Potentially idiomatic expressions (PIEs) carry meanings inherently tied to the everyday experience of a given language community. As such, they constitute an interesting challenge for assessing the linguistic (and to some extent cultural) capabilities of NLP systems. In this paper, we present XMPIE, a parallel multilingual and multimodal dataset of potentially idiomatic expressions. The dataset, containing 34 languages and over ten thousand items, allows comparative analyses of idiomatic patterns among language-specific realisations and preferences in order to gather insights about shared cultural aspects. This parallel dataset allows evaluation of language model performance for a given PIE in different languages and whether idiomatic understanding in one language can be transferred to another. Moreover, the dataset supports the study of PIEs across textual and visual modalities, to measure to what extent PIE understanding in one modality transfers or implies in understanding in another modality (text vs. image). The data was created by language experts, with both textual and visual components crafted under multilingual guidelines, and each PIE is accompanied by five images representing a spectrum from idiomatic to literal meanings, including semantically related and random distractors. The result is a high-quality benchmark for evaluating multilingual and multimodal idiomatic language understanding.

The increase in the use of abusive language on social media and virtual platforms has emphasized the importance of developing efficient hate speech detection systems. While there have been considerable advancements in creating such systems for the English language, resources are scarce for other languages, such as Serbian. This research paper explores the use of machine learning and deep learning techniques to identify abusive language in Serbian text. The authors used AbCoSER, a dataset of Serbian tweets that have been labeled as abusive or non-abusive. They evaluated various algorithms to classify tweets, and the best-performing model is based on the deep learning transformer architecture. The model attained an F1 macro score of 0.827, a figure that is commensurate with the benchmarks established for offensive speech datasets of a similar magnitude in other languages.

This paper presents our work on the refinement and improvement of the Serbian language part of Hurtlex, a multilingual lexicon of words to hurt. We pay special attention to adding Multi-word expressions that can be seen as abusive, as such lexical entries are very important in obtaining good results in a plethora of abusive language detection tasks. We use Serbian morphological dictionaries as a basis for data cleaning and MWE dictionary creation. A connection to other lexical and semantic resources in Serbian is outlined and building of abusive language detection systems based on that connection is foreseen.