Spain

The multiword adverbials N-BY-N and NUM-BY-NUM (as English brick by brick and one by one, respectively) are event modifiers which require temporal sequencing of the event they modify into a linearly ordered series of sub-events. Previous studies unified these two constructions under a single semantic analysis and adopted either a mereological or a scalar approach. However, based on a corpus study examining new Slavic language material and a binomial logistic regression modelling of the manually annotated data, we argue that two separate analyses are needed to account for these constructions, namely a scalar analysis for the N-BY-N construction and a mereological one for the NUM-BY-NUM construction.

COLING 2020

Scalar vs. mereological conceptualizations of the N-BY-N and NUM-BY-NUM adverbials

stages 

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.

technical paper

We present edition 1.2 of the PARSEME shared task on identification of verbal multiword expressions (VMWEs). Lessons learned from previous editions indicate that VMWEs have low ambiguity, and that the major challenge lies in identifying test instances never seen in the training data. Therefore, this edition focuses on unseen VMWEs. We have split annotated corpora so that the test corpora contain around 300 unseen VMWEs, and we provide non-annotated raw corpora to be used by complementary discovery methods. We released annotated and raw corpora in 14 languages, and this semi-supervised challenge attracted 7 teams who submitted 9 system results. This paper describes the effort of corpus creation, the task design, and the results obtained by the participating systems, especially their performance on unseen expressions.

Edition 1.2 of the PARSEME Shared Task on Semi-supervised Identification of Verbal Multiword Expressions

In this presentation I describe the automatic construction of FinnMWE: a lexicon of Finnish Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs). In focus are syntactic frames: verbal constructions with arguments in a particular morphological form. The verbal frames are automatically extracted from FinnWordNet and English Wiktionary. The resulting lexicon interoperates with dependency tree searching software so that instances can be quickly found within dependency treebanks. I close by describing some experiments comparing FinnMWE with Finnish PropBank.

Filling the ___-s in Finnish MWE lexicons

We introduce what is to the best of our knowledge a new task in natural language processing: measuring alignment to authoritarian state media. We operationalize alignment in terms of sociological definitions of media bias. We take as a case study the alignment of four Taiwanese media outlets to the Chinese Communist Party state media. We present the results of an initial investigation using the frequency of words in psychologically meaningful categories. Our findings suggest that the chosen word categories correlate with framing choices. We develop a calculation method that yields reasonable results for measuring alignment, agreeing well with the known labels. We confirm that our method does capture event selection bias, but whether it captures framing bias requires further investigation.

Measuring Alignment to Authoritarian State Media as Framing Bias

The explosive growth and popularity of Social Media has revolutionised the way we communicate and collaborate. Unfortunately, this same ease of accessing and sharing information has led
to an explosion of misinformation and propaganda. Given that stance detection can significantly
aid in veracity prediction, this work focuses on boosting automated stance detection, a task on
which pre-trained models have been extremely successful on, as on several other tasks. This
work shows that the task of stance detection can benefit from feature based information, especially on certain under performing classes, however, integrating such features into pre-trained
models using ensembling is challenging. We propose a novel architecture for integrating features
with pre-trained models that address these challenges and test our method on the RumourEval
2019 dataset. This method achieves state-of-the-art results with an F1-score of 63.94 on the test
set.

Incorporating Count-Based Features into Pre-Trained Models for
Improved Stance Detection

Satire is a form of humorous critique, but it is sometimes misinterpreted by readers as legitimate news, which can lead to harmful consequences. We observe that the images used in satirical news articles often contain absurd or ridiculous content and that image manipulation is used to create fictional scenarios. While previous work have studied text-based methods, in this work we propose a multi-modal approach based on state-of-the-art visiolinguistic model ViLBERT. To this end, we create a new dataset consisting of images and headlines of regular and satirical news for the task of satire detection. We fine-tune ViLBERT on the dataset and train a convolutional neural network that uses an image forensics technique. Evaluation on the dataset shows that our proposed multi-modal approach outperforms image-only, text-only, and simple fusion baselines.

A Multi-Modal Method for Satire Detection Using Textual and Visual Cues

This paper presents a time-topic cohesive model describing the communication patterns on the coronavirus pandemic from three Asian countries. The strength of our model is two-fold. First, it detects contextualized events based on topical and temporal information via contrastive learning. Second, it can be applied to multiple languages, enabling a comparison of risk communication across cultures. We present a case study and discuss future implications of the proposed model.

A Risk Communication Event Detection Model via Contrastive Learning

We present a new comprehensive dataset for the unstandardised West-Germanic language Low Saxon covering the last two centuries, the majority of modern dialects and various genres, which will be made openly available in connection with the final version of this paper. Since so far no such comprehensive dataset of contemporary Low Saxon exists, this provides a great contribution to NLP research on this language. We also test the use of this dataset for dialect classification by training a few baseline models comparing statistical and neural approaches. The performance of these models shows that in spite of an imbalance in the amount of data per dialect, enough features can be learned for a relatively high classification accuracy.

LSDC - A Comprehensive Dataset for Low Saxon Dialect Classification

For languages with complex morphology, word-to-word translation is a task with various potential applications, for example, in information retrieval and dictionary creation, as well as in machine translation. In this paper, we confine ourselves to the subtask of character alignment for the particular case of families of related languages with very few resources for most or all members. There are many such families; we focus on the subgroup of Semitic languages spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea. We begin with an adaptation of the familiar alignment algorithms behind statistical machine translation, modifying them as appropriate for our task. We show how character alignment can reveal morphological, phonological, and orthographic correspondences among related languages.

Character Alignment in Morphologically Complex Translation Sets for Related Languages

Strong regional variation, together with the lack of standard orthography, makes Swiss German automatic speech recognition (ASR) particularly difficult in a multi-dialectal setting. This paper focuses on one of the many challenges, namely, the choice of the output text to represent non-standardised Swiss German. We investigate two potential options: a) dialectal writing – approximate phonemic transcriptions that provide close correspondence between grapheme labels and the acoustic signal but are highly inconsistent and b) normalised writing – transcriptions resembling standard German that are relatively consistent but distant from the acoustic signal. To find out which writing facilitates Swiss German ASR, we build several systems using the Kaldi toolkit and a dataset covering 14 regional varieties. A formal comparison shows that the system trained on the normalised transcriptions achieves better results in word error rate (WER) (29.39\%) but underperforms at the character level, suggesting dialectal transcriptions offer a viable solution for downstream applications where dialectal differences are important. To better assess word-level performance for dialectal transcriptions, we use a flexible WER measure (FlexWER). When evaluated with this metric, the system trained on dialectal transcriptions outperforms that trained on the normalised writing. Besides establishing a benchmark for Swiss German multi-dialectal ASR, our findings can be helpful in designing ASR systems for other languages without standard orthography.

ASR for Non-standardised Languages with Dialectal Variation: the case of Swiss German

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are typically trained by considering humans as end-users and maximizing human-oriented objectives. However, in some scenarios, their output is consumed by automatic NLP components rather than by humans. In these scenarios, translations’ quality is measured in terms of their “fitness for purpose” (i.e. maximizing performance of external NLP tools) rather than in terms of standard human fluency/adequacy criteria. Recently, reinforcement learning techniques exploiting the feedback from downstream NLP tools have been proposed for “machine-oriented” NMT adaptation. In this work, we tackle the problem in a multilingual setting where a single NMT model translates from multiple languages for downstream automatic processing in the target language. Knowledge sharing across close and distant languages allows to apply our machine-oriented approach in the zero-shot setting where no labeled data for the test language is seen at training time. Moreover, we incorporate multi-lingual BERT in the source side of our NMT system to benefit from the knowledge embedded in this model. Our experiments show coherent performance gains, for different language directions over both i) “generic” NMT models (trained for human consumption), and ii) fine-tuned multilingual BERT. This gain for zero-shot language directions (e.g. Spanish–English) is higher when the models are fine-tuned on a closely-related source language (Italian) than a distant one (German).

Scalar vs. mereological conceptualizations of the N-BY-N and NUM-BY-NUM adverbials

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Scalar vs. mereological conceptualizations of the N-BY-N and NUM-BY-NUM adverbials

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Next from COLING 2020

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