ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Ellogon Casual Annotation Infrastructure (2020)

This paper presents a new annotation paradigm, casual annotation, along with a proposed architecture and a reference implementation, the Ellogon Casual Annotation Tool, which implements this paradigm and architecture. The novel aspects of the proposed paradigm originate from the vision to tightly integrate annotation with the casual, everyday activities of users. Annotating in a less {\textquotedblleft}controlled{\textquotedblright} environment, and removing the bottleneck of selecting content and importing it to annotation infrastructures, casual annotation provides the ability to vastly increase the content that can be annotated and ease the annotation process through automatic pre-training. The proposed paradigm, architecture and reference implementation has been evaluated for more than two years on an annotation task related to sentiment analysis. Evaluation results suggest that, at least for this annotation task, there is a huge improvement in productivity after casual annotation adoption, in comparison to the more traditional annotation paradigms followed in the early stages of the annotation task.
European Language Grid: An Overview (2020)

With 24 official EU and many additional languages, multilingualism in Europe and an inclusive Digital Single Market can only be enabled through Language Technologies (LTs). European LT business is dominated by hundreds of SMEs and a few large players. Many are world-class, with technologies that outperform the global players. However, European LT business is also fragmented {--} by nation states, languages, verticals and sectors, significantly holding back its impact. The European Language Grid (ELG) project addresses this fragmentation by establishing the ELG as the primary platform for LT in Europe. The ELG is a scalable cloud platform, providing, in an easy-to-integrate way, access to hundreds of commercial and non-commercial LTs for all European languages, including running tools and services as well as data sets and resources. Once fully operational, it will enable the commercial and non-commercial European LT community to deposit and upload their technologies and data sets into the ELG, to deploy them through the grid, and to connect with other resources. The ELG will boost the Multilingual Digital Single Market towards a thriving European LT community, creating new jobs and opportunities. Furthermore, the ELG project organises two open calls for up to 20 pilot projects. It also sets up 32 national competence centres and the European LT Council for outreach and coordination purposes.
The Competitiveness Analysis of the European Language Technology Market (2020)

This paper presents the key results of a study on the global competitiveness of the European Language Technology market for three areas {--} Machine Translation, speech technology, and cross-lingual search. EU competitiveness is analyzed in comparison to North America and Asia. The study focuses on seven dimensions (research, innovations, investments, market dominance, industry, infrastructure, and Open Data) that have been selected to characterize the language technology market. The study concludes that while Europe still has strong positions in Research and Innovation, it lags behind North America and Asia in scaling innovations and conquering market share.
Constructing a Bilingual Hadith Corpus Using a Segmentation Tool (2020)

This article describes the process of gathering and constructing a bilingual parallel corpus of Islamic Hadith, which is the set of narratives reporting different aspects of the prophet Muhammad`s life. The corpus data is gathered from the six canonical Hadith collections using a custom segmentation tool that automatically segments and annotates the two Hadith components with 92{\%} accuracy. This Hadith segmenter minimises the costs of language resource creation and produces consistent results independently from previous knowledge and experiences that usually influence human annotators. The corpus includes more than 10M tokens and will be freely available via the LREC repository.
Facilitating Corpus Usage: Making Icelandic Corpora More Accessible for Researchers and Language Users (2020)

We introduce an array of open and accessible tools to facilitate the use of the Icelandic Gigaword Corpus, in the field of Natural Language Processing as well as for students, linguists, sociologists and others benefitting from using large corpora. A KWIC engine, powered by the Swedish Korp tool is adapted to the specifics of the corpus. An n-gram viewer, highly customizable to suit different needs, allows users to study word usage throughout the period of our text collection. A frequency dictionary provides much sought after information about word frequency statistics, computed for each subcorpus as well as aggregate, disambiguating homographs based on their respective lemmas and morphosyntactic tags. Furthermore, we provide n-grams based on the corpus, and a variety of pre-trained word embeddings models, based on word2vec, GloVe, fastText and ELMo. For three of the model types, multiple word embedding models are available trained with different algorithms and using either lemmatised or unlemmatised texts.
Interoperability in an Infrastructure Enabling Multidisciplinary Research: The case of CLARIN (2020)

CLARIN is a European Research Infrastructure providing access to language resources and technologies for researchers in the humanities and social sciences. It supports the use and study of language data in general and aims to increase the potential for comparative research of cultural and societal phenomena across the boundaries of languages and disciplines, all in line with the European agenda for Open Science. Data infrastructures such as CLARIN have recently embarked on the emerging frameworks for the federation of infrastructural services, such as the European Open Science Cloud and the integration of services resulting from multidisciplinary collaboration in federated services for the wider SSH domain. In this paper we describe the interoperability requirements that arise through the existing ambitions and the emerging frameworks. The interoperability theme will be addressed at several levels, including organisation and ecosystem, design of workflow services, data curation, performance measurement and collaboration.
Language Technology Programme for Icelandic 2019-2023 (2020)

In this paper, we describe a new national language technology programme for Icelandic. The programme, which spans a period of five years, aims at making Icelandic usable in communication and interactions in the digital world, by developing accessible, open-source language resources and software. The research and development work within the programme is carried out by a consortium of universities, institutions, and private companies, with a strong emphasis on cooperation between academia and industries. Five core projects will be the main content of the programme: language resources, speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation, and spell and grammar checking. We also describe other national language technology programmes and give an overview over the history of language technology in Iceland.
Privacy by Design and Language Resources (2020)

Privacy by Design (also referred to as Data Protection by Design) is an approach in which solutions and mechanisms addressing privacy and data protection are embedded through the entire project lifecycle, from the early design stage, rather than just added as an additional lawyer to the final product. Formulated in the 1990 by the Privacy Commissionner of Ontario, the principle of Privacy by Design has been discussed by institutions and policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic, and mentioned already in the 1995 EU Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC). More recently, Privacy by Design was introduced as one of the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), obliging data controllers to define and adopt, already at the conception phase, appropriate measures and safeguards to implement data protection principles and protect the rights of the data subject. Failing to meet this obligation may result in a hefty fine, as it was the case in the Uniontrad decision by the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL). The ambition of the proposed paper is to analyse the practical meaning of Privacy by Design in the context of Language Resources, and propose measures and safeguards that can be implemented by the community to ensure respect of this principle.
Making Metadata Fit for Next Generation Language Technology Platforms: The Metadata Schema of the European Language Grid (2020)

The current scientific and technological landscape is characterised by the increasing availability of data resources and processing tools and services. In this setting, metadata have emerged as a key factor facilitating management, sharing and usage of such digital assets. In this paper we present ELG-SHARE, a rich metadata schema catering for the description of Language Resources and Technologies (processing and generation services and tools, models, corpora, term lists, etc.), as well as related entities (e.g., organizations, projects, supporting documents, etc.). The schema powers the European Language Grid platform that aims to be the primary hub and marketplace for industry-relevant Language Technology in Europe. ELG-SHARE has been based on various metadata schemas, vocabularies, and ontologies, as well as related recommendations and guidelines.
Related Works in the Linguistic Data Consortium Catalog (2020)

Defining relations between language resources provides an archive with the ability to better serve its users. This paper covers the development and implementation of a Related Works addition to the Linguistic Data Consortium`s (LDC) catalog. The authors go step-by-step through the development of the Related Works schema, implementation of the software and database changes, and data entry of the relations. The Related Work schema involved developing of a set of controlled terms for relations based on previous work and other schema. Software and database changes consisted of both front and back end interface additions, along with modification and additions to the LDC Catalog database tables. Data entry consisted of two parts: seed data from previous work and 2019 language resources, and ongoing legacy population. Previous work in this area is discussed as well as overview information about the LDC Catalog. A list of the full LDC Related Works terms is included with brief explanations.
Language Data Sharing in European Public Services -- Overcoming Obstacles and Creating Sustainable Data Sharing Infrastructures (2020)

Data is key in training modern language technologies. In this paper, we summarise the findings of the first pan-European study on obstacles to sharing language data across 29 EU Member States and CEF-affiliated countries carried out under the ELRC White Paper action on Sustainable Language Data Sharing to Support Language Equality in Multilingual Europe. Why Language Data Matters. We present the methodology of the study, the obstacles identified and report on recommendations on how to overcome those. The obstacles are classified into (1) lack of appreciation of the value of language data, (2) structural challenges, (3) disposition towards CAT tools and lack of digital skills, (4) inadequate language data management practices, (5) limited access to outsourced translations, and (6) legal concerns. Recommendations are grouped into addressing the European/national policy level, and the organisational/institutional level.
A Progress Report on Activities at the Linguistic Data Consortium Benefitting the LREC Community (2020)

This latest in a series of Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) progress reports to the LREC community does not describe any single language resource, evaluation campaign or technology but sketches the activities, since the last report, of a data center devoted to supporting the work of LREC attendees among other research communities. Specifically, we describe 96 new corpora released in 2018-2020 to date, a new technology evaluation campaign, ongoing activities to support multiple common task human language technology programs, and innovations to advance the methodology of language data collection and annotation.
Digital Language Infrastructures -- Documenting Language Actors (2020)

The major European language infrastructure initiatives like CLARIN (Hinrichs and Krauwer, 2014), DARIAH (Edmond et al., 2017) or Europeana (Europeana Foundation, 2015) have been built by focusing in the first place on institutions of larger scale, like specialized research departments and larger official units like national libraries, etc. However, besides these principal players also a large number of smaller language actors could contribute to and benefit from language infrastructures. Especially since these smaller institutions, like local libraries, archives and publishers, often collect, manage and host language resources of particular value for their geographical and cultural region, it seems highly relevant to find ways of engaging and connecting them to existing European infrastructure initiatives. In this article, we first highlight the need for reaching out to smaller local language actors and discuss challenges related to this ambition. Then we present the first step in how this objective was approached within a local language infrastructure project, namely by means of a structured documentation of the local language actors landscape in South Tyrol. We describe how the documentation efforts were structured and organized, and what tool we have set up to distribute the collected data online, by adapting existing CLARIN solutions.
Samr\'omur: Crowd-sourcing Data Collection for Icelandic Speech Recognition (2020)

This contribution describes an ongoing project of speech data collection, using the web application Samr{\'o}mur which is built upon Common Voice, Mozilla Foundation`s web platform for open-source voice collection. The goal of the project is to build a large-scale speech corpus for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for Icelandic. Upon completion, Samr{\'o}mur will be the largest open speech corpus for Icelandic collected from the public domain. We discuss the methods used for the crowd-sourcing effort and show the importance of marketing and good media coverage when launching a crowd-sourcing campaign. Preliminary results exceed our expectations, and in one month we collected data that we had estimated would take three months to obtain. Furthermore, our initial dataset of around 45 thousand utterances has good demographic coverage, is gender-balanced and with proper age distribution. We also report on the task of validating the recordings, which we have not promoted, but have had numerous hours invested by volunteers.
Semi-supervised Development of ASR Systems for Multilingual Code-switched Speech in Under-resourced Languages (2020)

This paper reports on the semi-supervised development of acoustic and language models for under-resourced, code-switched speech in five South African languages. Two approaches are considered. The first constructs four separate bilingual automatic speech recognisers (ASRs) corresponding to four different language pairs between which speakers switch frequently. The second uses a single, unified, five-lingual ASR system that represents all the languages (English, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Setswana and Sesotho). We evaluate the effectiveness of these two approaches when used to add additional data to our extremely sparse training sets. Results indicate that batch-wise semi-supervised training yields better results than a non-batch-wise approach. Furthermore, while the separate bilingual systems achieved better recognition performance than the unified system, they benefited more from pseudolabels generated by the five-lingual system than from those generated by the bilingual systems.
CLFD: A Novel Vectorization Technique and Its Application in Fake News Detection (2020)

In recent years, fake news detection has been an emerging research area. In this paper, we put forward a novel statistical approach for the generation of feature vectors to describe a document. Our so-called class label frequency distance (clfd), is shown experimentally to provide an effective way for boosting the performance of machine learning methods. Specifically, our experiments, carried out in the fake news detection domain, verify that efficient traditional machine learning methods that use our vectorization approach, consistently outperform deep learning methods that use word embeddings for small and medium sized datasets, while the results are comparable for large datasets. In addition, we demonstrate that a novel hybrid method that utilizes both a clfd-boosted logistic regression classifier and a deep learning one, clearly outperforms deep learning methods even in large datasets.
SimplifyUR: Unsupervised Lexical Text Simplification for Urdu (2020)

This paper presents the first attempt at Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) for Urdu, the language of 170 million people worldwide. Being a low-resource language in terms of standard linguistic resources, recent text simplification approaches that rely on manually crafted simplified corpora or lexicons such as WordNet are not applicable to Urdu. Urdu is a morphologically rich language that requires unique considerations such as proper handling of inflectional case and honorifics. We present an unsupervised method for lexical simplification of complex Urdu text. Our method only requires plain Urdu text and makes use of word embeddings together with a set of morphological features to generate simplifications. Our system achieves a BLEU score of 80.15 and SARI score of 42.02 upon automatic evaluation on manually crafted simplified corpora. We also report results for human evaluations for correctness, grammaticality, meaning-preservation and simplicity of the output. Our code and corpus are publicly available to make our results reproducible.
Jamo Pair Encoding: Subcharacter Representation-based Extreme Korean Vocabulary Compression for Efficient Subword Tokenization (2020)

In the context of multilingual language model pre-training, vocabulary size for languages with a broad set of potential characters is an unsolved problem. We propose two algorithms applicable in any unsupervised multilingual pre-training task, increasing the elasticity of budget required for building the vocabulary in Byte-Pair Encoding inspired tokenizers, significantly reducing the cost of supporting Korean in a multilingual model.
Offensive Language and Hate Speech Detection for Danish (2020)

The presence of offensive language on social media platforms and the implications this poses is becoming a major concern in modern society. Given the enormous amount of content created every day, automatic methods are required to detect and deal with this type of content. Until now, most of the research has focused on solving the problem for the English language, while the problem is multilingual. We construct a Danish dataset DKhate containing user-generated comments from various social media platforms, and to our knowledge, the first of its kind, annotated for various types and target of offensive language. We develop four automatic classification systems, each designed to work for both the English and the Danish language. In the detection of offensive language in English, the best performing system achieves a macro averaged F1-score of 0.74, and the best performing system for Danish achieves a macro averaged F1-score of 0.70. In the detection of whether or not an offensive post is targeted, the best performing system for English achieves a macro averaged F1-score of 0.62, while the best performing system for Danish achieves a macro averaged F1-score of 0.73. Finally, in the detection of the target type in a targeted offensive post, the best performing system for English achieves a macro averaged F1-score of 0.56, and the best performing system for Danish achieves a macro averaged F1-score of 0.63. Our work for both the English and the Danish language captures the type and targets of offensive language, and present automatic methods for detecting different kinds of offensive language such as hate speech and cyberbullying.
Semi-supervised Deep Embedded Clustering with Anomaly Detection for Semantic Frame Induction (2020)

Although FrameNet is recognized as one of the most fine-grained lexical databases, its coverage of lexical units is still limited. To tackle this issue, we propose a two-step frame induction process: for a set of lexical units not yet present in Berkeley FrameNet data release 1.7, first remove those that cannot fit into any existing semantic frame in FrameNet; then, assign the remaining lexical units to their correct frames. We also present the Semi-supervised Deep Embedded Clustering with Anomaly Detection (SDEC-AD) model{---}an algorithm that maps high-dimensional contextualized vector representations of lexical units to a low-dimensional latent space for better frame prediction and uses reconstruction error to identify lexical units that cannot evoke frames in FrameNet. SDEC-AD outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both steps of the frame induction process. Empirical results also show that definitions provide contextual information for representing and characterizing the frame membership of lexical units.
Search Query Language Identification Using Weak Labeling (2020)

Language identification is a well-known task for natural language documents. In this paper we explore search query language identification which is usually the first task before any other query understanding. Without loss of generalization, we run our experiments on the Adobe Stock search engine. Even though the domain is relatively generic because Adobe Stock queries cover a broad range of objects and concepts, out-of-the-box language identifiers do not perform well due to the extremely short text found in queries. Unlike other well-studied supervised approaches for this task, we examine a practical approach for the cold start problem for automatically getting large-scale query-language pairs for training. We describe the process of creating weak-labeled training data and then human-annotated evaluation data for the search query language identification task. The effectiveness of this technique is demonstrated by training a gradient boosting model for language classification given a query. We out-perform the open domain text model baselines by a large margin.
Automated Phonological Transcription of Akkadian Cuneiform Text (2020)

Akkadian was an East-Semitic language spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The language is attested on hundreds of thousands of cuneiform clay tablets. Several Akkadian text corpora contain only the transliterated text. In this paper, we investigate automated phonological transcription of the transliterated corpora. The phonological transcription provides a linguistically appealing form to represent Akkadian, because the transcription is normalized according to the grammatical description of a given dialect and explicitly shows the Akkadian renderings for Sumerian logograms. Because cuneiform text does not mark the inflection for logograms, the inflected form needs to be inferred from the sentence context. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first documented attempt to automatically transcribe Akkadian. Using a context-aware neural network model, we are able to automatically transcribe syllabic tokens at near human performance with 96{\%} recall @ 3, while the logogram transcription remains more challenging at 82{\%} recall @ 3.