ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TELP -- Text Extraction with Linguistic Patterns (2024)

Linguistic studies in under-resourced languages pose additional challenges at various levels, including the automatic collection of examples, cases, and corpora construction. Several sophisticated applications, such as GATE (Cunningham, 2002), can be configured/adjusted/programmed by experts to automatically collect examples from the Web in any language. However, these applications are too complex and intricate to be operated, requiring, in some cases, skills in computer science. In this work, we present TELP, a tool that allows for the simplified expression of linguistic patterns to extract case studies automatically from World Wide Web sites. It is a straightforward application with an intuitive GUI and a quick learning curve, facilitating its broad use by researchers from different domains. In this paper, we describe the operational and technical aspects of TELP and some relatively recent and relevant use cases in the field of linguistic studies.
The First Parallel Corpus and Neural Machine Translation Model of Western Armenian and English (2024)

Western Armenian is a low-resource language spoken by the Armenian Diaspora residing in various places of the world. Although having content on the internet as well as a relatively rich literary heritage for a minority language, there is no data for the machine translation task and only a very limited amount of labeled data for other NLP tasks. In this work, we build the first machine translation system between Western Armenian and English. We explore different techniques for data collection and evaluate their impact in this very low-resource scenario. Then, we build the machine translation system while focusing on the possibilities of performing knowledge transfer from Eastern Armenian. The system is finetuned with the data collected for the first Western Armenian-English parallel corpus, which contains a total of approximately 147k sentence pairs, whose shareable part of 52k examples was made open-source. The best system through the experiments performs with a BLEU score of 29.8 while translating into English and 17 into Western Armenian.
Tracing Linguistic Heritage: Constructing a Somali-Italian Terminological Resource through Explorers' Notebooks and Contemporary Corpus Analysis (2024)

The aim of this contribution is to introduce the initial phases of constructing a Somali-Italian terminological resource that dates back to Italy`s colonial expansion into Africa. Specifically, the terminological data was extracted from the notebooks authored by the Italian explorer Ugo Ferrandi (1852 - 1928) and published by the Societ{\`a} Geografica in 1903 under the title {\textquotedblleft}Lugh. Emporio Commerciale sul Giuba{\textquotedblright}. In order to develop Ferrandi`s terminological resource, we have employed Semantic Web technologies (RDF, OWL, and SPARQL) and embraced the Linked Open Data paradigm. This ensures the FAIRness of the data and enables the publication and sharing of our terminological resource within an open interconnected Web of Data, thus contributing to addressing the absence of Somali in the Linguistic Linked Data cloud. Whenever feasible, Ferrandi`s lexicon entries have been linked and enriched with information derived from a Somali lexicon included in a contemporary Somali Corpus. This approach allows the synchronic corpus-related Somali lexicon to acquire historical depth, thereby illuminating the linguistic dynamics that have transpired over time and would otherwise have remained obscure.
Uncovering Social Changes of the Basque Speaking Twitter Community During COVID-19 Pandemic (2024)

The aim of this work is to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Basque speaking Twitter community by applying Natural Language Processing unsupervised techniques. In order to carry out this study, we collected and publicly released the biggest dataset of Basque tweets containing up to 8M tweets from September 2019 to February 2021. To analyze the impact of the pandemic, the variability of the content over time was studied through quantitative and qualitative analysis of words and emojis. For the quantitative analysis, the shift at the frequency of the terms was calculated using linear regression over frequencies. On the other hand, for the qualitative analysis, word embeddings were used to study the changes in the meaning of the most significant words and emojis at different periods of the pandemic. Through this multifaceted approach, we discovered noteworthy alterations in the political inclinations exhibited by Basque users throughout the course of the pandemic.
UniDive: A COST Action on Universality, Diversity and Idiosyncrasy in Language Technology (2024)

This paper presents the objectives, organization and activities of the UniDive COST Action, a scientific network dedicated to universality, diversity and idiosyncrasy in language technology. We describe the objectives and organization of this initiative, the people involved, the working groups and the ongoing tasks and activities. This paper is also an pen call for participation towards new members and countries.
Unsupervised Outlier Detection for Language-Independent Text Quality Filtering (2024)

Web-crawled corpora offer an abundant source of training data for language models. However, they are generally noisy and are typically filtered using heuristic rules or classifiers. These methods require careful tuning or labeling by fluent speakers. In this paper, we assess the effectiveness of commonly applied rules on TQ-IS, a manually labeled text quality dataset for Icelandic. Additionally, we advocate for the utilization of unsupervised clustering and outlier detection algorithms for filtering. These algorithms are language-independent, computationally efficient and do not require language expertise. Using grid search, we find the optimal configuration for every combination of rules, optimizing for F1 score on TQ-IS. For a rule-based approach, we discover that optimal results can be achieved with only a small subset of the full ruleset. Using five rules, we obtain an F1 score of 98.2{\%}. We then evaluate three unsupervised algorithms, i.e., Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs), Isolation Forests and One-Class SVMs. Our findings reveal that unsupervised algorithms perform well on the TQ-IS dataset, with GMMs obtaining the best results, comparable to those obtained with the rule-based approach. Finally, we show that unsupervised methods appear to be equally suitable for languages other than Icelandic, including Estonian and Basque.
UzABSA: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis for the Uzbek Language (2024)

The objective of enhancing the availability of natural language processing technologies for low-resource languages has significant importance in facilitating technological accessibility within the populations of speakers of these languages. Our current grasping shows that there are no established linguistic resources available open source to develop aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) tools tailored to the Uzbek language. This work aims to address the aforementioned gap by presenting the first high-quality annotated ABSA dataset - UzABSA. The data used in this study was obtained from a compilation of online reviews of Uzbek restaurants. Consequently, the constructed dataset has a length of 3500 reviews at the document level and 6100+ sentences at the sentence level. The popular approach to language resources of this kind explores four distinctive characteristics, namely Aspect Terms, Aspect Term Polarities, Aspect Category Terms, as well as Aspect Category Polarities. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first and the largest ABSA dataset for the Uzbek language. To evaluate the annotation process of our dataset, we used established statistical techniques such as Cohen`s kappa coefficient and Krippendorff`s $\alpha$ to assess agreement between annotators. Subsequently, a classification model, namely K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN), was used to evaluate the performance of the created dataset. Both sets of evaluation techniques demonstrate comparable levels of accuracy. The first findings across the various tasks showed promising outcomes, with accuracy rates ranging from 72{\%} to 88{\%}. This study not only highlights the significance of our acquired dataset but also plays a valuable tool for scholars interested in furthering sentiment analysis in the Uzbek language.
ViHealthNLI: A Dataset for Vietnamese Natural Language Inference in Healthcare (2024)

This paper introduces ViHealthNLI, a large dataset for the natural language inference problem for Vietnamese. Unlike the similar Vietnamese datasets, ours is specific to the healthcare domain. We conducted an exploratory analysis to characterize the dataset and evaluated the state-of-the-art methods on the dataset. Our findings indicate that the dataset poses significant challenges while also holding promise for further advanced research and the creation of practical applications.
Why the Unexpected? Dissecting the Political and Economic Bias in Persian Small and Large Language Models (2024)

Recently, language models (LMs) like BERT and large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have demonstrated potential in various linguistic tasks such as text generation, translation, and sentiment analysis. However, these abilities come with a cost of a risk of perpetuating biases from their training data. Political and economic inclinations play a significant role in shaping these biases. Thus, this research aims to understand political and economic biases in Persian LMs and LLMs, addressing a significant gap in AI ethics and fairness research. Focusing on the Persian language, our research employs a two-step methodology. First, we utilize the political compass test adapted to Persian. Second, we analyze biases present in these models. Our findings indicate the presence of nuanced biases, underscoring the importance of ethical considerations in AI deployments within Persian-speaking contexts.
Work in Progress: Text-to-speech on Edge Devices for Te Reo M\=aori and \textquoteleft\=Olelo Hawaiʻi (2024)

Existing popular text-to-speech technologies focus on large models requiring a large corpus of recorded speech to train. The resulting models are typically run on high-resource servers where users synthesise speech from a client device requiring constant connectivity. For speakers of low-resource languages living in remote areas, this approach does not work. Corpora are typically small and synthesis needs to run on an unconnected, battery or solar-powered edge device. In this paper, we demonstrate how knowledge transfer and adversarial training can be used to create efficient models capable of running on edge devices using a corpus of only several hours. We apply these concepts to create a voice synthesiser for te reo M{\={a}}ori (the indigenous language of Aotearoa New Zealand) for a non-speaking user and {\textquoteleft}{\={o}}lelo Hawaiʻi (the indigenous language of Hawaiʻi) for a legally blind user, thus creating the first high-quality text-to-speech tools for these endangered, central-eastern Polynesian languages capable of running on a low powered edge device.
Syntactic dependency length shaped by strategic memory allocation (2024)

Human processing of nonlocal syntactic dependencies requires the engagement of limited working memory for encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. This process creates an evolutionary pressure for language to be structured in a way that keeps the subparts of a dependency closer to each other, an efficiency principle termed dependency locality. The current study proposes that such a dependency locality pressure can be modulated by the surprisal of the antecedent, defined as the first part of a dependency, due to strategic allocation of working memory. In particular, antecedents with novel and unpredictable information are prioritized for memory encoding, receiving more robust representation against memory interference and decay, and thus are more capable of handling longer dependency length. We examine this claim by analyzing dependency corpora of 11 languages, with word surprisal generated from GPT-3 language model. In support of our hypothesis, we find evidence for a positive correlation between dependency length and the antecedent surprisal in most of the languages in our analyses. A closer look into the dependencies with core arguments shows that this correlation consistently holds for subject relations but not for object relations.
GUIDE: Creating Semantic Domain Dictionaries for Low-Resource Languages (2024)

Over 7,000 of the world`s 7,168 living languages are still low-resourced. This paper aims to narrow the language documentation gap by creating multiparallel dictionaries, clustered by SIL`s semantic domains. This task is new for machine learning and has previously been done manually by native speakers. We propose GUIDE, a language-agnostic tool that uses a GNN to create and populate semantic domain dictionaries, using seed dictionaries and Bible translations as a parallel text corpus. Our work sets a new benchmark, achieving an exemplary average precision of 60{\%} in eight zero-shot evaluation languages and predicting an average of 2,400 dictionary entries. We share the code, model, multilingual evaluation data, and new dictionaries with the research community: https://github.com/janetzki/GUIDE
A New Dataset for Tonal and Segmental Dialectometry from the Yue- and Pinghua-Speaking Area (2024)

Traditional dialectology or dialect geography is the study of geographical variation of language. Originated in Europe and pioneered in Germany and France, this field has predominantly been focusing on sounds, more specifically, on segments. Similarly, quantitative approaches to language variation concerned with the phonetic level are in most cases focusing on segments as well. However, more than half of the world`s languages include lexical tones (Yip, 2002). Despite this, tones are still underexplored in quantitative language comparison, partly due to the low accessibility of the suitable data. This paper aims to introduce a newly digitised dataset which comes from the Yue- and Pinghua-speaking areas in Southern China, with over 100 dialects. This dataset consists of two parts: tones and segments. In this paper, we illustrate how we can computationaly model tones in order to explore linguistic variation. We have applied a tone distance metric on our data, and we have found that 1) dialects also form a continuum on the tonal level and 2) other than tonemic (inventory) and tonetic differences, dialects can also differ in the lexical distribution of tones. The availability of this dataset will hopefully enable further exploration of the role of tones in quantitative typology and NLP research.
A Computational Model for the Assessment of Mutual Intelligibility Among Closely Related Languages (2024)

Closely related languages show linguistic similarities that allow speakers of one language to understand speakers of another language without having actively learned it. Mutual intelligibility varies in degree and is typically tested in psycholinguistic experiments. To study mutual intelligibility computationally, we propose a computer-assisted method using the Linear Discriminative Learner, a computational model developed to approximate the cognitive processes by which humans learn languages, which we expand with multilingual semantic vectors and multilingual sound classes. We test the model on cognate data from German, Dutch, and English, three closely related Germanic languages. We find that our model`s comprehension accuracy depends on 1) the automatic trimming of inflections and 2) the language pair for which comprehension is tested. Our multilingual modelling approach does not only offer new methodological findings for automatic testing of mutual intelligibility across languages but also extends the use of Linear Discriminative Learning to multilingual settings.
Predicting Mandarin and Cantonese Adult Speakers' Eye-Movement Patterns in Natural Reading (2024)

Please find the attached PDF file for the extended abstract of our study.
The Typology of Ellipsis: A Corpus for Linguistic Analysis and Machine Learning Applications (2024)

State-of-the-art (SotA) Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology faces significant challenges with constructions that contain ellipses. Although theoretically well-documented and understood, there needs to be more sufficient cross-linguistic language resources to document, study, and ultimately engineer NLP solutions that can adequately provide analyses for ellipsis constructions. This article describes the typological data set on ellipsis that we created for currently seventeen languages. We demonstrate how SotA parsers based on a variety of syntactic frameworks fail to parse sentences with ellipsis, and in fact, probabilistic, neural, and Large Language Models (LLM) do so, too. We demonstrate experiments that focus on detecting sentences with ellipsis, predicting the position of elided elements, and predicting elided surface forms in the appropriate positions. We show that cross-linguistic variation of ellipsis-related phenomena has different consequences for the architecture of NLP systems.
Language Atlas of Japanese and Ryukyuan (LAJaR): A Linguistic Typology Database for Endangered Japonic Languages (2024)

LAJaR (Language Atlas of Japanese and Ryukyuan) is a linguistic typology database focusing on micro-variation of the Japonic (Japanese and Ryukyuan) languages. This paper aims to report the design and progress of this ongoing database project. Finally, we also show a case study utilizing its database on zero copulas among the Japonic languages.
GTNC: A Many-To-One Dataset of Google Translations from NewsCrawl (2024)

This paper lays the groundwork for initiating research into Source Language Identification; the task of identifying the original language of a machine-translated text. We contribute a dataset of translations from a typologically diverse spectrum of languages into English and use it to set initial baselines for this novel task.
Sociolinguistically Informed Interpretability: A Case Study on Hinglish Emotion Classification (2024)

Emotion classification is a challenging task in NLP due to the inherent idiosyncratic and subjective nature of linguistic expression,especially with code-mixed data. Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved high performance for many tasks and languages, but it remains to be seen whether these models learn and are robust to the differences in emotional expression across languages. Sociolinguistic studies have shown that Hinglish speakers switch to Hindi when expressing negative emotions and to English when expressing positive emotions. To understand if language models can learn these associations, we study the effect of language on emotion prediction across 3 PLMs on a Hinglish emotion classification dataset. Using LIME and token level language ID, we find that models do learn these associations between language choice and emotional expression. Moreover, having code-mixed data present in the pre-training can augment that learning when task-specific data is scarce. We also conclude from the misclassifications that the models may overgeneralise this heuristic to other infrequent examples where this sociolinguistic phenomenon does not apply.
A Call for Consistency in Reporting Typological Diversity (2024)

In order to draw generalizable conclusions about the performance of multilingual models across languages, it is important to evaluate on a set of languages that captures linguistic diversity.Linguistic typology is increasingly used to justify language selection, inspired by language sampling in linguistics.However, justifications for {\textquoteleft}typological diversity' exhibit great variation, as there seems to be no set definition, methodology or consistent link to linguistic typology.In this work, we provide a systematic insight into how previous work in the ACL Anthology uses the term {\textquoteleft}typological diversity'.Our two main findings are: 1) what is meant by typologically diverse language selection is not consistent and 2) the actual typological diversity of the language sets in these papers varies greatly.We argue that, when making claims about {\textquoteleft}typological diversity', an operationalization of this should be included.A systematic approach that quantifies this claim, also with respect to the number of languages used, would be even better.
Are Sounds Sound for Phylogenetic Reconstruction? (2024)

In traditional studies on language evolution, scholars often emphasize the importance of sound laws and sound correspondences for phylogenetic inference of language family trees. However, to date, computational approaches have typically not taken this potential into account. Most computational studies still rely on lexical cognates as major data source for phylogenetic reconstruction in linguistics, although there do exist a few studies in which authors praise the benefits of comparing words at the level of sound sequences. Building on (a) ten diverse datasets from different language families, and (b) state-of-the-art methods for automated cognate and sound correspondence detection, we test, for the first time, the performance of sound-based versus cognate-based approaches to phylogenetic reconstruction. Our results show that phylogenies reconstructed from lexical cognates are topologically closer, by approximately one third with respect to the generalized quartet distance on average, to the gold standard phylogenies than phylogenies reconstructed from sound correspondences.
Compounds in Universal Dependencies: A Survey in Five European Languages (2024)

In Universal Dependencies, compounds, which we understand as words containing two or more roots, are represented according to tokenization, which reflects the orthographic conventions of the language. A closed compound (e.g. $\textit{waterfall}$) corresponds to a single word in Universal Dependencies while a hyphenated compound ($\textit{father-in-law}$) and an open compound ($\textit{apple pie}$) to multiple words. The aim of this paper is to open a discussion on how to move towards a more consistent annotation of compounds.The solution we argue for is to represent the internal structure of all compound types analogously to syntactic phrases, which would not only increase the comparability of compounding within and across languages, but also allow comparisons of compounds and syntactic phrases.
Predicting positive transfer for improved low-resource speech recognition using acoustic pseudo-tokens (2024)

While massively multilingual speech models like wav2vec 2.0 XLSR-128 can be directly fine-tuned for automatic speech recognition (ASR), downstream performance can still be relatively poor on languages that are under-represented in the pre-training data. Continued pre-training on 70{--}200 hours of untranscribed speech in these languages can help {---} but what about languages without that much recorded data? For such cases, we show that supplementing the target language with data from a similar, higher-resource {\textquoteleft}donor' language can help. For example, continued pretraining on only 10 hours of low-resource Punjabi supplemented with 60 hours of donor Hindi is almost as good as continued pretraining on 70 hours of Punjabi. By contrast, sourcing supplemental data from less similar donors like Bengali does not improve ASR performance. To inform donor language selection, we propose a novel similarity metric based on the sequence distribution of induced acoustic units: the Acoustic Token Distribution Similarity (ATDS). Across a set of typologically different target languages (Punjabi, Galician, Iban, Setswana), we show that the ATDS between the target language and its candidate donors precisely predicts target language ASR performance.