This paper describes Adam Mickiewicz University’s (AMU) solution for the 4th Shared Task on SlavNER. The task involves the identification, categorization, and lemmatization of named entities in Slavic languages. Our approach involved exploring the use of foundation models for these tasks. In particular, we used models based on the popular BERT and T5 model architectures. Additionally, we used external datasets to further improve the quality of our models. Our solution obtained promising results, achieving high metrics scores in both tasks. We describe our approach and the results of our experiments in detail, showing that the method is effective for NER and lemmatization in Slavic languages. Additionally, our models for lemmatization will be available at: https://huggingface.co/amu-cai.

This paper presents Adam Mickiewicz University’s (AMU) submissions to the constrained track of the WMT 2022 General MT Task. We participated in the Ukrainian ↔ Czech translation directions. The systems are a weighted ensemble of four models based on the Transformer (big) architecture. The models use source factors to utilize the information about named entities present in the input. Each of the models in the ensemble was trained using only the data provided by the shared task organizers. A noisy back-translation technique was used to augment the training corpora. One of the models in the ensemble is a document-level model, trained on parallel and synthetic longer sequences. During the sentence-level decoding process, the ensemble generated the n-best list. The n-best list was merged with the n-best list generated by a single document-level model which translated multiple sentences at a time. Finally, existing quality estimation models and minimum Bayes risk decoding were used to rerank the n-best list so that the best hypothesis was chosen according to the COMET evaluation metric. According to the automatic evaluation results, our systems rank first in both translation directions.

We propose a new shared task of semantic retrieval from legal texts, in which a so-called contract discovery is to be performed – where legal clauses are extracted from documents, given a few examples of similar clauses from other legal acts. The task differs substantially from conventional NLI and shared tasks on legal information extraction (e.g., one has to identify text span instead of a single document, page, or paragraph). The specification of the proposed task is followed by an evaluation of multiple solutions within the unified framework proposed for this branch of methods. It is shown that state-of-the-art pretrained encoders fail to provide satisfactory results on the task proposed. In contrast, Language Model-based solutions perform better, especially when unsupervised fine-tuning is applied. Besides the ablation studies, we addressed questions regarding detection accuracy for relevant text fragments depending on the number of examples available. In addition to the dataset and reference results, LMs specialized in the legal domain were made publicly available.