In this study, we explore the performance oflarge language models (LLMs) using differ-ent prompt engineering approaches in the con-text of legal text classification. Prior researchhas demonstrated that various prompting tech-niques can improve the performance of a di-verse array of tasks done by LLMs. However,in this research, we observe that professionaldocuments, and in particular legal documents,pose unique challenges for LLMs. We experi-ment with several LLMs and various promptingtechniques, including zero/few-shot prompting,prompt ensembling, chain-of-thought, and ac-tivation fine-tuning and compare the perfor-mance on legal datasets. Although the newgeneration of LLMs and prompt optimizationtechniques have been shown to improve gener-ation and understanding of generic tasks, ourfindings suggest that such improvements maynot readily transfer to other domains. Specifi-cally, experiments indicate that not all prompt-ing approaches and models are well-suited forthe legal domain which involves complexitiessuch as long documents and domain-specificlanguage.

In this paper, we present three supervised systems for English lexical complexity prediction of single and multiword expressions for SemEval-2021 Task 1. We explore the use of statistical baseline features, masked language models, and character-level encoders to predict the complexity of a target token in context. Our best system combines information from these three sources. The results indicate that information from masked language models and character-level encoders can be combined to improve lexical complexity prediction.

Cross-lingual word embeddings provide a way for information to be transferred between languages. In this paper we evaluate an extension of a joint training approach to learning cross-lingual embeddings that incorporates sub-word information during training. This method could be particularly well-suited to lower-resource and morphologically-rich languages because it can be trained on modest size monolingual corpora, and is able to represent out-of-vocabulary words (OOVs). We consider bilingual lexicon induction, including an evaluation focused on OOVs. We find that this method achieves improvements over previous approaches, particularly for OOVs.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for learning cross-lingual word embeddings, that incorporates sub-word information during training, and is able to learn high-quality embeddings from modest amounts of monolingual data and a bilingual lexicon. This method could be particularly well-suited to learning cross-lingual embeddings for lower-resource, morphologically-rich languages, enabling knowledge to be transferred from rich- to lower-resource languages. We evaluate our proposed approach simulating lower-resource languages for bilingual lexicon induction, monolingual word similarity, and document classification. Our results indicate that incorporating sub-word information indeed leads to improvements, and in the case of document classification, performance better than, or on par with, strong benchmark approaches.

Cross-lingual word embeddings create a shared space for embeddings in two languages, and enable knowledge to be transferred between languages for tasks such as bilingual lexicon induction. One problem, however, is out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, for which no embeddings are available. This is particularly problematic for low-resource and morphologically-rich languages, which often have relatively high OOV rates. Approaches to learning sub-word embeddings have been proposed to address the problem of OOV words, but most prior work has not considered sub-word embeddings in cross-lingual models. In this paper, we consider whether sub-word embeddings can be leveraged to form cross-lingual embeddings for OOV words. Specifically, we consider a novel bilingual lexicon induction task focused on OOV words, for language pairs covering several language families. Our results indicate that cross-lingual representations for OOV words can indeed be formed from sub-word embeddings, including in the case of a truly low-resource morphologically-rich language.

In this paper we apply a range of approaches to language modeling – including word-level n-gram and neural language models, and character-level neural language models – to the problem of detecting hate speech and offensive language. Our findings indicate that language models are able to capture knowledge of whether text is hateful or offensive. However, our findings also indicate that more conventional approaches to text classification often perform similarly or better.

In this paper, we propose the first model for multiword expression (MWE) compositionality prediction based on character-level neural network language models. Experimental results on two kinds of MWEs (noun compounds and verb-particle constructions) and two languages (English and German) suggest that character-level neural network language models capture knowledge of multiword expression compositionality, in particular for English noun compounds and the particle component of English verb-particle constructions. In contrast to many other approaches to MWE compositionality prediction, this character-level approach does not require token-level identification of MWEs in a training corpus, and can potentially predict the compositionality of out-of-vocabulary MWEs.

In this paper we present three unsupervised models for capturing discriminative attributes based on information from word embeddings, WordNet, and sentence-level word co-occurrence frequency. We show that, of these approaches, the simple approach based on word co-occurrence performs best. We further consider supervised and unsupervised approaches to combining information from these models, but these approaches do not improve on the word co-occurrence model.