Spain

This paper analyses the challenge of working with dialectal variation when semi-automatically normalising and analysing historical Basque texts. This work is part of a more general ongoing project for the construction of a morphosyntactically annotated historical corpus of Basque called Basque in the Making (BIM): A Historical Look at a European Language Isolate, whose main objective is the systematic and diachronic study of a number of grammatical features. This will
be not only the first tagged corpus of historical Basque, but also a means to improve language processing tools by analysing historical Basque varieties more or less distant from present-day standard Basque.

COLING 2020

Dealing with dialectal variation in the construction of the Basque historical corpus

dialectal variation

normalisation

historical corpus

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
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ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

In this work, we systematically investigate different set-ups for training of neural machine translation (NMT) systems for translation into Croatian and Serbian, two closely related South Slavic languages. We explore English and German as source languages, different sizes and types of training corpora, as well as bilingual and multilingual systems. We also explore translation of English IMDb user movie reviews, a domain/genre where only monolingual data are available. 

First, our results confirm that multilingual systems with joint target languages perform better. 
Furthermore, translation performance from English is much better than from German, partly because German is morphologically more complex and partly because the corpus consists mostly of parallel human translations instead of original text and its human translation. The translation from German should be further investigated systematically.

For translating user reviews, creating synthetic in-domain parallel data through back- and forward-translation and adding them to a small out-of-domain parallel corpus can yield performance comparable with a system trained on a full out-of-domain corpus. However, it is still not clear what is the optimal size of synthetic in-domain data, especially for forward-translated data where the target language is machine translated.
More detailed research including manual evaluation and analysis is needed in this direction.

Neural Machine Translation for translating into Croatian and Serbian

In this paper, as a preliminary study of its kind, we propose an approach for the tokenization of the Sorani and Kurmanji dialects of Kurdish using a lexicon and a morphological analyzer. We demonstrate how the morphological complexity of the language along with the lack of a unified orthography can be efficiently addressed in tokenization. We also develop an annotated dataset for which our approach outperforms the performance of unsupervised methods.

A Tokenization System for the Kurdish Language

Deep neural networks have been employed for various spoken language recognition tasks, including tasks that are multilingual by definition such as spoken language identification. In this paper, we present a neural model for Slavic language identification in speech signals and analyze its emergent representations to investigate whether they reflect objective measures of language relatedness and/or non-linguists’ perception of language similarity. While our analysis shows that the language representation space indeed captures language relatedness to a great extent, we find perceptual confusability between languages in our study to be the best predictor of the language representation similarity.

Rediscovering the Slavic Continuum in Representations Emerging from Neural Models of Spoken Language Identification

Occitan is a Romance language spoken mainly in the south of France. It has no official status in the country, it is not standardized and displays important diatopic variation resulting in a rich system of dialects. Recently, we created a first treebank for this language. However, this corpus is based exclusively on texts in the Lengadocian dialect. Our paper describes the work aimed at extending the existing corpus with content in three new dialects, namely Gascon, Provençau and Lemosin. We describe both the annotation of initial content in these new varieties of Occitan and experiments allowing us to identify the most efficient method for further enrichment of the corpus. We observe that parsing models trained on Occitan dialects achieve better results than a delexicalized model trained on other Romance languages despite the latter training corpus being much larger (20K vs 900K tokens). The results of the native Occitan models show an important impact of cross-dialectal lexical variation, whereas syntactic variation seems to affect the systems less. We hope that these results, as well as the associated corpus, incorporating several Occitan varieties, will facilitate the training of robust NLP tools, capable of processing all kinds of Occitan texts.

A Four-Dialect Treebank for Occitan: Building Process and Parsing Experiments

Italian is a Romance language that has its roots in Vulgar Latin. The birth of the modern Italian started in Tuscany around the 14th century, and it is mainly attributed to the works of Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Boccaccio, who are among the most acclaimed authors of the medieval age in Tuscany. However, Italy has been characterized by a high variety of dialects, which are often loosely related to each other, due to the past fragmentation of the territory. Italian has absorbed influences from many of these dialects, as also from other languages due to dominion of portions of the country by other nations, such as Spain and France. In this work we present Vulgaris, a project aimed at studying a corpus of Italian textual resources from authors of different regions, ranging in a time period between 1200 and 1600. Each composition is associated to its author, and authors are also grouped in families, i.e. sharing similar stylistic/chronological characteristics. Hence, the dataset is not only a valuable resource for studying the diachronic evolution of Italian and the differences between its dialects, but it is also useful to investigate stylistic aspects between single authors. We provide a detailed statistical analysis of the data, and a corpus-driven study in dialectology and diachronic varieties.

Vulgaris: Analysis of a Corpus for Middle-Age Varieties of Italian Language

Researchers in natural language processing have developed large, robust resources for understanding formal Standard American English (SAE), but we lack similar resources for variations of English, such as slang and African American English (AAE). In this work, we use word embeddings and clustering algorithms to group semantically similar words in three datasets, two of which contain high incidence of slang and AAE. Since high-quality clusters would contain related words, we could also infer the meaning of an unfamiliar word based on the meanings of words clustered with it. After clustering, we compute precision and recall scores using WordNet and ConceptNet as gold standards and show that these scores are unimportant when the given resources do not fully represent slang and AAE. Amazon Mechanical Turk and expert evaluations show that clusters with low precision can still be considered high quality, and we propose the new Cluster Split Score as a metric for machine-generated clusters. These contributions emphasize the gap in natural language processing research for variations of English and motivate further work to close it.

Towards Augmenting Lexical Resources for Slang and African American English

This poster introduces the Wanca 2017 web corpora from which the sentences written in minor Uralic languages were collected for the test set of the Uralic Language Identification (ULI) 2020 shared task. We describe the ULI shared task and how the test set was constructed using the Wanca 2017 corpora and texts in different languages from the Leipzig corpora collection.

Uralic Language Identification (Uli)

This paper describes a set of experiments for discriminating between two closely related language varieties, Moldavian and Romanian, under a substantial domain shift. The experiments were conducted as part of the Romanian dialect identification task in the VarDial 2020 evaluation campaign. Our best system based on linear SVM classifier obtained the first position in the shared task with an F1 score of .79, supporting the earlier results showing (unexpected) success of machine learning systems in this task. The additional experiments reported in this paper also show that adapting to the test set is useful when the training data comes from another domain. However, the benefit of adaptation becomes doubtful even when a small amount of data from the target domain is available.

Dialect Identification under Domain Shift: Experiments with Discriminating Romanian and Moldavian

We study the ability of large fine-tuned transformer models to solve a binary classification task of dialect identification, with a special interest in comparing the performance of multilingual to monolingual ones. The corpus analyzed contains Romanian and Moldavian samples from the news domain, as well as tweets for assessing the performance. We find that the monolingual models are superior to the multilingual ones and the best results are obtained using an SVM ensemble of 5 different transformer-based models. We provide our experimental results and an analysis of the attention mechanisms of the best-performing individual classifiers to explain their decisions. The code we used was released under an open-source license.

Applying Multilingual and Monolingual Transformer-Based Models for Dialect Identification

This paper describes the Helsinki--Ljubljana contribution to the VarDial shared task on social media variety geolocation. Our solutions are based on the BERT Transformer models, the constrained versions of our models reaching 1st place in two subtasks and 3rd place in one subtask, while our unconstrained models outperform all the constrained systems by a large margin. We show in our analyses that Transformer-based models outperform traditional models by far, and that improvements obtained by pre-training models on large quantities of (mostly standard) text are significant, but not drastic, with single-language models also outperforming multilingual models. Our manual analysis shows that two types of signals are the most crucial for a (mis)prediction: named entities and dialectal features, both of which are handled well by our models.

Dealing with dialectal variation in the construction of the Basque historical corpus

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