The ability to automatically summarize news articles has become increasingly important due to the vast amount of information available online. Together with the rise of chatbots , Natural Language Processing (NLP) has recently experienced a tremendous amount of development. Despite these advancements, the majority of research is focused on established well-resourced languages, such as English. To contribute to development of the low resource Slovak language, we introduce SlovakSum, a Slovak news summarization dataset consisting of over 200 thousand news articles with titles and short abstracts obtained from multiple Slovak newspapers. The abstractive approach, including MBART and mT5 models, was used to evaluate various baselines. The code for the reproduction of our dataset and experiments can be found at https://github.com/NaiveNeuron/slovaksum

We introduce Universal NER (UNER), an open, community-driven project to develop gold-standard NER benchmarks in many languages. The overarching goal of UNER is to provide high-quality, cross-lingually consistent annotations to facilitate and standardize multilingual NER research. UNER v1 contains 19 datasets annotated with named entities in a cross-lingual consistent schema across 13 diverse languages. In this paper, we detail the dataset creation and composition of UNER; we also provide initial modeling baselines on both in-language and cross-lingual learning settings. We will release the data, code, and fitted models to the public.

This study details our approach for the CASE 2024 Shared Task on Climate Activism Stance and Hate Event Detection, focusing on Hate Speech Detection, Hate Speech Target Identification, and Stance Detection as classification challenges. We explored the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly GPT-4, in zero- or few-shot settings enhanced by retrieval augmentation and re-ranking for Tweet classification. Our goal was to determine if LLMs could match or surpass traditional methods in this context. We conducted an ablation study with LLaMA for comparison, and our results indicate that our models significantly outperformed the baselines, securing second place in the Target Detection task. The code for our submission is available at https://github.com/NaiveNeuron/bryndza-case-2024

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable potential in advancing natural language processing in dialect-specific contexts, their effectiveness in these settings has yet to be thoroughly assessed. This study introduces a case study on Šariš, a dialect of Slovak, which is itself a language with fewer resources, focusing on Machine Translation and Common Sense Reasoning tasks. We employ LLMs in a zero-shot configuration and for data augmentation to refine Slovak-Šariš and Šariš-Slovak translation models. The accuracy of these models is then manually verified by native speakers. Additionally, we introduce ŠarišCOPA, a new dataset for causal common sense reasoning, which, alongside SlovakCOPA, serves to evaluate LLM’s performance in a zero-shot framework. Our findings highlight LLM’s capabilities in processing low-resource dialects and suggest a viable approach for initiating dialect-specific translation models in such contexts.

With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) the process known as prompting, which entices the LLM to solve an arbitrary language processing task without the need for finetuning, has risen to prominence. Finding well-performing prompts, however, is a non-trivial task which requires experimentation in order to arrive at a prompt that solves a specific task. When a given task does not readily reduce to one that can be easily measured with well established metrics, human evaluation of the results obtained by prompting is often necessary. In this work we present prompterator, a tool that helps the user interactively iterate over various potential prompts and choose the best performing one based on human feedback. It is distributed as an open source package with out-of-the-box support for various LLM providers and was designed to be easily extensible.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental NLP tasks with a wide range of practical applications. The performance of state-of-the-art NER methods depends on high quality manually anotated datasets which still do not exist for some languages. In this work we aim to remedy this situation in Slovak by introducing WikiGoldSK, the first sizable human labelled Slovak NER dataset. We benchmark it by evaluating state-of-the-art multilingual Pretrained Language Models and comparing it to the existing silver-standard Slovak NER dataset. We also conduct few-shot experiments and show that training on a sliver-standard dataset yields better results. To enable future work that can be based on Slovak NER, we release the dataset, code, as well as the trained models publicly under permissible licensing terms at https://github.com/NaiveNeuron/WikiGoldSK

In this study, we demonstrate the viability of deploying BERT-style models to AWS Lambda in a production environment. Since the freely available pre-trained models are too large to be deployed in this environment, we utilize knowledge distillation and fine-tune the models on proprietary datasets for two real-world tasks: sentiment analysis and semantic textual similarity. As a result, we obtain models that are tuned for a specific domain and deployable in the serverless environment. The subsequent performance analysis shows that this solution does not only report latency levels acceptable for production use but that it is also a cost-effective alternative to small-to-medium size deployments of BERT models, all without any infrastructure overhead.

In this paper we describe TraSpaS, a submission to the third shared task on named entity recognition hosted as part of the Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing (BSNLP) Workshop. In it we evaluate various pre-trained language models on the NER task using three open-source NLP toolkits: character level language model with Stanza, language-specific BERT-style models with SpaCy and Adapter-enabled XLM-R with Trankit. Our results show that the Trankit-based models outperformed those based on the other two toolkits, even when trained on smaller amounts of data. Our code is available at https://github.com/NaiveNeuron/slavner-2021.

As a well established NLP task, single-document summarization has seen significant interest in the past few years. However, most of the work has been done on English datasets. This is particularly noticeable in the context of evaluation where the dominant ROUGE metric assumes its input to be written in English. In this paper we aim to address both of these issues by introducing a summarization dataset of articles from a popular Slovak news site and proposing small adaptation to the ROUGE metric that make it better suited for Slovak texts. Several baselines are evaluated on the dataset, including an extractive approach based on the Multilingual version of the BERT architecture. To the best of our knowledge, the presented dataset is the first large-scale news-based summarization dataset for text written in Slovak language. It can be reproduced using the utilities available at https://github.com/NaiveNeuron/sme-sum