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In this paper, we explore the feasibility of irony detection in Dutch social media. To this end, we investigate both transformer models with embedding representations, as well as traditional machine learning classifiers with extensive feature sets. Our feature-based methodology implements a variety of information sources including lexical, semantic, syntactic, sentiment features, as well as two new data-driven features to model common sense. Based on patterns in the syntactic structure of tweets, we aim to model the presence of contrasting sentiments, a phenomenon that is known to be indicative of verbal irony and sarcasm. Feature selection, as well as voting ensemble techniques were implemented to enhance the classification performance. The final systems reach F1-scores up to 0.79, which are promising results for a task as difficult as irony detection. Besides a quantitative analysis, this paper also describes a thorough qualitative analysis of the system output. Although lexical cues appear to be very important to express irony, our analysis also revealed the need for more advanced modeling of common-sense knowledge to detect more subtle examples of irony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection of online cyberbullying has seen an increase in societal importance, popularity in research, and available open data. Nevertheless, while computational power and affordability of resources continue to increase, the access restrictions on high-quality data limit the applicability of state-of-the-art techniques. Consequently, much of the recent research uses small, heterogeneous datasets, without a thorough evaluation of applicability. In this paper, we further illustrate these issues, as we (i) evaluate many publicly available resources for this task and demonstrate difficulties with data collection. These predominantly yield small datasets that fail to capture the required complex social dynamics and impede direct comparison of progress. We (ii) conduct an extensive set of experiments that indicate a general lack of cross-domain generalization of classifiers trained on these sources, and openly provide this framework to replicate and extend our evaluation criteria. Finally, we (iii) present an effective crowdsourcing method: simulating real-life bullying scenarios in a lab setting generates plausible data that can be effectively used to enrich real data. This largely circumvents the restrictions on data that can be collected, and increases classifier performance. We believe these contributions can aid in improving the empirical practices of future research in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic term extraction is a productive field of research within natural language processing, but it still faces significant obstacles regarding datasets and evaluation, which require manual term annotation. This is an arduous task, made even more difficult by the lack of a clear distinction between terms and general language, which results in low inter-annotator agreement. There is a large need for well-documented, manually validated datasets, especially in the rising field of multilingual term extraction from comparable corpora, which presents a unique new set of challenges. In this paper, a new approach is presented for both monolingual and multilingual term annotation in comparable corpora. The detailed guidelines with different term labels, the domain- and language-independent methodology and the large volumes annotated in three different languages and four different domains make this a rich resource. The resulting datasets are not just suited for evaluation purposes but can also serve as a general source of information about terms and even as training data for supervised methods. Moreover, the gold standard for multilingual term extraction from comparable corpora contains information about term variants and translation equivalents, which allows an in-depth, nuanced evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-disciplinary communication is often impeded by terminological ambiguity. Hence, cross-disciplinary teams would greatly benefit from using a language technology-based tool that allows for the (at least semi-) automated resolution of ambiguous terms. Although no such tool is readily available, an interesting theoretical outline of one does exist. The main obstacle for the concrete realization of this tool is the current lack of an effective method for the automatic detection of the different meanings of ambiguous terms across different disciplinary jargons. In this paper, we set up a pilot study to experimentally assess whether the word sense induction technique of 'context clustering', as implemented in the software package 'SenseClusters', might be a solution. More specifically, given several sets of sentences coming from a cross-disciplinary corpus containing a specific ambiguous term, we verify whether this technique can classify each sentence in accordance to the meaning of the ambiguous term in that sentence. For the experiments, we first compile a corpus that represents the disciplinary jargons involved in a project on Bone Tissue Engineering. Next, we conduct two series of experiments. The first series focuses on determining appropriate SenseClusters parameter settings using manually selected test data for the ambiguous target terms 'matrix' and 'model'. The second series evaluates the actual performance of SenseClusters using randomly selected test data for an extended set of target terms. We observe that SenseClusters can successfully classify sentences from a cross-disciplinary corpus according to the meaning of the ambiguous term they contain. Hence, we argue that this implementation of context clustering shows potential as a method for the automatic detection of the meanings of ambiguous terms in cross-disciplinary communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To push the state of the art in text mining applications, research in natural language processing has increasingly been investigating automatic irony detection, but manually annotated irony corpora are scarce. We present the construction of a manually annotated irony corpus based on a fine-grained annotation scheme that allows for identification of different types of irony. We conduct a series of binary classification experiments for automatic irony recognition using a support vector machine (SVM) that exploits a varied feature set and compare this method to a deep learning approach that is based on an LSTM network and (pre-trained) word embeddings. Evaluation on a held-out corpus shows that the SVM model outperforms the neural network approach and benefits from combining lexical, semantic and syntactic information sources. A qualitative analysis of the classification output reveals that the classifier performance may be further enhanced by integrating implicit sentiment information and context- and user-based features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore the feasibility of developing a part-of-speech tagger for not-normalised, Byzantine Greek epigrams. Hence, we compared three different transformer-based models with embedding representations, which are then fine-tuned on a fine-grained part-of-speech tagging task. To train the language models, we compiled two data sets: the first consisting of Ancient and Byzantine Greek texts, the second of Ancient, Byzantine and Modern Greek. This allowed us to ascertain whether Modern Greek contributes to the modelling of Byzantine Greek. For the supervised task of part-of-speech tagging, we collected a training set of existing, annotated (Ancient) Greek texts. For evaluation, a gold standard containing 10,000 tokens of unedited Byzantine Greek poems was manually annotated and validated through an inter-annotator agreement study. The experimental results look very promising, with the BERT model trained on all Greek data achieving the best performance for fine-grained part-of-speech tagging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]