This paper presents NER-UK 2.0, a corpus of texts in the Ukrainian language manually annotated for the named entity recognition task. The corpus contains 560 texts of multiple genres, boasting 21,993 entities in total. The annotation scheme covers 13 entity types, namely location, person name, organization, artifact, document, job title, date, time, period, money, percentage, quantity, and miscellaneous. Such a rich set of entities makes the corpus valuable for training named-entity recognition models in various domains, including news, social media posts, legal documents, and procurement contracts. The paper presents an updated baseline solution for named entity recognition in Ukrainian with 0.89 F1. The corpus is the largest of its kind for the Ukrainian language and is available for download.

To build large language models for Ukrainian we need to expand our corpora with large amounts of new algorithmic tasks expressed in natural language. Examples of task performance expressed in English are abundant, so with a high-quality translation system our community will be enabled to curate datasets faster. To aid this goal, we introduce a recipe to build a translation system using supervised finetuning of a large pretrained language model with a noisy parallel dataset of 3M pairs of Ukrainian and English sentences followed by a second phase of training using 17K examples selected by k-fold perplexity filtering on another dataset of higher quality. Our decoder-only model named Dragoman beats performance of previous state of the art encoder-decoder models on the FLORES devtest set.

WordNet is a crucial resource in linguistics and natural language processing, providing a detailed and expansive set of lexico-semantic relationships among words in a language. The trend toward automated construction and expansion of WordNets has become increasingly popular due to the high costs of manual development. This study aims to automate the development of the Ukrainian WordNet, explicitly concentrating on hypo-hypernym relations that are crucial building blocks of the hierarchical structure of WordNet. Utilizing the linking between Princeton WordNet, Wikidata, and multilingual resources from Wikipedia, the proposed approach successfully mapped 17% of Princeton WordNet (PWN) content to Ukrainian Wikipedia. Furthermore, the study introduces three innovative strategies for generating new entries to fill in the gaps of the Ukrainian WordNet: machine translation, the Hypernym Discovery model, and the Hypernym Instruction-Following LLaMA model. The latter model shows a high level of effectiveness, evidenced by a 41.61% performance on the Mean Overlap Coefficient (MOC) metric. With the proposed approach that combines automated techniques with expert human input, we provide a reliable basis for creating the Ukrainian WordNet.

This paper addresses the need for massive corpora for a low-resource language and presents the publicly available UberText 2.0 corpus for the Ukrainian language and discusses the methodology of its construction. While the collection and maintenance of such a corpus is more of a data extraction and data engineering task, the corpus itself provides a solid foundation for natural language processing tasks. It can enable the creation of contemporary language models and word embeddings, resulting in a better performance of numerous downstream tasks for the Ukrainian language. In addition, the paper and software developed can be used as a guidance and model solution for other low-resource languages. The resulting corpus is available for download on the project page. It has 3.274 billion tokens, consists of 8.59 million texts and takes up 32 gigabytes of space.

This research proposes a novel approach to the Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) task in the Ukrainian language based on supervised fine-tuning of a pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) on the dataset generated in an unsupervised way to obtain better contextual embeddings for words with multiple senses. The paper presents a method for generating a new dataset for WSD evaluation in the Ukrainian language based on the SUM dictionary. We developed a comprehensive framework that facilitates the generation of WSD evaluation datasets, enables the use of different prediction strategies, LLMs, and pooling strategies, and generates multiple performance reports. Our approach shows 77,9% accuracy for lexical meaning prediction for homonyms.

This study addresses the challenges of learning unsupervised word representations for the morphologically rich and low-resource Ukrainian language. Traditional models that perform decently on English do not generalize well for such languages due to a lack of sufficient data and the complexity of their grammatical structures. To overcome these challenges, we utilized a high-quality, large dataset of different genres for learning Ukrainian word vector representations. We found the best hyperparameters to train fastText language models on this dataset and performed intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations of the generated word embeddings using the established methods and metrics. The results of this study indicate that the trained vectors exhibit superior performance on intrinsic tests in comparison to existing embeddings for Ukrainian. Our best model gives 62% Accuracy on the word analogy task. Extrinsic evaluations were performed on two sequence labeling tasks: NER and POS tagging (83% spaCy NER F-score, 83% spaCy POS Accuracy, 92% Flair POS Accuracy).

We explore pretraining unidirectional language models on 4B tokens from the largest curated corpus of Ukrainian, UberText 2.0. We enrich document text by surrounding it with weakly structured metadata, such as title, tags, and publication year, enabling metadata-conditioned text generation and text-conditioned metadata prediction at the same time. We pretrain GPT-2 Small, Medium and Large models each on single GPU, reporting training times, BPC on BrUK and BERTScore on titles for 1000 News from the Future. Next, we venture to formatting POS and NER datasets as instructions, and train low-rank attention adapters, performing these tasks as constrained text generation. We release our models for the community at https://github.com/proger/uk4b.