Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploring Unsupervised Semantic Similarity Methods for Claim Verification in Health Care News Articles

In the 21st century, the proliferation of fake information has emerged as a significant threat to society. Particularly, healthcare medical reporters face challenges when verifying claims related to treatment effects, side effects, and risks mentioned in news articles, relying on scientific publications for accuracy. The accurate communication of scientific information in news articles has long been a crucial concern in the scientific community, as the dissemination of misinformation can have dire consequences in the healthcare domain. Healthcare medical reporters would greatly benefit from efficient methods to retrieve evidence from scientific publications supporting specific claims. This paper delves into the application of unsupervised semantic similarity models to facilitate claim verification for medical reporters, thereby expediting the process. We explore unsupervised multilingual evidence retrieval techniques aimed at reducing the time required to obtain evidence from scientific studies. Instead of employing content classification, we propose an approach that retrieves relevant evidence from scientific publications for claim verification within the healthcare domain. Given a claim and a set of scientific publications, our system generates a list of the most similar paragraphs containing supporting evidence. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art unsupervised semantic similarity methods in this task. As the claim and evidence are present in a cross-lingual space, we find that the XML-RoBERTa model exhibits high accuracy in achieving our objective. Through this research, we contribute to enhancing the efficiency and reliability of claim verification for healthcare medical reporters, enabling them to accurately source evidence from scientific publications in a timely manner.
Multimodal Learning for Accurate Visual Question Answering: An Attention-Based Approach

This paper proposes an open-ended task for Visual Question Answering (VQA) that leverages the InceptionV3 Object Detection model and an attention-based Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network for question answering. Our proposed model provides accurate natural language answers to questions about an image, including those that require understanding contextual information and background details. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve high accuracy, even with complex and varied visual information. The proposed method can contribute to developing more advanced vision systems that can process and interpret visual information like humans.
Selam@DravidianLangTech:Sentiment Analysis of Code-Mixed Dravidian Texts using SVM Classification

Sentiment analysis in code-mixed text written in Dravidian languages. Specifically, Tamil- English and Tulu-English. This paper describes the system paper of the RANLP-2023 shared task. The goal of this shared task is to develop systems that accurately classify the sentiment polarity of code-mixed comments and posts. be provided with development, training, and test data sets containing code-mixed text in Tamil- English and Tulu-English. The task involves message-level polarity classification, to classify YouTube comments into positive, negative, neutral, or mixed emotions. This Code- Mix was compiled by RANLP-2023 organizers from posts on social media. We use classification techniques SVM and achieve an F1 score of 0.147 for Tamil-English and 0.518 for Tulu- English.
A Computational Analysis of the Voices of Shakespeare’s Characters

In this paper we propose a study of a relatively novel problem in authorship attribution research: that of classifying the stylome of characters in a literary work. We choose as a case study the plays of William Shakespeare, presumably the most renowned and respected dramatist in the history of literature. Previous research in the field of authorship attribution has shown that the writing style of an author can be characterized and distinguished from that of other authors automatically. The question we propose to answer is a related but different one: can the styles of different characters be distinguished? We aim to verify in this way if an author managed to create believable characters with individual styles, and focus on Shakespeare’s iconic characters. We present our experiments using various features and models, including an SVM and a neural network, show that characters in Shakespeare’s plays can be classified with up to 50% accuracy.
Developing a Multilingual Corpus of Wikipedia Biographies

For many languages, Wikipedia is the most accessible source of biographical information. Studying how Wikipedia describes the lives of people can provide insights into societal biases, as well as cultural differences more generally. We present a method for extracting datasets of Wikipedia biographies. The accompanying codebase is adapted to English, Swedish, Russian, Chinese, and Farsi, and is extendable to other languages. We present an exploratory analysis of biographical topics and gendered patterns in four languages using topic modelling and embedding clustering. We find similarities across languages in the types of categories present, with the distribution of biographies concentrated in the language’s core regions. Masculine terms are over-represented and spread out over a wide variety of topics. Feminine terms are less frequent and linked to more constrained topics. Non-binary terms are nearly non-represented.
Event Annotation and Detection in Kannada-English Code-Mixed Social Media Data

Code-mixing (CM) is a frequently observed phenomenon on social media platforms in multilingual societies such as India. While the increase in code-mixed content on these platforms provides good amount of data for studying various aspects of code-mixing, the lack of automated text analysis tools makes such studies difficult. To overcome the same, tools such as language identifiers, Parts-of-Speech (POS) taggers and Named Entity Recognition (NER) for analysing code-mixed data have been developed. One such important tool is Event Detection, an important information retrieval task which can be used to identify critical facts occurring in the vast streams of unstructured text data available. While event detection from text is a hard problem on its own, social media data adds to it with its informal nature, and code-mixed (Kannada-English) data further complicates the problem due to its word-level mixing, lack of structure and incomplete information. In this work, we have tried to address this problem. We have proposed guidelines for the annotation of events in Kannada-English CM data and provided some baselines for the same with careful feature selection.
VEL@LT-EDI-2023: Automatic Detection of Hope Speech in Bulgarian Language using Embedding Techniques

Many people may find motivation in their lives by spreading content on social media that is encouraging or hopeful. Creating an effective model that helps in accurately predicting the target class is a challenging task. The problem of Hope speech identification is dealt with in this work using machine learning and deep learning methods. This paper presents the description of the system submitted by our team(VEL) to the Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion(HSD-EDI) LT-EDI-RANLP 2023 shared task for the Bulgarian language. The main goal of this shared task is to identify the given text into the Hope speech or Non-Hope speech category. The proposed method used the H2O deep learning model with MPNet embeddings and achieved the second rank for the Bulgarian language with the Macro F1 score of 0.69.
Human Evaluation Reproduction Report for Data-to-text Generation with Macro Planning

This paper presents a partial reproduction study of Data-to-text Generation with Macro Planning by Puduppully et al. (2021). This work was conducted as part of the ReproHum project, a multi-lab effort to reproduce the results of NLP papers incorporating human evaluations. We follow the same instructions provided by the authors and the ReproHum team to the best of our abilities. We collect preference ratings for the following evaluation criteria in order: conciseness, coherence, and grammaticality. Our results are highly correlated with the original experiment. Nonetheless, we believe the presented results are insufficent to conclude that the Macro system proposed and developed by the original paper is superior compared to other systems. We suspect combining our results with the three other reproductions of this paper through the ReproHum project will paint a clearer picture. Overall, we hope that our work is a step towards a more transparent and reproducible research landscape.
Identifying Semantic Argument Types in Predication and Copredication Contexts: A Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Approach

Identifying semantic argument types in predication contexts is not a straightforward task for several reasons, such as inherent polysemy, coercion, and copredication phenomena. In this paper, we train monolingual and multilingual classifiers with a zero-shot cross-lingual approach to identify semantic argument types in predications using pre-trained language models as feature extractors. We train classifiers for different semantic argument types and for both verbal and adjectival predications. Furthermore, we propose a method to detect copredication using these classifiers through identifying the argument semantic type targeted in different predications over the same noun in a sentence. We evaluate the performance of the method on copredication test data with Food•Event nouns for 5 languages.
Towards a Consensus Taxonomy for Annotating Errors in Automatically Generated Text

Error analysis aims to provide insights into system errors at different levels of granularity. NLP as a field has a long-standing tradition of analysing and reporting errors which is generally considered good practice. There are existing error taxonomies tailored for different types of NLP task. In this paper, we report our work reviewing existing research on meaning/content error types in generated text, attempt to identify emerging consensus among existing meaning/content error taxonomies, and propose a standardised error taxonomy on this basis. We find that there is virtually complete agreement at the highest taxonomic level where errors of meaning/content divide into (1) Content Omission, (2) Content Addition, and (3) Content Substitution. Consensus in the lower levels is less pronounced, but a compact standardised consensus taxonomy can nevertheless be derived that works across generation tasks and application domains.
On the Generalization of Projection-Based Gender Debiasing in Word Embedding

Gender bias estimation and mitigation techniques in word embeddings lack an understanding of their generalization capabilities. In this work, we complement prior research by comparing in a systematic way four gender bias metrics (Word Embedding Association Tes, Relative Negative Sentiment Bias, Embedding Coherence Test and Bias Analogy Test), two types of projection-based gender mitigation strategies (hard- and soft-debiasing) on three well-known word embedding representations (Word2Vec, FastText and Glove). The experiments have shown that the considered word embeddings are consistent between them but the debiasing techniques are inconsistent across the different metrics, also highlighting the potential risk of unintended bias after the mitigation strategies.
Undrained Deformation and Liquefaction of Sand under Cyclic Stresses

ABSTRACT The key findings in the previous studies on the deformation of sand are first reviewed to the necessary extent. Then, in summary form, five fundamental postulates are introduced as the bases on which a model of undrained deformation of sand under cyclic loading is to be established. The procedures for assessing pore pressures, shear strains and consequent occurrence of liquefaction during cyclic loading are illustrated on the diagrams based on the above postulates as well as actual data obtained in the static triaxial tests. The undrained performance of sand predicted by the proposed model were compared with several cyclic triaxial test results conducted under various conditions. These include stress and strain controlled tests; static and dynamic tests; and the tests cycled with constant and erratically changing stress amplitude. The comparison disclosed the relevance and applicability of this method of approach.
LeSS: A Computationally-Light Lexical Simplifier for Spanish

Due to having knowledge of only basic vocabulary, many people cannot understand up-to-date written information and thus make informed decisions and fully participate in the society. We propose LeSS, a modular lexical simplification architecture that outperforms state-of-the-art lexical simplification systems for Spanish. In addition to its state-of-the-art performance, LeSS is computationally light, using much less disk space, CPU and GPU, and having faster loading and execution time than the transformer-based lexical simplification models which are predominant in the field.
Hindi to Dravidian Language Neural Machine Translation Systems

Neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved state-of-art performance in high-resource language pairs, but the performance of NMT drops in low-resource conditions. Morphologically rich languages are yet another challenge in NMT. The common strategy to handle this issue is to apply sub-word segmentation. In this work, we compare the morphologically inspired segmentation methods against the Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) in processing the input for building NMT systems for Hindi to Malayalam and Hindi to Tamil, where Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language and Malayalam and Tamil are south Dravidian languages. These two languages are low resource, morphologically rich and agglutinative. Malayalam is more agglutinative than Tamil. We show that for both the language pairs, the morphological segmentation algorithm out-performs BPE. We also present an elaborate analysis on translation outputs from both the NMT systems.
Topic Modeling Using Community Detection on a Word Association Graph

Topic modeling of a text corpus is one of the most well-studied areas of information retrieval and knowledge discovery. Despite several decades of research in the area that begets an array of modeling tools, some common problems still obstruct automated topic modeling from matching users’ expectations. In particular, existing topic modeling solutions suffer when the distribution of words among the underlying topics is uneven or the topics are overlapped. Furthermore, many solutions ask the user to provide a topic count estimate as input, which limits their usefulness in modeling a corpus where such information is unavailable. We propose a new topic modeling approach that overcomes these shortcomings by formulating the topic modeling problem as a community detection problem in a word association graph/network that we generate from the text corpus. Experimental evaluation using multiple data sets of three different types of text corpora shows that our approach is superior to prominent topic modeling alternatives in most cases. This paper describes our approach and discusses the experimental findings.
From Stigma to Support: A Parallel Monolingual Corpus and NLP Approach for Neutralizing Mental Illness Bias

Negative attitudes and perceptions towards mental illness continue to be pervasive in our society. One of the factors contributing to and reinforcing this stigma is the usage of language that is biased against mental illness. Identifying biased language and replacing it with person-first, neutralized language is a first step towards eliminating harmful stereotypes and creating a supportive and inclusive environment for those living with mental illness. This paper presents a novel Natural Language Processing (NLP) system that aims to automatically identify biased text related to mental illness and suggest neutral language replacements without altering the original text’s meaning. Building on previous work in the field, this paper presents the Mental Illness Neutrality Corpus (MINC) comprising over 5500 mental illness-biased text and neutralized sentence pairs (in English), which is used to fine-tune a CONCURRENT model system developed by Pryzant et al. (2020). After evaluation, the model demonstrates high proficiency in neutralizing mental illness bias with an accuracy of 98.7%. This work contributes a valuable resource for reducing mental illness bias in text and has the potential for further research in tackling more complex nuances and multilingual biases.
Computer, enhence: POS-tagging improvements for nonbinary pronoun use in Swedish

Part of Speech (POS) taggers for Swedish routinely fail for the third person gender-neutral pronoun “hen”, despite the fact that it has been a well-established part of the Swedish language since at least 2014. In addition to simply being a form of gender bias, this failure can have negative effects on other tasks relying on POS information. We demonstrate the usefulness of semi-synthetic augmented datasets in a case study, retraining a POS tagger to correctly recognize “hen” as a personal pronoun. We evaluate our retrained models for both tag accuracy and on a downstream task (dependency parsing) in a classicial NLP pipeline. Our results show that adding such data works to correct for the disparity in performance. The accuracy rate for identifying “hen” as a pronoun can be brought up to acceptable levels with only minor adjustments to the tagger’s vocabulary files. Performance parity to gendered pronouns can be reached after retraining with only a few hundred examples. This increase in POS tag accuracy also results in improvements for dependency parsing sentences containing hen.
Cross-lingual Mediation: Readability Effects

This paper explores the readability of translated and interpreted texts compared to the original source texts and target language texts in the same domain. It was shown in the literature that translated and interpreted texts could exhibit lexical and syntactic properties that make them simpler, and hence, easier to process than their sources or comparable non-translations. In translation, this effect is attributed to the tendency to simplify and disambiguate the message. In interpreting, it can be enhanced by the temporal and cognitive constraints. We use readability annotations from the Newsela corpus to formulate a number of classification and regression tasks and fine-tune a multilingual pre-trained model on these tasks, obtaining models that can differentiate between complex and simple sentences. Then, the models are applied to predict the readability of sources, targets, and comparable target language originals in a zero-shot manner. Our test data – parallel and comparable – come from English-German bidirectional interpreting and translation subsets from the Europarl corpus. The results confirm the difference in readability between translated/interpreted targets against sentences in standard originally-authored source and target languages. Besides, we find consistent differences between the translation directions in the English-German language pair.
Clinical Text Classification to SNOMED CT Codes Using Transformers Trained on Linked Open Medical Ontologies

We present an approach for medical text coding with SNOMED CT. Our approach uses publicly available linked open data from terminologies and ontologies as training data for the algorithms. We claim that even small training corpora made of short text snippets can be used to train models for the given task. We propose a method based on transformers enhanced with clustering and filtering of the candidates. Further, we adopt a classical machine learning approach - support vector classification (SVC) using transformer embeddings. The resulting approach proves to be more accurate than the predictions given by Large Language Models. We evaluate on a dataset generated from linked open data for SNOMED codes related to morphology and topography for four use cases. Our transformers-based approach achieves an F1-score of 0.82 for morphology and 0.99 for topography codes. Further, we validate the applicability of our approach in a clinical context using labelled real clinical data that are not used for model training.
Poetry Generation Combining Poetry Theme Labels Representations

Ancient Chinese poetry is the earliest literary genre that took shape in Chinese literature and has a dissemination effect, showing China’s profound cultural heritage. At the same time, the generation of ancient poetry is an important task in the field of digital humanities, which is of great significance to the inheritance of national culture and the education of ancient poetry. The current work in the field of poetry generation is mainly aimed at improving the fluency and structural accuracy of words and sentences, ignoring the theme unity of poetry generation results. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a graph neural network poetry theme representation model based on label embedding. On the basis of the network representation of poetry, the topic feature representation of poetry is constructed and learned from the granularity of words. Then, the features of the poetry theme representation model are combined with the autoregressive language model to construct a theme-oriented ancient Chinese poetry generation model TLPG (Poetry Generation with Theme Label). Through machine evaluation and evaluation by experts in related fields, the model proposed in this paper has significantly improved the topic consistency of poetry generation compared with existing work on the premise of ensuring the fluency and format accuracy of poetry.
Microsyntactic Unit Detection Using Word Embedding Models: Experiments on Slavic Languages

Microsyntactic units have been defined as language-specific transitional entities between lexicon and grammar, whose idiomatic properties are closely tied to syntax. These units are typically described based on individual constructions, making it difficult to understand them comprehensively as a class. This study proposes a novel approach to detect microsyntactic units using Word Embedding Models (WEMs) trained on six Slavic languages, namely Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian, and evaluates how well these models capture the nuances of syntactic non-compositionality. To evaluate the models, we develop a cross-lingual inventory of microsyntactic units using the lists of microsyntantic units available at the Russian National Corpus. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of WEMs in capturing microsyntactic units across all six Slavic languages under analysis. Additionally, we find that WEMs tailored for syntax-based tasks consistently outperform other WEMs at the task. Our findings contribute to the theory of microsyntax by providing insights into the detection of microsyntactic units and their cross-linguistic properties.
Acoustic Analysis of the Fifth Liquid in Malayalam

This paper investigates the claim of rhoticity of the fifth liquid in Malayalam using various acoustic characteristics. The Malayalam liquid phonemes are analyzed in terms of the smoothness of the pitch window, formants, formant bandwidth, the effect on surrounding vowels, duration, and classification patterns by an unrelated classifier. We report, for the fifth liquid, a slight similarity in terms of pitch smoothness with one of the laterals, similarity with the laterals in terms of F1 for males, and similarity with the laterals and one of the rhotics in terms of F1 for females. The similarity in terms of formant bandwidth between the fifth liquid and the other liquids is inconclusive. Similarly, the effect of the fifth liquid on the surrounding vowels is inconclusive. No similarity is observed between the fifth liquid and the other liquids in phoneme duration. Classification of the fifth liquid section implies higher order signal level similarity with both laterals and rhotics.