metadata

languages:
  - ca

Semantic Textual Similarity in Catalan

BibTeX citation

If you use any of these resources (datasets or models) in your work, please cite our latest paper:

@inproceedings{armengol-estape-etal-2021-multilingual,
    title = "Are Multilingual Models the Best Choice for Moderately Under-resourced Languages? {A} Comprehensive Assessment for {C}atalan",
    author = "Armengol-Estap{\'e}, Jordi  and
      Carrino, Casimiro Pio  and
      Rodriguez-Penagos, Carlos  and
      de Gibert Bonet, Ona  and
      Armentano-Oller, Carme  and
      Gonzalez-Agirre, Aitor  and
      Melero, Maite  and
      Villegas, Marta",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021",
    month = aug,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-acl.437",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.findings-acl.437",
    pages = "4933--4946",
}

Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and access to dataset files

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4529184

Introduction

STS corpus is a benchmark for evaluating Semantic Text Similarity in Catalan. It consists of more than 3000 sentence pairs, annotated with the semantic similarity between them, using a scale from 0 (no similarity at all) to 5 (semantic equivalence). It is done manually by 4 different annotators following our guidelines based on previous work from the SemEval challenges (https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/S13-1004.pdf).

The source data are scraped sentences from the Catalan Textual Corpus (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4519349), used under CC-by-SA-4.0 licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). The dataset is released under the same licence.

This dataset was developed by BSC TeMU as part of the AINA project, to enrich the Catalan Language Understanding Benchmark (CLUB).

This is the version 1.0.1 of the dataset with the complete human and automatic annotations, as well as the QA analysis scripts. It also has a more accurate license.

This dataset can be used to build and score semantic similarity models.

Supported Tasks and Leaderboards

Semantic textual similiarity, Language Model

Languages

CA - Catalan

Directory structure

* dev.tsv
* sts-ca.py
* test.tsv
* train.tsv
* README

Dataset Structure

Data Instances

Follows SemEval challenges (https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/S13-1004.pdf).

Data Fields

SemEval challenges formats and conventions (https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/S13-1004.pdf).

Example:

index	id	sentence 1	sentence 2	avg
19	ACN2_131	Els manifestants ocupen l'Imperial Tarraco durant una hora fent jocs de taula	Els manifestants ocupen l'Imperial Tarraco i fan jocs de taula	4
21	TE2_80	El festival comptarà amb cinc escenaris i se celebrarà entre el 7 i el 9 de juliol al Parc del Fòrum.	El festival se celebrarà el 7 i 8 de juliol al Parc del Fòrum de Barcelona	3
23	Oscar2_609	Aleshores hi posarem un got de vi i continuarem amb la cocció fins que s'hagi evaporat el vi i ho salpebrarem.	Mentre, hi posarem el vi al sofregit i deixarem coure uns 7/8′, fins que el vi s'evapori.	3
25	Viqui2_48	L'arboç grec (Arbutus andrachne) és un arbust o un petit arbre dins la família ericàcia.	El ginjoler ("Ziziphus jujuba") és un arbust o arbre petit de la família de les "Rhamnaceae".	2.75
27	ACN2_1072	Mentre han estat davant la comandància, els manifestants han cridat consignes a favor de la independència i han cantat cançons com 'L'estaca'.	Entre les consignes que han cridat s'ha pogut escoltar càntics com 'els carrers seran sempre nostres' i contínues consignes en favor de la independència.	3
28	Viqui2_587	Els cinc municipis ocupen una superfície de poc més de 100 km2 i conjuntament sumen una població total aproximada de 3.691 habitants (any 2019).	Té una població d'1.811.177 habitants (2005) repartits en 104 municipis d'una superfície total de 14.001 km2.	2.67

Data Splits

sts_cat_dev_v1.tsv (493 annotated pairs)
sts_cat_train_v1.tsv (492 annotated pairs)
sts_cat_test_v1.tsv (2043 annotated pairs)

Dataset Creation

Methodology

Random sentences were extracted from 3 Catalan corpus: ACN, Oscar and Wikipedia, and we generated candidate pairs using a combination of metrics from Doc2Vec, Jaccard and a BERT-like model (“distiluse-base-multilingual-cased-v2”, link). Finally, we manually reviewed the generated pairs to reject non-relevant pairs (identical or ungrammatical sentences, etc.) before providing them to the annotation team. The average of the four annotations was selected as a “ground truth” for each sentence pair, except when an annotator diverged in more than one unit from the average. In these cases, we discarded the divergent annotation and recalculated the average without it. We also discarded 45 sentence pairs because the annotators disagreed too much.

Curation Rationale

For compatibility with similar datasets in other languages, we followed as close as possible existing curation guidelines.

Source Data

Initial Data Collection and Normalization

The source data are scraped sentences from the Catalan Textual Corpus.

Who are the source language producers?

The Catalan Textual Corpus is a 1760-million-token web corpus of Catalan built from several sources: existing corpus such as DOGC, CaWac (non-dedup version), Oscar (unshuffled version), Open Subtitles, Catalan Wikipedia; and three brand new crawlings: the Catalan General Crawling, obtained by crawling the 500 most popular .cat and .ad domains; the Catalan Government Crawling, obtained by crawling the .gencat domain and subdomains, belonging to the Catalan Government; and the ACN corpus with 220k news items from March 2015 until October 2020, crawled from the Catalan News Agency.

Annotations

Annotation process

We comissioned the manual annotation of the similiarity between the sentences of each pair, following the provided guidelines.

Who are the annotators?

A team of native language speakers from 2 different companies, working independently.

Dataset Curators

Carlos Rodríguez and Carme Armentano, from BSC-CNS

Personal and Sensitive Information

No personal or sensitive information included.

Considerations for Using the Data

Social Impact of Dataset

[More Information Needed]

Discussion of Biases

[More Information Needed]

Other Known Limitations

[More Information Needed]

Contact

Carlos Rodríguez-Penagos (carlos.rodriguez1@bsc.es) and Carme Armentano-Oller (carme.armentano@bsc.es)

License

This work is licensed under a Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.