In this paper, we describe M-FleNS, a multilingual flexible plug-and-play architecture designed to accommodate neural and symbolic modules, and initially instantiated with rule-based modules. We focus on using M-FleNS for the specific purpose of building new resources for Irish, a language currently under-represented in the NLP landscape. We present the general M-FleNS framework and how we use it to build an Irish Natural Language Generation system for verbalising part of the DBpedia ontology and building a multilayered dataset with rich linguistic annotations. Via automatic and human assessments of the output texts we show that with very limited resources we are able to create a system that reaches high levels of fluency and semantic accuracy, while having very low energy and memory requirements.

In this paper, we describe the submission of Dublin City University (DCU) and Trinity College Dublin (TCD) for the WebNLG 2023 shared task. We present a fully rule-based pipeline for generating Irish texts from DBpedia triple sets which comprises 4 components: triple lexicalisation, generation of noninflected Irish text, inflection generation, and post-processing.

Modern Irish is a minority language lacking sufficient computational resources for the task of accurate automatic syntactic parsing of user-generated content such as tweets. Although language technology for the Irish language has been developing in recent years, these tools tend to perform poorly on user-generated content. As with other languages, the linguistic style observed in Irish tweets differs, in terms of orthography, lexicon, and syntax, from that of standard texts more commonly used for the development of language models and parsers. We release the first Universal Dependencies treebank of Irish tweets, facilitating natural language processing of user-generated content in Irish. In this paper, we explore the differences between Irish tweets and standard Irish text, and the challenges associated with dependency parsing of Irish tweets. We describe our bootstrapping method of treebank development and report on preliminary parsing experiments.

The BERT family of neural language models have become highly popular due to their ability to provide sequences of text with rich context-sensitive token encodings which are able to generalise well to many NLP tasks. We introduce gaBERT, a monolingual BERT model for the Irish language. We compare our gaBERT model to multilingual BERT and the monolingual Irish WikiBERT, and we show that gaBERT provides better representations for a downstream parsing task. We also show how different filtering criteria, vocabulary size and the choice of subword tokenisation model affect downstream performance. We compare the results of fine-tuning a gaBERT model with an mBERT model for the task of identifying verbal multiword expressions, and show that the fine-tuned gaBERT model also performs better at this task. We release gaBERT and related code to the community.

The paper presents a discussion on the main linguistic phenomena of user-generated texts found in web and social media, and proposes a set of annotation guidelines for their treatment within the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework. Given on the one hand the increasing number of treebanks featuring user-generated content, and its somewhat inconsistent treatment in these resources on the other, the aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to provide a short, though comprehensive, overview of such treebanks - based on available literature - along with their main features and a comparative analysis of their annotation criteria, and (2) to propose a set of tentative UD-based annotation guidelines, to promote consistent treatment of the particular phenomena found in these types of texts. The main goal of this paper is to provide a common framework for those teams interested in developing similar resources in UD, thus enabling cross-linguistic consistency, which is a principle that has always been in the spirit of UD.