We present version 1.3 of the PARSEME multilingual corpus annotated with verbal multiword expressions. Since the previous version, new languages have joined the undertaking of creating such a resource, some of the already existing corpora have been enriched with new annotated texts, while others have been enhanced in various ways. The PARSEME multilingual corpus represents 26 languages now. All monolingual corpora therein use Universal Dependencies v.2 tagset. They are (re-)split observing the PARSEME v.1.2 standard, which puts impact on unseen VMWEs. With the current iteration, the corpus release process has been detached from shared tasks; instead, a process for continuous improvement and systematic releases has been introduced.

This paper presents the experimentation of systems for detecting online sexism relying on classical models, deep learning models, and transformer-based models. The systems aim to provide a comprehensive approach to handling the intricacies of online language, including slang and neologisms. The dataset consists of labeled and unlabeled data from Gab and Reddit, which allows for the development of unsupervised or semi-supervised models. The system utilizes TF-IDF with classical models, bidirectional models with embedding, and pre-trained transformer models. The paper discusses the experimental setup and results, demonstrating the effectiveness of the system in detecting online sexism.

In this paper, we provide an overview of current technologies for cross-lingual link discovery, and we discuss challenges, experiences and prospects of their application to under-resourced languages. We rst introduce the goals of cross-lingual linking and associated technologies, and in particular, the role that the Linked Data paradigm (Bizer et al., 2011) applied to language data can play in this context. We de ne under-resourced languages with a speci c focus on languages actively used on the internet, i.e., languages with a digitally versatile speaker community, but limited support in terms of language technology. We argue that languages for which considerable amounts of textual data and (at least) a bilingual word list are available, techniques for cross-lingual linking can be readily applied, and that these enable the implementation of downstream applications for under-resourced languages via the localisation and adaptation of existing technologies and resources.

Discourse markers carry information about the discourse structure and organization, and also signal local dependencies or epistemological stance of speaker. They provide instructions on how to interpret the discourse, and their study is paramount to understand the mechanism underlying discourse organization. This paper presents a new language resource, an ISO-based annotated multilingual parallel corpus for discourse markers. The corpus comprises nine languages, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, German, European Portuguese, Hebrew, Romanian, Polish, and Macedonian, with English as a pivot language. In order to represent the meaning of the discourse markers, we propose an annotation scheme of discourse relations from ISO 24617-8 with a plug-in to ISO 24617-2 for communicative functions. We describe an experiment in which we applied the annotation scheme to assess its validity. The results reveal that, although some extensions are required to cover all the multilingual data, it provides a proper representation of discourse markers value. Additionally, we report some relevant contrastive phenomena concerning discourse markers interpretation and role in discourse. This first step will allow us to develop deep learning methods to identify and extract discourse relations and communicative functions, and to represent that information as Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD).

Unfortunately, offensive language in social media is a common phenomenon nowadays. It harms many people and vulnerable groups. Therefore, automated detection of offensive language is in high demand and it is a serious challenge in multilingual domains. Various machine learning approaches combined with natural language techniques have been applied for this task lately. This paper contributes to this area from several aspects: (1) it introduces a new dataset of annotated Facebook comments in Hebrew; (2) it describes a case study with multiple supervised models and text representations for a task of offensive language detection in three languages, including two Semitic (Hebrew and Arabic) languages; (3) it reports evaluation results of cross-lingual and multilingual learning for detection of offensive content in Semitic languages; and (4) it discusses the limitations of these settings.

The aim of this study was to compare the morphological complexity in a corpus representing the language production of younger and older children across different languages. The language samples were taken from the Frog Story subcorpus of the CHILDES corpora, which comprises oral narratives collected by various researchers between 1990 and 2005. We extracted narratives by typically developing, monolingual, middle-class children. Additionally, samples of Lithuanian language, collected according to the same principles, were added. The corpus comprises 249 narratives evenly distributed across eight languages: Croatian, English, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Russian and Spanish. Two subcorpora were formed for each language: a younger children corpus and an older children corpus. Four measures of morphological complexity were calculated for each subcorpus: Bane, Kolmogorov, Word entropy and Relative entropy of word structure. The results showed that younger children corpora had lower morphological complexity than older children corpora for all four measures for Spanish and Russian. Reversed results were obtained for English and French, and the results for the remaining four languages showed variation. Relative entropy of word structure proved to be indicative of age differences. Word entropy and relative entropy of word structure show potential to demonstrate typological differences.

In this paper, we present our contribution in SemEval-2021 Task 1: Lexical Complexity Prediction, where we integrate linguistic, statistical, and semantic properties of the target word and its context as features within a Machine Learning (ML) framework for predicting lexical complexity. In particular, we use BERT contextualized word embeddings to represent the semantic meaning of the target word and its context. We participated in the sub-task of predicting the complexity score of single words

In this paper, we present our contribution in SemEval-2020 Task 1: Unsupervised Lexical Semantic Change Detection, where we systematically combine existing models for unsupervised capturing of lexical semantic change across time in text corpora of German, English, Latin and Swedish. In particular, we analyze the score distribution of existing models. Then we define a general threshold, adjust it independently to each of the models and measure the models’ score reliability. Finally, using both the threshold and score reliability, we aggregate the models for the two sub- tasks: binary classification and ranking.

Aramaic is an ancient Semitic language with a 3,000 year history. However, since the number of Aramaic speakers in the world hasdeclined, Aramaic is in danger of extinction. In this paper, we suggest a methodology for automatic construction of Aramaic-Hebrew translation Lexicon. First, we generate an initial translation lexicon by a state-of-the-art word alignment translation model. Then,we filter the initial lexicon using string similarity measures of three types: similarity between terms in the target language, similarity between a source and a target term, and similarity between terms in the source language. In our experiments, we use a parallel corporaof Biblical Aramaic-Hebrew sentence pairs and evaluate various string similarity measures for each type of similarity. We illustratethe empirical benefit of our methodology and its effect on precision and F1. In particular, we demonstrate that our filtering methodsignificantly exceeds a filtering approach based on the probability scores given by a state-of-the-art word alignment translation model.

We present edition 1.2 of the PARSEME shared task on identification of verbal multiword expressions (VMWEs). Lessons learned from previous editions indicate that VMWEs have low ambiguity, and that the major challenge lies in identifying test instances never seen in the training data. Therefore, this edition focuses on unseen VMWEs. We have split annotated corpora so that the test corpora contain around 300 unseen VMWEs, and we provide non-annotated raw corpora to be used by complementary discovery methods. We released annotated and raw corpora in 14 languages, and this semi-supervised challenge attracted 7 teams who submitted 9 system results. This paper describes the effort of corpus creation, the task design, and the results obtained by the participating systems, especially their performance on unseen expressions.

This paper describes the PARSEME Shared Task 1.1 on automatic identification of verbal multiword expressions. We present the annotation methodology, focusing on changes from last year’s shared task. Novel aspects include enhanced annotation guidelines, additional annotated data for most languages, corpora for some new languages, and new evaluation settings. Corpora were created for 20 languages, which are also briefly discussed. We report organizational principles behind the shared task and the evaluation metrics employed for ranking. The 17 participating systems, their methods and obtained results are also presented and analysed.

A verb-noun Multi-Word Expression (MWE) is a combination of a verb and a noun with or without other words, in which the combination has a meaning different from the meaning of the words considered separately. In this paper, we present a new lexical resource of Hebrew Verb-Noun MWEs (VN-MWEs). The VN-MWEs of this resource were manually collected and annotated from five different web resources. In addition, we analyze the lexical properties of Hebrew VN-MWEs by classifying them to three types: morphological, syntactic, and semantic. These two contributions are essential for designing algorithms for automatic VN-MWEs extraction. The analysis suggests some interesting features of VN-MWEs for exploration. The lexical resource enables to sample a set of positive examples for Hebrew VN-MWEs. This set of examples can either be used for training supervised algorithms or as seeds in unsupervised bootstrapping algorithms. Thus, this resource is a first step towards automatic identification of Hebrew VN-MWEs, which is important for natural language understanding, generation and translation systems.

Identification of Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs) lies at the heart of many natural language processing applications. In this research, we deal with a particular type of Hebrew MWEs, Verb-Noun MWEs (VN-MWEs), which combine a verb and a noun with or without other words. Most prior work on MWEs classification focused on linguistic and statistical information. In this paper, we claim that it is essential to utilize semantic information. To this end, we propose a semantically motivated indicator for classifying VN-MWE and define features that are related to various semantic spaces and combine them as features in a supervised classification framework. We empirically demonstrate that our semantic feature set yields better performance than the common linguistic and statistical feature sets and that combining semantic features contributes to the VN-MWEs identification task.