Most research in Relation Extraction (RE) involves the English language, mainly due to the lack of multi-lingual resources. We propose Multi-CrossRE, the broadest multi-lingual dataset for RE, including 26 languages in addition to English, and covering six text domains. Multi-CrossRE is a machine translated version of CrossRE (Bassignana and Plank, 2022), with a sub-portion including more than 200 sentences in seven diverse languages checked by native speakers. We run a baseline model over the 26 new datasets and–as sanity check–over the 26 back-translations to English. Results on the back-translated data are consistent with the ones on the original English CrossRE, indicating high quality of the translation and the resulting dataset.

Relation Extraction (RE) remains a challenging task, especially when considering realistic out-of-domain evaluations. One of the main reasons for this is the limited training size of current RE datasets: obtaining high-quality (manually annotated) data is extremely expensive and cannot realistically be repeated for each new domain. An intermediate training step on data from related tasks has shown to be beneficial across many NLP tasks. However, this setup still requires supplementary annotated data, which is often not available. In this paper, we investigate intermediate pre-training specifically for RE. We exploit the affinity between syntactic structure and semantic RE, and identify the syntactic relations which are closely related to RE by being on the shortest dependency path between two entities. We then take advantage of the high accuracy of current syntactic parsers in order to automatically obtain large amounts of low-cost pre-training data. By pre-training our RE model on the relevant syntactic relations, we are able to outperform the baseline in five out of six cross-domain setups, without any additional annotated data.

With the increase in availability of large pre-trained language models (LMs) in Natural Language Processing (NLP), it becomes critical to assess their fit for a specific target task a priori—as fine-tuning the entire space of available LMs is computationally prohibitive and unsustainable. However, encoder transferability estimation has received little to no attention in NLP. In this paper, we propose to generate quantitative evidence to predict which LM, out of a pool of models, will perform best on a target task without having to fine-tune all candidates. We provide a comprehensive study on LM ranking for 10 NLP tasks spanning the two fundamental problem types of classification and structured prediction. We adopt the state-of-the-art Logarithm of Maximum Evidence (LogME) measure from Computer Vision (CV) and find that it positively correlates with final LM performance in 94% of the setups. In the first study of its kind, we further compare transferability measures with the de facto standard of human practitioner ranking, finding that evidence from quantitative metrics is more robust than pure intuition and can help identify unexpected LM candidates.

Over the last five years, research on Relation Extraction (RE) witnessed extensive progress with many new dataset releases. At the same time, setup clarity has decreased, contributing to increased difficulty of reliable empirical evaluation (Taillé et al., 2020). In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of RE datasets, and revisit the task definition and its adoption by the community. We find that cross-dataset and cross-domain setups are particularly lacking. We present an empirical study on scientific Relation Classification across two datasets. Despite large data overlap, our analysis reveals substantial discrepancies in annotation. Annotation discrepancies strongly impact Relation Classification performance, explaining large drops in cross-dataset evaluations. Variation within further sub-domains exists but impacts Relation Classification only to limited degrees. Overall, our study calls for more rigour in reporting setups in RE and evaluation across multiple test sets.

The field of Deep Learning (DL) has undergone explosive growth during the last decade, with a substantial impact on Natural Language Processing (NLP) as well. Yet, compared to more established disciplines, a lack of common experimental standards remains an open challenge to the field at large. Starting from fundamental scientific principles, we distill ongoing discussions on experimental standards in NLP into a single, widely-applicable methodology. Following these best practices is crucial to strengthen experimental evidence, improve reproducibility and enable scientific progress. These standards are further collected in a public repository to help them transparently adapt to future needs.

Relation Extraction (RE) has attracted increasing attention, but current RE evaluation is limited to in-domain evaluation setups. Little is known on how well a RE system fares in challenging, but realistic out-of-distribution evaluation setups. To address this gap, we propose CrossRE, a new, freely-available cross-domain benchmark for RE, which comprises six distinct text domains and includes multi-label annotations. An additional innovation is that we release meta-data collected during annotation, to include explanations and flags of difficult instances. We provide an empirical evaluation with a state-of-the-art model for relation classification. As the meta-data enables us to shed new light on the state-of-the-art model, we provide a comprehensive analysis on the impact of difficult cases and find correlations between model and human annotations. Overall, our empirical investigation highlights the difficulty of cross-domain RE. We release our dataset, to spur more research in this direction.

As a contribution to personality detection in languages other than English, we rely on distant supervision to create Personal-ITY, a novel corpus of YouTube comments in Italian, where authors are labelled with personality traits. The traits are derived from one of the mainstream personality theories in psychology research, named MBTI. Using personality prediction experiments, we (i) study the task of personality prediction in itself on our corpus as well as on TWISTY, a Twitter dataset also annotated with MBTI labels; (ii) carry out an extensive, in-depth analysis of the features used by the classifier, and view them specifically under the light of the original theory that we used to create the corpus in the first place. We observe that no single model is best at personality detection, and that while some traits are easier than others to detect, and also to match back to theory, for other, less frequent traits the picture is much more blurred.