Robert Munro


2020

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Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 at ACL 2020
Karin Verspoor | Kevin Bretonnel Cohen | Mark Dredze | Emilio Ferrara | Jonathan May | Robert Munro | Cecile Paris | Byron Wallace
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 at ACL 2020

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Detecting Independent Pronoun Bias with Partially-Synthetic Data Generation
Robert Munro | Alex (Carmen) Morrison
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

We report that state-of-the-art parsers consistently failed to identify “hers” and “theirs” as pronouns but identified the masculine equivalent “his”. We find that the same biases exist in recent language models like BERT. While some of the bias comes from known sources, like training data with gender imbalances, we find that the bias is _amplified_ in the language models and that linguistic differences between English pronouns that are not inherently biased can become biases in some machine learning models. We introduce a new technique for measuring bias in models, using Bayesian approximations to generate partially-synthetic data from the model itself.

2012

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Accurate Unsupervised Joint Named-Entity Extraction from Unaligned Parallel Text
Robert Munro | Christopher D. Manning
Proceedings of the 4th Named Entity Workshop (NEWS) 2012

2011

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Subword and Spatiotemporal Models for Identifying Actionable Information in Haitian Kreyol
Robert Munro
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

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Crisis MT: Developing A Cookbook for MT in Crisis Situations
William Lewis | Robert Munro | Stephan Vogel
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

2010

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Crowdsourcing and language studies: the new generation of linguistic data
Robert Munro | Steven Bethard | Victor Kuperman | Vicky Tzuyin Lai | Robin Melnick | Christopher Potts | Tyler Schnoebelen | Harry Tily
Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Creating Speech and Language Data with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

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Subword Variation in Text Message Classification
Robert Munro | Christopher D. Manning
Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Crowdsourced translation for emergency response in Haiti: the global collaboration of local knowledge
Robert Munro
Proceedings of the Workshop on Collaborative Translation: technology, crowdsourcing, and the translator perspective

In the wake of the January 12 earthquake in Haiti it quickly became clear that the existing emergency response services had failed but text messages were still getting through. A number of people quickly came together to establish a text-message based emergency reporting system. There was one hurdle: the majority of the messages were in Haitian Kreyol, which for the most part was not understood by the primary emergency responders, the US Military. We therefore crowdsourced the translation of messages, allowing volunteers from within the Haitian Kreyol and French-speaking communities to translate, categorize and geolocate the messages in real-time. Collaborating online, they employed their local knowledge of locations, regional slang, abbreviations and spelling variants to process more than 40,000 messages in the first six weeks alone. According the responders this saved hundreds of lives and helped direct the first food and aid to tens of thousands. The average turn-around from a message arriving in Kreyol to it being translated, categorized, geolocated and streamed back to the responders was 10 minutes. Collaboration among translators was crucial for data-quality, motivation and community contacts, enabling richer value-adding in the translation than would have been possible from any one person.

2003

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A queueing-theory model of word frequency distributions
Robert Munro
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2003

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Meta-Learning Orthographic and Contextual Models for Language Independent Named Entity Recognition
Robert Munro | Daren Ler | Jon Patrick
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Natural Language Learning at HLT-NAACL 2003

2002

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SLINERC: The Sydney Language-Independent Named Entity Recogniser and Classifier
Jon Patrick | Casey Whitelaw | Robert Munro
COLING-02: The 6th Conference on Natural Language Learning 2002 (CoNLL-2002)