Ivan Meza-Ruiz

Also published as: Ivan Meza, Ivan V. Meza, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz, Ivan Vladimir Meza-Ruiz


2022

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Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Marine Carpuat | Marie-Catherine de Marneffe | Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Creating Mexican Spanish Language Resources through the Social Service Program
Carlos Daniel Hernandez Mena | Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Novel Incentives in Data Collection from People: models, implementations, challenges and results within LREC 2022

This work presents the path toward the creation of eight Spoken Language Resources under the umbrella of the Mexican Social Service national program. This program asks undergraduate students to donate time and work for the benefit of their society as a requirement to receive their degree. The program has thousands of options for the students who enroll. We show how we created a program which has resulted in the creation of open language resources which now are freely available in different repositories. We estimate that this exercise is equivalent to a budget of more than half a million US dollars. However, since the program is based on retribution from the students to their communities there has not been a necessity of a financial budget.

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AmericasNLI: Evaluating Zero-shot Natural Language Understanding of Pretrained Multilingual Models in Truly Low-resource Languages
Abteen Ebrahimi | Manuel Mager | Arturo Oncevay | Vishrav Chaudhary | Luis Chiruzzo | Angela Fan | John Ortega | Ricardo Ramos | Annette Rios | Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz | Gustavo Giménez-Lugo | Elisabeth Mager | Graham Neubig | Alexis Palmer | Rolando Coto-Solano | Thang Vu | Katharina Kann
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Pretrained multilingual models are able to perform cross-lingual transfer in a zero-shot setting, even for languages unseen during pretraining. However, prior work evaluating performance on unseen languages has largely been limited to low-level, syntactic tasks, and it remains unclear if zero-shot learning of high-level, semantic tasks is possible for unseen languages. To explore this question, we present AmericasNLI, an extension of XNLI (Conneau et al., 2018) to 10 Indigenous languages of the Americas. We conduct experiments with XLM-R, testing multiple zero-shot and translation-based approaches. Additionally, we explore model adaptation via continued pretraining and provide an analysis of the dataset by considering hypothesis-only models. We find that XLM-R’s zero-shot performance is poor for all 10 languages, with an average performance of 38.48%. Continued pretraining offers improvements, with an average accuracy of 43.85%. Surprisingly, training on poorly translated data by far outperforms all other methods with an accuracy of 49.12%.

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Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
Marine Carpuat | Marie-Catherine de Marneffe | Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

2021

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Ayuuk-Spanish Neural Machine Translator
Delfino Zacarías Márquez | Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas

This paper presents the first neural machine translator system for the Ayuuk language. In our experiments we translate from Ayuuk to Spanish, and fromSpanish to Ayuuk. Ayuuk is a language spoken in the Oaxaca state of Mexico by the Ayuukjä’äy people (in Spanish commonly known as Mixes. We use different sources to create a low-resource parallel corpus, more than 6,000 phrases. For some of these resources we rely on automatic alignment. The proposed system is based on the Transformer neural architecture and it uses sub-word level tokenization as the input. We show the current performance given the resources we have collected for the San Juan Güichicovi variant, they are promising, up to 5 BLEU. We based our development on the Masakhane project for African languages.

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Findings of the AmericasNLP 2021 Shared Task on Open Machine Translation for Indigenous Languages of the Americas
Manuel Mager | Arturo Oncevay | Abteen Ebrahimi | John Ortega | Annette Rios | Angela Fan | Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques | Luis Chiruzzo | Gustavo Giménez-Lugo | Ricardo Ramos | Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz | Rolando Coto-Solano | Alexis Palmer | Elisabeth Mager-Hois | Vishrav Chaudhary | Graham Neubig | Ngoc Thang Vu | Katharina Kann
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas

This paper presents the results of the 2021 Shared Task on Open Machine Translation for Indigenous Languages of the Americas. The shared task featured two independent tracks, and participants submitted machine translation systems for up to 10 indigenous languages. Overall, 8 teams participated with a total of 214 submissions. We provided training sets consisting of data collected from various sources, as well as manually translated sentences for the development and test sets. An official baseline trained on this data was also provided. Team submissions featured a variety of architectures, including both statistical and neural models, and for the majority of languages, many teams were able to considerably improve over the baseline. The best performing systems achieved 12.97 ChrF higher than baseline, when averaged across languages.

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GeSERA: General-domain Summary Evaluation by Relevance Analysis
Jessica López Espejel | Gaël de Chalendar | Jorge Garcia Flores | Thierry Charnois | Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021)

We present GeSERA, an open-source improved version of SERA for evaluating automatic extractive and abstractive summaries from the general domain. SERA is based on a search engine that compares candidate and reference summaries (called queries) against an information retrieval document base (called index). SERA was originally designed for the biomedical domain only, where it showed a better correlation with manual methods than the widely used lexical-based ROUGE method. In this paper, we take out SERA from the biomedical domain to the general one by adapting its content-based method to successfully evaluate summaries from the general domain. First, we improve the query reformulation strategy with POS Tags analysis of general-domain corpora. Second, we replace the biomedical index used in SERA with two article collections from AQUAINT-2 and Wikipedia. We conduct experiments with TAC2008, TAC2009, and CNNDM datasets. Results show that, in most cases, GeSERA achieves higher correlations with manual evaluation methods than SERA, while it reduces its gap with ROUGE for general-domain summary evaluation. GeSERA even surpasses ROUGE in two cases of TAC2009. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments and provide a comprehensive study of the impact of human annotators and the index size on summary evaluation with SERA and GeSERA.

2018

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UNAM at SemEval-2018 Task 10: Unsupervised Semantic Discriminative Attribute Identification in Neural Word Embedding Cones
Ignacio Arroyo-Fernández | Ivan Meza | Carlos-Francisco Méndez-Cruz
Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

In this paper we report an unsupervised method aimed to identify whether an attribute is discriminative for two words (which are treated as concepts, in our particular case). To this end, we use geometrically inspired vector operations underlying unsupervised decision functions. These decision functions operate on state-of-the-art neural word embeddings of the attribute and the concepts. The main idea can be described as follows: if attribute q discriminates concept a from concept b, then q is excluded from the feature set shared by these two concepts: the intersection. That is, the membership q∈ (a∩ b) does not hold. As a,b,q are represented with neural word embeddings, we tested vector operations allowing us to measure membership, i.e. fuzzy set operations (t-norm, for fuzzy intersection, and t-conorm, for fuzzy union) and the similarity between q and the convex cone described by a and b.

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Challenges of language technologies for the indigenous languages of the Americas
Manuel Mager | Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques | Gerardo Sierra | Ivan Meza-Ruiz
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Indigenous languages of the American continent are highly diverse. However, they have received little attention from the technological perspective. In this paper, we review the research, the digital resources and the available NLP systems that focus on these languages. We present the main challenges and research questions that arise when distant languages and low-resource scenarios are faced. We would like to encourage NLP research in linguistically rich and diverse areas like the Americas.

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Fortification of Neural Morphological Segmentation Models for Polysynthetic Minimal-Resource Languages
Katharina Kann | Jesus Manuel Mager Hois | Ivan Vladimir Meza-Ruiz | Hinrich Schütze
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

Morphological segmentation for polysynthetic languages is challenging, because a word may consist of many individual morphemes and training data can be extremely scarce. Since neural sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models define the state of the art for morphological segmentation in high-resource settings and for (mostly) European languages, we first show that they also obtain competitive performance for Mexican polysynthetic languages in minimal-resource settings. We then propose two novel multi-task training approaches—one with, one without need for external unlabeled resources—, and two corresponding data augmentation methods, improving over the neural baseline for all languages. Finally, we explore cross-lingual transfer as a third way to fortify our neural model and show that we can train one single multi-lingual model for related languages while maintaining comparable or even improved performance, thus reducing the amount of parameters by close to 75%. We provide our morphological segmentation datasets for Mexicanero, Nahuatl, Wixarika and Yorem Nokki for future research.

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Lost in Translation: Analysis of Information Loss During Machine Translation Between Polysynthetic and Fusional Languages
Manuel Mager | Elisabeth Mager | Alfonso Medina-Urrea | Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz | Katharina Kann
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Modeling of Polysynthetic Languages

Machine translation from polysynthetic to fusional languages is a challenging task, which gets further complicated by the limited amount of parallel text available. Thus, translation performance is far from the state of the art for high-resource and more intensively studied language pairs. To shed light on the phenomena which hamper automatic translation to and from polysynthetic languages, we study translations from three low-resource, polysynthetic languages (Nahuatl, Wixarika and Yorem Nokki) into Spanish and vice versa. Doing so, we find that in a morpheme-to-morpheme alignment an important amount of information contained in polysynthetic morphemes has no Spanish counterpart, and its translation is often omitted. We further conduct a qualitative analysis and, thus, identify morpheme types that are commonly hard to align or ignored in the translation process.

2017

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LIPN-IIMAS at SemEval-2017 Task 1: Subword Embeddings, Attention Recurrent Neural Networks and Cross Word Alignment for Semantic Textual Similarity
Ignacio Arroyo-Fernández | Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2017)

In this paper we report our attempt to use, on the one hand, state-of-the-art neural approaches that are proposed to measure Semantic Textual Similarity (STS). On the other hand, we propose an unsupervised cross-word alignment approach, which is linguistically motivated. The neural approaches proposed herein are divided into two main stages. The first stage deals with constructing neural word embeddings, the components of sentence embeddings. The second stage deals with constructing a semantic similarity function relating pairs of sentence embeddings. Unfortunately our competition results were poor in all tracks, therefore we concentrated our research to improve them for Track 5 (EN-EN).

2016

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LIPN-IIMAS at SemEval-2016 Task 1: Random Forest Regression Experiments on Align-and-Differentiate and Word Embeddings penalizing strategies
Oscar William Lightgow Serrano | Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz | Albert Manuel Orozco Camacho | Jorge Garcia Flores | Davide Buscaldi
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016)

2015

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SOPA: Random Forests Regression for the Semantic Textual Similarity task
Davide Buscaldi | Jorge García Flores | Ivan V. Meza | Isaac Rodríguez
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2015)

2009

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Jointly Identifying Predicates, Arguments and Senses using Markov Logic
Ivan Meza-Ruiz | Sebastian Riedel
Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Multilingual Semantic Role Labelling with Markov Logic
Ivan Meza-Ruiz | Sebastian Riedel
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2009): Shared Task

2008

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Collective Semantic Role Labelling with Markov Logic
Sebastian Riedel | Ivan Meza-Ruiz
CoNLL 2008: Proceedings of the Twelfth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

2006

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Multi-lingual Dependency Parsing with Incremental Integer Linear Programming
Sebastian Riedel | Ruket Çakıcı | Ivan Meza-Ruiz
Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-X)