Within the research presented in this article, we created a new question answering benchmark database for Hungarian called MILQA. When creating the dataset, we basically followed the principles of the English SQuAD 2.0, however, like in some more recent English question answering datasets, we introduced a number of innovations beyond SQuAD: e.g., yes/no-questions, list-like answers consisting of several text spans, long answers, questions requiring calculation and other question types where you cannot simply copy the answer from the text. For all these non-extractive question types, the pragmatically adequate form of the answer was also added to make the training of generative models possible. We implemented and evaluated a set of baseline retrieval and answer span extraction models on the dataset. BM25 performed better than any vector-based solution for retrieval. Cross-lingual transfer from English significantly improved span extraction models.

In this paper, we present an upgraded version of the Hungarian NYTK-NerKor named entity corpus, which contains about twice as many annotated spans and 7 times as many distinct entity types as the original version. We used an extended version of the OntoNotes 5 annotation scheme including time and numerical expressions. NerKor is the newest and biggest NER corpus for Hungarian containing diverse domains. We applied cross-lingual transfer of NER models trained for other languages based on multilingual contextual language models to preannotate the corpus. We corrected the annotation semi-automatically and manually. Zero-shot preannotation was very effective with about 0.82 F1 score for the best model. We also added a 12000-token subcorpus on cars and other motor vehicles. We trained and release a transformer-based NER tagger for Hungarian using the annotation in the new corpus version, which provides similar performance to an identical model trained on the original version of the corpus.

In this paper, we present the results of our experiments concerning the zero-shot cross-lingual performance of the PERIN sentence-to-graph semantic parser. We applied the PTG model trained using the PERIN parser on a 740k-token Czech newspaper corpus to Hungarian. We evaluated the performance of the parser using the official evaluation tool of the MRP 2020 shared task. The gold standard Hungarian annotation was created by manual correction of the output of the parser following the annotation manual of the tectogrammatical level of the Prague Dependency Treebank. An English model trained on a larger one-million-token English newspaper corpus is also available, however, we found that the Czech model performed significantly better on Hungarian input due to the fact that Hungarian is typologically more similar to Czech than to English. We have found that zero-shot transfer of the PTG meaning representation across typologically not-too-distant languages using a neural parser model based on a multilingual contextual language model followed by a manual correction by linguist experts seems to be a viable scenario.

In this paper, we present a major update to the first Hungarian named entity dataset, the Szeged NER corpus. We used zero-shot cross-lingual transfer to initialize the enrichment of entity types annotated in the corpus using three neural NER models: two of them based on the English OntoNotes corpus and one based on the Czech Named Entity Corpus finetuned from multilingual neural language models. The output of the models was automatically merged with the original NER annotation, and automatically and manually corrected and further enriched with additional annotation, like qualifiers for various entity types. We present the evaluation of the zero-shot performance of the two OntoNotes-based models and a transformer-based new NER model trained on the training part of the final corpus. We release the corpus and the trained model.

In this paper, we present a modified version of the CBOW algorithm implemented in the fastText framework. Our modified algorithm, CBOW-tag builds a vector space model that includes the representation of the original word forms and their annotation at the same time. We illustrate the results by presenting a model built from a corpus that includes morphological and syntactic annotations. The simultaneous presence of unannotated elements and different annotations at the same time in the model makes it possible to constrain nearest neighbour queries to specific types of elements. The model can thus efficiently answer questions such as What do we eat?, What can we do with a skeleton? What else do we do with what we eat?, etc. Error analysis reveals that the model can highlight errors introduced into the annotation by the tagger and parser we used to generate the annotations as well as lexical peculiarities in the corpus itself, especially if we do not limit the vocabulary of the model to frequent items.

In this article, an ongoing research is presented, the immediate goal of which is to create a corpus annotated with semantic role labels for Hungarian that can be used to train a parser-based system capable of formulating relevant questions about the text it processes. We briefly describe the objectives of our research, our efforts at eliminating errors in the Hungarian Universal Dependencies corpus, which we use as the base of our annotation effort, at creating a Hungarian verbal argument database annotated with thematic roles, at classifying adjuncts, and at matching verbal argument frames to specific occurrences of verbs and participles in the corpus.