Numerous datasets have been proposed to combat the spread of online hate. Despite these efforts, a majority of these resources are English-centric, primarily focusing on overt forms of hate. This research gap calls for developing high-quality corpora in diverse languages that also encapsulate more subtle hate expressions. This study introduces K-HATERS, a new corpus for hate speech detection in Korean, comprising approximately 192K news comments with target-specific offensiveness ratings. This resource is the largest offensive language corpus in Korean and is the first to offer target-specific ratings on a three-point Likert scale, enabling the detection of hate expressions in Korean across varying degrees of offensiveness. We conduct experiments showing the effectiveness of the proposed corpus, including a comparison with existing datasets. Additionally, to address potential noise and bias in human annotations, we explore a novel idea of adopting the Cognitive Reflection Test, which is widely used in social science for assessing an individual’s cognitive ability, as a proxy of labeling quality. Findings indicate that annotations from individuals with the lowest test scores tend to yield detection models that make biased predictions toward specific target groups and are less accurate. This study contributes to the NLP research on hate speech detection and resource construction. The code and dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/ssu-humane/K-HATERS.

Typically, tokenization is the very first step in most text processing works. As a token serves as an atomic unit that embeds the contextual information of text, how to define a token plays a decisive role in the performance of a model. Even though Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) has been considered the de facto standard tokenization method due to its simplicity and universality, it still remains unclear whether BPE works best across all languages and tasks. In this paper, we test several tokenization strategies in order to answer our primary research question, that is, “What is the best tokenization strategy for Korean NLP tasks?” Experimental results demonstrate that a hybrid approach of morphological segmentation followed by BPE works best in Korean to/from English machine translation and natural language understanding tasks such as KorNLI, KorSTS, NSMC, and PAWS-X. As an exception, for KorQuAD, the Korean extension of SQuAD, BPE segmentation turns out to be the most effective. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/kakaobrain/kortok.

Jejueo was classified as critically endangered by UNESCO in 2010. Although diverse efforts to revitalize it have been made, there have been few computational approaches. Motivated by this, we construct two new Jejueo datasets: Jejueo Interview Transcripts (JIT) and Jejueo Single Speaker Speech (JSS). The JIT dataset is a parallel corpus containing 170k+ Jejueo-Korean sentences, and the JSS dataset consists of 10k high-quality audio files recorded by a native Jejueo speaker and a transcript file. Subsequently, we build neural systems of machine translation and speech synthesis using them. All resources are publicly available via our GitHub repository. We hope that these datasets will attract interest of both language and machine learning communities.

We present word2word, a publicly available dataset and an open-source Python package for cross-lingual word translations extracted from sentence-level parallel corpora. Our dataset provides top-k word translations in 3,564 (directed) language pairs across 62 languages in OpenSubtitles2018 (Lison et al., 2018). To obtain this dataset, we use a count-based bilingual lexicon extraction model based on the observation that not only source and target words but also source words themselves can be highly correlated. We illustrate that the resulting bilingual lexicons have high coverage and attain competitive translation quality for several language pairs. We wrap our dataset and model in an easy-to-use Python library, which supports downloading and retrieving top-k word translations in any of the supported language pairs as well as computing top-k word translations for custom parallel corpora.

Natural language inference (NLI) and semantic textual similarity (STS) are key tasks in natural language understanding (NLU). Although several benchmark datasets for those tasks have been released in English and a few other languages, there are no publicly available NLI or STS datasets in the Korean language. Motivated by this, we construct and release new datasets for Korean NLI and STS, dubbed KorNLI and KorSTS, respectively. Following previous approaches, we machine-translate existing English training sets and manually translate development and test sets into Korean. To accelerate research on Korean NLU, we also establish baselines on KorNLI and KorSTS. Our datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/kakaobrain/KorNLUDatasets.

Grammatical error correction can be viewed as a low-resource sequence-to-sequence task, because publicly available parallel corpora are limited. To tackle this challenge, we first generate erroneous versions of large unannotated corpora using a realistic noising function. The resulting parallel corpora are sub-sequently used to pre-train Transformer models. Then, by sequentially applying transfer learning, we adapt these models to the domain and style of the test set. Combined with a context-aware neural spellchecker, our system achieves competitive results in both restricted and low resource tracks in ACL 2019 BEAShared Task. We release all of our code and materials for reproducibility.