ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
NILC at SR`20: Exploring Pre-Trained Models in Surface Realisation (2020)

This paper describes the submission by the NILC Computational Linguistics research group of the University of S ̃ao Paulo/Brazil to the English Track 2 (closed sub-track) at the Surface Realisation Shared Task 2020. The success of the current pre-trained models like BERT or GPT-2 in several tasks is well-known, however, this is not the case for data-to-text generation tasks and just recently some initiatives focused on it. This way, we explore how a pre-trained model (GPT-2) performs on the UD-to-text generation task. In general, the achieved results were poor, but there are some interesting ideas to explore. Among the learned lessons we may note that it is necessary to study strategies to represent UD inputs and to introduce structural knowledge into these pre-trained models.
Surface Realization Using Pretrained Language Models (2020)

In the context of Natural Language Generation, surface realization is the task of generating the linear form of a text following a given grammar. Surface realization models usually consist of a cascade of complex sub-modules, either rule-based or neural network-based, each responsible for a specific sub-task. In this work, we show that a single encoder-decoder language model can be used in an end-to-end fashion for all sub-tasks of surface realization. The model is designed based on the BART language model that receives a linear representation of unordered and non-inflected tokens in a sentence along with their corresponding Universal Dependency information and produces the linear sequence of inflected tokens along with the missing words. The model was evaluated on the shallow and deep tracks of the 2020 Surface Realization Shared Task (SR`20) using both human and automatic evaluation. The results indicate that despite its simplicity, our model achieves competitive results among all participants in the shared task.
Towards modelling SUMO attributes through WordNet adjectives: a Case Study on Qualities (2020)

Previous studies have shown that the knowledge about attributes and properties in the SUMO ontology and its mapping to WordNet adjectives lacks of an accurate and complete characterization. A proper characterization of this type of knowledge is required to perform formal commonsense reasoning based on the SUMO properties, for instance to distinguish one concept from another based on their properties. In this context, we propose a new semi-automatic approach to model the knowledge about properties and attributes in SUMO by exploiting the information encoded in WordNet adjectives and its mapping to SUMO. To that end, we considered clusters of semantically related groups of WordNet adjectival and nominal synsets. Based on these clusters, we propose a new semi-automatic model for SUMO attributes and their mapping to WordNet, which also includes polarity information. In this paper, as an exploratory approach, we focus on qualities.
Incorporating Localised Context in Wordnet for Indic Languages (2020)

Due to rapid urbanization and a homogenized medium of instruction imposed in educational institutions, we have lost much of the golden literary offerings of the diverse languages and dialects that India once possessed. There is an urgent need to mitigate the paucity of online linguistic resources for several Hindi dialects. Given the corpus of a dialect, our system integrates the vocabulary of the dialect to the synsets of IndoWordnet along with their corresponding meta-data. Furthermore, we propose a systematic method for generating exemplary sentences for each newly integrated dialect word. The vocabulary thus integrated follows the schema of the wordnet and generates exemplary sentences to illustrate the meaning and usage of the word. We illustrate our methodology with the integration of words in the Awadhi dialect to the Hindi IndoWordnet to achieve an enrichment of 11.68 {\%} to the existing Hindi synsets. The BLEU metric for evaluating the quality of sentences yielded a 75th percentile score of 0.6351.
English WordNet 2020: Improving and Extending a WordNet for English using an Open-Source Methodology (2020)

WordNet, while one of the most widely used resources for NLP, has not been updated for a long time, and as such a new project English WordNet has arisen to continue the development of the model under an open-source paradigm. In this paper, we detail the second release of this resource entitled {\textquotedblleft}English WordNet 2020{\textquotedblright}. The work has focused firstly, on the introduction of new synsets and senses and developing guidelines for this and secondly, on the integration of contributions from other projects. We present the changes in this edition, which total over 15,000 changes over the previous release.
Exploring the Enrichment of Basque WordNet with a Sentiment Lexicon (2020)

Wordnets are lexical databases where the semantic relations of words and concepts are established. These resources are useful for manyNLP tasks, such as automatic text classification, word-sense disambiguation or machine translation. In comparison with other wordnets,the Basque version is smaller and some PoS are underrepresented or missing e.g. adjectives and adverbs. In this work, we explore anovel approach to enrich the Basque WordNet, focusing on the adjectives. We want to prove the use and and effectiveness of sentimentlexicons to enrich the resource without the need of starting from scratch. Using as complementary resources, one dictionary and thesentiment valences of the words, we check if the word of the lexicon matches with the meaning of the synset, and if it matches we addthe word as variant to the Basque WordNet. Following this methodology, we describe the most frequent adjectives with positive andnegative valence, the matches and the possible solutions for the non-matches.
Wordnet As a Backbone of Domain and Application Conceptualizations in Systems with Multimodal Data (2020)

Information systems gathering big amounts of resources growing with time containing distinct modalities (text, audio, video, images, GIS) and aggregating content in various ways (modular e-learning modules, Web systems presenting cultural artefacts) require tools supporting content description. The subject of the description may be the topic and the characteristics of the content expressed by sets of attributes. To describe such resources one can just use some of existing indexing languages like thesauri, classification systems, domain and upper ontologies, terminologies or dictionaries. When appropriate language does not exist, it is necessary to build a new system, which will have to serve both experts who describe resources and non-experts who search through them. The solution presented in this paper used to resource description, allows experts to freely select words and expressions, which are organized in hierarchies of various nature, including that of domain and application character. This is based on the wordnet structure, which introduces a clear order for each of these groups due to its lexical nature. The paper presents two systems where such approach was applied: the E-archaeology.org e-learning content repository in which domain knowledge was integrated to describe content topics and the Hatch system gathering multimodal information about the archaeological site targeted at a wide audience, where application conceptualization was applied to describe the content by a set of attributes.
Inclusion of Lithological terms (rocks and minerals) in The Open Wordnet for English (2020)

We extend the Open WordNet for English (OWN-EN) with rock-related and other lithological terms using the authoritative source of GBA`s Thesaurus. Our aim is to improve WordNet to better function within Oil {\&} Gas domain, particularly geoscience texts. We use a three step approach: a proof of concept-level extension of WordNet, a major extension on which we evaluate the impact with positive results and a full extension encompassing all GBA`s lithological terms. We also build a mapping to GBA which also links to several other resources: WikiData, British Geological Survey, Inspire, GeoSciML and DBpedia.
Adding Pronunciation Information to Wordnets (2020)

We describe on-going work consisting in adding pronunciation information to wordnets, as such information can indicate specific senses of a word. Many wordnets associate with their senses only a lemma form and a part-of-speech tag. At the same time, we are aware that additional linguistic information can be useful for identifying a specific sense of a wordnet lemma when encountered in a corpus. While work already deals with the addition of grammatical number or grammatical gender information to wordnet lemmas,we are investigating the linking of wordnet lemmas to pronunciation information, adding thus a speech-related modality to wordnets
Dating and Stratifying a Historical Corpus with a Bayesian Mixture Model (2020)

This paper introduces and evaluates a Bayesian mixture model that is designed for dating texts based on the distributions of linguistic features. The model is applied to the corpus of Vedic Sanskrit the historical structure of which is still unclear in many details. The evaluation concentrates on the interaction between time, genre and linguistic features, detecting those whose distributions are clearly coupled with the historical time. The evaluation also highlights the problems that arise when quantitative results need to be reconciled with philological insights.
Automatic Construction of Aramaic-Hebrew Translation Lexicon (2020)

Aramaic is an ancient Semitic language with a 3,000 year history. However, since the number of Aramaic speakers in the world hasdeclined, Aramaic is in danger of extinction. In this paper, we suggest a methodology for automatic construction of Aramaic-Hebrew translation Lexicon. First, we generate an initial translation lexicon by a state-of-the-art word alignment translation model. Then,we filter the initial lexicon using string similarity measures of three types: similarity between terms in the target language, similarity between a source and a target term, and similarity between terms in the source language. In our experiments, we use a parallel corporaof Biblical Aramaic-Hebrew sentence pairs and evaluate various string similarity measures for each type of similarity. We illustratethe empirical benefit of our methodology and its effect on precision and F1. In particular, we demonstrate that our filtering methodsignificantly exceeds a filtering approach based on the probability scores given by a state-of-the-art word alignment translation model.
Dating Ancient texts: an Approach for Noisy French Documents (2020)

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 (2020)

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 (2020)

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 {\textquotedblleft}cascades{\textquotedblright} of diachronic developments over a language`s lexicon and provides diagnostics for {\textquotedblleft}debugging{\textquotedblright} 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 (2020)

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.
A Tool for Facilitating OCR Postediting in Historical Documents (2020)

Optical character recognition (OCR) for historical documents is a complex procedure subject to a unique set of material issues, including inconsistencies in typefaces and low quality scanning. Consequently, even the most sophisticated OCR engines produce errors. This paper reports on a tool built for postediting the output of Tesseract, more specifically for correcting common errors in digitized historical documents. The proposed tool suggests alternatives for word forms not found in a specified vocabulary. The assumed error is replaced by a presumably correct alternative in the post-edition based on the scores of a Language Model (LM). The tool is tested on a chapter of the book An Essay Towards Regulating the Trade and Employing the Poor of this Kingdom (Cary, 1719). As demonstrated below, the tool is successful in correcting a number of common errors. If sometimes unreliable, it is also transparent and subject to human intervention.
Integration of Automatic Sentence Segmentation and Lexical Analysis of Ancient Chinese based on BiLSTM-CRF Model (2020)

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 (2020)

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 (2020)

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 (2020)

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 (2020)

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 (2020)

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 (2020)

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.