The growing interest in employing counter narratives for hatred intervention brings with it a focus on dataset creation and automation strategies. In this scenario, learning to recognize counter narrative types from natural text is expected to be useful for applications such as hate speech countering, where operators from non-governmental organizations are supposed to answer to hate with several and diverse arguments that can be mined from online sources. This paper presents the first multilingual work on counter narrative type classification, evaluating SoTA pre-trained language models in monolingual, multilingual and cross-lingual settings. When considering a fine-grained annotation of counter narrative classes, we report strong baseline classification results for the majority of the counter narrative types, especially if we translate every language to English before cross-lingual prediction. This suggests that knowledge about counter narratives can be successfully transferred across languages.

In the last few years, several methods have been proposed to build meta-embeddings. The general aim was to obtain new representations integrating complementary knowledge from different source pre-trained embeddings thereby improving their overall quality. However, previous meta-embeddings have been evaluated using a variety of methods and datasets, which makes it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions regarding the merits of each approach. In this paper we propose a unified common framework, including both intrinsic and extrinsic tasks, for a fair and objective meta-embeddings evaluation. Furthermore, we present a new method to generate meta-embeddings, outperforming previous work on a large number of intrinsic evaluation benchmarks. Our evaluation framework also allows us to conclude that previous extrinsic evaluations of meta-embeddings have been overestimated.

Stance detection aims to determine the attitude of a given text with respect to a specific topic or claim. While stance detection has been fairly well researched in the last years, most the work has been focused on English. This is mainly due to the relative lack of annotated data in other languages. The TW-10 referendum Dataset released at IberEval 2018 is a previous effort to provide multilingual stance-annotated data in Catalan and Spanish. Unfortunately, the TW-10 Catalan subset is extremely imbalanced. This paper addresses these issues by presenting a new multilingual dataset for stance detection in Twitter for the Catalan and Spanish languages, with the aim of facilitating research on stance detection in multilingual and cross-lingual settings. The dataset is annotated with stance towards one topic, namely, the ndependence of Catalonia. We also provide a semi-automatic method to annotate the dataset based on a categorization of Twitter users. We experiment on the new corpus with a number of supervised approaches, including linear classifiers and deep learning methods. Comparison of our new corpus with the with the TW-1O dataset shows both the benefits and potential of a well balanced corpus for multilingual and cross-lingual research on stance detection. Finally, we establish new state-of-the-art results on the TW-10 dataset, both for Catalan and Spanish.

Word embeddings and pre-trained language models allow to build rich representations of text and have enabled improvements across most NLP tasks. Unfortunately they are very expensive to train, and many small companies and research groups tend to use models that have been pre-trained and made available by third parties, rather than building their own. This is suboptimal as, for many languages, the models have been trained on smaller (or lower quality) corpora. In addition, monolingual pre-trained models for non-English languages are not always available. At best, models for those languages are included in multilingual versions, where each language shares the quota of substrings and parameters with the rest of the languages. This is particularly true for smaller languages such as Basque. In this paper we show that a number of monolingual models (FastText word embeddings, FLAIR and BERT language models) trained with larger Basque corpora produce much better results than publicly available versions in downstream NLP tasks, including topic classification, sentiment classification, PoS tagging and NER. This work sets a new state-of-the-art in those tasks for Basque. All benchmarks and models used in this work are publicly available.

In this paper we describe our participation to the Hyperpartisan News Detection shared task at SemEval 2019. Motivated by the late arrival of Doris Martin, we test a previously developed document classification system which consists of a combination of clustering features implemented on top of some simple shallow local features. We show how leveraging distributional features obtained from large in-domain unlabeled data helps to easily and quickly develop a reasonably good performing system for detecting hyperpartisan news. The system and models generated for this task are publicly available.

IXA pipeline is a modular set of Natural Language Processing tools (or pipes) which provide easy access to NLP technology. It offers robust and efficient linguistic annotation to both researchers and non-NLP experts with the aim of lowering the barriers of using NLP technology either for research purposes or for small industrial developers and SMEs. IXA pipeline can be used “as is” or exploit its modularity to pick and change different components. Given its open-source nature, it can also be modified and extended for it to work with other languages. This paper describes the general data-centric architecture of IXA pipeline and presents competitive results in several NLP annotations for English and Spanish.

In this paper we focus on the creation of general-purpose (as opposed to domain-specific) polarity lexicons in five languages: French, Italian, Dutch, English and Spanish using WordNet propagation. WordNet propagation is a commonly used method to generate these lexicons as it gives high coverage of general purpose language and the semantically rich WordNets where concepts are organised in synonym , antonym and hyperonym/hyponym structures seem to be well suited to the identification of positive and negative words. However, WordNets of different languages may vary in many ways such as the way they are compiled, the number of synsets, number of synonyms and number of semantic relations they include. In this study we investigate whether this variability translates into differences of performance when these WordNets are used for polarity propagation. Although many variants of the propagation method are developed for English, little is known about how they perform with WordNets of other languages. We implemented a propagation algorithm and designed a method to obtain seed lists similar with respect to quality and size, for each of the five languages. We evaluated the results against gold standards also developed according to a common method in order to achieve as less variance as possible between the different languages.

Subtitling and audiovisual translation have been recognized as areas that could greatly benefit from the introduction of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) followed by post-editing, in order to increase efficiency of subtitle production process. The FP7 European project SUMAT (An Online Service for SUbtitling by MAchine Translation: http://www.sumat-project.eu) aims to develop an online subtitle translation service for nine European languages, combined into 14 different language pairs, in order to semi-automate the subtitle translation processes of both freelance translators and subtitling companies on a large scale. In this paper we discuss the data collection and parallel corpus compilation for training SMT systems, which includes several procedures such as data partition, conversion, formatting, normalization and alignment. We discuss in detail each data pre-processing step using various approaches. Apart from the quantity (around 1 million subtitles per language pair), the SUMAT corpus has a number of very important characteristics. First of all, high quality both in terms of translation and in terms of high-precision alignment of parallel documents and their contents has been achieved. Secondly, the contents are provided in one consistent format and encoding. Finally, additional information such as type of content in terms of genres and domain is available.

This paper presents Q-WordNet, a lexical resource consisting of WordNet senses automatically annotated by positive and negative polarity. Polarity classification amounts to decide whether a text (sense, sentence, etc.) may be associated to positive or negative connotations. Polarity classification is becoming important within the fields of Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis for determining opinions about commercial products, on companies reputation management, brand monitoring, or to track attitudes by mining online forums, blogs, etc. Inspired by work on classification of word senses by polarity (e.g., SentiWordNet), and taking WordNet as a starting point, we build Q-WordNet. Instead of applying external tools such as supervised classifiers to annotated WordNet synsets by polarity, we try to effectively maximize the linguistic information contained in WordNet, thereby taking advantage of the human effort put by lexicographers and annotators. The resulting resource is a subset of WordNet senses classified as positive or negative. In this approach, neutral polarity is seen as the absence of positive or negative polarity. The evaluation of Q-WordNet shows an improvement with respect to previous approaches. We believe that Q-WordNet can be used as a starting point for data-driven approaches in sentiment analysis.