ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Investigating the Medical Coverage of a Translation System into Pictographs for Patients with an Intellectual Disability (2022)

Communication between physician and patients can lead to misunderstandings, especially for disabled people. An automatic system that translates natural language into a pictographic language is one of the solutions that could help to overcome this issue. In this preliminary study, we present the French version of a translation system using the Arasaac pictographs and we investigate the strategies used by speech therapists to translate into pictographs. We also evaluate the medical coverage of this tool for translating physician questions and patient instructions.
On the Ethical Considerations of Text Simplification (2022)

This paper outlines the ethical implications of text simplification within the framework of assistive systems. We argue that a distinction should be made between the technologies that perform text simplification and the realisation of these in assistive technologies. When using the latter as a motivation for research, it is important that the subsequent ethical implications be carefully considered. We provide guidelines for the framing of text simplification independently of assistive systems, as well as suggesting directions for future research and discussion based on the concerns raised.
Applying the Stereotype Content Model to assess disability bias in popular pre-trained NLP models underlying AI-based assistive technologies (2022)

Stereotypes are a positive or negative, generalized, and often widely shared belief about the attributes of certain groups of people, such as people with sensory disabilities. If stereotypes manifest in assistive technologies used by deaf or blind people, they can harm the user in a number of ways, especially considering the vulnerable nature of the target population. AI models underlying assistive technologies have been shown to contain biased stereotypes, including racial, gender, and disability biases. We build on this work to present a psychology-based stereotype assessment of the representation of disability, deafness, and blindness in BERT using the Stereotype Content Model. We show that BERT contains disability bias, and that this bias differs along established stereotype dimensions.
CueBot: Cue-Controlled Response Generation for Assistive Interaction Usages (2022)

Conversational assistants are ubiquitous among the general population, however, these systems have not had an impact on people with disabilities, or speech and language disorders, for whom basic day-to-day communication and social interaction is a huge struggle. Language model technology can play a huge role in empowering these users and help them interact with others with less effort via interaction support. To enable this population, we build a system that can represent them in a social conversation and generate responses that can be controlled by the users using cues/keywords. We build models that can speed up this communication by suggesting relevant cues in the dialog response context. We also introduce a keyword-loss to lexically constrain the model response output. We present automatic and human evaluation of our cue/keyword predictor and the controllable dialog system to show that our models perform significantly better than models without control. Our evaluation and user study shows that keyword-control on end-to-end response generation models is powerful and can enable and empower users with degenerative disorders to carry out their day-to-day communication.
Challenges in assistive technology development for an endangered language: an Irish (Gaelic) perspective (2022)

This paper describes three areas of assistive technology development which deploy the resources and speech technology for Irish (Gaelic), newly emerging from the ABAIR initiative. These include (i) a screenreading facility for visually impaired people, (ii) an application to help develop phonological awareness and early literacy for dyslexic people (iii) a speech-enabled AAC system for non-speaking people. Each of these is at a different stage of development and poses unique challenges: these are dis-cussed along with the approaches adopted to address them. Three guiding principles underlie development. Firstly, the sociolinguistic context and the needs of the community are essential considerations in setting priorities. Secondly, development needs to be language sensitive. The need for skilled researchers with a deep knowledge of Irish structure is illustrated in the case of (ii) and (iii), where aspects of Irish linguistic structure (phonological, morphological and grammatical) and the striking differences from English pose challenges for systems aimed at bilingual Irish-English users. Thirdly, and most importantly, the users and their support networks are central {--} not as passive recipients of ready-made technologies, but as active partners at every stage of development, from design to implementation, evaluation and dissemination.
Unsupervised Word Segmentation from Discrete Speech Units in Low-Resource Settings (2022)

Documenting languages helps to prevent the extinction of endangered dialects - many of which are otherwise expected to disappear by the end of the century. When documenting oral languages, unsupervised word segmentation (UWS) from speech is a useful, yet challenging, task. It consists in producing time-stamps for slicing utterances into smaller segments corresponding to words, being performed from phonetic transcriptions, or in the absence of these, from the output of unsupervised speech discretization models. These discretization models are trained using raw speech only, producing discrete speech units that can be applied for downstream (text-based) tasks. In this paper we compare five of these models: three Bayesian and two neural approaches, with regards to the exploitability of the produced units for UWS. For the UWS task, we experiment with two models, using as our target language the Mboshi (Bantu C25), an unwritten language from Congo-Brazzaville. Additionally, we report results for Finnish, Hungarian, Romanian and Russian in equally low-resource settings, using only 4 hours of speech. Our results suggest that neural models for speech discretization are difficult to exploit in our setting, and that it might be necessary to adapt them to limit sequence length. We obtain our best UWS results by using Bayesian models that produce high quality, yet compressed, discrete representations of the input speech signal.
An Open Source Web Reader for Under-Resourced Languages (2022)

We have developed an open source web reader in Iceland for under-resourced languages. The web reader was developed due to the need for a free and good quality web reader for languages which fall outside the scope of commercially available web readers. It relies on a text-to-speech (TTS) pipeline accessed via a cloud service. The web reader was developed using the Icelandic TTS voices Alfur and Dilja, but could be connected to any language which has a TTS pipeline. The design of our web reader focuses on functionality, adaptability and user friendliness. Therefore, the web reader`s feature set heavily overlaps with the minimal features necessary to provide a good web reading experience while still being extensible enough to be adapted to work for other languages, high-resourced and under-resourced. The web reader works well on all the major web browsers and has a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Level AA: Acceptable compliance, meaning that it works well for the largest user groups, people in under-resourced languages with visual impairments and difficulty reading. The code for our web reader is available and published with an Apache 2.0 license at \url{https://github.com/cadia-lvl/WebRICE}, which includes a simple demo of the project.
Text-to-Speech for Under-Resourced Languages: Phoneme Mapping and Source Language Selection in Transfer Learning (2022)

We propose a new approach for phoneme mapping in cross-lingual transfer learning for text-to-speech (TTS) in under-resourced languages (URLs), using phonological features from the PHOIBLE database and a language-independent mapping rule. This approach was validated through our experiment, in which we pre-trained acoustic models in Dutch, Finnish, French, Japanese, and Spanish, and fine-tuned them with 30 minutes of Frisian training data. The experiment showed an improvement in both naturalness and pronunciation accuracy in the synthesized Frisian speech when our mapping approach was used. Since this improvement also depended on the source language, we then experimented on finding a good criterion for selecting source languages. As an alternative to the traditionally used language family criterion, we tested a novel idea of using Angular Similarity of Phoneme Frequencies (ASPF), which measures the similarity between the phoneme systems of two languages. ASPF was empirically confirmed to be more effective than language family as a criterion for source language selection, and also to affect the phoneme mapping`s effectiveness. Thus, a combination of our phoneme mapping approach and the ASPF measure can be beneficially adopted by other studies involving multilingual or cross-lingual TTS for URLs.
ReadAlong Studio: Practical Zero-Shot Text-Speech Alignment for Indigenous Language Audiobooks (2022)

While the alignment of audio recordings and text (often termed {\textquotedblleft}forced alignment{\textquotedblright}) is often treated as a solved problem, in practice the process of adapting an alignment system to a new, under-resourced language comes with significant challenges, requiring experience and expertise that many outside of the speech community lack. This puts otherwise {\textquotedblleft}solvable{\textquotedblright} problems, like the alignment of Indigenous language audiobooks, out of reach for many real-world Indigenous language organizations. In this paper, we detail ReadAlong Studio, a suite of tools for creating and visualizing aligned audiobooks, including educational features like time-aligned highlighting, playing single words in isolation, and variable-speed playback. It is intended to be accessible to creators without an extensive background in speech or NLP, by automating or making optional many of the specialist steps in an alignment pipeline. It is well documented at a beginner-technologist level, has already been adapted to 30 languages, and can work out-of-the-box on many more languages without adaptation.
Corpus Creation for Sentiment Analysis in Code-Mixed Tulu Text (2022)

Sentiment Analysis (SA) employing code-mixed data from social media helps in getting insights to the data and decision making for various applications. One such application is to analyze users' emotions from comments of videos on YouTube. Social media comments do not adhere to the grammatical norms of any language and they often comprise a mix of languages and scripts. The lack of annotated code-mixed data for SA in a low-resource language like Tulu makes the SA a challenging task. To address the lack of annotated code-mixed Tulu data for SA, a gold standard trlingual code-mixed Tulu annotated corpus of 7,171 YouTube comments is created. Further, Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are employed as baseline models to evaluate the developed dataset and the performance of the ML algorithms are found to be encouraging.
Crowd-sourcing for Less-resourced Languages: Lingua Libre for Polish (2022)

Oral corpora for linguistic inquiry are frequently built based on the content of news, radio, and/or TV shows, sometimes also of laboratory recordings. Most of these existing corpora are restricted to languages with a large amount of data available. Furthermore, such corpora are not always accessible under a free open-access license. We propose a crowd-sourced alternative to this gap. Lingua Libre is the participatory linguistic media library hosted by Wikimedia France. It includes recordings from more than 140 languages. These recordings have been provided by more than 750 speakers worldwide, who voluntarily recorded word entries of their native language and made them available under a Creative Commons license. In the present study, we take Polish, a less-resourced language in terms of phonetic data, as an example, and compare our phonetic observations built on the data from Lingua Libre with the phonetic observations found by previous linguistic studies. We observe that the data from Lingua Libre partially matches the phonetic inventory of Polish as described in previous studies, but that the acoustic values are less precise, thus showing both the potential and the limitations of Lingua Libre to be used for phonetic research.
Tup\'ian Language Ressources: Data, Tools, Analyses (2022)

TuLaR (Tupian Language Resources) is a project for collecting, documenting, analyzing, and developing computational and pedagogical material for low-resource Brazilian indigenous languages. It provides valuable data for language research regarding typological, syntactic, morphological, and phonological aspects. Here we present TuLaR`s databases, with special consideration to TuDeT (Tupian Dependency Treebanks), an annotated corpus under development for nine languages of the Tupian family, built upon the Universal Dependencies framework. The annotation within such a framework serves a twofold goal: enriching the linguistic documentation of the Tupian languages due to the rapid and consistent annotation, and providing computational resources for those languages, thanks to the suitability of our framework for developing NLP tools. We likewise present a related lexical database, some tools developed by the project, and examine future goals for our initiative.
Quality versus Quantity: Building Catalan-English MT Resources (2022)

In this work, we make the case of quality over quantity when training a MT system for a medium-to-low-resource language pair, namely Catalan-English. We compile our training corpus out of existing resources of varying quality and a new high-quality corpus. We also provide new evaluation translation datasets in three different domains. In the process of building Catalan-English parallel resources, we evaluate the impact of drastically filtering alignments in the resulting MT engines. Our results show that even when resources are limited, as in this case, it is worth filtering for quality. We further explore the cross-lingual transfer learning capabilities of the proposed model for parallel corpus filtering by applying it to other languages. All resources generated in this work are released under open license to encourage the development of language technology in Catalan.
A Sentiment Corpus for South African Under-Resourced Languages in a Multilingual Context (2022)

Multilingual sentiment analysis is a process of detecting and classifying sentiment based on textual information written in multiple languages. There has been tremendous research advancement on high-resourced languages such as English. However, progress on under-resourced languages remains underrepresented with limited opportunities for further development of natural language processing (NLP) technologies. Sentiment analysis (SA) for under-resourced language still is a skewed research area. Although, there are some considerable efforts in emerging African countries to develop such resources for under-resourced languages, languages such as indigenous South African languages still suffer from a lack of datasets. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no dataset dedicated to SA research for South African languages in a multilingual context, i.e. comments are in different languages and may contain code-switching. In this paper, we present the first subset of the multilingual sentiment corpus SAfriSenti for the three most widely spoken languages in South Africa{---}English, Sepedi (i.e. Northern Sotho), and Setswana. This subset consists of over 40,000 annotated tweets in all the three languages including even 36.6{\%} of code-switched texts. We present data collection, cleaning and annotation strategies that were followed to curate the dataset for these languages. Furthermore, we describe how we developed language-specific sentiment lexicons, morpheme-based sentiment taggers, conduct linguistic analyses and present possible solutions for the challenges of this sentiment dataset. We will release the dataset and sentiment lexicons to the research communities to advance the NLP research of under-resourced languages.
CUNI Submission to MT4All Shared Task (2022)

This paper describes our submission to the MT4All Shared Task in unsupervised machine translation from English to Ukrainian, Kazakh and Georgian in the legal domain. In addition to the standard pipeline for unsupervised training (pretraining followed by denoising and back-translation), we used supervised training on a pseudo-parallel corpus retrieved from the provided mono-lingual corpora. Our system scored significantly higher than the baseline hybrid unsupervised MT system.
Resource: Indicators on the Presence of Languages in Internet (2022)

Reliable and maintained indicators of the space of languages on the Internet are required to support appropriate public policies and well-informed linguistic studies. Current sources are scarce and often strongly biased. The model to produce indicators on the presence of languages in the Internet, launched by the Observatory in 2017, has reached a sensible level of maturity and its data products are shared in CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. It reaches now 329 languages (L1 speakers {\ensuremath{>}} one million) and all the biases associated with the model have been controlled to an acceptable threshold, giving trust to the data, within an estimated confidence interval of +-20{\%}. Some of the indicators (mainly the percentage of L1+L2 speakers connected to the Internet per language and derivates) rely on Ethnologue Global Dataset {\#}24 for demo-linguistic data and ITU, completed by World Bank, for the percentage of persons connected to the Internet by country. The rest of indicators relies on the previous sources plus a large combination of hundreds of different sources for data related to Web contents per language. This research poster focuses the description of the new linguistic resources created. Methodological considerations are only exposed briefly and will be developed in another paper.
Language Technologies for Low Resource Languages: Sociolinguistic and Multilingual Insights (2022)

There is a growing interest in building language technologies (LTs) for low resource languages (LRLs). However, there are flaws in the planning, data collection and development phases mostly due to the assumption that LRLs are similar to High Resource Languages (HRLs) but only smaller in size. In our paper, we first provide examples of failed LTs for LRLs and provide the reasons for these failures. Second, we discuss the problematic issues with the data for LRLs. Finally, we provide recommendations for building better LTs for LRLs through insights from sociolinguistics and multilingualism. Our goal is not to solve all problems around LTs for LRLs but to raise awareness about the existing issues, provide recommendations toward possible solutions and encourage collaboration across academic disciplines for developing LTs that actually serve the needs and preferences of the LRL communities.
Sentiment Analysis for Hausa: Classifying Students' Comments (2022)

We describe our work on sentiment analysis for Hausa, where we investigated monolingual and cross-lingual approaches to classify student comments in course evaluations. Furthermore, we propose a novel stemming algorithm to improve accuracy. For studies in this area, we collected a corpus of more than 40,000 comments{---}the Hausa-English Sentiment Analysis Corpus For Educational Environments (HESAC). Our results demonstrate that the monolingual approaches for Hausa sentiment analysis slightly outperform the cross-lingual systems. Using our stemming algorithm in the pre-processing even improved the best model resulting in 97.4{\%} accuracy on HESAC.
Nepali Encoder Transformers: An Analysis of Auto Encoding Transformer Language Models for Nepali Text Classification (2022)

Language model pre-training has significantly impacted NLP and resulted in performance gains on many NLP-related tasks, but comparative study of different approaches on many low-resource languages seems to be missing. This paper attempts to investigate appropriate methods for pretraining a Transformer-based model for the Nepali language. We focus on the language-specific aspects that need to be considered for modeling. Although some language models have been trained for Nepali, the study is far from sufficient. We train three distinct Transformer-based masked language models for Nepali text sequences: distilbert-base (Sanh et al., 2019) for its efficiency and minuteness, deberta-base (P. He et al., 2020) for its capability of modeling the dependency of nearby token pairs and XLM-ROBERTa (Conneau et al., 2020) for its capabilities to handle multilingual downstream tasks. We evaluate and compare these models with other Transformer-based models on a downstream classification task with an aim to suggest an effective strategy for training low-resource language models and their fine-tuning.
CoSwID, a Code Switching Identification Method Suitable for Under-Resourced Languages (2022)

We propose a method for identifying monolingual textual segments in multilingual documents. It requires only a minimal number of linguistic resources {--} word lists and monolingual corpora {--} and can therefore be adapted to many under-resourced languages. Taking these languages into account when processing multilingual documents in NLP tools is important as it can contribute to the creation of essential textual resources. This language identification task {--} code switching detection being its most complex form {--} can also provide added value to various existing data or tools. Our research demonstrates that a language identification module performing well on short texts can be used to efficiently analyse a document through a sliding window. The results obtained for code switching identification {--} between 87.29{\%} and 97.97{\%} accuracy {--} are state-of-the-art, which is confirmed by the benchmarks performed on the few available systems that have been used on our test data.
A Neural Network Approach to Create Minangkabau-Indonesia Bilingual Dictionary (2022)

Indonesia has many varieties of ethnic languages, and most come from the same language family, namely Austronesian languages. Coming from that same language family, the words in Indonesian ethnic languages are very similar. However, there is research stating that Indonesian ethnic languages are endangered. Thus, to prevent that, we proposed to create a bilingual dictionary between ethnic languages using a neural network approach to extract transformation rules using character level embedding and the Bi-LSTM method in a sequence-to-sequence model. The model has an encoder and decoder. The encoder functions read the input sequence, character by character, generate context, then extract a summary of the input. The decoder will produce an output sequence where every character in each time-step and the next character that comes out are affected by the previous character. The current case for experiment translation focuses on Minangkabau and Indonesian languages with 13761-word pairs. For evaluating the model`s performance, 5-Fold Cross-Validation is used.