We present LESSLEX, a novel multilingual lexical resource. Different from the vast majority of existing approaches, we ground our embeddings on a sense inventory made available from the BabelNet semantic network. In this setting, multilingual access is governed by the mapping of terms onto their underlying sense descriptions, such that all vectors co-exist in the same semantic space. As a result, for each term we have thus the “blended” terminological vector along with those describing all senses associated to that term. LESSLEX has been tested on three tasks relevant to lexical semantics: conceptual similarity, contextual similarity, and semantic text similarity. We experimented over the principal data sets for such tasks in their multilingual and crosslingual variants, improving on or closely approaching state-of-the-art results. We conclude by arguing that LESSLEX vectors may be relevant for practical applications and for research on conceptual and lexical access and competence.

We introduce an approach to multilingual Offensive Language Detection based on the mBERT transformer model. We download extra training data from Twitter in English, Danish, and Turkish, and use it to re-train the model. We then fine-tuned the model on the provided training data and, in some configurations, implement transfer learning approach exploiting the typological relatedness between English and Danish. Our systems obtained good results across the three languages (.9036 for EN, .7619 for DA, and .7789 for TR).