective Hydrogenation of γ-Valerolactone to 2-Methyltetrahydrofuran Biofuel over Silica-Supported Copper Catalysts

2-Methyltetrahydrofuran (MTHF) is a desirable biomass-based platform chemical with excellent potential as an ideal biofuel, green solvent, and raw material for synthesizing downstream chemicals. In this work, a series of copper nanoparticles encapsulated on SiO2 were prepared by the wet impregnation method and evaluated as efficient non-noble metal catalysts for the vapour-phase hydrogenation of γ-valerolactone (GVL) to MTHF in a fixed-bed reactor under mild reaction conditions. The obtained catalyst properties were determined by XRD, FE-SEM, TEM, UV-DRS, TPR, NH3-TPD, N2O decomposition and pore size distribution measurements. Meanwhile, the parameters/variables tuning their catalytic performance (activity, conversion, selectivity and stability) were examined. Various Cu loadings featured on the SiO2 support are essential for tuning the catalytic activity. Among the catalysts tested, a 5 wt% Cu/SiO2 catalyst showed a 97.2% MTHF selectivity with 71.9% GVL conversion, and showed a stability for 33 h time-on-stream, achieved at 260 °C and atmospheric pressure conditions. It was found that a huge dispersion of Cu metal in support, hydrogen activation ability, abundant acidic sites and surface area are all beneficial for improved MTHF selectivity.