Since the advent of Federated Learning (FL), research has applied these methods to natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Despite a plethora of papers in FL for NLP, no previous works have studied how multilingual text impacts FL algorithms. Furthermore, multilingual text provides an interesting avenue to examine the impact of non-IID text (e.g. different languages) on FL in naturally occurring data. We explore three multilingual language tasks, language modeling, machine translation, and text classification using differing federated and non-federated learning algorithms. Our results show that using pretrained models reduces the negative effects of FL, helping them to perform near or better than centralized (no privacy) learning, even when using non-IID partitioning.

Named entity recognition (NER) identifies spans of text that contain names. Many researchers have reported the results of NER on text created through optical character recognition (OCR) over the past two decades. Unfortunately, the test collections that support this research are annotated with named entities after optical character recognition (OCR) has been run. This means that the collection must be re-annotated if the OCR output changes. Instead by tying annotations to character locations on the page, a collection can be built that supports OCR and NER research without requiring re-annotation when either improves. This means that named entities are annotated on the transcribed text. The transcribed text is all that is needed to evaluate the performance of OCR. For NER evaluation, the tagged OCR output is aligned to the transcriptions the aligned files, creating modified files of each, which are scored. This paper presents a methodology for building such a test collection and releases a collection of Chinese OCR-NER data constructed using the methodology. The paper provides performance baselines for current OCR and NER systems applied to this new collection.

Computer Assisted Discovery Extraction and Translation (CADET) is a workbench for helping knowledge workers find, label, and translate documents of interest. It combines a multitude of analytics together with a flexible environment for customizing the workflow for different users. This open-source framework allows for easy development of new research prototypes using a micro-service architecture based atop Docker and Apache Thrift.

To stimulate research in cross-language entity linking, we present a new test collection for evaluating the accuracy of cross-language entity linking in twenty-one languages. This paper describes an efficient way to create and curate such a collection, judiciously exploiting existing language resources. Queries are created by semi-automatically identifying person names on the English side of a parallel corpus, using judgments obtained through crowdsourcing to identify the entity corresponding to the name, and projecting the English name onto the non-English document using word alignments. Name projections are then curated, again through crowdsourcing. This technique resulted in the first publicly available multilingual cross-language entity linking collection. The collection includes approximately 55,000 queries, comprising between 875 and 4,329 queries for each of twenty-one non-English languages.