In ParlaMint I, a CLARIN-ERIC supported project in pandemic times, a set of comparable and uniformly annotated multilingual corpora for 17 national parliaments were developed and released in 2021. For 2022 and 2023, the project has been extended to ParlaMint II, again with the CLARIN ERIC financial support, in order to enhance the existing corpora with new data and metadata; upgrade the XML schema; add corpora for 10 new parliaments; provide more application scenarios and carry out additional experiments. The paper reports on these planned steps, including some that have already been taken, and outlines future plans.

Abbreviations present a significant challenge for NLP systems because they cause tokenization and out-of-vocabulary errors. They can also make the text less readable, especially in reference printed books, where they are extensively used. Abbreviations are especially problematic in low-resource settings, where systems are less robust to begin with. In this paper, we propose a new method for addressing the problems caused by a high density of domain-specific abbreviations in a text. We apply this method to the case of a Slovenian biographical lexicon and evaluate it on a newly developed gold-standard dataset of 51 Slovenian biographies. Our abbreviation identification method performs significantly better than commonly used ad-hoc solutions, especially at identifying unseen abbreviations. We also propose and present the results of a method for expanding the identified abbreviations in context.

The paper describes the process of acquisition, up-translation, encoding, annotation, and distribution of siParl, a collection of the parliamentary debates from the Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia from 1990–2018, covering the period from just before Slovenia became an independent country in 1991, and almost up to the present. The entire corpus, comprising over 8 thousand sessions, 1 million speeches and 200 million words was uniformly encoded in accordance with the TEI-based Parla-CLARIN schema for encoding corpora of parliamentary debates, and contains extensive meta-data about the speakers, a typology of sessions etc. and structural and editorial annotations. The corpus was also part-of-speech tagged and lemmatised using state-of-the-art tools. The corpus is maintained on GitHub with its major versions archived in the CLARIN.SI repository and is available for linguistic analysis in the scope of the on-line CLARIN.SI concordancers, thus offering an invaluable resource for scholars studying Slovenian political history.

We describe a new version of the Gigafida reference corpus of Slovene. In addition to updating the corpus with new material and annotating it with better tools, the focus of the upgrade was also on its transformation from a general reference corpus, which contains all language variants including non-standard language, to the corpus of standard (written) Slovene. This decision could be implemented as new corpora dedicated specifically to non-standard language emerged recently. In the new version, the whole Gigafida corpus was deduplicated for the first time, which facilitates automatic extraction of data for the purposes of compilation of new lexicographic resources such as the collocations dictionary and the thesaurus of Slovene.

This paper presents two large newly constructed datasets of moderated news comments from two highly popular online news portals in the respective countries: the Slovene RTV MCC and the Croatian 24sata. The datasets are analyzed by performing manual annotation of the types of the content which have been deleted by moderators and by investigating deletion trends among users and threads. Next, initial experiments on automatically detecting the deleted content in the datasets are presented. Both datasets are published in encrypted form, to enable others to perform experiments on detecting content to be deleted without revealing potentially inappropriate content. Finally, the baseline classification models trained on the non-encrypted datasets are disseminated as well to enable real-world use.

This paper introduces the Universal Dependencies Treebank for Slovenian. We overview the existing dependency treebanks for Slovenian and then detail the conversion of the ssj200k treebank to the framework of Universal Dependencies version 2. We explain the mapping of part-of-speech categories, morphosyntactic features, and the dependency relations, focusing on the more problematic language-specific issues. We conclude with a quantitative overview of the treebank and directions for further work.

In this paper we present the adaptations of a state-of-the-art tagger for South Slavic languages to non-standard texts on the example of the Slovene language. We investigate the impact of introducing in-domain training data as well as additional supervision through external resources or tools like word clusters and word normalization. We remove more than half of the error of the standard tagger when applied to non-standard texts by training it on a combination of standard and non-standard training data, while enriching the data representation with external resources removes additional 11 percent of the error. The final configuration achieves tagging accuracy of 87.41% on the full morphosyntactic description, which is, nevertheless, still quite far from the accuracy of 94.27% achieved on standard text.

In this paper we present a set of experiments and analyses on predicting the gender of Twitter users based on language-independent features extracted either from the text or the metadata of users’ tweets. We perform our experiments on the TwiSty dataset containing manual gender annotations for users speaking six different languages. Our classification results show that, while the prediction model based on language-independent features performs worse than the bag-of-words model when training and testing on the same language, it regularly outperforms the bag-of-words model when applied to different languages, showing very stable results across various languages. Finally we perform a comparative analysis of feature effect sizes across the six languages and show that differences in our features correspond to cultural distances.

In this paper we present the legal framework, dataset and annotation schema of socially unacceptable discourse practices on social networking platforms in Slovenia. On this basis we aim to train an automatic identification and classification system with which we wish contribute towards an improved methodology, understanding and treatment of such practices in the contemporary, increasingly multicultural information society.

In this paper we present a tagger developed for inflectionally rich languages for which both a training corpus and a lexicon are available. We do not constrain the tagger by the lexicon entries, allowing both for lexicon incompleteness and noisiness. By using the lexicon indirectly through features we allow for known and unknown words to be tagged in the same manner. We test our tagger on Slovene data, obtaining a 25% error reduction of the best previous results both on known and unknown words. Given that Slovene is, in comparison to some other Slavic languages, a well-resourced language, we perform experiments on the impact of token (corpus) vs. type (lexicon) supervision, obtaining useful insights in how to balance the effort of extending resources to yield better tagging results.

In computer-mediated communication, Latin-based scripts users often omit diacritics when writing. Such text is typically easily understandable to humans but very difficult for computational processing because many words become ambiguous or unknown. Letter-level approaches to diacritic restoration generalise better and do not require a lot of training data but word-level approaches tend to yield better results. However, they typically rely on a lexicon which is an expensive resource, not covering non-standard forms, and often not available for less-resourced languages. In this paper we present diacritic restoration models that are trained on easy-to-acquire corpora. We test three different types of corpora (Wikipedia, general web, Twitter) for three South Slavic languages (Croatian, Serbian and Slovene) and evaluate them on two types of text: standard (Wikipedia) and non-standard (Twitter). The proposed approach considerably outperforms charlifter, so far the only open source tool available for this task. We make the best performing systems freely available.

The paper presents sloWCrowd, a simple tool developed to facilitate crowdsourcing lexicographic tasks, such as error correction in automatically generated wordnets and semantic annotation of corpora. The tool is open-source, language-independent and can be adapted to a broad range of crowdsourcing tasks. Since volunteers who participate in our crowdsourcing tasks are not trained lexicographers, the tool has been designed to obtain multiple answers to the same question and compute the majority vote, making sure individual unreliable answers are discarded. We also make sure unreliable volunteers, who systematically provide unreliable answers, are not taken into account. This is achieved by measuring their accuracy against a gold standard, the questions from which are posed to the annotators on a regular basis in between the real question. We tested the tool in an extensive crowdsourcing task, i.e. error correction of the Slovene wordnet, the results of which are encouraging, motivating us to use the tool in other annotation tasks in the future as well.

This paper presents TweetCaT, an open-source Python tool for building Twitter corpora that was designed for smaller languages. Using the Twitter search API and a set of seed terms, the tool identifies users tweeting in the language of interest together with their friends and followers. By running the tool for 235 days we tested it on the task of collecting two monitor corpora, one for Croatian and Serbian and the other for Slovene, thus also creating new and valuable resources for these languages. A post-processing step on the collected corpus is also described, which filters out users that tweet predominantly in a foreign language thus further cleans the collected corpora. Finally, an experiment on discriminating between Croatian and Serbian Twitter users is reported.

The paper presents a gold-standard reference corpus of historical Slovene containing 1,000 sampled pages from over 80 texts, which were, for the most part, written between 1750-1900. Each page of the transcription has an associated facsimile and the words in the texts have been manually annotated with their modern-day equivalent, lemma and part-of-speech. The paper presents the structure of the text collection, the sampling procedure, annotation process and encoding of the corpus. The corpus is meant to facilitate HLT research and enable corpus based diachronic studies for historical Slovene. The corpus is encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines (TEI P5), is available via a concordancer and for download from http://nl.ijs.si/imp/ under the Creative Commons Attribution licence.

The paper presents the fourth, ``Mondilex'' edition of the MULTEXT-East language resources, a multilingual dataset for language engineering research and development, focused on the morphosyntactic level of linguistic description. This standardised and linked set of resources covers a large number of mainly Central and Eastern European languages and includes the EAGLES-based morphosyntactic specifications; morphosyntactic lexica; and annotated parallel, comparable, and speech corpora. The fourth release of these resources introduces XML-encoded morphosyntactic specifications and adds six new languages, bringing the total to 16: to Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, English, Hungarian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovene, and the Resian dialect of Slovene it adds Macedonian, Persian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, and Ukrainian. This dataset, unique in terms of languages covered and the wealth of encoding, is extensively documented, and freely available for research purposes at http://nl.ijs.si/ME/V4/.

The JOS language resources are meant to facilitate developments of HLT and corpus linguistics for the Slovene language and consist of the morphosyntactic specifications, defining the Slovene morphosyntactic features and tagset; two annotated corpora (jos100k and jos1M); and two web services (a concordancer and text annotation tool). The paper introduces these components, and concentrates on jos100k, a 100,000 word sampled balanced monolingual Slovene corpus, manually annotated for three levels of linguistic description. On the morphosyntactic level, each word is annotated with its morphosyntactic description and lemma; on the syntactic level the sentences are annotated with dependency links; on the semantic level, all the occurrences of 100 top nouns in the corpus are annotated with their wordnet synset from the Slovene semantic lexicon sloWNet. The JOS corpora and specifications have a standardised encoding (Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines TEI P5) and are available for research from http://nl.ijs.si/jos/ under the Creative Commons licence.

We propose to create a grid virtual organization for human language technologies, at first chiefly with the task of enabling linguistic researches to use existing distributed computing facilities of the European grid infrastructure for more efficient processing of large data sets. After a brief overview of modern grid computing, a number of common use-cases of natural language processing tasks running on the grid are presented, notably corpus annotation with morpho-syntactic tagging (600+ million-word corpus annotated in less than a day), $n$-gram statistics processing of a corpus and creation of grid-backed web-accessible services with annotation and term-extraction as examples. Implementation considerations and common problems of using grid for this type of tasks are laid out. We conclude with an outline of a simple action plan for evolving the infrastructure created for these experiments into a fully functional Human Language Technology grid Virtual Organization with the goal of making the power of European grid infrastructure available to the linguistic community.

The JOSmorphosyntactic resources for Slovene consist of the specifications, lexicon, and two corpora: jos100k, a 100,000 word balanced monolingual sampled corpus annotated with hand validated morphosyntactic descriptions (MSDs) and lemmas, and jos1M, the 1 million-word partially hand validated corpus. The two corpora have been sampled from the 600M-word Slovene reference corpus FidaPLUS. The JOS resources have a standardised encoding, with the MULTEXT-East-type morphosyntactic specifications and the corpora encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines P5. JOS resources are available as a dataset for research under the Creative Commons licence and are meant to facilitate developments of HLT for Slovene.

This paper reports the principles behind designing a tagset to cover Russian morphosyntactic phenomena, modifications of the core tagset, and its evaluation. The tagset is based on the MULTEXT-East framework, while the decisions in designing it were aimed at achieving a balance between parameters important for linguists and the possibility to detect and disambiguate them automatically. The final tagset contains about 500 tags and achieves about 95% accuracy on the disambiguated portion of the Russian National Corpus. We have also produced a test set that can be shared with other researchers.

The paper presents the initial release of the Slovene Dependency Treebank, currently containing 2000 sentences or 30.000 words. Ourapproach to annotation is based on the Prague Dependency Treebank, which serves as an excellent model due to the similarity of the languages, the existence of a detailed annotation guide and an annotation editor. The initial treebank contains a portion of theMULTEXT-East parallel word-level annotated corpus, namely the firstpart of the Slovene translation of Orwell's “1984”. This corpus was first parsed automatically, to arrive at the initial analytic level dependency trees. These were then hand corrected using the tree editorTrEd; simultaneously, the Czech annotation manual was modified forSlovene. The current version is available in XML/TEI, as well asderived formats, and has been used in a comparative evaluation using the MALT parser, and as one of the languages present in the CoNLL-Xshared task on dependency parsing. The paper also discusses further work, in the first instance the composition of the corpus to be annotated next.

The paper presents the SVEZ-IJS corpus, a large parallel annotated English-Slovene corpus containing translated legal texts of the European Union, the ACQUIS Communautaire. The corpus contains approx. 2 x 5 million words and was compiled from the translation memory obtained from the Translation Unit of the Slovene Government Office for European Affairs. The corpus is encoded in XML, accordingto the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines TEI P4, where each translation memory unit contains useful metadata and the two aligned segments (sentences). Both the Slovene and English text islinguistically annotated at the word-level, by context disambiguatedlemmas and morphosyntactic descriptions, which follow the MULTEXTguidelines. The complete corpus is freely available for research, either via an on-line concordancer, or for downloading from the corpushome page at http://nl.ijs.si/svez/.

A WordNet is a lexical database in which nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized in a conceptual hierarchy, linking semantically and lexically related concepts. Such semantic lexicons have become oneof the most valuable resources for a wide range of NLP research and applications, such as semantic tagging, automatic word-sense disambiguation, information retrieval and document summarisation. Following the WordNet design for the English languagedeveloped at Princeton, WordNets for a number of other languages havebeen developed in the past decade, taking the idea into the domain ofmultilingual processing. This paper reports on the prototype SloveneWordNet which currently contains about 5,000 top-level concepts. Theresource has been automatically translated from the Serbian WordNet, with the help of a bilingual dictionary, synset literals ranked according to the frequency of corpus occurrence, and results manually corrected. The paper presents the results obtained, discusses some problems encountered along the way and points out some possibilitiesof automated acquisition and refinement of synsets in the future.

We present a new, unique and freely available parallel corpus containing European Union (EU) documents of mostly legal nature. It is available in all 20 official EU languages, with additional documents being available in the languages of the EU candidate countries. The corpus consists of almost 8,000 documents per language, with an average size of nearly 9 million words per language. Pair-wise paragraph alignment information produced by two different aligners (Vanilla and HunAlign) is available for all 190+ language pair combinations. Most texts have been manually classified according to the EUROVOC subject domains so that the collection can also be used to train and test multi-label classification algorithms and keyword-assignment software. The corpus is encoded in XML, according to the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines. Due to the large number of parallel texts in many languages, the JRC-Acquis is particularly suitable to carry out all types of cross-language research, as well as to test and benchmark text analysis software across different languages (for instance for alignment, sentence splitting and term extraction).

Multilingual parallel corpora are a basic resource for research and development of MT. Such corpora are still scarce, especially for lower-diffusion languages. The paper presents a sentence-aligned tokenised Slovene-English corpus, developed in the scope of the EU ELAN project. The corpus contains 1 million words from fifteen recent terminology-rich texts and is encoded according to the Guidelines for Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI). Our document type definition is a parametrisation of the TEI which directly encodes translation units of the bi-texts. in a manner similar to that of translation memories. The corpus is aimed as a widely-distributable dataset for language engineering and for translation and terminology studies. The paper describes the compilation of the corpus, its composition, encoding and availability. We highlight the corpus acquisition and distribution bottlenecks and present our solutions. These have to do with the workflow in the project, and. not unrelatedly, with the encoding scheme for the corpus.