Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Comparing methods of orthographic conversion for Bàsàá, a language of Cameroon

Orthographical standardization is a milestone in a language’s documentation and the development of its resources. However, texts written in former orthographies remain relevant to the language’s history and development and therefore must be converted to the standardized orthography. Ensuring a language has access to the orthographically standardized version of all of its recorded texts is important in the development of resources as it provides additional textual resources for training, supports contribution of authors using former writing systems, and provides information about the development of the language. This paper evaluates the performance of natural language processing methods, specifically Finite State Transducers and Long Short-term Memory networks, for the orthographical conversion of Bàsàá texts from the Protestant missionary orthography to the now-standard AGLC orthography, with the conclusion that LSTMs are somewhat more effective in the absence of explicit lexical information.
PALI: A Language Identification Benchmark for Perso-Arabic Scripts

The Perso-Arabic scripts are a family of scripts that are widely adopted and used by various linguistic communities around the globe. Identifying various languages using such scripts is crucial to language technologies and challenging in low-resource setups. As such, this paper sheds light on the challenges of detecting languages using Perso-Arabic scripts, especially in bilingual communities where “unconventional” writing is practiced. To address this, we use a set of supervised techniques to classify sentences into their languages. Building on these, we also propose a hierarchical model that targets clusters of languages that are more often confused by the classifiers. Our experiment results indicate the effectiveness of our solutions.
Multilingual BERT has an Accent: Evaluating English Influences on Fluency in Multilingual Models

While multilingual language models can improve NLP performance on low-resource languages by leveraging higher-resource languages, they also reduce average performance on all languages (the ‘curse of multilinguality’). Here we show another problem with multilingual models: grammatical structures in higher-resource languages bleed into lower-resource languages, a phenomenon we call grammatical structure bias. We show this bias via a novel method for comparing the fluency of multilingual models to the fluency of monolingual Spanish and Greek models: testing their preference for two carefully-chosen variable grammatical structures (optional pronoun-drop in Spanish and optional Subject-Verb ordering in Greek). We find that multilingual BERT is biased toward the English-like setting (explicit pronouns and Subject-Verb-Object ordering) and against the default Spanish and Gerek settings, as compared to our monolingual control language model. With our case studies, we hope to bring to light the fine-grained ways in which multilingual models can be biased, and encourage more linguistically-aware fluency evaluation.
Predicting Compositionality of Verbal Multiword Expressions in Persian

The identification of Verbal Multiword Expressions (VMWEs) presents a greater challenge compared to non-verbal MWEs due to their higher surface variability. VMWEs are linguistic units that exhibit varying levels of semantic opaqueness and pose difficulties for computational models in terms of both their identification and the degree of compositionality. In this study, a new approach to predicting the compositional nature of VMWEs in Persian is presented. The method begins with an automatic identification of VMWEs in Persian sentences, which is approached as a sequence labeling problem for recognizing the components of VMWEs. The method then creates word embeddings that better capture the semantic properties of VMWEs and uses them to determine the degree of compositionality through multiple criteria. The study compares two neural architectures for identification, BiLSTM and ParsBERT, and shows that a fine-tuned BERT model surpasses the BiLSTM model in evaluation metrics with an F1 score of 89%. Next, a word2vec embedding model is trained to capture the semantics of identified VMWEs and is used to estimate their compositionality, resulting in an accuracy of 70.9% as demonstrated by experiments on a collected dataset of expert-annotated compositional and non-compositional VMWEs.
Using Modern Languages to Parse Ancient Ones: a Test on Old English

In this paper we test the parsing performances of a multilingual parser on Old English data using different sets of languages, alone and combined with the target language, to train the models. We compare the results obtained by the models and we analyze more in deep the annotation of some peculiar syntactic constructions of the target language, providing plausible linguistic explanations of the errors made even by the best performing models.
CoToHiLi at SIGTYP 2023: Ensemble Models for Cognate and Derivative Words Detection

The identification of cognates and derivatives is a fundamental process in historical linguistics, on which any further research is based. In this paper we present our contribution to the SIGTYP 2023 Shared Task on cognate and derivative detection. We propose a multi-lingual solution based on features extracted from the alignment of the orthographic and phonetic representations of the words.
Natural Language Processing in Ethiopian Languages: Current State, Challenges, and Opportunities

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Israel Abebe Azime, Abinew Ali Ayele, Moges Ahmed Mehamed, Olga Kolesnikova, Seid Muhie Yimam. Proceedings of the Fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL 2023). 2023.
Multilingual End-to-end Dependency Parsing with Linguistic Typology knowledge

We evaluate a Multilingual End-to-end BERT based Dependency Parser which parses an input sentence by directly predicting the relative head-position for each word within it. Our model is a Cross-lingual dependency parser which is trained on a diverse polyglot corpus of high-resource source languages, and is applied on a low-resource target language. To make model more robust to typological variations between source and target languages, and to facilitate the cross-lingual transferring, we utilized the Linguistic typology knowledge, available in typological databases WALS and URIEL. We induce such typology knowledge within our model through an auxiliary task within Multi-task Learning framework.
Does Topological Ordering of Morphological Segments Reduce Morphological Modeling Complexity? A Preliminary Study on 13 Languages

Generalization to novel forms and feature combinations is the key to efficient learning. Recently, Goldman et al. (2022) demonstrated that contemporary neural approaches to morphological inflection still struggle to generalize to unseen words and feature combinations, even in agglutinative languages. In this paper, we argue that the use of morphological segmentation in inflection modeling allows decomposing the problem into sub-problems of substantially smaller search space. We suggest that morphological segments may be globally topologically sorted according to their grammatical categories within a given language. Our experiments demonstrate that such segmentation provides all the necessary information for better generalization, especially in agglutinative languages.
Dialect Representation Learning with Neural Dialect-to-Standard Normalization

Language label tokens are often used in multilingual neural language modeling and sequence-to-sequence learning to enhance the performance of such models. An additional product of the technique is that the models learn representations of the language tokens, which in turn reflect the relationships between the languages. In this paper, we study the learned representations of dialects produced by neural dialect-to-standard normalization models. We use two large datasets of typologically different languages, namely Finnish and Norwegian, and evaluate the learned representations against traditional dialect divisions of both languages. We find that the inferred dialect embeddings correlate well with the traditional dialects. The methodology could be further used in noisier settings to find new insights into language variation.
Identifying the Correlation Between Language Distance and Cross-Lingual Transfer in a Multilingual Representation Space

Prior research has investigated the impact of various linguistic features on cross-lingual transfer performance. In this study, we investigate the manner in which this effect can be mapped onto the representation space. While past studies have focused on the impact on cross-lingual alignment in multilingual language models during fine-tuning, this study examines the absolute evolution of the respective language representation spaces produced by MLLMs. We place a specific emphasis on the role of linguistic characteristics and investigate their inter-correlation with the impact on representation spaces and cross-lingual transfer performance. Additionally, this paper provides preliminary evidence of how these findings can be leveraged to enhance transfer to linguistically distant languages.
A Survey of MWE Identification Experiments: The Devil is in the Details

Multiword expression (MWE) identification has been the focus of numerous research papers, especially in the context of the DiMSUM and PARSEME Shared Tasks (STs). This survey analyses 40 MWE identification papers with experiments on data from these STs. We look at corpus selection, pre- and post-processing, MWE encoding, evaluation metrics, statistical significance, and error analyses. We find that these aspects are usually considered minor and/or omitted in the literature. However, they may considerably impact the results and the conclusions drawn from them. Therefore, we advocate for more systematic descriptions of experimental conditions to reduce the risk of misleading conclusions drawn from poorly designed experimental setup.
Silver Data for Coreference Resolution in Ukrainian: Translation, Alignment, and Projection

Low-resource languages continue to present challenges for current NLP methods, and multilingual NLP is gaining attention in the research community. One of the main issues is the lack of sufficient high-quality annotated data for low-resource languages. In this paper, we show how labeled data for high-resource languages such as English can be used in low-resource NLP. We present two silver datasets for coreference resolution in Ukrainian, adapted from existing English data by manual translation and machine translation in combination with automatic alignment and annotation projection. The code is made publicly available.
Hierarchical3D Adapters for Long Video-to-text Summarization

In this paper, we focus on video-to-text summarization and investigate how to best utilize multimodal information for summarizing long inputs (e.g., an hour-long TV show) into long outputs (e.g., a multi-sentence summary). We extend SummScreen (Chen et al., 2022), a dialogue summarization dataset consisting of transcripts of TV episodes with reference summaries, and create a multimodal variant by collecting corresponding full-length videos. We incorporate multimodal information into a pre-trained textual summarizer efficiently using adapter modules augmented with a hierarchical structure while tuning only 3.8% of model parameters. Our experiments demonstrate that multimodal information offers superior performance over more memory-heavy and fully fine-tuned textual summarization methods.
Prompting for explanations improves Adversarial NLI. Is this true? {Yes} it is {true} because {it weakens superficial cues}

Explanation prompts ask language models to not only assign a particular label to a giveninput, such as true, entailment, or contradiction in the case of natural language inference but also to generate a free-text explanation that supports this label. For example: “This is label because explanation.” While this type of prompt was originally introduced with the aim of improving model interpretability, we showhere that explanation prompts also improve robustness to adversarial perturbations in naturallanguage inference benchmarks. Compared to prompting for labels only, explanation prompting consistently yields stronger performance on adversarial benchmarks, outperforming the state of the art on Adversarial Natural Language Inference, Counterfactually-Augmented Natural Language Inference, and SNLI-Hard datasets. We argue that the increase in robustness is due to the fact that prompting for explanations weakens superficial cues. Specifically, single tokens that are highly predictive of the correct answer in the label-only setting become uninformative when the model also has to generate explanations.
SWING: Balancing Coverage and Faithfulness for Dialogue Summarization

Missing information is a common issue of dialogue summarization where some information in the reference summaries is not covered in the generated summaries. To address this issue, we propose to utilize natural language inference (NLI) models to improve coverage while avoiding introducing factual inconsistencies. Specifically, we use NLI to compute fine-grained training signals to encourage the model to generate content in the reference summaries that have not been covered, as well as to distinguish between factually consistent and inconsistent generated sentences. Experiments on the DialogSum and SAMSum datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach in balancing coverage and faithfulness, validated with automatic metrics and human evaluations. Additionally, we compute the correlation between commonly used automatic metrics with human judgments in terms of three different dimensions regarding coverage and factual consistency to provide insight into the most suitable metric for evaluating dialogue summaries.
Towards a Unified Model for Generating Answers and Explanations in Visual Question Answering

The field of visual question answering (VQA) has recently seen a surge in research focused on providing explanations for predicted answers. However, current systems mostly rely on separate models to predict answers and generate explanations, leading to less grounded and frequently inconsistent results. To address this, we propose a multitask learning approach towards a Unified Model for Answer and Explanation generation (UMAE). Our approach involves the addition of artificial prompt tokens to training data and fine-tuning a multimodal encoder-decoder model on a variety of VQA-related tasks. In our experiments, UMAE models surpass the prior state-of-the-art answer accuracy on A-OKVQA by 10 15%, show competitive results on OK-VQA, achieve new state-of-the-art explanation scores on A-OKVQA and VCR, and demonstrate promising out-of-domain performance on VQA-X.
Task-specific Compression for Multi-task Language Models using Attribution-based Pruning

Multi-task language models show outstanding performance for various natural language understanding tasks with only a single model.However, these language models inevitably utilize an unnecessarily large number of model parameters, even when used only for a specific task.In this paper, we propose a novel training-free compression method for multi-task language models using pruning method.Specifically, we use an attribution method to determine which neurons are essential for performing a specific task.We task-specifically prune unimportant neurons and leave only task-specific parameters.Furthermore, we extend our method to be applicable in both low-resource and unsupervised settings. Since our compression method is training-free, it uses little computing resources and does not update the pre-trained parameters of language models, reducing storage space usage.Experimental results on the six widely-used datasets show that our proposed pruning method significantly outperforms baseline pruning methods.In addition, we demonstrate that our method preserves performance even in an unseen domain setting.
Curricular Next Conversation Prediction Pretraining for Transcript Segmentation

Transcript segmentation is the task of dividing a single continuous transcript into multiple segments. While document segmentation is a popular task, transcript segmentation has significant challenges due to the relatively noisy and sporadic nature of data. We propose pretraining strategies to address these challenges. The strategies are based on “Next Conversation Prediction” (NCP) with the underlying idea of pretraining a model to identify consecutive conversations. We further introduce “Advanced NCP” to make the pretraining task more relevant to the downstream task of segmentation break prediction while being significantly easier. Finally we introduce a curriculum to Advanced NCP (Curricular NCP) based on the similarity between pretraining and downstream task samples. Curricular NCP applied to a state-of-the-art model for text segmentation outperforms prior results. We also show that our pretraining strategies make the model robust to speech recognition errors commonly found in automatically generated transcripts.
SMATCH++: Standardized and Extended Evaluation of Semantic Graphs

The Smatch metric is a popular method for evaluating graph distances, as is necessary, for instance, to assess the performance of semantic graph parsing systems. However, we observe some issues in the metric that jeopardize meaningful evaluation. E.g., opaque pre-processing choices can affect results, and current graph-alignment solvers do not provide us with upper-bounds. Without upper-bounds, however, fair evaluation is not guaranteed. Furthermore, adaptions of Smatch for extended tasks (e.g., fine-grained semantic similarity) are spread out, and lack a unifying framework. For better inspection, we divide the metric into three modules: pre-processing, alignment, and scoring. Examining each module, we specify its goals and diagnose potential issues, for which we discuss and test mitigation strategies. For pre-processing, we show how to fully conform to annotation guidelines that allow structurally deviating but valid graphs. For safer and enhanced alignment, we show the feasibility of optimal alignment in a standard evaluation setup, and develop a lossless graph compression method that shrinks the search space and significantly increases efficiency. For improved scoring, we propose standardized and extended metric calculation of fine-grained sub-graph meaning aspects. Our code is available at https://github.com/flipz357/smatchpp
Improving User Controlled Table-To-Text Generation Robustness

In this work we study user controlled table-to-text generation where users explore the content in a table by selecting cells and reading a natural language description thereof automatically produce by a natural language generator. Such generation models usually learn from carefully selected cell combinations (clean cell selections); however, in practice users may select unexpected, redundant, or incoherent cell combinations (noisy cell selections). In experiments, we find that models perform well on test sets coming from the same distribution as the train data but their performance drops when evaluated on realistic noisy user inputs. We propose a fine-tuning regime with additional user-simulated noisy cell selections. Models fine-tuned with the proposed regime gain 4.85 BLEU points on user noisy test cases and 1.4 on clean test cases; and achieve comparable state-of-the-art performance on the ToTTo dataset.
ViDeBERTa: A powerful pre-trained language model for Vietnamese

This paper presents ViDeBERTa, a new pre-trained monolingual language model for Vietnamese, with three versions - ViDeBERTa_xsmall, ViDeBERTa_base, and ViDeBERTa_large, which are pre-trained on a large-scale corpus of high-quality and diverse Vietnamese texts using DeBERTa architecture. Although many successful pre-trained language models based on Transformer have been widely proposed for the English language, there are still few pre-trained models for Vietnamese, a low-resource language, that perform good results on downstream tasks, especially Question answering. We fine-tune and evaluate our model on three important natural language downstream tasks, Part-of-speech tagging, Named-entity recognition, and Question answering. The empirical results demonstrate that ViDeBERTa with far fewer parameters surpasses the previous state-of-the-art models on multiple Vietnamese-specific natural language understanding tasks. Notably, ViDeBERTa_base with 86M parameters, which is only about 23% of PhoBERT_large with 370M parameters, still performs the same or better results than the previous state-of-the-art model. Our ViDeBERTa models are available at: https://github.com/HySonLab/ViDeBERTa.
Does Masked Language Model Pre-training with Artificial Data Improve Low-resource Neural Machine Translation?

Pre-training masked language models (MLMs) with artificial data has been proven beneficial for several natural language processing tasks such as natural language understanding and summarization; however, it has been less explored for neural machine translation (NMT).A previous study revealed the benefit of transfer learning for NMT in a limited setup, which differs from MLM.In this study, we prepared two kinds of artificial data and compared the translation performance of NMT when pre-trained with MLM.In addition to the random sequences, we created artificial data mimicking token frequency information from the real world.Our results showed that pre-training the models with artificial data by MLM improves translation performance in low-resource situations.Additionally, we found that pre-training on artificial data created considering token frequency information facilitates improved performance.
Machine Translation between Spoken Languages and Signed Languages Represented in SignWriting

This paper presents work on novel machine translation (MT) systems between spoken and signed languages, where signed languages are represented in SignWriting, a sign language writing system. Our work seeks to address the lack of out-of-the-box support for signed languages in current MT systems and is based on the SignBank dataset, which contains pairs of spoken language text and SignWriting content. We introduce novel methods to parse, factorize, decode, and evaluate SignWriting, leveraging ideas from neural factored MT. In a bilingual setup—translating from American Sign Language to (American) English—our method achieves over 30 BLEU, while in two multilingual setups—translating in both directions between spoken languages and signed languages—we achieve over 20 BLEU. We find that common MT techniques used to improve spoken language translation similarly affect the performance of sign language translation. These findings validate our use of an intermediate text representation for signed languages to include them in natural language processing research.
On the Generalization Ability of Retrieval-Enhanced Transformers

Recent work on the Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer (RETRO) model has shown impressive results: off-loading memory from trainable weights to a retrieval database can significantly improve language modeling and match the performance of non-retrieval models that are an order of magnitude larger in size. It has been suggested that at least some of this performance gain is due to non-trivial generalization based on both model weights and retrieval. In this paper, we try to better understand the relative contributions of these two components. We find that the performance gains from retrieval to a very large extent originate from overlapping tokens between the database and the test data, suggesting less of non-trivial generalization than previously assumed. More generally, our results point to the challenges of evaluating the generalization of retrieval-augmented language models such as RETRO, as even limited token overlap may significantly decrease test-time loss. We release our code and model at https://github.com/TobiasNorlund/retro