This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first ever publicly available annotated dataset for sentiment classification and semantic polarity dictionary for Georgian. The characteristics of these resources and the process of their creation are described in detail. The results of various experiments on the performance of both lexicon- and machine learning-based models for Georgian sentiment classification are also reported. Both 3-label (positive, neutral, negative) and 4-label settings (same labels + mixed) are considered. The machine learning models explored include, i.a., logistic regression, SVMs, and transformed-based models. We also explore transfer learning- and translation-based (to a well-supported language) approaches. The obtained results for Georgian are on par with the state-of-the-art results in sentiment classification for well studied languages when using training data of comparable size.

We present our contribution to the SemEval 22 Share Task 8: Multilingual news article similarity. The approach is lightweight and language-agnostic, it is based on the computation of several lexicographic and embedding-based features, and the use of a simple ML approach: random forests. In a notable departure from the task formulation, which is a ranking task, we tackled this task as a classification one. We present a detailed analysis of the behaviour of our system under different settings.

In this paper we present an approach to efficiently recover texts from corrupted documents of endangered languages. Textual resources for such languages are scarce, and sometimes the few available resources are corrupted PDF documents. Endangered languages are not supported by standard tools and present even the additional difficulties of not possessing any corpus over which to train language models to assist with the recovery. The approach presented is able to fully recover born digital PDF documents with minimal effort, thereby helping the preservation effort of endangered languages, by extending the range of documents usable for corpus building.

This paper presents a study of state-of-the-art unsupervised and linguistically unsophisticated keyword extraction algorithms, based on statistic-, graph-, and embedding-based approaches, including, i.a., Total Keyword Frequency, TF-IDF, RAKE, KPMiner, YAKE, KeyBERT, and variants of TextRank-based keyword extraction algorithms. The study was motivated by the need to select the most appropriate technique to extract keywords for indexing news articles in a real-world large-scale news analysis engine. The algorithms were evaluated on a corpus of circa 330 news articles in 7 languages. The overall best F1 scores for all languages on average were obtained using a combination of the recently introduced YAKE algorithm and KPMiner (20.1%, 46.6% and 47.2% for exact, partial and fuzzy matching resp.).

This paper describes the Shared Task on Fine-grained Event Classification in News-like Text Snippets. The Shared Task is divided into three sub-tasks: (a) classification of text snippets reporting socio-political events (25 classes) for which vast amount of training data exists, although exhibiting different structure and style vis-a-vis test data, (b) enhancement to a generalized zero-shot learning problem, where 3 additional event types were introduced in advance, but without any training data (‘unseen’ classes), and (c) further extension, which introduced 2 additional event types, announced shortly prior to the evaluation phase. The reported Shared Task focuses on classification of events in English texts and is organized as part of the Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE 2021), co-located with the ACL-IJCNLP 2021 Conference. Four teams participated in the task. Best performing systems for the three aforementioned sub-tasks achieved 83.9%, 79.7% and 77.1% weighted F1 scores respectively.

Evaluating the state-of-the-art event detection systems on determining spatio-temporal distribution of the events on the ground is performed unfrequently. But, the ability to both (1) extract events “in the wild” from text and (2) properly evaluate event detection systems has potential to support a wide variety of tasks such as monitoring the activity of socio-political movements, examining media coverage and public support of these movements, and informing policy decisions. Therefore, we study performance of the best event detection systems on detecting Black Lives Matter (BLM) events from tweets and news articles. The murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of police officers received global attention throughout the second half of 2020. Protests against police violence emerged worldwide and the BLM movement, which was once mostly regulated to the United States, was now seeing activity globally. This shared task asks participants to identify BLM related events from large unstructured data sources, using systems pretrained to extract socio-political events from text. We evaluate several metrics, accessing each system’s ability to identify protest events both temporally and spatially. Results show that identifying daily protest counts is an easier task than classifying spatial and temporal protest trends simultaneously, with maximum performance of 0.745 and 0.210 (Pearson r), respectively. Additionally, all baselines and participant systems suffered from low recall, with a maximum recall of 5.08.