There is a global trend for responsible investing and the need for developing automated methods for analyzing and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) related elements in financial texts is raising. In this work we propose a solution to the FinSim4-ESG task, consisting of binary classification of sentences into sustainable or unsustainable. We propose a novel knowledge-based latent heterogeneous representation that is based on knowledge from taxonomies and knowledge graphs and multiple contemporary document representations. We hypothesize that an approach based on a combination of knowledge and document representations can introduce significant improvement over conventional document representation approaches. We consider ensembles on classifier as well on representation level late-fusion and early fusion. The proposed approaches achieve competitive accuracy of 89 and are 5.85 behind the best achieved score.

We tackle the problem of neural headline generation in a low-resource setting, where only limited amount of data is available to train a model. We compare the ideal high-resource scenario on English with results obtained on a smaller subset of the same data and also run experiments on two small news corpora covering low-resource languages, Croatian and Estonian. Two options for headline generation in a multilingual low-resource scenario are investigated: a pretrained multilingual encoder-decoder model and a combination of two pretrained language models, one used as an encoder and the other as a decoder, connected with a cross-attention layer that needs to be trained from scratch. The results show that the first approach outperforms the second one by a large margin. We explore several data augmentation and pretraining strategies in order to improve the performance of both models and show that while we can drastically improve the second approach using these strategies, they have little to no effect on the performance of the pretrained encoder-decoder model. Finally, we propose two new measures for evaluating the performance of the models besides the classic ROUGE scores.

We propose our solution to the multimodal semantic role labeling task from the CONSTRAINT’22 workshop. The task aims at classifying entities in memes into classes such as “hero” and “villain”. We use several pre-trained multi-modal models to jointly encode the text and image of the memes, and implement three systems to classify the role of the entities. We propose dynamic sampling strategies to tackle the issue of class imbalance. Finally, we perform qualitative analysis on the representations of the entities.

La tâche de détection de contenus haineux est ardue, car elle nécessite des connaissances culturelles et contextuelles approfondies ; les connaissances nécessaires varient, entre autres, selon la langue du locateur ou la cible du contenu. Or, des données annotées pour des domaines et des langues spécifiques sont souvent absentes ou limitées. C’est là que les données dans d’autres langues peuvent être exploitées ; mais du fait de ces variations, le transfert cross-lingue est souvent difficile. Dans cet article, nous mettons en évidence cette limitation pour plusieurs domaines et langues et montrons l’impact positif de l’apprentissage de tâches auxiliaires multilingues - analyse de sentiments, reconnaissance des entités nommées et tâches reposant sur des informations morpho-syntaxiques - sur le transfert cross-lingue zéro-shot des modèles de détection de discours haineux, afin de combler ce fossé culturel.

Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning has been shown to be highly challenging for tasks involving a lot of linguistic specificities or when a cultural gap is present between lan- guages, such as in hate speech detection. In this paper, we highlight this limitation for hate speech detection in several domains and languages using strict experimental settings. Then, we propose to train on multilingual auxiliary tasks – sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and tasks relying on syntactic information – to improve zero-shot transfer of hate speech detection models across languages. We show how hate speech detection models benefit from a cross-lingual knowledge proxy brought by auxiliary tasks fine-tuning and highlight these tasks’ positive impact on bridging the hate speech linguistic and cultural gap between languages.

Cognates and borrowings carry different aspects of etymological evolution. In this work, we study semantic change of such items using multilingual word embeddings, both static and contextualised. We underline caveats identified while building and evaluating these embeddings. We release both said embeddings and a newly-built historical words lexicon, containing typed relations between words of varied Romance languages.

Languages are dynamic systems: word usage may change over time, reflecting various societal factors. However, all languages do not evolve identically: the impact of an event, the influence of a trend or thinking, can differ between communities. In this paper, we propose to track these divergences by comparing the evolution of a word and its translation across two languages. We investigate several methods of building time-varying and bilingual word embeddings, using contextualised and non-contextualised embeddings. We propose a set of scenarios to characterize semantic divergence across two languages, along with a setup to differentiate them in a bilingual corpus. We evaluate the different methods by generating a corpus of synthetic semantic change across two languages, English and French, before applying them to newspaper corpora to detect bilingual semantic divergence and provide qualitative insight for the task. We conclude that BERT embeddings coupled with a clustering step lead to the best performance on synthetic corpora; however, the performance of CBOW embeddings is very competitive and more adapted to an exploratory analysis on a large corpus.

Several cluster-based methods for semantic change detection with contextual embeddings emerged recently. They allow a fine-grained analysis of word use change by aggregating embeddings into clusters that reflect the different usages of the word. However, these methods are unscalable in terms of memory consumption and computation time. Therefore, they require a limited set of target words to be picked in advance. This drastically limits the usability of these methods in open exploratory tasks, where each word from the vocabulary can be considered as a potential target. We propose a novel scalable method for word usage-change detection that offers large gains in processing time and significant memory savings while offering the same interpretability and better performance than unscalable methods. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method by analysing a large corpus of news articles about COVID-19.

Plusieurs méthodes de détection des changements sémantiques utilisant des plongements lexicaux contextualisés sont apparues récemment. Elles permettent une analyse fine du changement d’usage des mots, en agrégeant les plongements contextualisés en clusters qui reflètent les différents usages d’un mot. Nous proposons une nouvelle méthode basée sur le transport optimal. Nous l’évaluons sur plusieurs corpus annotés, montrant un gain de précision par rapport aux autres méthodes utilisant des plongements contextualisés, et l’illustrons sur un corpus d’articles de journaux.

Au sein d’une langue, l’usage des mots varie selon deux axes : diachronique (dimension temporelle) et synchronique (variation selon l’auteur, la communauté, la zone géographique... ). Dans ces travaux, nous proposons une méthode de détection et d’interprétation des variations d’usages des mots à travers ces différentes dimensions. Pour cela, nous exploitons les capacités d’une nouvelle ligne de plongements lexicaux contextualisés, en particulier le modèle BERT. Nous expérimentons sur un corpus de rapports financiers d’entreprises françaises, pour appréhender les enjeux et préoccupations propres à certaines périodes, acteurs et secteurs d’activités.

This paper describes the approaches used by the Discovery Team to solve SemEval-2020 Task 1 - Unsupervised Lexical Semantic Change Detection. The proposed method is based on clustering of BERT contextual embeddings, followed by a comparison of cluster distributions across time. The best results were obtained by an ensemble of this method and static Word2Vec embeddings. According to the official results, our approach proved the best for Latin in Subtask 2.

Word meaning change can be inferred from drifts of time-varying word embeddings. However, temporal data may be too sparse to build robust word embeddings and to discriminate significant drifts from noise. In this paper, we compare three models to learn diachronic word embeddings on scarce data: incremental updating of a Skip-Gram from Kim et al. (2014), dynamic filtering from Bamler & Mandt (2017), and dynamic Bernoulli embeddings from Rudolph & Blei (2018). In particular, we study the performance of different initialisation schemes and emphasise what characteristics of each model are more suitable to data scarcity, relying on the distribution of detected drifts. Finally, we regularise the loss of these models to better adapt to scarce data.

L’usage, le sens et la connotation des mots peuvent changer au cours du temps. Les plongements lexicaux diachroniques permettent de modéliser ces changements de manière non supervisée. Dans cet article nous étudions l’impact de plusieurs fonctions de coût sur l’apprentissage de plongements dynamiques, en comparant les comportements de variantes du modèle Dynamic Bernoulli Embeddings. Les plongements dynamiques sont estimés sur deux corpus couvrant les mêmes deux décennies, le New York Times Annotated Corpus en anglais et une sélection d’articles du journal Le Monde en français, ce qui nous permet de mettre en place un processus d’analyse bilingue de l’évolution de l’usage des mots.

This study is a preliminary exploration of the concept of informativeness –how much information a sentence gives about a word it contains– and its potential benefits to building quality word representations from scarce data. We propose several sentence-level classifiers to predict informativeness, and we perform a manual annotation on a set of sentences. We conclude that these two measures correspond to different notions of informativeness. However, our experiments show that using the classifiers’ predictions to train word embeddings has an impact on embedding quality.