We study how differences in persuasive language across Wikipedia articles, written in either English and Russian, can uncover each culture's distinct perspective on different subjects. We develop a large language model (LLM) powered system to identify instances of persuasive language in multilingual texts. Instead of directly prompting LLMs to detect persuasion, which is subjective and difficult, we propose to reframe the task to instead ask high-level questions (HLQs) which capture different persuasive aspects. Importantly, these HLQs are authored by LLMs themselves. LLMs over-generate a large set of HLQs, which are subsequently filtered to a small set aligned with human labels for the original task. We then apply our approach to a large-scale, bilingual dataset of Wikipedia articles (88K total), using a two-stage identify-then-extract prompting strategy to find instances of persuasion.
We quantify the amount of persuasion per article, and explore the differences in persuasion through several experiments on the paired articles. Notably, we generate rankings of articles by persuasion in both languages. These rankings match our intuitions on the culturally-salient subjects; Russian Wikipedia highlights subjects on Ukraine, while English Wikipedia highlights the Middle East. Grouping subjects into larger topics, we find politically-related events contain more persuasion than others. We further demonstrate that HLQs obtain similar performance when posed in either English or Russian. Our methodology enables cross-lingual, cross-cultural understanding at scale, and we release our code, prompts, and data.
The development of large and super-large language models, such as GPT-3, T5, Switch Transformer, ERNIE, etc., has significantly improved the performance of text generation. One of the important research directions in this area is the generation of texts with arguments. The solution of this problem can be used in business meetings, political debates, dialogue systems, for preparation of student essays. One of the main domains for these applications is the economic sphere. The key problem of the argument text generation for the Russian language is the lack of annotated argumentation corpora. In …
The Rashomon Wikipedia: A Data-Perspectivist Analysis of Divergent Historical Narratives
Interdisciplinary School of Doctoral Studies（跨学科博士研究院）；HLT Research Center（HLT研究中心）；Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science（数学与计算机科学学院）；Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures（外国语与文学学院）；University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学）
Tailored untruths: How personalisation challenges LLM safeguards
University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Big Data for Smart Society Institute (GATE)（大数据智能社会研究所（GATE））；University of São Paulo（圣保罗大学）
Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (AIRI)（人工智能研究院（AIRI））；SberDevices
The General QA field has been developing the methodology referencing the Stanford Question answering dataset (SQuAD) as the significant benchmark. However, compiling factual questions is accompanied by time- and labour-consuming annotation, limiting the training data's potential size. We present the WikiOmnia dataset, a new publicly available set of QA-pairs and corresponding Russian Wikipedia article summary sections, composed with a fully automated generative pipeline. The dataset includes every available article from Wikipedia for the Russian language. The WikiOmnia pipeline is available op…
Unidata；Saint-Petersburg State University（圣彼得堡国立大学）
Corpora that contain tabular data such as WebTables are a vital resource for the academic community. Essentially, they are the backbone of any modern research in information management. They are used for various tasks of data extraction, knowledge base construction, question answering, column semantic type detection and many other. Such corpora are useful not only as a source of data, but also as a base for building test datasets. So far, there were no such corpora for the Russian language and this seriously hindered research in the aforementioned areas. In this paper, we present the first cor…
Санкт-Петербургский институт информатики и автоматизации РАН（俄罗斯科学院圣彼得堡信息学与自动化研究所）
The classification of metrics and algorithms search for related terms via WordNet, Roget's Thesaurus, and Wikipedia was extended to include adapted HITS algorithm. Evaluation experiments on Information Content and adapted HITS algorithm are described. The test collection of Russian word pairs with human-assigned similarity judgments is proposed. ----- Klassifikacija metrik i algoritmov poiska semanticheski blizkih slov v tezaurusah WordNet, Rozhe i jenciklopedii Vikipedija rasshirena adaptirovannym HITS algoritmom. S pomow'ju jeksperimentov v Vikipedii oceneny metrika Information Content i ada…
Vyatka State University（维亚特卡国立大学）；ITMO University（ITMO大学）
Argumentation mining is a field of computational linguistics that is devoted to extracting from texts and classifying arguments and relations between them, as well as constructing an argumentative structure. A significant obstacle to research in this area for the Russian language is the lack of annotated Russian-language text corpora. This article explores the possibility of improving the quality of argumentation mining using the extension of the Russian-language version of the Argumentative Microtext Corpus (ArgMicro) based on the machine translation of the Persuasive Essays Corpus (PersEssay…
The most studied and most successful language models were developed and evaluated mainly for English and other close European languages, such as French, German, etc. It is important to study applicability of these models to other languages. The use of vector space models for Russian was recently studied for multiple corpora, such as Wikipedia, RuWac, lib.ru. These models were evaluated against word semantic similarity task. For our knowledge Twitter was not considered as a corpus for this task, with this work we fill the gap. Results for vectors trained on Twitter corpus are comparable in accu…
St.Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of RAS（俄罗斯科学院圣彼得堡信息学与自动化研究所）
With the fantastic growth of Internet usage, information search in documents of a special type called a "wiki page" that is written using a simple markup language, has become an important problem. This paper describes the software architectural model for indexing wiki texts in three languages (Russian, English, and German) and the interaction between the software components (GATE, Lemmatizer, and Synarcher). The inverted file index database was designed using visual tool DBDesigner. The rules for parsing Wikipedia texts are illustrated by examples. Two index databases of Russian Wikipedia (RW)…
Specific lexical choices in narrative text reflect both the writer's attitudes towards people in the narrative and influence the audience's reactions. Prior work has examined descriptions of people in English using contextual affective analysis, a natural language processing (NLP) technique that seeks to analyze how people are portrayed along dimensions of power, agency, and sentiment. Our work presents an extension of this methodology to multilingual settings, which is enabled by a new corpus that we collect and a new multilingual model. We additionally show how word connotations differ acros…
L3S Research Center（L3S研究中心）；University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）
In this article we address the problem of text passage alignment across interlingual article pairs in Wikipedia. We develop methods that enable the identification and interlinking of text passages written in different languages and containing overlapping information. Interlingual text passage alignment can enable Wikipedia editors and readers to better understand language-specific context of entities, provide valuable insights in cultural differences and build a basis for qualitative analysis of the articles. An important challenge in this context is the trade-off between the granularity of th…
University of Hamburg（汉堡大学）；National Research University Higher School of Economics（国立研究型大学高等经济学院）；The Vinogradov Institute of the Russian Language, Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院维诺格拉多夫俄语研究所）；University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）；Krasovskii Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics（克拉索夫斯基数学与力学研究所）；Scrapinghub（Scrapinghub公司）；Lomonosov Moscow State University（罗蒙诺索夫莫斯科国立大学）；Samsung Moscow Research Center（三星莫斯科研究中心）；ABBYY（ABBYY公司）
The paper describes the results of the first shared task on word sense induction (WSI) for the Russian language. While similar shared tasks were conducted in the past for some Romance and Germanic languages, we explore the performance of sense induction and disambiguation methods for a Slavic language that shares many features with other Slavic languages, such as rich morphology and virtually free word order. The participants were asked to group contexts of a given word in accordance with its senses that were not provided beforehand. For instance, given a word "bank" and a set of contexts for …
This paper extends the task of probing sentence representations for linguistic insight in a multilingual domain. In doing so, we make two contributions: first, we provide datasets for multilingual probing, derived from Wikipedia, in five languages, viz. English, French, German, Spanish and Russian. Second, we evaluate six sentence encoders for each language, each trained by mapping sentence representations to English sentence representations, using sentences in a parallel corpus. We discover that cross-lingually mapped representations are often better at retaining certain linguistic informatio…
