Croatia

Sound correspondence patterns form the basis of cognate detection and phonological reconstruction in historical language comparison. Methods for the automatic inference of correspondence patterns from phonetically aligned cognate sets have been proposed, but their application to multilingual wordlists requires extremely well annotated datasets. Since annotation is tedious and time consuming, it would be desirable to find ways to improve aligned cognate data automatically. Taking inspiration from trimming techniques in evolutionary biology, which improve alignments by excluding problematic sites, we propose a workflow that trims phonetic alignments in comparative linguistics prior to the inference of correspondence patterns. Testing these techniques on a large standardized collection of ten datasets with expert annotations from different language families, we find that the best trimming technique substantially improves the overall consistency of the alignments, showing a clear increase in the proportion of frequent correspondence patterns and words exhibiting regular cognate relations.

EACL 2023

Trimming Phonetic Alignments Improves the Inference of Sound Correspondence Patterns from Multilingual Wordlists

trimming

sound correspondences

historical linguistics

Welcome to the 18th 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 has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. 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. 
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EACL 2024

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

### 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.

You Can Have Your Data and Balance It Too: Towards Balanced and Efficient Multilingual Models

We present a large, multilingual study into how vision constrains linguistic choice, covering four languages and five linguistic properties, such as verb transitivity or use of numerals. 
We propose a novel method that leverages existing corpora of images with captions written by native speakers, and apply it to nine corpora, comprising 600k images and 3M captions. 
We study the relation between visual input and linguistic choices by training classifiers to predict the probability of expressing a property from raw images, and find evidence supporting the claim that linguistic properties are constrained by visual context across languages. 
We complement this investigation with a corpus study, taking the test case of numerals. Specifically, we use existing annotations (number or type of objects) to investigate the effect of different visual conditions on the use of numeral expressions in captions, and show that similar patterns emerge across languages.
Our methods and findings both confirm and extend existing research in the cognitive literature. We additionally discuss possible applications for language generation.

A Large-Scale Multilingual Study of Visual Constraints on Linguistic Selection of Descriptions

We introduce a crosslinguistic database for attitude predicates, which references their combinatorial (syntactic) and semantic properties. Our data allows assessment of crosslinguistic generalizations about attitude predicates as well as discovery of new typological/crosslinguistic patterns. This presentation highlights empirical and theoretical issues that our database will help to address, motivates the predicate sample and the properties that it references, as well as our methodological choices. Two case studies illustrate how the database can be used to assess the validity of crosslinguistic generalizations.

A Crosslinguistic Database for Combinatorial and Semantic Properties of Attitude Predicates

In this replication study of previous research into dependency length minimisation (DLM), we pilot a new parallel multilingual parsed corpus to examine whether previous findings are upheld when controlling for variation in domain and sentence content between languages.
We follow the approach of previous research in comparing the dependency lengths of observed sentences in a multilingual corpus to a variety of baselines: permutations of the sentences, either random or according to some fixed schema.
We go on to compare DLM with intervener complexity measure (ICM), an alternative measure of syntactic complexity.
Our findings uphold both dependency length and intervener complexity minimisation in all languages under investigation. We also find a markedly lesser extent of dependency length minimisation in verb-final languages, and the same for intervener complexity measure.
We conclude that dependency length and intervener complexity minimisation as universals are upheld when controlling for domain and content variation, but that further research is needed into the asymmetry between verb-final and other languages in this regard.

Revisiting Dependency Length and Intervener Complexity Minimisation on a Parallel Corpus in 35 Languages

This paper describes the structure and findings of the SIGTYP 2023 shared task on cognate and derivative detection for low-resourced languages, broken down into a supervised and unsupervised sub-task.
The participants were asked to submit the test data's final prediction.
A total of nine teams registered for the shared task, where seven teams registered for both sub-tasks. Only two participants ended up submitting system descriptions, with only one submitting systems for both sub-tasks.
While all systems show a rather promising performance, all could be within the baseline score for the supervised sub-task. However, the system submitted for the unsupervised sub-task outperforms the baseline score.

Findings of the SIGTYP 2023 Shared task on Cognate and Derivative DetectionFor Low-Resourced Languages

ÚFAL Submission for SIGTYP Supervised Cognate Detection Task

Of approximately 7,000 languages around the world, only a handful have abundant computational resources. Extending the reach of language technologies to diverse, less-resourced languages is important for tackling the challenges of digital equity and inclusion. Here we introduce the Grambank typological database as a resource to support such efforts. To date, work that uses typological data to extend computational research to less-resourced languages has relied on cross-linguistic morphosyntax datasets that are sparsely populated, use categorical coding that can be difficult to interpret, and introduce redundant information across features. Grambank presents similar information (e.g. word order, grammatical relation marking, constructions like interrogatives and negation), but is designed to avoid several disadvantages of legacy typological resources. Grambank’s 195 features encode basic information about morphology and syntax for over 2,400 languages. 83% of these languages are annotated for at least 100 features. By implementing binary coding for most features and curating the dataset to avoid logical dependencies, Grambank presents information in a user-friendly format for computational applications. The scale, completeness, reliability, format, and documentation of Grambank make it a useful resource for linguistically-informed models, cross-lingual NLP, and research targeting less-resourced languages.

Grambank’s typological advances support work on less-resourced languages

Language-agnostic measures discriminate inflection and derivation

Does Topological Ordering of Morphological Segments Reduce Morphological Modeling Complexity? A Preliminary Study on 13 Languages

In this paper we test the parsing performances of a multilingual parser on Old English data using different sets of languages, alone and combined with the target language, to train the models. We compare the results obtained by the models and we analyze more in deep the annotation of some peculiar syntactic constructions of the target language, providing plausible linguistic explanations of the errors made even by the best performing models.

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