ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Interactive Analysis and Visualisation of Annotated Collocations in Spanish (AVAnCES) (2022)

Phraseology studies have been enhanced by Corpus Linguistics, which has become an interdisciplinary field where current technologies play an important role in its development. Computational tools have been implemented in the last decades with positive results on the identification of phrases in different languages. One specific technology that has impacted these studies is social media. As researchers, we have turned our attention to collecting data from these platforms, which comes with great advantages and its own challenges. One of the challenges is the way we design and build corpora relevant to the questions emerging in this type of language expression. This has been approached from different angles, but one that has given invaluable outputs is the building of linguistic corpora with the use of online web applications. In this paper, we take a multidimensional approach to the collection, design, and deployment of a phraseology corpus for Latin American Spanish from Twitter data, extracting features using NLP techniques, and presenting it in an interactive online web application. We expect to contribute to the methodologies used for Corpus Linguistics in the current technological age. Finally, we make this tool publicly available to be used by any researcher interested in the data itself and also on the technological tools developed here.
Fractality of sentiment arcs for literary quality assessment: The case of Nobel laureates (2022)

In the few works that have used NLP to study literary quality, sentiment and emotion analysis have often been considered valuable sources of information. At the same time, the idea that the nature and polarity of the sentiments expressed by a novel might have something to do with its perceived quality seems limited at best. In this paper, we argue that the fractality of narratives, specifically the long-term memory of their sentiment arcs, rather than their simple shape or average valence, might play an important role in the perception of literary quality by a human audience. In particular, we argue that such measure can help distinguish Nobel-winning writers from control groups in a recent corpus of English language novels. To test this hypothesis, we present the results from two studies: (i) a probability distribution test, where we compute the probability of seeing a title from a Nobel laureate at different levels of arc fractality; (ii) a classification test, where we use several machine learning algorithms to measure the predictive power of both sentiment arcs and their fractality measure. Our findings seem to indicate that despite the competitive and complex nature of the task, the populations of Nobel and non-Nobel laureates seem to behave differently and can to some extent be told apart by a classifier.
Style Classification of Rabbinic Literature for Detection of Lost Midrash Tanhuma Material (2022)

Midrash collections are complex rabbinic works that consist of text in multiple languages, that evolved through long processes of instable oral and written transmission. Determining the origin of a given passage in such a compilation is not always straightforward and is often a matter disputed by scholars, yet it is essential for scholars' understanding of the passage and its relationship to other texts in the rabbinic corpus. To help solve this problem, we propose a system for classification of rabbinic literature based on its style, leveraging recently released pretrained Transformer models for Hebrew. Additionally, we demonstrate how our method can be applied to uncover lost material from the Midrash Tanhuma.
Use the Metadata, Luke! -- An Experimental Joint Metadata Search and N-gram Trend Viewer for Personal Web Archives (2022)

Many digital humanists (philologists, historians, sociologists, librarians, the audience for web archives) design their research around metadata (publication date ranges, sources, authors, etc.). However, current major web archives are limited to technical metadata while lacking high quality, descriptive metadata allowing for faceted queries. As researchers often lack the technical skill necessary to enrich existing web archives with descriptive metadata, they increasingly turn to creating personal web archives that contain such metadata, tailored to their research requirements. Software that enable creating such archives without advanced technical skills have gained popularity, however, tools for examination and querying are currently the missing link. We showcase a solution designed to fill this gap.
MALM: Mixing Augmented Language Modeling for Zero-Shot Machine Translation (2022)

Large pre-trained language models have brought remarkable progress in NLP. Pre-training and Fine-tuning have given state-of-art performance across tasks in text processing. Data Augmentation techniques have also helped build state-of-art models on low or zero resource tasks. Many works in the past have attempted at learning a single massively multilingual machine translation model for zero-shot translation. Although those translation models are producing correct translations, the main challenge is those models are producing the wrong languages for zero-shot translation. This work and its results indicate that prompt conditioned large models do not suffer from off-target language errors i.e. errors arising due to translation to wrong languages. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of self-supervised pre-training and data augmentation for zero-shot multi-lingual machine translation.
ParsSimpleQA: The Persian Simple Question Answering Dataset and System over Knowledge Graph (2022)

The simple question answering over the knowledge graph concerns answering single-relation questions by querying the facts in the knowledge graph. This task has drawn significant attention in recent years. However, there is a demand for a simple question dataset in the Persian language to study open-domain simple question answering. In this paper, we present the first Persian single-relation question answering dataset and a model that uses a knowledge graph as a source of knowledge to answer questions. We create the ParsSimpleQA dataset semi-automatically in two steps. First, we build single-relation question templates. Next, we automatically create simple questions and answers using templates, entities, and relations from Farsbase. To present the reliability of the presented dataset, we proposed a simple question-answering system that receives questions and uses deep learning and information retrieval techniques for answering questions. The experimental results presented in this paper show that the ParsSimpleQA dataset is very promising for the Persian simple question-answering task.
Enhancing Digital History -- Event discovery via Topic Modeling and Change Detection (2022)

Digital history is the application of computer science techniques to historical data in order to uncover insights into events occurring during specific time periods from the past. This relatively new interdisciplinary field can help identify and record latent information about political, cultural, and economic trends that are not otherwise apparent from traditional historical analysis. This paper presents a method that uses topic modeling and breakpoint detection to observe how extracted topics come in and out of prominence over various time periods. We apply our techniques on British parliamentary speech data from the 19th century. Findings show that some of the events produced are cohesive in topic content (religion, transportation, economics, etc.) and time period (events are focused in the same year or month). Topic content identified should be further analyzed for specific events and undergo external validation to determine the quality and value of the findings to historians specializing in 19th century Britain.
A Parallel Corpus and Dictionary for Amis-Mandarin Translation (2022)

Amis is an endangered language indigenous to Taiwan with limited data available for computational processing. We thus present an Amis-Mandarin dataset containing a parallel corpus of 5,751 Amis and Mandarin sentences and a dictionary of 7,800 Amis words and phrases with their definitions in Mandarin. Using our dataset, we also established a baseline for machine translation between Amis and Mandarin in both directions. Our dataset can be found at \url{https://github.com/francisdzheng/amis-mandarin}.
Machines in the media: semantic change in the lexicon of mechanization in 19th-century British newspapers (2022)

The industrialization process associated with the so-called Industrial Revolution in 19th-century Great Britain was a time of profound changes, including in the English lexicon. An important yet understudied phenomenon is the semantic shift in the lexicon of mechanisation. In this paper we present the first large-scale analysis of terms related to mechanization over the course of the 19th-century in English. We draw on a corpus of historical British newspapers comprising 4.6 billion tokens and train historical word embedding models. We test existing semantic change detection techniques and analyse the results in light of previous historical linguistic scholarship.
Optimizing the weighted sequence alignment algorithm for large-scale text similarity computation (2022)

We present an optimized implementation of the weighted sequence alignment algorithm (a.k.a. weighted edit distance) in a scenario where the items to align are numeric vectors and the substitution weights are determined by their cosine similarity. The optimization relies on using vector and matrix operations provided by numeric computation libraries (including GPU acceleration) instead of loops. The resulting algorithm provides an efficient way of aligning large sets of texts represented as sequences of continuous-space numeric vectors (embeddings). The optimization made it possible to compute alignment-based similarity for all pairs of texts in a large corpus of Finnic oral folk poetry for the purpose of studying intertextuality in the oral tradition.
Domain-specific Evaluation of Word Embeddings for Philosophical Text using Direct Intrinsic Evaluation (2022)

We perform a direct intrinsic evaluation of word embeddings trained on the works of a single philosopher. Six models are compared to human judgements elicited using two tasks: a synonym detection task and a coherence task. We apply a method that elicits judgements based on explicit knowledge from experts, as the linguistic intuition of non-expert participants might differ from that of the philosopher. We find that an in-domain SVD model has the best 1-nearest neighbours for target terms, while transfer learning-based Nonce2Vec performs better for low frequency target terms.
Towards Bootstrapping a Chatbot on Industrial Heritage through Term and Relation Extraction (2022)

We describe initial work in developing a methodology for the automatic generation of a conversational agent or {\textquoteleft}chatbot' through term and relation extraction from a relevant corpus of language data. We develop our approach in the domain of industrial heritage in the 18th and 19th centuries, and more specifically on the industrial history of canals and mills in Ireland. We collected a corpus of relevant newspaper reports and Wikipedia articles, which we deemed representative of a layman`s understanding of this topic. We used the Saffron toolkit to extract relevant terms and relations between the terms from the corpus and leveraged the extracted knowledge to query the British Library Digital Collection and the Project Gutenberg library. We leveraged the extracted terms and relations in identifying possible answers for a constructed set of questions based on the extracted terms, by matching them with sentences in the British Library Digital Collection and the Project Gutenberg library. In a final step, we then took this data set of question-answer pairs to train a chatbot. We evaluate our approach by manually assessing the appropriateness of the generated answers for a random sample, each of which is judged by four annotators.
Non-Parametric Word Sense Disambiguation for Historical Languages (2022)

Recent approaches to Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) have profited from the enhanced contextualized word representations coming from contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs). This advancement is accompanied by a renewed interest in WSD applications in Humanities research, where the lack of suitable, specific WSD-annotated resources is a hurdle in developing ad-hoc WSD systems. Because they can exploit sentential context, LLMs are particularly suited for disambiguation tasks. Still, the application of LLMs is often limited to linear classifiers trained on top of the LLM architecture. In this paper, we follow recent developments in non-parametric learning and show how LLMs can be efficiently fine-tuned to achieve strong few-shot performance on WSD for historical languages (English and Dutch, date range: 1450-1950). We test our hypothesis using (i) a large, general evaluation set taken from large lexical databases, and (ii) a small real-world scenario involving an ad-hoc WSD task. Moreover, this paper marks the release of GysBERT, a LLM for historical Dutch.
Introducing a Large Corpus of Tokenized Classical Chinese Poems of Tang and Song Dynasties (2022)

Classical Chinese poems of Tang and Song dynasties are an important part for the studies of Chinese literature. To thoroughly understand the poems, properly segmenting the verses is an important step for human readers and software agents. Yet, due to the availability of data and the costs of annotation, there are still no known large and useful sources that offer classical Chinese poems with annotated word boundaries. In this project, annotators with Chinese literature background labeled 32399 poems. We analyzed the annotated patterns and conducted inter-rater agreement studies about the annotations. The distributions of the annotated patterns for poem lines are very close to some well-known professional heuristics, i.e., that the 2-2-1, 2-1-2, 2-2-1-2, and 2-2-2-1 patterns are very frequent. The annotators agreed well at the line level, but agreed on the segmentations of a whole poem only 43{\%} of the time. We applied a traditional machine-learning approach to segment the poems, and achieved promising results at the line level as well. Using the annotated data as the ground truth, these methods could segment only about 18{\%} of the poems completely right under favorable conditions. Switching to deep-learning methods helped us achieved better than 30{\%}.
Creative Text-to-Image Generation: Suggestions for a Benchmark (2022)

Language models for text-to-image generation can output good quality images when referential aspects of pictures are evaluated. The generation of creative images is not under scrutiny at the moment, but it poses interesting challenges: should we expect more creative images using more creative prompts? What is the relationship between prompts and images in the global process of human evaluation? In this paper, we want to highlight several criteria that should be taken into account for building a creative text-to-image generation benchmark, collecting insights from multiple disciplines (e.g., linguistics, cognitive psychology, philosophy, psychology of art).
The predictability of literary translation (2022)

Research has shown that the practice of translation exhibits predictable linguistic cues that make translated texts detectable from original-language texts (a phenomenon known as {\textquotedblleft}translationese{\textquotedblright}). In this paper, we test the extent to which literary translations are subject to the same effects and whether they also exhibit meaningful differences at the level of content. Research into the function of translations within national literary markets using smaller case studies has suggested that translations play a cultural role that is distinct from that of original-language literature, i.e. their differences reside not only at the level of translationese but at the level of content. Using a dataset consisting of original-language fiction in English and translations into English from 120 languages (N=21,302), we find that one of the principal functions of literary translation is to convey predictable geographic identities to local readers that nevertheless extend well beyond the foreignness of persons and places.
Emotion Conditioned Creative Dialog Generation (2022)

We present a DialGPT based model for generating creative dialog responses that are conditioned based on one of the following emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, pain, sadness and surprise. Our model is capable of producing a contextually apt response given an input sentence and a desired emotion label. Our model is capable of expressing the desired emotion with an accuracy of 0.6. The best performing emotions are neutral, fear and disgust. When measuring the strength of the expressed emotion, we find that anger, fear and disgust are expressed in the most strong fashion by the model.
Integration of Named Entity Recognition and Sentence Segmentation on Ancient Chinese based on Siku-BERT (2022)

Sentence segmentation and named entity recognition are two significant tasks in ancient Chinese processing since punctuation and named entity information are important for further research on ancient classics. These two are sequence labeling tasks in essence so we can tag the labels of these two tasks for each token simultaneously. Our work is to evaluate whether such a unified way would be better than tagging the label of each task separately with a BERT-based model. The paper adopts a BERT-based model that was pre-trained on ancient Chinese text to conduct experiments on Zuozhuan text. The results show there is no difference between these two tagging approaches without concerning the type of entities and punctuation. The ablation experiments show that the punctuation token in the text is useful for NER tasks, and finer tagging sets such as differentiating the tokens that locate at the end of an entity and those are in the middle of an entity could offer a useful feature for NER while impact negatively sentences segmentation with unified tagging.
(Re-)Digitizing 吳守禮 Ng\^oo Si\'u-l\'e`s Mandarin -- Taiwanese Dictionary (2022)

This paper presents the efforts conducted to obtain a usable and open digital version in XML-TEI of one of the major lexicographic work for bilingual Taiwanese dictionaries, namely the 《國臺對照活用辭典》(Practical Mandarin-Taiwanese Dictionary) The original dictionary was published in 2000, after decades of work by Prof. 吳守禮 (Ng{\^o}o Siu-le/Wu Shouli)
A Randomized Link Transformer for Diverse Open-Domain Dialogue Generation (2022)

A major issue in open-domain dialogue generation is the agent`s tendency to generate repetitive and generic responses. The lack in response diversity has been addressed in recent years via the use of latent variable models, such as the Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (CVAE), which typically involve learning a latent Gaussian distribution over potential response intents. However, due to latent variable collapse, training latent variable dialogue models are notoriously complex, requiring substantial modification to the standard training process and loss function. Other approaches proposed to improve response diversity also largely entail a significant increase in training complexity. Hence, this paper proposes a Randomized Link (RL) Transformer as an alternative to the latent variable models. The RL Transformer does not require any additional enhancements to the training process or loss function. Empirical results show that, when it comes to response diversity, the RL Transformer achieved comparable performance compared to latent variable models.
Are Pre-trained Transformers Robust in Intent Classification? A Missing Ingredient in Evaluation of Out-of-Scope Intent Detection (2022)

Pre-trained Transformer-based models were reported to be robust in intent classification. In this work, we first point out the importance of in-domain out-of-scope detection in few-shot intent recognition tasks and then illustrate the vulnerability of pre-trained Transformer-based models against samples that are in-domain but out-of-scope (ID-OOS). We construct two new datasets, and empirically show that pre-trained models do not perform well on both ID-OOS examples and general out-of-scope examples, especially on fine-grained few-shot intent detection tasks.
Conversational AI for Positive-sum Retailing under Falsehood Control (2022)

Retailing combines complicated communication skills and strategies to reach an agreement between buyer and seller with identical or different goals. In each transaction a good seller finds an optimal solution by considering his/her own profits while simultaneously considering whether the buyer`s needs have been met. In this paper, we manage the retailing problem by mixing cooperation and competition. We present a rich dataset of buyer-seller bargaining in a simulated marketplace in which each agent values goods and utility separately. Various attributes (preference, quality, and profit) are initially hidden from one agent with respect to its role; during the conversation, both sides may reveal, fake, or retain the information uncovered to come to a final decision through natural language. Using this dataset, we leverage transfer learning techniques on a pretrained, end-to-end model and enhance its decision-making ability toward the best choice in terms of utility by means of multi-agent reinforcement learning. An automatic evaluation shows that our approach results in more optimal transactions than human does. We also show that our framework controls the falsehoods generated by seller agents.
D-REX: Dialogue Relation Extraction with Explanations (2022)

Existing research studies on cross-sentence relation extraction in long-form multi-party conversations aim to improve relation extraction without considering the explainability of such methods. This work addresses that gap by focusing on extracting explanations that indicate that a relation exists while using only partially labeled explanations. We propose our model-agnostic framework, D-REX, a policy-guided semi-supervised algorithm that optimizes for explanation quality and relation extraction simultaneously. We frame relation extraction as a re-ranking task and include relation- and entity-specific explanations as an intermediate step of the inference process. We find that human annotators are 4.2 times more likely to prefer D-REX`s explanations over a joint relation extraction and explanation model. Finally, our evaluations show that D-REX is simple yet effective and improves relation extraction performance of strong baseline models by 1.2-4.7{\%}.
Data Augmentation for Intent Classification with Off-the-shelf Large Language Models (2022)

Data augmentation is a widely employed technique to alleviate the problem of data scarcity. In this work, we propose a prompting-based approach to generate labelled training data for intent classification with off-the-shelf language models (LMs) such as GPT-3. An advantage of this method is that no task-specific LM-fine-tuning for data generation is required; hence the method requires no hyper parameter tuning and is applicable even when the available training data is very scarce. We evaluate the proposed method in a few-shot setting on four diverse intent classification tasks. We find that GPT-generated data significantly boosts the performance of intent classifiers when intents in consideration are sufficiently distinct from each other. In tasks with semantically close intents, we observe that the generated data is less helpful. Our analysis shows that this is because GPT often generates utterances that belong to a closely-related intent instead of the desired one. We present preliminary evidence that a prompting-based GPT classifier could be helpful in filtering the generated data to enhance its quality.