This paper presents a new web portal with information about the state of the art of natural language processing tasks in Spanish. It provides information about forums, competitions, tasks and datasets in Spanish, that would otherwise be spread in multiple articles and web sites. The portal consists of overview pages where information can be searched for and filtered by several criteria and individual pages with detailed information and hyperlinks to facilitate navigation. Information has been manually curated from publications that describe competitions and NLP tasks from 2013 until 2023 and will be updated as new tasks appear. A total of 185 tasks and 128 datasets from 94 competitions have been introduced.

In the context of text representation, Compositional Distributional Semantics models aim to fuse the Distributional Hypothesis and the Principle of Compositionality. Text embedding is based on co-ocurrence distributions and the representations are in turn combined by compositional functions taking into account the text structure. However, the theoretical basis of compositional functions is still an open issue. In this article we define and study the notion of Information Theory–based Compositional Distributional Semantics (ICDS): (i) We first establish formal properties for embedding, composition, and similarity functions based on Shannon’s Information Theory; (ii) we analyze the existing approaches under this prism, checking whether or not they comply with the established desirable properties; (iii) we propose two parameterizable composition and similarity functions that generalize traditional approaches while fulfilling the formal properties; and finally (iv) we perform an empirical study on several textual similarity datasets that include sentences with a high and low lexical overlap, and on the similarity between words and their description. Our theoretical analysis and empirical results show that fulfilling formal properties affects positively the accuracy of text representation models in terms of correspondence (isometry) between the embedding and meaning spaces.

Several natural language processing (NLP) tasks are defined as a classification problem in its most complex form: Multi-label Hierarchical Extreme classification, in which items may be associated with multiple classes from a set of thousands of possible classes organized in a hierarchy and with a highly unbalanced distribution both in terms of class frequency and the number of labels per item. We analyze the state of the art of evaluation metrics based on a set of formal properties and we define an information theoretic based metric inspired by the Information Contrast Model (ICM). Experiments on synthetic data and a case study on real data show the suitability of the ICM for such scenarios.

In Ordinal Classification tasks, items have to be assigned to classes that have a relative ordering, such as “positive”, “neutral”, “negative” in sentiment analysis. Remarkably, the most popular evaluation metrics for ordinal classification tasks either ignore relevant information (for instance, precision/recall on each of the classes ignores their relative ordering) or assume additional information (for instance, Mean Average Error assumes absolute distances between classes). In this paper we propose a new metric for Ordinal Classification, Closeness Evaluation Measure, that is rooted on Measurement Theory and Information Theory. Our theoretical analysis and experimental results over both synthetic data and data from NLP shared tasks indicate that the proposed metric captures quality aspects from different traditional tasks simultaneously. In addition, it generalizes some popular classification (nominal scale) and error minimization (interval scale) metrics, depending on the measurement scale in which it is instantiated.

We present the IQMT Framework for Machine Translation Evaluation Inside QARLA. IQMT offers a common workbench in which existing evaluation metrics can be utilized and combined. It provides i) a measure to evaluate the quality of any set of similarity metrics (KING), ii) a measure to evaluate the quality of a translation using a set of similarity metrics (QUEEN), and iii) a measure to evaluate the reliability of a test set (JACK). The first release of the IQMT package is freely available for public use. Current version includes a set of 26 metrics from 7 different well-known metric families, and allows the user to supply its own metrics. For future releases, we are working on the design of new metrics that are able to capture linguistic aspects of translation beyond lexical ones.