Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in natural language processing, but they depend on vast, diverse datasets, creating challenges for languages with limited resources. The paper presents a national initiative that addresses these challenges for Slovene. We outline strategies for large-scale text collection, including the creation of an online platform to engage the broader public in contributing texts and a communication campaign promoting openly accessible and transparently developed LLMs.

This paper introduces the upgrade of a training corpus for linguistic annotation of modern standard Slovene. The enhancement spans both the size of the corpus and the depth of annotation layers. The revised SUK 1.0 corpus, building on its predecessor ssj500k 2.3, has doubled in size, containing over a million tokens. This expansion integrates three preexisting open-access datasets, all of which have undergone automatic tagging and meticulous manual review across multiple annotation layers, each represented in varying proportions. These layers span tokenization, segmentation, lemmatization, MULTEXT-East morphology, Universal Dependencies, JOS-SYN syntax, semantic role labeling, named entity recognition, and the newly incorporated coreferences. The paper illustrates the annotation processes for each layer while also presenting the results of the new CLASSLA-Stanza annotation tool, trained on the SUK corpus data. As one of the fundamental language resources of modern Slovene, the SUK corpus calls for constant development, as outlined in the concluding section.

We present ongoing work towards defining a lexicon-corpus interface to serve as a benchmark in the representation of multiword expressions (of various parts of speech) in dedicated lexica and the linking of these entries to their corpus occurrences. The final aim is the harnessing of such resources for the automatic identification of multiword expressions in a text. The involvement of several natural languages aims at the universality of a solution not centered on a particular language, and also accommodating idiosyncrasies. Challenges in the lexicographic description of multiword expressions are discussed, the current status of lexica dedicated to this linguistic phenomenon is outlined, as well as the solution we envisage for creating an ecosystem of interlinked lexica and corpora containing and, respectively, annotated with multiword expressions.

In the last five years, there has been a significant focus in Natural Language Processing (NLP) on developing larger Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) and introducing benchmarks such as SuperGLUE and SQuAD to measure their abilities in language understanding, reasoning, and reading comprehension. These PLMs have achieved impressive results on these benchmarks, even surpassing human performance in some cases. This has led to claims of superhuman capabilities and the provocative idea that certain tasks have been solved. In this position paper, we take a critical look at these claims and ask whether PLMs truly have superhuman abilities and what the current benchmarks are really evaluating. We show that these benchmarks have serious limitations affecting the comparison between humans and PLMs and provide recommendations for fairer and more transparent benchmarks.

The work in progress on the CEF Action CURLICA T is presented. The general aim of the Action is to compile curated datasets in seven languages of the con- sortium in domains of relevance to Euro- pean Digital Service Infrastructures (DSIs) in order to enhance the eTransla- tion services.

This article presents the current outcomes of the CURLICAT CEF Telecom project, which aims to collect and deeply annotate a set of large corpora from selected domains. The CURLICAT corpus includes 7 monolingual corpora (Bulgarian, Croatian, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak and Slovenian) containing selected samples from respective national corpora. These corpora are automatically tokenized, lemmatized and morphologically analysed and the named entities annotated. The annotations are uniformly provided for each language specific corpus while the common metadata schema is harmonised across the languages. Additionally, the corpora are annotated for IATE terms in all languages. The file format is CoNLL-U Plus format, containing the ten columns specific to the CoNLL-U format and three extra columns specific to our corpora as defined by Varádi et al. (2020). The CURLICAT corpora represent a rich and valuable source not just for training NMT models, but also for further studies and developments in machine learning, cross-lingual terminological data extraction and classification.

Aligning senses across resources and languages is a challenging task with beneficial applications in the field of natural language processing and electronic lexicography. In this paper, we describe our efforts in manually aligning monolingual dictionaries. The alignment is carried out at sense-level for various resources in 15 languages. Moreover, senses are annotated with possible semantic relationships such as broadness, narrowness, relatedness, and equivalence. In comparison to previous datasets for this task, this dataset covers a wide range of languages and resources and focuses on the more challenging task of linking general-purpose language. We believe that our data will pave the way for further advances in alignment and evaluation of word senses by creating new solutions, particularly those notoriously requiring data such as neural networks. Our resources are publicly available at https://github.com/elexis-eu/MWSA.

Multilingualism is a cultural cornerstone of Europe and firmly anchored in the European treaties including full language equality. However, language barriers impacting business, cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication are still omnipresent. Language Technologies (LTs) are a powerful means to break down these barriers. While the last decade has seen various initiatives that created a multitude of approaches and technologies tailored to Europe’s specific needs, there is still an immense level of fragmentation. At the same time, AI has become an increasingly important concept in the European Information and Communication Technology area. For a few years now, AI – including many opportunities, synergies but also misconceptions – has been overshadowing every other topic. We present an overview of the European LT landscape, describing funding programmes, activities, actions and challenges in the different countries with regard to LT, including the current state of play in industry and the LT market. We present a brief overview of the main LT-related activities on the EU level in the last ten years and develop strategic guidance with regard to four key dimensions.

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 article presents the current outcomes of the MARCELL CEF Telecom project aiming to collect and deeply annotate a large comparable corpus of legal documents. The MARCELL corpus includes 7 monolingual sub-corpora (Bulgarian, Croatian, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak and Slovenian) containing the total body of respective national legislative documents. These sub-corpora are automatically sentence split, tokenized, lemmatized and morphologically and syntactically annotated. The monolingual sub-corpora are complemented by a thematically related parallel corpus (Croatian-English). The metadata and the annotations are uniformly provided for each language specific sub-corpus. Besides the standard morphosyntactic analysis plus named entity and dependency annotation, the corpus is enriched with the IATE and EUROVOC labels. The file format is CoNLL-U Plus Format, containing the ten columns specific to the CoNLL-U format and four extra columns specific to our corpora. The MARCELL corpora represents a rich and valuable source for further studies and developments in machine learning, cross-lingual terminological data extraction and classification.

The paper describes objectives, concept and methodology for ELEXIS, a European infrastructure fostering cooperation and information exchange among lexicographical research communities. The infrastructure is a newly granted project under the Horizon 2020 INFRAIA call, with the topic Integrating Activities for Starting Communities. The project is planned to start in January 2018.

This paper describes the PARSEME Shared Task 1.1 on automatic identification of verbal multiword expressions. We present the annotation methodology, focusing on changes from last year’s shared task. Novel aspects include enhanced annotation guidelines, additional annotated data for most languages, corpora for some new languages, and new evaluation settings. Corpora were created for 20 languages, which are also briefly discussed. We report organizational principles behind the shared task and the evaluation metrics employed for ranking. The 17 participating systems, their methods and obtained results are also presented and analysed.

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.

This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until early 2014; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the situation of funding for LT topics. This paper documents the initiative’s work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.

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.

The paper describes the project whose main purpose is the creation of the Slovene terminology web portal, funded by the Slovene Research Agency and the Amebis software company. It focuses on the DTD/schema used for the unification of different terminology resources in different input formats into one database available on the web. Two projects involving unification DTD/schemas were taken as the model for the resulting DTD/schema: the CONCEDE project and the TMF project. The final DTD/schema was tested on twenty different specialized dictionaries, both monolingual and bilingual, in various formats either without any existing markup or with complex XML structure. The result of the project will be an on-line terminology resource for Slovenian which will also include didactic material on terminology and free tools for uploading domain-specific text collections to be processed with NLP software, including a term extractor.

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.