We present the first comprehensive survey of Native Language Identification (NLI) applied to texts. NLI is the task of automatically identifying an author’s native language (L1) based on their second language (L2) production. NLI is an important task with practical applications in second language teaching and NLP. The task has been widely studied for both text and speech, particularly for L2 English due to the availability of suitable corpora. Speech-based NLI relies heavily on accent modeled by pronunciation patterns and prosodic cues while text-based NLI relies primarily on modeling spelling errors and grammatical patterns that reveal properties of an individuals’ L1 influencing L2 production. We survey over one hundred papers on the topic including the papers associated with the NLI and INLI shared tasks. We describe several text representations and computational techniques used in text-based NLI. Finally, we present a comprehensive account of publicly available datasets used for the task thus far.

Conversational Task Assistants (CTAs) guide users in performing a multitude of activities, such as making recipes. However, ensuring that interactions remain engaging, interesting, and enjoyable for CTA users is not trivial, especially for time-consuming or challenging tasks. Grounded in psychological theories of human interest, we propose to engage users with contextual and interesting statements or facts during interactions with a multi-modal CTA, to reduce fatigue and task abandonment before a task is complete. To operationalize this idea, we train a high-performing classifier (82% F1-score) to automatically identify relevant and interesting facts for users. We use it to create an annotated dataset of task-specific interesting facts for the domain of cooking. Finally, we design and validate a dialogue policy to incorporate the identified relevant and interesting facts into a conversation, to improve user engagement and task completion. Live testing on a leading multi-modal voice assistant shows that 66% of the presented facts were received positively, leading to a 40% gain in the user satisfaction rating, and a 37% increase in conversation length. These findings emphasize that strategically incorporating interesting facts into the CTA experience can promote real-world user participation for guided task interactions.

Sentence Ordering (SO) is a linguistic task which requires re-ordering of shuffled sentences into a coherent paragraph. SO has downstream applications, but also serves as a semantic probe for computational models as this capability is essential for understanding narrative structures, causal and temporal relations within texts. Despite its importance, prior research has been limited to predictable English language structures and has not thoroughly addressed the complexities of multilingual and varied narrative contexts. To fill this gap, we introduce a novel and comprehensive Multilingual Sentence Ordering task that extends SO to diverse narratives across 12 languages, including challenging code-switched texts. We have developed MultiSO, a new benchmark dataset that represents these challenges. Our findings reveal that both specialized sentence ordering models and advanced Large Language Models like GPT-4 face significant challenges with this task.

Continued improvement of conversational assistants in knowledge-rich domains like E-Commerce requires large volumes of realistic high-quality conversation data to power increasingly sophisticated large language model chatbots, dialogue managers, response rankers, and recommenders. The problem is exacerbated for multi-modal interactions in realistic conversational product search and recommendation. Here, an artificial sales agent must interact intelligently with a customer using both textual and visual information and incorporate results from external search systems, such as a product catalog. Yet, it remains an open question how to best crowd-source large-scale, naturalistic multi-modal dialogue and action data, required to train such an artificial agent. We describe our crowd-sourced task where one worker (the Buyer) plays the role of the customer, and another (the Seller) plays the role of the sales agent. We identify subtle interactions between one worker’s environment and their partner’s behavior mediated by workers’ word choice. We find that limiting information presented to the Buyer, both in their backstory and by the Seller, improves conversation quality. We also show how conversations are improved through minimal automated Seller “coaching”. While typed and spoken messages are slightly different, the differences are not as large as frequently assumed. We plan to release our platform code and the resulting dialogues to advance research on conversational search agents.

Conversational AI is a subtype of Human Computer Interaction that has gained wide adoption. These systems are typically powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) that use Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to infuse external knowledge, which is effective against issues like hallucination. However, automatically evaluating retrieval augmented conversations with minimal human effort remains challenging, particularly in online settings. We address this challenge by proposing a lexical metric, and a novel method for combining it with other metrics, including semantic models. Our approach involves: (1) Conversational Information Utility (CIU), a new automated metric inspired by prior user studies on web search evaluation, to compute information overlap between conversation context and grounded information in an unsupervised, purely lexical way; and (2) a generalized reward model through Mixture-of-Experts (MoE-CIU) that dynamically ensembles CIU with other metrics, including learned ones, into a single reward. Evaluation against human ratings on two public datasets (Topical Chat and Persona Chat) shows that CIU improves correlation against human judgments by 2.0% and 0.9% respectively compared to the second best metric. When MoE is applied to combine lexical and learned semantic metrics, correlations further improve by 9.9% and 5.0%, suggesting that unified reward models are a promising approach.

Large Language Models (LLMs) operating in 0-shot or few-shot settings achieve competitive results in Text Classification tasks. In-Context Learning (ICL) typically achieves better accuracy than the 0-shot setting, but it pays in terms of efficiency, due to the longer input prompt. In this paper, we propose a strategy to make LLMs as efficient as 0-shot text classifiers, while getting comparable or better accuracy than ICL. Our solution targets the low resource setting, i.e., when only 4 examples per class are available. Using a single LLM and few-shot real data we perform a sequence of generation, filtering and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning steps to create a robust and efficient classifier. Experimental results show that our approach leads to competitive results on multiple text classification datasets.

Recommender systems are widely used to suggest engaging content, and Large Language Models (LLMs) have given rise to generative recommenders. Such systems can directly generate items, including for open-set tasks like question suggestion. While the world knowledge of LLMs enables good recommendations, improving the generated content through user feedback is challenging as continuously fine-tuning LLMs is prohibitively expensive. We present a training-free approach for optimizing generative recommenders by connecting user feedback loops to LLM-based optimizers. We propose a generative explore-exploit method that can not only exploit generated items with known high engagement, but also actively explore and discover hidden population preferences to improve recommendation quality. We evaluate our approach on question generation in two domains (e-commerce and general knowledge), and model user feedback with Click Through Rate (CTR). Experiments show our LLM-based explore-exploit approach can iteratively improve recommendations and consistently increase CTR. Ablation analysis shows that generative exploration is key to learning user preferences, avoiding the pitfalls of greedy exploit-only approaches. A human evaluation strongly supports our quantitative findings.

E-commerce product catalogs contain billions of items. Most products have lengthy titles, as sellers pack them with product attributes to improve retrieval, and highlight key product aspects. This results in a gap between such unnatural products titles, and how customers refer to them. It also limits how e-commerce stores can use these seller-provided titles for recommendation, QA, or review summarization. Inspired by recent work on instruction-tuned LLMs, we present InstructPTS, a controllable approach for the task of Product Title Summarization (PTS). Trained using a novel instruction fine-tuning strategy, our approach is able to summarize product titles according to various criteria (e.g. number of words in a summary, inclusion of specific phrases, etc.). Extensive evaluation on a real-world e-commerce catalog shows that compared to simple fine-tuning of LLMs, our proposed approach can generate more accurate product name summaries, with an improvement of over 14 and 8 BLEU and ROUGE points, respectively.

We present the findings of SemEval-2023 Task 2 on Fine-grained Multilingual Named Entity Recognition (MultiCoNER 2). Divided into 13 tracks, the task focused on methods to identify complex fine-grained named entities (like WRITTENWORK, VEHICLE, MUSICALGRP) across 12 languages, in both monolingual and multilingual scenarios, as well as noisy settings. The task used the MultiCoNER V2 dataset, composed of 2.2 million instances in Bangla, Chinese, English, Farsi, French, German, Hindi, Italian., Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian. MultiCoNER 2 was one of the most popular tasks of SemEval-2023. It attracted 842 submissions from 47 teams, and 34 teams submitted system papers. Results showed that complex entity types such as media titles and product names were the most challenging. Methods fusing external knowledge into transformer models achieved the best performance, and the largest gains were on the Creative Work and Group classes, which are still challenging even with external knowledge. Some fine-grained classes proved to be more challenging than others, such as SCIENTIST, ARTWORK, and PRIVATECORP. We also observed that noisy data has a significant impact on model performance, with an average drop of 10% on the noisy subset. The task highlights the need for future research on improving NER robustness on noisy data containing complex entities.

The adoption of voice assistants like Alexa or Siri has grown rapidly, allowing users to instantly access information via voice search. Query suggestion is a standard feature of screen-based search experiences, allowing users to explore additional topics. However, this is not trivial to implement in voice-based settings. To enable this, we tackle the novel task of suggesting questions with compact and natural voice hints to allow users to ask follow-up questions. We define the task, ground it in syntactic theory and outline linguistic desiderata for spoken hints. We propose baselines and an approach using sequence-to-sequence Transformers to generate spoken hints from a list of questions. Using a new dataset of 6681 input questions and human written hints, we evaluated the models with automatic metrics and human evaluation. Results show that a naive approach of concatenating suggested questions creates poor voice hints. Our approach, which applies a linguistically-motivated pretraining task was strongly preferred by humans for producing the most natural hints.

We present MULTICONER V2, a dataset for fine-grained Named Entity Recognition covering 33 entity classes across 12 languages, in both monolingual and multilingual settings. This dataset aims to tackle the following practical challenges in NER: (i) effective handling of fine-grained classes that include complex entities like movie titles, and (ii) performance degradation due to noise generated from typing mistakes or OCR errors. The dataset is compiled from open resources like Wikipedia and Wikidata, and is publicly available. Evaluation based on the XLM-RoBERTa baseline highlights the unique challenges posed by MULTICONER V2: (i) the fine-grained taxonomy is challenging, where the scores are low with macro-F1=0.63 (across all languages), and (ii) the corruption strategy significantly impairs performance, with entity corruption resulting in 9% lower performance relative to non-entity corruptions across all languages. This highlights the greater impact of entity noise in contrast to context noise.

Methods to generate text from structured data have advanced significantly in recent years, primarily due to fine-tuning of pre-trained language models on large datasets. However, such models can fail to produce output faithful to the input data, particularly on out-of-domain data. Sufficient annotated data is often not available for specific domains, leading us to seek an unsupervised approach to improve the faithfulness of output text. Since the problem is fundamentally one of consistency between the representations of the structured data and text, we evaluate the effectiveness of cycle training in this work. Cycle training uses two models which are inverses of each other: one that generates text from structured data, and one which generates the structured data from natural language text. We show that cycle training, when initialized with a small amount of supervised data (100 samples in our case), achieves nearly the same performance as fully supervised approaches for the data-to-text generation task on the WebNLG, E2E, WTQ, and WSQL datasets. We perform extensive empirical analysis with automated evaluation metrics and a newly designed human evaluation schema to reveal different cycle training strategies’ effectiveness of reducing various types of generation errors. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Edillower/CycleNLG.

Spoken Question Answering (QA) is a key feature of voice assistants, usually backed by multiple QA systems. Users ask questions via spontaneous speech that can contain disfluencies, errors, and informal syntax or phrasing. This is a major challenge in QA, causing unanswered questions or irrelevant answers, leading to bad user experiences. We analyze failed QA requests to identify core challenges: lexical gaps, proposition types, complex syntactic structure, and high specificity. We propose a Semantic Question Reformulation (SURF) model offering three linguistically-grounded operations (repair, syntactic reshaping, generalization) to rewrite questions to facilitate answering. Offline evaluation on 1M unanswered questions from a leading voice assistant shows that SURF significantly improves answer rates: up to 24% of previously unanswered questions obtain relevant answers (75%). Live deployment shows positive impact for millions of customers with unanswered questions; explicit relevance feedback shows high user satisfaction.

Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) retrieval aims at retrieving question-answer pairs for a given a user query. Integrating FAQ retrieval with product search can not only empower users to make more informed purchase decisions, but also enhance user retention through efficient post-purchase support. Providing FAQ content without disrupting user’s shopping experience poses challenges on deciding when and how to show FAQ results. Our proposed intent-aware FAQ retrieval consists of (1) an intent classifier that predicts whether the query is looking for an FAQ; (2) a reformulation model that rewrites query into a natural question. Offline evaluation demonstrates that our approach improves 12% in Hit@1 on retrieving ground-truth FAQs, while reducing latency by 95% compared to baseline systems. These improvements are further validated by real user feedback, where more than 99% of users consider FAQs displayed on top of product search results is helpful. Overall, our findings show promising directions for integrating FAQ retrieval into product search at scale.

Conversational Task Assistants (CTAs) are conversational agents whose goal is to help humans perform real-world tasks. CTAs can help in exploring available tasks, answering task-specific questions and guiding users through step-by-step instructions. In this work, we present Wizard of Tasks, the first corpus of such conversations in two domains: Cooking and Home Improvement. We crowd-sourced a total of 549 conversations (18,077 utterances) with an asynchronous Wizard-of-Oz setup, relying on recipes from WholeFoods Market for the cooking domain, and WikiHow articles for the home improvement domain. We present a detailed data analysis and show that the collected data can be a valuable and challenging resource for CTAs in two tasks: Intent Classification (IC) and Abstractive Question Answering (AQA). While on IC we acquired a high performing model (>85% F1), on AQA the performance is far from being satisfactory (~27% BertScore-F1), suggesting that more work is needed to solve the task of low-resource AQA.

We present AnonData, a large multilingual dataset for Named Entity Recognition that covers 3 domains (Wiki sentences, questions, and search queries) across 11 languages, as well as multilingual and code-mixing subsets. This dataset is designed to represent contemporary challenges in NER, including low-context scenarios (short and uncased text), syntactically complex entities like movie titles, and long-tail entity distributions. The 26M token dataset is compiled from public resources using techniques such as heuristic-based sentence sampling, template extraction and slotting, and machine translation. We tested the performance of two NER models on our dataset: a baseline XLM-RoBERTa model, and a state-of-the-art NER GEMNET model that leverages gazetteers. The baseline achieves moderate performance (macro-F1=54%). GEMNET, which uses gazetteers, improvement significantly (average improvement of macro-F1=+30%) and demonstrates the difficulty of our dataset. AnonData poses challenges even for large pre-trained language models, and we believe that it can help further research in building robust NER systems.

We present the findings of SemEval-2022 Task 11 on Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition MULTICONER. Divided into 13 tracks, the task focused on methods to identify complex named entities (like names of movies, products and groups) in 11 languages in both monolingual and multi-lingual scenarios. Eleven tracks required building monolingual NER models for individual languages, one track focused on multilingual models able to work on all languages, and the last track featured code-mixed texts within any of these languages. The task is based on the MULTICONER dataset comprising of 2.3 millions instances in Bangla, Chinese, Dutch, English, Farsi, German, Hindi, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Results showed that methods fusing external knowledge into transformer models achieved the best results. However, identifying entities like creative works is still challenging even with external knowledge. MULTICONER was one of the most popular tasks in SemEval-2022 and it attracted 377 participants during the practice phase. 236 participants signed up for the final test phase and 55 teams submitted their systems.

Named entity recognition (NER) in a real-world setting remains challenging and is impacted by factors like text genre, corpus quality, and data availability. NER models trained on CoNLL do not transfer well to other domains, even within the same language. This is especially the case for multi-lingual models when applied to low-resource languages, and is mainly due to missing entity information. We propose an approach that with limited effort and data, addresses the NER knowledge gap across languages and domains. Our novel approach uses a token-level gating layer to augment pre-trained multilingual transformers with gazetteers containing named entities (NE) from a target language or domain. This approach provides the flexibility to jointly integrate both textual and gazetteer information dynamically: entity knowledge from gazetteers is used only when a token’s textual representation is insufficient for the NER task. Evaluation on several languages and domains demonstrates: (i) a high mismatch of reported NER performance on CoNLL vs. domain specific datasets, (ii) gazetteers significantly improve NER performance across languages and domains, and (iii) gazetteers can be flexibly incorporated to guide knowledge transfer. On cross-lingual transfer we achieve an improvement over the baseline with F1=+17.6%, and with F1=+21.3% for cross-domain transfer.

Users expect their queries to be answered by search systems, regardless of the query’s surface form, which include keyword queries and natural questions. Natural Language Understanding (NLU) components of Search and QA systems may fail to correctly interpret semantically equivalent inputs if this deviates from how the system was trained, leading to suboptimal understanding capabilities. We propose the keyword-question rewriting task to improve query understanding capabilities of NLU systems for all surface forms. To achieve this, we present CycleKQR, an unsupervised approach, enabling effective rewriting between keyword and question queries using non-parallel data.Empirically we show the impact on QA performance of unfamiliar query forms for open domain and Knowledge Base QA systems (trained on either keywords or natural language questions). We demonstrate how CycleKQR significantly improves QA performance by rewriting queries into the appropriate form, while at the same time retaining the original semantic meaning of input queries, allowing CycleKQR to improve performance by up to 3% over supervised baselines. Finally, we release a datasetof 66k keyword-question pairs.

Conversational Question Answering (CQA) aims to answer questions contained within dialogues, which are not easily interpretable without context. Developing a model to rewrite conversational questions into self-contained ones is an emerging solution in industry settings as it allows using existing single-turn QA systems to avoid training a CQA model from scratch. Previous work trains rewriting models using human rewrites as supervision. However, such objectives are disconnected with QA models and therefore more human-like rewrites do not guarantee better QA performance. In this paper we propose using QA feedback to supervise the rewriting model with reinforcement learning. Experiments show that our approach can effectively improve QA performance over baselines for both extractive and retrieval QA. Furthermore, human evaluation shows that our method can generate more accurate and detailed rewrites when compared to human annotations.

We describe an application of Knowledge Distillation used to distill and deploy multilingual Transformer models for voice assistants, enabling text classification for customers globally. Transformers have set new state-of-the-art results for tasks like intent classification, and multilingual models exploit cross-lingual transfer to allow serving requests across 100+ languages. However, their prohibitive inference time makes them impractical to deploy in real-world scenarios with low latency requirements, such as is the case of voice assistants. We address the problem of cross-architecture distillation of multilingual Transformers to simpler models, while maintaining multilinguality without performance degradation. Training multilingual student models has received little attention, and is our main focus. We show that a teacher-student framework, where the teacher’s unscaled activations (logits) on unlabelled data are used to supervise student model training, enables distillation of Transformers into efficient multilingual CNN models. Our student model achieves equivalent performance as the teacher, and outperforms a similar model trained on the labelled data used to train the teacher model. This approach has enabled us to accurately serve global customer requests at speed (18x improvement), scale, and low cost.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) remains difficult in real-world settings; current challenges include short texts (low context), emerging entities, and complex entities (e.g. movie names). Gazetteer features can help, but results have been mixed due to challenges with adding extra features, and a lack of realistic evaluation data. It has been shown that including gazetteer features can cause models to overuse or underuse them, leading to poor generalization. We propose GEMNET, a novel approach for gazetteer knowledge integration, including (1) a flexible Contextual Gazetteer Representation (CGR) encoder that can be fused with any word-level model; and (2) a Mixture-of- Experts gating network that overcomes the feature overuse issue by learning to conditionally combine the context and gazetteer features, instead of assigning them fixed weights. To comprehensively evaluate our approaches, we create 3 large NER datasets (24M tokens) reflecting current challenges. In an uncased setting, our methods show large gains (up to +49% F1) in recognizing difficult entities compared to existing baselines. On standard benchmarks, we achieve a new uncased SOTA on CoNLL03 and WNUT17.

In this paper, we present the report and findings of the Shared Task on Aggression and Gendered Aggression Identification organised as part of the Second Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying (TRAC - 2) at LREC 2020. The task consisted of two sub-tasks - aggression identification (sub-task A) and gendered identification (sub-task B) - in three languages - Bangla, Hindi and English. For this task, the participants were provided with a dataset of approximately 5,000 instances from YouTube comments in each language. For testing, approximately 1,000 instances were provided in each language for each sub-task. A total of 70 teams registered to participate in the task and 19 teams submitted their test runs. The best system obtained a weighted F-score of approximately 0.80 in sub-task A for all the three languages. While approximately 0.87 in sub-task B for all the three languages.

In this paper, we present the findings of the Third VarDial Evaluation Campaign organized as part of the sixth edition of the workshop on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial), co-located with NAACL 2019. This year, the campaign included five shared tasks, including one task re-run – German Dialect Identification (GDI) – and four new tasks – Cross-lingual Morphological Analysis (CMA), Discriminating between Mainland and Taiwan variation of Mandarin Chinese (DMT), Moldavian vs. Romanian Cross-dialect Topic identification (MRC), and Cuneiform Language Identification (CLI). A total of 22 teams submitted runs across the five shared tasks. After the end of the competition, we received 14 system description papers, which are published in the VarDial workshop proceedings and referred to in this report.

This paper presents the results of the premier shared task organized alongside the Conference on Machine Translation (WMT) 2019. Participants were asked to build machine translation systems for any of 18 language pairs, to be evaluated on a test set of news stories. The main metric for this task is human judgment of translation quality. The task was also opened up to additional test suites to probe specific aspects of translation.

As offensive content has become pervasive in social media, there has been much research in identifying potentially offensive messages. However, previous work on this topic did not consider the problem as a whole, but rather focused on detecting very specific types of offensive content, e.g., hate speech, cyberbulling, or cyber-aggression. In contrast, here we target several different kinds of offensive content. In particular, we model the task hierarchically, identifying the type and the target of offensive messages in social media. For this purpose, we complied the Offensive Language Identification Dataset (OLID), a new dataset with tweets annotated for offensive content using a fine-grained three-layer annotation scheme, which we make publicly available. We discuss the main similarities and differences between OLID and pre-existing datasets for hate speech identification, aggression detection, and similar tasks. We further experiment with and we compare the performance of different machine learning models on OLID.

We present the results and the main findings of SemEval-2019 Task 6 on Identifying and Categorizing Offensive Language in Social Media (OffensEval). The task was based on a new dataset, the Offensive Language Identification Dataset (OLID), which contains over 14,000 English tweets, and it featured three sub-tasks. In sub-task A, systems were asked to discriminate between offensive and non-offensive posts. In sub-task B, systems had to identify the type of offensive content in the post. Finally, in sub-task C, systems had to detect the target of the offensive posts. OffensEval attracted a large number of participants and it was one of the most popular tasks in SemEval-2019. In total, nearly 800 teams signed up to participate in the task and 115 of them submitted results, which are presented and analyzed in this report.

In this paper we revisit the problem of automatically identifying hate speech in posts from social media. We approach the task using a system based on minimalistic compositional Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). We tested our approach on the SemEval-2019 Task 5: Multilingual Detection of Hate Speech Against Immigrants and Women in Twitter (HatEval) shared task dataset. The dataset made available by the HatEval organizers contained English and Spanish posts retrieved from Twitter annotated with respect to the presence of hateful content and its target. In this paper we present the results obtained by our system in comparison to the other entries in the shared task. Our system achieved competitive performance ranking 7th in sub-task A out of 62 systems in the English track.

We present methods for the automatic classification of patent applications using an annotated dataset provided by the organizers of the ALTA 2018 shared task - Classifying Patent Applications. The goal of the task is to use computational methods to categorize patent applications according to a coarse-grained taxonomy of eight classes based on the International Patent Classification (IPC). We tested a variety of approaches for this task and the best results, 0.778 micro-averaged F1-Score, were achieved by SVM ensembles using a combination of words and characters as features. Our team, BMZ, was ranked first among 14 teams in the competition.

We report the findings of the second Complex Word Identification (CWI) shared task organized as part of the BEA workshop co-located with NAACL-HLT’2018. The second CWI shared task featured multilingual and multi-genre datasets divided into four tracks: English monolingual, German monolingual, Spanish monolingual, and a multilingual track with a French test set, and two tasks: binary classification and probabilistic classification. A total of 12 teams submitted their results in different task/track combinations and 11 of them wrote system description papers that are referred to in this report and appear in the BEA workshop proceedings.

In this paper we present NLI-PT, the first Portuguese dataset compiled for Native Language Identification (NLI), the task of identifying an author’s first language based on their second language writing. The dataset includes 1,868 student essays written by learners of European Portuguese, native speakers of the following L1s: Chinese, English, Spanish, German, Russian, French, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Tetum, Arabic, Polish, Korean, Romanian, and Swedish. NLI-PT includes the original student text and four different types of annotation: POS, fine-grained POS, constituency parses, and dependency parses. NLI-PT can be used not only in NLI but also in research on several topics in the field of Second Language Acquisition and educational NLP. We discuss possible applications of this dataset and present the results obtained for the first lexical baseline system for Portuguese NLI.

We present the results and the findings of the Second VarDial Evaluation Campaign on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects. The campaign was organized as part of the fifth edition of the VarDial workshop, collocated with COLING’2018. This year, the campaign included five shared tasks, including two task re-runs – Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI) and German Dialect Identification (GDI) –, and three new tasks – Morphosyntactic Tagging of Tweets (MTT), Discriminating between Dutch and Flemish in Subtitles (DFS), and Indo-Aryan Language Identification (ILI). A total of 24 teams submitted runs across the five shared tasks, and contributed 22 system description papers, which were included in the VarDial workshop proceedings and are referred to in this report.

In this paper we present a system based on SVM ensembles trained on characters and words to discriminate between five similar languages of the Indo-Aryan family: Hindi, Braj Bhasha, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, and Magahi. The system competed in the Indo-Aryan Language Identification (ILI) shared task organized within the VarDial Evaluation Campaign 2018. Our best entry in the competition, named ILIdentification, scored 88.95% F1 score and it was ranked 3rd out of 8 teams.

In this paper we present the GDI classification entry to the second German Dialect Identification (GDI) shared task organized within the scope of the VarDial Evaluation Campaign 2018. We present a system based on SVM classifier ensembles trained on characters and words. The system was trained on a collection of speech transcripts of five Swiss-German dialects provided by the organizers. The transcripts included in the dataset contained speakers from Basel, Bern, Lucerne, and Zurich. Our entry in the challenge reached 62.03% F1 score and was ranked third out of eight teams.

In this paper, we present the report and findings of the Shared Task on Aggression Identification organised as part of the First Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying (TRAC - 1) at COLING 2018. The task was to develop a classifier that could discriminate between Overtly Aggressive, Covertly Aggressive, and Non-aggressive texts. For this task, the participants were provided with a dataset of 15,000 aggression-annotated Facebook Posts and Comments each in Hindi (in both Roman and Devanagari script) and English for training and validation. For testing, two different sets - one from Facebook and another from a different social media - were provided. A total of 130 teams registered to participate in the task, 30 teams submitted their test runs, and finally 20 teams also sent their system description paper which are included in the TRAC workshop proceedings. The best system obtained a weighted F-score of 0.64 for both Hindi and English on the Facebook test sets, while the best scores on the surprise set were 0.60 and 0.50 for English and Hindi respectively. The results presented in this report depict how challenging the task is. The positive response from the community and the great levels of participation in the first edition of this shared task also highlights the interest in this topic.

Ensemble methods using multiple classifiers have proven to be among the most successful approaches for the task of Native Language Identification (NLI), achieving the current state of the art. However, a systematic examination of ensemble methods for NLI has yet to be conducted. Additionally, deeper ensemble architectures such as classifier stacking have not been closely evaluated. We present a set of experiments using three ensemble-based models, testing each with multiple configurations and algorithms. This includes a rigorous application of meta-classification models for NLI, achieving state-of-the-art results on several large data sets, evaluated in both intra-corpus and cross-corpus modes.

In this paper we examine methods to detect hate speech in social media, while distinguishing this from general profanity. We aim to establish lexical baselines for this task by applying supervised classification methods using a recently released dataset annotated for this purpose. As features, our system uses character n-grams, word n-grams and word skip-grams. We obtain results of 78% accuracy in identifying posts across three classes. Results demonstrate that the main challenge lies in discriminating profanity and hate speech from each other. A number of directions for future work are discussed.

We present the results of the VarDial Evaluation Campaign on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, which we organized as part of the fourth edition of the VarDial workshop at EACL’2017. This year, we included four shared tasks: Discriminating between Similar Languages (DSL), Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI), German Dialect Identification (GDI), and Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing (CLP). A total of 19 teams submitted runs across the four tasks, and 15 of them wrote system description papers.

This paper presents three systems submitted to the German Dialect Identification (GDI) task at the VarDial Evaluation Campaign 2017. The task consists of training models to identify the dialect of Swiss-German speech transcripts. The dialects included in the GDI dataset are Basel, Bern, Lucerne, and Zurich. The three systems we submitted are based on: a plurality ensemble, a mean probability ensemble, and a meta-classifier trained on character and word n-grams. The best results were obtained by the meta-classifier achieving 68.1% accuracy and 66.2% F1-score, ranking first among the 10 teams which participated in the GDI shared task.

This paper presents the systems submitted by the MAZA team to the Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI) shared task at the VarDial Evaluation Campaign 2017. The goal of the task is to evaluate computational models to identify the dialect of Arabic utterances using both audio and text transcriptions. The ADI shared task dataset included Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and four Arabic dialects: Egyptian, Gulf, Levantine, and North-African. The three systems submitted by MAZA are based on combinations of multiple machine learning classifiers arranged as (1) voting ensemble; (2) mean probability ensemble; (3) meta-classifier. The best results were obtained by the meta-classifier achieving 71.7% accuracy, ranking second among the six teams which participated in the ADI shared task.

Native Language Identification (NLI) is the task of automatically identifying the native language (L1) of an individual based on their language production in a learned language. It is typically framed as a classification task where the set of L1s is known a priori. Two previous shared tasks on NLI have been organized where the aim was to identify the L1 of learners of English based on essays (2013) and spoken responses (2016) they provided during a standardized assessment of academic English proficiency. The 2017 shared task combines the inputs from the two prior tasks for the first time. There are three tracks: NLI on the essay only, NLI on the spoken response only (based on a transcription of the response and i-vector acoustic features), and NLI using both responses. We believe this makes for a more interesting shared task while building on the methods and results from the previous two shared tasks. In this paper, we report the results of the shared task. A total of 19 teams competed across the three different sub-tasks. The fusion track showed that combining the written and spoken responses provides a large boost in prediction accuracy. Multiple classifier systems (e.g. ensembles and meta-classifiers) were the most effective in all tasks, with most based on traditional classifiers (e.g. SVMs) with lexical/syntactic features.

This paper revisits the problem of complex word identification (CWI) following up the SemEval CWI shared task. We use ensemble classifiers to investigate how well computational methods can discriminate between complex and non-complex words. Furthermore, we analyze the classification performance to understand what makes lexical complexity challenging. Our findings show that most systems performed poorly on the SemEval CWI dataset, and one of the reasons for that is the way in which human annotation was performed.

Most work on segmenting text does so on the basis of topic changes, but it can be of interest to segment by other, stylistically expressed characteristics such as change of authorship or native language. We propose a Bayesian unsupervised text segmentation approach to the latter. While baseline models achieve essentially random segmentation on our task, indicating its difficulty, a Bayesian model that incorporates appropriately compact language models and alternating asymmetric priors can achieve scores on the standard metrics around halfway to perfect segmentation.

We evaluate feature hashing for language identification (LID), a method not previously used for this task. Using a standard dataset, we first show that while feature performance is high, LID data is highly dimensional and mostly sparse (>99.5%) as it includes large vocabularies for many languages; memory requirements grow as languages are added. Next we apply hashing using various hash sizes, demonstrating that there is no performance loss with dimensionality reductions of up to 86%. We also show that using an ensemble of low-dimension hash-based classifiers further boosts performance. Feature hashing is highly useful for LID and holds great promise for future work in this area.

We present the results of the third edition of the Discriminating between Similar Languages (DSL) shared task, which was organized as part of the VarDial’2016 workshop at COLING’2016. The challenge offered two subtasks: subtask 1 focused on the identification of very similar languages and language varieties in newswire texts, whereas subtask 2 dealt with Arabic dialect identification in speech transcripts. A total of 37 teams registered to participate in the task, 24 teams submitted test results, and 20 teams also wrote system description papers. High-order character n-grams were the most successful feature, and the best classification approaches included traditional supervised learning methods such as SVM, logistic regression, and language models, while deep learning approaches did not perform very well.

In this study we apply classification methods for detecting subdialectal differences in Sorani Kurdish texts produced in different regions, namely Iran and Iraq. As Sorani is a low-resource language, no corpus including texts from different regions was readily available. To this end, we identified data sources that could be leveraged for this task to create a dataset of 200,000 sentences. Using surface features, we attempted to classify Sorani subdialects, showing that sentences from news sources in Iraq and Iran are distinguishable with 96% accuracy. This is the first preliminary study for a dialect that has not been widely studied in computational linguistics, evidencing the possible existence of distinct subdialects.

In this paper we describe a system developed to identify a set of four regional Arabic dialects (Egyptian, Gulf, Levantine, North African) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in a transcribed speech corpus. We competed under the team name MAZA in the Arabic Dialect Identification sub-task of the 2016 Discriminating between Similar Languages (DSL) shared task. Our system achieved an F1-score of 0.51 in the closed training track, ranking first among the 18 teams that participated in the sub-task. Our system utilizes a classifier ensemble with a set of linear models as base classifiers. We experimented with three different ensemble fusion strategies, with the mean probability approach providing the best performance.

We present an analysis of the performance of machine learning classifiers on discriminating between similar languages and language varieties. We carried out a number of experiments using the results of the two editions of the Discriminating between Similar Languages (DSL) shared task. We investigate the progress made between the two tasks, estimate an upper bound on possible performance using ensemble and oracle combination, and provide learning curves to help us understand which languages are more challenging. A number of difficult sentences are identified and investigated further with human annotation

This paper presents a number of experiments to model changes in a historical Portuguese corpus composed of literary texts for the purpose of temporal text classification. Algorithms were trained to classify texts with respect to their publication date taking into account lexical variation represented as word n-grams, and morphosyntactic variation represented by part-of-speech (POS) distribution. We report results of 99.8% accuracy using word unigram features with a Support Vector Machines classifier to predict the publication date of documents in time intervals of both one century and half a century. A feature analysis is performed to investigate the most informative features for this task and how they are linked to language change.