Cross-lingual transfer-learning is widely used in Event Extraction for low-resource languages and involves a Multilingual Language Model that is trained in a source language and applied to the target language. This paper studies whether the typological similarity between source and target languages impacts the performance of cross-lingual transfer, an under-explored topic. We first focus on Basque as the target language, which is an ideal target language because it is typologically different from surrounding languages. Our experiments on three Event Extraction tasks show that the shared linguistic characteristic between source and target languages does have an impact on transfer quality. Further analysis of 72 language pairs reveals that for tasks that involve token classification such as entity and event trigger identification, common writing script and morphological features produce higher quality cross-lingual transfer. In contrast, for tasks involving structural prediction like argument extraction, common word order is the most relevant feature. In addition, we show that when increasing the training size, not all the languages scale in the same way in the cross-lingual setting. To perform the experiments we introduce EusIE, an event extraction dataset for Basque, which follows the Multilingual Event Extraction dataset (MEE). The dataset and code are publicly available.

In this position paper we argue that the classical evaluation on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks using annotated benchmarks is in trouble. The worst kind of data contamination happens when a Large Language Model (LLM) is trained on the test split of a benchmark, and then evaluated in the same benchmark. The extent of the problem is unknown, as it is not straightforward to measure. Contamination causes an overestimation of the performance of a contaminated model in a target benchmark and associated task with respect to their non-contaminated counterparts. The consequences can be very harmful, with wrong scientific conclusions being published while other correct ones are discarded. This position paper defines different levels of data contamination and argues for a community effort, including the development of automatic and semi-automatic measures to detect when data from a benchmark was exposed to a model, and suggestions for flagging papers with conclusions that are compromised by data contamination.

Language Models are the core for almost any Natural Language Processing system nowadays. One of their particularities is their contextualized representations, a game changer feature when a disambiguation between word senses is necessary. In this paper we aim to explore to what extent language models are capable of discerning among senses at inference time. We performed this analysis by prompting commonly used Languages Models such as BERT or RoBERTa to perform the task of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). We leverage the relation between word senses and domains, and cast WSD as a textual entailment problem, where the different hypothesis refer to the domains of the word senses. Our results show that this approach is indeed effective, close to supervised systems.

The current workflow for Information Extraction (IE) analysts involves the definition of the entities/relations of interest and a training corpus with annotated examples. In this demonstration we introduce a new workflow where the analyst directly verbalizes the entities/relations, which are then used by a Textual Entailment model to perform zero-shot IE. We present the design and implementation of a toolkit with a user interface, as well as experiments on four IE tasks that show that the system achieves very good performance at zero-shot learning using only 5–15 minutes per type of a user’s effort. Our demonstration system is open-sourced at https://github.com/BBN-E/ZS4IE. A demonstration video is available at https://vimeo.com/676138340.

Recent work has shown that NLP tasks such as Relation Extraction (RE) can be recasted as a Textual Entailment tasks using verbalizations, with strong performance in zero-shot and few-shot settings thanks to pre-trained entailment models. The fact that relations in current RE datasets are easily verbalized casts doubts on whether entailment would be effective in more complex tasks. In this work we show that entailment is also effective in Event Argument Extraction (EAE), reducing the need of manual annotation to 50% and 20% in ACE and WikiEvents, respectively, while achieving the same performance as with full training. More importantly, we show that recasting EAE as entailment alleviates the dependency on schemas, which has been a roadblock for transferring annotations between domains. Thanks to entailment, the multi-source transfer between ACE and WikiEvents further reduces annotation down to 10% and 5% (respectively) of the full training without transfer. Our analysis shows that key to good results is the use of several entailment datasets to pre-train the entailment model. Similar to previous approaches, our method requires a small amount of effort for manual verbalization: only less than 15 minutes per event argument types is needed; comparable results can be achieved from users of different level of expertise.

Relation extraction systems require large amounts of labeled examples which are costly to annotate. In this work we reformulate relation extraction as an entailment task, with simple, hand-made, verbalizations of relations produced in less than 15 min per relation. The system relies on a pretrained textual entailment engine which is run as-is (no training examples, zero-shot) or further fine-tuned on labeled examples (few-shot or fully trained). In our experiments on TACRED we attain 63% F1 zero-shot, 69% with 16 examples per relation (17% points better than the best supervised system on the same conditions), and only 4 points short to the state-of-the-art (which uses 20 times more training data). We also show that the performance can be improved significantly with larger entailment models, up to 12 points in zero-shot, allowing to report the best results to date on TACRED when fully trained. The analysis shows that our few-shot systems are specially effective when discriminating between relations, and that the performance difference in low data regimes comes mainly from identifying no-relation cases.

Automatic generation of reading comprehension questions is a topic receiving growing interest in the NLP community, but there is currently no consensus on evaluation metrics and many approaches focus on linguistic quality only while ignoring the pedagogic value and appropriateness of questions. This paper overcomes such weaknesses by a new evaluation scheme where questions from the questionnaire are structured in a hierarchical way to avoid confronting human annotators with evaluation measures that do not make sense for a certain question. We show through an annotation study that our scheme can be applied, but that expert annotators with some level of expertise are needed. We also created and evaluated two new evaluation data sets from the biology domain for Basque and German, composed of questions written by people with an educational background, which will be publicly released. Results show that manually generated questions are in general both of higher linguistic as well as pedagogic quality and that among the human generated questions, teacher-generated ones tend to be most useful.

In this paper we present a relation extraction system that given a text extracts pedagogically motivated relation types, as a previous step to obtaining a semantic representation of the text which will make possible to automatically generate questions for reading comprehension. The system maps pedagogically motivated relations with relations from ConceptNet and deploys Distant Supervision for relation extraction. We run a study on a subset of those relationships in order to analyse the viability of our approach. For that, we build a domain-specific relation extraction system and explore two relation extraction models: a state-of-the-art model based on transfer learning and a discrete feature based machine learning model. Experiments show that the neural model obtains better results in terms of F-score and we yield promising results on the subset of relations suitable for pedagogical purposes. We thus consider that distant supervision for relation extraction is a valid approach in our target domain, i.e. biology.

To detect how and when readers are experiencing engagement with a literary work, we bring together empirical literary studies and language technology via focusing on the affective state of absorption. The goal of our resource development is to enable the detection of different levels of reading absorption in millions of user-generated reviews hosted on social reading platforms. We present a corpus of social book reviews in English that we annotated with reading absorption categories. Based on these data, we performed supervised, sentence level, binary classification of the explicit presence vs. absence of the mental state of absorption. We compared the performances of classical machine learners where features comprised sentence representations obtained from a pretrained embedding model (Universal Sentence Encoder) vs. neural classifiers in which sentence embedding vector representations are adapted or fine-tuned while training for the absorption recognition task. We discuss the challenges in creating the labeled data as well as the possibilities for releasing a benchmark corpus.

UKB is an open source collection of programs for performing, among other tasks, Knowledge-Based Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). Since it was released in 2009 it has been often used out-of-the-box in sub-optimal settings. We show that nine years later it is the state-of-the-art on knowledge-based WSD. This case shows the pitfalls of releasing open source NLP software without optimal default settings and precise instructions for reproducibility.

Although it is commonly assumed that word sense disambiguation (WSD) should help to improve lexical choice and improve the quality of machine translation systems, how to successfully integrate word senses into such systems remains an unanswered question. Some successful approaches have involved reformulating either WSD or the word senses it produces, but work on using traditional word senses to improve machine translation have met with limited success. In this paper, we build upon previous work that experimented on including word senses as contextual features in maxent-based translation models. Training on a large, open-domain corpus (Europarl), we demonstrate that this aproach yields significant improvements in machine translation from English to Portuguese.

Selecting appropriate translations for source words with multiple meanings still remains a challenge for statistical machine translation (SMT). One reason for this is that most SMT systems are not good at detecting the proper sense for a polysemic word when it appears in different contexts. In this paper, we adopt a supersense tagging method to annotate source words with coarse-grained ontological concepts. In order to enable the system to choose an appropriate translation for a word or phrase according to the annotated supersense of the word or phrase, we propose two translation models with supersense knowledge: a maximum entropy based model and a supersense embedding model. The effectiveness of our proposed models is validated on a large-scale English-to-Spanish translation task. Results indicate that our method can significantly improve translation quality via correctly conveying the meaning of the source language to the target language.

Digitised Cultural Heritage (CH) items usually have short descriptions and lack rich contextual information. Wikipedia articles, on the contrary, include in-depth descriptions and links to related articles, which motivate the enrichment of CH items with information from Wikipedia. In this paper we explore the feasibility of finding matching articles in Wikipedia for a given Cultural Heritage item. We manually annotated a random sample of items from Europeana, and performed a qualitative and quantitative study of the issues and problems that arise, showing that each kind of CH item is different and needs a nuanced definition of what ``matching article'' means. In addition, we test a well-known wikification (aka entity linking) algorithm on the task. Our results indicate that a substantial number of items can be effectively linked to their corresponding Wikipedia article.