Croatia

When humans read a text, their eye movements are influenced by the structural complexity of the input sentences. This cognitive phenomenon holds across languages and recent studies indicate that multilingual language models utilize structural similarities between languages to facilitate cross-lingual transfer. We use sentence-level eye-tracking patterns as a cognitive indicator for structural complexity and show that the multilingual model XLM-RoBERTa can successfully predict varied patterns for 13 typologically diverse languages, despite being fine-tuned only on English data. We quantify the sensitivity of the model to structural complexity and distinguish a range of complexity characteristics. Our results indicate that the model develops a meaningful bias towards sentence length but also integrates cross-lingual differences. We conduct a control experiment with randomized word order and find that the model seems to additionally capture more complex structural information.

EACL 2023

Cross-Lingual Transfer of Cognitive Complexity

structural complexity

eye-tracking

cross-lingual transfer

### 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

Script diversity presents a challenge to Multilingual Language Models (MLLM) by reducing lexical overlap among closely related languages. Therefore, transliterating closely related languages that use different writing scripts to a common script may improve the downstream task performance of MLLMs. We empirically measure the effect of transliteration on MLLMs in this context. We specifically focus on the Indic languages, which have the highest script diversity in the world, and we evaluate our models on the IndicGLUE benchmark. We perform the Mann-Whitney U test to rigorously verify whether the effect of transliteration is significant or not. We find that transliteration benefits the low-resource languages without negatively affecting the comparatively highresource languages. We also measure the crosslingual representation similarity of the models using centered kernel alignment on parallel sentences from the FLORES-101 dataset. We find that for parallel sentences across different languages, the transliteration-based model learns sentence representations that are more similar

Does Transliteration Help Multilingual Language Modeling?

Multilingual BERT has an accent: Evaluating English influences on fluency in multilingual models

The Denglisch Corpus of German-English Code-Switching

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.

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

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.

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