Traditionally linguists have organized languages of the world as language families modelled as trees. In this work we take a contrarian approach and question the tree-based model that is rather restrictive. For example, the affinity that Sanskrit independently has with languages across Indo-European languages is better illustrated using a network model. We can say the same about inter-relationship between languages in India, where the inter-relationships are better discovered than assumed. To enable such a discovery, in this paper we have made use of instance-based learning techniques to assign language labels to words. We vocalize each word and then classify it by making use of our custom linguistic distance metric of the word relative to training sets containing language labels. We construct the training sets by making use of word clusters and assigning a language and category label to that cluster. Further, we make use of clustering coefficients as a quality metric for our research. We believe our work has the potential to usher in a new era in linguistics. We have limited this work for important languages in India. This work can be further strengthened by applying Adaboost for classification coupled with structural equivalence concepts of social network analysis.
Sentiment polarity classification is perhaps the most widely studied topic. It classifies an opinionated document as expressing a positive or negative opinion. In this paper, using movie review dataset, we perform a comparative study with different single kind linguistic features and the combinations of these features. We find that the classic topic-based classifier(Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machine) do not perform as well on sentiment polarity classification. And we find that with some combination of different linguistic features, the classification accuracy can be boosted a lot. We give…
Intent classification is a task in spoken language understanding. An intent classification system is usually implemented as a pipeline process, with a speech recognition module followed by text processing that classifies the intents. There are also studies of end-to-end system that takes acoustic features as input and classifies the intents directly. Such systems don't take advantage of relevant linguistic information, and suffer from limited training data. In this work, we propose a novel intent classification framework that employs acoustic features extracted from a pretrained speech recogni…
Sentiment understanding has been a long-term goal of AI in the past decades. This paper deals with sentence-level sentiment classification. Though a variety of neural network models have been proposed very recently, however, previous models either depend on expensive phrase-level annotation, whose performance drops substantially when trained with only sentence-level annotation; or do not fully employ linguistic resources (e.g., sentiment lexicons, negation words, intensity words), thus not being able to produce linguistically coherent representations. In this paper, we propose simple models tr…
Winterlight Labs；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）
Fine-tuned Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based sequence classification models have proven to be effective for detecting Alzheimer's Disease (AD) from transcripts of human speech. However, previous research shows it is possible to improve BERT's performance on various tasks by augmenting the model with additional information. In this work, we use probing tasks as introspection techniques to identify linguistic information not well-represented in various layers of BERT, but important for the AD detection task. We supplement these linguistic features in which repr…
National Engineering Laboratory for Speech and Language Information Processing（语音及语言信息处理国家工程实验室）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Topic classification systems on spoken documents usually consist of two modules: an automatic speech recognition (ASR) module to convert speech into text and a text topic classification (TTC) module to predict the topic class from the decoded text. In this paper, instead of using the ASR transcripts, the fusion of deep acoustic and linguistic features is used for topic classification on spoken documents. More specifically, a conventional CTC-based acoustic model (AM) using phonemes as output units is first trained, and the outputs of the layer before the linear phoneme classifier in the traine…
Tata Consultancy Services Limited（塔塔咨询服务有限公司）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
A classification scheme of a scientific subject gives an overview of its body of knowledge. It can also be used to facilitate access to research articles and other materials related to the subject. For example, the ACM Computing Classification System (CCS) is used in the ACM Digital Library search interface and also for indexing computer science papers. We observed that a comprehensive classification system like CCS or Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC) does not exist for Computational Linguistics (CL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). We propose a classification scheme -- CLICKER f…
To consider Hawrami and Zaza (Zazaki) standalone languages or dialects of a language have been discussed and debated for a while among linguists active in studying Iranian languages. The question of whether those languages/dialects belong to the Kurdish language or if they are independent descendants of Iranian languages was answered by MacKenzie (1961). However, a majority of people who speak the dialects are against that answer. Their disapproval mainly seems to be based on the sociological, cultural, and historical relationship among the speakers of the dialects. While the case of Hawrami a…
The Education University of Hong Kong（香港教育大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）
Eye movements are known to reflect cognitive processes in reading, and psychological reading research has shown that eye gaze patterns differ between readers with and without dyslexia. In recent years, researchers have attempted to classify readers with dyslexia based on their eye movements using Support Vector Machines (SVMs). However, these approaches (i) are based on highly aggregated features averaged over all words read by a participant, thus disregarding the sequential nature of the eye movements, and (ii) do not consider the linguistic stimulus and its interaction with the reader's eye …
University of Wolverhampton（伍尔弗汉普顿大学）；Saarland University（萨尔大学）
In this paper we describe the use of text classification methods to investigate genre and method variation in an English - German translation corpus. For this purpose we use linguistically motivated features representing texts using a combination of part-of-speech tags arranged in bigrams, trigrams, and 4-grams. The classification method used in this paper is a Bayesian classifier with Laplace smoothing. We use the output of the classifiers to carry out an extensive feature analysis on the main difference between genres and methods of translation.
We study the problem of interpreting trained classification models in the setting of linguistic data sets. Leveraging a parse tree, we propose to assign least-squares based importance scores to each word of an instance by exploiting syntactic constituency structure. We establish an axiomatic characterization of these importance scores by relating them to the Banzhaf value in coalitional game theory. Based on these importance scores, we develop a principled method for detecting and quantifying interactions between words in a sentence. We demonstrate that the proposed method can aid in interpret…
University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；Bloomberg（彭博）；Ghent University（根特大学）
Bragging is a speech act employed with the goal of constructing a favorable self-image through positive statements about oneself. It is widespread in daily communication and especially popular in social media, where users aim to build a positive image of their persona directly or indirectly. In this paper, we present the first large scale study of bragging in computational linguistics, building on previous research in linguistics and pragmatics. To facilitate this, we introduce a new publicly available data set of tweets annotated for bragging and their types. We empirically evaluate different…
State University of New York at Albany（纽约州立大学奥尔巴尼分校）；College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity（应急准备、国土安全与网络安全学院）
Over the past couple of years, the topic of "fake news" and its influence over people's opinions has become a growing cause for concern. Although the spread of disinformation on the Internet is not a new phenomenon, the widespread use of social media has exacerbated its effects, providing more channels for dissemination and the potential to "go viral." Nowhere was this more evident than during the 2016 United States Presidential Election. Although the current of disinformation spread via trolls, bots, and hyperpartisan media outlets likely reinforced existing biases rather than sway undecided …
Is AI Catching Up to Human Expression? Exploring Emotion, Personality, Authorship, and Linguistic Style in English and Arabic with Six Large Language Models
College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University（计算机与信息科学学院，沙特阿拉伯国王沙德大学）
There has been a long standing interest in understanding `Social Influence' both in Social Sciences and in Computational Linguistics. In this paper, we present a novel approach to study and measure interpersonal influence in daily interactions. Motivated by the basic principles of influence, we attempt to identify indicative linguistic features of the posts in an online knitting community. We present the scheme used to operationalize and label the posts with indicator features. Experiments with the identified features show an improvement in the classification accuracy of influence by 3.15%. Ou…
Online reviews play an integral part for success or failure of businesses. Prior to purchasing services or goods, customers first review the online comments submitted by previous customers. However, it is possible to superficially boost or hinder some businesses through posting counterfeit and fake reviews. This paper explores a natural language processing approach to identify fake reviews. We present a detailed analysis of linguistic features for distinguishing fake and trustworthy online reviews. We study 15 linguistic features and measure their significance and importance towards the classi…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；Surgical Safety Technologies（外科安全技术公司）
There is increasing interest in assessing the linguistic knowledge encoded in neural representations. A popular approach is to attach a diagnostic classifier -- or "probe" -- to perform supervised classification from internal representations. However, how to select a good probe is in debate. Hewitt and Liang (2019) showed that a high performance on diagnostic classification itself is insufficient, because it can be attributed to either "the representation being rich in knowledge", or "the probe learning the task", which Pimentel et al. (2020) challenged. We show this dichotomy is valid informa…
Deep learning approaches for sentiment classification do not fully exploit sentiment linguistic knowledge. In this paper, we propose a Multi-sentiment-resource Enhanced Attention Network (MEAN) to alleviate the problem by integrating three kinds of sentiment linguistic knowledge (e.g., sentiment lexicon, negation words, intensity words) into the deep neural network via attention mechanisms. By using various types of sentiment resources, MEAN utilizes sentiment-relevant information from different representation subspaces, which makes it more effective to capture the overall semantics of the sen…
The use of linguistic typological resources in natural language processing has been steadily gaining more popularity. It has been observed that the use of typological information, often combined with distributed language representations, leads to significantly more powerful models. While linguistic typology representations from various resources have mostly been used for conditioning the models, there has been relatively little attention on predicting features from these resources from the input data. In this paper we investigate whether the various linguistic features from World Atlas of Lang…
The rise in popularity and ubiquity of Twitter has made sentiment analysis of tweets an important and well-covered area of research. However, the 140 character limit imposed on tweets makes it hard to use standard linguistic methods for sentiment classification. On the other hand, what tweets lack in structure they make up with sheer volume and rich metadata. This metadata includes geolocation, temporal and author information. We hypothesize that sentiment is dependent on all these contextual factors. Different locations, times and authors have different emotional valences. In this paper, we e…
The hidden nature and the limited accessibility of the Dark Web, combined with the lack of public datasets in this domain, make it difficult to study its inherent characteristics such as linguistic properties. Previous works on text classification of Dark Web domain have suggested that the use of deep neural models may be ineffective, potentially due to the linguistic differences between the Dark and Surface Webs. However, not much work has been done to uncover the linguistic characteristics of the Dark Web. This paper introduces CoDA, a publicly available Dark Web dataset consisting of 10000 …
Employing self-supervised learning models for cross-linguistic child speech maturity classification
Dept. of Computer Science, UCLA, USA（UCLA计算机科学系）；Dept. of Linguistics, UCLA, USA（UCLA语言学系）；Dept. of Linguistics, Stanford University, USA（斯坦福大学语言学系）；Dept. of Communication, UCLA, USA（UCLA传播学系）；Department of Computer Science George Washington University, USA（乔治华盛顿大学计算机科学系）；Département d’études cognitives, ENS, France（法兰西综合理工学院认知研究系）
This paper addresses the task of user gender classification in social media, with an application to Twitter. The approach automatically predicts gender by leveraging observable information such as the tweet behavior, linguistic content of the user's Twitter feed and the celebrities followed by the user. This paper first evaluates linguistic content based features using LIWC dictionary and popular neighborhood features using Wikipedia and Freebase. Then augments both features which yielded a significant increase in the accuracy for gender prediction. Results show that rich linguistic features c…
Exploring Linguistic Properties of Monolingual BERTs with Typological Classification among Languages
University of Rome Tor Vergata（罗马第二大学）；University for foreigners of Siena（锡耶纳外国人大学）；Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome（罗马校园生物医学大学）；Idiap Research Institute（伊迪亚普研究所）
There is an increasing amount of evidence that in cases with little or no data in a target language, training on a different language can yield surprisingly good results. However, currently there are no established guidelines for choosing the training (source) language. In attempt to solve this issue we thoroughly analyze a state-of-the-art multilingual model and try to determine what impacts good transfer between languages. As opposed to the majority of multilingual NLP literature, we don't only train on English, but on a group of almost 30 languages. We show that looking at particular syntac…
This paper describes team LCP-RIT's submission to the SemEval-2021 Task 1: Lexical Complexity Prediction (LCP). The task organizers provided participants with an augmented version of CompLex (Shardlow et al., 2020), an English multi-domain dataset in which words in context were annotated with respect to their complexity using a five point Likert scale. Our system uses logistic regression and a wide range of linguistic features (e.g. psycholinguistic features, n-grams, word frequency, POS tags) to predict the complexity of single words in this dataset. We analyze the impact of different linguis…
A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to learn new concepts purely from language. Several recent approaches have explored training machine learning models via natural language supervision. However, these approaches fall short in leveraging linguistic quantifiers (such as 'always' or 'rarely') and mimicking humans in compositionally learning complex tasks. Here, we present LaSQuE, a method that can learn zero-shot classifiers from language explanations by using three new strategies - (1) modeling the semantics of linguistic quantifiers in explanations (including exploiting ordinal str…
To investigate the role of linguistic knowledge in data augmentation (DA) for Natural Language Processing (NLP), we designed two adapted DA programs and applied them to LCQMC (a Large-scale Chinese Question Matching Corpus) for a binary Chinese question matching classification task. The two DA programs produce augmented texts by five simple text editing operations (or DA techniques), largely irrespective of language generation rules, but one is enhanced with a pre-trained n-gram language model to fuse it with prior linguistic knowledge. We then trained four neural network models (BOW, CNN, LST…
BITS Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus（Birla技术与科学学院皮拉尼校区 K.K. Birla果阿校区）；IEMN Université de Lille（里尔大学微电子与纳米技术研究所）
Alzheimers disease is a fatal progressive brain disorder that worsens with time. It is high time we have inexpensive and quick clinical diagnostic techniques for early detection and care. In previous studies, various Machine Learning techniques and Pre-trained Deep Learning models have been used in conjunction with the extraction of various acoustic and linguistic features. Our study focuses on three models for the classification task in the ADReSS (The Alzheimers Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech) 2021 Challenge. We use the well-balanced dataset provided by the ADReSS Challenge …
By leveraging large amounts of product data collected across hundreds of live e-commerce websites, we construct 1000 unique classification tasks that share similarly-structured input data, comprised of both text and images. These classification tasks focus on learning the product hierarchy of different e-commerce websites, causing many of them to be correlated. Adopting a multi-modal transformer model, we solve these tasks in unison using multi-task learning (MTL). Extensive experiments are presented over an initial 100-task dataset to reveal best practices for "large-scale MTL" (i.e., MTL wit…
Recent studies have shown that neural models can achieve high performance on several sequence labelling/tagging problems without the explicit use of linguistic features such as part-of-speech (POS) tags. These models are trained only using the character-level and the word embedding vectors as inputs. Others have shown that linguistic features can improve the performance of neural models on tasks such as chunking and named entity recognition (NER). However, the change in performance depends on the degree of semantic relatedness between the linguistic features and the target task; in some instan…
Noisy labels in large E-commerce product data (i.e., product items are placed into incorrect categories) are a critical issue for product categorization task because they are unavoidable, non-trivial to remove and degrade prediction performance significantly. Training a product title classification model which is robust to noisy labels in the data is very important to make product classification applications more practical. In this paper, we study the impact of instance-dependent noise to performance of product title classification by comparing our data denoising algorithm and different noise-…
SYNTAGMA is a rule-based parsing system, structured on two levels: a general parsing engine and a language specific grammar. The parsing engine is a language independent program, while grammar and language specific rules and resources are given as text files, consisting in a list of constituent structuresand a lexical database with word sense related features and constraints. Since its theoretical background is principally Tesniere's Elements de syntaxe, SYNTAGMA's grammar emphasizes the role of argument structure (valency) in constraint satisfaction, and allows also horizontal bounds, for ins…
Neural methods for SA have led to quantitative improvements over previous approaches, but these advances are not always accompanied with a thorough analysis of the qualitative differences. Therefore, it is not clear what outstanding conceptual challenges for sentiment analysis remain. In this work, we attempt to discover what challenges still prove a problem for sentiment classifiers for English and to provide a challenging dataset. We collect the subset of sentences that an (oracle) ensemble of state-of-the-art sentiment classifiers misclassify and then annotate them for 18 linguistic and par…
University of Electronics Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
BERT achieves remarkable results in text classification tasks, it is yet not fully exploited, since only the last layer is used as a representation output for downstream classifiers. The most recent studies on the nature of linguistic features learned by BERT, suggest that different layers focus on different kinds of linguistic features. We propose a CNN-Enhanced Transformer-Encoder model which is trained on top of fixed BERT $[CLS]$ representations from all layers, employing Convolutional Neural Networks to generate QKV feature maps inside the Transformer-Encoder, instead of linear projection…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Ubiquiti, Inc.（优比快公司）
This paper presents a comparison of classification methods for linguistic typology for the purpose of expanding an extensive, but sparse language resource: the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) (Dryer and Haspelmath, 2013). We experimented with a variety of regression and nearest-neighbor methods for use in classification over a set of 325 languages and six syntactic rules drawn from WALS. To classify each rule, we consider the typological features of the other five rules; linguistic features extracted from a word-aligned Bible in each language; and genealogical features (genus and fam…
This work addresses the problem of measuring how many languages a person "effectively" speaks given that some of the languages are close to each other. In other words, to assign a meaningful number to her language portfolio. Intuition says that someone who speaks fluently Spanish and Portuguese is linguistically less proficient compared to someone who speaks fluently Spanish and Chinese since it takes more effort for a native Spanish speaker to learn Chinese than Portuguese. As the number of languages grows and their proficiency levels vary, it gets even more complicated to assign a score to a…
Whose LLM is it Anyway? Linguistic Comparison and LLM Attribution for GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and Bard
Department of Information Science（信息科学系）；Bar Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；Department of Information Systems（信息系统系）；University of Haifa（海法大学）；Department of Computing（计算机系）；Jonkoping University（约翰·科普林大学）
Neural network based models are a very powerful tool for creating word embeddings, the objective of these models is to group similar words together. These embeddings have been used as features to improve results in various applications such as document classification, named entity recognition, etc. Neural language models are able to learn word representations which have been used to capture semantic shifts across time and geography. The objective of this paper is to first identify and then visualize how words change meaning in different text corpus. We will train a neural language model on tex…
