Malta

The Mvskoke language, an indigenous language in the US, has experienced an increase in language revitalization activity in the last few years. This talk is an overview of current language reclamation activities as well as how NLP can come alongside to support community efforts. I will review four NLP tools that are relevant to the Mvskoke case - morphological analysis, TTS, ASR, and corpus search, and discuss challenges and benefits for language revitalization.

EACL 2024

Technology and Language Revitalization: A Roadmap for the Mvskoke Language

endangered languages

indigenous

low-resource

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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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 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. 
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

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.

Although fine-tuning a pre-trained model with a conventional approach has shown to be effective in various downstream tasks, previous work has used only backpropagation to fine-tune the model, which causes a massive amount of computational resources and time. We propose Extreme Fine-Tuning (EFT), a novel approach for fine-tuning a pre-trained model effectively and efficiently. EFT uses backpropagation for a brief fine-tuning and an iterative extreme learning machine for training a classifier. We applied EFT to four text classification datasets, MELD, IEMOCAP, IMDb, and AG News, and compared its performance with state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches. The results indicate that EFT noticeably outperformed the other approaches in training-time measurement with comparable model performance. We will release our code at https://github.com/up-33/extreme-fine-tuning.

Extreme Fine-tuning: A Novel and Fast Fine-tuning Approach for text Classification

Verifying biomedical claims fails if no evidence can be discovered. In these cases, the fact-checking verdict remains unknown and the claim is unverifiable. To improve this situation, we have to understand if there are any claim properties that impact its verifiability. In this work we assume that entities and relations define the core variables in a biomedical claim's anatomy and analyze if their properties help us to differentiate verifiable from unverifiable claims. In a study with trained annotation experts we prompt them to find evidence for biomedical claims, and observe how they refine search queries for their evidence search. This leads to the first corpus for scientific fact verification annotated with subject--relation--object triplets, evidence documents, and fact-checking verdicts (the BEAR-FACT corpus). We find (1) that discovering evidence for negated claims (e.g., X--does-not-cause--Y) is particularly challenging. Further, we see that annotators process queries mostly by adding constraints to the search and by normalizing entities to canonical names. (2) We compare our in-house annotations with a small crowdsourcing setting where we employ both medical experts and laypeople. We find that domain expertise does not have a substantial effect on the reliability of annotations. Finally, (3), we demonstrate that it is possible to reliably estimate the success of evidence retrieval purely from the claim text (.82F$_1$), whereas identifying unverifiable claims proves more challenging (.27F$_1$)

What Makes Medical Claims (Un)Verifiable? Analyzing Entity and Relation Properties for Fact Verification

**Karen Spärck Jones Award Lecture** 
The advent of generative AI technology produces transformative impact on the content creation landscape, offering alternative approaches to produce diverse, good-quality content across media, thereby reshaping the ecosystems of online content creation and publishing, but also raising concerns about market over-saturation and the potential marginalization of human creativity. Our recent work introduces a competition model generalized from the Tullock contest to analyze the tension between human creators and generative AI. Our theory and simulations suggest that despite challenges, a stable equilibrium between human and AI-generated content is possible. Our work contributes to understanding the competitive dynamics in the content creation industry, offering insights into the future interplay between human creativity and technological advancements in generative AI.

Human vs. Generative AI in Content Creation Competition: Symbiosis or Conflict?

Blackfoot is challenging for English speaking instructors and learners to acquire because it exhibits unique pitch patterns. This study presents MeTILDA (Melodic Transcription in Language Documentation and Application) as a solution to teaching pitch patterns distinct from English. Specifically, we explore ways to improve data visualization through a visualized pronunciation teaching guide called Pitch Art. The working materials can be downloaded or stored in the cloud for further use and collaboration. These features are aimed to facilitate teachers in developing curriculum for learning pronunciation, and provide students with an interactive and integrative learning environment to better understand Blackfoot language and pronunciation.

Cloud-based Platform for Indigenous Language Sound Education

Descriptive linguistics is a sub-field of linguistics that involves the collection and annotationof language resources to describe linguistic phenomena. The transcription of these resources is often described as a tedious task, and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has frequently been employed to support this process. However, the typical research approach to ASR in documentary linguistics often only captures a subset of the field’s diverse reality. In this paper, we focus specifically on one type of data known as grammaticality judgment elicitation in the context of documenting Kréyòl Gwadloupéyen. We show that only a few minutes of speech is enough to fine-tune a model originally trained in French to transcribe segments in Kréyol.

Automatic Transcription of Grammaticality Judgements for Language Documentation

This abstract outlines how members of various fragmented Celtic language com-
munities have, over the last few years, improved inter-community collaboration.
This collaboration has manifested itself in quite a diverse way. In particular, this
abstract focuses on the improved collaboration between the Welsh and Breton
language technology communities.

How collaboration between Celtic language communities has improved

We present MunTTS, an end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) system specifically for Mundari, a low-resource Indian language of the Austo-Asiatic family. Our work addresses the gap in linguistic technology for underrepresented languages by collecting and processing data to build a speech synthesis system. We begin our study by gathering a substantial dataset of Mundari text and speech and train end-to-end speech models. We also delve into the methods used for training our models, ensuring they are efficient and effective despite the data constraints. We evaluate our system with native speakers and objective metrics, demonstrating its potential as a tool for preserving and promoting the Mundari language in the digital age.

MunTTS: A Text-to-Speech System for Mundari

In this project, we develop an electronic corpus for Nepalbhāsā, a transhimalayan language indigenous to the Kathmandu Valley and surrounding areas in Nepal. We use web content scraped from four Nepalbhāsā news publications' websites; filters out all content in languages other than Nepalbhāsā; and carry out encoding adjustment of data, such as dates from the indigenous calendar of the speaker community, by scraping the Gregorian dates from the metadata of published news pieces. We discuss further challenges in encoding adjustment, given dates from multiple indigenous calendar systems in Nepalbhāsā newspapers from the early 1920s. We also discuss the project's immediate prospects and its beneficiaries from the speaker community.

Developing a Nepalbhāsā E-corpus and Challenges in Encoding Adjustment

We investigate the performance of state-of-the-art neural ASR systems in transcribing audio recordings for Hupa, a critically endangered language of the Hoopa Valley Tribe. We also explore the impact on ASR performance when augmenting a small dataset of gold-standard high-quality transcriptions with a) a larger dataset with transcriptions of lower quality, and b) model-generated transcriptions in a self- training approach. An evaluation of both dataaugmentation approaches shows that the self- training approach is competitive, producing better WER scores than models trained with no additional data and not lagging far behind models trained with additional lower quality manual transcriptions instead: the deterioration in WER score is just 4.85 points when all the additional data is used in experiments with the best performing system, Wav2Vec. These findings have encouraging implications on the use of ASR systems for transcription and language documentation efforts in the Hupa language

Looking within the self: Investigating the Impact of Data Augmentation with Self-training on Automatic Speech Recognition for Hupa

We explore loss functions for fact verification in the FEVER shared task. While the cross-entropy loss is a standard objective for training verdict predictors, it fails to capture the heterogeneity among the FEVER verdict classes. In this paper, we develop two task-specific objectives tailored to FEVER. Experimental results confirm that the proposed objective functions outperform the standard cross-entropy. Performance is further improved when these objectives are combined with simple class weighting, which effectively overcomes the imbalance in the training data. The source code is available (https://github.com/yuta-mukobara/RLF-KGAT).

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