ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Writing System and Speaker Metadata for 2,800+ Language Varieties (2022)

We describe an open-source dataset providing metadata for about 2,800 language varieties used in the world today. Specifically, the dataset provides the attested writing system(s) for each of these 2,800+ varieties, as well as an estimated speaker count for each variety. This dataset was developed through internal research and has been used for analyses around language technologies. This is the largest publicly-available, machine-readable resource with writing system and speaker information for the world`s languages. We analyze the distribution of languages and writing systems in our data and compare it to their representation in current NLP. We hope the availability of this data will catalyze research in under-represented languages.
The PALMA Corpora of African Varieties of Portuguese (2022)

We present three new corpora of urban varieties of Portuguese spoken in Angola, Mozambique, and S{\~a}o Tom{\'e} and Pr{\'i}ncipe, where Portuguese is increasingly being spoken as first and second language in different multilingual settings. Given the scarcity of linguistic resources available for the African varieties of Portuguese, these corpora provide new, contemporary data for the study of each variety and for comparative research on African, Brazilian and European varieties, hereby improving our understanding of processes of language variation and change in postcolonial societies. The corpora consist of transcribed spoken data, complemented by a rich set of metadata describing the setting of the audio recordings and sociolinguistic information about the speakers. They are annotated with POS and lemma information and made available on the CQPweb platform, which allows for sophisticated data searches. The corpora are already being used for comparative research on constructions in the domain of possession and location involving the argument structure of intransitive, monotransitive and ditransitive verbs that select Goals, Locatives, and Recipients.
A Learning-Based Dependency to Constituency Conversion Algorithm for the Turkish Language (2022)

This study aims to create the very first dependency-to-constituency conversion algorithm optimised for Turkish language. For this purpose, a state-of-the-art morphologic analyser and a feature-based machine learning model was used. In order to enhance the performance of the conversion algorithm, bootstrap aggregating meta-algorithm was integrated. While creating the conversation algorithm, typological properties of Turkish were carefully considered. A comprehensive and manually annotated UD-style dependency treebank was the input, and constituency trees were the output of the conversion algorithm. A team of linguists manually annotated a set of constituency trees. These manually annotated trees were used as the gold standard to assess the performance of the algorithm. The conversion process yielded more than 8000 constituency trees whose UD-style dependency trees are also available on GitHub. In addition to its contribution to Turkish treebank resources, this study also offers a viable and easy-to-implement conversion algorithm that can be used to generate new constituency treebanks and training data for NLP resources like constituency parsers.
Standard German Subtitling of Swiss German TV content: the PASSAGE Project (2022)

In Switzerland, two thirds of the population speak Swiss German, a primarily spoken language with no standardised written form. It is widely used on Swiss TV, for example in news reports, interviews or talk shows, and subtitles are required for people who cannot understand this spoken language. This paper focuses on the task of automatic Standard German subtitling of spoken Swiss German, and more specifically on the translation of a normalised Swiss German speech recognition result into Standard German suitable for subtitles. Our contribution consists of a comparison of different statistical and deep learning MT systems for this task and an aligned corpus of normalised Swiss German and Standard German subtitles. Results of two evaluations, automatic and human, show that the systems succeed in improving the content, but are currently not capable of producing entirely correct Standard German.
A Survey of Multilingual Models for Automatic Speech Recognition (2022)

Although Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have achieved human-like performance for a few languages, the majority of the world`s languages do not have usable systems due to the lack of large speech datasets to train these models. Cross-lingual transfer is an attractive solution to this problem, because low-resource languages can potentially benefit from higher-resource languages either through transfer learning, or being jointly trained in the same multilingual model. The problem of cross-lingual transfer has been well studied in ASR, however, recent advances in Self Supervised Learning are opening up avenues for unlabeled speech data to be used in multilingual ASR models, which can pave the way for improved performance on low-resource languages. In this paper, we survey the state of the art in multilingual ASR models that are built with cross-lingual transfer in mind. We present best practices for building multilingual models from research across diverse languages and techniques, discuss open questions and provide recommendations for future work.
LuxemBERT: Simple and Practical Data Augmentation in Language Model Pre-Training for Luxembourgish (2022)

Pre-trained Language Models such as BERT have become ubiquitous in NLP where they have achieved state-of-the-art performance in most NLP tasks. While these models are readily available for English and other widely spoken languages, they remain scarce for low-resource languages such as Luxembourgish. In this paper, we present LuxemBERT, a BERT model for the Luxembourgish language that we create using the following approach: we augment the pre-training dataset by considering text data from a closely related language that we partially translate using a simple and straightforward method. We are then able to produce the LuxemBERT model, which we show to be effective for various NLP tasks: it outperforms a simple baseline built with the available Luxembourgish text data as well the multilingual mBERT model, which is currently the only option for transformer-based language models in Luxembourgish. Furthermore, we present datasets for various downstream NLP tasks that we created for this study and will make available to researchers on request.
PerPaDa: A Persian Paraphrase Dataset based on Implicit Crowdsourcing Data Collection (2022)

In this paper we introduce PerPaDa, a Persian paraphrase dataset that is collected from users' input in a plagiarism detection system. As an implicit crowdsourcing experience, we have gathered a large collection of original and paraphrased sentences from Hamtajoo; a Persian plagiarism detection system, in which users try to conceal cases of text re-use in their documents by paraphrasing and re-submitting manuscripts for analysis. The compiled dataset contains 2446 instances of paraphrasing. In order to improve the overall quality of the collected data, some heuristics have been used to exclude sentences that don`t meet the proposed criteria. The introduced corpus is much larger than the available datasets for the task of paraphrase identification in Persian. Moreover, there is less bias in the data compared to the similar datasets, since the users did not try some fixed predefined rules in order to generate similar texts to their original inputs.
Introducing the Welsh Text Summarisation Dataset and Baseline Systems (2022)

Welsh is an official language in Wales and is spoken by an estimated 884,300 people (29.2{\%} of the population of Wales). Despite this status and estimated increase in speaker numbers since the last (2011) census, Welsh remains a minority language undergoing revitalisation and promotion by Welsh Government and relevant stakeholders. As part of the effort to increase the availability of Welsh digital technology, this paper introduces the first Welsh summarisation dataset, which we provide freely for research purposes to help advance the work on Welsh summarisation. The dataset was created by Welsh speakers through manually summarising Welsh Wikipedia articles. In addition, the paper discusses the implementation and evaluation of different summarisation systems for Welsh. The summarisation systems and results will serve as benchmarks for the development of summarisers in other minority language contexts.
A Systematic Approach to Derive a Refined Speech Corpus for Sinhala (2022)

Speech Recognition is an active research area where advances of technology have continuously driven the development of research work. However, due to the lack of adequate resources, certain languages such as Sinhala, are left to underutilize the technology. With techniques such as crowdsourcing and web scraping, several Sinhala corpora have been created and made publicly available. Despite them being large and generic, the correctness and consistency in their text data remain questionable, especially due to the lack of uniformity in the language used in the different sources of web scraped text. Addressing that requires a thorough understanding of technical and linguistic particulars pertaining to the language, which often leaves the issue unattended. We have followed a systematic approach to derive a refined corpus using a publicly available corpus for Sinhala speech recognition. In particular, we standardized the transcriptions of the corpus by removing noise in the text. Further, we applied corrections based on Sinhala linguistics. A comparative experiment shows a promising effect of the linguistic corrections by having a relative reduction of the Word-Error-Rate by 15.9{\%}.
IgboBERT Models: Building and Training Transformer Models for the Igbo Language (2022)

This work presents a standard Igbo named entity recognition (IgboNER) dataset as well as the results from training and fine-tuning state-of-the-art transformer IgboNER models. We discuss the process of our dataset creation - data collection and annotation and quality checking. We also present experimental processes involved in building an IgboBERT language model from scratch as well as fine-tuning it along with other non-Igbo pre-trained models for the downstream IgboNER task. Our results show that, although the IgboNER task benefited hugely from fine-tuning large transformer model, fine-tuning a transformer model built from scratch with comparatively little Igbo text data seems to yield quite decent results for the IgboNER task. This work will contribute immensely to IgboNLP in particular as well as the wider African and low-resource NLP efforts Keywords: Igbo, named entity recognition, BERT models, under-resourced, dataset
Latvian National Corpora Collection -- Korpuss.lv (2022)

LNCC is a diverse collection of Latvian language corpora representing both written and spoken language and is useful for both linguistic research and language modelling. The collection is intended to cover diverse Latvian language use cases and all the important text types and genres (e.g. news, social media, blogs, books, scientific texts, debates, essays, etc.), taking into account both quality and size aspects. To reach this objective, LNCC is a continuous multi-institutional and multi-project effort, supported by the Digital Humanities and Language Technology communities in Latvia. LNCC includes a broad range of Latvian texts from the Latvian National Library, Culture Information Systems Centre, Latvian National News Agency, Latvian Parliament, Latvian web crawl, various Latvian publishers, and from the Latvian language corpora created by Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science and its partners, including spoken language corpora. All corpora of LNCC are re-annotated with a uniform morpho-syntactic annotation scheme which enables federated search and consistent linguistics analysis in all the LNCC corpora, as well as facilitates to select and mix various corpora for pre-training large Latvian language models like BERT and GPT.
Investigating the Relationship Between Romanian Financial News and Closing Prices from the Bucharest Stock Exchange (2022)

A new data set is gathered from a Romanian financial news website for the duration of four years. It is further refined to extract only information related to one company by selecting only paragraphs and even sentences that referred to it. The relation between the extracted sentiment scores of the texts and the stock prices from the corresponding dates is investigated using various approaches like the lexicon-based Vader tool, Financial BERT, as well as Transformer-based models. Automated translation is used, since some models could be only applied for texts in English. It is encouraging that all models, be that they are applied to Romanian or English texts, indicate a correlation between the sentiment scores and the increase or decrease of the stock closing prices.
A Free/Open-Source Morphological Analyser and Generator for Sakha (2022)

We present, to our knowledge, the first ever published morphological analyser and generator for Sakha, a marginalised language of Siberia. The transducer, developed using HFST, has coverage of solidly above 90{\%}, and high precision. In the development of the analyser, we have expanded linguistic knowledge about Sakha, and developed strategies for complex grammatical patterns. The transducer is already being used in downstream tasks, including computer assisted language learning applications for linguistic maintenance and computational linguistic shared tasks.
An Expanded Finite-State Transducer for Tsuut`ina Verbs (2022)

This paper describes the expansion of a finite state transducer (FST) for the transitive verb system of Tsuut`ina (ISO 639-3: srs), a Dene (Athabaskan) language spoken in Alberta, Canada. Dene languages have unique templatic morphology, in which lexical, inflectional and derivational tiers are interlaced. Drawing on data from close to 9,000 verbal forms, the expanded model can handle a great range of common and rare argument structure types, including ditransitive and uniquely Dene object experiencer verbs. While challenges of speed remain, this expansion shows the ability of FST modelling to handle morphology of this type, and the expnded FST shows great promise for community language applications such as a morphologically informed online dictionary and word predictor, and for further FST development. This paper describes the expansion of a finite state transducer (FST) for the transitive verb system of Tsuut`ina (ISO 639-3: srs), a Dene (Athabaskan) language spoken in Alberta, Canada. Dene languages have unique templatic morphology, in which lexical, inflectional and derivational tiers are interlaced. Drawing on data from over 12,000 verbs forms, the expanded model can handle a great range of common and rare argument structure types, including ditransitive and uniquely Dene object experiencer verbs. While challenges of speed remain, this expansion shows the ability of FST modelling to handle morphology of this type, and the expnded FST shows great promise for community language applications such as a morphologically informed online dictionary and word predictor, and for further FST development.
BD-SHS: A Benchmark Dataset for Learning to Detect Online Bangla Hate Speech in Different Social Contexts (2022)

Social media platforms and online streaming services have spawned a new breed of Hate Speech (HS). Due to the massive amount of user-generated content on these sites, modern machine learning techniques are found to be feasible and cost-effective to tackle this problem. However, linguistically diverse datasets covering different social contexts in which offensive language is typically used are required to train generalizable models. In this paper, we identify the shortcomings of existing Bangla HS datasets and introduce a large manually labeled dataset BD-SHS that includes HS in different social contexts. The labeling criteria were prepared following a hierarchical annotation process, which is the first of its kind in Bangla HS to the best of our knowledge. The dataset includes more than 50,200 offensive comments crawled from online social networking sites and is at least 60{\%} larger than any existing Bangla HS datasets. We present the benchmark result of our dataset by training different NLP models resulting in the best one achieving an F1-score of 91.0{\%}. In our experiments, we found that a word embedding trained exclusively using 1.47 million comments from social media and streaming sites consistently resulted in better modeling of HS detection in comparison to other pre-trained embeddings. Our dataset and all accompanying codes is publicly available at github.com/naurosromim/hate-speech-dataset-for-Bengali-social-media
Introducing RezoJDM16k: a French KnowledgeGraph DataSet for Link Prediction (2022)

Knowledge graphs applications, in industry and academia, motivate substantial research directions towards large-scale information extraction from various types of resources. Nowadays, most of the available knowledge graphs are either in English or multilingual. In this paper, we introduce RezoJDM16k, a French knowledge graph dataset based on RezoJDM. With 16k nodes, 832k triplets, and 53 relation types, RezoJDM16k can be employed in many NLP downstream tasks for the French language such as machine translation, question-answering, and recommendation systems. Moreover, we provide strong knowledge graph embedding baselines that are used in link prediction tasks for future benchmarking. Compared to the state-of-the-art English knowledge graph datasets used in link prediction, RezoJDM16k shows a similar promising predictive behavior.
The Badalona Corpus - An Audio, Video and Neuro-Physiological Conversational Dataset (2022)

We present in this paper the first natural conversation corpus recorded with all modalities and neuro-physiological signals. 5 dyads (10 participants) have been recorded three times, during three sessions (30mns each) with 4 days interval. During each session, audio and video are captured as well as the neural signal (EEG with Emotiv-EPOC) and the electro-physiological one (with Empatica-E4). This resource original in several respects. Technically, it is the first one gathering all these types of data in a natural conversation situation. Moreover, the recording of the same dyads at different periods opens the door to new longitudinal investigations such as the evolution of interlocutors' alignment during the time. The paper situates this new type of resources with in the literature, presents the experimental setup and describes different annotations enriching the corpus.
Reading Time and Vocabulary Rating in the Japanese Language: Large-Scale Japanese Reading Time Data Collection Using Crowdsourcing (2022)

This study examines how differences in human vocabulary affect reading time. Specifically, we assumed vocabulary to be the random effect of research participants when applying a generalized linear mixed model to the ratings of participants in the word familiarity survey. Thereafter, we asked the participants to take part in a self-paced reading task to collect their reading times. Through fixed effect of vocabulary when applying a generalized linear mixed model to reading time, we clarified the tendency that vocabulary differences give to reading time.
Thematic Fit Bits: Annotation Quality and Quantity Interplay for Event Participant Representation (2022)

Modeling thematic fit (a verb-argument compositional semantics task) currently requires a very large burden of labeled data. We take a linguistically machine-annotated large corpus and replace corpus layers with output from higher-quality, more modern taggers. We compare the old and new corpus versions' impact on a verb-argument fit modeling task, using a high-performing neural approach. We discover that higher annotation quality dramatically reduces our data requirement while demonstrating better supervised predicate-argument classification. But in applying the model to psycholinguistic tasks outside the training objective, we see clear gains at scale, but only in one of two thematic fit estimation tasks, and no clear gains on the other. We also see that quality improves with training size, but perhaps plateauing or even declining in one task. Last, we tested the effect of role set size. All this suggests that the quality/quantity interplay is not all you need. We replicate previous studies while modifying certain role representation details and set a new state-of-the-art in event modeling, using a fraction of the data. We make the new corpus version public.
ChiSense-12: An English Sense-Annotated Child-Directed Speech Corpus (2022)

Language acquisition research has benefitted from the use of annotated corpora of child-directed speech to examine key questions about how children learn and process language in real-world contexts. However, a lack of sense-annotated corpora has limited investigations of child word sense disambiguation in naturalistic contexts. In this work, we sense-tagged 53 corpora of American and English speech directed to 958 target children up to 59 months of age, comprising a large-scale sample of 15,581 utterances for 12 ambiguous words. Importantly, we carefully selected target senses that we know - from previous investigations - young children understand. As such work was part of a project focused on investigating the role of verbs in child word sense disambiguation, we additionally coded for verb instances which took a target ambiguous word as verb object. We present experimental work where we leveraged our sense-tagged corpus ChiSense-12 to examine the role of verb-event structure in child word sense disambiguation, and we outline our plan to use Transformer-based computational architectures to test hypotheses on the role of different learning mechanisms underlying children word sense disambiguation performance.
Making People Laugh like a Pro: Analysing Humor Through Stand-Up Comedy (2022)

The analysis of humor using computational tools has gained popularity in the past few years, and a lot of resources have been built for this purpose. However, most of these resources focus on standalone jokes or on occasional humorous sentences during presentations. In this paper I present a new dataset, SCRIPTS, built using stand-up comedy shows transcripts: the humor that this dataset collects is inserted in a larger narrative, composed of daily events made humorous by the ability of the comedian. This different perspective on the humor problem can allow us to think and study humor in a different way and possibly to open the path to new lines of research.
Testing Focus and Non-at-issue Frameworks with a Question-under-Discussion-Annotated Corpus (2022)

We present an annotated corpus of German driving reports for the analysis of Question-under-Discussion (QUD) based information structural distinctions. Since QUDs can hardly be defined in advance for providing a corresponding tagset, several theoretical issues arise concerning the scope and quality of the corpus and the development of an appropriate annotation tool for creating the corpus. We developed the corpus for testing the adequacy of QUD-based pragmatic frameworks of information structure. First analyses of the annotated information structures show that focus-related meaning aspects are essentially confirmed, indicating a sufficent accuracy of the annotations. Assumptions on non-at-issueness expressed by non-restrictive relative clauses made in the literature seem to be too strong, given the corpus data.