pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Dating Ancient texts: an Approach for Noisy French Documents
Authors: Ana{\"e}lle Baledent, Nicolas Hiebel, Ga{\"e}l Lejeune
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Document Dating, POS

Automatic dating of ancient documents is a very important area of research for digital humanities applications. Many documents available via digital libraries do not have any dating or dating that is uncertain. Document dating is not only useful by itself but it also helps to choose the appropriate NLP tools (lemmatizer, POS tagger ) for subsequent analysis. This paper provides a dataset with thousands of ancient documents in French and present methods and evaluation metrics for this task. We compare character-level methods with token-level methods on two different datasets of two different time periods and two different text genres. Our results show that character-level models are more robust to noise than classical token-level models. The experiments presented in this article focused on documents written in French but we believe that the ability of character-level models to handle noise properly would help to achieve comparable results on other languages and more ancient languages in particular.
Lemmatization and POS-tagging process by using joint learning approach. Experimental results on Classical Armenian, Old Georgian, and Syriac
Authors: Chahan Vidal-Gor{\`e}ne, Bastien Kindt
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Lemmatization, POS, POS Tagging

Classical Armenian, Old Georgian and Syriac are under-resourced digital languages. Even though a lot of printed critical editions or dictionaries are available, there is currently a lack of fully tagged corpora that could be reused for automatic text analysis. In this paper, we introduce an ongoing project of lemmatization and POS-tagging for these languages, relying on a recurrent neural network (RNN), specific morphological tags and dedicated datasets. For this paper, we have combine different corpora previously processed by automatic out-of-context lemmatization and POS-tagging, and manual proofreading by the collaborators of the GREgORI Project (UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). We intend to compare a rule based approach and a RNN approach by using PIE specialized by Calfa (Paris, France). We introduce here first results. We reach a mean accuracy of 91,63{\%} in lemmatization and of 92,56{\%} in POS-tagging. The datasets, which were constituted and used for this project, are not yet representative of the different variations of these languages through centuries, but they are homogenous and allow reaching tangible results, paving the way for further analysis of wider corpora.
Computerized Forward Reconstruction for Analysis in Diachronic Phonology, and Latin to French Reflex Prediction
Authors: Clayton Marr, David R. Mortensen
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5

Traditionally, historical phonologists have relied on tedious manual derivations to calibrate the sequences of sound changes that shaped the phonological evolution of languages. However, humans are prone to errors, and cannot track thousands of parallel word derivations in any efficient manner. We propose to instead automatically derive each lexical item in parallel, and we demonstrate forward reconstruction as both a computational task with metrics to optimize, and as an empirical tool for inquiry. For this end we present DiaSim, a user-facing application that simulates {``}cascades{''} of diachronic developments over a language{'}s lexicon and provides diagnostics for {``}debugging{''} those cascades. We test our methodology on a Latin-to-French reflex prediction task, using a newly compiled dataset FLLex with 1368 paired Latin/French forms. We also present, FLLAPS, which maps 310 Latin reflexes through five stages until Modern French, derived from Pope (1934){'}s sound tables. Our publicly available rule cascades include the baselines BaseCLEF and BaseCLEF*, representing the received view of Latin to French development, and DiaCLEF, build by incremental corrections to BaseCLEF aided by DiaSim{'}s diagnostics. DiaCLEF vastly outperforms the baselines, improving final accuracy on FLLex from 3.2{\%}to 84.9{\%}, and similar improvements across FLLAPS{'} stages.
Using LatInfLexi for an Entropy-Based Assessment of Predictability in Latin Inflection
Authors: Matteo Pellegrini
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Descriptive

This paper presents LatInfLexi, a large inflected lexicon of Latin providing information on all the inflected wordforms of 3,348 verbs and 1,038 nouns. After a description of the structure of the resource and some data on its size, the procedure followed to obtain the lexicon from the database of the Lemlat 3.0 morphological analyzer is detailed, as well as the choices made regarding overabundant and defective cells. The way in which the data of LatInfLexi can be exploited in order to perform a quantitative assessment of predictability in Latin verb inflection is then illustrated: results obtained by computing the conditional entropy of guessing the content of a paradigm cell assuming knowledge of one wordform or multiple wordforms are presented in turn, highlighting the descriptive and theoretical relevance of the analysis. Lastly, the paper envisages the advantages of an inclusion of LatInfLexi into the LiLa knowledge base, both for the presented resource and for the knowledge base itself.
Integration of Automatic Sentence Segmentation and Lexical Analysis of Ancient Chinese based on BiLSTM-CRF Model
Authors: Ning Cheng, Bin Li, Liming Xiao, Changwei Xu, Sijia Ge, Xingyue Hao, Minxuan Feng
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Lexical Analysis, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Part-Of-Speech Tagging, Segmentation, Sentence, Sentence segmentation

The basic tasks of ancient Chinese information processing include automatic sentence segmentation, word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging and named entity recognition. Tasks such as lexical analysis need to be based on sentence segmentation because of the reason that a plenty of ancient books are not punctuated. However, step-by-step processing is prone to cause multi-level diffusion of errors. This paper designs and implements an integrated annotation system of sentence segmentation and lexical analysis. The BiLSTM-CRF neural network model is used to verify the generalization ability and the effect of sentence segmentation and lexical analysis on different label levels on four cross-age test sets. Research shows that the integration method adopted in ancient Chinese improves the F1-score of sentence segmentation, word segmentation and part of speech tagging. Based on the experimental results of each test set, the F1-score of sentence segmentation reached 78.95, with an average increase of 3.5{\%}; the F1-score of word segmentation reached 85.73{\%}, with an average increase of 0.18{\%}; and the F1-score of part-of-speech tagging reached 72.65, with an average increase of 0.35{\%}.
Automatic semantic role labeling in Ancient Greek using distributional semantic modeling
Authors: Alek Keersmaekers
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Semantic Role Labeling

This paper describes a first attempt to automatic semantic role labeling in Ancient Greek, using a supervised machine learning approach. A Random Forest classifier is trained on a small semantically annotated corpus of Ancient Greek, annotated with a large amount of linguistic features, including form of the construction, morphology, part-of-speech, lemmas, animacy, syntax and distributional vectors of Greek words. These vectors turned out to be more important in the model than any other features, likely because they are well suited to handle a low amount of training examples. Overall labeling accuracy was 0.757, with large differences with respect to the specific role that was labeled and with respect to text genre. Some ways to further improve these results include expanding the amount of training examples, improving the quality of the distributional vectors and increasing the consistency of the syntactic annotation.
A Thesaurus for Biblical Hebrew
Authors: Miriam Azar, Aliza Pahmer, Joshua Waxman
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

We built a thesaurus for Biblical Hebrew, with connections between roots based on phonetic, semantic, and distributional similarity. To this end, we apply established algorithms to find connections between headwords based on existing lexicons and other digital resources. For semantic similarity, we utilize the cosine-similarity of tf-idf vectors of English gloss text of Hebrew headwords from Ernest Klein{'}s A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Readers of English as well as to Brown-Driver-Brigg{'}s Hebrew Lexicon. For phonetic similarity, we digitize part of Matityahu Clark{'}s Etymological Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, grouping Hebrew roots into phonemic classes, and establish phonetic relationships between headwords in Klein{'}s Dictionary. For distributional similarity, we consider the cosine similarity of PPMI vectors of Hebrew roots and also, in a somewhat novel approach, apply Word2Vec to a Biblical corpus reduced to its lexemes. The resulting resource is helpful to those trying to understand Biblical Hebrew, and also stands as a good basis for programs trying to process the Biblical text.
Word Probability Findings in the Voynich Manuscript
Authors: Colin Layfield, Lonneke van der Plas, Michael Rosner, John Abela
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5

The Voynich Manuscript has baffled scholars for centuries. Some believe the elaborate 15th century codex to be a hoax whilst others believe it is a real medieval manuscript whose contents are as yet unknown. In this paper, we provide additional evidence that the text of the manuscript displays the hallmarks of a proper natural language with respect to the relationship between word probabilities and (i) average information per subword segment and (ii) the relative positioning of consecutive subword segments necessary to uniquely identify words of different probabilities.
Comparing Statistical and Neural Models for Learning Sound Correspondences
Authors: Cl{\'e}mentine Fourrier, Beno{\^\i}t Sagot
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Cognate Prediction, Machine Translation, Translation

Cognate prediction and proto-form reconstruction are key tasks in computational historical linguistics that rely on the study of sound change regularity. Solving these tasks appears to be very similar to machine translation, though methods from that field have barely been applied to historical linguistics. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the learnability of sound correspondences between a proto-language and daughter languages for two machine-translation-inspired models, one statistical, the other neural. We first carry out our experiments on plausible artificial languages, without noise, in order to study the role of each parameter on the algorithms respective performance under almost perfect conditions. We then study real languages, namely Latin, Italian and Spanish, to see if those performances generalise well. We show that both model types manage to learn sound changes despite data scarcity, although the best performing model type depends on several parameters such as the size of the training data, the ambiguity, and the prediction direction.
Distributional Semantics for Neo-Latin
Authors: Jelke Bloem, Maria Chiara Parisi, Martin Reynaert, Yvette Oortwijn, Arianna Betti
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Word Embeddings

We address the problem of creating and evaluating quality Neo-Latin word embeddings for the purpose of philosophical research, adapting the Nonce2Vec tool to learn embeddings from Neo-Latin sentences. This distributional semantic modeling tool can learn from tiny data incrementally, using a larger background corpus for initialization. We conduct two evaluation tasks: definitional learning of Latin Wikipedia terms, and learning consistent embeddings from 18th century Neo-Latin sentences pertaining to the concept of mathematical method. Our results show that consistent Neo-Latin word embeddings can be learned from this type of data. While our evaluation results are promising, they do not reveal to what extent the learned models match domain expert knowledge of our Neo-Latin texts. Therefore, we propose an additional evaluation method, grounded in expert-annotated data, that would assess whether learned representations are conceptually sound in relation to the domain of study.
Latin-Spanish Neural Machine Translation: from the Bible to Saint Augustine
Authors: Eva Mart{\'\i}nez Garcia, {\'A}lvaro Garc{\'\i}a Tejedor
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Machine Translation, Translation

Although there are several sources where to find historical texts, they usually are available in the original language that makes them generally inaccessible. This paper presents the development of state-of-the-art Neural Machine Systems for the low-resourced Latin-Spanish language pair. First, we build a Transformer-based Machine Translation system on the Bible parallel corpus. Then, we build a comparable corpus from Saint Augustine texts and their translations. We use this corpus to study the domain adaptation case from the Bible texts to Saint Augustine{'}s works. Results show the difficulties of handling a low-resourced language as Latin. First, we noticed the importance of having enough data, since the systems do not achieve high BLEU scores. Regarding domain adaptation, results show how using in-domain data helps systems to achieve a better quality translation. Also, we observed that it is needed a higher amount of data to perform an effective vocabulary extension that includes in-domain vocabulary.
Detecting Direct Speech in Multilingual Collection of 19th-century Novels
Authors: Joanna Byszuk, Micha{\l} Wo{\'z}niak, Mike Kestemont, Albert Le{\'s}niak, Wojciech {\L}ukasik, Artjoms {\v{S}}e{\c{l}}a, Maciej Eder
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Sentence

Fictional prose can be broadly divided into narrative and discursive forms with direct speech being central to any discourse representation (alongside indirect reported speech and free indirect discourse). This distinction is crucial in digital literary studies and enables interesting forms of narratological or stylistic analysis. The difficulty of automatically detecting direct speech, however, is currently under-estimated. Rule-based systems that work reasonably well for modern languages struggle with (the lack of) typographical conventions in 19th-century literature. While machine learning approaches to sequence modeling can be applied to solve the task, they typically face a severed skewness in the availability of training material, especially for lesser resourced languages. In this paper, we report the result of a multilingual approach to direct speech detection in a diverse corpus of 19th-century fiction in 9 European languages. The proposed method finetunes a transformer architecture with multilingual sentence embedder on a minimal amount of annotated training in each language, and improves performance across languages with ambiguous direct speech marking, in comparison to a carefully constructed regular expression baseline.
Overview of the EvaLatin 2020 Evaluation Campaign
Authors: Rachele Sprugnoli, Marco Passarotti, Flavio Massimiliano Cecchini, Matteo Pellegrini
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Lemmatization, Part-Of-Speech Tagging

This paper describes the first edition of EvaLatin, a campaign totally devoted to the evaluation of NLP tools for Latin. The two shared tasks proposed in EvaLatin 2020, i. e. Lemmatization and Part-of-Speech tagging, are aimed at fostering research in the field of language technologies for Classical languages. The shared dataset consists of texts taken from the Perseus Digital Library, processed with UDPipe models and then manually corrected by Latin experts. The training set includes only prose texts by Classical authors. The test set, alongside with prose texts by the same authors represented in the training set, also includes data relative to poetry and to the Medieval period. This also allows us to propose the Cross-genre and Cross-time subtasks for each task, in order to evaluate the portability of NLP tools for Latin across different genres and time periods. The results obtained by the participants for each task and subtask are presented and discussed.
Data-driven Choices in Neural Part-of-Speech Tagging for Latin
Authors: Geoff Bacon
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Part-Of-Speech Tagging

Textual data in ancient and historical languages such as Latin is increasingly available in machine readable forms, yet computational tools to analyze and process this data are still lacking. We describe our system for part-of-speech tagging in Latin, an entry in the EvaLatin 2020 shared task. Based on a detailed analysis of the training data, we make targeted preprocessing decisions and design our model. We leverage existing large unlabelled resources to pre-train representations at both the grapheme and word level, which serve as the inputs to our LSTM-based models. We perform an extensive cross-validated hyperparameter search, achieving an accuracy score of up to 93 on in-domain texts. We publicly release all our code and trained models in the hope that our system will be of use to social scientists and digital humanists alike. The insights we draw from our inital analysis can also inform future NLP work modeling syntactic information in Latin.
JHUBC's Submission to LT4HALA EvaLatin 2020
Authors: Winston Wu, Garrett Nicolai
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Decoder, Lemmatization, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, POS

We describe the JHUBC submission to the EvaLatin Shared task on lemmatization and part-of-speech tagging for Latin. We modify a hard-attentional character-based encoder-decoder to produce lemmas and POS tags with separate decoders, and to incorporate contextual tagging cues. While our results show that the dual decoder approach fails to encode data as successfully as the single encoder, our simple context incorporation method does lead to modest improvements.
A Gradient Boosting-Seq2Seq System for Latin POS Tagging and Lemmatization
Authors: Celano Giuseppe
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Lemmatization, POS, POS Tagging, TAG, Word Embeddings

The paper presents the system used in the EvaLatin shared task to POS tag and lemmatize Latin. It consists of two components. A gradient boosting machine (LightGBM) is used for POS tagging, mainly fed with pre-computed word embeddings of a window of seven contiguous tokens{---}the token at hand plus the three preceding and following ones{---}per target feature value. Word embeddings are trained on the texts of the Perseus Digital Library, Patrologia Latina, and Biblioteca Digitale di Testi Tardo Antichi, which together comprise a high number of texts of different genres from the Classical Age to Late Antiquity. Word forms plus the outputted POS labels are used to feed a seq2seq algorithm implemented in Keras to predict lemmas. The final shared-task accuracies measured for Classical Latin texts are in line with state-of-the-art POS taggers (∼0.96) and lemmatizers (∼0.95).
Voting for POS tagging of Latin texts: Using the flair of FLAIR to better Ensemble Classifiers by Example of Latin
Authors: Manuel Stoeckel, Alex Henlein, Wahed Hemati, Alex Mehler, er
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Lemmatization, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, POS, POS Tagging, Word Embeddings

Despite the great importance of the Latin language in the past, there are relatively few resources available today to develop modern NLP tools for this language. Therefore, the EvaLatin Shared Task for Lemmatization and Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging was published in the LT4HALA workshop. In our work, we dealt with the second EvaLatin task, that is, POS tagging. Since most of the available Latin word embeddings were trained on either few or inaccurate data, we trained several embeddings on better data in the first step. Based on these embeddings, we trained several state-of-the-art taggers and used them as input for an ensemble classifier called LSTMVoter. We were able to achieve the best results for both the cross-genre and the cross-time task (90.64{\%} and 87.00{\%}) without using additional annotated data (closed modality). In the meantime, we further improved the system and achieved even better results (96.91{\%} on classical, 90.87{\%} on cross-genre and 87.35{\%} on cross-time).
Detecting Adverse Drug Events from Swedish Electronic Health Records using Text Mining
Authors: Maria Bampa, Hercules Dalianis
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5

Electronic Health Records are a valuable source of patient information which can be leveraged to detect Adverse Drug Events (ADEs) and aid post-mark drug-surveillance. The overall aim of this study is to scrutinize text written by clinicians in the EHRs and build a model for ADE detection that produces medically relevant predictions. Natural Language Processing techniques will be exploited to create important predictors and incorporate them into the learning process. The study focuses on the 5 most frequent ADE cases found ina Swedish electronic patient record corpus. The results indicate that considering textual features, rather than the structured, can improve the classification performance by 15{\%} in some ADE cases. Additionally, variable patient history lengths are incorporated in the models, demonstrating the importance of the above decision rather than using an arbitrary number for a history length. The experimental findings suggest that the clinical text in EHRs includes information that can capture data beyond the ones that are found in a structured format.
Building a Norwegian Lexical Resource for Medical Entity Recognition
Authors: Ildiko Pilan, P{\aa}l H. Brekke, Lilja {\O}vrelid
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5

We present a large Norwegian lexical resource of categorized medical terms. The resource, which merges information from large medical databases, contains over 56,000 entries, including automatically mapped terms from a Norwegian medical dictionary. We describe the methodology behind this automatic dictionary entry mapping based on keywords and suffixes and further present the results of a manual evaluation performed on a subset by a domain expert. The evaluation indicated that ca. 80{\%} of the mappings were correct.