Elena Álvarez-Mellado

Also published as: Elena Alvarez-Mellado, Elena Álvarez Mellado


2022

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Borrowing or Codeswitching? Annotating for Finer-Grained Distinctions in Language Mixing
Elena Alvarez-Mellado | Constantine Lignos
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We present a new corpus of Twitter data annotated for codeswitching and borrowing between Spanish and English. The corpus contains 9,500 tweets annotated at the token level with codeswitches, borrowings, and named entities. This corpus differs from prior corpora of codeswitching in that we attempt to clearly define and annotate the boundary between codeswitching and borrowing and do not treat common “internet-speak” (lol, etc.) as codeswitching when used in an otherwise monolingual context. The result is a corpus that enables the study and modeling of Spanish-English borrowing and codeswitching on Twitter in one dataset. We present baseline scores for modeling the labels of this corpus using Transformer-based language models. The annotation itself is released with a CC BY 4.0 license, while the text it applies to is distributed in compliance with the Twitter terms of service.

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Detecting Unassimilated Borrowings in Spanish: An Annotated Corpus and Approaches to Modeling
Elena Álvarez-Mellado | Constantine Lignos
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

This work presents a new resource for borrowing identification and analyzes the performance and errors of several models on this task. We introduce a new annotated corpus of Spanish newswire rich in unassimilated lexical borrowings—words from one language that are introduced into another without orthographic adaptation—and use it to evaluate how several sequence labeling models (CRF, BiLSTM-CRF, and Transformer-based models) perform. The corpus contains 370,000 tokens and is larger, more borrowing-dense, OOV-rich, and topic-varied than previous corpora available for this task. Our results show that a BiLSTM-CRF model fed with subword embeddings along with either Transformer-based embeddings pretrained on codeswitched data or a combination of contextualized word embeddings outperforms results obtained by a multilingual BERT-based model.

2021

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Extracting English lexical borrowings from Spanish newswire
Elena Álvarez Mellado
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2021

2020

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An Annotated Corpus of Emerging Anglicisms in Spanish Newspaper Headlines
Elena Alvarez-Mellado
Proceedings of the The 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Code Switching

The extraction of anglicisms (lexical borrowings from English) is relevant both for lexicographic purposes and for NLP downstream tasks. We introduce a corpus of European Spanish newspaper headlines annotated with anglicisms and a baseline model for anglicism extraction. In this paper we present: (1) a corpus of 21,570 newspaper headlines written in European Spanish annotated with emergent anglicisms and (2) a conditional random field baseline model with handcrafted features for anglicism extraction. We present the newspaper headlines corpus, describe the annotation tagset and guidelines and introduce a CRF model that can serve as baseline for the task of detecting anglicisms. The presented work is a first step towards the creation of an anglicism extractor for Spanish newswire.

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A Corpus of Spanish Political Speeches from 1937 to 2019
Elena Álvarez-Mellado
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper documents a corpus of political speeches in Spanish. The documents in the corpus belong to the Christmas speeches that have been delivered yearly by the head of state of Spain since 1937. The historical period covered by these speeches ranges from the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship up until today. As a result, the corpus reflects some of the most significant events and political changes in the recent history of Spain. Up until now, the speeches as a whole had not been collected into a single, systematic and reusable resource, as most of the texts were scattered among different sources. The paper describes: (1) the composition of the corpus; (2) the Python interface that facilitates querying and analyzing the corpus using the NLTK and spaCy libraries and (3) a set of HTML visualizations aimed at the general public to navigate the corpus and explore differences between TF-IDF frequencies.

2019

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Assessing the Efficacy of Clinical Sentiment Analysis and Topic Extraction in Psychiatric Readmission Risk Prediction
Elena Alvarez-Mellado | Eben Holderness | Nicholas Miller | Fyonn Dhang | Philip Cawkwell | Kirsten Bolton | James Pustejovsky | Mei-Hua Hall
Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis (LOUHI 2019)

Predicting which patients are more likely to be readmitted to a hospital within 30 days after discharge is a valuable piece of information in clinical decision-making. Building a successful readmission risk classifier based on the content of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) has proved, however, to be a challenging task. Previously explored features include mainly structured information, such as sociodemographic data, comorbidity codes and physiological variables. In this paper we assess incorporating additional clinically interpretable NLP-based features such as topic extraction and clinical sentiment analysis to predict early readmission risk in psychiatry patients.