Although multilingual language models exhibit impressive cross-lingual transfer capabilities on unseen languages, the performance on downstream tasks is impacted when there is a script disparity with the languages used in the multilingual model’s pre-training data. Using transliteration offers a straightforward yet effective means to align the script of a resource-rich language with a target language thereby enhancing cross-lingual transfer capabilities. However, for mixed languages, this approach is suboptimal, since only a subset of the language benefits from the cross-lingual transfer while the remainder is impeded. In this work, we focus on Maltese, a Semitic language, with substantial influences from Arabic, Italian, and English, and notably written in Latin script. We present a novel dataset annotated with word-level etymology. We use this dataset to train a classifier that enables us to make informed decisions regarding the appropriate processing of each token in the Maltese language. We contrast indiscriminate transliteration or translation to mixing processing pipelines that only transliterate words of Arabic origin, thereby resulting in text with a mixture of scripts. We fine-tune the processed data on four downstream tasks and show that conditional transliteration based on word etymology yields the best results, surpassing fine-tuning with raw Maltese or Maltese processed with non-selective pipelines.

Multilingual models such as mBERT have been demonstrated to exhibit impressive crosslingual transfer for a number of languages. Despite this, the performance drops for lowerresourced languages, especially when they are not part of the pre-training setup and when there are script differences. In this work we consider Maltese, a low-resource language of Arabic and Romance origins written in Latin script. Specifically, we investigate the impact of transliterating Maltese into Arabic scipt on a number of downstream tasks: Part-of-Speech Tagging, Dependency Parsing, and Sentiment Analysis. We compare multiple transliteration pipelines ranging from deterministic character maps to more sophisticated alternatives, including manually annotated word mappings and non-deterministic character mappings. For the latter, we show that selection techniques using n-gram language models of Tunisian Arabic, the dialect with the highest degree of mutual intelligibility to Maltese, yield better results on downstream tasks. Moreover, our experiments highlight that the use of an Arabic pre-trained model paired with transliteration outperforms mBERT. Overall, our results show that transliterating Maltese can be considered an option to improve the cross-lingual transfer capabilities.

The WebNLG task consists of mapping a knowledge graph to a text verbalising the con- tent of that graph. The 2017 WebNLG edi- tion required participating systems to gener- ate English text from a set of DBpedia triples, while the 2020 WebNLG+ challenge addition- ally included generation into Russian and se- mantic parsing of English and Russian texts. In contrast, WebNLG 2023 focuses on four under-resourced languages which are severely under-represented in research on text genera- tion, namely Breton, Irish, Maltese and Welsh. In addition, WebNLG 2023 once again includes Russian. In this paper, we present the organi- sation of the shared task (data, timeline, eval- uation), briefly describe the participating sys- tems and summarise results for participating systems.

This paper reports on the shared tasks organized by the 20th IWSLT Conference. The shared tasks address 9 scientific challenges in spoken language translation: simultaneous and offline translation, automatic subtitling and dubbing, speech-to-speech translation, multilingual, dialect and low-resource speech translation, and formality control. The shared tasks attracted a total of 38 submissions by 31 teams. The growing interest towards spoken language translation is also witnessed by the constantly increasing number of shared task organizers and contributors to the overview paper, almost evenly distributed across industry and academia.

For the 2023 IWSLT Maltese Speech Translation Task, UM-DFKI jointly presents a cascade solution which achieves 0.6 BLEU. While this is the first time that a Maltese speech translation task has been released by IWSLT, this paper explores previous solutions for other speech translation tasks, focusing primarily on low-resource scenarios. Moreover, we present our method of fine-tuning XLS-R models for Maltese ASR using a collection of multi-lingual speech corpora as well as the fine-tuning of the mBART model for Maltese to English machine translation.

Multilingual language models such as mBERT have seen impressive cross-lingual transfer to a variety of languages, but many languages remain excluded from these models. In this paper, we analyse the effect of pre-training with monolingual data for a low-resource language that is not included in mBERT – Maltese – with a range of pre-training set ups. We conduct evaluations with the newly pre-trained models on three morphosyntactic tasks – dependency parsing, part-of-speech tagging, and named-entity recognition – and one semantic classification task – sentiment analysis. We also present a newly created corpus for Maltese, and determine the effect that the pre-training data size and domain have on the downstream performance. Our results show that using a mixture of pre-training domains is often superior to using Wikipedia text only. We also find that a fraction of this corpus is enough to make significant leaps in performance over Wikipedia-trained models. We pre-train and compare two models on the new corpus: a monolingual BERT model trained from scratch (BERTu), and a further pretrained multilingual BERT (mBERTu). The models achieve state-of-the-art performance on these tasks, despite the new corpus being considerably smaller than typically used corpora for high-resourced languages. On average, BERTu outperforms or performs competitively with mBERTu, and the largest gains are observed for higher-level tasks.

The work in progress on the CEF Action National Language Technology Platform (NLTP) is presented. The Action aims at combining the most advanced Language Technology (LT) tools and solutions in a new state-of-the-art, Artificial Intelli- gence (AI) driven, National Language Technology Platform (NLTP).

Current image description generation models do not transfer well to the task of describing human faces. To encourage the development of more human-focused descriptions, we developed a new data set of facial descriptions based on the CelebA image data set. We describe the properties of this data set, and present results from a face description generator trained on it, which explores the feasibility of using transfer learning from VGGFace/ResNet CNNs. Comparisons are drawn through both automated metrics and human evaluation by 76 English-speaking participants. The descriptions generated by the VGGFace-LSTM + Attention model are closest to the ground truth according to human evaluation whilst the ResNet-LSTM + Attention model obtained the highest CIDEr and CIDEr-D results (1.252 and 0.686 respectively). Together, the new data set and these experimental results provide data and baselines for future work in this area.

This article presents the work in progress on the collaborative project of several European countries to develop National Language Technology Platform (NLTP). The project aims at combining the most advanced Language Technology tools and solutions in a new, state-of-the-art, Artificial Intelligence driven, National Language Technology Platform for five EU/EEA official and lower-resourced languages.

Recent work has shown evidence that the knowledge acquired by multilingual BERT (mBERT) has two components: a language-specific and a language-neutral one. This paper analyses the relationship between them, in the context of fine-tuning on two tasks – POS tagging and natural language inference – which require the model to bring to bear different degrees of language-specific knowledge. Visualisations reveal that mBERT loses the ability to cluster representations by language after fine-tuning, a result that is supported by evidence from language identification experiments. However, further experiments on ‘unlearning’ language-specific representations using gradient reversal and iterative adversarial learning are shown not to add further improvement to the language-independent component over and above the effect of fine-tuning. The results presented here suggest that the process of fine-tuning causes a reorganisation of the model’s limited representational capacity, enhancing language-independent representations at the expense of language-specific ones.

We introduce in this paper a generic approach to combine implicit crowdsourcing and language learning in order to mass-produce language resources (LRs) for any language for which a crowd of language learners can be involved. We present the approach by explaining its core paradigm that consists in pairing specific types of LRs with specific exercises, by detailing both its strengths and challenges, and by discussing how much these challenges have been addressed at present. Accordingly, we also report on on-going proof-of-concept efforts aiming at developing the first prototypical implementation of the approach in order to correct and extend an LR called ConceptNet based on the input crowdsourced from language learners. We then present an international network called the European Network for Combining Language Learning with Crowdsourcing Techniques (enetCollect) that provides the context to accelerate the implementation of this generic approach. Finally, we exemplify how it can be used in several language learning scenarios to produce a multitude of NLP resources and how it can therefore alleviate the long-standing NLP issue of the lack of LRs.

Maltese, the national language of Malta, is spoken by approximately 500,000 people. Speech processing for Maltese is still in its early stages of development. In this paper, we present the first spoken Maltese corpus designed purposely for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). The MASRI-HEADSET corpus was developed by the MASRI project at the University of Malta. It consists of 8 hours of speech paired with text, recorded by using short text snippets in a laboratory environment. The speakers were recruited from different geographical locations all over the Maltese islands, and were roughly evenly distributed by gender. This paper also presents some initial results achieved in baseline experiments for Maltese ASR using Sphinx and Kaldi. The MASRI HEADSET Corpus is publicly available for research/academic purposes.

This paper presents the submission by the Charles University-University of Malta team to the SIGMORPHON 2019 Shared Task on Morphological Analysis and Lemmatization in context. We present a lemmatization model based on previous work on neural transducers (Makarov and Clematide, 2018b; Aharoni and Goldberg, 2016). The key difference is that our model transforms the whole word form in every step, instead of consuming it character by character. We propose a merging strategy inspired by Byte-Pair-Encoding that reduces the space of valid operations by merging frequent adjacent operations. The resulting operations not only encode the actions to be performed but the relative position in the word token and how characters need to be transformed. Our morphological tagger is a vanilla biLSTM tagger that operates over operation representations, encoding operations and words in a hierarchical manner. Even though relative performance according to metrics is below the baseline, experiments show that our models capture important associations between interpretable operation labels and fine-grained morpho-syntax labels.

Maltese is a morphologically rich language with a hybrid morphological system which features both concatenative and non-concatenative processes. This paper analyses the impact of this hybridity on the performance of machine learning techniques for morphological labelling and clustering. In particular, we analyse a dataset of morphologically related word clusters to evaluate the difference in results for concatenative and non-concatenative clusters. We also describe research carried out in morphological labelling, with a particular focus on the verb category. Two evaluations were carried out, one using an unseen dataset, and another one using a gold standard dataset which was manually labelled. The gold standard dataset was split into concatenative and non-concatenative to analyse the difference in results between the two morphological systems.

The automatic discovery and clustering of morphologically related words is an important problem with several practical applications. This paper describes the evaluation of word clusters carried out through crowd-sourcing techniques for the Maltese language. The hybrid (Semitic-Romance) nature of Maltese morphology, together with the fact that no large-scale lexical resources are available for Maltese, make this an interesting and challenging problem.

Plain text corpora contain much information which can only be accessed through human annotation and semantic analysis, which is typically very time consuming to perform. Analysis of such texts at a syntactic or grammatical structure level can however extract some of this information in an automated manner, even if identifying effective rules can be extremely difficult. One such type of implicit information present in texts is that of definitional phrases and sentences. In this paper, we investigate the use of evolutionary algorithms to learn classifiers to discriminate between definitional and non-definitional sentences in non-technical texts, and show how effective grammar-based definition discriminators can be automatically learnt with minor human intervention.