ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Method of Augmenting Bilingual Terminology by Taking Advantage of the Conceptual Systematicity of Terminologies (2016)

In this paper, we propose a method of augmenting existing bilingual terminologies. Our method belongs to a {\textquotedblleft}generate and validate{\textquotedblright} framework rather than extraction from corpora. Although many studies have proposed methods to find term translations or to augment terminology within a {\textquotedblleft}generate and validate{\textquotedblright} framework, few has taken full advantage of the systematic nature of terminologies. A terminology of a domain represents the conceptual system of the domain fairly systematically, and we contend that making use of the systematicity fully will greatly contribute to the effective augmentation of terminologies. This paper proposes and evaluates a novel method to generate bilingual term candidates by using existing terminologies and delving into their systematicity. Experiments have shown that our method can generate much better term candidate pairs than the existing method and give improved performance for terminology augmentation.
Acquisition of semantic relations between terms: how far can we get with standard NLP tools? (2016)

The extraction of data exemplifying relations between terms can make use, at least to a large extent, of techniques that are similar to those used in standard hybrid term candidate extraction, namely basic corpus analysis tools (e.g. tagging, lemmatization, parsing), as well as morphological analysis of complex words (compounds and derived items). In this article, we discuss the use of such techniques for the extraction of raw material for a description of relations between terms, and we provide internal evaluation data for the devices developed. We claim that user-generated content is a rich source of term variation through paraphrasing and reformulation, and that these provide relational data at the same time as term variants. Germanic languages with their rich word formation morphology may be particularly good candidates for the approach advocated here.
Evaluation of distributional semantic models: a holistic approach (2016)

We investigate how both model-related factors and application-related factors affect the accuracy of distributional semantic models (DSMs) in the context of specialized lexicography, and how these factors interact. This holistic approach to the evaluation of DSMs provides valuable guidelines for the use of these models and insight into the kind of semantic information they capture.
A Study on the Interplay Between the Corpus Size and Parameters of a Distributional Model for Term Classification (2016)

We propose and evaluate a method for identifying co-hyponym lexical units in a terminological resource. The principles of term recognition and distributional semantics are combined to extract terms from a similar category of concept. Given a set of candidate terms, random projections are employed to represent them as low-dimensional vectors. These vectors are derived automatically from the frequency of the co-occurrences of the candidate terms and words that appear within windows of text in their proximity (context-windows). In a $k$-nearest neighbours framework, these vectors are classified using a small set of manually annotated terms which exemplify concept categories. We then investigate the interplay between the size of the corpus that is used for collecting the co-occurrences and a number of factors that play roles in the performance of the proposed method: the configuration of context-windows for collecting co-occurrences, the selection of neighbourhood size ($k$), and the choice of similarity metric.
Pattern-based Word Sketches for the Extraction of Semantic Relations (2016)

Despite advances in computer technology, terminologists still tend to rely on manual work to extract all the semantic information that they need for the description of specialized concepts. In this paper we propose the creation of new word sketches in Sketch Engine for the extraction of semantic relations. Following a pattern-based approach, new sketch grammars are devel-oped in order to extract some of the most common semantic relations used in the field of ter-minology: generic-specific, part-whole, location, cause and function.
Constructing and Evaluating Controlled Bilingual Terminologies (2016)

This paper presents the construction and evaluation of Japanese and English controlled bilingual terminologies that are particularly intended for controlled authoring and machine translation with special reference to the Japanese municipal domain. Our terminologies are constructed by extracting terms from municipal website texts, and the term variations are controlled by defining preferred and proscribed terms for both the source Japanese and the target English. To assess the coverage of the terms/concepts in the municipal domain and validate the quality of the control, we employ a quantitative extrapolation method that estimates the potential vocabulary size. Using Large-Number-of-Rare-Event (LNRE) modelling, we compare two parameters: (1) uncontrolled and controlled and (2) Japanese and English. The results show that our terminologies currently cover about 45{--}65{\%} of the terms and 50{--}65{\%} of the concepts in the municipal domain, and are well controlled. The detailed analysis of growth patterns of terminologies also provides insight into the extent to which we can enlarge the terminologies within the realistic range.
Providing and Analyzing NLP Terms for our Community (2016)

By its own nature, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community is a priori the best equipped to study the evolution of its own publications, but works in this direction are rare and only recently have we seen a few attempts at charting the field. In this paper, we use the algorithms, resources, standards, tools and common practices of the NLP field to build a list of terms characteristic of ongoing research, by mining a large corpus of scientific publications, aiming at the largest possible exhaustivity and covering the largest possible time span. Study of the evolution of this term list through time reveals interesting insights on the dynamics of field and the availability of the term database and of the corpus (for a large part) make possible many further comparative studies in addition to providing a test field for a new graphic interface designed to perform visual time analytics of large sized thesauri.
Evaluating a dictionary of human phenotype terms focusing on rare diseases (2016)

Annotating medical text such as clinical notes with human phenotype descriptors is an important task that can, for example, assist in building patient profiles. To automatically annotate text one usually needs a dictionary of predefined terms. However, do to the variety of human expressiveness, current state-of-the art phenotype concept recognizers and automatic annotators struggle with specific domain issues and challenges. In this paper we present results of an-notating gold standard corpus with a dictionary containing lexical variants for the Human Phenotype Ontology terms. The main purpose of the dictionary is to improve the recall of phenotype concept recognition systems. We compare the method with four other approaches and present results.
A semi automatic annotation approach for ontological and terminological knowledge acquisition (2016)

We propose a semi-automatic method for the acquisition of specialised ontological and terminological knowledge. An ontology and a terminology are automatically built from domain experts' annotations. The ontology formalizes the common and shared conceptual vocabulary of those experts. Its associated terminology defines a glossary linking annotated terms to their semantic categories. These two resources evolve incrementally and are used for an automatic annotation of a new corpus at each iteration. The annotated corpus concerns the evaluation of French higher education and science institutions.
Understanding Medical free text: A Terminology driven approach (2016)

With many hospitals digitalizing clinical records it has opened opportunities for researchers in NLP, Machine Learning to apply techniques for extracting meaning and make actionable insights. There has been previous attempts in mapping free text to medical nomenclature like UMLS, SNOMED. However, in this paper, we had analyzed diagnosis in clinical reports using ICD10 to achieve a lightweight, real-time predictions by introducing concepts like WordInfo, root word identification. We were able to achieve 68.3{\%} accuracy over clinical records collected from qualified clinicians. Our study would further help the healthcare institutes in organizing their clinical reports based on ICD10 mappings and derive numerous insights to achieve operational efficiency and better medical care.
Discriminating between Similar Languages and Arabic Dialect Identification: A Report on the Third DSL Shared Task (2016)

We present the results of the third edition of the Discriminating between Similar Languages (DSL) shared task, which was organized as part of the VarDial`2016 workshop at COLING`2016. The challenge offered two subtasks: subtask 1 focused on the identification of very similar languages and language varieties in newswire texts, whereas subtask 2 dealt with Arabic dialect identification in speech transcripts. A total of 37 teams registered to participate in the task, 24 teams submitted test results, and 20 teams also wrote system description papers. High-order character n-grams were the most successful feature, and the best classification approaches included traditional supervised learning methods such as SVM, logistic regression, and language models, while deep learning approaches did not perform very well.
Discriminating Similar Languages with Linear SVMs and Neural Networks (2016)

This paper describes the systems we experimented with for participating in the discriminating between similar languages (DSL) shared task 2016. We submitted results of a single system based on support vector machines (SVM) with linear kernel and using character ngram features, which obtained the first rank at the closed training track for test set A. Besides the linear SVM, we also report additional experiments with a number of deep learning architectures. Despite our intuition that non-linear deep learning methods should be advantageous, linear models seems to fare better in this task, at least with the amount of data and the amount of effort we spent on tuning these models.
LSTM Autoencoders for Dialect Analysis (2016)

Computational approaches for dialectometry employed Levenshtein distance to compute an aggregate similarity between two dialects belonging to a single language group. In this paper, we apply a sequence-to-sequence autoencoder to learn a deep representation for words that can be used for meaningful comparison across dialects. In contrast to the alignment-based methods, our method does not require explicit alignments. We apply our architectures to three different datasets and show that the learned representations indicate highly similar results with the analyses based on Levenshtein distance and capture the traditional dialectal differences shown by dialectologists.
The GW/LT3 VarDial 2016 Shared Task System for Dialects and Similar Languages Detection (2016)

This paper describes the GW/LT3 contribution to the 2016 VarDial shared task on the identification of similar languages (task 1) and Arabic dialects (task 2). For both tasks, we experimented with Logistic Regression and Neural Network classifiers in isolation. Additionally, we implemented a cascaded classifier that consists of coarse and fine-grained classifiers (task 1) and a classifier ensemble with majority voting for task 2. The submitted systems obtained state-of-the art performance and ranked first for the evaluation on social media data (test sets B1 and B2 for task 1), with a maximum weighted F1 score of 91.94{\%}.
Processing Dialectal Arabic: Exploiting Variability and Similarity to Overcome Challenges and Discover Opportunities (2016)

We recently witnessed an exponential growth in dialectal Arabic usage in both textual data and speech recordings especially in social media. Processing such media is of great utility for all kinds of applications ranging from information extraction to social media analytics for political and commercial purposes to building decision support systems. Compared to other languages, Arabic, especially the informal variety, poses a significant challenge to natural language processing algorithms since it comprises multiple dialects, linguistic code switching, and a lack of standardized orthographies, to top its relatively complex morphology. Inherently, the problem of processing Arabic in the context of social media is the problem of how to handle resource poor languages. In this talk I will go over some of our insights to some of these problems and show how there is a silver lining where we can generalize some of our solutions to other low resource language contexts.
Language Related Issues for Machine Translation between Closely Related South Slavic Languages (2016)

Machine translation between closely related languages is less challenging and exibits a smaller number of translation errors than translation between distant languages, but there are still obstacles which should be addressed in order to improve such systems. This work explores the obstacles for machine translation systems between closely related South Slavic languages, namely Croatian, Serbian and Slovenian. Statistical systems for all language pairs and translation directions are trained using parallel texts from different domains, however mainly on spoken language i.e. subtitles. For translation between Serbian and Croatian, a rule-based system is also explored. It is shown that for all language pairs and translation systems, the main obstacles are differences between structural properties.
Romanized Berber and Romanized Arabic Automatic Language Identification Using Machine Learning (2016)

The identification of the language of text/speech input is the first step to be able to properly do any language-dependent natural language processing. The task is called Automatic Language Identification (ALI). Being a well-studied field since early 1960`s, various methods have been applied to many standard languages. The ALI standard methods require datasets for training and use character/word-based n-gram models. However, social media and new technologies have contributed to the rise of informal and minority languages on the Web. The state-of-the-art automatic language identifiers fail to properly identify many of them. Romanized Arabic (RA) and Romanized Berber (RB) are cases of these informal languages which are under-resourced. The goal of this paper is twofold: detect RA and RB, at a document level, as separate languages and distinguish between them as they coexist in North Africa. We consider the task as a classification problem and use supervised machine learning to solve it. For both languages, character-based 5-grams combined with additional lexicons score the best, F-score of 99.75{\%} and 97.77{\%} for RB and RA respectively.
How Many Languages Can a Language Model Model? (2016)

One of the purposes of the VarDial workshop series is to encourage research into NLP methods that treat human languages as a continuum, by designing models that exploit the similarities between languages and variants. In my work, I am using a continuous vector representation of languages that allows modeling and exploring the language continuum in a very direct way. The basic tool for this is a character-based recurrent neural network language model conditioned on language vectors whose values are learned during training. By feeding the model Bible translations in a thousand languages, not only does the learned vector space capture language similarity, but by interpolating between the learned vectors it is possible to generate text in unattested intermediate forms between the training languages.
Automatic Detection of Arabicized Berber and Arabic Varieties (2016)

Automatic Language Identification (ALI) is the detection of the natural language of an input text by a machine. It is the first necessary step to do any language-dependent natural language processing task. Various methods have been successfully applied to a wide range of languages, and the state-of-the-art automatic language identifiers are mainly based on character n-gram models trained on huge corpora. However, there are many languages which are not yet automatically processed, for instance minority and informal languages. Many of these languages are only spoken and do not exist in a written format. Social media platforms and new technologies have facilitated the emergence of written format for these spoken languages based on pronunciation. The latter are not well represented on the Web, commonly referred to as under-resourced languages, and the current available ALI tools fail to properly recognize them. In this paper, we revisit the problem of ALI with the focus on Arabicized Berber and dialectal Arabic short texts. We introduce new resources and evaluate the existing methods. The results show that machine learning models combined with lexicons are well suited for detecting Arabicized Berber and different Arabic varieties and distinguishing between them, giving a macro-average F-score of 92.94{\%}.
Automatic Verification and Augmentation of Multilingual Lexicons (2016)

We present an approach for automatic verification and augmentation of multilingual lexica. We exploit existing parallel and monolingual corpora to extract multilingual correspondents via tri-angulation. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on two publicly available resources: Tharwa, a three-way lexicon comprising Dialectal Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and English lemmas among other information (Diab et al., 2014); and BabelNet, a multilingual thesaurus comprising over 276 languages including Arabic variant entries (Navigli and Ponzetto, 2012). Our automated approach yields an F1-score of 71.71{\%} in generating correct multilingual correspondents against gold Tharwa, and 54.46{\%} against gold BabelNet without any human intervention.
Faster Decoding for Subword Level Phrase-based SMT between Related Languages (2016)

A common and effective way to train translation systems between related languages is to consider sub-word level basic units. However, this increases the length of the sentences resulting in increased decoding time. The increase in length is also impacted by the specific choice of data format for representing the sentences as subwords. In a phrase-based SMT framework, we investigate different choices of decoder parameters as well as data format and their impact on decoding time and translation accuracy. We suggest best options for these settings that significantly improve decoding time with little impact on the translation accuracy.
Subdialectal Differences in Sorani Kurdish (2016)

In this study we apply classification methods for detecting subdialectal differences in Sorani Kurdish texts produced in different regions, namely Iran and Iraq. As Sorani is a low-resource language, no corpus including texts from different regions was readily available. To this end, we identified data sources that could be leveraged for this task to create a dataset of 200,000 sentences. Using surface features, we attempted to classify Sorani subdialects, showing that sentences from news sources in Iraq and Iran are distinguishable with 96{\%} accuracy. This is the first preliminary study for a dialect that has not been widely studied in computational linguistics, evidencing the possible existence of distinct subdialects.
Enlarging Scarce In-domain English-Croatian Corpus for SMT of MOOCs Using Serbian (2016)

Massive Open Online Courses have been growing rapidly in size and impact. Yet the language barrier constitutes a major growth impediment in reaching out all people and educating all citizens. A vast majority of educational material is available only in English, and state-of-the-art machine translation systems still have not been tailored for this peculiar genre. In addition, a mere collection of appropriate in-domain training material is a challenging task. In this work, we investigate statistical machine translation of lecture subtitles from English into Croatian, which is morphologically rich and generally weakly supported, especially for the educational domain. We show that results comparable with publicly available systems trained on much larger data can be achieved if a small in-domain training set is used in combination with additional in-domain corpus originating from the closely related Serbian language.
Arabic Dialect Identification in Speech Transcripts (2016)

In this paper we describe a system developed to identify a set of four regional Arabic dialects (Egyptian, Gulf, Levantine, North African) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in a transcribed speech corpus. We competed under the team name MAZA in the Arabic Dialect Identification sub-task of the 2016 Discriminating between Similar Languages (DSL) shared task. Our system achieved an F1-score of 0.51 in the closed training track, ranking first among the 18 teams that participated in the sub-task. Our system utilizes a classifier ensemble with a set of linear models as base classifiers. We experimented with three different ensemble fusion strategies, with the mean probability approach providing the best performance.
DSL Shared Task 2016: Perfect Is The Enemy of Good Language Discrimination Through Expectation--Maximization and Chunk-based Language Model (2016)

In this paper we investigate two approaches to discrimination of similar languages: Expectation{--}maximization algorithm for estimating conditional probability P(word|language) and byte level language models similar to compression-based language modelling methods. The accuracy of these methods reached respectively 86.6{\%} and 88.3{\%} on set A of the DSL Shared task 2016 competition.
Byte-based Language Identification with Deep Convolutional Networks (2016)

We report on our system for the shared task on discriminating between similar languages (DSL 2016). The system uses only byte representations in a deep residual network (ResNet). The system, named ResIdent, is trained only on the data released with the task (closed training). We obtain 84.88{\%} accuracy on subtask A, 68.80{\%} accuracy on subtask B1, and 69.80{\%} accuracy on subtask B2. A large difference in accuracy on development data can be observed with relatively minor changes in our network`s architecture and hyperparameters. We therefore expect fine-tuning of these parameters to yield higher accuracies.
Classifying ASR Transcriptions According to Arabic Dialect (2016)

We describe several systems for identifying short samples of Arabic dialects. The systems were prepared for the shared task of the 2016 DSL Workshop. Our best system, an SVM using character tri-gram features, achieved an accuracy on the test data for the task of 0.4279, compared to a baseline of 0.20 for chance guesses or 0.2279 if we had always chosen the same most frequent class in the test set. This compares with the results of the team with the best weighted F1 score, which was an accuracy of 0.5117. The team entries seem to fall into cohorts, with all the teams in a cohort within a standard-deviation of each other, and our three entries are in the third cohort, which is about seven standard deviations from the top.