United States

Recent advances in the field of deep learning have led to a growing interest in the development of NLP approaches for low-resource and endangered languages. Nevertheless, relatively little research, related to NLP, has been conducted on indigenous languages. These languages are considered to be filled with complexities and challenges that make their study incredibly difficult in the NLP and AI fields. This paper focuses on the morphological segmentation of indigenous languages, an extremely challenging task because of polysynthesis, dialectal variations with rich morpho-phonemics, misspellings and resource-limited scenario issues. The proposed approach, towards a morphological segmentation of Innu-Aimun, an extremely low-resource indigenous language of Canada, is based on deep learning. 
Experiments and evaluations have shown promising results, compared to state-of-the-art rule-based and unsupervised approaches.

NAACL 2022

Deep Learning-Based Morphological Segmentation for Indigenous Languages: A Study Case on Innu-Aimun

innu-aimun

segmentation

indigenous languages

deep learning

transformer

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

workshop paper

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Crowdsourcing platforms are often used to collect datasets for training machine learning models, despite higher levels of inaccurate labeling compared to expert labeling. There are two common strategies to manage the impact of such noise: The first involves aggregating redundant annotations, but comes at the expense of labeling substantially fewer examples. Secondly, prior works have also considered using the entire annotation budget to label as many examples as possible and subsequently apply denoising algorithms to implicitly clean the dataset. We find a middle ground and propose an approach which reserves a fraction of annotations to explicitly clean up highly probable error samples to optimize the annotation process. In particular, we allocate a large portion of the labeling budget to form an initial dataset used to train a model. This model is then used to identify specific examples that appear most likely to be incorrect, which we spend the remaining budget to relabel. Experiments across three model variations and four natural language processing tasks show our approach outperforms or matches both label aggregation and advanced denoising methods designed to handle noisy labels when allocated the same finite annotation budget.

Clean or Annotate: How to Spend a Limited Data Collection Budget

Our collective attention span is shortened by the flood of online information. With FarFetched, we address the need for automated claim validation based on the aggregated evidence derived from multiple online news sources. We introduce an entity-centric reasoning framework in which latent connections between events, actions, or statements are revealed via entity mentions and represented in a graph database. Using entity linking and semantic similarity, we offer a way for collecting and combining information from diverse sources in order to generate evidence relevant to the user’s claim. Then, we leverage textual entailment recognition to quantitatively determine whether this assertion is credible, based on the created evidence. Our approach tries to fill the gap in automated claim validation for less-resourced languages and is showcased on the Greek language, complemented by the training of relevant semantic textual similarity (STS) and natural language inference (NLI) models that are evaluated on translated versions of common benchmarks.

FarFetched: Entity centric Reasoning and Claim Validation for the Greek Language based on Textually Represented Environments

Aspect Term Extraction (ATE) is the task of identifying the word(s) in a review text toward which the author express an opinion. A major challenges for ATE involve data scarcity that hinder the training of deep sequence taggers to identify rare targets. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel method to better exploit the available labeled data for ATE by computing effective complement sentences to augment the input data and facilitate the aspect term prediction. In particular, we introduce a multi-step training procedure that first obtains optimal complement representations and sentences for training data with respect to a deep ATE model. Afterward, we fine-tune the generative language model GPT-2 to allow complement sentence generation at test data. The REINFORCE algorithm is employed to incorporate different expected properties into the reward function to perform the fine-tuning. We perform extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method that achieve the state-of-the-art performance on different datasets.

Generating Complement Data for Aspect Term Extraction with GPT-2

Highly accurate machine translation systems are very important in societies and countries where multilinguality is very common, and where English often does not suffice. The Indian subcontinent (or South Asia) is such a region, with all the Indic languages currently being under-represented in the NLP ecosystem. It is thus essential to thoroughly explore various techniques to improve the performance of such low-resource languages at least using the data available in open-source, which itself is something not very explored in the Indic ecosystem. In our work, we perform a study with a focus on improving the performance of very-low-resource South Asian languages, especially of countries in addition to India. Specifically, we propose how unified models can be built that can exploit the data from comparatively resource-rich languages of the same region. We propose strategies to unify different types of unexplored scripts, especially Perso--Arabic scripts and Brahmic scripts to build multilingual models for all the South Asian languages despite the script barrier. We also study how augmentation techniques like back-translation can be made use-of to build unified models just using openly available raw data, to understand what levels of improvements can be expected for these Indic languages.

Unified NMT models for the Indian subcontinent, transcending script barriers

Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks in non-dominant and low-resource languages have not experienced significant progress. Although pre-trained BERT models are available, GPU-dependency, large memory requirement, and data scarcity often limit their applicability. As a solution, this paper proposes a fusion chain architecture comprised of one or more layers of CNN, LSTM, and BiLSTM and identifies precise configuration and chain length. The study shows that a simpler, CPU-trainable non-BERT fusion CNN + BiLSTM + CNN is sufficient to surpass the textual classification performance of the BERT-related models in resource-limited languages and environments. The fusion architecture competitively approaches the state-of-the-art accuracy in several Bengali NLP tasks and a six-class emotion detection task for a newly developed Bengali dataset. Interestingly, the performance of the identified fusion model, for instance, CNN+ BiLSTM + CNN, also holds for other low-resource languages and environments. Efficacy study shows that the CNN + BiLSTM+ CNN model outperforms BERT implementation for Vietnamese languages and performs almost equally in English NLP tasks experiencing artificial data scarcity. For the GLUE benchmark and other datasets such as Emotion, IMDB, and Intent classification, the CNN + BiLSTM + CNN model often surpasses or competes with BERT-base, TinyBERT, DistilBERT, and mBERT. Besides, a position-sensitive self-attention layer role further improves the fusion models’ performance in the Bengali emotion classification. The models are also compressible to as low as ≈ 5× smaller through pruning and retraining, making them more viable for resource-constrained environments. Together, this study may help NLP practitioners and serve as a blueprint for NLP model choices in textual classification for low-resource languages and environments.

Alternative Non-BERT Model Choices for the Textual Classification in Low-Resource Languages and Environments

We present an extension of the Morfessor Baseline model of unsupervised morphological segmentation (Creutz and Lagus, 2007) that incorporates abstract templates for reduplication, a typologically common but computationally underaddressed process. Through a detailed investigation that applies the model to Māori, the Indigenous language of Aotearoa New Zealand, we show that incorporating templates improves Morfessor’s ability to identify instances of reduplication, and does so most when there are multiple minimally-overlapping templates. We present an error analysis that reveals important factors to consider when applying the extended model and suggests useful future directions.

Unsupervised Morphological Segmentation in a Language with Reduplication

Word embeddings are growing to be a crucial resource in the field of NLP for any language. This work introduces a novel technique for static subword embeddings transfer for Indic languages from a relatively higher resource language to a genealogically related low resource language. We primarily work with Hindi-Marathi, simulating a low-resource scenario for Marathi, and confirm observed trends on Nepali. We demonstrate the consistent benefits of unsupervised morphemic segmentation on both source and target sides over the treatment performed by fastText. Our best-performing approach uses an EM-style approach to learning bilingual subword embeddings; we also show, for the first time, that a trivial ``copy-and-paste'' embeddings transfer based on even perfect bilingual lexicons is inadequate in capturing language-specific relationships. We find that our approach substantially outperforms the fastText baselines for both Marathi and Nepali on the Word Similarity task as well as WordNet-Based Synonymy Tests; on the former task, its performance for Marathi is close to that of pretrained fastText embeddings that use three orders of magnitude more Marathi data.

Subword-based Cross-lingual Transfer of Embeddings from Hindi to Marathi and Nepali

Arabic is a morphologically rich and complex language, with numerous dialectal variants. Previous efforts on Arabic morphology modeling focused on specific variants and specific domains using a range of techniques with different degrees of linguistic modeling transparency. 
In this paper we propose a new approach to modeling Arabic morphology with an eye towards multi-dialectness, resource openness, and easy extensibility and use.
We demonstrate our approach by modeling verbs from Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic, within a common framework, and with high coverage.

Morphotactic Modeling in an Open-source Multi-dialectal Arabic Morphological Analyzer and Generator

OSU’s inflection system is a transformer whose
input is augmented with an analogical exemplar
showing how to inflect a different word into the
target cell. In addition, alignment-based heuris-
tic features indicate how well the exemplar is
likely to match the output. OSU’s scores sub-
stantially improve over the baseline transformer
for instances where an exemplar is available,
though not quite matching the challenge win-
ner. In Part 2, the system shows a tendency to
over-apply the majority pattern in English, but
not Arabic.

OSU At at SIGMORPHON ‘22: Analogical Inflection with Rule Features

Motivations for methods in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) often include detecting, quantifying and mitigating bias, and contributing to making machine learning models fairer. However, exactly how an XAI method can help in combating biases is often left unspecified. In this paper, we briefly review trends in explainability and fairness in NLP research, identify the current practices in which explainability methods are applied to detect and mitigate bias, and investigate the barriers preventing XAI methods from being used more widely in tackling fairness issues.

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