Ross Kristensen-Mclachlan

Also published as: Ross Kristensen-McLachlan


2024

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A New Benchmark for Kalaallisut-Danish Neural Machine Translation
Ross Kristensen-Mclachlan | Johanne Nedergård
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP 2024)

Kalaallisut, also known as (West) Greenlandic, poses a number of unique challenges to contemporary natural language processing (NLP). In particular, the language has historically lacked benchmarking datasets and robust evaluation of specific NLP tasks, such as neural machine translation (NMT). In this paper, we present a new benchmark dataset for Greenlandic to Danish NMT comprising over 1.2m words of Greenlandic and 2.1m words of parallel Danish translations. We provide initial metrics for models trained on this dataset and conclude by suggesting how these findings can be taken forward to other NLP tasks for the Greenlandic language.

2023

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DanSumT5: Automatic Abstractive Summarization for Danish
Sara Kolding | Katrine Nymann | Ida Hansen | Kenneth Enevoldsen | Ross Kristensen-McLachlan
Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

Automatic abstractive text summarization is a challenging task in the field of natural language processing. This paper presents a model for domain-specific sum marization for Danish news articles, Dan SumT5; an mT5 model fine-tuned on a cleaned subset of the DaNewsroom dataset consisting of abstractive summary-article pairs. The resulting state-of-the-art model is evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively, using ROUGE and BERTScore metrics and human rankings of the summaries. We find that although model refinements increase quantitative and qualitative performance, the model is still prone to factual errors. We discuss the limitations of current evaluation methods for automatic abstractive summarization and underline the need for improved metrics and transparency within the field. We suggest that future work should employ methods for detecting and reducing errors in model output and methods for referenceless evaluation of summaries.