Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Challenges in Creating a Representative Corpus of Romanian Micro-Blogging Text

Following the successful creation of a national representative corpus of contemporary Romanian language, we turned our attention to the social media text, as present in micro-blogging platforms. In this paper, we present the current activities as well as the challenges faced when trying to apply existing tools (for both annotation and indexing) to a Romanian language micro-blogging corpus. These challenges are encountered at all annotation levels, including tokenization, and at the indexing stage. We consider that existing tools for Romanian language processing must be adapted to recognize features such as emoticons, emojis, hashtags, unusual abbreviations, elongated words (commonly used for emphasis in micro-blogging), multiple words joined together (within oroutside hashtags), and code-mixed text.
Reflections on 30 Years of Language Resource Development and Sharing

The Linguistic Data Consortium was founded in 1992 to solve the problem that limitations in access to shareable data was impeding progress in Human Language Technology research and development. At the time, DARPA had adopted the common task research management paradigm to impose additional rigor on their programs by also providing shared objectives, data and evaluation methods. Early successes underscored the promise of this paradigm but also the need for a standing infrastructure to host and distribute the shared data. During LDC’s initial five year grant, it became clear that the demand for linguistic data could not easily be met by the existing providers and that a dedicated data center could add capacity first for data collection and shortly thereafter for annotation. The expanding purview required expansions of LDC’s technical infrastructure including systems support and software development. An open question for the center would be its role in other kinds of research beyond data development. Over its 30 years history, LDC has performed multiple roles ranging from neutral, independent data provider to multisite programs, to creator of exploratory data in tight collaboration with system developers, to research group focused on data intensive investigations.
Agree to Disagree: Exploring Subjectivity in Lexical Complexity

Subjective factors affect our familiarity with different words. Our education, mother tongue, dialect or social group all contribute to the words we know and understand. When asking people to mark words they understand some words are unanimously agreed to be complex, whereas other annotators universally disagree on the complexity of other words. In this work, we seek to expose this phenomenon and investigate the factors affecting whether a word is likely to be subjective, or not. We investigate two recent word complexity datasets from shared tasks. We demonstrate that subjectivity is present and describable in both datasets. Further we show results of modelling and predicting the subjectivity of the complexity annotations in the most recent dataset, attaining an F1-score of 0.714.
Stars at Qur’an QA 2022: Building Automatic Extractive Question Answering Systems for the Holy Qur’an with Transformer Models and Releasing a New Dataset

The Holy Qur’an is the most sacred book for more than 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, and it provides a guide for their behaviours and daily interactions. Its miraculous eloquence and the divine essence of its verses (Khorami, 2014)(Elhindi,2017) make it far more difficult for non-scholars to answer their questions from the Qur’an. Here comes the significant role of technology in assisting all Muslims in answering their Qur’anic questions with state-of-the-art advancements in natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR). The task of constructing the finest automatic extractive Question Answering system from the Holy Qur’an with the use of the recently available Qur’anic Reading Comprehension Dataset(QRCD) was announced for LREC 2022 (Malhas et al., 2022) which opened up this new area for researchers around the world. In this paper, we propose a novel Qur’an Question Answering dataset with over 700 samples to aid future Qur’an research projects and three different approaches where we utilised self-attention based deep learning models (transformers) for building reliable intelligent question-answering systems for the Holy Qur’an that achieved a partial Reciprocal Rank (pRR) best score of 52% on the released QRCD test se
Classifying Arabic Crisis Tweets using Data Selection and Pre-trained Language Models

User-generated Social Media (SM) content has been explored as a valuable and accessible source of data about crises to enhance situational awareness and support humanitarian response efforts. However, the timely extraction of crisis-related SM messages is challenging as it involves processing large quantities of noisy data in real-time. Supervised machine learning methods have been successfully applied to this task but such approaches require human-labelled data, which are unlikely to be available from novel and emerging crises. Supervised machine learning algorithms trained on labelled data from past events did not usually perform well when classifying a new disaster due to data variations across events. Using the BERT embeddings, we propose and investigate an instance distance-based data selection approach for adaptation to improve classifiers’ performance under a domain shift. The K-nearest neighbours algorithm selects a subset of multi-event training data that is most similar to the target event. Results show that fine-tuning a BERT model on a selected subset of data to classify crisis tweets outperforms a model that has been fine-tuned on all available source data. We demonstrated that our approach generally works better than the self-training adaptation method. Combing the self-training with our proposed classifier does not enhance the performance.
From ELTeC Text Collection Metadata and Named Entities to Linked-data (and Back)

In this paper we present the wikification of the ELTeC (European Literary Text Collection), developed within the COST Action “Distant Reading for European Literary History” (CA16204). ELTeC is a multilingual corpus of novels written in the time period 1840—1920, built to apply distant reading methods and tools to explore the European literary history. We present the pipeline that led to the production of the linked dataset, the novels’ metadata retrieval and named entity recognition, transformation, mapping and Wikidata population, followed by named entity linking and export to NIF (NLP Interchange Format). The speeding up of the process of data preparation and import to Wikidata is presented on the use case of seven sub-collections of ELTeC (English, Portuguese, French, Slovenian, German, Hungarian and Serbian). Our goal was to automate the process of preparing and importing information, so OpenRefine and QuickStatements were chosen as the best options. The paper also includes examples of SPARQL queries for retrieval of authors, novel titles, publication places and other metadata with different visualisation options as well as statistical overviews.
AraNPCC: The Arabic Newspaper COVID-19 Corpus

This paper introduces a corpus for Arabic newspapers during COVID-19: AraNPCC. The AraNPCC corpus covers 2019 until 2021 via automatically-collected data from 12 Arab countries. It comprises more than 2 billion words and 7.2 million texts alongside their metadata. AraNPCC can be used for several natural language processing tasks, such as updating available Arabic language models or corpus linguistics tasks, including language change over time. We utilized the corpus in two case studies. In the first case study, we investigate the correlation between the number of officially reported infected cases and the collective word frequency of “COVID” and “Corona. ” The data shows a positive correlation that varies among Arab countries. For the second case study, we extract and compare the top 50 keywords in 2020 and 2021 to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on two Arab countries, namely Algeria and Saudi Arabia. For 2020, the data shows that the two countries’ newspapers strongly interacted with the pandemic, emphasizing its spread and dangerousness, and in 2021 the data suggests that the two countries coped with the pandemic.
Features and Categories of Hyperbole in Cyberbullying Discourse on Social Media

Cyberbullying discourse is achieved with multiple linguistic conveyances. Hyperboles witnessed in a corpus of cyberbullying utterances are studied. Linguistic features of hyperbole using the traditional grammatical indications of exaggerations are analyzed. The method relies on data selected from a larger corpus of utterances identified and labelled as “bullying”, from Twitter, from October 2020 to March 2022. An outcome is a lexicon of 250 entries. A small number of lexical level features have been isolated, and chi-squared contingency tests applied to evaluating their information value in identifying hyperbole. Words or affixes indicating superlatives or extremes of scales, with positive but not negative valency items, interact with hyperbole classification in this data set. All utterances extracted has been considered exaggerations and the stylistic status of “hyperbole” has been commented within the frame of new meanings in the context of social media.
Error Correction Environment for the Polish Parliamentary Corpus

The paper introduces the environment for detecting and correcting various kinds of errors in the Polish Parliamentary Corpus. After performing a language model-based error detection experiment which resulted in too many false positives, a simpler rule-based method was introduced and is currently used in the process of manual verification of corpus texts. The paper presents types of errors detected in the corpus, the workflow of the correction process and the tools newly implemented for this purpose. To facilitate comparison of a target corpus XML file with its usually graphical PDF source, a new mechanism for inserting PDF page markers into XML was developed and is used for displaying a single source page corresponding to a given place in the resulting XML directly in the error correction environment.
Annotation of Messages from Social Media for Influencer Detection

To develop an influencer detection system, we designed an influence model based on the analysis of conversations in the “Change My View” debate forum. This led us to identify enunciative features (argumentation, emotion expression, view change, .) related to influence between participants. In this paper, we present the annotation campaign we conducted to build up a reference corpus on these enunciative features. The annotation task was to identify in social media posts the text segments that corresponded to each enunciative feature. The posts to be annotated were extracted from two social media: the “Change My View” debate forum, with discussions on various topics, and Twitter, with posts from users identified as supporters of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). Over a thousand posts have been double or triple annotated throughout five annotation sessions gathering a total of 27 annotators. Some of the sessions involved the same annotators, which allowed us to analyse the evolution of their annotation work. Most of the sessions resulted in a reconciliation phase between the annotators, allowing for discussion and iterative improvement of the guidelines. We measured and analysed inter-annotator agreements over the course of the sessions, which allowed us to validate our iterative approach.
Annotation of expressive dimensions on a multimodal French corpus of political interviews

We present a French corpus of political interviews labeled at the utterance level according to expressive dimensions such as Arousal. This corpus consists of 7.5 hours of high-quality audio-visual recordings with transcription. At the time of this publication, 1 hour of speech was segmented into short utterances, each manually annotated in Arousal. Our segmentation approach differs from similar corpora and allows us to perform an automatic Arousal prediction baseline by building a speech-based classification model. Although this paper focuses on the acoustic expression of Arousal, it paves the way for future work on conflictual and hostile expression recognition as well as multimodal architectures.
About the Applicability of Combining Implicit Crowdsourcing and Language Learning for the Collection of NLP Datasets

In this article, we present a recent trend of approaches, hereafter referred to as Collect4NLP, and discuss its applicability. Collect4NLP-based approaches collect inputs from language learners through learning exercises and aggregate the collected data to derive linguistic knowledge of expert quality. The primary purpose of these approaches is to improve NLP resources, however sincere concern with the needs of learners is crucial for making Collect4NLP work. We discuss the applicability of Collect4NLP approaches in relation to two perspectives. On the one hand, we compare Collect4NLP approaches to the two crowdsourcing trends currently most prevalent in NLP, namely Crowdsourcing Platforms (CPs) and Games-With-A-Purpose (GWAPs), and identify strengths and weaknesses of each trend. By doing so we aim to highlight particularities of each trend and to identify in which kind of settings one trend should be favored over the other two. On the other hand, we analyze the applicability of Collect4NLP approaches to the production of different types of NLP resources. We first list the types of NLP resources most used within its community and second propose a set of blueprints for mapping these resources to well-established language learning exercises as found in standard language learning textbooks.
Making Italian Parliamentary Records Machine-Actionable: the Construction of the ParlaMint-IT corpus

This paper describes the process of acquisition, cleaning, interpretation, coding and linguistic annotation of a collection of parliamentary debates from the Senate of the Italian Republic covering the COVID-19 period and a former period for reference and comparison according to the CLARIN ParlaMint guidelines and prescriptions. The corpus contains 1199 sessions and 79,373 speeches, for a total of about 31 million words and was encoded according to the ParlaCLARIN TEI XML format, as well as in CoNLL-UD format. It includes extensive metadata about the speakers, the sessions, the political parties and Parliamentary groups. As required by the ParlaMint initiative, the corpus was also linguistically annotated for sentences, tokens, POS tags, lemmas and dependency syntax according to the universal dependencies guidelines. Named entity classification was also included. All linguistic annotation was performed automatically using state-of-the-art NLP technology with no manual revision. The Italian dataset is freely available as part of the larger ParlaMint 2.1 corpus deposited and archived in CLARIN repository together with all other national corpora. It is also available for direct analysis and inspection via various CLARIN services and has already been used both for research and educational purposes.
Annotating Verbal Multiword Expressions in Arabic: Assessing the Validity of a Multilingual Annotation Procedure

This paper describes our efforts to extend the PARSEME framework to Modern Standard Arabic. Theapplicability of the PARSEME guidelines was tested by measuring the inter-annotator agreement in theearly annotation stage. A subset of 1,062 sentences from the Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank PADTwas selected and annotated by two Arabic native speakers independently. Following their annotations, anew Arabic corpus with over 1,250 annotated VMWEs has been built. This corpus already exceeds thesmallest corpora of the PARSEME suite, and enables first observations. We discuss our annotation guide-line schema that shows full MWE annotation is realizable in Arabic where we get good inter-annotator agreement.
Using Semantic Role Labeling to Improve Neural Machine Translation

Despite impressive progress in machine translation in recent years, it has occasionally been argued that current systems are still mainly based on pattern recognition and that further progress may be possible by using text understanding techniques, thereby e.g. looking at semantics of the type “Who is doing what to whom? ”. In the current research we aim to take a small step into this direction. Assuming that semantic role labeling (SRL) grasps some of the relevant semantics, we automatically annotate the source language side of a standard parallel corpus, namely Europarl, with semantic roles. We then train a neural machine translation (NMT) system using the annotated corpus on the source language side, and the original unannotated corpus on the target language side. New text to be translated is first annotated by the same SRL system and then fed into the translation system. We compare the results to those of a baseline NMT system trained with unannotated text on both sides and find that the SRL-based system yields small improvements in terms of BLEU scores for each of the four language pairs under investigation, involving English, French, German, Greek and Spanish.
CHILLAX - at Arabic Hate Speech 2022: A Hybrid Machine Learning and Transformers based Model to Detect Arabic Offensive and Hate Speech

Hate speech and offensive language have become a crucial problem nowadays due to the extensive usage of social media by people of different gender, nationality, religion and other types of characteristics allowing anyone to share their thoughts and opinions. In this research paper, We proposed a hybrid model for the first and second tasks of OSACT2022. This model used the Arabic pre-trained Bert language model MARBERT for feature extraction of the Arabic tweets in the dataset provided by the OSACT2022 shared task, then fed the features to two classic machine learning classifiers (Logistic Regression, Random Forest). The best results achieved for the offensive tweet detection task were by the Logistic Regression model with accuracy, precision, recall, and f1-score of 80%, 78%, 78%, and 78%, respectively. The results for the hate speech tweet detection task were 89%, 72%, 80%, and 76%.
Makadi: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Hindi Semantic Parsing

Parsing natural language queries into formal database calls is a very well-studied problem. Because of the rich diversity of semantic markers across the world’s languages, progress in solving this problem is irreducibly language-dependent. This has created an asymmetry in progress in NLIDB solutions, with most state-of-the-art efforts focused on the resource-rich English language, with limited progress seen for low resource languages. In this short paper, we present Makadi, a large-scale, complex, cross-lingual, cross-domain semantic parsing and text-to-SQL dataset for semantic parsing in the Hindi language. Produced by translating the recently introduced English language Spider NLIDB dataset, it consists of 9693 questions and SQL queries on 166 databases with multiple tables which cover multiple domains. This is the first large-scale dataset in the Hindi language for semantic parsing and related language understanding tasks. Our dataset is publicly available at: Link removed to preserve anonymization during peer review.
Solving nonlinear rational expectations models by parameterized expectations: Convergence to stationary solutions

This paper develops the Parameterized Expectations Approach (PEA) for solving nonlinear dynamic stochastic models with rational expectations. The method can be applied to a variety of models, including models with strong nonlinearities, sub-optimal equilibria, and many continuous state variables. In this approach, the conditional expectations in the equilibrium conditions are approximated by finite-dimensional classes of functional forms. The approach is highly efficient computationally because it incorporates endogenous oversampling and Monte-Carlo integration, and it does not impost a discrete grid on the state variables or the stochastic shocks. We prove that PEA can approximate the correct solution with arbitrary accuracy on the ergodic set by increasing the size of the Monte-Carlo simulations and the dimensionality of the approximating family of functions.
Isolated Sign Recognition using ASL Datasets with Consistent Text-based Gloss Labeling and Curriculum Learning

We present a new approach for isolated sign recognition, which combines a spatial-temporal Graph Convolution Network (GCN) architecture for modeling human skeleton keypoints with late fusion of both the forward and backward video streams, and we explore the use of curriculum learning. We employ a type of curriculum learning that dynamically estimates, during training, the order of difficulty of each input video for sign recognition; this involves learning a new family of data parameters that are dynamically updated during training. The research makes use of a large combined video dataset for American Sign Language (ASL), including data from both the American Sign Language Lexicon Video Dataset (ASLLVD) and the Word-Level American Sign Language (WLASL) dataset, with modified gloss labeling of the latter—to ensure 1-1 correspondence between gloss labels and distinct sign productions, as well as consistency in gloss labeling across the two datasets. This is the first time that these two datasets have been used in combination for isolated sign recognition research. We also compare the sign recognition performance on several different subsets of the combined dataset, varying in, e.g., the minimum number of samples per sign (and therefore also in the total number of sign classes and video examples).
Evaluating a New Danish Sentiment Resource: the Danish Sentiment Lexicon, DSL

In this paper, we evaluate a new sentiment lexicon for Danish, the Danish Sentiment Lexicon (DSL), to gain input regarding how to carry out the final adjustments of the lexicon. A feature of the lexicon that differentiates it from other sentiment resources for Danish is that it is linked to a large number of other Danish lexical resources via the DDO lemma and sense inventory and the LLOD via the Danish wordnet, DanNet. We perform our evaluation on four datasets labeled with sentiments. In addition, we compare the lexicon against two existing benchmarks for Danish: the Afinn and the Sentida resources. We observe that DSL performs mostly comparably to the existing resources, but that more fine-grained explorations need to be done in order to fully exploit its possibilities given its linking properties.
Predicting Literary Quality How Perspectivist Should We Be?

Approaches in literary quality tend to belong to two main grounds: one sees quality as completely subjective, relying on the idiosyncratic nature of individual perspectives on the apperception of beauty; the other is ground-truth inspired, and attempts to find one or two values that predict something like an objective quality: the number of copies sold, for example, or the winning of a prestigious prize. While the first school usually does not try to predict quality at all, the second relies on a single majority vote in one form or another. In this article we discuss the advantages and limitations of these schools of thought and describe a different approach to reader’s quality judgments, which moves away from raw majority vote, but does try to create intermediate classes or groups of annotators. Drawing on previous works we describe the benefits and drawbacks of building similar annotation classes. Finally we share early results from a large corpus of literary reviews for an insight into which classes of readers might make most sense when dealing with the appreciation of literary quality.