ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
UnibucKernel: An Approach for Arabic Dialect Identification Based on Multiple String Kernels (2016)

The most common approach in text mining classification tasks is to rely on features like words, part-of-speech tags, stems, or some other high-level linguistic features. Unlike the common approach, we present a method that uses only character p-grams (also known as n-grams) as features for the Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI) Closed Shared Task of the DSL 2016 Challenge. The proposed approach combines several string kernels using multiple kernel learning. In the learning stage, we try both Kernel Discriminant Analysis (KDA) and Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR), and we choose KDA as it gives better results in a 10-fold cross-validation carried out on the training set. Our approach is shallow and simple, but the empirical results obtained in the ADI Shared Task prove that it achieves very good results. Indeed, we ranked on the second place with an accuracy of 50.91{\%} and a weighted F1 score of 51.31{\%}. We also present improved results in this paper, which we obtained after the competition ended. Simply by adding more regularization into our model to make it more suitable for test data that comes from a different distribution than training data, we obtain an accuracy of 51.82{\%} and a weighted F1 score of 52.18{\%}. Furthermore, the proposed approach has an important advantage in that it is language independent and linguistic theory neutral, as it does not require any NLP tools.
A Character-level Convolutional Neural Network for Distinguishing Similar Languages and Dialects (2016)

Discriminating between closely-related language varieties is considered a challenging and important task. This paper describes our submission to the DSL 2016 shared-task, which included two sub-tasks: one on discriminating similar languages and one on identifying Arabic dialects. We developed a character-level neural network for this task. Given a sequence of characters, our model embeds each character in vector space, runs the sequence through multiple convolutions with different filter widths, and pools the convolutional representations to obtain a hidden vector representation of the text that is used for predicting the language or dialect. We primarily focused on the Arabic dialect identification task and obtained an F1 score of 0.4834, ranking 6th out of 18 participants. We also analyze errors made by our system on the Arabic data in some detail, and point to challenges such an approach is faced with.
HeLI, a Word-Based Backoff Method for Language Identification (2016)

In this paper we describe the Helsinki language identification method, HeLI, and the resources we created for and used in the 3rd edition of the Discriminating between Similar Languages (DSL) shared task, which was organized as part of the VarDial 2016 workshop. The shared task comprised of a total of 8 tracks, of which we participated in 7. The shared task had a record number of participants, with 17 teams providing results for the closed track of the test set A. Our system reached the 2nd position in 4 tracks (A closed and open, B1 open and B2 open) and in this paper we are focusing on the methods and data used for those tracks. We describe our word-based backoff method in mathematical notation. We also describe how we selected the corpus we used in the open tracks.
ASIREM Participation at the Discriminating Similar Languages Shared Task 2016 (2016)

This paper presents the system built by ASIREM team for the Discriminating between Similar Languages (DSL) Shared task 2016. It describes the system which uses character-based and word-based n-grams separately. ASIREM participated in both sub-tasks (sub-task 1 and sub-task 2) and in both open and closed tracks. For the sub-task 1 which deals with Discriminating between similar languages and national language varieties, the system achieved an accuracy of 87.79{\%} on the closed track, ending up ninth (the best results being 89.38{\%}). In sub-task 2, which deals with Arabic dialect identification, the system achieved its best performance using character-based n-grams (49.67{\%} accuracy), ranking fourth in the closed track (the best result being 51.16{\%}), and an accuracy of 53.18{\%}, ranking first in the open track.
Comparing Two Basic Methods for Discriminating Between Similar Languages and Varieties (2016)

This article describes the systems submitted by the Citius{\_}Ixa{\_}Imaxin team to the Discriminating Similar Languages Shared Task 2016. The systems are based on two different strategies: classification with ranked dictionaries and Naive Bayes classifiers. The results of the evaluation show that ranking dictionaries are more sound and stable across different domains while basic bayesian models perform reasonably well on in-domain datasets, but their performance drops when they are applied on out-of-domain texts.
Advances in Ngram-based Discrimination of Similar Languages (2016)

We describe the systems entered by the National Research Council in the 2016 shared task on discriminating similar languages. Like previous years, we relied on character ngram features, and a mixture of discriminative and generative statistical classifiers. We mostly investigated the influence of the amount of data on the performance, in the open task, and compared the two-stage approach (predicting language/group, then variant) to a flat approach. Results suggest that ngrams are still state-of-the-art for language and variant identification, and that additional data has a small but decisive impact.
Discrimination between Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects using CNN- and LSTM-based Deep Neural Networks (2016)

In this paper, we describe a system (CGLI) for discriminating similar languages, varieties and dialects using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks. We have participated in the Arabic dialect identification sub-task of DSL 2016 shared task for distinguishing different Arabic language texts under closed submission track. Our proposed approach is language independent and works for discriminating any given set of languages, varieties, and dialects. We have obtained 43.29{\%} weighted-F1 accuracy in this sub-task using CNN approach using default network parameters.
Language and Dialect Discrimination Using Compression-Inspired Language Models (2016)

The DSL 2016 shared task continued previous evaluations from 2014 and 2015 that facilitated the study of automated language and dialect identification. This paper describes results for this year`s shared task and from several related experiments conducted at the Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (JHU HLTCOE). Previously the HLTCOE has explored the use of compression-inspired language modeling for language and dialect identification, using news, Wikipedia, blog post, and Twitter corpora. The technique we have relied upon is based on prediction by partial matching (PPM), a state of the art text compression technique. Due to the close relationship between adaptive compression and language modeling, such compression techniques can also be applied to multi-way text classification problems, and previous studies have examined tasks such as authorship attribution, email spam detection, and topical classification. We applied our approach to the multi-class decision that considered each dialect or language as a possibility for the given shared task input line. Results for test-set A were in accord with our expectations, however results for test-sets B and C appear to be markedly worse. We had not anticipated the inclusion of multiple communications in differing languages in test-set B (social media) input lines, and had not expected the test-set C (dialectal Arabic) data to be represented phonetically instead of in native orthography.
Arabic Language WEKA-Based Dialect Classifier for Arabic Automatic Speech Recognition Transcripts (2016)

This paper describes an Arabic dialect identification system which we developed for the Discriminating Similar Languages (DSL) 2016 shared task. We classified Arabic dialects by using Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) data analytic tool which contains many alternative filters and classifiers for machine learning. We experimented with several classifiers and the best accuracy was achieved using the Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) algorithm for training and testing process set to three different feature-sets for each testing process. Our approach achieved an accuracy equal to 42.85{\%} which is considerably worse in comparison to the evaluation scores on the training set of 80-90{\%} and with training set {\textquotedblleft}60:40{\textquotedblright} percentage split which achieved accuracy around 50{\%}. We observed that Buckwalter transcripts from the Saarland Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system are given without short vowels, though the Buckwalter system has notation for these. We elaborate such observations, describe our methods and analyse the training dataset.
An Unsupervised Morphological Criterion for Discriminating Similar Languages (2016)

In this study conducted on the occasion of the Discriminating between Similar Languages shared task, I introduce an additional decision factor focusing on the token and subtoken level. The motivation behind this submission is to test whether a morphologically-informed criterion can add linguistically relevant information to global categorization and thus improve performance. The contributions of this paper are (1) a description of the unsupervised, low-resource method; (2) an evaluation and analysis of its raw performance; and (3) an assessment of its impact within a model comprising common indicators used in language identification. I present and discuss the systems used in the task A, a 12-way language identification task comprising varieties of five main language groups. Additionally I introduce a new off-the-shelf Naive Bayes classifier using a contrastive word and subword n-gram model ({\textquotedblleft}Bayesline{\textquotedblright}) which outperforms the best submissions.
QCRI @ DSL 2016: Spoken Arabic Dialect Identification Using Textual Features (2016)

The paper describes the QCRI submissions to the task of automatic Arabic dialect classification into 5 Arabic variants, namely Egyptian, Gulf, Levantine, North-African, and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The training data is relatively small and is automatically generated from an ASR system. To avoid over-fitting on such small data, we carefully selected and designed the features to capture the morphological essence of the different dialects. We submitted four runs to the Arabic sub-task. For all runs, we used a combined feature vector of character bi-grams, tri-grams, 4-grams, and 5-grams. We tried several machine-learning algorithms, namely Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Neural Networks, and Support Vector Machines (SVM) with linear and string kernels. However, our submitted runs used SVM with a linear kernel. In the closed submission, we got the best accuracy of 0.5136 and the third best weighted F1 score, with a difference less than 0.002 from the highest score.
Tuning Bayes Baseline for Dialect Detection (2016)

This paper describes an analysis of our submissions to the Dialect Detection Shared Task 2016. We proposed three different systems that involved simplistic features, to name: a Naive-bayes system, a Support Vector Machines-based system and a Tree Kernel-based system. These systems underperform when compared to other submissions in this shared task, since the best one achieved an accuracy of {\textasciitilde}0.834.
Vanilla Classifiers for Distinguishing between Similar Languages (2016)

In this paper we describe the submission of the UniBuc-NLP team for the Discriminating between Similar Languages Shared Task, DSL 2016. We present and analyze the results we obtained in the closed track of sub-task 1 (Similar languages and language varieties) and sub-task 2 (Arabic dialects). For sub-task 1 we used a logistic regression classifier with tf-idf feature weighting and for sub-task 2 a character-based string kernel with an SVM classifier. Our results show that good accuracy scores can be obtained with limited feature and model engineering. While certain limitations are to be acknowledged, our approach worked surprisingly well for out-of-domain, social media data, with 0.898 accuracy (3rd place) for dataset B1 and 0.838 accuracy (4th place) for dataset B2.
N-gram and Neural Language Models for Discriminating Similar Languages (2016)

This paper describes our submission to the 2016 Discriminating Similar Languages (DSL) Shared Task. We participated in the closed Sub-task 1 with two separate machine learning techniques. The first approach is a character based Convolution Neural Network with an LSTM layer (CLSTM), which achieved an accuracy of 78.45{\%} with minimal tuning. The second approach is a character-based n-gram model of size 7. It achieved an accuracy of 88.45{\%} which is close to the accuracy of 89.38{\%} achieved by the best submission.
Simplification of Example Sentences for Learners of Japanese Functional Expressions (2016)

Learning functional expressions is one of the difficulties for language learners, since functional expressions tend to have multiple meanings and complicated usages in various situations. In this paper, we report an experiment of simplifying example sentences of Japanese functional expressions especially for Chinese-speaking learners. For this purpose, we developed {\textquotedblleft}Japanese Functional Expressions List{\textquotedblright} and {\textquotedblleft}Simple Japanese Replacement List{\textquotedblright}. To evaluate the method, we conduct a small-scale experiment with Chinese-speaking learners on the effectiveness of the simplified example sentences. The experimental results indicate that simplified sentences are helpful in learning Japanese functional expressions.
Effectiveness of Linguistic and Learner Features to Listenability Measurement Using a Decision Tree Classifier (2016)

In learning Asian languages, learners encounter the problem of character types that are different from those in their first language, for instance, between Chinese characters and the Latin alphabet. This problem also affects listening because learners reconstruct letters from speech sounds. Hence, special attention should be paid to listening practice for learners of Asian languages. However, to our knowledge, few studies have evaluated the ease of listening comprehension (listenability) in Asian languages. Therefore, as a pilot study of listenability in Asian languages, we developed a measurement method for learners of English in order to examine the discriminability of linguistic and learner features. The results showed that the accuracy of our method outperformed a simple majority vote, which suggests that a combination of linguistic and learner features should be used to measure listenability in Asian languages as well as in English.
A Two-Phase Approach Towards Identifying Argument Structure in Natural Language (2016)

We propose a new approach for extracting argument structure from natural language texts that contain an underlying argument. Our approach comprises of two phases: Score Assignment and Structure Prediction. The Score Assignment phase trains models to classify relations between argument units (Support, Attack or Neutral). To that end, different training strategies have been explored. We identify different linguistic and lexical features for training the classifiers. Through ablation study, we observe that our novel use of word-embedding features is most effective for this task. The Structure Prediction phase makes use of the scores from the Score Assignment phase to arrive at the optimal structure. We perform experiments on three argumentation datasets, namely, AraucariaDB, Debatepedia and Wikipedia. We also propose two baselines and observe that the proposed approach outperforms baseline systems for the final task of Structure Prediction.
Distributed Vector Representations for Unsupervised Automatic Short Answer Grading (2016)

We address the problem of automatic short answer grading, evaluating a collection of approaches inspired by recent advances in distributional text representations. In addition, we propose an unsupervised approach for determining text similarity using one-to-many alignment of word vectors. We evaluate the proposed technique across two datasets from different domains, namely, computer science and English reading comprehension, that additionally vary between highschool level and undergraduate students. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed technique often outperforms other compositional distributional semantics approaches as well as vector space methods such as latent semantic analysis. When combined with a scoring scheme, the proposed technique provides a powerful tool for tackling the complex problem of short answer grading. We also discuss a number of other key points worthy of consideration in preparing viable, easy-to-deploy automatic short-answer grading systems for the real-world.
A Comparison of Word Embeddings for English and Cross-Lingual Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation (2016)

Word embeddings are now ubiquitous forms of word representation in natural language processing. There have been applications of word embeddings for monolingual word sense disambiguation (WSD) in English, but few comparisons have been done. This paper attempts to bridge that gap by examining popular embeddings for the task of monolingual English WSD. Our simplified method leads to comparable state-of-the-art performance without expensive retraining. Cross-Lingual WSD {--} where the word senses of a word in a source language come from a separate target translation language {--} can also assist in language learning; for example, when providing translations of target vocabulary for learners. Thus we have also applied word embeddings to the novel task of cross-lingual WSD for Chinese and provide a public dataset for further benchmarking. We have also experimented with using word embeddings for LSTM networks and found surprisingly that a basic LSTM network does not work well. We discuss the ramifications of this outcome.
Overview of NLP-TEA 2016 Shared Task for Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis (2016)

This paper presents the NLP-TEA 2016 shared task for Chinese grammatical error diagnosis which seeks to identify grammatical error types and their range of occurrence within sentences written by learners of Chinese as foreign language. We describe the task definition, data preparation, performance metrics, and evaluation results. Of the 15 teams registered for this shared task, 9 teams developed the system and submitted a total of 36 runs. We expected this evaluation campaign could lead to the development of more advanced NLP techniques for educational applications, especially for Chinese error detection. All data sets with gold standards and scoring scripts are made publicly available to researchers.
Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis with Long Short-Term Memory Networks (2016)

Grammatical error diagnosis is an important task in natural language processing. This paper introduces our Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis (CGED) system in the NLP-TEA-3 shared task for CGED. The CGED system can diagnose four types of grammatical errors which are redundant words (R), missing words (M), bad word selection (S) and disordered words (W). We treat the CGED task as a sequence labeling task and describe three models, including a CRF-based model, an LSTM-based model and an ensemble model using stacking. We also show in details how we build and train the models. Evaluation includes three levels, which are detection level, identification level and position level. On the CGED-HSK dataset of NLP-TEA-3 shared task, our system presents the best F1-scores in all the three levels and also the best recall in the last two levels.
Automatic Grammatical Error Detection for Chinese based on Conditional Random Field (2016)

In the process of learning and using Chinese, foreigners may have grammatical errors due to negative migration of their native languages. Currently, the computer-oriented automatic detection method of grammatical errors is not mature enough. Based on the evaluating task {---} CGED2016, we select and analyze the classification model and design feature extraction method to obtain grammatical errors including Mission(M), Disorder(W), Selection (S) and Redundant (R) automatically. The experiment results based on the dynamic corpus of HSK show that the Chinese grammatical error automatic detection method, which uses CRF as classification model and n-gram as feature extraction method. It is simple and efficient which play a positive effect on the research of Chinese grammatical error automatic detection and also a supporting and guiding role in the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.
CYUT-III System at Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis Task (2016)

This paper describe the CYUT-III system on grammar error detection in the 2016 NLP-TEA Chinese Grammar Error Detection shared task CGED. In this task a system has to detect four types of errors, in-cluding redundant word error, missing word error, word selection error and word ordering error. Based on the conditional random fields (CRF) model, our system is a linear tagger that can detect the errors in learners' essays. Since the system performance depends on the features heavily, in this paper, we are going to report how to integrate the collocation feature into the CRF model. Our system presents the best detection accuracy and Identification accuracy on the TOCFL dataset, which is in traditional Chi-nese. The same system also works well on the simplified Chinese HSK dataset.
Word Order Sensitive Embedding Features/Conditional Random Field-based Chinese Grammatical Error Detection (2016)

This paper discusses how to adapt two new word embedding features to build a more efficient Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis (CGED) systems to assist Chinese foreign learners (CFLs) in improving their written essays. The major idea is to apply word order sensitive Word2Vec approaches including (1) structured skip-gram and (2) continuous window (CWindow) models, because they are more suitable for solving syntax-based problems. The proposed new features were evaluated on the Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language (TOCFL) learner database provided by NLP-TEA-3{\&}CGED shared task. Experimental results showed that the new features did work better than the traditional word order insensitive Word2Vec approaches. Moreover, according to the official evaluation results, our system achieved the lowest (0.1362) false positive (FA) and the highest precision rates in all three measurements.
A Fluctuation Smoothing Approach for Unsupervised Automatic Short Answer Grading (2016)

We offer a fluctuation smoothing computational approach for unsupervised automatic short answer grading (ASAG) techniques in the educational ecosystem. A major drawback of the existing techniques is the significant effect that variations in model answers could have on their performances. The proposed fluctuation smoothing approach, based on classical sequential pattern mining, exploits lexical overlap in students' answers to any typical question. We empirically demonstrate using multiple datasets that the proposed approach improves the overall performance and significantly reduces (up to 63{\%}) variation in performance (standard deviation) of unsupervised ASAG techniques. We bring in additional benchmarks such as (a) paraphrasing of model answers and (b) using answers by k top performing students as model answers, to amplify the benefits of the proposed approach.