pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Automated Essay Scoring System for Nonnative Japanese Learners
Authors: Reo Hirao, Mio Arai, Hiroki Shimanaka, Satoru Katsumata, Mamoru Komachi
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Automated Essay Scoring

In this study, we created an automated essay scoring (AES) system for nonnative Japanese learners using an essay dataset with annotations for a holistic score and multiple trait scores, including content, organization, and language scores. In particular, we developed AES systems using two different approaches: a feature-based approach and a neural-network-based approach. In the former approach, we used Japanese-specific linguistic features, including character-type features such as {``}kanji{''} and {``}hiragana.{''} In the latter approach, we used two models: a long short-term memory (LSTM) model (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber, 1997) and a bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model (Devlin et al., 2019), which achieved the highest accuracy in various natural language processing tasks in 2018. Overall, the BERT model achieved the best root mean squared error and quadratic weighted kappa scores. In addition, we analyzed the robustness of the outputs of the BERT model. We have released and shared this system to facilitate further research on AES for Japanese as a second language learners.
A Real-World Data Resource of Complex Sensitive Sentences Based on Documents from the Monsanto Trial
Authors: Jan Neerbek, Morten Eskildsen, Peter Dolog, Ira Assent
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Sentence

In this work we present a corpus for the evaluation of sensitive information detection approaches that addresses the need for real world sensitive information for empirical studies. Our sentence corpus contains different notions of complex sensitive information that correspond to different aspects of concern in a current trial of the Monsanto company. This paper describes the annotations process, where we both employ human annotators and furthermore create automatically inferred labels regarding technical, legal and informal communication within and with employees of Monsanto, drawing on a classification of documents by lawyers involved in the Monsanto court case. We release corpus of high quality sentences and parse trees with these two types of labels on sentence level. We characterize the sensitive information via several representative sensitive information detection models, in particular both keyword-based (n-gram) approaches and recent deep learning models, namely, recurrent neural networks (LSTM) and recursive neural networks (RecNN). Data and code are made publicly available.
Discovering Biased News Articles Leveraging Multiple Human Annotations
Authors: Konstantina Lazaridou, Alex L{\"o}ser, er, Maria Mestre, Felix Naumann
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Articles

Unbiased and fair reporting is an integral part of ethical journalism. Yet, political propaganda and one-sided views can be found in the news and can cause distrust in media. Both accidental and deliberate political bias affect the readers and shape their views. We contribute to a trustworthy media ecosystem by automatically identifying politically biased news articles. We introduce novel corpora annotated by two communities, i.e., domain experts and crowd workers, and we also consider automatic article labels inferred by the newspapers{'} ideologies. Our goal is to compare domain experts to crowd workers and also to prove that media bias can be detected automatically. We classify news articles with a neural network and we also improve our performance in a self-supervised manner.
Corpora and Baselines for Humour Recognition in Portuguese
Authors: Hugo Gon{\c{c}}alo Oliveira, Andr{\'e} Clem{\^e}ncio, Ana Alves
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5

Having in mind the lack of work on the automatic recognition of verbal humour in Portuguese, a topic connected with fluency in a natural language, we describe the creation of three corpora, covering two styles of humour and four sources of non-humorous text, that may be used for related studies. We then report on some experiments where the created corpora were used for training and testing computational models that exploit content and linguistic features for humour recognition. The obtained results helped us taking some conclusions about this challenge and may be seen as baselines for those willing to tackle it in the future, using the same corpora.
FactCorp: A Corpus of Dutch Fact-checks and its Multiple Usages
Authors: Marten van der Meulen, W. Gudrun Reijnierse
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Fact Checking

Fact-checking information before publication has long been a core task for journalists, but recent times have seen the emergence of dedicated news items specifically aimed at fact-checking after publication. This relatively new form of fact-checking receives a fair amount of attention from academics, with current research focusing mostly on journalists{'} motivations for publishing post-hoc fact-checks, the effects of fact-checking on the perceived accuracy of false claims, and the creation of computational tools for automatic fact-checking. In this paper, we propose to study fact-checks from a corpus linguistic perspective. This will enable us to gain insight in the scope and contents of fact-checks, to investigate what fact-checks can teach us about the way in which science appears (incorrectly) in the news, and to see how fact-checks behave in the science communication landscape. We report on the creation of FactCorp, a 1,16 million-word corpus containing 1,974 fact-checks from three major Dutch newspapers. We also present results of several exploratory analyses, including a rhetorical moves analysis, a qualitative content elements analysis, and keyword analyses. Through these analyses, we aim to demonstrate the wealth of possible applications that FactCorp allows, thereby stressing the importance of creating such resources.
Automatic Orality Identification in Historical Texts
Authors: Katrin Ortmann, Stefanie Dipper
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Sentence

Independently of the medial representation (written/spoken), language can exhibit characteristics of conceptual orality or literacy, which mainly manifest themselves on the lexical or syntactic level. In this paper we aim at automatically identifying conceptually-oral historical texts, with the ultimate goal of gaining knowledge about spoken data of historical time stages. We apply a set of general linguistic features that have been proven to be effective for the classification of modern language data to historical German texts from various registers. Many of the features turn out to be equally useful in determining the conceptuality of historical data as they are for modern data, especially the frequency of different types of pronouns and the ratio of verbs to nouns. Other features like sentence length, particles or interjections point to peculiarities of the historical data and reveal problems with the adoption of a feature set that was developed on modern language data.
Using Deep Neural Networks with Intra- and Inter-Sentence Context to Classify Suicidal Behaviour
Authors: Xingyi Song, Johnny Downs, Sumithra Velupillai, Rachel Holden, Maxim Kikoler, Kalina Bontcheva, Rina Dutta, Angus Roberts
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Sentence

Identifying statements related to suicidal behaviour in psychiatric electronic health records (EHRs) is an important step when modeling that behaviour, and when assessing suicide risk. We apply a deep neural network based classification model with a lightweight context encoder, to classify sentence level suicidal behaviour in EHRs. We show that incorporating information from sentences to left and right of the target sentence significantly improves classification accuracy. Our approach achieved the best performance when classifying suicidal behaviour in Autism Spectrum Disorder patient records. The results could have implications for suicidality research and clinical surveillance.
A First Dataset for Film Age Appropriateness Investigation
Authors: Emad Mohamed, Le An Ha
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Age Classification, General Classification

Film age appropriateness classification is an important problem with a significant societal impact that has so far been out of the interest of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning researchers. To this end, we have collected a corpus of 17000 films along with their age ratings. We use the textual contents in an experiment to predict the correct age classification for the United States (G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17) and the United Kingdom (U, PG, 12A, 15, 18 and R18). Our experiments indicate that gradient boosting machines beat FastText and various Deep Learning architectures. We reach an overall accuracy of 79.3{\%} for the US ratings compared to a projected super human accuracy of 84{\%}. For the UK ratings, we reach an overall accuracy of 65.3{\%} (UK) compared to a projected super human accuracy of 80.0{\%}.
Habibi - a multi Dialect multi National Arabic Song Lyrics Corpus
Authors: Mahmoud El-Haj
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Dialect Identification, Word Embeddings

This paper introduces Habibi the first Arabic Song Lyrics corpus. The corpus comprises more than 30,000 Arabic song lyrics in 6 Arabic dialects for singers from 18 different Arabic countries. The lyrics are segmented into more than 500,000 sentences (song verses) with more than 3.5 million words. I provide the corpus in both comma separated value (csv) and annotated plain text (txt) file formats. In addition, I converted the csv version into JavaScript Object Notation (json) and eXtensible Markup Language (xml) file formats. To experiment with the corpus I run extensive binary and multi-class experiments for dialect and country-of-origin identification. The identification tasks include the use of several classical machine learning and deep learning models utilising different word embeddings. For the binary dialect identification task the best performing classifier achieved a testing accuracy of 93{\%}. This was achieved using a word-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) utilising a Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) word embeddings model. The results overall show all classical and deep learning models to outperform our baseline, which demonstrates the suitability of the corpus for both dialect and country-of-origin identification tasks. I am making the corpus and the trained CBOW word embeddings freely available for research purposes.
Age Suitability Rating: Predicting the MPAA Rating Based on Movie Dialogues
Authors: Mahsa Shafaei, Niloofar Safi Samghabadi, Sudipta Kar, Thamar Solorio
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5

Movies help us learn and inspire societal change. But they can also contain objectionable content that negatively affects viewers{'} behaviour, especially children. In this paper, our goal is to predict the suitability of movie content for children and young adults based on scripts. The criterion that we use to measure suitability is the MPAA rating that is specifically designed for this purpose. We create a corpus for movie MPAA ratings and propose an RNN based architecture with attention that jointly models the genre and the emotions in the script to predict the MPAA rating. We achieve 81{\%} weighted F1-score for the classification model that outperforms the traditional machine learning method by 7{\%}.
Email Classification Incorporating Social Networks and Thread Structure
Authors: Sakhar Alkhereyf, Owen Rambow
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Classification, Document Classification, General Classification, Sentiment Analysis

Existing methods for different document classification tasks in the context of social networks typically only capture the semantics of texts, while ignoring the users who exchange the text and the network they form. However, some work has shown that incorporating the social network information in addition to information from language is effective for various NLP applications including sentiment analysis, inferring user attributes, and predicting inter-personal relations. In this paper, we present an empirical study of email classification into {``}Business{''} and {``}Personal{''} categories. We represent the email communication using various graph structures. As features, we use both the textual information from the email content and social network information from the communication graphs. We also model the thread structure for emails. We focus on detecting personal emails, and we evaluate our methods on two corpora, only one of which we train on. The experimental results reveal that incorporating social network information improves over the performance of an approach based on textual information only. The results also show that considering the thread structure of emails improves the performance further. Furthermore, our approach improves over a state-of-the-art baseline which uses node embeddings based on both lexical and social network information.
Development and Validation of a Corpus for Machine Humor Comprehension
Authors: Yuen-Hsien Tseng, Wun-Syuan Wu, Chia-Yueh Chang, Hsueh-Chih Chen, Wei-Lun Hsu
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: valid

This work developed a Chinese humor corpus containing 3,365 jokes collected from over 40 sources. Each joke was labeled with five levels of funniness, eight skill sets of humor, and six dimensions of intent by only one annotator. To validate the manual labels, we trained SVM (Support Vector Machine) and BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) with half of the corpus (labeled by one annotator) to predict the skill and intent labels of the other half (labeled by the other annotator). Based on two assumptions that a valid manually labeled corpus should follow, our results showed the validity for the skill and intent labels. As to the funniness label, the validation results showed that the correlation between the corpus label and user feedback rating is marginal, which implies that the funniness level is a harder annotation problem to be solved. The contribution of this work is two folds: 1) a Chinese humor corpus is developed with labels of humor skills, intents, and funniness, which allows machines to learn more intricate humor framing, effect, and amusing level to predict and respond in proper context (https://github.com/SamTseng/Chinese{\_}Humor{\_}MultiLabeled). 2) An approach to verify whether a minimum human labeled corpus is valid or not, which facilitates the validation of low-resource corpora.
Alector: A Parallel Corpus of Simplified French Texts with Alignments of Misreadings by Poor and Dyslexic Readers
Authors: N{\'u}ria Gala, Ana{\"\i}s Tack, Ludivine Javourey-Drevet, Thomas Fran{\c{c}}ois, Johannes C. Ziegler
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Text Simplification

In this paper, we present a new parallel corpus addressed to researchers, teachers, and speech therapists interested in text simplification as a means of alleviating difficulties in children learning to read. The corpus is composed of excerpts drawn from 79 authentic literary (tales, stories) and scientific (documentary) texts commonly used in French schools for children aged between 7 to 9 years old. The excerpts were manually simplified at the lexical, morpho-syntactic, and discourse levels in order to propose a parallel corpus for reading tests and for the development of automatic text simplification tools. A sample of 21 poor-reading and dyslexic children with an average reading delay of 2.5 years read a portion of the corpus. The transcripts of readings errors were integrated into the corpus with the goal of identifying lexical difficulty in the target population. By means of statistical testing, we provide evidence that the manual simplifications significantly reduced reading errors, highlighting that the words targeted for simplification were not only well-chosen but also substituted with substantially easier alternatives. The entire corpus is available for consultation through a web interface and available on demand for research purposes.
Multilingual Stance Detection in Tweets: The Catalonia Independence Corpus
Authors: Elena Zotova, Rodrigo Agerri, Manuel Nu{\~n}ez, German Rigau
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Stance Detection

Stance detection aims to determine the attitude of a given text with respect to a specific topic or claim. While stance detection has been fairly well researched in the last years, most the work has been focused on English. This is mainly due to the relative lack of annotated data in other languages. The TW-10 referendum Dataset released at IberEval 2018 is a previous effort to provide multilingual stance-annotated data in Catalan and Spanish. Unfortunately, the TW-10 Catalan subset is extremely imbalanced. This paper addresses these issues by presenting a new multilingual dataset for stance detection in Twitter for the Catalan and Spanish languages, with the aim of facilitating research on stance detection in multilingual and cross-lingual settings. The dataset is annotated with stance towards one topic, namely, the ndependence of Catalonia. We also provide a semi-automatic method to annotate the dataset based on a categorization of Twitter users. We experiment on the new corpus with a number of supervised approaches, including linear classifiers and deep learning methods. Comparison of our new corpus with the with the TW-1O dataset shows both the benefits and potential of a well balanced corpus for multilingual and cross-lingual research on stance detection. Finally, we establish new state-of-the-art results on the TW-10 dataset, both for Catalan and Spanish.
An Evaluation of Progressive Neural Networksfor Transfer Learning in Natural Language Processing
Authors: Abdul Moeed, Gerhard Hagerer, Sumit Dugar, Sarthak Gupta, Mainak Ghosh, Hannah Danner, Oliver Mitevski, Andreas Nawroth, Georg Groh
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: text-classification, Text Classification, Transfer Learning

A major challenge in modern neural networks is the utilization of previous knowledge for new tasks in an effective manner, otherwise known as transfer learning. Fine-tuning, the most widely used method for achieving this, suffers from catastrophic forgetting. The problem is often exacerbated in natural language processing (NLP). In this work, we assess progressive neural networks (PNNs) as an alternative to fine-tuning. The evaluation is based on common NLP tasks such as sequence labeling and text classification. By gauging PNNs across a range of architectures, datasets, and tasks, we observe improvements over the baselines throughout all experiments.
FloDusTA: Saudi Tweets Dataset for Flood, Dust Storm, and Traffic Accident Events
Authors: Btool Hamoui, Mourad Mars, Khaled Almotairi
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Event Detection

The rise of social media platforms makes it a valuable information source of recent events and users{'} perspective towards them. Twitter has been one of the most important communication platforms in recent years. Event detection, one of the information extraction aspects, involves identifying specified types of events in the text. Detecting events from tweets can help to predict real-world events precisely. A serious challenge that faces Arabic event detection is the lack of Arabic datasets that can be exploited in detecting events. This paper will describe FloDusTA, which is a dataset of tweets that we have built for the purpose of developing an event detection system. The dataset contains tweets written in both Modern Standard Arabic and Saudi dialect. The process of building the dataset starting from tweets collection to annotation by human annotators will be present. The tweets are labeled with four labels: flood, dust storm, traffic accident, and non-event. The dataset was tested for classification and the result was strongly encouraging.
An Annotated Corpus for Sexism Detection in French Tweets
Authors: Patricia Chiril, V{\'e}ronique Moriceau, Farah Benamara, Alda Mari, Gloria Origgi, Marl{\`e}ne Coulomb-Gully
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5

Social media networks have become a space where users are free to relate their opinions and sentiments which may lead to a large spreading of hatred or abusive messages which have to be moderated. This paper presents the first French corpus annotated for sexism detection composed of about 12,000 tweets. In a context of offensive content mediation on social media now regulated by European laws, we think that it is important to be able to detect automatically not only sexist content but also to identify if a message with a sexist content is really sexist (i.e. addressed to a woman or describing a woman or women in general) or is a story of sexism experienced by a woman. This point is the novelty of our annotation scheme. We also propose some preliminary results for sexism detection obtained with a deep learning approach. Our experiments show encouraging results.
Measuring the Impact of Readability Features in Fake News Detection
Authors: Roney Santos, Gabriela Pedro, Sidney Leal, Oto Vale, Thiago Pardo, Kalina Bontcheva, Carolina Scarton
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Classification, Fake News Detection, General Classification

The proliferation of fake news is a current issue that influences a number of important areas of society, such as politics, economy and health. In the Natural Language Processing area, recent initiatives tried to detect fake news in different ways, ranging from language-based approaches to content-based verification. In such approaches, the choice of the features for the classification of fake and true news is one of the most important parts of the process. This paper presents a study on the impact of readability features to detect fake news for the Brazilian Portuguese language. The results show that such features are relevant to the task (achieving, alone, up to 92{\%} classification accuracy) and may improve previous classification results.
When Shallow is Good Enough: Automatic Assessment of Conceptual Text Complexity using Shallow Semantic Features
Authors: Sanja Stajner, Ioana Hulpu{\textcommabelow{s}}
Date: 2020-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Entity Linking

According to psycholinguistic studies, the complexity of concepts used in a text and the relations between mentioned concepts play the most important role in text understanding and maintaining reader{'}s interest. However, the classical approaches to automatic assessment of text complexity, and their commercial applications, take into consideration mainly syntactic and lexical complexity. Recently, we introduced the task of automatic assessment of conceptual text complexity, proposing a set of graph-based deep semantic features using DBpedia as a proxy to human knowledge. Given that such graphs can be noisy, incomplete, and computationally expensive to deal with, in this paper, we propose the use of textual features and shallow semantic features that only require entity linking. We compare the results obtained with new features with those of the state-of-the-art deep semantic features on two tasks: (1) pairwise comparison of two versions of the same text; and (2) five-level classification of texts. We find that the shallow features achieve state-of-the-art results on both tasks, significantly outperforming performances of the deep semantic features on the five-level classification task. Interestingly, the combination of the shallow and deep semantic features lead to a significant improvement of the performances on that task.