Contextual word-representations became a standard in modern natural language processing systems. These models use subword tokenization to handle large vocabularies and unknown words. Word-level usage of such systems requires a way of pooling multiple subwords that correspond to a single word. In this paper we investigate how the choice of subword pooling affects the downstream performance on three tasks: morphological probing, POS tagging and NER, in 9 typologically diverse languages. We compare these in two massively multilingual models, mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa. For morphological tasks, the widely used ‘choose the first subword’ is the worst strategy and the best results are obtained by using attention over the subwords. For POS tagging both of these strategies perform poorly and the best choice is to use a small LSTM over the subwords. The same strategy works best for NER and we show that mBERT is better than XLM-RoBERTa in all 9 languages. We publicly release all code, data and the full result tables at https://github.com/juditacs/subword-choice .

We study a typical intermediary task to Machine Translation, the alignment of NPs in the bitext. After arguing that the task remains relevant even in an end-to-end paradigm, we present simple, dictionary- and word vector-based baselines and a BERT-based system. Our results make clear that even state of the art systems relying on the best end-to-end methods can be improved by bringing in old-fashioned methods such as stopword removal, lemmatization, and dictionaries

We present a system for mapping Universal Dependency structures to raw text which learns to restore word order by training an Interpreted Regular Tree Grammar (IRTG) that establishes a mapping between string and graph operations. The reinflection step is handled by a standard sequence-to-sequence architecture with a biLSTM encoder and an LSTM decoder with attention. We modify our 2019 system (Kovács et al., 2019) with a new grammar induction mechanism that allows IRTG rules to operate on lemmata in addition to part-of-speech tags and ensures that each word and its dependents are reordered using the most specific set of learned patterns. We also introduce a hierarchical approach to word order restoration that independently determines the word order of each clause in a sentence before arranging them with respect to the main clause, thereby improving overall readability and also making the IRTG parsing task tractable. We participated in the 2020 Surface Realization Shared task, subtrack T1a (shallow, closed). Human evaluation shows we achieve significant improvements on two of the three out-of-domain datasets compared to the 2019 system we modified. Both components of our system are available on GitHub under an MIT license.

In this paper we present a novel rule-based, language independent method for determining lexical entailment relations using semantic representations built from Wiktionary definitions. Combined with a simple WordNet-based method our system achieves top scores on the English and Italian datasets of the Semeval-2020 task “Predicting Multilingual and Cross-lingual (graded) Lexical Entailment” (Glavaš et al., 2020). A detailed error analysis of our output uncovers future di- rections for improving both the semantic parsing method and the inference process on semantic graphs.

The Surface Realization Shared Task involves mapping Universal Dependency graphs to raw text, i.e. restoring word order and inflection from a graph of typed, directed dependencies between lemmas. Interpreted Regular Tree Grammars (IRTGs) encode the correspondence between generations in multiple algebras, and have previously been used for semantic parsing from raw text. Our system induces an IRTG for simultaneously building pairs of surface forms and UD graphs in the SRST training data, then prunes this grammar for each UD graph in the test data for efficient parsing and generation of the surface ordering of lemmas. For the inflection step we use a standard sequence-to-sequence model with a biLSTM encoder and an LSTM decoder with attention. Both components of our system are available on GitHub under an MIT license.

We propose a novel method for detecting optional arguments of Hungarian verbs using only positive data. We introduce a custom variant of collexeme analysis that explicitly models the noise in verb frames. Our method is, for the most part, unsupervised: we use the spectral clustering algorithm described in Brew and Schulte in Walde (2002) to build a noise model from a short, manually verified seed list of verbs. We experimented with both raw count- and context-based clusterings and found their performance almost identical. The code for our algorithm and the frame list are freely available at http://hlt.bme.hu/en/resources/tade.

We describe, and make public, large-scale language resources and the toolchain used in their creation, for fifteen medium density European languages: Catalan, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish. To make the process uniform across languages, we selected tools that are either language-independent or easily customizable for each language, and reimplemented all stages that were taking too long. To achieve processing times that are insignificant compared to the time data collection (crawling) takes, we reimplemented the standard sentence- and word-level tokenizers and created new boilerplate and near-duplicate detection algorithms. Preliminary experiments with non-European languages indicate that our methods are now applicable not just to our sample, but the entire population of digitally viable languages, with the main limiting factor being the availability of high quality stemmers.

Aligning the NPs of parallel corpora is logically halfway between the sentence- and word-alignment tasks that occupy much of the MT literature, but has received far less attention. NP alignment is a challenging problem, capable of rapidly exposing flaws both in the word-alignment and in the NP chunking algorithms one may bring to bear. It is also a very rewarding problem in that NPs are semantically natural translation units, which means that (i) word alignments will cross NP boundaries only exceptionally, and (ii) within sentences already aligned, the proportion of 1-1 alignments will be higher for NPs than words. We created a simple gold standard for English-Hungarian, Orwell’s 1984, (since this already exists in manually verified POS-tagged format in many languages thanks to the Multex and MultexEast project) by manually verifying the automaticaly generated NP chunking (we used the yamcha, mallet and hunchunk taggers) and manually aligning the maximal NPs and PPs. The maximum NP chunking problem is much harder than base NP chunking, with F-measure in the .7 range (as opposed to over .94 for base NPs). Since the results are highly impacted by the quality of the NP chunking, we tested our alignment algorithms both with real world (machine obtained) chunkings, where results are in the .35 range for the baseline algorithm which propagates GIZA++ word alignments to the NP level, and on idealized (manually obtained) chunkings, where the baseline reaches .4 and our current system reaches .64.

For increased speed in developing gigaword language resources for medium resource density languages we integrated several FOSS tools in the HUN* toolkit. While the speed and efficiency of the resulting pipeline has surpassed our expectations, our experience in developing LDC-style resource packages for Uzbek and Kurdish makes clear that neither the data collection nor the subsequent processing stages can be fully automated.

The paper presents an evaluation of maxent POS disambiguation systems that incorporate an open source morphological analyzer to constrain the probabilistic models. The experiments show that the best proposed architecture, which is the first application of the maximum entropy framework in a Hungarian NLP task, outperforms comparable state of the art tagging methods and is able to handle out of vocabulary items robustly, allowing for efficient analysis of large (web-based) corpora.