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Prior research on the impact of genre on cross-lingual dependency parsing has suggested that genre is an important signal. However, these studies suffer from a scarcity of reliable data for multiple genres and languages. While Universal Dependencies (UD), the only available large-scale resource for cross-lingual dependency parsing, contains data from diverse genres, the documentation of genre labels is missing, and there are multiple inconsistencies. This makes studies of the impact of genres difficult to design. To address this, we present a new dataset, UD-MULTIGENRE, where 17 genres are defined and instance-level annotations of these are applied to a subset of UD data, covering 38 languages. It provides a rich ground for research related to text genre from a multilingual perspective. Utilizing this dataset, we can overcome the data shortage that hindered previous research and reproduce experiments from earlier studies with an improved setup. We revisit a previous study that used genre-based clusters and show that the clusters for most target genres provide a mix of genres. We compare training data selection based on clustering and gold genre labels and provide an analysis of the results. The dataset is publicly available. (https://github.com/UppsalaNLP/UD-MULTIGENRE)

The Dagstuhl Seminar 23191 entitled “Universals of Linguistic Idiosyncrasy in MultilingualComputational Linguistics” took place May 7–12, 2023. Its main objectives were to deepenthe understanding of language universals and linguistic idiosyncrasy, to harness idiosyncrasyin treebanking frameworks in computationally tractable ways, and to promote a higher degreeof convergence in universalism-driven initiatives to natural language morphology, syntax andsemantics.Most of the seminar was devoted to working group discussions, covering topics such as:representations below and beyond word boundaries; annotation of particular kinds of constructions;semantic representations, in particular for multiword expressions; finding idiosyncrasy in corpora;large language models; and methodological issues, community interactions and cross-communityinitiatives. Thanks to the collaboration of linguistic typologists, NLP experts and experts indifferent annotation frameworks, significant progress was made towards the theoretical, practicaland networking objectives of the seminar.

We present version 1.3 of the PARSEME multilingual corpus annotated with verbal multiword expressions. Since the previous version, new languages have joined the undertaking of creating such a resource, some of the already existing corpora have been enriched with new annotated texts, while others have been enhanced in various ways. The PARSEME multilingual corpus represents 26 languages now. All monolingual corpora therein use Universal Dependencies v.2 tagset. They are (re-)split observing the PARSEME v.1.2 standard, which puts impact on unseen VMWEs. With the current iteration, the corpus release process has been detached from shared tasks; instead, a process for continuous improvement and systematic releases has been introduced.

We investigate the effectiveness of multilingual automatic speech recognition models for Scandinavian languages by further fine-tuning a Swedish model on Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. We first explore zero-shot models, which perform poorly across the three languages. However, we show that a multilingual model based on a strong Swedish model, further fine-tuned on all three languages, performs well for Norwegian and Danish, with a relatively low decrease in the performance for Swedish. With a language classification module, we improve the performance of the multilingual model even further.

Extracting statements about causality from text documents is a challenging task in the absence of annotated training data. We create a search system for causal statements about user-specified concepts by combining pattern matching of causal connectives with semantic similarity ranking, using a language model fine-tuned for semantic textual similarity. Preliminary experiments on a small test set from Swedish governmental reports show promising results in comparison to two simple baselines.

In this study, we aim to find a parser for accurately identifying different types of subordinate clauses, and related phenomena, in 19th–20th-century Swedish literature. Since no test set is available for parsing from this time period, we propose a lightweight annotation scheme for annotating a single relation of interest per sentence. We train a variety of parsers for Swedish and compare evaluations on standard modern test sets and our targeted test set. We find clear trends in which parser types perform best on the standard test sets, but that performance is considerably more varied on the targeted test set. We believe that our proposed annotation scheme can be useful for complementing standard evaluations, with a low annotation effort., Fictional prose and language change. The role of colloquialization in the history of Swedish 1830–1930

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are challenging and pervasive phenomena whose idiosyncratic properties show notably at the levels of lexicon, morphology, and syntax. Thus, they should best be annotated jointly with morphosyntax. In this position paper we discuss two multilingual initiatives, Universal Dependencies and PARSEME, addressing these annotation layers in cross-lingually unified ways. We compare the annotation principles of these initiatives with respect to MWEs, and we put forward a roadmap towards their gradual unification. The expected outcomes are more consistent treebanking and higher universality in modeling idiosyncrasy.

The Dagstuhl Seminar 23191 entitled "Universals of Linguistic Idiosyncrasy in Multilingual Computational Linguistics" took place May 7-12, 2023. Its main objectives were to deepen the understanding of language universals and linguistic idiosyncrasy, to harness idiosyncrasy in treebanking frameworks in computationally tractable ways, and to promote a higher degree of convergence in universalism-driven initiatives to natural language morphology, syntax and semantics. Most of the seminar was devoted to working group discussions, covering topics such as: representations below and beyond word boundaries; annotation of particular kinds of constructions; semantic representations, in particular for multiword expressions; finding idiosyncrasy in corpora; large language models; and methodological issues, community interactions and cross-community initiatives. Thanks to the collaboration of linguistic typologists, NLP experts and experts in different annotation frameworks, significant progress was made towards the theoretical, practical and networking objectives of the seminar.

Causality detection is the task of extracting information about causal relations from text. It is an important task for different types of document analysis, including political impact assessment. We present two new data sets for causality detection in Swedish. The first data set is annotated with binary relevance judgments, indicating whether a sentence contains causality information or not. In the second data set, sentence pairs are ranked for relevance with respect to a causality query, containing a specific hypothesized cause and/or effect. Both data sets are carefully curated and mainly intended for use as test data. We describe the data sets and their annotation, including detailed annotation guidelines. In addition, we present pilot experiments on cross-lingual zero-shot and few-shot causality detection, using training data from English and German., Datorlabbet resultaten i staten

We present the Uppsala University system for SemEval-2022 Task 1: Comparing Dictionaries and Word Embeddings (CODWOE). We explore the performance of multilingual reverse dictionaries as well as the possibility of utilizing annotated data in other languages to improve the quality of a reverse dictionary in the target language. We mainly focus on characterbased embeddings. In our main experiment, we train multilingual models by combining the training data from multiple languages. In an additional experiment, using resources beyond the shared task, we use the training data in Russian and French to improve the English reverse dictionary using unsupervised embeddings alignment and machine translation. The results show that multilingual models occasionally but not consistently can outperform the monolingual baselines. In addition, we demonstrate an improvement of an English reverse dictionary using translated entries from the Russian training data set.

In this paper, we describe version 2.0 of the SLaNDa corpus. SLäNDa, the Swedish Literary corpus of Narrative and Dialogue, now contains excerpts from 19 novels, written between 1809–1940. The main focus of the SLaNDa corpus is to distinguish between direct speech and the main narrative. In order to isolate the narrative, we also annotate everything else which does not belong to the narrative, such as thoughts, quotations, and letters. SLäNDa version 2.0 has a slightly updated annotation scheme from version 1.0. In addition, we added new texts from eleven authors and performed quality control on the previous version. We are specifically interested in different ways of marking speech segments, such as quotation marks, dashes, or no marking at all. To allow a detailed evaluation of this aspect, we added dedicated test sets to SLaNDa for these different types of speech marking. In a pilot experiment, we explore the impact of typographic speech marking by using these test sets, as well as artificially stripping the training data of speech markers., Fictional prose and language change. The role of colloquialization in the history of Swedish 1830–1930

Finding causal relations in text is an important task for many types of textual analysis. It is a challenging task, especially for the many languages with no or only little annotated training data available. To overcome this issue, we explore cross-lingual methods. Our main focus is on Swedish, for which we have a limited amount of data, and where we explore transfer from English and German. We also present additional results for German with English as a source language. We explore both a zero-shot setting without any target training data, and a few-shot setting with a small amount of target data. An additional challenge is the fact that the annotation schemes for the different data sets differ, and we discuss how we can address this issue. Moreover, we explore the impact of different types of sentence representations. We find that we have the best results for Swedish with German as a source language, for which we have a rather small but compatible data set. We are able to take advantage of a limited amount of noisy Swedish training data, but only if we balance its classes. In addition we find that the newer transformer-based representations can make better use of target language data, but that a representation based on recurrent neural networks is surprisingly competitive in the zero-shot setting., Datorlabbet resultaten i staten

Exploring aspects of sentential meaning that are implicit or underspecified in context is important for sentence understanding. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture based on mentions for revision requirements detection. The goal is to improve understandability, addressing some types of revisions, especially for the Replaced Pronoun type. We show that our mention-based system can predict replaced pronouns well on the mention-level. However, our combined sentence-level system does not improve on the sentence-level BERT baseline. We also present additional contrastive systems, and show results for each type of edit.

We discuss a set of methods for the creation of IESTAC: a English-Italian speech and text parallel corpus designed for the training of end-to-end speech-to-text machine translation models and publicly released as part of this work. We first mapped English LibriVox audiobooks and their corresponding English Gutenberg Project e-books to Italian e-books with a set of three complementary methods. Then we aligned the English and the Italian texts using both traditional Gale-Church based alignment methods and a recently proposed tool to perform bilingual sentences alignment computing the cosine similarity of multilingual sentence embeddings. Finally, we forced the alignment between the English audiobooks and the English side of our textual parallel corpus with a text-to-speech and dynamic time warping based forced alignment tool. For each step, we provide the reader with a critical discussion based on detailed evaluation and comparison of the results of the different methods.

We show how we can adapt parsing to low-resource domains by combining treebanks across languages for a parser model with treebank embeddings. We demonstrate how we can take advantage of in-domain treebanks from other languages, and show that this is especially useful when only out-of-domain treebanks are available for the target language. The method is also extended to low-resource languages by using out-of-domain treebanks from related languages. Two parameter-free methods for applying treebank embeddings at test time are proposed, which give competitive results to tuned methods when applied to Twitter data and transcribed speech. This gives us a method for selecting treebanks and training a parser targeted at any combination of domain and language.

There is a growing interest in investigating what neural NLP models learn about language. A prominent open question is the question of whether or not it is necessary to model hierarchical structure. We present a linguistic investigation of a neural parser adding insights to this question. We look at transitivity and agreement information of auxiliary verb constructions (AVCs) in comparison to finite main verbs (FMVs). This comparison is motivated by theoretical work in dependency grammar and in particular the work of Tesnière (1959), where AVCs and FMVs are both instances of a nucleus, the basic unit of syntax. An AVC is a dissociated nucleus; it consists of at least two words, and an FMV is its non-dissociated counterpart, consisting of exactly one word. We suggest that the representation of AVCs and FMVs should capture similar information. We use diagnostic classifiers to probe agreement and transitivity information in vectors learned by a transition-based neural parser in four typologically different languages. We find that the parser learns different information about AVCs and FMVs if only sequential models (BiLSTMs) are used in the architecture but similar information when a recursive layer is used. We find explanations for why this is the case by looking closely at how information is learned in the network and looking at what happens with different dependency representations of AVCs. We conclude that there may be benefits to using a recursive layer in dependency parsing and that we have not yet found the best way to integrate it in our parsers.

We present an analysis of a number of coreference phenomena in English-Croatian human and machine translations. The aim is to shed light on the differences in the way these structurally different languages make use of discourse information and provide insights for discourse-aware machine translation system development. The phenomena are automatically identified in parallel data using annotation produced by parsers and word alignment tools, enabling us to pinpoint patterns of interest in both languages. We make the analysis more fine-grained by including three corpora pertaining to three different registers. In a second step, we create a test set with the challenging linguistic constructions and use it to evaluate the performance of three MT systems. We show that both SMT and NMT systems struggle with handling these discourse phenomena, even though NMT tends to perform somewhat better than SMT. By providing an overview of patterns frequently occurring in actual language use, as well as by pointing out the weaknesses of current MT systems that commonly mistranslate them, we hope to contribute to the effort of resolving the issue of discourse phenomena in MT applications.