Taiwan

Amis is an endangered language indigenous to Taiwan with limited data available for computational processing. We thus present an Amis-Mandarin dataset containing a parallel corpus of 5,751 Amis and Mandarin sentences and a dictionary of 7,800 Amis words and phrases with their deﬁnitions in Mandarin. Using our dataset, we also established a baseline for machine translation between Amis and Mandarin in both directions. Our dataset can be found at https://github.com/ francisdzheng/amis-mandarin.

IJCNLP-AACL 2022

A Parallel Corpus and Dictionary for Amis-Mandarin Translation

mandarin

amis

chinese

low-resource

machine translation

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). 
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The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). 

workshop paper

The industrialization process associated with the so-called Industrial Revolution in 19th-century Great Britain was a time of profound changes, including in the English lexicon. An important yet understudied phenomenon is the semantic shift in the lexicon of mechanisation. In this paper we present the first large-scale analysis of terms related to mechanization over the course of the 19th century in English. We draw on a corpus of historical British newspapers comprising 4.6 billion tokens and train historical word embedding models. We test existing semantic change detection techniques and analyse the results in light of previous historical linguistic scholarship.

Machines in the media: semantic change in the lexicon of mechanization in 19th-century British newspapers

Optimizing the weighted sequence alignment algorithm for large-scale text similarity computation

We perform a direct intrinsic evaluation of word embeddings trained on the works of a single philosopher. Six models are compared to human judgements elicited using two tasks: a synonym detection task and a coherence task. We apply a method that elicits judgements based on explicit knowledge from experts, as the linguistic intuition of non-expert participants might differ from that of the philosopher. We find that an in-domain SVD model has the best 1-nearest neighbours for target terms, while transfer learning-based Nonce2Vec performs better for low frequency target terms.

Domain-specific Evaluation of Word Embeddings for Philosophical Text using Direct Intrinsic Evaluation

We describe initial work in developing a methodology for the automatic generation of a conversational agent or ‘chatbot’ through term and relation extraction from a relevant corpus of language data. We develop our approach in the domain of industrial heritage in the 18th and 19th centuries, and more specifically on the industrial history of canals and mills in Ireland. We collected a corpus of relevant newspaper reports and Wikipedia articles, which we deemed representative of a layman’s understanding of this topic. We used the Saffron toolkit to extract relevant terms and relations between the terms from the corpus and leveraged the extracted knowledge to query the British Library Digital Collection and the Project Gutenberg library. We leveraged the extracted terms and relations in identifying possible answers for a constructed set of questions based on the extracted terms, by matching them with sentences in the British Library Digital Collection and the Project Gutenberg library. In a final step, we then took this data set of question-answer pairs to train a chatbot. We evaluate our approach by manually assessing the appropriateness of the generated answers for a random sample, each of which is judged by four annotators.

Towards Bootstrapping a Chatbot on Industrial Heritage through Term and Relation Extraction

Emotion Conditioned Creative Dialog Generation

Integration of Named Entity Recognition and Sentence Segmentation on Ancient Chinese based on Siku-BERT

Emotional Intensity Estimation based on Writer's Personality

Automation of dialogue system evaluation is a driving force for the efficient development of dialogue systems. This paper introduces the bipartite-play method, a dialogue collection method for automating dialogue system evaluation. It addresses the limitations of existing dialogue collection methods: (i) inability to compare with systems that are not publicly available, and (ii) vulnerability to cheating by intentionally selecting systems to be compared. Experimental results show that the automatic evaluation using the bipartite-play method mitigates these two drawbacks and correlates as strongly with human subjectivity as existing methods.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-srw.2/)


Bipartite-play Dialogue Collection for Practical Automatic Evaluation of Dialogue Systems

The ability to capture temporal commonsense relationships for time-related events expressed in text is a very important task in natural language understanding. However, pre-trained language models such as BERT, which have recently achieved great success in a wide range of natural language processing tasks, are still considered to have poor performance in temporal reasoning. In this paper, we focus on the development of language models for temporal commonsense inference over several pre-trained language models. Our model relies on multi-step fine-tuning using multiple corpora and masked language modeling to predict masked temporal indicators that are crucial for temporal commonsense reasoning. We also experimented with multi-task learning and build a language model that can improve performance on multiple time-related tasks. In our experiments, multi-step fine-tuning using the general commonsense knowledge task as an auxiliary task produced the best results. We obtained a significant improvement in accuracy over standard fine-tuning in the temporal commonsense inference task and on other time-related tasks.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-srw.3/)


Toward Building a Language Model for Understanding Temporal Commonsense

In dialogue systems, one option for creating a better dialogue experience for the user is to have a human operator take over the dialogue when the system runs into trouble communicating with the user. In this type of handover situation (we call it intervention), it is useful for the operator to have access to the dialogue summary. However, it is not clear exactly what type of summary would be the most useful for a smooth handover. In this study, we investigated the optimal type of summary through experiments in which interlocutors were presented with various summary types during interventions in order to examine their effects. Our findings showed that the best summaries were an abstractive summary plus one utterance immediately before the handover and an extractive summary consisting of five utterances immediately before the handover. From the viewpoint of computational cost, we recommend that extractive summaries consisting of the last five utterances be used.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-srw.4/)


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A Parallel Corpus and Dictionary for Amis-Mandarin Translation

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Machines in the media: semantic change in the lexicon of mechanization in 19th-century British newspapers

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