The increasing size and diversity of corpora in natural language processing requires highly efficient processing frameworks. Building on the universal corpus format, Teanga, we present Cuaċ, a format for the compact representation of corpora. We describe this methodology based on short-string compression and indexing techniques and show that the files created with this methodology are similar to compressed human-readable serializations and can be further compressed using lossless compression. We also show that this introduces no computational penalty on the time to process files. This methodology aims to speed up natural language processing pipelines and is the basis for a fast database system for corpora.

Corpus data is the main source of data for natural language processing applications, however no standard or model for corpus data has become predominant in the field. Linguistic linked data aims to provide methods by which data can be made findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). However, current attempts to create a linked data format for corpora have been unsuccessful due to the verbose and specialised formats that they use. In this work, we present the Teanga data model, which uses a layered annotation model to capture all NLP-relevant annotations. We present the YAML serializations of the model, which is concise and uses a widely-deployed format, and we describe how this can be interpreted as RDF. Finally, we demonstrate three examples of the use of the Teanga data model for syntactic annotation, literary analysis and multilingual corpora.

This paper explores the use of L2-specific grammatical microsystems as elements of the domain knowledge of an Intelligent Computer-assisted Language Learning (ICALL) system. We report on the design of new grammatico-functional measures and their association with proficiency. We illustrate the approach with the design of the IT, THIS, THAT proform microsystem. The measures rely on the paradigmatic relations between words of the same linguistic functions. They are operationalised with one frequency-based and two probabilistic methods, i.e., the relative proportions of the forms and their likelihood of occurrence. Ordinal regression models show that the measures are significant in terms of association with CEFR levels, paving the way for their introduction in a specific proform microsystem expert model.

This paper describes the structure and findings of the SIGTYP 2023 shared task on cognate and derivative detection for low-resourced languages, broken down into a supervised and unsupervised sub-task. The participants were asked to submit the test data’s final prediction. A total of nine teams registered for the shared task where seven teams registered for both sub-tasks. Only two participants ended up submitting system descriptions, with only one submitting systems for both sub-tasks. While all systems show a rather promising performance, all could be within the baseline score for the supervised sub-task. However, the system submitted for the unsupervised sub-task outperforms the baseline score.

Pharmaceutical text classification is an important area of research for commercial and research institutions working in the pharmaceutical domain. Addressing this task is challenging due to the need of expert verified labelled data which can be expensive and time consuming to obtain. Towards this end, we leverage predictive coding methods for the task as they have been shown to generalise well for sentence classification. Specifically, we utilise GAN-BERT architecture to classify pharmaceutical texts. To capture the domain specificity, we propose to utilise the BioBERT model as our BERT model in the GAN-BERT framework. We conduct extensive evaluation to show the efficacy of our approach over baselines on multiple metrics.

This paper describes the workflow and architecture adopted by a linguistic research project. We report our experience and present the research outputs turned into resources that we wish to share with the community. We discuss the current limitations and the next steps that could be taken for the scaling and development of our research project. Allying NLP and language-centric AI, we discuss similar projects and possible ways to start collaborating towards potential platform interoperability.

Cet article décrit un prototype axé sur la prédiction du niveau de compétence des apprenants de l’anglais. Le système repose sur un modèle d’apprentissage supervisé, couplé à une interface web.

This paper focuses on aspect extraction which is a sub-task of Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis. The goal is to report an extraction method of financial aspects in microblog messages. Our approach uses a stock-investment taxonomy for the identification of explicit and implicit aspects. We compare supervised and unsupervised methods to assign predefined categories at message level. Results on 7 aspect classes show 0.71 accuracy, while the 32 class classification gives 0.82 accuracy for messages containing explicit aspects and 0.35 for implicit aspects.