This paper presents the development process of a Vietnamese spoken language corpus for machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks and provides insights into the challenges and opportunities associated with using real-world data for machine reading comprehension tasks. The existing MRC corpora in Vietnamese mainly focus on formal written documents such as Wikipedia articles, online newspapers, or textbooks. In contrast, the VlogQA consists of 10,076 question-answer pairs based on 1,230 transcript documents sourced from YouTube – an extensive source of user-uploaded content, covering the topics of food and travel. By capturing the spoken language of native Vietnamese speakers in natural settings, an obscure corner overlooked in Vietnamese research, the corpus provides a valuable resource for future research in reading comprehension tasks for the Vietnamese language. Regarding performance evaluation, our deep-learning models achieved the highest F1 score of 75.34% on the test set, indicating significant progress in machine reading comprehension for Vietnamese spoken language data. In terms of EM, the highest score we accomplished is 53.97%, which reflects the challenge in processing spoken-based content and highlights the need for further improvement.

The success of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) benchmarks in various languages, such as GLUE for English, CLUE for Chinese, KLUE for Korean, and IndoNLU for Indonesian, has facilitated the evaluation of new NLU models across a wide range of tasks. To establish a standardized set of benchmarks for Vietnamese NLU, we introduce the first Vietnamese Language Understanding Evaluation (VLUE) benchmark. The VLUE benchmark encompasses five datasets covering different NLU tasks, including text classification, span extraction, and natural language understanding. To provide an insightful overview of the current state of Vietnamese NLU, we then evaluate seven state-of-the-art pre-trained models, including both multilingual and Vietnamese monolingual models, on our proposed VLUE benchmark. Furthermore, we present CafeBERT, a new state-of-the-art pre-trained model that achieves superior results across all tasks in the VLUE benchmark. Our model combines the proficiency of a multilingual pre-trained model with Vietnamese linguistic knowledge. CafeBERT is developed based on the XLM-RoBERTa model, with an additional pretraining step utilizing a significant amount of Vietnamese textual data to enhance its adaptation to the Vietnamese language. For the purpose of future research, CafeBERT is made publicly available for research purposes.

This paper describes the system of the ABCD team for three main tasks in the SemEval-2023 Task 12: AfriSenti-SemEval for Low-resource African Languages using Twitter Dataset. We focus on exploring the performance of ensemble architectures based on the soft voting technique and different pre-trained transformer-based language models. The experimental results show that our system has achieved competitive performance in some Tracks in Task A: Monolingual Sentiment Analysis, where we rank the Top 3, Top 2, and Top 4 for the Hause, Igbo and Moroccan languages. Besides, our model achieved competitive results and ranked $14ˆ{th}$ place in Task B (multilingual) setting and $14ˆ{th}$ and $8ˆ{th}$ place in Track 17 and Track 18 of Task C (zero-shot) setting.

We present our works on SemEval-2021 Task 5 about Toxic Spans Detection. This task aims to build a model for identifying toxic words in whole posts. We use the BiLSTM-CRF model combining with ToxicBERT Classification to train the detection model for identifying toxic words in posts. Our model achieves 62.23% by F1-score on the Toxic Spans Detection task.

Over 97 million inhabitants speak Vietnamese as the native language in the world. However, there are few research studies on machine reading comprehension (MRC) in Vietnamese, the task of understanding a document or text, and answering questions related to it. Due to the lack of benchmark datasets for Vietnamese, we present the Vietnamese Question Answering Dataset (UIT-ViQuAD), a new dataset for the low-resource language as Vietnamese to evaluate MRC models. This dataset comprises over 23,000 human-generated question-answer pairs based on 5,109 passages of 174 Vietnamese articles from Wikipedia. In particular, we propose a new process of dataset creation for Vietnamese MRC. Our in-depth analyses illustrate that our dataset requires abilities beyond simple reasoning like word matching and demands complicate reasoning such as single-sentence and multiple-sentence inferences. Besides, we conduct experiments on state-of-the-art MRC methods in English and Chinese as the first experimental models on UIT-ViQuAD, which will be compared to further models. We also estimate human performances on the dataset and compare it to the experimental results of several powerful machine models. As a result, the substantial differences between humans and the best model performances on the dataset indicate that improvements can be explored on UIT-ViQuAD through future research. Our dataset is freely available to encourage the research community to overcome challenges in Vietnamese MRC.

This paper describes the system of NLP@UIT that participated in Task 4 of SemEval-2019. We developed a system that predicts whether an English news article follows a hyperpartisan argumentation. Paparazzo is the name of our system and is also the code name of our team in Task 4 of SemEval-2019. The Paparazzo system, in which we use tri-grams of words and hepta-grams of characters, officially ranks thirteen with an accuracy of 0.747. Another system of ours, which utilizes trigrams of words, tri-grams of characters, trigrams of part-of-speech, syntactic dependency sub-trees, and named-entity recognition tags, achieved an accuracy of 0.787 and is proposed after the deadline of Task 4.

Treebanks are important resources for researchers in natural language processing, speech recognition, theoretical linguistics, etc. To strengthen the automatic processing of the Vietnamese language, a Vietnamese treebank has been built. However, the quality of this treebank is not satisfactory and is a possible source for the low performance of Vietnamese language processing. We have been building a new treebank for Vietnamese with about 40,000 sentences annotated with three layers: word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and bracketing. In this paper, we describe several challenges of Vietnamese language and how we solve them in developing annotation guidelines. We also present our methods to improve the quality of the annotation guidelines and ensure annotation accuracy and consistency. Experiment results show that inter-annotator agreement ratios and accuracy are higher than 90% which is satisfactory.

This paper presents our findings on the feasibility of doing pronoun resolution for biomedical texts, in comparison with conducting pronoun resolution for the newswire domain. In our experiments, we built a simple machine learning-based pronoun resolution system, and evaluated the system on three different corpora: MUC, ACE, and GENIA. Comparative statistics not only reveal the noticeable issues in constructing an effective pronoun resolution system for a new domain, but also provides a comprehensive view of those corpora often used for this task.