This article studies register classification of documents from the unrestricted web, such as news articles or opinion blogs, in a multilingual setting, exploring both the benefit of training on multiple languages and the capabilities for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. While the wide range of linguistic variation found on the web poses challenges for register classification, recent studies have shown that good levels of cross-lingual transfer from the extensive English CORE corpus to other languages can be achieved. In this study, we show that training on multiple languages 1) benefits languages with limited amounts of register-annotated data, 2) on average achieves performance on par with monolingual models, and 3) greatly improves upon previous zero-shot results in Finnish, French and Swedish. The best results are achieved with the multilingual XLM-R model. As data, we use the CORE corpus series featuring register annotated data from the unrestricted web.

We explore cross-lingual transfer of register classification for web documents. Registers, that is, text varieties such as blogs or news are one of the primary predictors of linguistic variation and thus affect the automatic processing of language. We introduce two new register-annotated corpora, FreCORE and SweCORE, for French and Swedish. We demonstrate that deep pre-trained language models perform strongly in these languages and outperform previous state-of-the-art in English and Finnish. Specifically, we show 1) that zero-shot cross-lingual transfer from the large English CORE corpus can match or surpass previously published monolingual models, and 2) that lightweight monolingual classification requiring very little training data can reach or surpass our zero-shot performance. We further analyse classification results finding that certain registers continue to pose challenges in particular for cross-lingual transfer.

The web presents unprecedented opportunities for large-scale collection of text in many languages. However, two critical steps in the development of web corpora remain challenging: the identification of clean text from source HTML and the assignment of genre or register information to the documents. In this paper, we evaluate a multilingual approach to this end. Our starting points are the Swedish and French Common Crawl datasets gathered for the 2017 CoNLL shared task, particularly the URLs. We 1) fetch HTML pages based on the URLs and run boilerplate removal, 2) train a classifier to further clean out undesired text fragments, and 3) annotate text registers. We compare boilerplate removal against the CoNLL texts, and find an improvement. For the further cleaning of undesired material, the best results are achieved using Multilingual BERT with monolingual fine-tuning. However, our results are promising also in a cross-lingual setting, without fine-tuning on the target language. Finally, the register annotations show that most of the documents belong to a relatively small set of registers, which are relatively similar in the two languages. A number of additional flags in the annotation are, however, necessary to reflect the wide range of linguistic variation associated with the documents.

News articles such as sports game reports are often thought to closely follow the underlying game statistics, but in practice they contain a notable amount of background knowledge, interpretation, insight into the game, and quotes that are not present in the official statistics. This poses a challenge for automated data-to-text news generation with real-world news corpora as training data. We report on the development of a corpus of Finnish ice hockey news, edited to be suitable for training of end-to-end news generation methods, as well as demonstrate generation of text, which was judged by journalists to be relatively close to a viable product. The new dataset and system source code are available for research purposes.

The multilingual BERT model is trained on 104 languages and meant to serve as a universal language model and tool for encoding sentences. We explore how well the model performs on several languages across several tasks: a diagnostic classification probing the embeddings for a particular syntactic property, a cloze task testing the language modelling ability to fill in gaps in a sentence, and a natural language generation task testing for the ability to produce coherent text fitting a given context. We find that the currently available multilingual BERT model is clearly inferior to the monolingual counterparts, and cannot in many cases serve as a substitute for a well-trained monolingual model. We find that the English and German models perform well at generation, whereas the multilingual model is lacking, in particular, for Nordic languages. The code of the experiments in the paper is available at: https://github.com/TurkuNLP/bert-eval

We introduce an attention-based Bi-LSTM for Chinese implicit discourse relations and demonstrate that modeling argument pairs as a joint sequence can outperform word order-agnostic approaches. Our model benefits from a partial sampling scheme and is conceptually simple, yet achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Chinese Discourse Treebank. We also visualize its attention activity to illustrate the model’s ability to selectively focus on the relevant parts of an input sequence.