We introduce MAFALDA, a benchmark for fallacy classification that merges and unites previous fallacy datasets. It comes with a taxonomy that aligns, refines, and unifies existing classifications of fallacies. We further provide a manual annotation of a part of the dataset together with manual explanations for each annotation. We propose a new annotation scheme tailored for subjective NLP tasks, and a new evaluation method designed to handle subjectivity. We then evaluate several language models under a zero-shot learning setting and human performances on MAFALDA to assess their capability to detect and classify fallacies.

Logical reasoning on natural language is one of the most challenging tasks for deep learning models. There has been an increasing interest in developing new benchmarks to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of language models such as BERT. In parallel, new models based on transformers have emerged to achieve ever better performance on these datasets. However, there is currently no library for logical reasoning that includes such benchmarks and models. This paper introduces LogiTorch, a PyTorch-based library that includes different logical reasoning benchmarks, different models, as well as utility functions such as co-reference resolution. This makes it easy to directly use the preprocessed datasets, to run the models, or to finetune them with different hyperparameters. LogiTorch is open source and can be found on GitHub.

Transformer-based language models achieve state-of-the-art results on several natural language processing tasks. One of these is textual entailment, i.e., the task of determining whether a premise logically entails a hypothesis. However, the models perform poorly on this task when the examples contain negations. In this paper, we propose a new definition of textual entailment that captures also negation. This allows us to develop TINA (Textual Inference with Negation Augmentation), a principled technique for negated data augmentation that can be combined with the unlikelihood loss function.Our experiments with different transformer-based models show that our method can significantly improve the performance of the models on textual entailment datasets with negation – without sacrificing performance on datasets without negation.

Named entity recognition (NER) plays a significant role in many applications such as information extraction, information retrieval, question answering, and even machine translation. Most of the work on NER using deep learning was done for non-Arabic languages like English and French, and only few studies focused on Arabic. This paper proposes a semi-supervised learning approach to train a BERT-based NER model using labeled and semi-labeled datasets. We compared our approach against various baselines, and state-of-the-art Arabic NER tools on three datasets: AQMAR, NEWS, and TWEETS. We report a significant improvement in F-measure for the AQMAR and the NEWS datasets, which are written in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and competitive results for the TWEETS dataset, which contains tweets that are mostly in the Egyptian dialect and contain many mistakes or misspellings.

Assessing the credibility of online content has garnered a lot of attention lately. We focus on one such type of online content, namely weblogs or blogs for short. Some recent work attempted the task of automatically assessing the credibility of blogs, typically via machine learning. However, in the case of Arabic blogs, there are hardly any datasets available that can be used to train robust machine learning models for this difficult task. To overcome the lack of sufficient training data, we propose deep co-learning, a semi-supervised end-to-end deep learning approach to assess the credibility of Arabic blogs. In deep co-learning, multiple weak deep neural network classifiers are trained using a small labeled dataset, and each using a different view of the data. Each one of these classifiers is then used to classify unlabeled data, and its prediction is used to train the other classifiers in a semi-supervised fashion. We evaluate our deep co-learning approach on an Arabic blogs dataset, and we report significant improvements in performance compared to many baselines including fully-supervised deep learning models as well as ensemble models.

Many unsupervised learning techniques have been proposed to obtain meaningful representations of words from text. In this study, we evaluate these various techniques when used to generate Arabic word embeddings. We first build a benchmark for the Arabic language that can be utilized to perform intrinsic evaluation of different word embeddings. We then perform additional extrinsic evaluations of the embeddings based on two NLP tasks.