There is a large and growing body of literature on datasets created to facilitate the study of socio-political events of conflict and unrest. However, the datasets, and the approaches taken to create them, vary a lot depending on the type of research they are intended to support. For example, while scholars from natural language processing (NLP) tend to focus on annotating specific spans of text indicating various components of an event, scholars from the disciplines of political science and conflict studies tend to focus on creating databases that code an abstract but structured representation of the event, less tied to a specific source text.The survey presented in this paper aims to map out the current landscape of available event datasets within the domain of social and political conflict and unrest – both from the NLP and political science communities – offering a unified view of the work done across different disciplines.

We investigate annotator variation for the novel task of Entity-Level Sentiment Analysis (ELSA) which annotates the aggregated sentiment directed towards volitional entities in a text. More specifically, we analyze the annotations of a newly constructed Norwegian ELSA dataset and release additional data with each annotator’s labels for the 247 entities in the dataset’s test split. We also perform a number of experiments prompting ChatGPT for these sentiment labels regarding each entity in the text and compare the generated annotations with the human labels. Cohen’s Kappa for agreement between the best LLM-generated labels and curated gold was 0.425, which indicates that these labels would not have high quality. Our analyses further investigate the errors that ChatGPT outputs, and compare them with the variations that we find among the 5 trained annotators that all annotated the same test data.

We investigate in this paper how distributions of occupations with respect to gender is reflected in pre-trained language models. Such distributions are not always aligned to normative ideals, nor do they necessarily reflect a descriptive assessment of reality. In this paper, we introduce an approach for measuring to what degree pre-trained language models are aligned to normative and descriptive occupational distributions. To this end, we use official demographic information about gender–occupation distributions provided by the national statistics agencies of France, Norway, United Kingdom, and the United States. We manually generate template-based sentences combining gendered pronouns and nouns with occupations, and subsequently probe a selection of ten language models covering the English, French, and Norwegian languages. The scoring system we introduce in this work is language independent, and can be used on any combination of template-based sentences, occupations, and languages. The approach could also be extended to other dimensions of national census data and other demographic variables.

This paper introduces the first emotion-annotated dataset for the Dari variant of Persian spoken in Afghanistan. The LetHerLearn dataset contains 7,600 tweets posted in reaction to the Taliban’s ban of women’s rights to education in 2022 and has been manually annotated according to Ekman’s emotion categories. We here detail the data collection and annotation process, present relevant dataset statistics as well as initial experiments on the resulting dataset, benchmarking a number of different neural architectures for the task of Dari emotion classification.

In contrast to large text corpora, knowledge graphs (KG) provide dense and structured representations of factual information. This makes them attractive for systems that supplement or ground the knowledge found in pre-trained language models with an external knowledge source. This has especially been the case for classification tasks, where recent work has focused on creating pipeline models that retrieve information from KGs like ConceptNet as additional context. Many of these models consist of multiple components, and although they differ in the number and nature of these parts, they all have in common that for some given text query, they attempt to identify and retrieve a relevant subgraph from the KG. Due to the noise and idiosyncrasies often found in KGs, it is not known how current methods compare to a scenario where the aligned subgraph is completely relevant to the query. In this work, we try to bridge this knowledge gap by reviewing current approaches to text-to-KG alignment and evaluating them on two datasets where manually created graphs are available, providing insights into the effectiveness of current methods. We release our code for reproducibility.

In this paper we present NorQuAD: the first Norwegian question answering dataset for machine reading comprehension. The dataset consists of 4,752 manually created question-answer pairs. We here detail the data collection procedure and present statistics of the dataset. We also benchmark several multilingual and Norwegian monolingual language models on the dataset and compare them against human performance. The dataset will be made freely available.

We present NorBench: a streamlined suite of NLP tasks and probes for evaluating Norwegian language models (LMs) on standardized data splits and evaluation metrics. We also introduce a range of new Norwegian language models (both encoder and encoder-decoder based). Finally, we compare and analyze their performance, along with other existing LMs, across the different benchmark tests of NorBench.

This paper explores the use of masked language modeling (MLM) for data augmentation (DA), targeting structured sentiment analysis (SSA) for Norwegian based on a dataset of annotated reviews. Considering the limited resources for Norwegian language and the complexity of the annotation task, the aim is to investigate whether this approach to data augmentation can help boost the performance. We report on experiments with substituting words both inside and outside of sentiment annotations, and we also present an error analysis, discussing some of the potential pitfalls of using MLM-based DA for SSA, and suggest directions for future work.

Negation constitutes a challenging phenomenon for many natural language processing tasks, such as sentiment analysis (SA). In this paper we investigate the relationship between negation and sentiment in the context of Norwegian professional reviews. The first part of this paper includes a corpus study which investigates how negation is tied to sentiment in this domain, based on existing annotations. In the second part, we introduce NoReC-NegSynt, a synthetically augmented test set for negation and sentiment, to allow for a more detailed analysis of the role of negation in current neural SA models. This diagnostic test set, containing both clausal and non-clausal negation, allows for analyzing and comparing models’ abilities to treat several different types of negation. We also present a case-study, applying several neural SA models to the diagnostic data.

While modern masked language models (LMs) are trained on ever larger corpora, we here explore the effects of down-scaling training to a modestly-sized but representative, well-balanced, and publicly available English text source – the British National Corpus. We show that pre-training on this carefully curated corpus can reach better performance than the original BERT model. We argue that this type of corpora has great potential as a language modeling benchmark. To showcase this potential, we present fair, reproducible and data-efficient comparative studies of LMs, in which we evaluate several training objectives and model architectures and replicate previous empirical results in a systematic way. We propose an optimized LM architecture called LTG-BERT.

In recent years, language models have become increasingly larger and more complex. However, the input representations for these models continue to rely on simple and greedy subword tokenization methods. In this paper, we propose a novel tokenization method that factorizes subwords onto discrete triplets using a VQ-VAE model. The effectiveness of the proposed tokenization method, referred to as the Factorizer, is evaluated on language modeling and morpho-syntactic tasks for 7 diverse languages. Results indicate that this method is more appropriate and robust for morphological tasks than the commonly used byte-pair encoding (BPE) tokenization algorithm.

We propose a novel method to bootstrap text anonymization models based on distant supervision. Instead of requiring manually labeled training data, the approach relies on a knowledge graph expressing the background information assumed to be publicly available about various individuals. This knowledge graph is employed to automatically annotate text documents including personal data about a subset of those individuals. More precisely, the method determines which text spans ought to be masked in order to guarantee k-anonymity, assuming an adversary with access to both the text documents and the background information expressed in the knowledge graph. The resulting collection of labeled documents is then used as training data to fine-tune a pre-trained language model for text anonymization. We illustrate this approach using a knowledge graph extracted from Wikidata and short biographical texts from Wikipedia. Evaluation results with a RoBERTa-based model and a manually annotated collection of 553 summaries showcase the potential of the approach, but also unveil a number of issues that may arise if the knowledge graph is noisy or incomplete. The results also illustrate that, contrary to most sequence labeling problems, the text anonymization task may admit several alternative solutions.

In this paper we explore how a demographic distribution of occupations, along gender dimensions, is reflected in pre-trained language models. We give a descriptive assessment of the distribution of occupations, and investigate to what extent these are reflected in four Norwegian and two multilingual models. To this end, we introduce a set of simple bias probes, and perform five different tasks combining gendered pronouns, first names, and a set of occupations from the Norwegian statistics bureau. We show that language specific models obtain more accurate results, and are much closer to the real-world distribution of clearly gendered occupations. However, we see that none of the models have correct representations of the occupations that are demographically balanced between genders. We also discuss the importance of the training data on which the models were trained on, and argue that template-based bias probes can sometimes be fragile, and a simple alteration in a template can change a model’s behavior.

In this paper, we introduce the first SemEval shared task on Structured Sentiment Analysis, for which participants are required to predict all sentiment graphs in a text, where a single sentiment graph is composed of a sentiment holder, target, expression and polarity. This new shared task includes two subtracks (monolingual and cross-lingual) with seven datasets available in five languages, namely Norwegian, Catalan, Basque, Spanish and English. Participants submitted their predictions on a held-out test set and were evaluated on Sentiment Graph F1 . Overall, the task received over 200 submissions from 32 participating teams. We present the results of the 15 teams that provided system descriptions and our own expanded analysis of the test predictions.

We present the Norwegian Anaphora Resolution Corpus (NARC), the first publicly available corpus annotated with anaphoric relations between noun phrases for Norwegian. The paper describes the annotated data for 326 documents in Norwegian Bokmål, together with inter-annotator agreement and discussions of relevant statistics. We also present preliminary modelling results which are comparable to existing corpora for other languages, and discuss relevant problems in relation to both modelling and the annotations themselves.

We present a novel approach for text sanitization, which is the task of editing a document to mask all (direct and indirect) personal identifiers and thereby conceal the identity of the individuals(s) mentioned in the text. In contrast to previous work, the approach relies on explicit measures of privacy risk, making it possible to explicitly control the trade-off between privacy protection and data utility. The approach proceeds in three steps. A neural, privacy-enhanced entity recognizer is first employed to detect and classify potential personal identifiers. We then determine which entities, or combination of entities, are likely to pose a re-identification risk through a range of privacy risk assessment measures. We present three such measures of privacy risk, respectively based on (1) span probabilities derived from a BERT language model, (2) web search queries and (3) a classifier trained on labelled data. Finally, a linear optimization solver decides which entities to mask to minimize the semantic loss while simultaneously ensuring that the estimated privacy risk remains under a given threshold. We evaluate the approach both in the absence and presence of manually annotated data. Our results highlight the potential of the approach, as well as issues specific types of personal data can introduce to the process.

This paper explores the task of identifying the overall sentiment expressed towards volitional entities (persons and organizations) in a document - what we refer to as Entity-Level Sentiment Analysis (ELSA). While identifying sentiment conveyed towards an entity is well researched for shorter texts like tweets, we find little to no research on this specific task for longer texts with multiple mentions and opinions towards the same entity. This lack of research would be understandable if ELSA can be derived from existing tasks and models. To assess this, we annotate a set of professional reviews for their overall sentiment towards each volitional entity in the text. We sample from data already annotated for document-level, sentence-level, and target-level sentiment in a multi-domain review corpus, and our results indicate that there is no single proxy task that provides this overall sentiment we seek for the entities at a satisfactory level of performance. We present a suite of experiments aiming to assess the contribution towards ELSA provided by document-, sentence-, and target-level sentiment analysis, and provide a discussion of their shortcomings. We show that sentiment in our dataset is expressed not only with an entity mention as target, but also towards targets with a sentiment-relevant relation to a volitional entity. In our data, these relations extend beyond anaphoric coreference resolution, and our findings call for further research of the topic. Finally, we also present a survey of previous relevant work.

We present a qualitative analysis of the (potentially erroneous) outputs of contextualized embedding-based methods for detecting diachronic semantic change. First, we introduce an ensemble method outperforming previously described contextualized approaches. This method is used as a basis for an in-depth analysis of the degrees of semantic change predicted for English words across 5 decades. Our findings show that contextualized methods can often predict high change scores for words which are not undergoing any real diachronic semantic shift in the lexicographic sense of the term (or at least the status of these shifts is questionable). Such challenging cases are discussed in detail with examples, and their linguistic categorization is proposed. Our conclusion is that pre-trained contextualized language models are prone to confound changes in lexicographic senses and changes in contextual variance, which naturally stem from their distributional nature, but is different from the types of issues observed in methods based on static embeddings. Additionally, they often merge together syntactic and semantic aspects of lexical entities. We propose a range of possible future solutions to these issues.

This paper demonstrates how a graph-based semantic parser can be applied to the task of structured sentiment analysis, directly predicting sentiment graphs from text. We advance the state of the art on 4 out of 5 standard benchmark sets. We release the source code, models and predictions.

Event extraction involves the detection and extraction of both the event triggers and the corresponding arguments. Existing systems often decompose event extraction into multiple subtasks, without considering their possible interactions. In this paper, we propose EventGraph, a joint framework for event extraction, which encodes events as graphs. We represent event triggers and arguments as nodes in a semantic graph. Event extraction therefore becomes a graph parsing problem, which provides the following advantages: 1) performing event detection and argument extraction jointly; 2) detecting and extracting multiple events from a piece of text; 3) capturing the complicated interaction between event arguments and triggers. Experimental results on ACE2005 show that our model is competitive to state-of-the-art systems and has substantially improved the results on argument extraction. Additionally, we create two new datasets from ACE2005 where we keep the entire text spans for event arguments, instead of just the head word(s). Our code and models will be released as open-source.

This paper presents our submission to the 2022 edition of the CASE 2021 shared task 1, subtask 4. The EventGraph system adapts an end-to-end, graph-based semantic parser to the task of Protest Event Extraction and more specifically subtask 4 on event trigger and argument extraction. We experiment with various graphs, encoding the events as either “labeled-edge” or “node-centric” graphs. We show that the “node-centric” approach yields best results overall, performing well across the three languages of the task, namely English, Spanish, and Portuguese. EventGraph is ranked 3rd for English and Portuguese, and 4th for Spanish.

We present a novel benchmark and associated evaluation metrics for assessing the performance of text anonymization methods. Text anonymization, defined as the task of editing a text document to prevent the disclosure of personal information, currently suffers from a shortage of privacy-oriented annotated text resources, making it difficult to properly evaluate the level of privacy protection offered by various anonymization methods. This paper presents TAB (Text Anonymization Benchmark), a new, open-source annotated corpus developed to address this shortage. The corpus comprises 1,268 English-language court cases from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) enriched with comprehensive annotations about the personal information appearing in each document, including their semantic category, identifier type, confidential attributes, and co-reference relations. Compared with previous work, the TAB corpus is designed to go beyond traditional de-identification (which is limited to the detection of predefined semantic categories), and explicitly marks which text spans ought to be masked in order to conceal the identity of the person to be protected. Along with presenting the corpus and its annotation layers, we also propose a set of evaluation metrics that are specifically tailored toward measuring the performance of text anonymization, both in terms of privacy protection and utility preservation. We illustrate the use of the benchmark and the proposed metrics by assessing the empirical performance of several baseline text anonymization models. The full corpus along with its privacy-oriented annotation guidelines, evaluation scripts, and baseline models are available on: https://github.com/NorskRegnesentral/text-anonymization-benchmark.

We present the ongoing NorLM initiative to support the creation and use of very large contextualised language models for Norwegian (and in principle other Nordic languages), including a ready-to-use software environment, as well as an experience report for data preparation and training. This paper introduces the first large-scale monolingual language models for Norwegian, based on both the ELMo and BERT frameworks. In addition to detailing the training process, we present contrastive benchmark results on a suite of NLP tasks for Norwegian. For additional background and access to the data, models, and software, please see: http://norlm.nlpl.eu

This paper introduces NorecNeg – the first annotated dataset of negation for Norwegian. Negation cues and their in-sentence scopes have been annotated across more than 11K sentences spanning more than 400 documents for a subset of the Norwegian Review Corpus (NoReC). In addition to providing in-depth discussion of the annotation guidelines, we also present a first set of benchmark results based on a graph-parsing approach.

Multilingual pretrained language models are rapidly gaining popularity in NLP systems for non-English languages. Most of these models feature an important corpus sampling step in the process of accumulating training data in different languages, to ensure that the signal from better resourced languages does not drown out poorly resourced ones. In this study, we train multiple multilingual recurrent language models, based on the ELMo architecture, and analyse both the effect of varying corpus size ratios on downstream performance, as well as the performance difference between monolingual models for each language, and broader multilingual language models. As part of this effort, we also make these trained models available for public use.

Fine-grained sentiment analysis attempts to extract sentiment holders, targets and polar expressions and resolve the relationship between them, but progress has been hampered by the difficulty of annotation. Targeted sentiment analysis, on the other hand, is a more narrow task, focusing on extracting sentiment targets and classifying their polarity. In this paper, we explore whether incorporating holder and expression information can improve target extraction and classification and perform experiments on eight English datasets. We conclude that jointly predicting target and polarity BIO labels improves target extraction, and that augmenting the input text with gold expressions generally improves targeted polarity classification. This highlights the potential importance of annotating expressions for fine-grained sentiment datasets. At the same time, our results show that performance of current models for predicting polar expressions is poor, hampering the benefit of this information in practice.

Structured sentiment analysis attempts to extract full opinion tuples from a text, but over time this task has been subdivided into smaller and smaller sub-tasks, e.g., target extraction or targeted polarity classification. We argue that this division has become counterproductive and propose a new unified framework to remedy the situation. We cast the structured sentiment problem as dependency graph parsing, where the nodes are spans of sentiment holders, targets and expressions, and the arcs are the relations between them. We perform experiments on five datasets in four languages (English, Norwegian, Basque, and Catalan) and show that this approach leads to strong improvements over state-of-the-art baselines. Our analysis shows that refining the sentiment graphs with syntactic dependency information further improves results.

This position paper investigates the problem of automated text anonymisation, which is a prerequisite for secure sharing of documents containing sensitive information about individuals. We summarise the key concepts behind text anonymisation and provide a review of current approaches. Anonymisation methods have so far been developed in two fields with little mutual interaction, namely natural language processing and privacy-preserving data publishing. Based on a case study, we outline the benefits and limitations of these approaches and discuss a number of open challenges, such as (1) how to account for multiple types of semantic inferences, (2) how to strike a balance between disclosure risk and data utility and (3) how to evaluate the quality of the resulting anonymisation. We lay out a case for moving beyond sequence labelling models and incorporate explicit measures of disclosure risk into the text anonymisation process.

In this work we explore the effect of incorporating demographic metadata in a text classifier trained on top of a pre-trained transformer language model. More specifically, we add information about the gender of critics and book authors when classifying the polarity of book reviews, and the polarity of the reviews when classifying the genders of authors and critics. We use an existing data set of Norwegian book reviews with ratings by professional critics, which has also been augmented with gender information, and train a document-level sentiment classifier on top of a recently released Norwegian BERT-model. We show that gender-informed models obtain substantially higher accuracy, and that polarity-informed models obtain higher accuracy when classifying the genders of book authors. For this particular data set, we take this result as a confirmation of the gender bias in the underlying label distribution, but in other settings we believe a similar approach can be used for mitigating bias in the model.

Loss of consciousness, so-called syncope, is a commonly occurring symptom associated with worse prognosis for a number of heart-related diseases. We present a comparison of methods for a diagnosis classification task in Norwegian clinical notes, targeting syncope, i.e. fainting cases. We find that an often neglected baseline with keyword matching constitutes a rather strong basis, but more advanced methods do offer some improvement in classification performance, especially a convolutional neural network model. The developed pipeline is planned to be used for quantifying unregistered syncope cases in Norway.

Gender bias in models and datasets is widely studied in NLP. The focus has usually been on analysing how females and males express themselves, or how females and males are described. However, a less studied aspect is the combination of these two perspectives, how female and male describe the same or opposite gender. In this paper, we present a new gender annotated sentiment dataset of critics reviewing the works of female and male authors. We investigate if this newly annotated dataset contains differences in how the works of male and female authors are critiqued, in particular in terms of positive and negative sentiment. We also explore the differences in how this is done by male and female critics. We show that there are differences in how critics assess the works of authors of the same or opposite gender. For example, male critics rate crime novels written by females, and romantic and sentimental works written by males, more negatively.

We present a large Norwegian lexical resource of categorized medical terms. The resource, which merges information from large medical databases, contains over 56,000 entries, including automatically mapped terms from a Norwegian medical dictionary. We describe the methodology behind this automatic dictionary entry mapping based on keywords and suffixes and further present the results of a manual evaluation performed on a subset by a domain expert. The evaluation indicated that ca. 80% of the mappings were correct.

We discuss methodological choices in contrastive and diagnostic evaluation in meaning representation parsing, i.e. mapping from natural language utterances to graph-based encodings of its semantic structure. Drawing inspiration from earlier work in syntactic dependency parsing, we transfer and refine several quantitative diagnosis techniques for use in the context of the 2019 shared task on Meaning Representation Parsing (MRP). As in parsing proper, moving evaluation from simple rooted trees to general graphs brings along its own range of challenges. Specifically, we seek to begin to shed light on relative strenghts and weaknesses in different broad families of parsing techniques. In addition to these theoretical reflections, we conduct a pilot experiment on a selection of top-performing MRP systems and one of the five meaning representation frameworks in the shared task. Empirical results suggest that the proposed methodology can be meaningfully applied to parsing into graph-structured target representations, uncovering hitherto unknown properties of the different systems that can inform future development and cross-fertilization across approaches.

This paper presents NorNE, a manually annotated corpus of named entities which extends the annotation of the existing Norwegian Dependency Treebank. Comprising both of the official standards of written Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk), the corpus contains around 600,000 tokens and annotates a rich set of entity types including persons, organizations, locations, geo-political entities, products, and events, in addition to a class corresponding to nominals derived from names. We here present details on the annotation effort, guidelines, inter-annotator agreement and an experimental analysis of the corpus using a neural sequence labeling architecture.

We here introduce NoReC_fine, a dataset for fine-grained sentiment analysis in Norwegian, annotated with respect to polar expressions, targets and holders of opinion. The underlying texts are taken from a corpus of professionally authored reviews from multiple news-sources and across a wide variety of domains, including literature, games, music, products, movies and more. We here present a detailed description of this annotation effort. We provide an overview of the developed annotation guidelines, illustrated with examples and present an analysis of inter-annotator agreement. We also report the first experimental results on the dataset, intended as a preliminary benchmark for further experiments.

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 information than representations derived from English encoders trained on natural language inference (NLI) as a downstream task.

In this paper we present first results for the task of Automated Essay Scoring for Norwegian learner language. We analyze a number of properties of this task experimentally and assess (i) the formulation of the task as either regression or classification, (ii) the use of various non-neural and neural machine learning architectures with various types of input representations, and (iii) applying multi-task learning for joint prediction of essay scoring and native language identification. We find that a GRU-based attention model trained in a single-task setting performs best at the AES task.

We extend the well-known word analogy task to a one-to-X formulation, including one-to-none cases, when no correct answer exists. The task is cast as a relation discovery problem and applied to historical armed conflicts datasets, attempting to predict new relations of type ‘location:armed-group’ based on data about past events. As the source of semantic information, we use diachronic word embedding models trained on English news texts. A simple technique to improve diachronic performance in such task is demonstrated, using a threshold based on a function of cosine distance to decrease the number of false positives; this approach is shown to be beneficial on two different corpora. Finally, we publish a ready-to-use test set for one-to-X analogy evaluation on historical armed conflicts data.

Neural methods for sentiment analysis 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 paralinguistic phenomena, such as negation, sarcasm, modality, etc. Finally, we provide a case study that demonstrates the usefulness of the dataset to probe the performance of a given sentiment classifier with respect to linguistic phenomena.

This paper documents the creation of a large-scale dataset of evaluative sentences – i.e. both subjective and objective sentences that are found to be sentiment-bearing – based on mixed-domain professional reviews from various news-sources. We present both the annotation scheme and first results for classification experiments. The effort represents a step toward creating a Norwegian dataset for fine-grained sentiment analysis.

This paper explores the use of multi-task learning (MTL) for incorporating external knowledge in neural models. Specifically, we show how MTL can enable a BiLSTM sentiment classifier to incorporate information from sentiment lexicons. Our MTL set-up is shown to improve model performance (compared to a single-task set-up) on both English and Norwegian sentence-level sentiment datasets. The paper also introduces a new sentiment lexicon for Norwegian.

Encoders that generate representations based on context have, in recent years, benefited from adaptations that allow for pre-training on large text corpora. Earlier work on evaluating fixed-length sentence representations has included the use of ‘probing’ tasks, that use diagnostic classifiers to attempt to quantify the extent to which these encoders capture specific linguistic phenomena. The principle of probing has also resulted in extended evaluations that include relatively newer word-level pre-trained encoders. We build on probing tasks established in the literature and comprehensively evaluate and analyse – from a typological perspective amongst others – multilingual variants of existing encoders on probing datasets constructed for 6 non-English languages. Specifically, we probe each layer of a multiple monolingual RNN-based ELMo models, the transformer-based BERT’s cased and uncased multilingual variants, and a variant of BERT that uses a cross-lingual modelling scheme (XLM).

Existing named entity recognition (NER) systems rely on large amounts of human-labeled data for supervision. However, obtaining large-scale annotated data is challenging particularly in specific domains like health-care, e-commerce and so on. Given the availability of domain specific knowledge resources, (e.g., ontologies, dictionaries), distant supervision is a solution to generate automatically labeled training data to reduce human effort. The outcome of distant supervision for NER, however, is often noisy. False positive and false negative instances are the main issues that reduce performance on this kind of auto-generated data. In this paper, we explore distant supervision in a supervised setup. We adopt a technique of partial annotation to address false negative cases and implement a reinforcement learning strategy with a neural network policy to identify false positive instances. Our results establish a new state-of-the-art on four benchmark datasets taken from different domains and different languages. We then go on to show that our model reduces the amount of manually annotated data required to perform NER in a new domain.

We investigate the use of different syntactic dependency representations in a neural relation classification task and compare the CoNLL, Stanford Basic and Universal Dependencies schemes. We further compare with a syntax-agnostic approach and perform an error analysis in order to gain a better understanding of the results.

This article presents the SIRIUS-LTG system for the Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) Shared Task. It consists of three components: 1) Wikipedia Page Retrieval: First we extract the entities in the claim, then we find potential Wikipedia URI candidates for each of the entities using a SPARQL query over DBpedia 2) Sentence selection: We investigate various techniques i.e. Smooth Inverse Frequency (SIF), Word Mover’s Distance (WMD), Soft-Cosine Similarity, Cosine similarity with unigram Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) to rank sentences by their similarity to the claim. 3) Textual Entailment: We compare three models for the task of claim classification. We apply a Decomposable Attention (DA) model (Parikh et al., 2016), a Decomposed Graph Entailment (DGE) model (Khot et al., 2018) and a Gradient-Boosted Decision Trees (TalosTree) model (Sean et al., 2017) for this task. The experiments show that the pipeline with simple Cosine Similarity using TFIDF in sentence selection along with DA model as labelling model achieves the best results on the development set (F1 evidence: 32.17, label accuracy: 59.61 and FEVER score: 0.3778). Furthermore, it obtains 30.19, 48.87 and 36.55 in terms of F1 evidence, label accuracy and FEVER score, respectively, on the test set. Our system ranks 15th among 23 participants in the shared task prior to any human-evaluation of the evidence.

In this article, we describe the development of annotation guidelines for family history information in Norwegian clinical text. We make use of incrementally developed synthetic clinical text describing patients’ family history relating to cases of cardiac disease and present a general methodology which integrates the synthetically produced clinical statements and guideline development. We analyze inter-annotator agreement based on the developed guidelines and present results from experiments aimed at evaluating the validity and applicability of the annotated corpus using machine learning techniques. The resulting annotated corpus contains 477 sentences and 6030 tokens. Both the annotation guidelines and the annotated corpus are made freely available and as such constitutes the first publicly available resource of Norwegian clinical text.

Although treebanks annotated according to the guidelines of Universal Dependencies (UD) now exist for many languages, the goal of annotating the same phenomena in a cross-linguistically consistent fashion is not always met. In this paper, we investigate one phenomenon where we believe such consistency is lacking, namely expletive elements. Such elements occupy a position that is structurally associated with a core argument (or sometimes an oblique dependent), yet are non-referential and semantically void. Many UD treebanks identify at least some elements as expletive, but the range of phenomena differs between treebanks, even for closely related languages, and sometimes even for different treebanks for the same language. In this paper, we present criteria for identifying expletives that are applicable across languages and compatible with the goals of UD, give an overview of expletives as found in current UD treebanks, and present recommendations for the annotation of expletives so that more consistent annotation can be achieved in future releases.

We summarize empirical results and tentative conclusions from the Second Extrinsic Parser Evaluation Initiative (EPE 2018). We review the basic task setup, downstream applications involved, and end-to-end results for seventeen participating teams. Based on in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis, we correlate intrinsic evaluation results at different layers of morph-syntactic analysis with observed downstream behavior.

This article presents the SIRIUS-LTG-UiO system for the SemEval 2018 Task 7 on Semantic Relation Extraction and Classification in Scientific Papers. First we extract the shortest dependency path (sdp) between two entities, then we introduce a convolutional neural network (CNN) which takes the shortest dependency path embeddings as input and performs relation classification with differing objectives for each subtask of the shared task. This approach achieved overall F1 scores of 76.7 and 83.2 for relation classification on clean and noisy data, respectively. Furthermore, for combined relation extraction and classification on clean data, it obtained F1 scores of 37.4 and 33.6 for each phase. Our system ranks 3rd in all three sub-tasks of the shared task.

Recent years have witnessed a surge of publications aimed at tracing temporal changes in lexical semantics using distributional methods, particularly prediction-based word embedding models. However, this vein of research lacks the cohesion, common terminology and shared practices of more established areas of natural language processing. In this paper, we survey the current state of academic research related to diachronic word embeddings and semantic shifts detection. We start with discussing the notion of semantic shifts, and then continue with an overview of the existing methods for tracing such time-related shifts with word embedding models. We propose several axes along which these methods can be compared, and outline the main challenges before this emerging subfield of NLP, as well as prospects and possible applications.

This paper deals with using word embedding models to trace the temporal dynamics of semantic relations between pairs of words. The set-up is similar to the well-known analogies task, but expanded with a time dimension. To this end, we apply incremental updating of the models with new training texts, including incremental vocabulary expansion, coupled with learned transformation matrices that let us map between members of the relation. The proposed approach is evaluated on the task of predicting insurgent armed groups based on geographical locations. The gold standard data for the time span 1994–2010 is extracted from the UCDP Armed Conflicts dataset. The results show that the method is feasible and outperforms the baselines, but also that important work still remains to be done.

This paper presents an open-source toolkit for negation detection. It identifies negation cues and their corresponding scope in either raw or parsed text using maximum-margin classification. The system design draws on best practice from the existing literature on negation detection, aiming for a simple and portable system that still achieves competitive performance. Pre-trained models and experimental results are provided for English.

Recent studies have shown that word embedding models can be used to trace time-related (diachronic) semantic shifts in particular words. In this paper, we evaluate some of these approaches on the new task of predicting the dynamics of global armed conflicts on a year-to-year basis, using a dataset from the conflict research field as the gold standard and the Gigaword news corpus as the training data. The results show that much work still remains in extracting ‘cultural’ semantic shifts from diachronic word embedding models. At the same time, we present a new task complete with an evaluation set and introduce the ‘anchor words’ method which outperforms previous approaches on this set.

This article describes the conversion of the Norwegian Dependency Treebank to the Universal Dependencies scheme. This paper details the mapping of PoS tags, morphological features and dependency relations and provides a description of the structural changes made to NDT analyses in order to make it compliant with the UD guidelines. We further present PoS tagging and dependency parsing experiments which report first results for the processing of the converted treebank. The full converted treebank was made available with the 1.2 release of the UD treebanks.

The Norwegian Dependency Treebank is a new syntactic treebank for Norwegian Bokmäl and Nynorsk with manual syntactic and morphological annotation, developed at the National Library of Norway in collaboration with the University of Oslo. It is the first publically available treebank for Norwegian. This paper presents the core principles behind the syntactic annotation and how these principles were employed in certain specific cases. We then present the selection of texts and distribution between genres, as well as the annotation process and an evaluation of the inter-annotator agreement. Finally, we present the first results of data-driven dependency parsing of Norwegian, contrasting four state-of-the-art dependency parsers trained on the treebank. The consistency and the parsability of this treebank is shown to be comparable to other large treebank initiatives.

We present the WeSearch Data Collection (WDC)―a freely redistributable, partly annotated, comprehensive sample of User-Generated Content. The WDC contains data extracted from a range of genres of varying formality (user forums, product review sites, blogs and Wikipedia) and covers two different domains (NLP and Linux). In this article, we describe the data selection and extraction process, with a focus on the extraction of linguistic content from different sources. We present the format of syntacto-semantic annotations found in this resource and present initial parsing results for these data, as well as some reflections following a first round of treebanking.

We present our efforts to create a large-scale, semi-automatically annotated parallel corpus of cleft constructions. The corpus is intended to reduce or make more effective the manual task of finding examples of clefts in a corpus. The corpus is being developed in the context of the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 632, which is a large, interdisciplinary research initiative to study information structure, at the University of Potsdam and the Humboldt University in Berlin. The corpus is based on the Europarl corpus (version 3). We show how state-of-the-art NLP tools, like POS taggers and statistical dependency parsers, may facilitate powerful and precise searches. We argue that identifying clefts using automatically added syntactic structure annotation is ultimately to be preferred over using lower level, though more robust, extraction methods like regular expression matching. An evaluation of the extraction method for one of the languages also offers some support for this method. We end the paper by discussing the resulting corpus itself. We present some examples of interesting clefts and translational counterparts from the corpus and suggest ways of exploiting our newly created resource in the cross-linguistic study of clefts.

We present a study that compares data-driven dependency parsers obtained by means of annotation projection between language pairs of varying structural similarity. We show how the partial dependency trees projected from English to Dutch, Italian and German can be exploited to train parsers for the target languages. We evaluate the parsers against manual gold standard annotations and find that the projected parsers substantially outperform our heuristic baselines by 9―25% UAS, which corresponds to a 21―43% reduction in error rate. A comparative error analysis focuses on how the projected target language parsers handle subjects, which is especially interesting for Italian as an instance of a pro-drop language. For Dutch, we further present experiments with German as an alternative source language. In both source languages, we contrast standard baseline parsers with parsers that are enhanced with the predictions from large-scale LFG grammars through a technique of parser stacking, and show that improvements of the source language parser can directly lead to similar improvements of the projected target language parser.