Keyword extraction is the task of retrieving words that are essential to the content of a given document. Researchers proposed various approaches to tackle this problem. At the top-most level, approaches are divided into ones that require training - supervised and ones that do not - unsupervised. In this study, we are interested in settings, where for a language under investigation, no training data is available. More specifically, we explore whether pretrained multilingual language models can be employed for zero-shot cross-lingual keyword extraction on low-resource languages with limited or no available labeled training data and whether they outperform state-of-the-art unsupervised keyword extractors. The comparison is conducted on six news article datasets covering two high-resource languages, English and Russian, and four low-resource languages, Croatian, Estonian, Latvian, and Slovenian. We find that the pretrained models fine-tuned on a multilingual corpus covering languages that do not appear in the test set (i.e. in a zero-shot setting), consistently outscore unsupervised models in all six languages.

In this paper, we present the participation of the EMBEDDIA team in the SemEval-2022 Task 8 (Multilingual News Article Similarity). We cover several techniques and propose different methods for finding the multilingual news article similarity by exploring the dataset in its entirety. We take advantage of the textual content of the articles, the provided metadata (e.g., titles, keywords, topics), the translated articles, the images (those that were available), and knowledge graph-based representations for entities and relations present in the articles. We, then, compute the semantic similarity between the different features and predict through regression the similarity scores. Our findings show that, while our proposed methods obtained promising results, exploiting the semantic textual similarity with sentence representations is unbeatable. Finally, in the official SemEval-2022 Task 8, we ranked fifth in the overall team ranking cross-lingual results, and second in the English-only results.

Depression is a mental illness that negatively affects a person’s well-being and can, if left untreated, lead to serious consequences such as suicide. Therefore, it is important to recognize the signs of depression early. In the last decade, social media has become one of the most common places to express one’s feelings. Hence, there is a possibility of text processing and applying machine learning techniques to detect possible signs of depression. In this paper, we present our approaches to solving the shared task titled Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text. We explore three different approaches to solve the challenge: fine-tuning BERT model, leveraging AutoML for the construction of features and classifier selection and finally, we explore latent spaces derived from the combination of textual and knowledge-based representations. We ranked 9th out of 31 teams in the competition. Our best solution, based on knowledge graph and textual representations, was 4.9% behind the best model in terms of Macro F1, and only 1.9% behind in terms of Recall.

Crosslingual terminology alignment task has many practical applications. In this work, we propose an aligning method for the shared task of the 15th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora. Our method combines several different approaches into one cohesive machine learning model, based on SVM. From shared-task specific and external sources, we crafted four types of features: cognate-based, dictionary-based, embedding-based, and combined features, which combine aspects of the other three types. We added a post-processing re-scoring method, which reducess the effect of hubness, where some terms are nearest neighbours of many other terms. We achieved the average precision score of 0.833 on the English-French training set of the shared task.

Keyword extraction is the task of identifying words (or multi-word expressions) that best describe a given document and serve in news portals to link articles of similar topics. In this work, we develop and evaluate our methods on four novel data sets covering less-represented, morphologically-rich languages in European news media industry (Croatian, Estonian, Latvian, and Russian). First, we perform evaluation of two supervised neural transformer-based methods, Transformer-based Neural Tagger for Keyword Identification (TNT-KID) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) with an additional Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Conditional Random Fields (BiLSTM CRF) classification head, and compare them to a baseline Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) based unsupervised approach. Next, we show that by combining the keywords retrieved by both neural transformer-based methods and extending the final set of keywords with an unsupervised TF-IDF based technique, we can drastically improve the recall of the system, making it appropriate for usage as a recommendation system in the media house environment.

This paper presents tools and data sources collected and released by the EMBEDDIA project, supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. The collected resources were offered to participants of a hackathon organized as part of the EACL Hackashop on News Media Content Analysis and Automated Report Generation in February 2021. The hackathon had six participating teams who addressed different challenges, either from the list of proposed challenges or their own news-industry-related tasks. This paper goes beyond the scope of the hackathon, as it brings together in a coherent and compact form most of the resources developed, collected and released by the EMBEDDIA project. Moreover, it constitutes a handy source for news media industry and researchers in the fields of Natural Language Processing and Social Science.

Team Name: team-8 Embeddia Tool: Cross-Lingual Document Retrieval Zosa et al. Dataset: Estonian and Latvian news datasets abstract: Contemporary news media face increasing amounts of available data that can be of use when prioritizing, selecting and discovering new news. In this work we propose a methodology for retrieving interesting articles in a cross-border news discovery setting. More specifically, we explore how a set of seed documents in Estonian can be projected in Latvian document space and serve as a basis for discovery of novel interesting pieces of Latvian news that would interest Estonian readers. The proposed methodology was evaluated by Estonian journalist who confirmed that in the best setting, from top 10 retrieved Latvian documents, half of them represent news that are potentially interesting to be taken by the Estonian media house and presented to Estonian readers.