ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Estonian Wordnet: Current State and Future Prospects (2018)

This paper presents Estonian Wordnet (EstWN) with its latest developments. We are focusing on the time period of 2011{--}2017 because during this time EstWN project was supported by the National Programme for Estonian Language Technology (NPELT1). We describe which were the goals at the beginning of 2011 and what are the accomplishments today. This paper serves as a summarizing report about the progress of EstWN during this programme. While building EstWN we have been concentrating on the fact, that EstWN as a valuable Estonian resource would also be compatible in a common multilingual framework.
Further expansion of the Croatian WordNet (2018)

In this paper a semi-automatic procedure for the expansion of the Croatian Wordnet (CroWN) is presented. An English-Croatian dictionary was used in order to translate monosemous PWN 3.0 English variants. The precision values of the automatic process is low (about 30{\%}), but the results proved valuable for the enlargment of CroWN. After manual validation, 10,884 new synset-variant pairs were added to CroWN, achieving a total of 62,075 synset-variant pairs.
Linking WordNet to 3D Shapes (2018)

We describe a project to link the Princeton WordNet to 3D representations of real objects and scenes. The goal is to establish a dataset that helps us to understand how people categorize everyday common objects via their parts, attributes, and context. This paper describes the annotation and data collection effort so far as well as ideas for future work.
Multis\lownik: Linking plWordNet-based Lexical Data for Lexicography and Educational Purposes (2018)

Multis{\l}ownik is an automated integrator of Polish lexical data retrieved from multiple available online sources intended to be used in various scenarios requiring access to such data, most prominently dictionary creation, linguistic studies and education. In contrast to many available internet dictionaries Multis{\l}ownik is WordNet-centric, capturing the core definitions from S{\l}owosiec ́, the Polish WordNet, and linking external resources to particular synsets. The paper provides details of construction of the resource, discussed the difficulties related to linking different logical structures of underlying data and investigates two sample scenarios for using the resulting platform.
Putting Figures on Influences on Moroccan Darija from Arabic, French and Spanish using the WordNet (2018)

Moroccan Darija is a variant of Arabic with many influences. Using the Open Multilingual WordNet (OMW), we compare the lemmas in the Moroccan Darija Wordnet (MDW) with the standard Arabic, French and Spanish ones. We then compared the lemmas in each synset with their translation equivalents. Transliteration is used to bridge alphabet differences and match lemmas in the closest phonological way. The results put figures on the similarity Moroccan Darija has with Arabic, French and Spanish: respectively 42.0{\%}, 2.8{\%} and 2.2{\%}.
pyiwn: A Python based API to access Indian Language WordNets (2018)

Indian language WordNets have their individual web-based browsing interfaces along with a common interface for IndoWordNet. These interfaces prove to be useful for language learners and in an educational domain, however, they do not provide the functionality of connecting to them and browsing their data through a lucid application programming interface or an API. In this paper, we present our work on creating such an easy-to-use framework which is bundled with the data for Indian language WordNets and provides NLTK WordNet interface like core functionalities in Python. Additionally, we use a pre-built speech synthesis system for Hindi language and augment Hindi data with audios for words, glosses, and example sentences. We provide a detailed usage of our API and explain the functions for ease of the user. Also, we package the IndoWordNet data along with the source code and provide it openly for the purpose of research. We aim to provide all our work as an open source framework for further development.
Sinitic Wordnet: Laying the Groundwork with Chinese Varieties Written in Traditional Characters (2018)

The present work seeks to make the logographic nature of Chinese script a relevant research ground in wordnet studies. While wordnets are not so much about words as about the concepts represented in words, synset formation inevitably involves the use of orthographic and/or phonetic representations to serve as headword for a given concept. For wordnets of Chinese languages, if their synsets are mapped with each other, the connection from logographic forms to lexicalized concepts can be explored backwards to, for instance, help trace the development of cognates in different varieties of Chinese. The Sinitic Wordnet project is an attempt to construct such an integrated wordnet that aggregates three Chinese varieties that are widely spoken in Taiwan and all written in traditional Chinese characters.
Synthesizing Audio for Hindi WordNet (2018)

In this paper, we describe our work on the creation of a voice model using a speech synthesis system for the Hindi Language. We use pre-existing {\textquotedblleft}voices{\textquotedblright}, use publicly available speech corpora to create a {\textquotedblleft}voice{\textquotedblright} using the Festival Speech Synthesis System (Black, 1997). Our contribution is two-fold: (1) We scrutinize multiple speech synthesis systems and provide an extensive report on the currently available state-of-the-art systems. We also develop voices using the existing implementations of the aforementioned systems, and (2) We use these voices to generate sample audios for randomly chosen words; manually evaluate the audio generated, and produce audio for all WordNet words using the winner voice model. We also produce audios for the Hindi WordNet Glosses and Example sentences. We describe our efforts to use pre-existing implementations for WaveNet - a model to generate raw audio using neural nets (Oord et al., 2016) and generate speech for Hindi. Our lexicographers perform a manual evaluation of the audio generated using multiple voices. A qualitative and quantitative analysis reveals that the voice model generated by us performs the best with an accuracy of 0.44.
Toward Constructing the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus Derived WordNet (ncitWN) (2018)

We describe preliminary work in the creation of the first specialized vocabulary to be integrated into the Open Multilingual Wordnet (OMW). The NCIt Derived WordNet (ncitWN) is based on the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus (NCIt), a controlled biomedical terminology that includes formal class restrictions and English definitions developed by groups of clinicians and terminologists. The ncitWN is created by converting the NCIt to the WordNet Lexical Markup Framework and adding semantic types. We report the development of a prototype ncitWN and first steps towards integrating it into the OMW.
Towards a Crowd-Sourced WordNet for Colloquial English (2018)

Princeton WordNet is one of the most widely-used resources for natural language processing, but is updated only infrequently and cannot keep up with the fast-changing usage of the English language on social media platforms such as Twitter. The Colloquial WordNet aims to provide an open platform whereby anyone can contribute, while still following the structure of WordNet. Many crowd-sourced lexical resources often have significant quality issues, and as such care must be taken in the design of the interface to ensure quality. In this paper, we present the development of a platform that can be opened on the Web to any lexicographer who wishes to contribute to this resource and the lexicographic methodology applied by this interface.
WordNet Troponymy and Extraction of \textquotedblleftManner-Result\textquotedblright Relations (2018)

Commonsense knowledge bases need to have relations that allow to predict the consequences of specific actions (say, if John stabbed Peter, Peter might be killed) and to unfold the possible actions for the specific results (Peter was killed. It could happen because of poisoning, stabbing, shooting, etc.) This kind of causal relations are established between manner verbs and result verbs: manner-result relations. We offer a procedure on how to extract manner-result relations from WordNet through the analysis of the troponym glosses. The procedure of extraction includes three steps and the results are based on the analysis of the whole set of verbs in WordNet.
SardaNet: a Linguistic Resource for Sardinian Language (2018)

This paper describes the process of building SardaNet, a linguistic resource for Sardinian language including the different linguistic varieties in Sardinia. SardaNet aims at identifying the semantic relations between Sardinian terms, by manually mapping existing WordNet entries to Sardinian word senses. The work, still in progress, has been developed in collaboration with the University of Cagliari. After discussing some linguistic peculiarities, the paper presents the basic steps of the construction process, the method and the tools involved, the issues encountered during the development and the current version of SardaNet.
Extraction of Verbal Synsets and Relations for FarsNet (2018)

WordNet or ontology development for resource-poor languages like Persian, requires composition of several strategies and employment of appropriate heuristics. Lexical and linguistic structured resources are limited for Persian and there is a lot of diversity and structural and syntagmatic complexities. This paper proposes a system for extraction of verbal synsets and relations to extend FarsNet (Persian WordNet). The proposed method extracts verbal words and concepts using noun and adjective words and synsets. It exploits the data from digital lexicon glossaries, which leads to the identification of 6890 proper verbal words and 2790 verbal synsets, with 91{\%} and 67{\%} precision respectively. The proposed system also extracts relations such as semantic roles of verbal arguments (instrument, location, agent, and patient) and also {\textquotedblleft}related-to{\textquotedblright} (unlabeled) relations and co-occurrence among verbs and other concepts. For this purpose, a combination of linguistic approaches such as morphological analysis of words, semantic analysis, and use of key phrases and syntactic and semantic patterns, corpus-based approach, statistical techniques and co-occurrence analysis have been utilized. The presented strategy extracts 5600 proper relations between the existing concepts in FarsNet 2.0 with 76{\%} precision.
Contextual Handling in Neural Machine Translation: Look behind, ahead and on both sides (2018)

A salient feature of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is the end-to-end nature of training employed, eschewing the need of separate components to model different linguistic phenomena. Rather, an NMT model learns to translate individual sentences from the labeled data itself. However, traditional NMT methods trained on large parallel corpora with a one-to-one sentence mapping make an implicit assumption of sentence independence. This makes it challenging for current NMT systems to model inter-sentential discourse phenomena. While recent research in this direction mainly leverages a single previous source sentence to model discourse, this paper proposes the incorporation of a context window spanning previous as well as next sentences as source-side context and previously generated output as target-side context, using an effective non-recurrent architecture based on self-attention. Experiments show improvement over non-contextual models as well as contextual methods using only previous context.
Towards a post-editing recommendation system for Spanish-Basque machine translation (2018)

The overall machine translation quality available for professional translators working with the Spanish{--}Basque pair is rather poor, which is a deterrent for its adoption. This work investigates the plausibility of building a comprehensive recommendation system to speed up decision time between post-editing or translation from scratch using the very limited training data available. First, we build a set of regression models that predict the post-editing effort in terms of overall quality, time and edits. Secondly, we build classification models that recommend the most efficient editing approach using post-editing effort features on top of linguistic features. Results show high correlations between the predictions of the regression models and the expected HTER, time and edit number values. Similarly, the results for the classifiers show that they are able to predict with high accuracy whether it is more efficient to translate or to post-edit a new segment.
Compositional Source Word Representations for Neural Machine Translation (2018)

The requirement for neural machine translation (NMT) models to use fixed-size input and output vocabularies plays an important role for their accuracy and generalization capability. The conventional approach to cope with this limitation is performing translation based on a vocabulary of sub-word units that are predicted using statistical word segmentation methods. However, these methods have recently shown to be prone to morphological errors, which lead to inaccurate translations. In this paper, we extend the source-language embedding layer of the NMT model with a bi-directional recurrent neural network that generates compositional representations of the source words from embeddings of character n-grams. Our model consistently outperforms conventional NMT with sub-word units on four translation directions with varying degrees of morphological complexity and data sparseness on the source side.
Development and evaluation of phonological models for cognate identication (2018)

The paper presents a methodology for the development and task-based evaluation of phonological models, which improve the accuracy of cognate terminology identification, but may potentially be used for other applications, such as transliteration or improving character-based NMT. Terminology translation remains a bottleneck for MT, especially for under-resourced languages and domains, and automated identification of cognate terms addresses this problem. The proposed phonological models explicitly represent distinctive phonological features for each character, such as acoustic types (e.g., vowel/ consonant, voiced/ unvoiced/ sonant), place and manner of articulation (closed/open, front/back vowel; plosive, fricative, or labial, dental, glottal consonant). The advantage of such representations is that they explicate information about characters' internal structure rather than treat them as elementary atomic units of comparison, placing graphemes into a feature space that provides additional information about their articulatory (pronunciation-based) or acoustic (soundbased) distances and similarity. The article presents experimental results of using the proposed phonological models for extracting cognate terminology with the phonologically aware Levenshtein edit distance, which for Top-1 cognate ranking metric outperforms the baseline character-based Levenshtein by 16.5{\%}. Project resources are released on: \url{https://github.com/bogdanbabych/cognates-phonology}
Rule-based machine translation from Kazakh to Turkish (2018)

This paper presents a shallow-transfer machine translation (MT) system for translating from Kazakh to Turkish. Background on the differences between the languages is presented, followed by how the system was designed to handle some of these differences. The system is based on the Apertium free/open-source machine translation platform. The structure of the system and how it works is described, along with an evaluation against two competing systems. Linguistic components were developed, including a Kazakh-Turkish bilingual dictionary, Constraint Grammar disambiguation rules, lexical selection rules, and structural transfer rules. With many known issues yet to be addressed, our RBMT system has reached performance comparable to publicly-available corpus-based MT systems between the languages.
SRL for low resource languages isn`t needed for semantic SMT (2018)

Previous attempts at injecting semantic frame biases into SMT training for low resource languages failed because either (a) no semantic parser is available for the low resource input language; or (b) the output English language semantic parses excise relevant parts of the alignment space too aggressively. We present the first semantic SMT model to succeed in significantly improving translation quality across many low resource input languages for which no automatic SRL is available {---}consistently and across all common MT metrics. The results we report are the best by far to date for this type of approach; our analyses suggest that in general, easier approaches toward including semantics in training SMT models may be more feasible than generally assumed even for low resource languages where semantic parsers remain scarce. While recent proposals to use the crosslingual evaluation metric XMEANT during inversion transduction grammar (ITG) induction are inapplicable to low resource languages that lack semantic parsers, we break the bottleneck via a vastly improved method of biasing ITG induction toward learning more semantically correct alignments using the monolingual semantic evaluation metric MEANT. Unlike XMEANT, MEANT requires only a readily-available English (output language) semantic parser. The advances we report here exploit the novel realization that MEANT represents an excellent way to semantically bias expectationmaximization induction even for low resource languages. We test our systems on challenging languages including Amharic, Uyghur, Tigrinya and Oromo. Results show that our model influences the learning towards more semantically correct alignments, leading to better translation quality than both the standard ITG or GIZA++ based SMT training models on different datasets.
M3TRA: integrating TM and MT for professional translators (2018)

Translation memories (TM) and machine translation (MT) both are potentially useful resources for professional translators, but they are often still used independently in translation workflows. As translators tend to have a higher confidence in fuzzy matches than in MT, we investigate how to combine the benefits of TM retrieval with those of MT, by integrating the results of both. We develop a flexible TM-MT integration approach based on various techniques combining the use of TM and MT, such as fuzzy repair, span pretranslation and exploiting multiple matches. Results for ten language pairs using the DGT-TM dataset indicate almost consistently better BLEU, METEOR and TER scores compared to the MT, TM and NMT baselines.
Reading Comprehension of Machine Translation Output: What Makes for a Better Read? (2018)

This paper reports on a pilot experiment that compares two different machine translation (MT) paradigms in reading comprehension tests. To explore a suitable methodology, we set up a pilot experiment with a group of six users (with English, Spanish and Simplified Chinese languages) using an English Language Testing System (IELTS), and an eye-tracker. The users were asked to read three texts in their native language: either the original English text (for the English speakers) or the machine-translated text (for the Spanish and Simplified Chinese speakers). The original texts were machine-translated via two MT systems: neural (NMT) and statistical (SMT). The users were also asked to rank satisfaction statements on a 3-point scale after reading each text and answering the respective comprehension questions. After all tasks were completed, a post-task retrospective interview took place to gather qualitative data. The findings suggest that the users from the target languages completed more tasks in less time with a higher level of satisfaction when using translations from the NMT system.
Are Automatic Metrics Robust and Reliable in Specific Machine Translation Tasks? (2018)

We present a comparison of automatic metrics against human evaluations of translation quality in several scenarios which were unexplored up to now. Our experimentation was conducted on translation hypotheses that were problematic for the automatic metrics, as the results greatly diverged from one metric to another. We also compared three different translation technologies. Our evaluation shows that in most cases, the metrics capture the human criteria. However, we face failures of the automatic metrics when applied to some domains and systems. Interestingly, we find that automatic metrics applied to the neural machine translation hypotheses provide the most reliable results. Finally, we provide some advice when dealing with these problematic domains.
Creating the best development corpus for Statistical Machine Translation systems (2018)

We propose and study three different novel approaches for tackling the problem of development set selection in Statistical Machine Translation. We focus on a scenario where a machine translation system is leveraged for translating a specific test set, without further data from the domain at hand. Such test set stems from a real application of machine translation, where the texts of a specific e-commerce were to be translated. For developing our development-set selection techniques, we first conducted experiments in a controlled scenario, where labelled data from different domains was available, and evaluated the techniques both with classification and translation quality metrics. Then, the bestperforming techniques were evaluated on the e-commerce data at hand, yielding consistent improvements across two language directions.
Training Deployable General Domain MT for a Low Resource Language Pair: English-Bangla (2018)

A large percentage of the world`s population speaks a language of the Indian subcontinent, what we will call here Indic languages, comprising languages from both Indo-European (e.g., Hindi, Bangla, Gujarati, etc.) and Dravidian (e.g., Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, etc.) families, upwards of 1.5 Billion people. A universal characteristic of Indic languages is their complex morphology, which, when combined with the general lack of sufficient quantities of high quality parallel data, can make developing machine translation (MT) for these languages difficult. In this paper, we describe our efforts towards developing general domain English{--}Bangla MT systems which are deployable to the Web. We initially developed and deployed SMT-based systems, but over time migrated to NMT-based systems. Our initial SMT-based systems had reasonably good BLEU scores, however, using NMT systems, we have gained significant improvement over SMT baselines. This is achieved using a number of ideas to boost the data store and counter data sparsity: crowd translation of intelligently selected monolingual data (throughput enhanced by an IME (Input Method Editor) designed specifically for QWERTY keyboard entry for Devanagari scripted languages), back-translation, different regularization techniques, dataset augmentation and early stopping.
Deep Neural Machine Translation with Weakly-Recurrent Units (2018)

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have represented for years the state of the art in neural machine translation. Recently, new architectures have been proposed, which can leverage parallel computation on GPUs better than classical RNNs. Faster training and inference combined with different sequence-to-sequence modeling also lead to performance improvements. While the new models completely depart from the original recurrent architecture, we decided to investigate how to make RNNs more efficient. In this work, we propose a new recurrent NMT architecture, called Simple Recurrent NMT, built on a class of fast and weakly-recurrent units that use layer normalization and multiple attentions. Our experiments on the WMT14 English-to-German and WMT16 English-Romanian benchmarks show that our model represents a valid alternative to LSTMs, as it can achieve better results at a significantly lower computational cost.