Although pre-trained named entity recognition (NER) models are highly accurate on modern corpora, they underperform on historical texts due to differences in language OCR errors. In this work, we develop a new NER corpus of 3.6M sentences from late medieval charters written mainly in Czech, Latin, and German.We show that we can start with a list of known historical figures and locations and an unannotated corpus of historical texts, and use information retrieval techniques to automatically bootstrap a NER-annotated corpus. Using our corpus, we train a NER model that achieves entity-level Precision of 72.81–93.98% with 58.14–81.77% Recall on a manually-annotated test dataset. Furthermore, we show that using a weighted loss function helps to combat class imbalance in token classification tasks. To make it easy for others to reproduce and build upon our work, we publicly release our corpus, models, and experimental code.

This paper introduces Adaptor library, which transposes traditional model-centric approach composed of pre-training + fine-tuning steps to objective-centric approach, composing the training process by applications of selected objectives. We survey research directions that can benefit from enhanced objective-centric experimentation in multitask training, custom objectives development, dynamic training curricula, or domain adaptation. Adaptor aims to ease reproducibility of these research directions in practice. Finally, we demonstrate the practical applicability of Adaptor in selected unsupervised domain adaptation scenarios.

Unsupervised representation learning of words from large multilingual corpora is useful for downstream tasks such as word sense disambiguation, semantic text similarity, and information retrieval. The representation precision of log-bilinear fastText models is mostly due to their use of subword information. In previous work, the optimization of fastText’s subword sizes has not been fully explored, and non-English fastText models were trained using subword sizes optimized for English and German word analogy tasks. In our work, we find the optimal subword sizes on the English, German, Czech, Italian, Spanish, French, Hindi, Turkish, and Russian word analogy tasks. We then propose a simple n-gram coverage model and we show that it predicts better-than-default subword sizes on the Spanish, French, Hindi, Turkish, and Russian word analogy tasks. We show that the optimization of fastText’s subword sizes matters and results in a 14% improvement on the Czech word analogy task. We also show that expensive parameter optimization can be replaced by a simple n-gram coverage model that consistently improves the accuracy of fastText models on the word analogy tasks by up to 3% compared to the default subword sizes, and that it is within 1% accuracy of the optimal subword sizes.

This work introduces a simple regressive ensemble for evaluating machine translation quality based on a set of novel and established metrics. We evaluate the ensemble using a correlation to expert-based MQM scores of the WMT 2021 Metrics workshop. In both monolingual and zero-shot cross-lingual settings, we show a significant performance improvement over single metrics. In the cross-lingual settings, we also demonstrate that an ensemble approach is well-applicable to unseen languages. Furthermore, we identify a strong reference-free baseline that consistently outperforms the commonly-used BLEU and METEOR measures and significantly improves our ensemble’s performance.

Vector representations and vector space modeling (VSM) play a central role in modern machine learning. We propose a novel approach to ‘vector similarity searching’ over dense semantic representations of words and documents that can be deployed on top of traditional inverted-index-based fulltext engines, taking advantage of their robustness, stability, scalability and ubiquity. We show that this approach allows the indexing and querying of dense vectors in text domains. This opens up exciting avenues for major efficiency gains, along with simpler deployment, scaling and monitoring. The end result is a fast and scalable vector database with a tunable trade-off between vector search performance and quality, backed by a standard fulltext engine such as Elasticsearch. We empirically demonstrate its querying performance and quality by applying this solution to the task of semantic searching over a dense vector representation of the entire English Wikipedia.