Simone Tedeschi


2022

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EUREKA: EUphemism Recognition Enhanced through Knn-based methods and Augmentation
Sedrick Scott Keh | Rohit Bharadwaj | Emmy Liu | Simone Tedeschi | Varun Gangal | Roberto Navigli
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FLP)

We introduce EUREKA, an ensemble-based approach for performing automatic euphemism detection. We (1) identify and correct potentially mislabelled rows in the dataset, (2) curate an expanded corpus called EuphAug, (3) leverage model representations of Potentially Euphemistic Terms (PETs), and (4) explore using representations of semantically close sentences to aid in classification. Using our augmented dataset and kNN-based methods, EUREKA was able to achieve state-of-the-art results on the public leaderboard of the Euphemism Detection Shared Task, ranking first with a macro F1 score of 0.881.

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MultiNERD: A Multilingual, Multi-Genre and Fine-Grained Dataset for Named Entity Recognition (and Disambiguation)
Simone Tedeschi | Roberto Navigli
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of identifying named entities in texts and classifying them through specific semantic categories, a process which is crucial for a wide range of NLP applications. Current datasets for NER focus mainly on coarse-grained entity types, tend to consider a single textual genre and to cover a narrow set of languages, thus limiting the general applicability of NER systems.In this work, we design a new methodology for automatically producing NER annotations, and address the aforementioned limitations by introducing a novel dataset that covers 10 languages, 15 NER categories and 2 textual genres.We also introduce a manually-annotated test set, and extensively evaluate the quality of our novel dataset on both this new test set and standard benchmarks for NER.In addition, in our dataset, we include: i) disambiguation information to enable the development of multilingual entity linking systems, and ii) image URLs to encourage the creation of multimodal systems.We release our dataset at https://github.com/Babelscape/multinerd.

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ID10M: Idiom Identification in 10 Languages
Simone Tedeschi | Federico Martelli | Roberto Navigli
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Idioms are phrases which present a figurative meaning that cannot be (completely) derived by looking at the meaning of their individual components.Identifying and understanding idioms in context is a crucial goal and a key challenge in a wide range of Natural Language Understanding tasks. Although efforts have been undertaken in this direction, the automatic identification and understanding of idioms is still a largely under-investigated area, especially when operating in a multilingual scenario. In this paper, we address such limitations and put forward several new contributions: we propose a novel multilingual Transformer-based system for the identification of idioms; we produce a high-quality automatically-created training dataset in 10 languages, along with a novel manually-curated evaluation benchmark; finally, we carry out a thorough performance analysis and release our evaluation suite at https://github.com/Babelscape/ID10M.

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NER4ID at SemEval-2022 Task 2: Named Entity Recognition for Idiomaticity Detection
Simone Tedeschi | Roberto Navigli
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

Idioms are lexically-complex phrases whose meaning cannot be derived by compositionally interpreting their components. Although the automatic identification and understanding of idioms is essential for a wide range of Natural Language Understanding tasks, they are still largely under-investigated.This motivated the organization of the SemEval-2022 Task 2, which is divided into two multilingual subtasks: one about idiomaticity detection, and the other about sentence embeddings. In this work, we focus on the first subtask and propose a Transformer-based dual-encoder architecture to compute the semantic similarity between a potentially-idiomatic expression and its context and, based on this, predict idiomaticity. Then, we show how and to what extent Named Entity Recognition can be exploited to reduce the degree of confusion of idiom identification systems and, therefore, improve performance.Our model achieves 92.1 F1 in the one-shot setting and shows strong robustness towards unseen idioms achieving 77.4 F1 in the zero-shot setting. We release our code at https://github.com/Babelscape/ner4id.

2021

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WikiNEuRal: Combined Neural and Knowledge-based Silver Data Creation for Multilingual NER
Simone Tedeschi | Valentino Maiorca | Niccolò Campolungo | Francesco Cecconi | Roberto Navigli
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Multilingual Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a key intermediate task which is needed in many areas of NLP. In this paper, we address the well-known issue of data scarcity in NER, especially relevant when moving to a multilingual scenario, and go beyond current approaches to the creation of multilingual silver data for the task. We exploit the texts of Wikipedia and introduce a new methodology based on the effective combination of knowledge-based approaches and neural models, together with a novel domain adaptation technique, to produce high-quality training corpora for NER. We evaluate our datasets extensively on standard benchmarks for NER, yielding substantial improvements up to 6 span-based F1-score points over previous state-of-the-art systems for data creation.

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Named Entity Recognition for Entity Linking: What Works and What’s Next
Simone Tedeschi | Simone Conia | Francesco Cecconi | Roberto Navigli
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Entity Linking (EL) systems have achieved impressive results on standard benchmarks mainly thanks to the contextualized representations provided by recent pretrained language models. However, such systems still require massive amounts of data – millions of labeled examples – to perform at their best, with training times that often exceed several days, especially when limited computational resources are available. In this paper, we look at how Named Entity Recognition (NER) can be exploited to narrow the gap between EL systems trained on high and low amounts of labeled data. More specifically, we show how and to what extent an EL system can benefit from NER to enhance its entity representations, improve candidate selection, select more effective negative samples and enforce hard and soft constraints on its output entities. We release our software – code and model checkpoints – at https://github.com/Babelscape/ner4el.