ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Prompting Multilingual Large Language Models to Generate Code-Mixed Texts: The Case of South East Asian Languages (2023)

While code-mixing is a common linguistic practice in many parts of the world, collecting high-quality and low-cost code-mixed data remains a challenge for natural language processing (NLP) research. The recent proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) compels one to ask: how capable are these systems in generating code-mixed data? In this paper, we explore prompting multilingual LLMs in a zero-shot manner to generate code-mixed data for seven languages in South East Asia (SEA), namely Indonesian, Malay, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Tamil, and Singlish. We find that publicly available multilingual instruction-tuned models such as BLOOMZ and Flan-T5-XXL are incapable of producing texts with phrases or clauses from different languages. ChatGPT exhibits inconsistent capabilities in generating code-mixed texts, wherein its per-formance varies depending on the prompt template and language pairing. For instance, ChatGPT generates fluent and natural Singlish texts (an English-based creole spoken in Singapore), but for English-Tamil language pair, the system mostly produces grammatically incorrect or semantically meaningless utterances. Furthermore, it may erroneously introduce languages not specified in the prompt. Based on our investigation, existing multilingual LLMs exhibit a wide range of proficiency in code-mixed data generation for SEA languages. As such, we advise against using LLMs in this context without extensive human checks.
CONFLATOR: Incorporating Switching Point based Rotatory Positional Encodings for Code-Mixed Language Modeling (2023)

The mixing of two or more languages is called Code-Mixing (CM). CM is a social norm in multilingual societies. Neural Language Models (NLMs) like transformers have been effective on many NLP tasks. However, NLM for CM is an under-explored area. Though transformers are capable and powerful, they cannot always encode positional information since they are non-recurrent. Therefore, to enrich word information and incorporate positional information, positional encoding is defined. We hypothesize that Switching Points (SPs), i.e., junctions in the text where the language switches (L1 -{\ensuremath{>}} L2 or L2 -{\ensuremath{>}} L1), pose a challenge for CM Language Models (LMs), and hence give special emphasis to SPs in the modeling process. We experiment with several positional encoding mechanisms and show that rotatory positional encodings along with switching point information yield the best results.We introduce CONFLATOR: a neural language modeling approach for code-mixed languages. CONFLATOR tries to learn to emphasize switching points using smarter positional encoding, both at unigram and bigram levels. CONFLATOR outperforms the state-of-the-art on two tasks based on code-mixed Hindi and English (Hinglish): (i) sentiment analysis and (ii) machine translation.
Unified Model for Code-Switching Speech Recognition and Language Identification Based on Concatenated Tokenizer (2023)

Code-Switching (CS) multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models can transcribe speech containing two or more alternating languages during a conversation. This paper proposes (1) a new method for creating code-switching ASR datasets from purely monolingual data sources, and (2) a novel Concatenated Tokenizer that enables ASR models to generate language ID for each emitted text token while reusing existing monolingual tokenizers. The efficacy of these approaches for building CS ASR models is demonstrated for two language pairs, English-Hindi and English-Spanish, where we achieve new state-of-the-art results on the Miami Bangor CS evaluation corpus. In addition to competitive ASR performance, the proposed Concatenated Tokenizer models are highly effective for spoken language identification, achieving 98{\%}+ accuracy on the out-of-distribution FLEURS dataset.
Multilingual self-supervised speech representations improve the speech recognition of low-resource African languages with codeswitching (2023)

While many speakers of low-resource languages regularly code-switch between their languages and other regional languages or English, datasets of codeswitched speech are too small to train bespoke acoustic models from scratch or do language model rescoring. Here we propose finetuning self-supervised speech representations such as wav2vec 2.0 XLSR to recognize code-switched data. We find that finetuning self-supervised multilingual representations and augmenting them with n-gram language models trained from transcripts reduces absolute word error rates by up to 20{\%} compared to baselines of hybrid models trained from scratch on code-switched data. Our findings suggest that in circumstances with limited training data finetuning self-supervised representations is a better performing and viable solution.
Varepsilon k\'u mask: Integrating Yor\`ub\'a cultural greetings into machine translation (2023)

This paper investigates the performance of massively multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) systems in translating Yor{\`u}b{\'a} greetings (k{\'u} mask), which are a big part of Yor{\`u}b{\'a} language and culture, into English. To evaluate these models, we present IkiniYor{\`u}b{\'a}, a Yor{\`u}b{\'a}-English translation dataset containing some Yor{\`u}b{\'a} greetings, and sample use cases. We analysed the performance of different multilingual NMT systems including Google and NLLB and show that these models struggle to accurately translate Yor{\`u}b{\'a} greetings into English. In addition, we trained a Yor{\`u}b{\'a}-English model by fine-tuning an existing NMT model on the training split of IkiniYor{\`u}b{\'a} and this achieved better performance when compared to the pre-trained multilingual NMT models, although they were trained on a large volume of data.
Cross-Cultural Transfer Learning for Chinese Offensive Language Detection (2023)

Detecting offensive language is a challenging task. Generalizing across different cultures and languages becomes even more challenging: besides lexical, syntactic and semantic differences, pragmatic aspects such as cultural norms and sensitivities, which are particularly relevant in this context, vary greatly. In this paper, we target Chinese offensive language detection and aim to investigate the impact of transfer learning using offensive language detection data from different cultural backgrounds, specifically Korean and English. We find that culture-specific biases in what is considered offensive negatively impact the transferability of language models (LMs) and that LMs trained on diverse cultural data are sensitive to different features in Chinese offensive language detection. In a few-shot learning scenario, however, our study shows promising prospects for non-English offensive language detection with limited resources. Our findings highlight the importance of cross-cultural transfer learning in improving offensive language detection and promoting inclusive digital spaces.
A Cross-Lingual Study of Homotransphobia on Twitter (2023)

We present a cross-lingual study of homotransphobia on Twitter, examining the prevalence and forms of homotransphobic content in tweets related to LGBT issues in seven languages. Our findings reveal that homotransphobia is a global problem that takes on distinct cultural expressions, influenced by factors such as misinformation, cultural prejudices, and religious beliefs. To aid the detection of hate speech, we also devise a taxonomy that classifies public discourse around LGBT issues. By contributing to the growing body of research on online hate speech, our study provides valuable insights for creating effective strategies to combat homotransphobia on social media.
Strengthening Relationships Between Indigenous Communities, Documentary Linguists, and Computational Linguists in the Era of NLP-Assisted Language Revitalization (2023)

As the global crisis of language endangerment deepens, Indigenous communities have continued to seek new means of preserving, promoting and passing on their languages to future generations. For many communities, modern language technology holds the promise of accelerating that process. However, the cultural and disciplinary divides between documentary linguists, computational linguists and Indigenous communities have posed an on-going challenge for the development and deployment of NLP applications that can support the documentation and revitalization of Indigenous languages. In this paper, we discuss the main barriers to collaboration that these groups have encountered, as well as some notable initiatives in recent years to bring the groups closer together. We follow this with specific recommendations to build upon those efforts, calling for increased opportunities for awareness-building and skills-training in computational linguistics, tailored to the specific needs of both documentary linguists and Indigenous community members. We see this as an essential step as we move forward into an era of NLP-assisted language revitalization.
Hate Speech Classifiers are Culturally Insensitive (2023)

Increasingly, language models and machine translation are becoming valuable tools to help people communicate with others from diverse cultural backgrounds. However, current language models lack cultural awareness because they are trained on data representing only the culture within the dataset. This presents a problem in the context of hate speech classification, where cultural awareness is especially critical. This study aims to quantify the cultural insensitivity of three monolingual (Korean, English, Arabic) hate speech classifiers by evaluating their performance on translated datasets from the other two languages. Our research has revealed that hate speech classifiers evaluated on datasets from other cultures yield significantly lower F1 scores, up to almost 50{\%}. In addition, they produce considerably higher false negative rates, with a magnitude up to five times greater, demonstrating the extent of the cultural gap. The study highlights the severity of cultural insensitivity of language models in hate speech classification.
MMT: A Multilingual and Multi-Topic Indian Social Media Dataset (2023)

Social media plays a significant role in cross-cultural communication. A vast amount of this occurs in code-mixed and multilingual form, posing a significant challenge to Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for processing such information, like language identification, topic modeling, and named-entity recognition. To address this, we introduce a large-scale multilingual and multi-topic dataset MMT collected from Twitter (1.7 million Tweets), encompassing 13 coarse-grained and 63 fine-grained topics in the Indian context. We further annotate a subset of 5,346 tweets from the MMT dataset with various Indian languages and their code-mixed counterparts. Also, we demonstrate that the currently existing tools fail to capture the linguistic diversity in MMT on two downstream tasks, i.e., topic modeling and language identification. To facilitate future research, we will make the anonymized and annotated dataset available in the public domain.
Assessing Cross-Cultural Alignment between ChatGPT and Human Societies: An Empirical Study (2023)

The recent release of ChatGPT has garnered widespread recognition for its exceptional ability to generate human-like conversations. Given its usage by users from various nations and its training on a vast multilingual corpus that includes diverse cultural and societal norms, it is crucial to evaluate its effectiveness in cultural adaptation. In this paper, we investigate the underlying cultural background of ChatGPT by analyzing its responses to questions designed to quantify human cultural differences. Our findings suggest that, when prompted with American context, ChatGPT exhibits a strong alignment with American culture, but it adapts less effectively to other cultural contexts. Furthermore, by using different prompts to probe the model, we show that English prompts reduce the variance in model responses, flattening out cultural differences and biasing them towards American culture. This study provides valuable insights into the cultural implications of ChatGPT and highlights the necessity of greater diversity and cultural awareness in language technologies.
Toward Cultural Bias Evaluation Datasets: The Case of Bengali Gender, Religious, and National Identity (2023)

Critical studies found NLP systems to bias based on gender and racial identities. However, few studies focused on identities defined by cultural factors like religion and nationality. Compared to English, such research efforts are even further limited in major languages like Bengali due to the unavailability of labeled datasets. This paper describes a process for developing a bias evaluation dataset highlighting cultural influences on identity. We also provide a Bengali dataset as an artifact outcome that can contribute to future critical research.
Building Stereotype Repositories with Complementary Approaches for Scale and Depth (2023)

Measurements of fairness in NLP have been critiqued for lacking concrete definitions of biases or harms measured, and for perpetuating a singular, Western narrative of fairness globally. To combat some of these pivotal issues, methods for curating datasets and benchmarks that target specific harms are rapidly emerging. However, these methods still face the significant challenge of achieving coverage over global cultures and perspectives at scale. To address this, in this paper, we highlight the utility and importance of complementary approaches that leverage both community engagement as well as large generative models, in these curation strategies. We specifically target the harm of stereotyping and demonstrate a pathway to build a benchmark that covers stereotypes about diverse, and intersectional identities. We discuss the two approaches, their advantages and constraints, the characteristics of the data they produce, and finally, their potential to be used complementarily for better evaluation of stereotyping harms.
Bias assessment for experts in discrimination, not in computer science (2023)

Approaches to bias assessment usually require such technical skills that, by design, they leave discrimination experts out. In this paper we present EDIA, a tool that facilitates that experts in discrimination explore social biases in word embeddings and masked language models. Experts can then characterize those biases so that their presence can be assessed more systematically, and actions can be planned to address them. They can work interactively to assess the effects of different characterizations of bias in a given word embedding or language model, which helps to specify informal intuitions in concrete resources for systematic testing.
Toward Disambiguating the Definitions of Abusive, Offensive, Toxic, and Uncivil Comments (2023)

The definitions of abusive, offensive, toxic and uncivil comments used for annotating corpora for automated content moderation are highly intersected and researchers call for their disambiguation. We summarize the definitions of these terms as they appear in 23 papers across different fields. We compare examples given for uncivil, offensive, and toxic comments, attempting to foster more unified scientific resources. Additionally, we stress that the term incivility that frequently appears in social science literature has hardly been mentioned in the literature we analyzed that focuses on computational linguistics and natural language processing.
Probing Pre-Trained Language Models for Cross-Cultural Differences in Values (2023)

Language embeds information about social, cultural, and political values people hold. Prior work has explored potentially harmful social biases encoded in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). However, there has been no systematic study investigating how values embedded in these models vary across cultures. In this paper, we introduce probes to study which cross-cultural values are embedded in these models, and whether they align with existing theories and cross-cultural values surveys. We find that PLMs capture differences in values across cultures, but those only weakly align with established values surveys. We discuss implications of using mis-aligned models in cross-cultural settings, as well as ways of aligning PLMs with values surveys.
Named Entity Recognition for Low-Resource Languages - Profiting from Language Families (2023)

Machine learning drives forward the development in many areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Until now, many NLP systems and research are focusing on high-resource languages, i.e. languages for which many data resources exist. Recently, so-called low-resource languages increasingly come into focus. In this context, multi-lingual language models, which are trained on related languages to a target low-resource language, may enable NLP tasks on this low-resource language. In this work, we investigate the use of multi-lingual models for Named Entity Recognition (NER) for low-resource languages. We consider the West Slavic language family and the low-resource languages Upper Sorbian and Kashubian. Three RoBERTa models were trained from scratch, two mono-lingual models for Czech and Polish, and one bi-lingual model for Czech and Polish. These models were evaluated on the NER downstream task for Czech, Polish, Upper Sorbian, and Kashubian, and compared to existing state-of-the-art models such as RobeCzech, HerBERT, and XLM-R. The results indicate that the mono-lingual models perform better on the language they were trained on, and both the mono-lingual and language family models outperform the large multi-lingual model in downstream tasks. Overall, the study shows that low-resource West Slavic languages can benefit from closely related languages and their models.
MAUPQA: Massive Automatically-created Polish Question Answering Dataset (2023)

Recently, open-domain question answering systems have begun to rely heavily on annotated datasets to train neural passage retrievers. However, manually annotating such datasets is both difficult and time-consuming, which limits their availability for less popular languages. In this work, we experiment with several methods for automatically collecting weakly labeled datasets and show how they affect the performance of the neural passage retrieval models. As a result of our work, we publish the MAUPQA dataset, consisting of nearly 400,000 question-passage pairs for Polish, as well as the HerBERT-QA neural retriever.
TrelBERT: A pre-trained encoder for Polish Twitter (2023)

Pre-trained Transformer-based models have become immensely popular amongst NLP practitioners. We present TrelBERT {--} the first Polish language model suited for application in the social media domain. TrelBERT is based on an existing general-domain model and adapted to the language of social media by pre-training it further on a large collection of Twitter data. We demonstrate its usefulness by evaluating it in the downstream task of cyberbullying detection, in which it achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming larger monolingual models trained on general-domain corpora, as well as multilingual in-domain models, by a large margin. We make the model publicly available. We also release a new dataset for the problem of harmful speech detection.
Croatian Film Review Dataset (Cro-FiReDa): A Sentiment Annotated Dataset of Film Reviews (2023)

This paper introduces Cro-FiReDa, a sentiment-annotated dataset for Croatian in the domain of movie reviews. The dataset, which contains over 10,000 sentences, has been annotated at the sentence level. In addition to presentingthe overall annotation process, we also present benchmark results based on the transformer-based fine-tuning approach.
Too Many Cooks Spoil the Model: Are Bilingual Models for Slovene Better than a Large Multilingual Model? (2023)

This paper investigates whether adding data of typologically closer languages improves the performance of transformer-based models for three different downstream tasks, namely Part-of-Speech tagging, Named Entity Recognition, and Sentiment Analysis, compared to a monolingual and plain multilingual language model. For the presented pilot study, we performed experiments for the use case of Slovene, a low(er)-resourced language belonging to the Slavic language family. The experiments were carried out in a controlled setting, where a monolingual model for Slovene was compared to combined language models containing Slovene, trained with the same amount of Slovene data. The experimental results show that adding typologically closer languages indeed improves the performance of the Slovene language model, and even succeeds in outperforming the large multilingual XLM-RoBERTa model for NER and PoS-tagging. We also reveal that, contrary to intuition, distantly or unrelated languages also combine admirably with Slovene, often out-performing XLM-R as well. All the bilingual models used in the experiments are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/pranaydeeps/BLAIR}
Machine-translated texts from English to Polish show a potential for typological explanations in Source Language Identification (2023)

This work examines a case study that investigates (1) the achievability of extracting typological features from Polish texts, and (2) their contrastive power to discriminate between machine-translated texts from English. The findings indicate potential for a proposed method that deals with the explainable prediction of the source language of translated texts.
Comparing domain-specific and domain-general BERT variants for inferred real-world knowledge through rare grammatical features in Serbian (2023)

Transfer learning is one of the prevailing approaches towards training language-specific BERT models. However, some languages have uncommon features that may prove to be challenging to more domain-general models but not domain-specific models. Comparing the performance of BERTi{\'c}, a Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian model, and Multilingual BERT on a Named-Entity Recognition (NER) task and Masked Language Modelling (MLM) task based around a rare phenomenon of indeclinable female foreign names in Serbian reveals how the different training approaches impacts their performance. Multilingual BERT is shown to perform better than BERTi{\'c} in the NER task, but BERTi{\'c} greatly exceeds in the MLM task. Thus, there are applications both for domain-general training and domain-specific training depending on the tasks at hand.
Dispersing the clouds of doubt: can cosine similarity of word embeddings help identify relation-level metaphors in Slovene? (2023)

Word embeddings and pre-trained language models have achieved great performance in many tasks due to their ability to capture both syntactic and semantic information in their representations. The vector space representations have also been used to identify figurative language shifts such as metaphors, however, the more recent contextualized models have mostly been evaluated via their performance on downstream tasks. In this article, we evaluate static and contextualized word embeddings in terms of their representation and unsupervised identification of relation-level (ADJ-NOUN, NOUN-NOUN) metaphors in Slovene on a set of 24 literal and 24 metaphorical phrases. Our experiments show very promising results for both embedding methods, however, the performance in contextual embeddings notably depends on the layer involved and the input provided to the model.