Spanish is an official language in 20 countries; in 19 of them, it arrived by means of overseas colonisation. Its close contact with several coexistent languages and the rich regional and cultural diversity has produced varieties which divert from each other. We study these divergences in a data-based approach and according to their qualitative and quantitative effects in word embeddings. We generate embeddings for Spanish in 24 countries and examine the topology of the spaces. Due to the similarities between varieties —in contrast to what happens to different languages in bilingual topological studies— we first scrutinise the behaviour of three isomorphism measures in (quasi-)isomorphic settings: relational similarity, Eigenvalue similarity and Gromov-Hausdorff distance. We then use the most trustworthy measure to quantify the divergences among varieties. Finally, we use the departures from isomorphism to build relational trees for the Spanish varieties by hierarchical clustering.

Spanish is one of the most widespread languages: the official language in 20 countries and the second most-spoken native language. Its contact with other languages across different regions and the rich regional and cultural diversity has produced varieties which divert from each other, particularly in terms of lexicon. Still, available corpora, and models trained upon them, generally treat Spanish as one monolithic language, which dampers prediction and generation power when dealing with different varieties. To alleviate the situation, we compile and curate datasets in the different varieties of Spanish around the world at an unprecedented scale and create the CEREAL corpus. With such a resource at hand, we perform a stylistic analysis to identify and characterise varietal differences. We implement a classifier specially designed to deal with long documents and identify Spanish varieties (and therefore expand CEREAL further). We produce varietal-specific embeddings, and analyse the cultural differences that they encode. We make data, code and models publicly available.

We develop novel annotation guidelines for sentence-level subjectivity detection, which are not limited to language-specific cues. We use our guidelines to collect NewsSD-ENG, a corpus of 638 objective and 411 subjective sentences extracted from English news articles on controversial topics. Our corpus paves the way for subjectivity detection in English and across other languages without relying on language-specific tools, such as lexicons or machine translation. We evaluate state-of-the-art multilingual transformer-based models on the task in mono-, multi-, and cross-language settings. For this purpose, we re-annotate an existing Italian corpus. We observe that models trained in the multilingual setting achieve the best performance on the task.

Misogyny is often expressed through figurative language. Some neutral words can assume a negative connotation when functioning as pejorative epithets. Disambiguating the meaning of such terms might help the detection of misogyny. In order to address such task, we present PejorativITy, a novel corpus of 1,200 manually annotated Italian tweets for pejorative language at the word level and misogyny at the sentence level. We evaluate the impact of injecting information about disambiguated words into a model targeting misogyny detection. In particular, we explore two different approaches for injection: concatenation of pejorative information and substitution of ambiguous words with univocal terms. Our experimental results, both on our corpus and on two popular benchmarks on Italian tweets, show that both approaches lead to a major classification improvement, indicating that word sense disambiguation is a promising preliminary step for misogyny detection. Furthermore, we investigate LLMs’ understanding of pejorative epithets by means of contextual word embeddings analysis and prompting.

Hate speech is infamously one of the most demanding topics in Natural Language Processing, as its multifacetedness is accompanied by a handful of challenges, such as multilinguality and cross-linguality. Hate speech has a subjective aspect that intensifies when referring to different cultures and different languages. In this respect, we design a pipeline that will help us explore the possibility of the creation of a parallel multilingual hate speech dataset, using machine translation. In this paper, we evaluate how/whether this is feasible by assessing the quality of the translations, calculating the toxicity levels of original and target texts, and calculating correlations between the newly obtained scores. Finally, we perform a qualitative analysis to gain further semantic and grammatical insights. With this pipeline we aim at exploring ways of filtering hate speech texts in order to parallelize sentences in multiple languages, examining the challenges of the task.

We present our submission to SemEval-2023 Task 10: Explainable Detection of Online Sexism (EDOS). We address all three tasks: Task A consists of identifying whether a post is sexist. If so, Task B attempts to assign it one of four categories: threats, derogation, animosity, and prejudiced discussions. Task C aims for an even more fine-grained classification, divided among 11 classes. Our team UniBoe’s experiments with fine-tuning of hate-tuned Transformer-based models and priming for generative models. In addition, we explore model-agnostic strategies, such as data augmentation techniques combined with active learning, as well as obfuscation of identity terms. Our official submissions obtain an F1_score of 0.83 for Task A, 0.58 for Task B and 0.32 for Task C.

We approach the task of assessing the suitability of a source text for translation by transferring the knowledge from established MT evaluation metrics to a model able to predict MT quality a priori from the source text alone. To open the door to experiments in this regard, we depart from reference English-German parallel corpora to build a corpus of 14,253 source text-quality score tuples. The tuples include four state-of-the-art metrics: cushLEPOR, BERTScore, COMET, and TransQuest. With this new resource at hand, we fine-tune XLM-RoBERTa, both in a single-task and a multi-task setting, to predict these evaluation scores from the source text alone. Results for this methodology are promising, with the single-task model able to approximate well-established MT evaluation and quality estimation metrics - without looking at the actual machine translations - achieving low RMSE values in the [0.1-0.2] range and Pearson correlation scores up to 0.688.

Spotting hate speech in social media posts is crucial to increase the civility of the Web and has been thoroughly explored in the NLP community. For the first time, we introduce a multilingual corpus for the analysis and identification of hate speech in the domain of inceldom, built from incel Web forums in English and Italian, including expert annotation at the post level for two kinds of hate speech: misogyny and racism. This resource paves the way for the development of mono- and cross-lingual models for (a) the identification of hateful (misogynous and racist) posts and (b) the forecasting of the amount of hateful responses that a post is likely to trigger. Our experiments aim at improving the performance of Transformer-based models using masked language modeling pre-training and dataset merging. The results show that these strategies boost the models’ performance in all settings (binary classification, multi-label classification and forecasting), especially in the cross-lingual scenarios.

In the domain of cuisine, both dishes and ingredients tend to be heavily rooted in the local context they belong to. As a result, the associated terms are often realia tied to specific cultures and languages. This causes difficulties for non-speakers of the local language and ma- chine translation (MT) systems alike, as it implies a lack of the concept and/or of a plausible translation. MT typically opts for one of two alternatives: keeping the source language terms untranslated or relying on a hyperonym/near-synonym in the target language, provided one exists. !Translate proposes a better alternative: explaining. Given a cuisine entry such as a restaurant menu item, we identify culture-specific terms and enrich the output of the MT system with automatically retrieved definitions of the non-translatable terms in the target language, making the translation more actionable for the final user.

The automated detection of harmful language has been of great importance for the online world, especially with the growing importance of social media and, consequently, polarisation. There are many open challenges to high quality detection of harmful text, from dataset creation to generalisable application, thus calling for more systematic studies. In this paper, we explore re-annotation as a means of examining the robustness of already existing labelled datasets, showing that, despite using alternative definitions, the inter-annotator agreement remains very inconsistent, highlighting the intrinsically subjective and variable nature of the task. In addition, we build automatic toxicity detectors using the existing datasets, with their original labels, and we evaluate them on our multi-definition and multi-source datasets. Surprisingly, while other studies show that hate speech detection models perform better on data that are derived from the same distribution as the training set, our analysis demonstrates this is not necessarily true.

We address the problem of identifying misogyny in tweets in mono and multilingual settings in three languages: English, Italian, and Spanish. We explore model variations considering single and multiple languages both in the pre-training of the transformer and in the training of the downstream taskto explore the feasibility of detecting misogyny through a transfer learning approach across multiple languages. That is, we train monolingual transformers with monolingual data, and multilingual transformers with both monolingual and multilingual data. Our models reach state-of-the-art performance on all three languages. The single-language BERT models perform the best, closely followed by different configurations of multilingual BERT models. The performance drops in zero-shot classification across languages. Our error analysis shows that multilingual and monolingual models tend to make the same mistakes.

The 2022 edition of LT-EDI proposed two tasks in various languages. Task Hope Speech Detection required models for the automatic identification of hopeful comments for equality, diversity, and inclusion. Task Homophobia/Transphobia Detection focused on the identification of homophobic and transphobic comments. We targeted both tasks in English by using reinforced BERT-based approaches. Our core strategy aimed at exploiting the data available for each given task to augment the amount of supervised instances in the other. On the basis of an active learning process, we trained a model on the dataset for Task i and applied it to the dataset for Task j to iteratively integrate new silver data for Task i. Our official submissions to the shared task obtained a macro-averaged F₁ score of 0.53 for Hope Speech and 0.46 for Homo/Transphobia, placing our team in the third and fourth positions out of 11 and 12 participating teams respectively.

Some human preferences are universal. The odor of vanilla is perceived as pleasant all around the world. We expect neural models trained on human texts to exhibit these kind of preferences, i.e. biases, but we show that this is not always the case. We explore 16 static and contextual embedding models in 9 languages and, when possible, compare them under similar training conditions. We introduce and release CA-WEAT, multilingual cultural aware tests to quantify biases, and compare them to previous English-centric tests. Our experiments confirm that monolingual static embeddings do exhibit human biases, but values differ across languages, being far from universal. Biases are less evident in contextual models, to the point that the original human association might be reversed. Multilinguality proves to be another variable that attenuates and even reverses the effect of the bias, specially in contextual multilingual models. In order to explain this variance among models and languages, we examine the effect of asymmetries in the training corpus, departures from isomorphism in multilingual embedding spaces and discrepancies in the testing measures between languages.

We target the complementary binary tasks of identifying whether a tweet is misogynous and, if that is the case, whether it is also aggressive. We compare two ways to address these problems: one multi-class model that discriminates between all the classes at once: not misogynous, non aggressive-misogynous and aggressive-misogynous; as well as a cascaded approach where the binary classification is carried out separately (misogynous vs non-misogynous and aggressive vs non-aggressive) and then joined together. For the latter, two training and three testing scenarios are considered. Our models are built on top of AlBERTo and are evaluated on the framework of Evalita’s 2020 shared task on automatic misogyny and aggressiveness identification in Italian tweets. Our cascaded models —including the strong naïve baseline— outperform significantly the top submissions to Evalita, reaching state-of-the-art performance without relying on any external information.

We present our submission to SemEval 2022 Task 5 on Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification. We address the two tasks: Task A consists of identifying whether a meme is misogynous. If so, Task B attempts to identify its kind among shaming, stereotyping, objectification, and violence. Our approach combines a BERT Transformer with CLIP for the textual and visual representations. Both textual and visual encoders are fused in an early-fusion fashion through a Multimodal Bidirectional Transformer with unimodally pretrained components. Our official submissions obtain macro-averaged F₁=0.727 in Task A (4th position out of 69 participants)and weighted F₁=0.710 in Task B (4th position out of 42 participants).

We present the results and the main findings of SemEval-2020 Task 11 on Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles. The task featured two subtasks. Subtask SI is about Span Identification: given a plain-text document, spot the specific text fragments containing propaganda. Subtask TC is about Technique Classification: given a specific text fragment, in the context of a full document, determine the propaganda technique it uses, choosing from an inventory of 14 possible propaganda techniques. The task attracted a large number of participants: 250 teams signed up to participate and 44 made a submission on the test set. In this paper, we present the task, analyze the results, and discuss the system submissions and the methods they used. For both subtasks, the best systems used pre-trained Transformers and ensembles.

Recent events, such as the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, Brexit and the COVID-19 “infodemic”, have brought into the spotlight the dangers of online disinformation. There has been a lot of research focusing on fact-checking and disinformation detection. However, little attention has been paid to the specific rhetorical and psychological techniques used to convey propaganda messages. Revealing the use of such techniques can help promote media literacy and critical thinking, and eventually contribute to limiting the impact of “fake news” and disinformation campaigns. Prta (Propaganda Persuasion Techniques Analyzer) allows users to explore the articles crawled on a regular basis by highlighting the spans in which propaganda techniques occur and to compare them on the basis of their use of propaganda techniques. The system further reports statistics about the use of such techniques, overall and over time, or according to filtering criteria specified by the user based on time interval, keywords, and/or political orientation of the media. Moreover, it allows users to analyze any text or URL through a dedicated interface or via an API. The system is available online: https://www.tanbih.org/prta.

We describe the system submitted by the Jack Ryder team to SemEval-2019 Task 4 on Hyperpartisan News Detection. The task asked participants to predict whether a given article is hyperpartisan, i.e., extreme-left or extreme-right. We proposed an approach based on BERT with fine-tuning, which was ranked 7th out 28 teams on the distantly supervised dataset, where all articles from a hyperpartisan/non-hyperpartisan news outlet are considered to be hyperpartisan/non-hyperpartisan. On a manually annotated test dataset, where human annotators double-checked the labels, we were ranked 29th out of 42 teams.

We describe our submission to SemEval-2019 Task 4 on Hyperpartisan News Detection. We rely on a variety of engineered features originally used to detect propaganda. This is based on the assumption that biased messages are propagandistic and promote a particular political cause or viewpoint. In particular, we trained a logistic regression model with features ranging from simple bag of words to vocabulary richness and text readability. Our system achieved 72.9% accuracy on the manually annotated testset, and 60.8% on the test data that was obtained with distant supervision. Additional experiments showed that significant performance gains can be achieved with better feature pre-processing.

Propaganda aims at influencing people’s mindset with the purpose of advancing a specific agenda. Previous work has addressed propaganda detection at document level, typically labelling all articles from a propagandistic news outlet as propaganda. Such noisy gold labels inevitably affect the quality of any learning system trained on them. A further issue with most existing systems is the lack of explainability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel task: performing fine-grained analysis of texts by detecting all fragments that contain propaganda techniques as well as their type. In particular, we create a corpus of news articles manually annotated at fragment level with eighteen propaganda techniques and propose a suitable evaluation measure. We further design a novel multi-granularity neural network, and we show that it outperforms several strong BERT-based baselines.

We introduce Tanbih, a news aggregator with intelligent analysis tools to help readers understanding what’s behind a news story. Our system displays news grouped into events and generates media profiles that show the general factuality of reporting, the degree of propagandistic content, hyper-partisanship, leading political ideology, general frame of reporting, and stance with respect to various claims and topics of a news outlet. In addition, we automatically analyse each article to detect whether it is propagandistic and to determine its stance with respect to a number of controversial topics.

We present the shared task on Fine-Grained Propaganda Detection, which was organized as part of the NLP4IF workshop at EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019. There were two subtasks. FLC is a fragment-level task that asks for the identification of propagandist text fragments in a news article and also for the prediction of the specific propaganda technique used in each such fragment (18-way classification task). SLC is a sentence-level binary classification task asking to detect the sentences that contain propaganda. A total of 12 teams submitted systems for the FLC task, 25 teams did so for the SLC task, and 14 teams eventually submitted a system description paper. For both subtasks, most systems managed to beat the baseline by a sizable margin. The leaderboard and the data from the competition are available at http://propaganda.qcri.org/nlp4if-shared-task/.

We propose a multi-task deep-learning approach for estimating the check-worthiness of claims in political debates. Given a political debate, such as the 2016 US Presidential and Vice-Presidential ones, the task is to predict which statements in the debate should be prioritized for fact-checking. While different fact-checking organizations would naturally make different choices when analyzing the same debate, we show that it pays to learn from multiple sources simultaneously (PolitiFact, FactCheck, ABC, CNN, NPR, NYT, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, and Washington Post) in a multi-task learning setup, even when a particular source is chosen as a target to imitate. Our evaluation shows state-of-the-art results on a standard dataset for the task of check-worthiness prediction.

We present ClaimRank, an online system for detecting check-worthy claims. While originally trained on political debates, the system can work for any kind of text, e.g., interviews or just regular news articles. Its aim is to facilitate manual fact-checking efforts by prioritizing the claims that fact-checkers should consider first. ClaimRank supports both Arabic and English, it is trained on actual annotations from nine reputable fact-checking organizations (PolitiFact, FactCheck, ABC, CNN, NPR, NYT, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, and Washington Post), and thus it can mimic the claim selection strategies for each and any of them, as well as for the union of them all.

Although deep neural networks have been proving to be excellent tools to deliver state-of-the-art results, when data is scarce and the tackled tasks involve complex semantic inference, deep linguistic processing and traditional structure-based approaches, such as tree kernel methods, are an alternative solution. Community Question Answering is a research area that benefits from deep linguistic analysis to improve the experience of the community of forum users. In this paper, we present a UIMA framework to distribute the computation of cQA tasks over computer clusters such that traditional systems can scale to large datasets and deliver fast processing.

This is the Lump team participation at SemEval 2017 Task 1 on Semantic Textual Similarity. Our supervised model relies on features which are multilingual or interlingual in nature. We include lexical similarities, cross-language explicit semantic analysis, internal representations of multilingual neural networks and interlingual word embeddings. Our representations allow to use large datasets in language pairs with many instances to better classify instances in smaller language pairs avoiding the necessity of translating into a single language. Hence we can deal with all the languages in the task: Arabic, English, Spanish, and Turkish.

In the context of investigative journalism, we address the problem of automatically identifying which claims in a given document are most worthy and should be prioritized for fact-checking. Despite its importance, this is a relatively understudied problem. Thus, we create a new corpus of political debates, containing statements that have been fact-checked by nine reputable sources, and we train machine learning models to predict which claims should be prioritized for fact-checking, i.e., we model the problem as a ranking task. Unlike previous work, which has looked primarily at sentences in isolation, in this paper we focus on a rich input representation modeling the context: relationship between the target statement and the larger context of the debate, interaction between the opponents, and reaction by the moderator and by the public. Our experiments show state-of-the-art results, outperforming a strong rivaling system by a margin, while also confirming the importance of the contextual information.

Given the constantly growing proliferation of false claims online in recent years, there has been also a growing research interest in automatically distinguishing false rumors from factually true claims. Here, we propose a general-purpose framework for fully-automatic fact checking using external sources, tapping the potential of the entire Web as a knowledge source to confirm or reject a claim. Our framework uses a deep neural network with LSTM text encoding to combine semantic kernels with task-specific embeddings that encode a claim together with pieces of potentially relevant text fragments from the Web, taking the source reliability into account. The evaluation results show good performance on two different tasks and datasets: (i) rumor detection and (ii) fact checking of the answers to a question in community question answering forums.

In real-world data, e.g., from Web forums, text is often contaminated with redundant or irrelevant content, which leads to introducing noise in machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we apply Long Short-Term Memory networks with an attention mechanism, which can select important parts of text for the task of similar question retrieval from community Question Answering (cQA) forums. In particular, we use the attention weights for both selecting entire sentences and their subparts, i.e., word/chunk, from shallow syntactic trees. More interestingly, we apply tree kernels to the filtered text representations, thus exploiting the implicit features of the subtree space for learning question reranking. Our results show that the attention-based pruning allows for achieving the top position in the cQA challenge of SemEval 2016, with a relatively large gap from the other participants while greatly decreasing running time.

Community question answering (cQA) websites are focused on users who query questions onto an online forum, expecting for other users to provide them answers or suggestions. Unlike other social media, the length of the posted queries has no limits and queries tend to be multi-sentence elaborations combining context, actual questions, and irrelevant information. We approach the problem of question ranking: given a user’s new question, to retrieve those previously-posted questions which could be equivalent, or highly relevant. This could prevent the posting of nearly-duplicate questions and provide the user with instantaneous answers. For the first time in cQA, we address the selection of relevant text —both at sentence- and at constituent-level— for parse tree-based representations. Our supervised models for text selection boost the performance of a tree kernel-based machine learning model, allowing it to overtake the current state of the art on a recently released cQA evaluation framework.

We present an interactive system to provide effective and efficient search capabilities in Community Question Answering (cQA) forums. The system integrates state-of-the-art technology for answer search with a Web-based user interface specifically tailored to support the cQA forum readers. The answer search module automatically finds relevant answers for a new question by exploring related questions and the comments within their threads. The graphical user interface presents the search results and supports the exploration of related information. The system is running live at http://www.qatarliving.com/betasearch/.

The simple access to texts on digital libraries and the World Wide Web has led to an increased number of plagiarism cases in recent years, which renders manual plagiarism detection infeasible at large. Various methods for automatic plagiarism detection have been developed whose objective is to assist human experts in the analysis of documents for plagiarism. The methods can be divided into two main approaches: intrinsic and external. Unlike other tasks in natural language processing and information retrieval, it is not possible to publish a collection of real plagiarism cases for evaluation purposes since they cannot be properly anonymized. Therefore, current evaluations found in the literature are incomparable and, very often not even reproducible. Our contribution in this respect is a newly developed large-scale corpus of artificial plagiarism useful for the evaluation of intrinsic as well as external plagiarism detection. Additionally, new detection performance measures tailored to the evaluation of plagiarism detection algorithms are proposed.

The paper presents an approach for constructing a weighted bilingual dictionary of inflectional forms using as input data a traditional bilingual dictionary, and not parallel corpora. An algorithm is developed that generates all possible morphological (inflectional) forms and weights them using information on distribution of corresponding grammar sets (grammar information) in large corpora for each language. The algorithm also takes into account the compatibility of grammar sets in a language pair; for example, verb in past tense in language L normally is expected to be translated by verb in past tense in Language L'. We consider that the developed method is universal, i.e. can be applied to any pair of languages. The obtained dictionary is freely available. It can be used in several NLP tasks, for example, statistical machine translation.