ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Development of a Multilingual CCG Treebank via Universal Dependencies Conversion (2022)

This paper introduces an algorithm to convert Universal Dependencies (UD) treebanks to Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) treebanks. As CCG encodes almost all grammatical information into the lexicon, obtaining a high-quality CCG derivation from a dependency tree is a challenging task. Our algorithm relies on hand-crafted rules to assign categories to constituents, and a non-statistical parser to derive full CCG parses given the assigned categories. To evaluate our converted treebanks, we perform lexical, sentential, and syntactic rule coverage analysis, as well as CCG parsing experiments. Finally, we discuss how our method handles complex constructions, and propose possible future extensions.
The Automatic Extraction of Linguistic Biomarkers as a Viable Solution for the Early Diagnosis of Mental Disorders (2022)

Digital Linguistic Biomarkers extracted from spontaneous language productions proved to be very useful for the early detection of various mental disorders. This paper presents a computational pipeline for the automatic processing of oral and written texts: the tool enables the computation of a rich set of linguistic features at the acoustic, rhythmic, lexical, and morphosyntactic levels. Several applications of the instrument - for the detection of Mild Cognitive Impairments, Anorexia Nervosa, and Developmental Language Disorders - are also briefly discussed.
Singlish Where Got Rules One? Constructing a Computational Grammar for Singlish (2022)

Singlish is a variety of English spoken in Singapore. In this paper, we share some of its grammar features and how they are implemented in the construction of a computational grammar of Singlish as a branch of English grammar. New rules were created and existing ones from standard English grammar of the English Resource Grammar (ERG) were changed in this branch to cater to how Singlish works. In addition, Singlish lexicon was added into the grammar together with some new lexical types. We used Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) as the framework for this project of a creating a working computational grammar. As part of building the language resource, we also collected and formatted some data from the internet as part of a test suite for Singlish. Finally, the computational grammar was tested against a set of gold standard trees and compared with the standard English grammar to find out how well the grammar fares in analysing Singlish.
COSMOS: Experimental and Comparative Studies of Concept Representations in Schoolchildren (2022)

COSMOS is a multidisciplinary research project investigating schoolchildren`s beliefs and representations of specific concepts under control variables (age, gender, language spoken at home). Seven concepts are studied: \textit{friend, father, mother, villain, work, television} and \textit{dog}. We first present the protocol used and the data collected from a survey of 184 children in two age groups (6-7 and 9-11 years) in four schools in Brittany (France). A word-level lexical study shows that children`s linguistic proficiency and lexical diversity increase with age, and we observe an interaction effect between gender and age on lexical diversity as measured with MLR (Measure of Lexical Richness). In contrast, none of the control variables affects lexical density. We also present the lemmas that schoolchildren most often associate with each concept. Generalized linear mixed-effects models reveal significant effects of age, gender, and home language on some concept-lemma associations and specific interactions between age and gender. Most of the identified effects are documented in the child development literature. To better understand the process of semantic construction in children, additional lexical analyses at the n-gram, chunk, and clause levels would be helpful. We briefly present ongoing and planned work in this direction. The COSMOS data will soon be made freely available to the scientific community.
Features of Perceived Metaphoricity on the Discourse Level: Abstractness and Emotionality (2022)

Research on metaphorical language has shown ties between abstractness and emotionality with regard to metaphoricity; prior work is however limited to the word and sentence levels, and up to date there is no empirical study establishing the extent to which this is also true on the discourse level. This paper explores which textual and perceptual features human annotators perceive as important for the metaphoricity of discourses and expressions, and addresses two research questions more specifically. First, is a metaphorically-perceived discourse more abstract and more emotional in comparison to a literally- perceived discourse? Second, is a metaphorical expression preceded by a more metaphorical/abstract/emotional context than a synonymous literal alternative? We used a dataset of 1,000 corpus-extracted discourses for which crowdsourced annotators (1) provided judgements on whether they perceived the discourses as more metaphorical or more literal, and (2) systematically listed lexical terms which triggered their decisions in (1). Our results indicate that metaphorical discourses are more emotional and to a certain extent more abstract than literal discourses. However, neither the metaphoricity nor the abstractness and emotionality of the preceding discourse seem to play a role in triggering the choice between synonymous metaphorical vs. literal expressions. Our dataset is available at \url{https://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/data/discourse-met-lit}.
Hollywood Identity Bias Dataset: A Context Oriented Bias Analysis of Movie Dialogues (2022)

Movies reflect society and also hold power to transform opinions. Social biases and stereotypes present in movies can cause extensive damage due to their reach. These biases are not always found to be the need of storyline but can creep in as the author`s bias. Movie production houses would prefer to ascertain that the bias present in a script is the story`s demand. Today, when deep learning models can give human-level accuracy in multiple tasks, having an AI solution to identify the biases present in the script at the writing stage can help them avoid the inconvenience of stalled release, lawsuits, etc. Since AI solutions are data intensive and there exists no domain specific data to address the problem of biases in scripts, we introduce a new dataset of movie scripts that are annotated for identity bias. The dataset contains dialogue turns annotated for (i) bias labels for seven categories, viz., gender, race/ethnicity, religion, age, occupation, LGBTQ, and other, which contains biases like body shaming, personality bias, etc. (ii) labels for sensitivity, stereotype, sentiment, emotion, emotion intensity, (iii) all labels annotated with context awareness, (iv) target groups and reason for bias labels and (v) expert-driven group-validation process for high quality annotations. We also report various baseline performances for bias identification and category detection on our dataset.
VoxCommunis: A Corpus for Cross-linguistic Phonetic Analysis (2022)

Cross-linguistic phonetic analysis has long been limited by data scarcity and insufficient computational resources. In the past few years, the availability of large-scale cross-linguistic spoken corpora has increased dramatically, but the data still require considerable computational power and processing for downstream phonetic analysis. To facilitate large-scale cross-linguistic phonetic research in the field, we release the VoxCommunis Corpus, which contains acoustic models, pronunciation lexicons, and word- and phone-level alignments, derived from the publicly available Mozilla Common Voice Corpus. The current release includes data from 36 languages. The corpus also contains acoustic-phonetic measurements, which currently consist of formant frequencies (F1{--}F4) from all vowel quartiles. Major advantages of this corpus for phonetic analysis include the number of available languages, the large amount of speech per language, as well as the fact that most language datasets have dozens to hundreds of contributing speakers. We demonstrate the utility of this corpus for downstream phonetic research in a descriptive analysis of language-specific vowel systems, as well as an analysis of {\textquotedblleft}uniformity{\textquotedblright} in vowel realization across languages. The VoxCommunis Corpus is free to download and use under a CC0 license.
Tracking Textual Similarities in Neo-Latin Drama Networks (2022)

This paper describes the first experiments towards tracking the complex and international network of text reuse within the Early Modern (XV-XVII centuries) community of Neo-Latin humanists. Our research, conducted within the framework of the TransLatin project, aims at gaining more evidence on the topic of textual similarities and semi-conscious reuse of literary models. It consists of two experiments conveyed through two main research fields (Information Retrieval and Stylometry), as a means to a better understanding of the complex and subtle literary mechanisms underlying the drama production of Modern Age authors and their transnational network of relations. The experiments led to the construction of networks of works and authors that fashion different patterns of similarity and models of evolution and interaction between texts.
Named Entity Recognition in Estonian 19th Century Parish Court Records (2022)

This paper presents a new historical language resource, a corpus of Estonian Parish Court records from the years 1821-1920, annotated for named entities (NE), and reports on named entity recognition (NER) experiments using this corpus. The hand-written records have been transcribed manually via a crowdsourcing project, so the transcripts are of high quality, but the variation of language and spelling is high in these documents due to dialectal variation and the fact that there was a considerable change in Estonian spelling conventions during the time of their writing. The typology of NEs for manual annotation includes 7 categories, but the inter-annotator agreement is as good as 95.0 (mean F1-score). We experimented with fine-tuning BERT-like transfer learning approaches for NER, and found modern Estonian BERT models highly applicable, despite the difficulty of the historical material. Our best model, finetuned Est-RoBERTa, achieved microaverage F1 score of 93.6, which is comparable to state-of-the-art NER performance on the contemporary Estonian.
Investigating Independence vs. Control: Agenda-Setting in Russian News Coverage on Social Media (2022)

Agenda-setting is a widely explored phenomenon in political science: powerful stakeholders (governments or their financial supporters) have control over the media and set their agenda: political and economical powers determine which news should be salient. This is a clear case of targeted manipulation to divert the public attention from serious issues affecting internal politics (such as economic downturns and scandals) by flooding the media with potentially distracting information. We investigate agenda-setting in the Russian social media landscape, exploring the relation between economic indicators and mentions of foreign geopolitical entities, as well as of Russia itself. Our contributions are at three levels: at the level of the domain of the investigation, our study is the first to substructure the Russian media landscape in state-controlled vs. independent outlets in the context of strategic distraction from negative economic trends; at the level of the scope of the investigation, we involve a large set of geopolitical entities (while previous work has focused on the U.S.); at the qualitative level, our analysis of posts on Ukraine, whose relationship with Russia is of high geopolitical relevance, provides further insights into the contrast between state-controlled and independent outlets.
SL\"aNDa version 2.0: Improved and Extended Annotation of Narrative and Dialogue in Swedish Literature (2022)

In this paper, we describe version 2.0 of the SL{\"a}NDa corpus. SL{\"a}NDa, the Swedish Literary corpus of Narrative and Dialogue, now contains excerpts from 19 novels, written between 1809{--}1940. The main focus of the SL{\"a}NDa corpus is to distinguish between direct speech and the main narrative. In order to isolate the narrative, we also annotate everything else which does not belong to the narrative, such as thoughts, quotations, and letters. SL{\"a}NDa version 2.0 has a slightly updated annotation scheme from version 1.0. In addition, we added new texts from eleven authors and performed quality control on the previous version. We are specifically interested in different ways of marking speech segments, such as quotation marks, dashes, or no marking at all. To allow a detailed evaluation of this aspect, we added dedicated test sets to SL{\"a}NDa for these different types of speech marking. In a pilot experiment, we explore the impact of typographic speech marking by using these test sets, as well as artificially stripping the training data of speech markers.
AGILe: The First Lemmatizer for Ancient Greek Inscriptions (2022)

To facilitate corpus searches by classicists as well as to reduce data sparsity when training models, we focus on the automatic lemmatization of ancient Greek inscriptions, which have not received as much attention in this sense as literary text data has. We show that existing lemmatizers for ancient Greek, trained on literary data, are not performant on epigraphic data, due to major language differences between the two types of texts. We thus train the first inscription-specific lemmatizer achieving above 80{\%} accuracy, and make both the models and the lemmatized data available to the community. We also provide a detailed error analysis highlighting peculiarities of inscriptions which again highlights the importance of a lemmatizer dedicated to inscriptions.
\guillemotrighttextklang\guillemotleft -- Towards a Multi-Modal Exploration Platform for German Poetry (2022)

We present the steps taken towards an exploration platform for a multi-modal corpus of German lyric poetry from the Romantic era developed in the project {\guillemotright}textklang{\guillemotleft}. This interdisciplinary project develops a mixed-methods approach for the systematic investigation of the relationship between written text (here lyric poetry) and its potential and actual sonic realisation (in recitations, musical performances etc.). The multi-modal {\guillemotright}textklang{\guillemotleft} platform will be designed to technically and analytically combine three modalities: the poetic text, the audio signal of a recorded recitation and, at a later stage, music scores of a musical setting of a poem. The methodological workflow will enable scholars to develop hypotheses about the relationship between textual form and sonic/prosodic realisation based on theoretical considerations, text interpretation and evidence from recorded recitations. The full workflow will support hypothesis testing either through systematic corpus analysis alone or with addtional contrastive perception experiments. For the experimental track, researchers will be enabled to manipulate prosodic parameters in (re-)synthesised variants of the original recordings. The focus of this paper is on the design of the base corpus and on tools for systematic exploration {--} placing special emphasis on our response to challenges stemming from multi-modality and the methodologically diverse interdisciplinary setup.
Predicting the Proficiency Level of Nonnative Hebrew Authors (2022)

We present classifiers that can accurately predict the proficiency level of nonnative Hebrew learners. This is important for practical (mainly educational) applications, but the endeavor also sheds light on the features that support the classification, thereby improving our understanding of learner language in general, and transfer effects from Arabic, French, and Russian on nonnative Hebrew in particular.
Trends, Limitations and Open Challenges in Automatic Readability Assessment Research (2022)

Readability assessment is the task of evaluating the reading difficulty of a given piece of text. This article takes a closer look at contemporary NLP research on developing computational models for readability assessment, identifying the common approaches used for this task, their shortcomings, and some challenges for the future. Where possible, the survey also connects computational research with insights from related work in other disciplines such as education and psychology.
HateCheckHIn: Evaluating Hindi Hate Speech Detection Models (2022)

Due to the sheer volume of online hate, the AI and NLP communities have started building models to detect such hateful content. Recently, multilingual hate is a major emerging challenge for automated detection where code-mixing or more than one language have been used for conversation in social media. Typically, hate speech detection models are evaluated by measuring their performance on the held-out test data using metrics such as accuracy and F1-score. While these metrics are useful, it becomes difficult to identify using them where the model is failing, and how to resolve it. To enable more targeted diagnostic insights of such multilingual hate speech models, we introduce a set of functionalities for the purpose of evaluation. We have been inspired to design this kind of functionalities based on real-world conversation on social media. Considering Hindi as a base language, we craft test cases for each functionality. We name our evaluation dataset HateCheckHIn. To illustrate the utility of these functionalities , we test state-of-the-art transformer based m-BERT model and the Perspective API.
Surfer100: Generating Surveys From Web Resources, Wikipedia-style (2022)

Fast-developing fields such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) often outpace the efforts of encyclopedic sources such as Wikipedia, which either do not completely cover recently-introduced topics or lack such content entirely. As a result, methods for automatically producing content are valuable tools to address this information overload. We show that recent advances in pretrained language modeling can be combined for a two-stage extractive and abstractive approach for Wikipedia lead paragraph generation. We extend this approach to generate longer Wikipedia-style summaries with sections and examine how such methods struggle in this application through detailed studies with 100 reference human-collected surveys. This is the first study on utilizing web resources for long Wikipedia-style summaries to the best of our knowledge.
MS-LaTTE: A Dataset of Where and When To-do Tasks are Completed (2022)

Tasks are a fundamental unit of work in the daily lives of people, who are increasingly using digital means to keep track of, organize, triage, and act on them. These digital tools {--} such as task management applications {--} provide a unique opportunity to study and understand tasks and their connection to the real world, and through intelligent assistance, help people be more productive. By logging signals such as text, timestamp information, and social connectivity graphs, an increasingly rich and detailed picture of how tasks are created and organized, what makes them important, and who acts on them, can be progressively developed. Yet the context around actual task completion remains fuzzy, due to the basic disconnect between actions taken in the real world and telemetry recorded in the digital world. Thus, in this paper we compile and release a novel, real-life, large-scale dataset called MS-LaTTE that captures two core aspects of the context surrounding task completion: location and time. We describe our annotation framework and conduct a number of analyses on the data that were collected, demonstrating that it captures intuitive contextual properties for common tasks. Finally, we test the dataset on the two problems of predicting spatial and temporal task co-occurrence, concluding that predictors for co-location and co-time are both learnable, with a BERT fine-tuned model outperforming several other baselines. The MS-LaTTE dataset provides an opportunity to tackle many new modeling challenges in contextual task understanding and we hope that its release will spur future research in task intelligence more broadly.
KazakhTTS2: Extending the Open-Source Kazakh TTS Corpus With More Data, Speakers, and Topics (2022)

We present an expanded version of our previously released Kazakh text-to-speech (KazakhTTS) synthesis corpus. In the new KazakhTTS2 corpus, the overall size has increased from 93 hours to 271 hours, the number of speakers has risen from two to five (three females and two males), and the topic coverage has been diversified with the help of new sources, including a book and Wikipedia articles. This corpus is necessary for building high-quality TTS systems for Kazakh, a Central Asian agglutinative language from the Turkic family, which presents several linguistic challenges. We describe the corpus construction process and provide the details of the training and evaluation procedures for the TTS system. Our experimental results indicate that the constructed corpus is sufficient to build robust TTS models for real-world applications, with a subjective mean opinion score ranging from 3.6 to 4.2 for all the five speakers. We believe that our corpus will facilitate speech and language research for Kazakh and other Turkic languages, which are widely considered to be low-resource due to the limited availability of free linguistic data. The constructed corpus, code, and pretrained models are publicly available in our GitHub repository.
A Graph-Based Method for Unsupervised Knowledge Discovery from Financial Texts (2022)

The need for manual review of various financial texts, such as company filings and news, presents a major bottleneck in financial analysts' work. Thus, there is great potential for the application of NLP methods, tools and resources to fulfil a genuine industrial need in finance. In this paper, we show how this potential can be fulfilled by presenting an end-to-end, fully unsupervised method for knowledge discovery from financial texts. Our method creatively integrates existing resources to construct automatically a knowledge graph of companies and related entities as well as to carry out unsupervised analysis of the resulting graph to provide quantifiable and explainable insights from the produced knowledge. The graph construction integrates entity processing and semantic expansion, before carrying out open relation extraction. We illustrate our method by calculating automatically the environmental rating for companies in the S{\&}P 500, based on company filings with the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). We then show the usefulness of our method in this setting by providing an assessment of our method`s outputs with an independent MSCI source.