Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
TransCasm: A Bilingual Corpus of Sarcastic Tweets

Sarcasm is extensively used in User Generated Content (UGC) in order to express one’s discontent, especially through blogs, forums, or social media such as Twitter. Several works have attempted to detect and analyse sarcasm in UGC. However, the lack of freely available corpora in this field makes the task even more difficult. In this work, we present “TransCasm” corpus, a parallel corpus of sarcastic tweets translated from English into French along with their non-sarcastic representations. To build the bilingual corpus of sarcasm, we select the “SIGN” corpus, a monolingual data set of sarcastic tweets and their non-sarcastic interpretations, created by (Peled and Reichart, 2017). We propose to define linguistic guidelines for developing “TransCasm” which is the first ever bilingual corpus of sarcastic tweets. In addition, we utilise “TransCasm” for building a binary sarcasm classifier in order to identify whether a tweet is sarcastic or not. Our experiment reveals that the sarcasm classifier achieves 61% accuracy on detecting sarcasm in tweets. “TransCasm” is now freely available online and is ready to be explored for further research.
Disagreement Space in Argument Analysis

For a highly subjective task such as recognising speaker intention and argumentation, the traditional way of generating gold standards is to aggregate a number of labels into a single one. However, this seriously neglects the underlying richness that characterises discourse and argumentation and is also, in some cases, straightforwardly impossible. In this paper, we present QT30nonaggr, the first corpus of non-aggregated argument annotation, which will be openly available upon publication. QT30nonaggr encompasses 10% of QT30, the largest corpus of dialogical argumentation and analysed broadcast political debate currently available with 30 episodes of BBC’s ‘Question Time’ from 2020 and 2021. Based on a systematic and detailed investigation of annotation judgements across all steps of the annotation process, we structure the disagreement space with a taxonomy of the types of label disagreements in argument annotation, identifying the categories of annotation errors, fuzziness and ambiguity.
A Context-free Arabic Emoji Sentiment Lexicon (CF-Arab-ESL)

Emoji can be valuable features in textual sentiment analysis. One of the key elements of the use of emoji in sentiment analysis is the emoji sentiment lexicon. However, constructing such a lexicon is a challenging task. This is because interpreting the sentiment conveyed by these pictographic symbols is highly subjective, and differs depending upon how each person perceives them. Cultural background is considered to be one of the main factors that affects emoji sentiment interpretation. Thus, we focus in this work on targeting people from Arab cultures. This is done by constructing a context-free Arabic emoji sentiment lexicon annotated by native Arabic speakers from seven different regions (Gulf, Egypt, Levant, Sudan, North Africa, Iraq, and Yemen) to see how these Arabic users label the sentiment of these symbols without a textual context. We recruited 53 annotators (males and females) to annotate 1,069 unique emoji. Then we evaluated the reliability of the annotation for each participant by applying sensitivity (Recall) and consistency (Krippendorff’s Alpha) tests. For the analysis, we investigated the resulting emoji sentiment annotations to explore the impact of the Arabic cultural context. We analyzed this cultural reflection from different perspectives, including national affiliation, use of colour indications, animal indications, weather indications and religious impact.
XLNET-GRU Sentiment Regression Model for Cryptocurrency News in English and Malay

Contextual word embeddings such as the transformer language models are gaining popularity in text classification and analytics but have rarely been explored for sentiment analysis on cryptocurrency news particularly on languages other than English. Various state-of-the-art (SOTA) pre-trained language models have been introduced recently such as BERT, ALBERT, ELECTRA, RoBERTa, and XLNet for text representation. Hence, this study aims to investigate the performance of using Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) with Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language (XLNet) contextual word embedding for sentiment analysis on English and Malay cryptocurrency news (Bitcoin and Ethereum). We also compare the performance of our XLNet-GRU model against other SOTA pre-trained language models. Manually labelled corpora of English and Malay news are utilized to learn the context of text specifically in the cryptocurrency domain. Based on our experiments, we found that our XLNet-GRU sentiment regression model outperformed the lexicon-based baseline with mean adjusted R2 = 0.631 across Bitcoin and Ethereum for English and mean adjusted R2 = 0.514 for Malay.
Greek Sign Language Recognition for the SL-ReDu Learning Platform

There has been increasing interest lately in developing education tools for sign language (SL) learning that enable self-assessment and objective evaluation of learners’ SL productions, assisting both students and their instructors. Crucially, such tools require the automatic recognition of SL videos, while operating in a signer-independent fashion and under realistic recording conditions. Here, we present an early version of a Greek Sign Language (GSL) recognizer that satisfies the above requirements, and integrate it within the SL-ReDu learning platform that constitutes a first in GSL with recognition functionality. We develop the recognition module incorporating state-of-the-art deep-learning based visual detection, feature extraction, and classification, designing it to accommodate a medium-size vocabulary of isolated signs and continuously fingerspelled letter sequences. We train the module on a specifically recorded GSL corpus of multiple signers by a web-cam in non-studio conditions, and conduct both multi-signer and signer-independent recognition experiments, reporting high accuracies. Finally, we let student users evaluate the learning platform during GSL production exercises, reporting very satisfactory objective and subjective assessments based on recognition performance and collected questionnaires, respectively.
A Dataset for Term Extraction in Hindi

Automatic Term Extraction (ATE) is one of the core problems in natural language processing and forms a key component of text mining pipelines of domain specific corpora. Complex low-level tasks such as machine translation and summarization for domain specific texts necessitate the use of term extraction systems. However, the development of these systems requires the use of large annotated datasets and thus there has been little progress made on this front for under-resourced languages. As a part of ongoing research, we present a dataset for term extraction from Hindi texts in this paper. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset that provides term annotated documents for Hindi. Furthermore, we have evaluated this dataset on statistical term extraction methods and the results obtained indicate the problems associated with development of term extractors for under-resourced languages.
Introducing the signglossR Package

The signglossR package is a library written in the programming language R, intended as an easy-to-use resource for those who work with signed language data and are familiar with R. The package contains a variety of functions designed specifically towards signed language research, facilitating a single-pipeline workflow with R when accessing public language resources remotely (online) or a user’s own files and data. The package specifically targets processing of image and video files, but also features some interaction with software commonly used by researchers working on signed language and gesture, such as ELAN and OpenPose. The signglossR package combines features and functionality from many other libraries and tools in order to simplify and collect existing resources in one place, as well as adding some new functionality, and adapt everything to the needs of researchers working with visual language data. In this paper, the main features of this package are introduced.
Levels of Non-Fictionality in Fictional Texts

The annotation and automatic recognition of non-fictional discourse within a text is an important, yet unresolved task in literary research. While non-fictional passages can consist of several clauses or sentences, we argue that 1) an entity-level classification of fictionality and 2) the linking of Wikidata identifiers can be used to automatically identify (non-)fictional discourse. We query Wikidata and DBpedia for relevant information about a requested entity as well as the corresponding literary text to determine the entity’s fictionality status and assign a Wikidata identifier, if unequivocally possible. We evaluate our methods on an exemplary text from our diachronic literary corpus, where our methods classify 97% of persons and 62% of locations correctly as fictional or real. Furthermore, 75% of the resolved persons and 43% of the resolved locations are resolved correctly. In a quantitative experiment, we apply the entity-level fictionality tagger to our corpus and conclude that more non-fictional passages can be identified when information about real entities is available.
Fictionary-Based Games for Language Resource Creation

In this paper, we present a novel approach to data collection for natural language processing (NLP), linguistic research and lexicographic work. Using the parlor game Fictionary as a framework, data can be crowd-sourced in a gamified manner, which carries the potential of faster, cheaper and better data when compared to traditional methods due to the engaging and competitive nature of the game. To improve data quality, the game includes a built-in review process where players review each other’s data and evaluate its quality. The paper proposes several games that can be used within this framework, and explains the value of the data generated by their use. These proposals include games that collect named entities along with their corresponding type tags, question-answer pairs, translation pairs and neologism, to name only a few. We are currently working on a digital platform that will host these games in Icelandic but wish to open the discussion around this topic and encourage other researchers to explore their own versions of the proposed games, all of which are language-independent.
Objectifying Women? A Syntactic Bias in French and English Corpora.

Gender biases in syntax have been documented for languages with grammatical gender for cases where mixed-gender coordination structures take masculine agreement, or with male-first preference in the ordering of pairs (Adam and Eve). On the basis of various annotated corpora spanning different genres (fiction, newspapers, speech and web), we show another syntactic gender bias: masculine pronouns are more often subjects than feminine pronouns, in both English and French. We find the same bias towards masculine subjects for French human nouns, which then refer to males and females. Comparing the subject of passive verbs and the object of active verbs, we show that this syntactic function bias is not reducible to a bias in semantic role assignment since it is also found with non-agentive subjects. For French fiction, we also found that the masculine syntactic function bias is larger in text written by male authors – female authors seem to be unbiased. We finally discuss two principles as possible explanations, ‘Like Me’ and ‘Easy first’, and examine the effect of the discourse tendency for men being agents and topics. We conclude by addressing the impact of such biases in language technologies.
The Development of a Comprehensive Spanish Dictionary for Phonetic and Lexical Tagging in Socio-phonetic Research (ESPADA)

Pronunciation dictionaries are an important component in the process of speech forced alignment. The accuracy of these dictionaries has a strong effect on the aligned speech data since they help the mapping between orthographic transcriptions and acoustic signals. In this paper, I present the creation of a comprehensive pronunciation dictionary in Spanish (ESPADA) that can be used in most of the dialect variants of Spanish data. Current dictionaries focus on specific regional variants, but with the flexible nature of our tool, it can be readily applied to capture the most common phonetic differences across major dialectal variants. We propose improvements to current pronunciation dictionaries as well as mapping other relevant annotations such as morphological and lexical information. In terms of size, it is currently the most complete dictionary with more than 628,000 entries, representing words from 16 countries. All entries come with their corresponding pronunciations, morphological and lexical tagging, and other relevant information for phonetic analysis: stress patterns, phonotactics, IPA transcriptions, and more. This aims to equip socio-phonetic researchers with a complete open-source tool that enhances dialectal research within socio-phonetic frameworks in the Spanish language.
Detecting Users Prone to Spread Fake News on Arabic Twitter

The spread of misinformation has become a major concern to our society, and social media is one of its main culprits. Evidently, health misinformation related to vaccinations has slowed down global efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Studies have shown that fake news spreads substantially faster than real news on social media networks. One way to limit this fast dissemination is by assessing information sources in a semi-automatic way. To this end, we aim to identify users who are prone to spread fake news in Arabic Twitter. Such users play an important role in spreading misinformation and identifying them has the potential to control the spread. We construct an Arabic dataset on Twitter users, which consists of 1,546 users, of which 541 are prone to spread fake news (based on our definition). We use features extracted from users’ recent tweets, e.g., linguistic, statistical, and profile features, to predict whether they are prone to spread fake news or not. To tackle the classification task, multiple learning models are employed and evaluated. Empirical results reveal promising detection performance, where an F1 score of 0.73 was achieved by the logistic regression model. Moreover, when tested on a benchmark English dataset, our approach has outperformed the current state-of-the-art for this task.
GUCT at Arabic Hate Speech 2022: Towards a Better Isotropy for Hatespeech Detection

Hate Speech is an increasingly common occurrence in verbal and textual exchanges on online platforms, where many users, especially those from vulnerable minorities, are in danger of being attacked or harassed via text messages, posts, comments, or articles. Therefore, it is crucial to detect and filter out hate speech in the various forms of text encountered on online and social platforms. In this paper, we present our work on the shared task of detecting hate speech in dialectical Arabic tweets as part of the OSACT shared task on Fine-grained Hate Speech Detection. Normally, tweets have a short length, and hence do not have sufficient context for language models, which in turn makes a classification task challenging. To contribute to sub-task A, we leverage MARBERT’s pre-trained contextual word representations and aim to improve their semantic quality using a cluster-based approach. Our work explores MARBERT’s embedding space and assess its geometric properties in-order to achieve better representations and subsequently better classification performance. We propose to improve the isotropic word representations of MARBERT via clustering. we compare the word representations generated by our approach to MARBERT’s default word representations via feeding each to a bidirectional LSTM to detect offensive and non-offensive tweets. Our results show that enhancing the isotropy of an embedding space can boost performance. Our system scores 81.2% on accuracy and a macro-averaged F1 score of 79.1% on sub-task A’s development set and achieves 76.5% for accuracy and an F1 score of 74.2% on the test set.
Making Sign Language Corpora Comparable: A Study of Palm-Up and Throw-Away in Polish Sign Language, German Sign Language, and Russian Sign Language

This paper is primarily devoted to describing the preparation phase of a large-scale comparative study based on naturalistic linguistic data drawn from multiple sign language corpora. To provide an example, I am using my current project on manual gestural elements in Polish Sign Language, German Sign Language, and Russian Sign Language. The paper starts with a description of the reasons behind undertaking this project. Then, I describe the scope of my study, which is focused on two manual elements present in all three mentioned sign languages: palm-up and throw-away; and the three corpora which are my data sources. This is followed by a presentation of the steps taken in the initial stages of the project in order to make the data comparable. Those steps are: choosing the adequate data samples from all three corpora, gathering all data within the chosen software, and creating an annotation schema that builds on the annotations already present in all three corpora. Even though the project is still underway, and the annotation process is ongoing, preliminary discussions about the nature of the analysed manual activities are presented based on the initial annotations for the sake of evaluating the created annotation schema. I conclude the paper with some remarks about the performance of the employed methodology.
Framing Legitimacy in CSR: A Corpus of Chinese and American Petroleum Company CSR Reports and Preliminary Analysis

We examine how Chinese and American oil companies use the gain- and loss-framed BUILDING source domain to legitimize their business in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports. Gain and loss frames can create legitimacy because they can ethically position an issue. We will focus on oil companies in China and the U.S. because different socio-cultural contexts in these two countries can potentially lead to different legitimation strategies in CSR reports, which can shed light on differences in Chinese and American CSR. All of the oil companies in our data are on the Fortune 500 list (2020). The results showed that Chinese oil companies used BUILDING metaphors more frequently than American oil companies. The most frequent keyword in Chinese CSRs “build” highlights environmental achievements in compliance with governments’ policies. American CSRs often used the metaphorical verb “support” to show their alignment with environmental policies and the interests of different stakeholders. The BUILDING source domain was used more often as gain frames in both Chinese and American CSR reports to show how oil companies create benefits for different stakeholders.
Between History and Natural Language Processing: Study, Enrichment and Online Publication of French Parliamentary Debates of the Early Third Republic (1881-1899)

We present the AGODA (Analyse sémantique et Graphes relationnels pour l’Ouverture des Débats à l’Assemblée nationale) project, which aims to create a platform for consulting and exploring digitised French parliamentary debates (1881-1940) available in the digital library of the National Library of France. This project brings together historians and NLP specialists: parliamentary debates are indeed an essential source for French history of the contemporary period, but also for linguistics. This project therefore aims to produce a corpus of texts that can be easily exploited with computational methods, and that respect the TEI standard. Ancient parliamentary debates are also an excellent case study for the development and application of tools for publishing and exploring large historical corpora. In this paper, we present the steps necessary to produce such a corpus. We detail the processing and publication chain of these documents, in particular by mentioning the problems linked to the extraction of texts from digitised images. We also introduce the first analyses that we have carried out on this corpus with “bag-of-words” techniques not too sensitive to OCR quality (namely topic modelling and word embedding).
Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for Irish-Language Folklore

In this paper we present our method for digitising a large collection of handwritten Irish-language texts as part of a project to mine information from a large corpus of Irish and Scottish Gaelic folktales. The handwritten texts form part of the Main Manuscript Collection of the National Folklore Collection of Ireland and contain handwritten transcriptions of oral folklore collected in Ireland in the 20th century. With the goal of creating a large text corpus of the Irish-language folktales contained within this collection, our method involves scanning the pages of the physical volumes and digitising the text on these pages using Transkribus, a platform for the recognition of historical documents. Given the nature of the collection, the approach we have taken involves the creation of individual text recognition models for multiple collectors’ hands. Doing it this way was motivated by the fact that a relatively small number of collectors contributed the bulk of the material, while the differences between each collector in terms of style, layout and orthography were difficult to reconcile within a single handwriting model. We present our preliminary results along with a discussion on the viability of using crowdsourced correction to improve our HTR models.
Compiling a Highly Accurate Bilingual Lexicon by Combining Different Approaches

Bilingual lexicons can be generated automatically using a wide variety of approaches. We perform a rigorous manual evaluation of four different methods: word alignments on different types of bilingual data, pivoting, machine translation and cross-lingual word embeddings. We investigate how the different setups perform using publicly available data for the English-Icelandic language pair, doing separate evaluations for each method, dataset and confidence class where it can be calculated. The results are validated by human experts, working with a random sample from all our experiments. By combining the most promising approaches and data sets, using confidence scores calculated from the data and the results of manually evaluating samples from our manual evaluation as indicators, we are able to induce lists of translations with a very high acceptance rate. We show how multiple different combinations generate lists with well over 90% acceptance rate, substantially exceeding the results for each individual approach, while still generating reasonably large candidate lists. All manually evaluated equivalence pairs are published in a new lexicon of over 232,000 pairs under an open license.
Evaluating Monolingual and Crosslingual Embeddings on Datasets of Word Association Norms

In free word association tasks, human subjects are presented with a stimulus word and are then asked to name the first word (the response word) that comes up to their mind. Those associations, presumably learned on the basis of conceptual contiguity or similarity, have attracted for a long time the attention of researchers in linguistics and cognitive psychology, since they are considered as clues about the internal organization of the lexical knowledge in the semantic memory. Word associations data have also been used to assess the performance of Vector Space Models for English, but evaluations for other languages have been relatively rare so far. In this paper, we introduce word associations datasets for Italian, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese by extracting data from the Small World of Words project, and we propose two different tasks inspired by the previous literature. We tested both monolingual and crosslingual word embeddings on the new datasets, showing that they perform similarly in the evaluation tasks.