Croatia

The present work describes the solutions proposed by the UnibucNLP team to address the closed format of the DSL-TL task featured in the tenth VarDial Evaluation Campaign. The DSL-TL organizers provided approximately 11 thousand sentences written in three different languages and manually tagged with one of 9
classes. Out of these, 3 tags are considered common label and the remaining 6 tags are variety-specific. The DSL-TL task features 2 subtasks: Track 1 - a three-way and Track 2 - a two-way classification per language. In Track 2 only the variety-specific labels are used for scoring, whereas in Track 1 the common label is considered as well. Our team participated in both tracks, with three ensemble-based submissions for each. The meta-learner used for Track 1 is XGBoost and for Track 2, Logistic Regression. With each submission, we are gradually increasing the complexity of the ensemble, starting with two shallow, string-kernel based methods. To the first ensemble, we add a convolutional neural network for our second submission. The third ensemble submitted adds a fine-tuned BERT model to the second one. In
Track 1, ensemble three is our highest ranked, with an F 1 − score of 53.18%; 5.36% less than the leader. Surprisingly, in Track 2 the ensemble of shallow methods surpasses the other two, more complex ensembles, achieving an F 1 − score of 69.35%

EACL 2023

Using Ensemble Learning in Language Variety Identification

language variety identification

stacking ensembles

string kernels

deep learning

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

workshop paper

SIDLR: Slot and Intent Detection Models for Low-Resource Language Varieties

In light of unprecedented increases in the popularity of the internet and social media, comment moderation has never been a more relevant task. Semi-automated 
comment moderation systems greatly aid human moderators by either automatically 
classifying the examples or allowing the moderators to prioritize which comments to consider first. However, the concept of inappropriate content is often subjective, and such content can be conveyed in many subtle and indirect ways. In this work, we propose CoRAL1 – a language and culturally aware Croatian Abusive dataset covering phenomena of implicitness and reliance on local and global context. We show experimentally that current models degrade when comments are not explicit and further degrade when language skill and context knowledge
are required to interpret the comment.

CoRAL: a Context-aware Croatian Abusive Language Dataset

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.

Probing Pre-Trained Language Models for Cross-Cultural Differences in Values

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.

Strengthening Relationships Between Indigenous Communities, Documentary Linguists, and Computational Linguists in the Era of NLP-Assisted Language Revitalization

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 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 different 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.

Hate Speech Classifiers are Culturally Insensitive

The recent release of ChatGPT has garnered widespread recognition for its exceptional ability to generate human-like responses in dialogue. Given its usage by users from various nations and its training on a vast multilingual corpus that incorporates 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.

Assessing Cross-Cultural Alignment between ChatGPT and Human Societies: An Empirical Study

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.

Toward Cultural Bias Evaluation Datasets: The Case of Bengali Gender, Religious, and National Identity

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. 


Bias assessment for experts in discrimination, not in computer science

This paper investigates the performance of massively multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) systems in translating Yorùbá greetings (ε kú <MASK>), which are a big part of Yorùbá language and culture, into English. To evaluate these models, we present IkiniYorùbá, a Yorùbá-English translation dataset containing some Yorùbá 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 Yorùbá greetings into English. In addition, we trained a Yorùbá-English model by finetuning an existing NMT model on the training split of IkiniYorùbá and this achieved better performance when compared to the pre-trained multilingual NMT models, although they were trained on a large volume of data.

Ɛ KÚ [MASK]: Integrating Yorùbá cultural greetings into machine translation

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.

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