This paper measures similarity both within and between 84 language varieties across nine languages. These corpora are drawn from digital sources (the web and tweets), allowing us to evaluate whether such geo-referenced corpora are reliable for modelling linguistic variation. The basic idea is that, if each source adequately represents a single underlying language variety, then the similarity between these sources should be stable across all languages and countries. The paper shows that there is a consistent agreement between these sources using frequency-based corpus similarity measures. This provides further evidence that digital geo-referenced corpora consistently represent local language varieties.
This paper develops a construction-based dialectometry capable of identifying previously unknown constructions and measuring the degree to which a given construction is subject to regional variation. The central idea is to learn a grammar of constructions (a CxG) using construction grammar induction and then to use these constructions as features for dialectometry. This offers a method for measuring the aggregate similarity between regional CxGs without limiting in advance the set of constructions subject to variation. The learned CxG is evaluated on how well it describes held-out test corpora…
Calculating the semantic similarity between sentences is a long dealt problem in the area of natural language processing. The semantic analysis field has a crucial role to play in the research related to the text analytics. The semantic similarity differs as the domain of operation differs. In this paper, we present a methodology which deals with this issue by incorporating semantic similarity and corpus statistics. To calculate the semantic similarity between words and sentences, the proposed method follows an edge-based approach using a lexical database. The methodology can be applied in a v…
The course description provided by instructors is an essential piece of information as it defines what is expected from the instructor and what he/she is going to deliver during a particular course. One of the key components of a course description is the Learning Objectives section. The contents of this section are used by program managers who are tasked to compare and match two different courses during the development of Transfer Agreements between various institutions. This research introduces the development of semantic similarity algorithms to calculate the similarity between two learning…
This paper experiments with frequency-based corpus similarity measures across 39 languages using a register prediction task. The goal is to quantify (i) the distance between different corpora from the same language and (ii) the homogeneity of individual corpora. Both of these goals are essential for measuring how well corpus-based linguistic analysis generalizes from one dataset to another. The problem is that previous work has focused on Indo-European languages, raising the question of whether these measures are able to provide robust generalizations across diverse languages. This paper uses …
The study of language variation examines how language varies between and within different groups of speakers, shedding light on how we use language to construct identities and how social contexts affect language use. A common method is to identify instances of a certain linguistic feature - say, the zero copula construction - in a corpus, and analyze the feature's distribution across speakers, topics, and other variables, to either gain a qualitative understanding of the feature's function or systematically measure variation. In this paper, we explore the challenging task of automatic morphosy…
A German Corpus for Text Similarity Detection Tasks
Université d’Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse（阿维尼翁大学）；École Polytechnique de Montréal（蒙特利尔理工学院）；Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México（墨西哥国立自治大学）；University of Applied Sciences Fulda（富尔达应用技术大学）
DINFO, University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学DINFO学院）；DIISM, University of Siena（锡耶纳大学DIISM学院）
Italian is a Romance language that has its roots in Vulgar Latin. The birth of the modern Italian started in Tuscany around the 14th century, and it is mainly attributed to the works of Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Boccaccio, who are among the most acclaimed authors of the medieval age in Tuscany. However, Italy has been characterized by a high variety of dialects, which are often loosely related to each other, due to the past fragmentation of the territory. Italian has absorbed influences from many of these dialects, as also from other languages due to dominion of portions…
Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院）；Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth（达特茅斯盖泽尔医学院）
Objective: Currently, a major limitation for natural language processing (NLP) analyses in clinical applications is that a concept can be referenced in various forms across different texts. This paper introduces Multi-Ontology Refined Embeddings (MORE), a novel hybrid framework for incorporating domain knowledge from multiple ontologies into a distributional semantic model, learned from a corpus of clinical text. Materials and Methods: We use the RadCore and MIMIC-III free-text datasets for the corpus-based component of MORE. For the ontology-based part, we use the Medical Subject Headings (Me…
Fake news detection is a challenging task aiming to reduce human time and effort to check the truthfulness of news. Automated approaches to combat fake news, however, are limited by the lack of labeled benchmark datasets, especially in languages other than English. Moreover, many publicly available corpora have specific limitations that make them difficult to use. To address this problem, our contribution is threefold. First, we propose a new, publicly available German topic related corpus for fake news detection. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first corpus of its kind. In this rega…
Plagiarism means taking another person's work and not giving any credit to them for it. Plagiarism is one of the most serious problems in academia and among researchers. Even though there are multiple tools available to detect plagiarism in a document but most of them are domain-specific and designed to work in English texts, but plagiarism is not limited to a single language only. Bengali is the most widely spoken language of Bangladesh and the second most spoken language in India with 300 million native speakers and 37 million second-language speakers. Plagiarism detection requires a large c…
University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；University of Tyumen（秋明大学）
In this paper, we present a distributional word embedding model trained on one of the largest available Russian corpora: Araneum Russicum Maximum (over 10 billion words crawled from the web). We compare this model to the model trained on the Russian National Corpus (RNC). The two corpora are much different in their size and compilation procedures. We test these differences by evaluating the trained models against the Russian part of the Multilingual SimLex999 semantic similarity dataset. We detect and describe numerous issues in this dataset and publish a new corrected version. Aside from the …
Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）；Telekom Innovation Laboratories（德国电信创新实验室）
In the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), we revisit the well-known word embedding algorithm word2vec. Word embeddings identify words by vectors such that the words' distributional similarity is captured. Unexpectedly, besides semantic similarity even relational similarity has been shown to be captured in word embeddings generated by word2vec, whence two questions arise. Firstly, which kind of relations are representable in continuous space and secondly, how are relations built. In order to tackle these questions we propose a bottom-up point of view. We call generating input text for …
University of Massachusetts, Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
Phrase representations derived from BERT often do not exhibit complex phrasal compositionality, as the model relies instead on lexical similarity to determine semantic relatedness. In this paper, we propose a contrastive fine-tuning objective that enables BERT to produce more powerful phrase embeddings. Our approach (Phrase-BERT) relies on a dataset of diverse phrasal paraphrases, which is automatically generated using a paraphrase generation model, as well as a large-scale dataset of phrases in context mined from the Books3 corpus. Phrase-BERT outperforms baselines across a variety of phrase-…
College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学人文与社会科学学院）；Carnegie Mellon University Qatar（卡内基梅隆大学卡塔尔分校）
In this paper, we present Arap-Tweet, which is a large-scale and multi-dialectal corpus of Tweets from 11 regions and 16 countries in the Arab world representing the major Arabic dialectal varieties. To build this corpus, we collected data from Twitter and we provided a team of experienced annotators with annotation guidelines that they used to annotate the corpus for age categories, gender, and dialectal variety. During the data collection effort, we based our search on distinctive keywords that are specific to the different Arabic dialects and we also validated the location using Twitter API…
Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS), LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学信息与语言处理中心（CIS））；Research Center Deutscher Sprachatlas, Philipps University Marburg（马尔堡菲利普大学德国语言地图集研究中心）
With more than 7000 languages worldwide, multilingual natural language processing (NLP) is essential both from an academic and commercial perspective. Researching typological properties of languages is fundamental for progress in multilingual NLP. Examples include assessing language similarity for effective transfer learning, injecting inductive biases into machine learning models or creating resources such as dictionaries and inflection tables. We provide ParCourE, an online tool that allows to browse a word-aligned parallel corpus, covering 1334 languages. We give evidence that this is usefu…
Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School（北京大学深圳研究生院）
We present MedSim, a novel semantic SIMilarity method based on public well-established bio-MEDical knowledge graphs (KGs) and large-scale corpus, to study the therapeutic substitution of antibiotics. Besides hierarchy and corpus of KGs, MedSim further interprets medicine characteristics by constructing multi-dimensional medicine-specific feature vectors. Dataset of 528 antibiotic pairs scored by doctors is applied for evaluation and MedSim has produced statistically significant improvement over other semantic similarity methods. Furthermore, some promising applications of MedSim in drug substi…
This paper describes a web-based corpus of global language use with a focus on how this corpus can be used for data-driven language mapping. First, the corpus provides a representation of where national varieties of major languages are used (e.g., English, Arabic, Russian) together with consistently collected data for each variety. Second, the paper evaluates a language identification model that supports more local languages with smaller sample sizes than alternative off-the-shelf models. Improved language identification is essential for moving beyond majority languages. Given the focus on lan…
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；University of Rhode Island（罗德岛大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）；Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；Dicta: The Israel Center for Text Analysis（以色列文本分析中心（Dicta））；University of Vienna（维也纳大学）
Arabic is a widely-spoken language with a long and rich history, but existing corpora and language technology focus mostly on modern Arabic and its varieties. Therefore, studying the history of the language has so far been mostly limited to manual analyses on a small scale. In this work, we present a large-scale historical corpus of the written Arabic language, spanning 1400 years. We describe our efforts to clean and process this corpus using Arabic NLP tools, including the identification of reused text. We study the history of the Arabic language using a novel automatic periodization algorit…
MPI for Empirical Aesthetics（马克斯·普朗克经验美学研究所）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Due to its semantic succinctness and novelty of expression, poetry is a great test bed for semantic change analysis. However, so far there is a scarcity of large diachronic corpora. Here, we provide a large corpus of German poetry which consists of about 75k poems with more than 11 million tokens, with poems ranging from the 16th to early 20th century. We then track semantic change in this corpus by investigating the rise of tropes (`love is magic') over time and detecting change points of meaning, which we find to occur particularly within the German Romantic period. Additionally, through sel…
University of Chittagong（吉大港大学）；University of Saarland（萨尔大学）
Stemming is a process that can be utilized to trim inflected words to stem or root form. It is useful for enhancing the retrieval effectiveness, especially for text search in order to solve the mismatch problems. Previous research on Bangla stemming mostly relied on eliminating multiple suffixes from a solitary word through a recursive rule based procedure to recover progressively applicable relative root. Our proposed system has enhanced the aforementioned exploration by actualizing one of the stemming algorithms called N-gram stemming. By utilizing an affiliation measure called dice coeffici…
Urgench State University（乌尔根奇国立大学）；National University of Uzbekistan named after Mirzo Ulugbek（米尔佐·乌卢格别克国立乌兹别克斯坦大学）
One of the major challenges of an educational system is choosing appropriate content considering pupils' age and intellectual potential. In this article the experiment of primary school grades (from 1st to 4th grades) is considered for automatically determining the correspondence of an educational materials recommended for pupils by using the School corpus where it includes the dataset of 25 school textbooks confirmed by the Ministry of preschool and school education of the Republic of Uzbekistan. In this case, TF-IDF scores of the texts are determined, they are converted into a vector represe…
University of Louvain（鲁汶大学）；University Paris Diderot（巴黎狄德罗大学）；University of Geneva（日内瓦大学）
We present DisMo, a multi-level annotator for spoken language corpora that integrates part-of-speech tagging with basic disfluency detection and annotation, and multi-word unit recognition. DisMo is a hybrid system that uses a combination of lexical resources, rules, and statistical models based on Conditional Random Fields (CRF). In this paper, we present the first public version of DisMo for French. The system is trained and its performance evaluated on a 57k-token corpus, including different varieties of French spoken in three countries (Belgium, France and Switzerland). DisMo supports a mu…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Given a small set of seed entities (e.g., ``USA'', ``Russia''), corpus-based set expansion is to induce an extensive set of entities which share the same semantic class (Country in this example) from a given corpus. Set expansion benefits a wide range of downstream applications in knowledge discovery, such as web search, taxonomy construction, and query suggestion. Existing corpus-based set expansion algorithms typically bootstrap the given seeds by incorporating lexical patterns and distributional similarity. However, due to no negative sets provided explicitly, these methods suffer from sema…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Representing words and phrases into dense vectors of real numbers which encode semantic and syntactic properties is a vital constituent in natural language processing (NLP). The success of neural network (NN) models in NLP largely rely on such dense word representations learned on the large unlabeled corpus. Sindhi is one of the rich morphological language, spoken by large population in Pakistan and India lacks corpora which plays an essential role of a test-bed for generating word embeddings and developing language independent NLP systems. In this paper, a large corpus of more than 61 million…
University of Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学）；Birzeit University（比尔宰特大学）；American University of Beirut（贝鲁特美国大学）
The processing of the Arabic language is a complex field of research. This is due to many factors, including the complex and rich morphology of Arabic, its high degree of ambiguity, and the presence of several regional varieties that need to be processed while taking into account their unique characteristics. When its dialects are taken into account, this language pushes the limits of NLP to find solutions to problems posed by its inherent nature. It is a diglossic language; the standard language is used in formal settings and in education and is quite different from the vernacular languages s…
University of Canterbury（坎特伯雷大学）；New Zealand Institute for Language, Brain and Behaviour（新西兰语言、大脑与行为研究所）
This paper simulates a low-resource setting across 17 languages in order to evaluate embedding similarity, stability, and reliability under different conditions. The goal is to use corpus similarity measures before training to predict properties of embeddings after training. The main contribution of the paper is to show that it is possible to predict downstream embedding similarity using upstream corpus similarity measures. This finding is then applied to low-resource settings by modelling the reliability of embeddings created from very limited training data. Results show that it is possible t…
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED)（西班牙国立远程教育大学）
This registered report introduces the largest, and for the first time, reproducible experimental survey on biomedical sentence similarity with the following aims: (1) to elucidate the state of the art of the problem; (2) to solve some reproducibility problems preventing the evaluation of most of current methods; (3) to evaluate several unexplored sentence similarity methods; (4) to evaluate an unexplored benchmark, called Corpus-Transcriptional-Regulation; (5) to carry out a study on the impact of the pre-processing stages and Named Entity Recognition (NER) tools on the performance of the sent…
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington（华盛顿大学保罗·G·艾伦计算机科学与工程学院）；Department of Linguistics, University of Washington（华盛顿大学语言学系）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Pretrained multilingual contextual representations have shown great success, but due to the limits of their pretraining data, their benefits do not apply equally to all language varieties. This presents a challenge for language varieties unfamiliar to these models, whose labeled \emph{and unlabeled} data is too limited to train a monolingual model effectively. We propose the use of additional language-specific pretraining and vocabulary augmentation to adapt multilingual models to low-resource settings. Using dependency parsing of four diverse low-resource language varieties as a case study, w…
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；IBM Research Almaden（IBM阿尔马登研究院）；eBay Inc（eBay公司）
Recent advances in text representation have shown that training on large amounts of text is crucial for natural language understanding. However, models trained without predefined notions of topical interest typically require careful fine-tuning when transferred to specialized domains. When a sufficient amount of within-domain text may not be available, expanding a seed corpus of relevant documents from large-scale web data poses several challenges. First, corpus expansion requires scoring and ranking each document in the collection, an operation that can quickly become computationally expensiv…
Production of news content is growing at an astonishing rate. To help manage and monitor the sheer amount of text, there is an increasing need to develop efficient methods that can provide insights into emerging content areas, and stratify unstructured corpora of text into `topics' that stem intrinsically from content similarity. Here we present an unsupervised framework that brings together powerful vector embeddings from natural language processing with tools from multiscale graph partitioning that can reveal natural partitions at different resolutions without making a priori assumptions abo…
Kyoto University（京都大学）；National Institute of Information and Communications Technology（国立信息与通信技术研究所）
Lectures translation is a case of spoken language translation and there is a lack of publicly available parallel corpora for this purpose. To address this, we examine a language independent framework for parallel corpus mining which is a quick and effective way to mine a parallel corpus from publicly available lectures at Coursera. Our approach determines sentence alignments, relying on machine translation and cosine similarity over continuous-space sentence representations. We also show how to use the resulting corpora in a multistage fine-tuning based domain adaptation for high-quality lectu…
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence（德国人工智能研究中心）；University of Konstanz（康斯坦茨大学）；University of Wuppertal（伍珀塔尔大学）；University of Kiel（基尔大学）
Traditional document similarity measures provide a coarse-grained distinction between similar and dissimilar documents. Typically, they do not consider in what aspects two documents are similar. This limits the granularity of applications like recommender systems that rely on document similarity. In this paper, we extend similarity with aspect information by performing a pairwise document classification task. We evaluate our aspect-based document similarity for research papers. Paper citations indicate the aspect-based similarity, i.e., the section title in which a citation occurs acts as a la…
Is Textual Similarity Invariant under Machine Translation? Evidence Based on the Political Manifesto Corpus
Jagiellonian University（杰洛内亚大学）；Jagiellonian Center for Quantitative Political Science（杰洛内亚量化政治科学中心）；Jagiellonian University Excellence Initiative（杰洛内亚大学卓越计划）；DigiWorld PRA；QuantPol Center（QuantPol中心）；AGH University（AGH大学）；Jagiellonian Center for Digital Humanities（杰洛内亚数字人文中心）
Recent years have seen a rise in interest for cross-lingual transfer between languages with similar typology, and between languages of various scripts. However, the interplay between language similarity and difference in script on cross-lingual transfer is a less studied problem. We explore this interplay on cross-lingual transfer for two supervised tasks, namely part-of-speech tagging and sentiment analysis. We introduce a newly annotated corpus of Algerian user-generated comments comprising parallel annotations of Algerian written in Latin, Arabic, and code-switched scripts, as well as annot…
