The CASE@EACL2024 Shared Task addresses Climate Activism online through three subtasks that focus on hate speech detection (Subtask A), hate speech target classification (Subtask B), and stance detection (Subtask C) respectively.Our contribution examines the effect of fine-tuning on external data for each of these subtasks. For the two subtasks that focus on hate speech, we augment the training data with the OLID dataset, whereas for the stance subtask we harness the SemEval-2016 Stance dataset. We fine-tune RoBERTa and DeBERTa models for each of the subtasks, with and without external training data.For the hate speech detection and stance detection subtasks, our RoBERTa models came up third and first on the leaderboard, respectively. While the use of external data was not relevant on those tasks, we found that it greatly improved the performance on the hate speech target categorization.

This paper presents the description and primary outcomes of our team’s participation in the BEA 2024 shared task. Our primary exploration involved employing transformer-based systems, particularly BERT models, due to their suitability for Natural Language Processing tasks and efficiency with computational resources. We experimented with various input formats, including concatenating all text elements and incorporating only the clinical case. Surprisingly, our results revealed different impacts on predicting difficulty versus response time, with the former favoring clinical text only and the latter benefiting from including the correct answer. Despite moderate performance in difficulty prediction, our models excelled in response time prediction, ranking highest among all participants. This study lays the groundwork for future investigations into more complex approaches and configurations, aiming to advance the automatic prediction of exam difficulty and response time.

In this paper, we introduce a novel methodology to efficiently construct a corpus for question answering over structured data. For this, we introduce an intermediate representation that is based on the logical query plan in a database, called Operation Trees (OT). This representation allows us to invert the annotation process without loosing flexibility in the types of queries that we generate. Furthermore, it allows for fine-grained alignment of the tokens to the operations. Thus, we randomly generate OTs from a context free grammar and annotators just have to write the appropriate question and assign the tokens. We compare our corpus OTTA (Operation Trees and Token Assignment), a large semantic parsing corpus for evaluating natural language interfaces to databases, to Spider and LC-QuaD 2.0 and show that our methodology more than triples the annotation speed while maintaining the complexity of the queries. Finally, we train a state-of-the-art semantic parsing model on our data and show that our dataset is a challenging dataset and that the token alignment can be leveraged to significantly increase the performance.

The lack of time efficient and reliable evalu-ation methods is hampering the development of conversational dialogue systems (chat bots). Evaluations that require humans to converse with chat bots are time and cost intensive, put high cognitive demands on the human judges, and tend to yield low quality results. In this work, we introduce Spot The Bot, a cost-efficient and robust evaluation framework that replaces human-bot conversations with conversations between bots. Human judges then only annotate for each entity in a conversation whether they think it is human or not (assuming there are humans participants in these conversations). These annotations then allow us to rank chat bots regarding their ability to mimic conversational behaviour of humans. Since we expect that all bots are eventually recognized as such, we incorporate a metric that measures which chat bot is able to uphold human-like be-havior the longest, i.e.Survival Analysis. This metric has the ability to correlate a bot’s performance to certain of its characteristics (e.g.fluency or sensibleness), yielding interpretable results. The comparably low cost of our frame-work allows for frequent evaluations of chatbots during their evaluation cycle. We empirically validate our claims by applying Spot The Bot to three domains, evaluating several state-of-the-art chat bots, and drawing comparisonsto related work. The framework is released asa ready-to-use tool.

This paper describes a methodology for testing and evaluating the performance of Machine Reading systems through Question Answering and Reading Comprehension Tests. The methodology is being used in QA4MRE (QA for Machine Reading Evaluation), one of the labs of CLEF. The task was to answer a series of multiple choice tests, each based on a single document. This allows complex questions to be asked but makes evaluation simple and completely automatic. The evaluation architecture is completely multilingual: test documents, questions, and their answers are identical in all the supported languages. Background text collections are comparable collections harvested from the web for a set of predefined topics. Each test received an evaluation score between 0 and 1 using c@1. This measure encourages systems to reduce the number of incorrect answers while maintaining the number of correct ones by leaving some questions unanswered. 12 groups participated in the task, submitting 62 runs in 3 different languages (German, English, and Romanian). All runs were monolingual; no team attempted a cross-language task. We report here the conclusions and lessons learned after the first campaign in 2011.

In this paper we describe GikiCLEF, the first evaluation contest that, to our knowledge, was specifically designed to expose and investigate cultural and linguistic issues involved in structured multimedia collections and searching, and which was organized under the scope of CLEF 2009. GikiCLEF evaluated systems that answered hard questions for both human and machine, in ten different Wikipedia collections, namely Bulgarian, Dutch, English, German, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmäl and Nynorsk), Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. After a short historical introduction, we present the task, together with its motivation, and discuss how the topics were chosen. Then we provide another description from the point of view of the participants. Before disclosing their results, we introduce the SIGA management system explaining the several tasks which were carried out behind the scenes. We quantify in turn the GIRA resource, offered to the community for training and further evaluating systems with the help of the 50 topics gathered and the solutions identified. We end the paper with a critical discussion of what was learned, advancing possible ways to reuse the data.

The paper offers an overview of the key issues raised during the seven years’ activity of the Multilingual Question Answering Track at the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The general aim of the Multilingual Question Answering Track has been to test both monolingual and cross-language Question Answering (QA) systems that process queries and documents in several European languages, also drawing attention to a number of challenging issues for research in multilingual QA. The paper gives a brief description of how the task has evolved over the years and of the way in which the data sets have been created, presenting also a brief summary of the different types of questions developed. The document collections adopted in the competitions are sketched as well, and some data about the participation are provided. Moreover, the main evaluation measures used to evaluate system performances are explained and an overall analysis of the results achieved is presented.