In recent years, multimodal natural language processing, aimed at learning from diverse data types, has garnered significant attention. However, there needs to be more clarity when it comes to analysing multimodal tasks in multi-lingual contexts. While prior studies on sentiment analysis of tweets have predominantly focused on the English language, this paper addresses this gap by transforming an existing textual Twitter sentiment dataset into a multimodal format through a straightforward curation process. Our work opens up new avenues for sentiment-related research within the research community. Additionally, we conduct baseline experiments utilising this augmented dataset and report the findings. Notably, our evaluations reveal that when comparing unimodal and multimodal configurations, using a sentiment-tuned large language model as a text encoder performs exceptionally well.

This paper describes our system used for a shared task on code-mixed, less-resourced sentiment analysis for Indo-Aryan languages. We are using the large language models (LLMs) since they have demonstrated excellent performance on classification tasks. In our participation in all tracks, we use unsloth/mistral-7b-bnb-4bit LLM for the task of code-mixed sentiment analysis. For track 1, we used a simple fine-tuning strategy on PLMs by combining data from multiple phases. Our trained systems secured first place in four phases out of five. In addition, we present the results achieved using several PLMs for each language.

This article provides a thorough mapping of NLP and Language Technology research on 39 European languages onto 46 domains. Our analysis is based on almost 50,000 papers published between 2010 and October 2022 in the ACL Anthology. We use a dictionary-based approach to identify 1) languages, 2) domains, and 3) NLP tasks in these papers; the dictionary-based method using exact terms has a precision value of 0.81. Moreover, we identify common mistakes which can be useful to fine-tune the methodology for future work. While we are only able to highlight selected results in this submitted version, the final paper will contain detailed analyses and charts on a per-language basis. We hope that this study can contribute to digital language equality in Europe by providing information to the academic and industrial research community about the opportunities for novel LT/NLP research.

This article presents a comparative analysis of four different syntactic typological approaches applied to 20 different languages. We compared three specific quantitative methods, using parallel CoNLL-U corpora, to the classification obtained via syntactic features provided by a typological database (lang2vec). First, we analyzed the Marsagram linear approach which consists of extracting the frequency word-order patterns regarding the position of components inside syntactic nodes. The second approach considers the relative position of heads and dependents, and the third is based simply on the relative position of verbs and objects. From the results, it was possible to observe that each method provides different language clusters which can be compared to the classic genealogical classification (the lang2vec and the head and dependent methods being the closest). As different word-order phenomena are considered in these specific typological strategies, each one provides a different angle of analysis to be applied according to the precise needs of the researchers.

This article presents a comparative analysis of four different syntactic typological approaches applied to 20 different languages to determine the most effective one to be used for the improvement of dependency parsing results via corpora combination. We evaluated these strategies by calculating the correlation between the language distances and the empirical LAS results obtained when languages were combined in pairs. From the results, it was possible to observe that the best method is based on the extraction of word order patterns which happen inside subtrees of the syntactic structure of the sentences.

This paper introduces Cro-FiReDa, a sentiment-annotated dataset for Croatian in the domain of movie reviews. The dataset, which contains over 10,000 sentences, has been annotated at the sentence level. In addition to presentingthe overall annotation process, we also present benchmark results based on the transformer-based fine-tuning approach.

The work in progress on the CEF Action CURLICA T is presented. The general aim of the Action is to compile curated datasets in seven languages of the con- sortium in domains of relevance to Euro- pean Digital Service Infrastructures (DSIs) in order to enhance the eTransla- tion services.

The work in progress on the CEF Action National Language Technology Platform (NLTP) is presented. The Action aims at combining the most advanced Language Technology (LT) tools and solutions in a new state-of-the-art, Artificial Intelli- gence (AI) driven, National Language Technology Platform (NLTP).

This article presents the current outcomes of the CURLICAT CEF Telecom project, which aims to collect and deeply annotate a set of large corpora from selected domains. The CURLICAT corpus includes 7 monolingual corpora (Bulgarian, Croatian, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak and Slovenian) containing selected samples from respective national corpora. These corpora are automatically tokenized, lemmatized and morphologically analysed and the named entities annotated. The annotations are uniformly provided for each language specific corpus while the common metadata schema is harmonised across the languages. Additionally, the corpora are annotated for IATE terms in all languages. The file format is CoNLL-U Plus format, containing the ten columns specific to the CoNLL-U format and three extra columns specific to our corpora as defined by Varádi et al. (2020). The CURLICAT corpora represent a rich and valuable source not just for training NMT models, but also for further studies and developments in machine learning, cross-lingual terminological data extraction and classification.

This article presents a comparative analysis of dependency parsing results for a set of 16 languages, coming from a large variety of linguistic families and genera, whose parallel corpora were used to train a deep-learning tool. Results are analyzed in comparison to an innovative way of classifying languages concerning the head directionality parameter used to perform a quantitative syntactic typological classification of languages. It has been shown that, despite using parallel corpora, there is a large discrepancy in terms of LAS results. The obtained results show that this heterogeneity is mainly due to differences in the syntactic structure of the selected languages, where Indo-European ones, especially Romance languages, have the best scores. It has been observed that the differences in the size of the representation of each language in the language model used by the deep-learning tool also play a major role in the dependency parsing efficacy. Other factors, such as the number of dependency parsing labels may also have an influence on results with more complex labeling systems such as the Polish language.

This article presents the work in progress on the collaborative project of several European countries to develop National Language Technology Platform (NLTP). The project aims at combining the most advanced Language Technology tools and solutions in a new, state-of-the-art, Artificial Intelligence driven, National Language Technology Platform for five EU/EEA official and lower-resourced languages.

This article presents the results of the evaluation campaign of language tools available for fifteen EU-official under-resourced languages. The evaluation was conducted within the MSC ITN CLEOPATRA action that aims at building the cross-lingual event-centric knowledge processing on top of the application of linguistic processing chains (LPCs) for at least 24 EU-official languages. In this campaign, we concentrated on three existing NLP platforms (Stanford CoreNLP, NLP Cube, UDPipe) that all provide models for under-resourced languages and in this first run we covered 15 under-resourced languages for which the models were available. We present the design of the evaluation campaign and present the results as well as discuss them. We considered the difference between reported and our tested results within a single percentage point as being within the limits of acceptable tolerance and thus consider this result as reproducible. However, for a number of languages, the results are below what was reported in the literature, and in some cases, our testing results are even better than the ones reported previously. Particularly problematic was the evaluation of NERC systems. One of the reasons is the absence of universally or cross-lingually applicable named entities classification scheme that would serve the NERC task in different languages analogous to the Universal Dependency scheme in parsing task. To build such a scheme has become one of our the future research directions.

Multilingualism is a cultural cornerstone of Europe and firmly anchored in the European treaties including full language equality. However, language barriers impacting business, cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication are still omnipresent. Language Technologies (LTs) are a powerful means to break down these barriers. While the last decade has seen various initiatives that created a multitude of approaches and technologies tailored to Europe’s specific needs, there is still an immense level of fragmentation. At the same time, AI has become an increasingly important concept in the European Information and Communication Technology area. For a few years now, AI – including many opportunities, synergies but also misconceptions – has been overshadowing every other topic. We present an overview of the European LT landscape, describing funding programmes, activities, actions and challenges in the different countries with regard to LT, including the current state of play in industry and the LT market. We present a brief overview of the main LT-related activities on the EU level in the last ten years and develop strategic guidance with regard to four key dimensions.

This article presents the current outcomes of the MARCELL CEF Telecom project aiming to collect and deeply annotate a large comparable corpus of legal documents. The MARCELL corpus includes 7 monolingual sub-corpora (Bulgarian, Croatian, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak and Slovenian) containing the total body of respective national legislative documents. These sub-corpora are automatically sentence split, tokenized, lemmatized and morphologically and syntactically annotated. The monolingual sub-corpora are complemented by a thematically related parallel corpus (Croatian-English). The metadata and the annotations are uniformly provided for each language specific sub-corpus. Besides the standard morphosyntactic analysis plus named entity and dependency annotation, the corpus is enriched with the IATE and EUROVOC labels. The file format is CoNLL-U Plus Format, containing the ten columns specific to the CoNLL-U format and four extra columns specific to our corpora. The MARCELL corpora represents a rich and valuable source for further studies and developments in machine learning, cross-lingual terminological data extraction and classification.

This paper describes the building of the first Spanish-Croatian unidirectional parallel corpus, which has been constructed at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb. The corpus is comprised of eleven Spanish novels and their translations to Croatian done by six different professional translators. All the texts were published between 1999 and 2012. The corpus has more than 2 Mw, with approximately 1 Mw for each language. It was automatically sentence segmented and aligned, as well as manually post-corrected, and contains 71,778 translation units. In order to protect the copyright and to make the corpus available under permissive CC-BY licence, the aligned translation units are shuffled. This limits the usability of the corpus for research of language units at sentence and lower language levels only. There are two versions of the corpus in TMX format that will be available for download through META-SHARE and CLARIN ERIC infrastructure. The former contains plain TMX, while the latter is lemmatised and POS-tagged and stored in the aTMX format.

This article presents the strategy for developing a platform containing Language Processing Chains for European Union languages, consisting of Tokenization to Parsing, also including Named Entity recognition and with addition of Sentiment Analysis. These chains are part of the first step of an event-centric knowledge processing pipeline whose aim is to process multilingual media information about major events that can cause an impact in Europe and the rest of the world. Due to the differences in terms of availability of language resources for each language, we have built this strategy in three steps, starting with processing chains for the well-resourced languages and finishing with the development of new modules for the under-resourced ones. In order to classify all European Union official languages in terms of resources, we have analysed the size of annotated corpora as well as the existence of pre-trained models in mainstream Language Processing tools, and we have combined this information with the proposed classification published at META-NET whitepaper series.

In this paper we present the newly created parallel corpus of two under-resourced languages, namely, Macedonian-Croatian Parallel Corpus (mk-hr_pcorp) that has been collected during 2015 at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. The mk-hr_pcorp is a unidirectional (mk→hr) parallel corpus composed of synchronic fictional prose texts received already in digital form with over 500 Kw in each language. The corpus was sentence segmented and provides 39,735 aligned sentences. The alignment was done automatically and then post-corrected manually. The alignments order was shuffled and this enabled the corpus to be available under CC-BY license through META-SHARE. However, this prevents the research in language units over the sentence level.

The paper deals with the processing of Croatian morphology and presents CroDeriV ― a newly developed language resource that contains data about morphological structure and derivational relatedness of verbs in Croatian. In its present shape, CroDeriV contains 14 192 Croatian verbs. Verbs in CroDeriV are analyzed for morphemes and segmented into lexical, derivational and inflectional morphemes. The structure of CroDeriV enables the detection of verbal derivational families in Croatian as well as the distribution and frequency of particular affixes and lexical morphemes. Derivational families consist of a verbal base form and all prefixed or suffixed derivatives detected in available machine readable Croatian dictionaries and corpora. Language data structured in this way was further used for the expansion of other language resources for Croatian, such as Croatian WordNet and the Croatian Morphological Lexicon. Matching the data from CroDeriV on one side and Croatian WordNet and the Croatian Morphological Lexicon on the other resulted in significant enrichment of Croatian WordNet and enlargement of the Croatian Morphological Lexicon.

This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until early 2014; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the situation of funding for LT topics. This paper documents the initiative’s work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.

This paper presents the linguistic analysis tools and its infrastructure developed within the XLike project. The main goal of the implemented tools is to provide a set of functionalities for supporting some of the main objectives of XLike, such as enabling cross-lingual services for publishers, media monitoring or developing new business intelligence applications. The services cover seven major and minor languages: English, German, Spanish, Chinese, Catalan, Slovenian, and Croatian. These analyzers are provided as web services following a lightweight SOA architecture approach, and they are publically callable and are catalogued in META-SHARE.

We present a new version of the Croatian Dependency Treebank. It constitutes a slight departure from the previously closely observed Prague Dependency Treebank syntactic layer annotation guidelines as we introduce a new subset of syntactic tags on top of the existing tagset. These new tags are used in explicit annotation of subordinate clauses via subordinate conjunctions. Introducing the new annotation to Croatian Dependency Treebank, we also modify head attachment rules addressing subordinate conjunctions and subordinate clause predicates. In an experiment with data-driven dependency parsing, we show that implementing these new annotation guidelines leeds to a statistically significant improvement in parsing accuracy. We also observe a substantial improvement in inter-annotator agreement, facilitating more consistent annotation in further treebank development.

In recent years large repositories of structured knowledge (DBpedia, Freebase, YAGO) have become a valuable resource for language technologies, especially for the automatic aggregation of knowledge from textual data. One essential component of language technologies, which leverage such knowledge bases, is the linking of words or phrases in specific text documents with elements from the knowledge base (KB). We call this semantic annotation. In the same time, initiatives like Wikidata try to make those knowledge bases less language dependent in order to allow cross-lingual or language independent knowledge access. This poses a new challenge to semantic annotation tools which typically are language dependent and link documents in one language to a structured knowledge base grounded in the same language. Ultimately, the goal is to construct cross-lingual semantic annotation tools that can link words or phrases in one language to a structured knowledge database in any other language or to a language independent representation. To support this line of research we developed what we believe could serve as a gold standard Resource for Evaluating Cross-lingual Semantic Annotation (RECSA). We compiled a hand-annotated parallel corpus of 300 news articles in three languages with cross-lingual semantic groundings to the English Wikipedia and DBPedia. We hope that this new language resource, which is freely available, will help to establish a standard test set and methodology to comparatively evaluate cross-lingual semantic annotation technologies.

We present the current state of development of the Croatian Dependency Treebank ― with special empahsis on adapting the Prague Dependency Treebank formalism to Croatian language specifics ― and illustrate its possible applications in an experiment with dependency parsing using MaltParser. The treebank currently contains approximately 2870 sentences, out of which the 2699 sentences and 66930 tokens were used in this experiment. Three linear-time projective algorithms implemented by the MaltParser system ― Nivre eager, Nivre standard and stack projective ― running on default settings were used in the experiment. The highest performing system, implementing the Nivre eager algorithm, scored (LAS 71.31 UAS 80.93 LA 83.87) within our experiment setup. The results obtained serve as an illustration of treebank's usefulness in natural language processing research and as a baseline for further research in dependency parsing of Croatian.

The paper presents a procedure for generating prefixed verbs in Croatian comprising combinations of one, two or three prefixes. The result of this generation process is a pool of derivationally valid prefixed verbs, although not necessarily occuring in corpora. The statistics of occurences of generated verbs in Croatian National Corpus has been calculated. Further usage of such language resource with generated potential verbs is also suggested, namely, enrichment of Croatian Morphological Lexicon, Croatian Wordnet and CROVALLEX.

An increasing demand for new language resources of recent EU members and accessing countries has in turn initiated the development of different language tools and resources, such as alignment tools and corresponding translation memories for new languages pairs. The primary goal of this paper is to provide a description of a free sentence alignment tool CorAl (Corpus Aligner), developed at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb. The tool performs paragraph alignment at the first step of the alignment process, which is followed by sentence alignment. Description of the tool is followed by its evaluation. The paper describes an experiment with applying the CorAl aligner to a English-Croatian parallel corpus of legislative domain using metrics of precision, recall and F1-measure. Results are discussed and the concluding sections discuss future directions of CorAl development.

In this paper, we present the results of an experiment with utilizing a stochastic morphosyntactic tagger as a pre-processing module of a rule-based chunker and partial parser for Croatian in order to raise its overall chunking and partial parsing accuracy on Croatian texts. In order to conduct the experiment, we have manually chunked and partially parsed 459 sentences from the Croatia Weekly 100 kw newspaper sub-corpus taken from the Croatian National Corpus, that were previously also morphosyntactically disambiguated and lemmatized. Due to the lack of resources of this type, these sentences were designated as a temporary chunking and partial parsing gold standard for Croatian. We have then evaluated the chunker and partial parser in three different scenarios: (1) chunking previously morphosyntactically untagged text, (2) chunking text that was tagged using the stochastic morphosyntactic tagger for Croatian and (3) chunking manually tagged text. The obtained F1-scores for the three scenarios were, respectively, 0.874 (P: 0.825, R: 0.930), 0.891 (P: 0.856, R: 0.928) and 0.914 (P: 0.904, R: 0.925). The paper provides the description of language resources and tools used in the experiment, its setup and discussion of results and perspectives for future work.

The paper presents results of an experiment dealing with sentiment analysis of Croatian text from the domain of finance. The goal of the experiment was to design a system model for automatic detection of general sentiment and polarity phrases in these texts. We have assembled a document collection from web sources writing on the financial market in Croatia and manually annotated articles from a subset of that collection for general sentiment. Additionally, we have manually annotated a number of these articles for phrases encoding positive or negative sentiment within a text. In the paper, we provide an analysis of the compiled resources. We show a statistically significant correspondence (1) between the overall market trend on the Zagreb Stock Exchange and the number of positively and negatively accented articles within periods of trend and (2) between the general sentiment of articles and the number of polarity phrases within those articles. We use this analysis as an input for designing a rule-based local grammar system for automatic detection of polarity phrases and evaluate it on held out data. The system achieves F1-scores of 0.61 (P: 0.94, R: 0.45) and 0.63 (P: 0.97, R: 0.47) on positive and negative polarity phrases.

In this paper we discuss a rule-based approach to chunking sentences in Croatian, implemented using local regular grammars within the NooJ development environment. We describe the rules and their implementation by regular grammars and at the same time show that in NooJ environment it is extremely easy to fine tune their different sub-rules. Since Croatian has strong morphosyntactic features that are shared between most or all elements of a chunk, the rules are built by taking these features into account and strongly relying on them. For the evaluation of our chunker we used a extracted set of manually annotated sentences from 100 kw MSD/tagged and disambiguated Croatian corpus. Our chunker performed the best on VP-chunks (F: 97.01), while NP-chunks (F: 92.31) and PP-chunks (F: 83.08) were of lower quality. The results are comparable to chunker performance of CoNLL-2000 shared task of chunking.

This paper describes results of the first successful effort in applying a stochastic strategy – or, namely, a second order Markov model paradigm implemented by the TnT trigram tagger – to morphosyntactic tagging of Croatian texts. Beside the tagger, for purposes of both training and testing, we had at our disposal only a 100 Kw Croatia Weekly newspaper subcorpus, manually tagged using approximately 1000 different MULTEXT-East v3 morphosyntactic tags. The test basically consisted of randomly assigning a variable size portion of the corpus for the tagger’s training procedure and also another fixed-size portion, sized at 10% of the corpus, for the tagging procedure itself; this method allowed us not only to provide preliminary results regarding tagger accuracy on Croatian texts, but also to inspect the behavior of the stochastic tagging paradigm in general. The results were then taken from the test case providing 90% of the corpus for training purposes and varied from around 86% in the worst case scenario up to a peak of around 95% correctly assigned full MSD tags. Results on PoS only expectedly reached the human error level, with TnT correctly tagging above 98% of test sets on average. Most MSD errors occurred on types with the highest number of candidate tags per word form – nouns, pronouns and adjectives – while errors on PoS, although following the same pattern, were almost insignificant. Detailed insight on tagging, F-measure for all PoS categories is provided in the course of the paper along with other facts of interest.

This paper presents experiments for enlarging the Croatian Morphological Lexicon by applying an automatic acquisition methodology. The basic sources of information for the system are a set of morphological rules and a raw corpus. The morphological rules have been automatically derived from the existing Croatian Morphological Lexicon and we have used in our experiments a subset of the Croatian National Corpus. The methodology has proved to be efficient for those languages that, like Croatian, present a rich and mainly concatenative morphology. This method can be applied for the creation of new resources, as well as in the enrichment of existing ones. We also present an extension of the system that uses automatic querying to Internet to acquire those entries for which we have not enough information in our corpus.