We introduce Spivavtor, a dataset, and instruction-tuned models for text editing focused on the Ukrainian language. Spivavtor is the Ukrainian-focused adaptation of the English-only CoEdIT (Raheja et al., 2023) model. Similar to CoEdIT, Spivavtor performs text editing tasks by following instructions in Ukrainian like “Виправте граматику в цьому реченнi” and “Спростiть це речення” which translate to “Correct the grammar in this sentence” and “Simplify this sentence” in English, respectively. This paper describes the details of the Spivavtor-Instruct dataset and Spivavtor models. We evaluate Spivavtor on a variety of text editing tasks in Ukrainian, such as Grammatical Error Correction (GEC), Text Simplification, Coherence, and Paraphrasing, and demonstrate its superior performance on all of them. We publicly release our best performing models and data as resources to the community to advance further research in this space.

In this paper, we carry out experimental research on Grammatical Error Correction, delving into the nuances of single-model systems, comparing the efficiency of ensembling and ranking methods, and exploring the application of large language models to GEC as single-model systems, as parts of ensembles, and as ranking methods. We set new state-of-the-art records with F_0.5 scores of 72.8 on CoNLL-2014-test and 81.4 on BEA-test, respectively. To support further advancements in GEC and ensure the reproducibility of our research, we make our code, trained models, and systems’ outputs publicly available, facilitating future findings.

This work investigates the effectiveness of different pseudonymization techniques, ranging from rule-based substitutions to using pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs), on a variety of datasets and models used for two widely used NLP tasks: text classification and summarization. Our work provides crucial insights into the gaps between original and anonymized data (focusing on the pseudonymization technique) and model quality and fosters future research into higher-quality anonymization techniques better to balance the trade-offs between data protection and utility preservation. We make our code, pseudonymized datasets, and downstream models publicly available.

Over the past few years, much research has been conducted to identify and regulate toxic language. However, few studies have addressed a broader range of sensitive texts that are not necessarily overtly toxic. In this paper, we introduce and define a new category of sensitive text called “delicate text.” We provide the taxonomy of delicate text and present a detailed annotation scheme. We annotate DeTexD, the first benchmark dataset for delicate text detection. The significance of the difference in the definitions is highlighted by the relative performance deltas between models trained each definitions and corpora and evaluated on the other. We make publicly available the DeTexD Benchmark dataset, annotation guidelines, and baseline model for delicate text detection.

In this paper, we investigate improvements to the GEC sequence tagging architecture with a focus on ensembling of recent cutting-edge Transformer-based encoders in Large configurations. We encourage ensembling models by majority votes on span-level edits because this approach is tolerant to the model architecture and vocabulary size. Our best ensemble achieves a new SOTA result with an F_0.5 score of 76.05 on BEA-2019 (test), even without pre-training on synthetic datasets. In addition, we perform knowledge distillation with a trained ensemble to generate new synthetic training datasets, “Troy-Blogs” and “Troy-1BW”. Our best single sequence tagging model that is pretrained on the generated Troy- datasets in combination with the publicly available synthetic PIE dataset achieves a near-SOTA result with an F_0.5 score of 73.21 on BEA-2019 (test). The code, datasets, and trained models are publicly available.

In this paper, we propose a generation challenge called Feedback comment generation for language learners. It is a task where given a text and a span, a system generates, for the span, an explanatory note that helps the writer (language learner) improve their writing skills. The motivations for this challenge are: (i) practically, it will be beneficial for both language learners and teachers if a computer-assisted language learning system can provide feedback comments just as human teachers do; (ii) theoretically, feedback comment generation for language learners has a mixed aspect of other generation tasks together with its unique features and it will be interesting to explore what kind of generation technique is effective against what kind of writing rule. To this end, we have created a dataset and developed baseline systems to estimate baseline performance. With these preparations, we propose a generation challenge of feedback comment generation.

In this paper, we present a simple and efficient GEC sequence tagger using a Transformer encoder. Our system is pre-trained on synthetic data and then fine-tuned in two stages: first on errorful corpora, and second on a combination of errorful and error-free parallel corpora. We design custom token-level transformations to map input tokens to target corrections. Our best single-model/ensemble GEC tagger achieves an F_0.5 of 65.3/66.5 on CONLL-2014 (test) and F_0.5 of 72.4/73.6 on BEA-2019 (test). Its inference speed is up to 10 times as fast as a Transformer-based seq2seq GEC system.

We present TARGER, an open source neural argument mining framework for tagging arguments in free input texts and for keyword-based retrieval of arguments from an argument-tagged web-scale corpus. The currently available models are pre-trained on three recent argument mining datasets and enable the use of neural argument mining without any reproducibility effort on the user’s side. The open source code ensures portability to other domains and use cases.

Patients and their families often require a better understanding of medical information provided by doctors. We currently address this issue by improving the identification of difficult to understand medical words. We introduce novel embeddings received from RNN - FrnnMUTE (French RNN Medical Understandability Text Embeddings) which allow to reach up to 87.0 F1 score in identification of difficult words. We also note that adding pre-trained FastText word embeddings to the feature set substantially improves the performance of the model which classifies words according to their difficulty. We study the generalizability of different models through three cross-validation scenarios which allow testing classifiers in real-world conditions: understanding of medical words by new users, and classification of new unseen words by the automatic models. The RNN - FrnnMUTE embeddings and the categorization code are being made available for the research.