URIEL is a knowledge base offering geographical, phylogenetic, and typological vector representations for 7970 languages. It includes distance measures between these vectors for 4005 languages, which are accessible via the lang2vec tool. Despite being frequently cited, URIEL is limited in terms of linguistic inclusion and overall usability. To tackle these challenges, we introduce URIEL+, an enhanced version of URIEL and lang2vec that addresses these limitations. In addition to expanding typological feature coverage for 2898 languages, URIEL+ improves the user experience with robust, customizable distance calculations to better suit the needs of users. These upgrades also offer competitive performance on downstream tasks and provide distances that better align with linguistic distance studies.

Nigeria is a multilingual country with 500+ languages. Naija is a Nigerian Pidgin spoken by approximately 120M speakers and it is a mixed language (e.g., English, Portuguese, Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo). Although it has mainly been a spoken language until recently, there are some online platforms (e.g., Wikipedia), publishing in written Naija as well. West African Pidgin English (WAPE) is also spoken in Nigeria and it is used by BBC to broadcast news on the internet to a wider audience not only in Nigeria but also in other West African countries (e.g., Cameroon and Ghana). Through statistical analyses and Machine Translation experiments, our paper shows that these two pidgin varieties do not represent each other (i.e., there are linguistic differences in word order and vocabulary) and Generative AI operates only based on WAPE. In other words, Naija is underrepresented in Generative AI, and it is hard to teach LLMs with few examples. In addition to the statistical analyses, we also provide historical information on both pidgins as well as insights from the interviews conducted with volunteer Wikipedia contributors in Naija.

Optimizing language models for use in conversational agents requires large quantities of example dialogues. Increasingly, these dialogues are synthetically generated by using powerful large language models (LLMs), especially in domains where obtaining authentic human data is challenging. One such domain is human resources (HR). In this context, we compare two LLM-based dialogue generation methods for producing HR job interviews, and assess which method generates higher-quality dialogues, i.e., those more difficult to distinguish from genuine human discourse. The first method uses a single prompt to generate the complete interview dialog. The second method uses two agents that converse with each other. To evaluate dialogue quality under each method, we ask a judge LLM to determine whether AI was used for interview generation, using pairwise interview comparisons. We empirically find that, at the expense of a sixfold increase in token count, interviews generated with the dual-prompt method achieve a win rate 2 to 10 times higher than those generated with the single-prompt method. This difference remains consistent regardless of whether GPT-4o or Llama 3.3 70B is used for either interview generation or quality judging.

Large Language Models are transforming NLP for a lot of tasks. However, how LLMs perform NLP tasks for LRLs is less explored. In alliance with the theme track of the NAACL’24, we focus on 12 low-resource languages (LRLs) from Brazil, 2 LRLs from Africa and 2 high-resource languages (HRLs) (e.g., English and Brazilian Portuguese). Our results indicate that the LLMs perform worse for the labeling of LRLs in comparison to HRLs in general. We explain the reasons behind this failure and provide an error analyses through examples from 2 Brazilian LRLs.

Fine-tuning and testing a multilingual large language model is a challenge for low-resource languages (LRLs) since it is an expensive process. While previous studies have predicted the performance of natural language processing (NLP) tasks using machine learning methods, they primarily focus on high-resource languages, overlooking LRLs and shifts across domains. Focusing on LRLs, we investigate three factors (the size of the fine-tuning corpus, domain similarity between fine-tuning and testing corpora, and language similarity between source and target languages), which can potentially impact the model performance by using classical regression models. Our results indicate that domain similarity has the most important impact on predicting the performance of Machine Translation models.

Even though various speech data sets are available in Hungarian, there is a lack of a general overview about their types and sizes. To fill in this gap, we provide a survey of available data sets in spoken Hungarian in five categories (e.g., monolingual, Hungarian part of multilingual, pathological, child-related and dialectal collections). In total, the estimated size of available data is about 2800 hours (across 7500 speakers) and it represents a rich spoken language diversity. However, the distribution of the data and its alignment to real-life (e.g. speech recognition) tasks is far from optimal indicating the need for additional larger-scale natural language speech data sets. Our survey presents an overview of available data sets for Hungarian explaining their strengths and weaknesses which is useful for researchers working on Hungarian across disciplines. In addition, our survey serves as a starting point towards a unified foundational speech model specific to Hungarian.

Bragging is the act of uttering statements that are likely to be positively viewed by others and it is extensively employed in human communication with the aim to build a positive self-image of oneself. Social media is a natural platform for users to employ bragging in order to gain admiration, respect, attention and followers from their audiences. Yet, little is known about the scale of bragging online and its characteristics. This paper employs computational sociolinguistics methods to conduct the first large scale study of bragging behavior on Twitter (U.S.) by focusing on its overall prevalence, temporal dynamics and impact of demographic factors. Our study shows that the prevalence of bragging decreases over time within the same population of users. In addition, younger, more educated and popular users in the U.S. are more likely to brag. Finally, we conduct an extensive linguistics analysis to unveil specific bragging themes associated with different user traits.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in medical fields. In mental health support, the early identification of linguistic markers associated with mental health conditions can provide valuable support to mental health professionals, and reduce long waiting times for patients.Despite the benefits of LLMs for mental health support, there is limited research on their application in mental health systems for languages other than English. Our study addresses this gap by focusing on the detection of depression severity in Greek through user-generated posts which are automatically translated from English. Our results show that GPT3.5-turbo is not very successful in identifying the severity of depression in English, and it has a varying performance in Greek as well. Our study underscores the necessity for further research, especially in languages with less resources.Also, careful implementation is necessary to ensure that LLMs are used effectively in mental health platforms, and human supervision remains crucial to avoid misdiagnosis.

In the pursuit of supporting more languages around the world, tools that characterize properties of languages play a key role in expanding the existing multilingual NLP research. In this study, we focus on a widely used typological knowledge base, URIEL, which aggregates linguistic information into numeric vectors. Specifically, we delve into the soundness and reproducibility of the approach taken by URIEL in quantifying language similarity. Our analysis reveals URIEL’s ambiguity in calculating language distances and in handling missing values. Moreover, we find that URIEL does not provide any information about typological features for 31% of the languages it represents, undermining the reliabilility of the database, particularly on low-resource languages. Our literature review suggests URIEL and lang2vec are used in papers on diverse NLP tasks, which motivates us to rigorously verify the database as the effectiveness of these works depends on the reliability of the information the tool provides.

Since performing exercises (including, e.g.,practice tests) forms a crucial component oflearning, and creating such exercises requiresnon-trivial effort from the teacher. There is agreat value in automatic exercise generationin digital tools in education. In this paper, weparticularly focus on automatic creation of gap-filling exercises for language learning, specifi-cally grammar exercises. Since providing anyannotation in this domain requires human ex-pert effort, we aim to avoid it entirely and ex-plore the task of converting existing texts intonew gap-filling exercises, purely based on anexample exercise, without explicit instructionor detailed annotation of the intended gram-mar topics. We contribute (i) a novel neuralnetwork architecture specifically designed foraforementioned gap-filling exercise generationtask, and (ii) a real-world benchmark datasetfor French grammar. We show that our modelfor this French grammar gap-filling exercisegeneration outperforms a competitive baselineclassifier by 8% in F1 percentage points, achiev-ing an average F1 score of 82%. Our model im-plementation and the dataset are made publiclyavailable to foster future research, thus offeringa standardized evaluation and baseline solutionof the proposed partially annotated data predic-tion task in grammar exercise creation.

Multilingualism is widespread around the world and code-switching (CSW) is a common practice among different language pairs/tuples across locations and regions. However, there is still not much progress in building successful CSW systems, despite the recent advances in Massive Multilingual Language Models (MMLMs). We investigate the reasons behind this setback through a critical study about the existing CSW data sets (68) across language pairs in terms of the collection and preparation (e.g. transcription and annotation) stages. This in-depth analysis reveals that a) most CSW data involves English ignoring other language pairs/tuples b) there are flaws in terms of representativeness in data collection and preparation stages due to ignoring the location based, socio-demographic and register variation in CSW. In addition, lack of clarity on the data selection and filtering stages shadow the representativeness of CSW data sets. We conclude by providing a short check-list to improve the representativeness for forthcoming studies involving CSW data collection and preparation.

There is a surge in interest in the development of open-domain chatbots, driven by the recent advancements of large language models. The “openness” of the dialogue is expected to be maximized by providing minimal information to the users about the common ground they can expect, including the presumed joint activity. However, evidence suggests that the effect is the opposite. Asking users to “just chat about anything” results in a very narrow form of dialogue, which we refer to as the “open-domain paradox”. In this position paper, we explain this paradox through the theory of common ground as the basis for human-like communication. Furthermore, we question the assumptions behind open-domain chatbots and identify paths forward for enabling common ground in human-computer dialogue.

Bragging is a speech act employed with the goal of constructing a favorable self-image through positive statements about oneself. It is widespread in daily communication and especially popular in social media, where users aim to build a positive image of their persona directly or indirectly. In this paper, we present the first large scale study of bragging in computational linguistics, building on previous research in linguistics and pragmatics. To facilitate this, we introduce a new publicly available data set of tweets annotated for bragging and their types. We empirically evaluate different transformer-based models injected with linguistic information in (a) binary bragging classification, i.e., if tweets contain bragging statements or not; and (b) multi-class bragging type prediction including not bragging. Our results show that our models can predict bragging with macro F1 up to 72.42 and 35.95 in the binary and multi-class classification tasks respectively. Finally, we present an extensive linguistic and error analysis of bragging prediction to guide future research on this topic.

There is a growing interest in building language technologies (LTs) for low resource languages (LRLs). However, there are flaws in the planning, data collection and development phases mostly due to the assumption that LRLs are similar to High Resource Languages (HRLs) but only smaller in size. In our paper, we first provide examples of failed LTs for LRLs and provide the reasons for these failures. Second, we discuss the problematic issues with the data for LRLs. Finally, we provide recommendations for building better LTs for LRLs through insights from sociolinguistics and multilingualism. Our goal is not to solve all problems around LTs for LRLs but to raise awareness about the existing issues, provide recommendations toward possible solutions and encourage collaboration across academic disciplines for developing LTs that actually serve the needs and preferences of the LRL communities.

The analysis of data in which multiple languages are represented has gained popularity among computational linguists in recent years. So far, much of this research focuses mainly on the improvement of computational methods and largely ignores linguistic and social aspects of C-S discussed across a wide range of languages within the long-established literature in linguistics. To fill this gap, we offer a survey of code-switching (C-S) covering the literature in linguistics with a reflection on the key issues in language technologies. From the linguistic perspective, we provide an overview of structural and functional patterns of C-S focusing on the literature from European and Indian contexts as highly multilingual areas. From the language technologies perspective, we discuss how massive language models fail to represent diverse C-S types due to lack of appropriate training data, lack of robust evaluation benchmarks for C-S (across multilingual situations and types of C-S) and lack of end-to- end systems that cover sociolinguistic aspects of C-S as well. Our survey will be a step to- wards an outcome of mutual benefit for computational scientists and linguists with a shared interest in multilingualism and C-S.

This paper describes the team (“Tamalli”)’s submission to AmericasNLP2021 shared task on Open Machine Translation for low resource South American languages. Our goal was to evaluate different Machine Translation (MT) techniques, statistical and neural-based, under several configuration settings. We obtained the second-best results for the language pairs “Spanish-Bribri”, “Spanish-Asháninka”, and “Spanish-Rarámuri” in the category “Development set not used for training”. Our performed experiments will serve as a point of reference for researchers working on MT with low-resource languages.

Open-domain chatbots are supposed to converse freely with humans without being restricted to a topic, task or domain. However, the boundaries and/or contents of open-domain conversations are not clear. To clarify the boundaries of “openness”, we conduct two studies: First, we classify the types of “speech events” encountered in a chatbot evaluation data set (i.e., Meena by Google) and find that these conversations mainly cover the “small talk” category and exclude the other speech event categories encountered in real life human-human communication. Second, we conduct a small-scale pilot study to generate online conversations covering a wider range of speech event categories between two humans vs. a human and a state-of-the-art chatbot (i.e., Blender by Facebook). A human evaluation of these generated conversations indicates a preference for human-human conversations, since the human-chatbot conversations lack coherence in most speech event categories. Based on these results, we suggest (a) using the term “small talk” instead of “open-domain” for the current chatbots which are not that “open” in terms of conversational abilities yet, and (b) revising the evaluation methods to test the chatbot conversations against other speech events.

Machine translation (MT) quality is evaluated through comparisons between MT outputs and the human translations (HT). Traditionally, this evaluation relies on form related features (e.g. lexicon and syntax) and ignores the transfer of meaning reflected in HT outputs. Instead, we evaluate the quality of MT outputs through meaning related features (e.g. polarity, subjectivity) with two experiments. In the first experiment, the meaning related features are compared to human rankings individually. In the second experiment, combinations of meaning related features and other quality metrics are utilized to predict the same human rankings. The results of our experiments confirm the benefit of these features in predicting human evaluation of translation quality in addition to traditional metrics which focus mainly on form.