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Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a significant and growing public health concern. Investigating alterations in speech and language patterns offers a promising path towards cost-effective and non-invasive early detection of AD on a large scale. Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT, have enabled powerful new possibilities for semantic text analysis. In this study, we leverage GPT-4 to extract five semantic features from transcripts of spontaneous patient speech. The features capture known symptoms of AD, but they are difficult to quantify effectively using traditional methods of computational linguistics. We demonstrate the clinical significance of these features and further validate one of them ("Word-Finding Difficulties") against a proxy measure and human raters. When combined with established linguistic features and a Random Forest classifier, the GPT-derived features significantly improve the detection of AD. Our approach proves effective for both manually transcribed and automatically generated transcripts, representing a novel and impactful use of recent advancements in LLMs for AD speech analysis., Comment: Accepted at the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2025)

Hate speech detection models are only as good as the data they are trained on. Datasets sourced from social media suffer from systematic gaps and biases, leading to unreliable models with simplistic decision boundaries. Adversarial datasets, collected by exploiting model weaknesses, promise to fix this problem. However, adversarial data collection can be slow and costly, and individual annotators have limited creativity. In this paper, we introduce GAHD, a new German Adversarial Hate speech Dataset comprising ca.\ 11k examples. During data collection, we explore new strategies for supporting annotators, to create more diverse adversarial examples more efficiently and provide a manual analysis of annotator disagreements for each strategy. Our experiments show that the resulting dataset is challenging even for state-of-the-art hate speech detection models, and that training on GAHD clearly improves model robustness. Further, we find that mixing multiple support strategies is most advantageous. We make GAHD publicly available at https://github.com/jagol/gahd., Comment: Accepted at NAACL 2024 (main conference)

The present study asks if ChatGPT4, the version of ChatGPT which uses the language model GPT4, can successfully solve introductory linguistic exams. Previous exam questions of an Introduction to Linguistics course at a German university are used to test this. The exam questions were fed into ChatGPT4 with only minimal preprocessing. The results show that the language model is very successful in the interpretation even of complex and nested tasks. It proved surprisingly successful in the task of broad phonetic transcription, but performed less well in the analysis of morphemes and phrases. In simple cases it performs sufficiently well, but rarer cases, particularly with missing one-to-one correspondence, are currently treated with mixed results. The model is not yet able to deal with visualisations, such as the analysis or generation of syntax trees. More extensive preprocessing, which translates these tasks into text data, allow the model to also solve these tasks successfully., Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, presentation at ISLE (International Society for the Linguistics of English) 7, 2023, Brisbane

In this paper, we present the first application of Native Language Identification (NLI) for the Turkish language. NLI involves predicting the writer's first language by analysing their writing in different languages. While most NLI research has focused on English, our study extends its scope to Turkish. We used the recently constructed Turkish Learner Corpus and employed a combination of three syntactic features (CFG production rules, part-of-speech n-grams, and function words) with L2 texts to demonstrate their effectiveness in this task.

This paper presents the first comprehensive study on automatic readability assessment of Turkish texts. We combine state-of-the-art neural network models with linguistic features at lexical, morphosyntactic, syntactic and discourse levels to develop an advanced readability tool. We evaluate the effectiveness of traditional readability formulas compared to modern automated methods and identify key linguistic features that determine the readability of Turkish texts.

Most research on hate speech detection has focused on English where a sizeable amount of labeled training data is available. However, to expand hate speech detection into more languages, approaches that require minimal training data are needed. In this paper, we test whether natural language inference (NLI) models which perform well in zero- and few-shot settings can benefit hate speech detection performance in scenarios where only a limited amount of labeled data is available in the target language. Our evaluation on five languages demonstrates large performance improvements of NLI fine-tuning over direct fine-tuning in the target language. However, the effectiveness of previous work that proposed intermediate fine-tuning on English data is hard to match. Only in settings where the English training data does not match the test domain, can our customised NLI-formulation outperform intermediate fine-tuning on English. Based on our extensive experiments, we propose a set of recommendations for hate speech detection in languages where minimal labeled training data is available., Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, Accepted at the 7th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH), ACL 2023

Additive manufacturing of shape memory polymers has gained tremendous interest in recent years due to their versatile potential applications in various industries, such as biomedicine and aerospace. However, the polymers' mechanical properties, specifically stiffness and strength, often hinder their use in mechanically demanding applications, e.g. as structural materials. In this work we produced nacre-inspired composites with a covalent adaptable network, which enables fast and mechanically lossless self-healing, reshaping, and shape memory capabilities. We demonstrate a novel direct write 4D-printing strategy to print smart, nacre-inspired, organic-ceramic composites based on alumina platelets and vitrimers with up to 3.3 and 26.7 times higher tensile strength and stiffness, respectively, in comparison to the pristine vitrimer. To the best of our knowledge, we introduce for the first time a single step 4D-printing process for nacre-inspired composites, that exploits suspension spreading to align micron sized alumina platelets along a common plane, and which utilizes solvent evaporation to induce polycondensation of the monomers resulting in a vinylogous urethane vitrimer after extrusion of the suspension. This work presents a facile, direct write 4D-printing strategy at ambient printing conditions, establishing a foundation for adaptive additive manufacturing of smart organic-ceramic composites of interest to various industries.

Native language identification (NLI) is the task of automatically identifying the native language (L1) of an individual based on their language production in a learned language. It is useful for a variety of purposes including marketing, security and educational applications. NLI is usually framed as a multi-label classification task, where numerous designed features are combined to achieve state-of-the-art results. Recently deep generative approach based on transformer decoders (GPT-2) outperformed its counterparts and achieved the best results on the NLI benchmark datasets. We investigate this approach to determine the practical implications compared to traditional state-of-the-art NLI systems. We introduce transformer adapters to address memory limitations and improve training/inference speed to scale NLI applications for production., Comment: Paper accepted to International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing 2022 (ICNLSP 2022)

Standard approaches to hate speech detection rely on sufficient available hate speech annotations. Extending previous work that repurposes natural language inference (NLI) models for zero-shot text classification, we propose a simple approach that combines multiple hypotheses to improve English NLI-based zero-shot hate speech detection. We first conduct an error analysis for vanilla NLI-based zero-shot hate speech detection and then develop four strategies based on this analysis. The strategies use multiple hypotheses to predict various aspects of an input text and combine these predictions into a final verdict. We find that the zero-shot baseline used for the initial error analysis already outperforms commercial systems and fine-tuned BERT-based hate speech detection models on HateCheck. The combination of the proposed strategies further increases the zero-shot accuracy of 79.4% on HateCheck by 7.9 percentage points (pp), and the accuracy of 69.6% on ETHOS by 10.0pp., Comment: Third Workshop on Threat, Aggression and Cyberbullying (COLING 2022)