ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A French Corpus for Event Detection on Twitter (2020)

We present Event2018, a corpus annotated for event detection tasks, consisting of 38 million tweets in French (retweets excluded) including more than 130,000 tweets manually annotated by three annotators as related or unrelated to a given event. The 243 events were selected both from press articles and from subjects trending on Twitter during the annotation period (July to August 2018). In total, more than 95,000 tweets were annotated as related to one of the selected events. We also provide the titles and URLs of 15,500 news articles automatically detected as related to these events. In addition to this corpus, we detail the results of our event detection experiments on both this dataset and another publicly available dataset of tweets in English. We ran extensive tests with different types of text embeddings and a standard Topic Detection and Tracking algorithm, and detail our evaluation method. We show that tf-idf vectors allow the best performance for this task on both corpora. These results are intended to serve as a baseline for researchers wishing to test their own event detection systems on our corpus.
Minority Positive Sampling for Switching Points - an Anecdote for the Code-Mixing Language Modeling (2020)

Code-Mixing (CM) or language mixing is a social norm in multilingual societies. CM is quite prevalent in social media conversations in multilingual regions like - India, Europe, Canada and Mexico. In this paper, we explore the problem of Language Modeling (LM) for code-mixed Hinglish text. In recent times, there have been several success stories with neural language modeling like Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) (Radford et al., 2019), Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) (Devlin et al., 2018) etc.. Hence, neural language models have become the new holy grail of modern NLP, although LM for CM is an unexplored area altogether. To better understand the problem of LM for CM, we initially experimented with several statistical language modeling techniques and consequently experimented with contemporary neural language models. Analysis shows switching-points are the main challenge for the LMCM performance drop, therefore in this paper we introduce the idea of minority positive sampling to selectively induce more sample to achieve better performance. On the contrary, all neural language models demand a huge corpus to train on for better performance. Finally, we are reporting a perplexity of 139 for Hinglish (Hindi-English language pair) LMCM using statistical bi-directional techniques.
Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? Predicting Abusive Swearing in Social Media (2020)

Swearing plays an ubiquitous role in everyday conversations among humans, both in oral and textual communication, and occurs frequently in social media texts, typically featured by informal language and spontaneous writing. Such occurrences can be linked to an abusive context, when they contribute to the expression of hatred and to the abusive effect, causing harm and offense. However, swearing is multifaceted and is often used in casual contexts, also with positive social functions. In this study, we explore the phenomenon of swearing in Twitter conversations, taking the possibility of predicting the abusiveness of a swear word in a tweet context as the main investigation perspective. We developed the Twitter English corpus SWAD (Swear Words Abusiveness Dataset), where abusive swearing is manually annotated at the word level. Our collection consists of 1,511 unique swear words from 1,320 tweets. We developed models to automatically predict abusive swearing, to provide an intrinsic evaluation of SWAD and confirm the robustness of the resource. We also present the results of a glass box ablation study in order to investigate which lexical, syntactic, and affective features are more informative towards the automatic prediction of the function of swearing.
Detecting Troll Tweets in a Bilingual Corpus (2020)

During the past several years, a large amount of troll accounts has emerged with efforts to manipulate public opinion on social network sites. They are often involved in spreading misinformation, fake news, and propaganda with the intent of distracting and sowing discord. This paper aims to detect troll tweets in both English and Russian assuming that the tweets are generated by some {\textquotedblleft}troll farm.{\textquotedblright} We reduce this task to the authorship verification problem of determining whether a single tweet is authored by a {\textquotedblleft}troll farm{\textquotedblright} account or not. We evaluate a supervised classification approach with monolingual, cross-lingual, and bilingual training scenarios, using several machine learning algorithms, including deep learning. The best results are attained by the bilingual learning, showing the area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.875 and 0.828, for tweet classification in English and Russian test sets, respectively. It is noteworthy that these results are obtained using only raw text features, which do not require manual feature engineering efforts. In this paper, we introduce a resource of English and Russian troll tweets containing original tweets and translation from English to Russian, Russian to English. It is available for academic purposes.
Collecting Tweets to Investigate Regional Variation in Canadian English (2020)

We present a 78.8-million-tweet, 1.3-billion-word corpus aimed at studying regional variation in Canadian English with a specific focus on the dialect regions of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Our data collection and filtering pipeline reflects complex design criteria, which aim to allow for both data-intensive modeling methods and user-level variationist sociolinguistic analysis. It specifically consists in identifying Twitter users from the three cities, crawling their entire timelines, filtering the collected data in terms of user location and tweet language, and automatically excluding near-duplicate content. The resulting corpus mirrors national and regional specificities of Canadian English, it provides sufficient aggregate and user-level data, and it maintains a reasonably balanced distribution of content across regions and users. The utility of this dataset is illustrated by two example applications: the detection of regional lexical and topical variation, and the identification of contact-induced semantic shifts using vector space models. In accordance with Twitter`s developer policy, the corpus will be publicly released in the form of tweet IDs.
DAICT: A Dialectal Arabic Irony Corpus Extracted from Twitter (2020)

Identifying irony in user-generated social media content has a wide range of applications; however to date Arabic content has received limited attention. To bridge this gap, this study builds a new open domain Arabic corpus annotated for irony detection. We query Twitter using irony-related hashtags to collect ironic messages, which are then manually annotated by two linguists according to our working definition of irony. Challenges which we have encountered during the annotation process reflect the inherent limitations of Twitter messages interpretation, as well as the complexity of Arabic and its dialects. Once published, our corpus will be a valuable free resource for developing open domain systems for automatic irony recognition in Arabic language and its dialects in social media text.
Norm It! Lexical Normalization for Italian and Its Downstream Effects for Dependency Parsing (2020)

Lexical normalization is the task of translating non-standard social media data to a standard form. Previous work has shown that this is beneficial for many downstream tasks in multiple languages. However, for Italian, there is no benchmark available for lexical normalization, despite the presence of many benchmarks for other tasks involving social media data. In this paper, we discuss the creation of a lexical normalization dataset for Italian. After two rounds of annotation, a Cohen`s kappa score of 78.64 is obtained. During this process, we also analyze the inter-annotator agreement for this task, which is only rarely done on datasets for lexical normalization,and when it is reported, the analysis usually remains shallow. Furthermore, we utilize this dataset to train a lexical normalization model and show that it can be used to improve dependency parsing of social media data. All annotated data and the code to reproduce the results are available at: \url{http://bitbucket.org/robvanderg/normit}.
TArC: Incrementally and Semi-Automatically Collecting a Tunisian Arabish Corpus (2020)

This article describes the constitution process of the first morpho-syntactically annotated Tunisian Arabish Corpus (TArC). Arabish, also known as Arabizi, is a spontaneous coding of Arabic dialects in Latin characters and {\textquotedblleft}arithmographs{\textquotedblright} (numbers used as letters). This code-system was developed by Arabic-speaking users of social media in order to facilitate the writing in the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and text messaging informal frameworks. Arabish differs for each Arabic dialect and each Arabish code-system is under-resourced, in the same way as most of the Arabic dialects. In the last few years, the attention of NLP studies on Arabic dialects has considerably increased. Taking this into consideration, TArC will be a useful support for different types of analyses, computational and linguistic, as well as for NLP tools training. In this article we will describe preliminary work on the TArC semi-automatic construction process and some of the first analyses we developed on TArC. In addition, in order to provide a complete overview of the challenges faced during the building process, we will present the main Tunisian dialect characteristics and its encoding in Tunisian Arabish.
Small Town or Metropolis? Analyzing the Relationship between Population Size and Language (2020)

The variance in language used by different cultures has been a topic of study for researchers in linguistics and psychology, but often times, language is compared across multiple countries in order to show a difference in culture. As a geographically large country that is diverse in population in terms of the background and experiences of its citizens, the U.S. also contains cultural differences within its own borders. Using a set of over 2 million posts from distinct Twitter users around the country dating back as far as 2014, we ask the following question: is there a difference in how Americans express themselves online depending on whether they reside in an urban or rural area? We categorize Twitter users as either urban or rural and identify ideas and language that are more commonly expressed in tweets written by one population over the other. We take this further by analyzing how the language from specific cities of the U.S. compares to the language of other cities and by training predictive models to predict whether a user is from an urban or rural area. We publicly release the tweet and user IDs that can be used to reconstruct the dataset for future studies in this direction.
Inferring Social Media Users' Mental Health Status from Multimodal Information (2020)

Worldwide, an increasing number of people are suffering from mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety. In the United States alone, one in every four adults suffers from a mental health condition, which makes mental health a pressing concern. In this paper, we explore the use of multimodal cues present in social media posts to predict users' mental health status. Specifically, we focus on identifying social media activity that either indicates a mental health condition or its onset. We collect posts from Flickr and apply a multimodal approach that consists of jointly analyzing language, visual, and metadata cues and their relation to mental health. We conduct several classification experiments aiming to discriminate between (1) healthy users and users affected by a mental health illness; and (2) healthy users and users prone to mental illness. Our experimental results indicate that using multiple modalities can improve the performance of this classification task as compared to the use of one modality at a time, and can provide important cues into a user`s mental status.
Synthetic Data for English Lexical Normalization: How Close Can We Get to Manually Annotated Data? (2020)

Social media is a valuable data resource for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, standard NLP tools were often designed with standard texts in mind, and their performance decreases heavily when applied to social media data. One solution to this problem is to adapt the input text to a more standard form, a task also referred to as normalization. Automatic approaches to normalization have shown that they can be used to improve performance on a variety of NLP tasks. However, all of these systems are supervised, thereby being heavily dependent on the availability of training data for the correct language and domain. In this work, we attempt to overcome this dependence by automatically generating training data for lexical normalization. Starting with raw tweets, we attempt two directions, to insert non-standardness (noise) and to automatically normalize in an unsupervised setting. Our best results are achieved by automatically inserting noise. We evaluate our approaches by using an existing lexical normalization system; our best scores are achieved by custom error generation system, which makes use of some manually created datasets. With this system, we score 94.29 accuracy on the test data, compared to 95.22 when it is trained on human-annotated data. Our best system which does not depend on any type of annotation is based on word embeddings and scores 92.04 accuracy. Finally, we perform an experiment in which we asked humans to predict whether a sentence was written by a human or generated by our best model. This experiment showed that in most cases it is hard for a human to detect automatically generated sentences.
A Corpus of German Reddit Exchanges (GeRedE) (2020)

GeRedE is a 270 million token German CMC corpus containing approximately 380,000 submissions and 6,800,000 comments posted on Reddit between 2010 and 2018. Reddit is a popular online platform combining social news aggregation, discussion and micro-blogging. Starting from a large, freely available data set, the paper describes our approach to filter out German data and further pre-processing steps, as well as which metadata and annotation layers have been included so far. We explore the Reddit sphere, what makes the German data linguistically peculiar, and how some of the communities within Reddit differ from one another. The CWB-indexed version of our final corpus is available via CQPweb, and all our processing scripts as well as all manual annotation and automatic language classification can be downloaded from GitHub.
French Tweet Corpus for Automatic Stance Detection (2020)

The automatic stance detection task consists in determining the attitude expressed in a text toward a target (text, claim, or entity). This is a typical intermediate task for the fake news detection or analysis, which is a considerably widespread and a particularly difficult issue to overcome. This work aims at the creation of a human-annotated corpus for the automatic stance detection of tweets written in French. It exploits a corpus of tweets collected during July and August 2018. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first freely available stance annotated tweet corpus in the French language. The four classes broadly adopted by the community were chosen for the annotation: support, deny, query, and comment with the addition of the ignore class. This paper presents the corpus along with the tools used to build it, its construction, an analysis of the inter-rater reliability, as well as the challenges and questions that were raised during the building process.
LSCP: Enhanced Large Scale Colloquial Persian Language Understanding (2020)

Language recognition has been significantly advanced in recent years by means of modern machine learning methods such as deep learning and benchmarks with rich annotations. However, research is still limited in low-resource formal languages. This consists of a significant gap in describing the colloquial language especially for low-resourced ones such as Persian. In order to target this gap for low resource languages, we propose a {\textquotedblleft}Large Scale Colloquial Persian Dataset{\textquotedblright} (LSCP). LSCP is hierarchically organized in a semantic taxonomy that focuses on multi-task informal Persian language understanding as a comprehensive problem. This encompasses the recognition of multiple semantic aspects in the human-level sentences, which naturally captures from the real-world sentences. We believe that further investigations and processing, as well as the application of novel algorithms and methods, can strengthen enriching computerized understanding and processing of low resource languages. The proposed corpus consists of 120M sentences resulted from 27M tweets annotated with parsing tree, part-of-speech tags, sentiment polarity and translation in five different languages.
Burmese Speech Corpus, Finite-State Text Normalization and Pronunciation Grammars with an Application to Text-to-Speech (2020)

This paper introduces an open-source crowd-sourced multi-speaker speech corpus along with the comprehensive set of finite-state transducer (FST) grammars for performing text normalization for the Burmese (Myanmar) language. We also introduce the open-source finite-state grammars for performing grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion for Burmese. These three components are necessary (but not sufficient) for building a high-quality text-to-speech (TTS) system for Burmese, a tonal Southeast Asian language from the Sino-Tibetan family which presents several linguistic challenges. We describe the corpus acquisition process and provide the details of our finite state-based approach to Burmese text normalization and G2P. Our experiments involve building a multi-speaker TTS system based on long short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) models, which were previously shown to perform well for other languages in a low-resource setting. Our results indicate that the data and grammars that we are announcing are sufficient to build reasonably high-quality models comparable to other systems. We hope these resources will facilitate speech and language research on the Burmese language, which is considered by many to be low-resource due to the limited availability of free linguistic data.
Evaluating and Improving Child-Directed Automatic Speech Recognition (2020)

Speech recognition has seen dramatic improvements in the last decade, though those improvements have focused primarily on adult speech. In this paper, we assess child-directed speech recognition and leverage a transfer learning approach to improve child-directed speech recognition by training the recent DeepSpeech2 model on adult data, then apply additional tuning to varied amounts of child speech data. We evaluate our model using the CMU Kids dataset as well as our own recordings of child-directed prompts. The results from our experiment show that even a small amount of child audio data improves significantly over a baseline of adult-only or child-only trained models. We report a final general Word-Error-Rate of 29{\%} over a baseline of 62{\%} that uses the adult-trained model. Our analyses show that our model adapts quickly using a small amount of data and that the general child model works better than school grade-specific models. We make available our trained model and our data collection tool.
Parallel Corpus for Japanese Spoken-to-Written Style Conversion (2020)

With the increase of automatic speech recognition (ASR) applications, spoken-to-written style conversion that transforms spoken-style text into written-style text is becoming an important technology to increase the readability of ASR transcriptions. To establish such conversion technology, a parallel corpus of spoken-style text and written-style text is beneficial because it can be utilized for building end-to-end neural sequence transformation models. Spoken-to-written style conversion involves multiple conversion problems including punctuation restoration, disfluency detection, and simplification. However, most existing corpora tend to be made for just one of these conversion problems. In addition, in Japanese, we have to consider not only general spoken-to-written style conversion problems but also Japanese-specific ones, such as language style unification (e.g., polite, frank, and direct styles) and omitted postpositional particle expressions restoration. Therefore, we created a new Japanese parallel corpus of spoken-style text and written-style text that can simultaneously handle general problems and Japanese-specific ones. To make this corpus, we prepared four types of spoken-style text and utilized a crowdsourcing service for manually converting them into written-style text. This paper describes the building setup of this corpus and reports the baseline results of spoken-to-written style conversion using the latest neural sequence transformation models.
Multi-Staged Cross-Lingual Acoustic Model Adaption for Robust Speech Recognition in Real-World Applications - A Case Study on German Oral History Interviews (2020)

While recent automatic speech recognition systems achieve remarkable performance when large amounts of adequate, high quality annotated speech data is used for training, the same systems often only achieve an unsatisfactory result for tasks in domains that greatly deviate from the conditions represented by the training data. For many real-world applications, there is a lack of sufficient data that can be directly used for training robust speech recognition systems. To address this issue, we propose and investigate an approach that performs a robust acoustic model adaption to a target domain in a cross-lingual, multi-staged manner. Our approach enables the exploitation of large-scale training data from other domains in both the same and other languages. We evaluate our approach using the challenging task of German oral history interviews, where we achieve a relative reduction of the word error rate by more than 30{\%} compared to a model trained from scratch only on the target domain, and 6-7{\%} relative compared to a model trained robustly on 1000 hours of same-language out-of-domain training data.
Large Corpus of Czech Parliament Plenary Hearings (2020)

We present a large corpus of Czech parliament plenary sessions. The corpus consists of approximately 1200 hours of speech data and corresponding text transcriptions. The whole corpus has been segmented to short audio segments making it suitable for both training and evaluation of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. The source language of the corpus is Czech, which makes it a valuable resource for future research as only a few public datasets are available in the Czech language. We complement the data release with experiments of two baseline ASR systems trained on the presented data: the more traditional approach implemented in the Kaldi ASRtoolkit which combines hidden Markov models and deep neural networks (NN) and a modern ASR architecture implemented in Jaspertoolkit which uses deep NNs in an end-to-end fashion.