In this work, we analyze the uncertainty that is inherently present in the labels used for supervised machine learning in natural language inference (NLI). In cases where multiple annotations per instance are available, neither the majority vote nor the frequency of individual class votes is a trustworthy representation of the labeling uncertainty. We propose modeling the votes via a Bayesian mixture model to recover the data-generating process, i.e., the “true” latent classes, and thus gain insight into the class variations. This will enable a better understanding of the confusion happening during the annotation process. We also assess the stability of the proposed estimation procedure by systematically varying the numbers of i) instances and ii) labels. Thereby, we observe that few instances with many labels can predict the latent class borders reasonably well, while the estimation fails for many instances with only a few labels. This leads us to conclude that multiple labels are a crucial building block for properly analyzing label uncertainty.

While existing neural network-based approaches have shown promising results in Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for high-resource languages and standardized/machine-written text, their application to low-resource languages often presents challenges, resulting in reduced effectiveness. In this paper, we propose an innovative HTR approach that leverages the Transformer architecture for recognizing handwritten Old Occitan language. Given the limited availability of data, which comprises only word pairs of graphical variants and lemmas, we develop and rely on elaborate data augmentation techniques for both text and image data. Our model combines a custom-trained Swin image encoder with a BERT text decoder, which we pre-train using a large-scale augmented synthetic data set and fine-tune on the small human-labeled data set. Experimental results reveal that our approach surpasses the performance of current state-of-the-art models for Old Occitan HTR, including open-source Transformer-based models such as a fine-tuned TrOCR and commercial applications like Google Cloud Vision. To nurture further research and development, we make our models, data sets, and code publicly available.

The Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities aims to digitize the Medieval Latin Dictionary. This dictionary entails record cards referring to lemmas in medieval Latin, a low-resource language. A crucial step of the digitization process is the handwritten text recognition (HTR) of the handwritten lemmas on the record cards. In our work, we introduce an end-to-end pipeline, tailored for the medieval Latin dictionary, for locating, extracting, and transcribing the lemmas. We employ two state-of-the-art image segmentation models to prepare the initial data set for the HTR task. Further, we experiment with different transformer-based models and conduct a set of experiments to explore the capabilities of different combinations of vision encoders with a GPT-2 decoder. Additionally, we also apply extensive data augmentation resulting in a highly competitive model. The best-performing setup achieved a character error rate of 0.015, which is even superior to the commercial Google Cloud Vision model, and shows more stable performance.

Research on multi-class text classification of short texts mainly focuses on supervised (transfer) learning approaches, requiring a finite set of pre-defined classes which is constant over time. This work explores deep constrained clustering (CC) as an alternative to supervised learning approaches in a setting with a dynamically changing number of classes, a task we introduce as dynamic topic discovery (DTD).We do so by using pairwise similarity constraints instead of instance-level class labels which allow for a flexible number of classes while exhibiting a competitive performance compared to supervised approaches. First, we substantiate this through a series of experiments and show that CC algorithms exhibit a predictive performance similar to state-of-the-art supervised learning algorithms while requiring less annotation effort. Second, we demonstrate the overclustering capabilities of deep CC for detecting topics in short text data sets in the absence of the ground truth class cardinality during model training. Third, we showcase that these capabilities can be leveraged for the DTD setting as a step towards dynamic learning over time and finally, we release our codebase to nurture further research in this area.

Evaluating generated text received new attention with the introduction of model-based metrics in recent years. These new metrics have a higher correlation with human judgments and seemingly overcome many issues of previous n-gram based metrics from the symbolic age. In this work, we examine the recently introduced metrics BERTScore, BLEURT, NUBIA, MoverScore, and Mark-Evaluate (Petersen). We investigate their sensitivity to different types of semantic deterioration (part of speech drop and negation), word order perturbations, word drop, and the common problem of repetition. No metric showed appropriate behaviour for negation, and further none of them was overall sensitive to the other issues mentioned above.

Our goal is to evaluate the usefulness of unsupervised representation learning techniques for detecting stances of Fake News. Therefore we examine several pre-trained language models with respect to their performance on two Fake News related data sets, both consisting of instances with a headline, an associated news article and the stance of the article towards the respective headline. Specifically, the aim is to understand how much hyperparameter tuning is necessary when fine-tuning the pre-trained architectures, how well transfer learning works in this specific case of stance detection and how sensitive the models are to changes in hyperparameters like batch size, learning rate (schedule), sequence length as well as the freezing technique. The results indicate that the computationally more expensive autoregression approach of XLNet (Yanget al., 2019) is outperformed by BERT-based models, notably by RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019).While the learning rate seems to be the most important hyperparameter, experiments with different freezing techniques indicate that all evaluated architectures had already learned powerful language representations that pose a good starting point for fine-tuning them.