This paper presents the objectives, organization and activities of the UniDive COST Action, a scientific network dedicated to universality, diversity and idiosyncrasy in language technology. We describe the objectives and organization of this initiative, the people involved, the working groups and the ongoing tasks and activities. This paper is also an pen call for participation towards new members and countries.

This paper discusses the organisation and findings of the SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task on Word Embedding Evaluation for Ancient and Historical Languages. The shared task was split into the constrained and unconstrained tracks and involved solving either 3 or 5 problems for either 13 or 16 ancient and historical languages belonging to 4 language families, and making use of 6 different scripts. There were 14 registrations in total, of which 3 teams submitted to each track. Out of these 6 submissions, 2 systems were successful in the constrained setting and another 2 in the uncon- strained setting, and 4 system description papers were submitted by different teams. The best average result for morphological feature prediction was about 96%, while the best average results for POS-tagging and lemmatisation were 96% and 94% respectively. At the word level, the winning team could not achieve a higher average accuracy across all 16 languages than 5.95%, which demonstrates the difficulty of this problem. At the character level, the best average result over 16 languages 55.62%

This paper describes the structure and findings of the WILDRE 2024 shared task on Code-mixed Less-resourced Sentiment Analysis for Indo-Aryan Languages. The participants were asked to submit the test data’s final prediction on CodaLab. A total of fourteen teams registered for the shared task. Only four participants submitted the system for evaluation on CodaLab, with only two teams submitting the system description paper. While all systems show a rather promising performance, they outperform the baseline scores.

This paper presents the development of CHAMUÇA, a novel lexical resource designed to document the influence of the Portuguese language on various Asian languages, with an initial focus on the languages of South Asia. Through the utilization of linked open data and the OntoLex vocabulary, CHAMUÇA offers structured insights into the linguistic characteristics, and cultural ramifications of Portuguese borrowings across multiple languages. The article outlines CHAMUÇA’s potential contributions to the linguistic linked data community, emphasising its role in addressing the scarcity of resources for lesser-resourced languages and serving as a test case for organising etymological data in a queryable format. CHAMUÇA emerges as an initiative towards the comprehensive catalogization and analysis of Portuguese borrowings, offering valuable insights into language contact dynamics, historical evolution, and cultural exchange in Asia, one that is based on linked data technology.

This paper reports on the shared tasks organized by the 21st IWSLT Conference. The shared tasks address 7 scientific challenges in spoken language translation: simultaneous and offline translation, automatic subtitling and dubbing, speech-to-speech translation, dialect and low-resource speech translation, and Indic languages. The shared tasks attracted 17 teams whose submissions are documented in 27 system papers. The growing interest towards spoken language translation is also witnessed by the constantly increasing number of shared task organizers and contributors to the overview paper, almost evenly distributed across industry and academia.

Large Language Models are transforming NLP for a lot of tasks. However, how LLMs perform NLP tasks for LRLs is less explored. In alliance with the theme track of the NAACL’24, we focus on 12 low-resource languages (LRLs) from Brazil, 2 LRLs from Africa and 2 high-resource languages (HRLs) (e.g., English and Brazilian Portuguese). Our results indicate that the LLMs perform worse for the labeling of LRLs in comparison to HRLs in general. We explain the reasons behind this failure and provide an error analyses through examples from 2 Brazilian LRLs.

Text style transfer (TST) involves modifying the linguistic style of a given text while retaining its core content. This paper addresses the challenging task of text style transfer in the Bangla language, which is low-resourced in this area. We present a novel Bangla dataset that facilitates text sentiment transfer, a subtask of TST, enabling the transformation of positive sentiment sentences to negative and vice versa. To establish a high-quality base for further research, we refined and corrected an existing English dataset of 1,000 sentences for sentiment transfer based on Yelp reviews, and we introduce a new human-translated Bangla dataset that parallels its English counterpart. Furthermore, we offer multiple benchmark models that serve as a validation of the dataset and baseline for further research.

In this paper, we present UFAL-ULD team’s system, desinged as a part of the BLP Shared Task 1: Violence Inciting Text Detection (VITD). This task aims to classify text, with a particular challenge of identifying incitement to violence into Direct, Indirect or Non-violence levels. We experimented with several pre-trained sequence classification models, including XLM-RoBERTa, BanglaBERT, Bangla BERT Base, and Multilingual BERT. Our best-performing model was based on the XLM-RoBERTa-base architecture, which outperformed the baseline models. Our system was ranked 20th among the 27 teams that participated in the task.

In this paper, we present the UFAL-ULD team’s system for the BLP Shared Task 2: Sentiment Analysis of Bangla Social Media Posts. The Task 2 involves classifying text into Positive, Negative, or Neutral sentiments. As a part of this task, we conducted a series of experiments with several pre-trained sequence classification models – XLM-RoBERTa, BanglaBERT, Bangla BERT Base and Multilingual BERT. Among these, our best-performing model was based on the XLM-RoBERTa-base architecture, which outperforms baseline models. Our system was ranked 19th among the 30 teams that participated in the task.

This paper reports on the shared tasks organized by the 20th IWSLT Conference. The shared tasks address 9 scientific challenges in spoken language translation: simultaneous and offline translation, automatic subtitling and dubbing, speech-to-speech translation, multilingual, dialect and low-resource speech translation, and formality control. The shared tasks attracted a total of 38 submissions by 31 teams. The growing interest towards spoken language translation is also witnessed by the constantly increasing number of shared task organizers and contributors to the overview paper, almost evenly distributed across industry and academia.

This paper focuses on text detoxification, i.e., automatically converting toxic text into nontoxic text. This task contributes to safer and more respectful online communication and can be considered a Text Style Transfer (TST) task, where the text’s style changes while its content is preserved. We present three approaches: (i) knowledge transfer from a similar task (ii) multi-task learning approach, combining sequence-to-sequence modeling with various toxicity classification tasks, and (iii) delete and reconstruct approach. To support our research, we utilize a dataset provided by Dementieva et al. (2021), which contains multiple versions of detoxified texts corresponding to toxic texts. In our experiments, we selected the best variants through expert human annotators, creating a dataset where each toxic sentence is paired with a single, appropriate detoxified version. Additionally, we introduced a small Hindi parallel dataset, aligning with a part of the English dataset, suitable for evaluation purposes. Our results demonstrate that our approach effectively balances text detoxification while preserving the actual content and maintaining fluency.

This paper presents the development of the Parallel Universal Dependency (PUD) Treebank for two Indo-Aryan languages: Bengali and Magahi. A treebank of 1,000 sentences has been created using a parallel corpus of English and the UD framework. A preliminary set of sentences was annotated manually - 600 for Bengali and 200 for Magahi. The rest of the sentences were built using the Bengali and Magahi parser. The sentences have been translated and annotated manually by the authors, some of whom are also native speakers of the languages. The objective behind this work is to build a syntactically-annotated linguistic repository for the aforementioned languages, that can prove to be a useful resource for building further NLP tools. Additionally, Bengali and Magahi parsers were also created which is built on machine learning approach. The accuracy of the Bengali parser is 78.13% in the case of UPOS; 76.99% in the case of XPOS, 56.12% in the case of UAS; and 47.19% in the case of LAS. The accuracy of Magahi parser is 71.53% in the case of UPOS; 66.44% in the case of XPOS, 58.05% in the case of UAS; and 33.07% in the case of LAS. This paper also includes an illustration of the annotation schema followed, the findings of the Parallel Universal Dependency (PUD) treebank, and it’s resulting linguistic analysis

This paper presents the first publicly available treebank of Odia, a morphologically rich low resource Indian language. The treebank contains approx. 1082 tokens (100 sentences) in Odia were selected from “Samantar”, the largest available parallel corpora collection for Indic languages. All the selected sentences are manually annotated following the “Universal Dependency” guidelines. The morphological analysis of the Odia treebank was performed using machine learning techniques. The Odia annotated treebank will enrich the Odia language resource and will help in building language technology tools for cross-lingual learning and typological research. We also build a preliminary Odia parser using a machine learning approach. The accuracy of the parser is 86.6% Tokenization, 64.1% UPOS, 63.78% XPOS, 42.04% UAS and 21.34% LAS. Finally, the paper briefly discusses the linguistic analysis of the Odia UD treebank.

Pharmaceutical text classification is an important area of research for commercial and research institutions working in the pharmaceutical domain. Addressing this task is challenging due to the need of expert verified labelled data which can be expensive and time consuming to obtain. Towards this end, we leverage predictive coding methods for the task as they have been shown to generalise well for sentence classification. Specifically, we utilise GAN-BERT architecture to classify pharmaceutical texts. To capture the domain specificity, we propose to utilise the BioBERT model as our BERT model in the GAN-BERT framework. We conduct extensive evaluation to show the efficacy of our approach over baselines on multiple metrics.

In this paper, we discuss the development of a multilingual dataset annotated with a hierarchical, fine-grained tagset marking different types of aggression and the “context” in which they occur. The context, here, is defined by the conversational thread in which a specific comment occurs and also the “type” of discursive role that the comment is performing with respect to the previous comment. The initial dataset, being discussed here consists of a total 59,152 annotated comments in four languages - Meitei, Bangla, Hindi, and Indian English - collected from various social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Telegram. As is usual on social media websites, a large number of these comments are multilingual, mostly code-mixed with English. The paper gives a detailed description of the tagset being used for annotation and also the process of developing a multi-label, fine-grained tagset that has been used for marking comments with aggression and bias of various kinds including sexism (called gender bias in the tagset), religious intolerance (called communal bias in the tagset), class/caste bias and ethnic/racial bias. We also define and discuss the tags that have been used for marking the different discursive role being performed through the comments, such as attack, defend, etc. Finally, we present a basic statistical analysis of the dataset. The dataset is being incrementally made publicly available on the project website.

The application of predictive coding techniques to legal texts has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of legal review of documents, however, there is such a wide array of legal tasks and continuously evolving legislation that it is hard to construct sufficient training data to cover all cases. In this paper, we investigate few-shot and zero-shot approaches that require substantially less training data and introduce a triplet architecture, which for promissory statements produces performance close to that of a supervised system. This method allows predictive coding methods to be rapidly developed for new regulations and markets.

In this paper, we discuss the development of treebanks for two low-resourced Indian languages - Magahi and Braj - based on the Universal Dependencies framework. The Magahi treebank contains 945 sentences and Braj treebank around 500 sentences marked with their lemmas, part-of-speech, morphological features and universal dependencies. This paper gives a description of the different dependency relationship found in the two languages and give some statistics of the two treebanks. The dataset will be made publicly available on Universal Dependency (UD) repository in the next (v2.10) release.

This study aims to develop an intonation labelled database for Hindi, for enhancing prosody in ASR and TTS systems, which is also helpful for building Speech to Speech Machine Translation systems. Although no single standard for prosody labelling exists in Hindi, researchers in the past have employed perceptual and statistical methods in literature to draw inferences about the behaviour of prosody patterns in Hindi. Based on such existing research and largely agreed upon intonational theories in Hindi, this study attempts to develop a manually annotated prosodic corpus of Hindi speech data, which can be used for training speech models for natural-sounding speech in the future. 500 sentences (2,550 words) for declarative and interrogative types have been labelled using Praat.

We present the findings of the LoResMT 2021 shared task which focuses on machine translation (MT) of COVID-19 data for both low-resource spoken and sign languages. The organization of this task was conducted as part of the fourth workshop on technologies for machine translation of low resource languages (LoResMT). Parallel corpora is presented and publicly available which includes the following directions: English↔Irish, English↔Marathi, and Taiwanese Sign language↔Traditional Chinese. Training data consists of 8112, 20933 and 128608 segments, respectively. There are additional monolingual data sets for Marathi and English that consist of 21901 segments. The results presented here are based on entries from a total of eight teams. Three teams submitted systems for English↔Irish while five teams submitted systems for English↔Marathi. Unfortunately, there were no systems submissions for the Taiwanese Sign language↔Traditional Chinese task. Maximum system performance was computed using BLEU and follow as 36.0 for English–Irish, 34.6 for Irish–English, 24.2 for English–Marathi, and 31.3 for Marathi–English.

Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been utilised for various research studies, from the cohort-level discussion to community-driven approaches to address the challenges in utilizing social media data for health, clinical and biomedical information. Detection of medical jargon’s, named entity recognition, multi-word expression becomes the primary, fundamental steps in solving those challenges. In this paper, we enumerate the ULD-NUIG team’s system, designed as part of Social Media Mining for Health Applications (#SMM4H) Shared Task 2021. The team conducted a series of experiments to explore the challenges of task 6 and task 5. The submitted systems achieve F-1 0.84 and 0.53 score for task 6 and 5 respectively.

This paper presents the findings of the LoResMT 2020 Shared Task on zero-shot translation for low resource languages. This task was organised as part of the 3rd Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low Resource Languages (LoResMT) at AACL-IJCNLP 2020. The focus was on the zero-shot approach as a notable development in Neural Machine Translation to build MT systems for language pairs where parallel corpora are small or even non-existent. The shared task experience suggests that back-translation and domain adaptation methods result in better accuracy for small-size datasets. We further noted that, although translation between similar languages is no cakewalk, linguistically distinct languages require more data to give better results.

In this paper, we present the report and findings of the Shared Task on Aggression and Gendered Aggression Identification organised as part of the Second Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying (TRAC - 2) at LREC 2020. The task consisted of two sub-tasks - aggression identification (sub-task A) and gendered identification (sub-task B) - in three languages - Bangla, Hindi and English. For this task, the participants were provided with a dataset of approximately 5,000 instances from YouTube comments in each language. For testing, approximately 1,000 instances were provided in each language for each sub-task. A total of 70 teams registered to participate in the task and 19 teams submitted their test runs. The best system obtained a weighted F-score of approximately 0.80 in sub-task A for all the three languages. While approximately 0.87 in sub-task B for all the three languages.

In this paper, we discuss the development of a multilingual annotated corpus of misogyny and aggression in Indian English, Hindi, and Indian Bangla as part of a project on studying and automatically identifying misogyny and communalism on social media (the ComMA Project). The dataset is collected from comments on YouTube videos and currently contains a total of over 20,000 comments. The comments are annotated at two levels - aggression (overtly aggressive, covertly aggressive, and non-aggressive) and misogyny (gendered and non-gendered). We describe the process of data collection, the tagset used for annotation, and issues and challenges faced during the process of annotation. Finally, we discuss the results of the baseline experiments conducted to develop a classifier for misogyny in the three languages.

NUIG-Panlingua-KMI submission to WMT 2020 seeks to push the state-of-the-art in Similar Language Translation Task for Hindi↔Marathi language pair. As part of these efforts, we conducteda series of experiments to address the challenges for translation between similar languages. Among the 4 MT systems prepared under this task, 1 PBSMT systems were prepared for Hindi↔Marathi each and 1 NMT systems were developed for Hindi↔Marathi using Byte PairEn-coding (BPE) into subwords. The results show that different architectures NMT could be an effective method for developing MT systems for closely related languages. Our Hindi-Marathi NMT system was ranked 8th among the 14 teams that participated and our Marathi-Hindi NMT system was ranked 8th among the 11 teams participated for the task.

This paper enumerates SigTyP 2020 Shared Task on the prediction of typological features as performed by the KMI-Panlingua-IITKGP team. The task entailed the prediction of missing values in a particular language, provided, the name of the language family, its genus, location (in terms of latitude and longitude coordinates and name of the country where it is spoken) and a set of feature-value pair are available. As part of fulfillment of the aforementioned task, the team submitted 3 kinds of system - 2 rule-based and one hybrid system. Of these 3, one rule-based system generated the best performance on the test set. All the systems were ‘constrained’ in the sense that no additional dataset or information, other than those provided by the organisers, was used for developing the systems.

This paper presents the first dependency treebank for Bhojpuri, a resource-poor language that belongs to the Indo-Aryan language family. The objective behind the Bhojpuri Treebank (BHTB) project is to create a substantial, syntactically annotated treebank which not only acts as a valuable resource in building language technological tools, also helps in cross-lingual learning and typological research. Currently, the treebank consists of 4,881 annotated tokens in accordance with the annotation scheme of Universal Dependencies (UD). A Bhojpuri tagger and parser were created using machine learning approach. The accuracy of the model is 57.49% UAS, 45.50% LAS, 79.69% UPOS accuracy and 77.64% XPOS accuracy. The paper describes the details of the project including a discussion on linguistic analysis and annotation process of the Bhojpuri UD treebank.

The present paper enumerates the development of Panlingua-KMI Machine Translation (MT) systems for Hindi ↔ Nepali language pair, designed as part of the Similar Language Translation Task at the WMT 2019 Shared Task. The Panlingua-KMI team conducted a series of experiments to explore both the phrase-based statistical (PBSMT) and neural methods (NMT). Among the 11 MT systems prepared under this task, 6 PBSMT systems were prepared for Nepali-Hindi, 1 PBSMT for Hindi-Nepali and 2 NMT systems were developed for Nepali↔Hindi. The results show that PBSMT could be an effective method for developing MT systems for closely-related languages. Our Hindi-Nepali PBSMT system was ranked 2nd among the 13 systems submitted for the pair and our Nepali-Hindi PBSMTsystem was ranked 4th among the 12 systems submitted for the task.

In this paper, we present the system description of Offensive language detection tool which is developed by the KMI_Coling under the OffensEval Shared task. The OffensEval Shared Task was conducted in SemEval 2019 workshop. To develop the system, we have explored n-grams up to 8-gram and trained three different namely A, B and C systems for three different subtasks within the OffensEval task which achieves 79.76%, 87.91% and 44.37% accuracy respectively. The task was completed using the dataset provided to us by the OffensEval organisers was the part of OLID dataset. It consists of 13,240 tweets extracted from twitter and were annotated at three levels using crowdsourcing.

In this paper, we present the report and findings of the Shared Task on Aggression Identification organised as part of the First Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying (TRAC - 1) at COLING 2018. The task was to develop a classifier that could discriminate between Overtly Aggressive, Covertly Aggressive, and Non-aggressive texts. For this task, the participants were provided with a dataset of 15,000 aggression-annotated Facebook Posts and Comments each in Hindi (in both Roman and Devanagari script) and English for training and validation. For testing, two different sets - one from Facebook and another from a different social media - were provided. A total of 130 teams registered to participate in the task, 30 teams submitted their test runs, and finally 20 teams also sent their system description paper which are included in the TRAC workshop proceedings. The best system obtained a weighted F-score of 0.64 for both Hindi and English on the Facebook test sets, while the best scores on the surprise set were 0.60 and 0.50 for English and Hindi respectively. The results presented in this report depict how challenging the task is. The positive response from the community and the great levels of participation in the first edition of this shared task also highlights the interest in this topic.

Action verbs are one of the frequently occurring linguistic elements in any given natural language as the speakers use them during every linguistic intercourse. However, each language expresses action verbs in its own inherently unique manner by categorization. One verb can refer to several interpretations of actions and one action can be expressed by more than one verb. The inter-language and intra-language variations create ambiguity for the translation of languages from the source language to target language with respect to action verbs. IMAGACT is a corpus-based ontological platform of action verbs translated from prototypic animated images explained in English and Italian as meta-languages. In this paper, we are presenting the issues and challenges in translating action verbs of Indian languages as target and English as source language by observing the animated images. Among the ten Indian languages which have been annotated so far on the platform are Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Odia (Oriya), Bengali, Manipuri, Tamil, Assamese, Magahi and Marathi. Out of them, Manipuri belongs to the Sino-Tibetan, Tamil comes off the Dravidian and the rest owe their genesis to the Indo-Aryan language family. One of the issues is that the one-word morphological English verbs are translated into most of the Indian languages as verbs having more than one-word form; for instance as in the case of conjunct, compound, serial verbs and so on. We are further presenting a cross-lingual comparison of action verbs among Indian languages. In addition, we are also dealing with the issues in disambiguating animated images by the L1 native speakers using competence-based judgements and the theoretical and machine translation implications they bear.