Nina Tahmasebi


2024

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The DURel Annotation Tool: Human and Computational Measurement of Semantic Proximity, Sense Clusters and Semantic Change
Dominik Schlechtweg | Shafqat Mumtaz Virk | Pauline Sander | Emma Sköldberg | Lukas Theuer Linke | Tuo Zhang | Nina Tahmasebi | Jonas Kuhn | Sabine Schulte Im Walde
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

We present the DURel tool implementing the annotation of semantic proximity between word uses into an online, open source interface. The tool supports standardized human annotation as well as computational annotation, building on recent advances with Word-in-Context models. Annotator judgments are clustered with automatic graph clustering techniques and visualized for analysis. This allows to measure word senses with simple and intuitive micro-task judgments between use pairs, requiring minimal preparation efforts. The tool offers additional functionalities to compare the agreement between annotators to guarantee the inter-subjectivity of the obtained judgments and to calculate summary statistics over the annotated data giving insights into sense frequency distributions, semantic variation or changes of senses over time.

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Computational modeling of semantic change
Pierluigi Cassotti | Francesco Periti | Stefano de Pascale | Haim Dubossarsky | Nina Tahmasebi
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts

Languages change constantly over time, influenced by social, technological, cultural and political factors that affect how people express themselves. In particular, words can undergo the process of semantic change, which can be subtle and significantly impact the interpretation of texts. For example, the word terrific used to mean ‘causing terror’ and was as such synonymous to terrifying. Nowadays, speakers use the word in the sense of ‘excessive’ and even ‘amazing’. In Historical Linguistics, tools and methods have been developed to analyse this phenomenon, including systematic categorisations of the types of change, the causes and the mechanisms underlying the different types of change. However, traditional linguistic methods, while informative, are often based on small, carefully curated samples. Thanks to the availability of both large diachronic corpora, the computational means to model word meaning unsupervised, and evaluation benchmarks, we are seeing an increasing interest in the computational modelling of semantic change. This is evidenced by the increasing number of publications in this new domain as well as the organisation of initiatives and events related to this topic, such as four editions of the International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change LChange1, and several evaluation campaigns (Schlechtweg et al., 2020a; Basile et al., 2020b; Kutuzov et al.; Zamora-Reina et al., 2022).

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(Chat)GPT v BERT Dawn of Justice for Semantic Change Detection
Francesco Periti | Haim Dubossarsky | Nina Tahmasebi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024

In the universe of Natural Language Processing, Transformer-based language models like BERT and (Chat)GPT have emerged as lexical superheroes with great power to solve open research problems. In this paper, we specifically focus on the temporal problem of semantic change, and evaluate their ability to solve two diachronic extensions of the Word-in-Context (WiC) task: TempoWiC and HistoWiC. In particular, we investigate the potential of a novel, off-the-shelf technology like ChatGPT (and GPT) 3.5 compared to BERT, which represents a family of models that currently stand as the state-of-the-art for modeling semantic change. Our experiments represent the first attempt to assess the use of (Chat)GPT for studying semantic change. Our results indicate that ChatGPT performs significantly worse than the foundational GPT version. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that (Chat)GPT achieves slightly lower performance than BERT in detecting long-term changes but performs significantly worse in detecting short-term changes.

2023

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Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Nina Tahmasebi | Syrielle Montariol | Haim Dubossarsky | Andrey Kutuzov | Simon Hengchen | David Alfter | Francesco Periti | Pierluigi Cassotti
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change

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The Finer They Get: Combining Fine-Tuned Models For Better Semantic Change Detection
Wei Zhou | Nina Tahmasebi | Haim Dubossarsky
Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

In this work we investigate the hypothesis that enriching contextualized models using fine-tuning tasks can improve theircapacity to detect lexical semantic change (LSC). We include tasks aimed to capture both low-level linguistic information like part-of-speech tagging, as well as higher level (semantic) information. Through a series of analyses we demonstrate that certain combinations of fine-tuning tasks, like sentiment, syntactic information, and logical inference, bring large improvements to standard LSC models that are based only on standard language modeling. We test on the binary classification and ranking tasks of SemEval-2020 Task 1 and evaluate using both permutation tests and under transfer-learningscenarios.

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Superlim: A Swedish Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis | Gerlof Bouma | Robin Kurtz | Felix Morger | Joey Öhman | Yvonne Adesam | Lars Borin | Dana Dannélls | Markus Forsberg | Tim Isbister | Anna Lindahl | Martin Malmsten | Faton Rekathati | Magnus Sahlgren | Elena Volodina | Love Börjeson | Simon Hengchen | Nina Tahmasebi
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We present Superlim, a multi-task NLP benchmark and analysis platform for evaluating Swedish language models, a counterpart to the English-language (Super)GLUE suite. We describe the dataset, the tasks, the leaderboard and report the baseline results yielded by a reference implementation. The tested models do not approach ceiling performance on any of the tasks, which suggests that Superlim is truly difficult, a desirable quality for a benchmark. We address methodological challenges, such as mitigating the Anglocentric bias when creating datasets for a less-resourced language; choosing the most appropriate measures; documenting the datasets and making the leaderboard convenient and transparent. We also highlight other potential usages of the dataset, such as, for instance, the evaluation of cross-lingual transfer learning.

2022

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Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Nina Tahmasebi | Syrielle Montariol | Andrey Kutuzov | Simon Hengchen | Haim Dubossarsky | Lars Borin
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change

2021

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SuperSim: a test set for word similarity and relatedness in Swedish
Simon Hengchen | Nina Tahmasebi
Proceedings of the 23rd Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

Language models are notoriously difficult to evaluate. We release SuperSim, a large-scale similarity and relatedness test set for Swedish built with expert human judgements. The test set is composed of 1,360 word-pairs independently judged for both relatedness and similarity by five annotators. We evaluate three different models (Word2Vec, fastText, and GloVe) trained on two separate Swedish datasets, namely the Swedish Gigaword corpus and a Swedish Wikipedia dump, to provide a baseline for future comparison. We will release the fully annotated test set, code, models, and data.

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DWUG: A large Resource of Diachronic Word Usage Graphs in Four Languages
Dominik Schlechtweg | Nina Tahmasebi | Simon Hengchen | Haim Dubossarsky | Barbara McGillivray
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Word meaning is notoriously difficult to capture, both synchronically and diachronically. In this paper, we describe the creation of the largest resource of graded contextualized, diachronic word meaning annotation in four different languages, based on 100,000 human semantic proximity judgments. We describe in detail the multi-round incremental annotation process, the choice for a clustering algorithm to group usages into senses, and possible – diachronic and synchronic – uses for this dataset.

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Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2021
Nina Tahmasebi | Adam Jatowt | Yang Xu | Simon Hengchen | Syrielle Montariol | Haim Dubossarsky
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2021

2020

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SemEval-2020 Task 1: Unsupervised Lexical Semantic Change Detection
Dominik Schlechtweg | Barbara McGillivray | Simon Hengchen | Haim Dubossarsky | Nina Tahmasebi
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

Lexical Semantic Change detection, i.e., the task of identifying words that change meaning over time, is a very active research area, with applications in NLP, lexicography, and linguistics. Evaluation is currently the most pressing problem in Lexical Semantic Change detection, as no gold standards are available to the community, which hinders progress. We present the results of the first shared task that addresses this gap by providing researchers with an evaluation framework and manually annotated, high-quality datasets for English, German, Latin, and Swedish. 33 teams submitted 186 systems, which were evaluated on two subtasks.

2019

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Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Nina Tahmasebi | Lars Borin | Adam Jatowt | Yang Xu
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change

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Time-Out: Temporal Referencing for Robust Modeling of Lexical Semantic Change
Haim Dubossarsky | Simon Hengchen | Nina Tahmasebi | Dominik Schlechtweg
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

State-of-the-art models of lexical semantic change detection suffer from noise stemming from vector space alignment. We have empirically tested the Temporal Referencing method for lexical semantic change and show that, by avoiding alignment, it is less affected by this noise. We show that, trained on a diachronic corpus, the skip-gram with negative sampling architecture with temporal referencing outperforms alignment models on a synthetic task as well as a manual testset. We introduce a principled way to simulate lexical semantic change and systematically control for possible biases.

2018

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Generating a Gold Standard for a Swedish Sentiment Lexicon
Jacobo Rouces | Nina Tahmasebi | Lars Borin | Stian Rødven Eide
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

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SenSALDO: Creating a Sentiment Lexicon for Swedish
Jacobo Rouces | Nina Tahmasebi | Lars Borin | Stian Rødven Eide
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2017

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Proceedings of the 21st Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics
Jörg Tiedemann | Nina Tahmasebi
Proceedings of the 21st Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics

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Parameter Transfer across Domains for Word Sense Disambiguation
Sallam Abualhaija | Nina Tahmasebi | Diane Forin | Karl-Heinz Zimmermann
Proceedings of the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, RANLP 2017

Word sense disambiguation is defined as finding the corresponding sense for a target word in a given context, which comprises a major step in text applications. Recently, it has been addressed as an optimization problem. The idea behind is to find a sequence of senses that corresponds to the words in a given context with a maximum semantic similarity. Metaheuristics like simulated annealing and D-Bees provide approximate good-enough solutions, but are usually influenced by the starting parameters. In this paper, we study the parameter tuning for both algorithms within the word sense disambiguation problem. The experiments are conducted on different datasets to cover different disambiguation scenarios. We show that D-Bees is robust and less sensitive towards the initial parameters compared to simulated annealing, hence, it is sufficient to tune the parameters once and reuse them for different datasets, domains or languages.

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Finding Individual Word Sense Changes and their Delay in Appearance
Nina Tahmasebi | Thomas Risse
Proceedings of the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, RANLP 2017

We present a method for detecting word sense changes by utilizing automatically induced word senses. Our method works on the level of individual senses and allows a word to have e.g. one stable sense and then add a novel sense that later experiences change. Senses are grouped based on polysemy to find linguistic concepts and we can find broadening and narrowing as well as novel (polysemous and homonymic) senses. We evaluate on a testset, present recall and estimates of the time between expected and found change.

2015

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A case study on supervised classification of Swedish pseudo-coordination
Malin Ahlberg | Peter Andersson | Markus Forsberg | Nina Tahmasebi
Proceedings of the 20th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2015)

2014

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Extractive Summarization using Continuous Vector Space Models
Mikael Kågebäck | Olof Mogren | Nina Tahmasebi | Devdatt Dubhashi
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Continuous Vector Space Models and their Compositionality (CVSC)

2012

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NEER: An Unsupervised Method for Named Entity Evolution Recognition
Nina Tahmasebi | Gerhard Gossen | Nattiya Kanhabua | Helge Holzmann | Thomas Risse
Proceedings of COLING 2012

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fokas: Formerly Known As – A Search Engine Incorporating Named Entity Evolution
Helge Holzmann | Gerhard Gossen | Nina Tahmasebi
Proceedings of COLING 2012: Demonstration Papers