Sina Ahmadi


2024

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CODET: A Benchmark for Contrastive Dialectal Evaluation of Machine Translation
Md Mahfuz Ibn Alam | Sina Ahmadi | Antonios Anastasopoulos
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024

Neural machine translation (NMT) systems exhibit limited robustness in handling source-side linguistic variations. Their performance tends to degrade when faced with even slight deviations in language usage, such as different domains or variations introduced by second-language speakers. It is intuitive to extend this observation to encompass dialectal variations as well, but the work allowing the community to evaluate MT systems on this dimension is limited. To alleviate this issue, we compile and release CODET, a contrastive dialectal benchmark encompassing 891 different variations from twelve different languages. We also quantitatively demonstrate the challenges large MT models face in effectively translating dialectal variants. All the data and code have been released.

2023

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Approaches to Corpus Creation for Low-Resource Language Technology: the Case of Southern Kurdish and Laki
Sina Ahmadi | Zahra Azin | Sara Belelli | Antonios Anastasopoulos
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP Applications to Field Linguistics

One of the major challenges that under-represented and endangered language communities face in language technology is the lack or paucity of language data. This is also the case of the Southern varieties of the Kurdish and Laki languages for which very limited resources are available with insubstantial progress in tools. To tackle this, we provide a few approaches that rely on the content of local news websites, a local radio station that broadcasts content in Southern Kurdish and fieldwork for Laki. In this paper, we describe some of the challenges of such under-represented languages, particularly in writing and standardization, and also, in retrieving sources of data and retro-digitizing handwritten content to create a corpus for Southern Kurdish and Laki. In addition, we study the task of language identification in light of the other variants of Kurdish and Zaza-Gorani languages.

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Revisiting and Amending Central Kurdish Data on UniMorph 4.0
Sina Ahmadi | Aso Mahmudi
Proceedings of the 20th SIGMORPHON workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

UniMorph–the Universal Morphology project is a collaborative initiative to create and maintain morphological data and organize numerous related tasks for various language processing communities. The morphological data is provided by linguists for over 160 languages in the latest version of UniMorph 4.0. This paper sheds light on the Central Kurdish data on UniMorph 4.0 by analyzing the existing data, its fallacies, and systematic morphological errors. It also presents an approach to creating more reliable morphological data by considering various specific phenomena in Central Kurdish that have not been addressed previously, such as Izafe and several enclitics.

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PALI: A Language Identification Benchmark for Perso-Arabic Scripts
Sina Ahmadi | Milind Agarwal | Antonios Anastasopoulos
Tenth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial 2023)

The Perso-Arabic scripts are a family of scripts that are widely adopted and used by various linguistic communities around the globe. Identifying various languages using such scripts is crucial to language technologies and challenging in low-resource setups. As such, this paper sheds light on the challenges of detecting languages using Perso-Arabic scripts, especially in bilingual communities where “unconventional” writing is practiced. To address this, we use a set of supervised techniques to classify sentences into their languages. Building on these, we also propose a hierarchical model that targets clusters of languages that are more often confused by the classifiers. Our experiment results indicate the effectiveness of our solutions.

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Script Normalization for Unconventional Writing of Under-Resourced Languages in Bilingual Communities
Sina Ahmadi | Antonios Anastasopoulos
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The wide accessibility of social media has provided linguistically under-represented communities with an extraordinary opportunity to create content in their native languages. This, however, comes with certain challenges in script normalization, particularly where the speakers of a language in a bilingual community rely on another script or orthography to write their native language. This paper addresses the problem of script normalization for several such languages that are mainly written in a Perso-Arabic script. Using synthetic data with various levels of noise and a transformer-based model, we demonstrate that the problem can be effectively remediated. We conduct a small-scale evaluation of real data as well. Our experiments indicate that script normalization is also beneficial to improve the performance of downstream tasks such as machine translation and language identification.

2022

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Cross-Lingual Link Discovery for Under-Resourced Languages
Michael Rosner | Sina Ahmadi | Elena-Simona Apostol | Julia Bosque-Gil | Christian Chiarcos | Milan Dojchinovski | Katerina Gkirtzou | Jorge Gracia | Dagmar Gromann | Chaya Liebeskind | Giedrė Valūnaitė Oleškevičienė | Gilles Sérasset | Ciprian-Octavian Truică
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

In this paper, we provide an overview of current technologies for cross-lingual link discovery, and we discuss challenges, experiences and prospects of their application to under-resourced languages. We rst introduce the goals of cross-lingual linking and associated technologies, and in particular, the role that the Linked Data paradigm (Bizer et al., 2011) applied to language data can play in this context. We de ne under-resourced languages with a speci c focus on languages actively used on the internet, i.e., languages with a digitally versatile speaker community, but limited support in terms of language technology. We argue that languages for which considerable amounts of textual data and (at least) a bilingual word list are available, techniques for cross-lingual linking can be readily applied, and that these enable the implementation of downstream applications for under-resourced languages via the localisation and adaptation of existing technologies and resources.

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CoFiF Plus: A French Financial Narrative Summarisation Corpus
Nadhem Zmandar | Tobias Daudert | Sina Ahmadi | Mahmoud El-Haj | Paul Rayson
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Natural Language Processing is increasingly being applied in the finance and business industry to analyse the text of many different types of financial documents. Given the increasing growth of firms around the world, the volume of financial disclosures and financial texts in different languages and forms is increasing sharply and therefore the study of language technology methods that automatically summarise content has grown rapidly into a major research area. Corpora for financial narrative summarisation exists in English, but there is a significant lack of financial text resources in the French language. To remedy this, we present CoFiF Plus, the first French financial narrative summarisation dataset providing a comprehensive set of financial text written in French. The dataset has been extracted from French financial reports published in PDF file format. It is composed of 1,703 reports from the most capitalised companies in France (Euronext Paris) covering a time frame from 1995 to 2021. This paper describes the collection, annotation and validation of the financial reports and their summaries. It also describes the dataset and gives the results of some baseline summarisers. Our datasets will be openly available upon the acceptance of the paper.

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Resources and Technologies for Indigenous, Endangered and Lesser-resourced Languages in Eurasia within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Atul Kr. Ojha | Sina Ahmadi | Chao-Hong Liu | John P. McCrae
Proceedings of the Workshop on Resources and Technologies for Indigenous, Endangered and Lesser-resourced Languages in Eurasia within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

2021

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Monolingual Word Sense Alignment as a Classification Problem
Sina Ahmadi | John P. McCrae
Proceedings of the 11th Global Wordnet Conference

Words are defined based on their meanings in various ways in different resources. Aligning word senses across monolingual lexicographic resources increases domain coverage and enables integration and incorporation of data. In this paper, we explore the application of classification methods using manually-extracted features along with representation learning techniques in the task of word sense alignment and semantic relationship detection. We demonstrate that the performance of classification methods dramatically varies based on the type of semantic relationships due to the nature of the task but outperforms the previous experiments.

2020

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Towards Machine Translation for the Kurdish Language
Sina Ahmadi | Maraim Masoud
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low Resource Languages

Machine translation is the task of translating texts from one language to another using computers. It has been one of the major tasks in natural language processing and computational linguistics and has been motivating to facilitate human communication. Kurdish, an Indo-European language, has received little attention in this realm due to the language being less-resourced. Therefore, in this paper, we are addressing the main issues in creating a machine translation system for the Kurdish language, with a focus on the Sorani dialect. We describe the available scarce parallel data suitable for training a neural machine translation model for Sorani Kurdish-English translation. We also discuss some of the major challenges in Kurdish language translation and demonstrate how fundamental text processing tasks, such as tokenization, can improve translation performance.

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Proceedings of the 2020 Globalex Workshop on Linked Lexicography
Ilan Kernerman | Simon Krek | John P. McCrae | Jorge Gracia | Sina Ahmadi | Besim Kabashi
Proceedings of the 2020 Globalex Workshop on Linked Lexicography

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Challenges of Word Sense Alignment: Portuguese Language Resources
Ana Salgado | Sina Ahmadi | Alberto Simões | John Philip McCrae | Rute Costa
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics (LDL-2020)

This paper reports on an ongoing task of monolingual word sense alignment in which a comparative study between the Portuguese Academy of Sciences Dictionary and the Dicionário Aberto is carried out in the context of the ELEXIS (European Lexicographic Infrastructure) project. Word sense alignment involves searching for matching senses within dictionary entries of different lexical resources and linking them, which poses significant challenges. The lexicographic criteria are not always entirely consistent within individual dictionaries and even less so across different projects where different options may have been assumed in terms of structure and especially wording techniques of lexicographic glosses. This hinders the task of matching senses. We aim to present our annotation workflow in Portuguese using the Semantic Web technologies. The results obtained are useful for the discussion within the community.

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A Multilingual Evaluation Dataset for Monolingual Word Sense Alignment
Sina Ahmadi | John Philip McCrae | Sanni Nimb | Fahad Khan | Monica Monachini | Bolette Pedersen | Thierry Declerck | Tanja Wissik | Andrea Bellandi | Irene Pisani | Thomas Troelsgård | Sussi Olsen | Simon Krek | Veronika Lipp | Tamás Váradi | László Simon | András Gyorffy | Carole Tiberius | Tanneke Schoonheim | Yifat Ben Moshe | Maya Rudich | Raya Abu Ahmad | Dorielle Lonke | Kira Kovalenko | Margit Langemets | Jelena Kallas | Oksana Dereza | Theodorus Fransen | David Cillessen | David Lindemann | Mikel Alonso | Ana Salgado | José Luis Sancho | Rafael-J. Ureña-Ruiz | Jordi Porta Zamorano | Kiril Simov | Petya Osenova | Zara Kancheva | Ivaylo Radev | Ranka Stanković | Andrej Perdih | Dejan Gabrovsek
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Aligning senses across resources and languages is a challenging task with beneficial applications in the field of natural language processing and electronic lexicography. In this paper, we describe our efforts in manually aligning monolingual dictionaries. The alignment is carried out at sense-level for various resources in 15 languages. Moreover, senses are annotated with possible semantic relationships such as broadness, narrowness, relatedness, and equivalence. In comparison to previous datasets for this task, this dataset covers a wide range of languages and resources and focuses on the more challenging task of linking general-purpose language. We believe that our data will pave the way for further advances in alignment and evaluation of word senses by creating new solutions, particularly those notoriously requiring data such as neural networks. Our resources are publicly available at https://github.com/elexis-eu/MWSA.

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Defying Wikidata: Validation of Terminological Relations in the Web of Data
Patricia Martín-Chozas | Sina Ahmadi | Elena Montiel-Ponsoda
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

In this paper we present an approach to validate terminological data retrieved from open encyclopaedic knowledge bases. This need arises from the enrichment of automatically extracted terms with information from existing resources in theLinguistic Linked Open Data cloud. Specifically, the resource employed for this enrichment is WIKIDATA, since it is one of the biggest knowledge bases freely available within the Semantic Web. During the experiment, we noticed that certain RDF properties in the Knowledge Base did not contain the data they are intended to represent, but a different type of information. In this paper we propose an approach to validate the retrieved data based on four axioms that rely on two linguistic theories: the x-bar theory and the multidimensional theory of terminology. The validation process is supported by a second knowledge base specialised in linguistic data; in this case, CONCEPTNET. In our experiment, we validate terms from the legal domain in four languages: Dutch, English, German and Spanish. The final aim is to generate a set of sound and reliable terminological resources in RDF to contribute to the population of the Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud.

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A Corpus of the Sorani Kurdish Folkloric Lyrics
Sina Ahmadi | Hossein Hassani | Kamaladdin Abedi
Proceedings of the 1st Joint Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) and Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages (CCURL)

Kurdish poetry and prose narratives were historically transmitted orally and less in a written form. Being an essential medium of oral narration and literature, Kurdish lyrics have had a unique attribute in becoming a vital resource for different types of studies, including Digital Humanities, Computational Folkloristics and Computational Linguistics. As an initial study of its kind for the Kurdish language, this paper presents our efforts in transcribing and collecting Kurdish folk lyrics as a corpus that covers various Kurdish musical genres, in particular Beyt, Gorani, Bend, and Heyran. We believe that this corpus contributes to Kurdish language processing in several ways, such as compensation for the lack of a long history of written text by incorporating oral literature, presenting an unexplored realm in Kurdish language processing, and assisting the initiation of Kurdish computational folkloristics. Our corpus contains 49,582 tokens in the Sorani dialect of Kurdish. The corpus is publicly available in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) format for non-commercial use.

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KLPTKurdish Language Processing Toolkit
Sina Ahmadi
Proceedings of Second Workshop for NLP Open Source Software (NLP-OSS)

Despite the recent advances in applying language-independent approaches to various natural language processing tasks thanks to artificial intelligence, some language-specific tools are still essential to process a language in a viable manner. Kurdish language is a less-resourced language with a remarkable diversity in dialects and scripts and lacks basic language processing tools. To address this issue, we introduce a language processing toolkit to handle such a diversity in an efficient way. Our toolkit is composed of fundamental components such as text preprocessing, stemming, tokenization, lemmatization and transliteration and is able to get further extended by future developers. The project is publicly available.

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Building a Corpus for the Zaza–Gorani Language Family
Sina Ahmadi
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects

Thanks to the growth of local communities and various news websites along with the increasing accessibility of the Web, some of the endangered and less-resourced languages have a chance to revive in the information era. Therefore, the Web is considered a huge resource that can be used to extract language corpora which enable researchers to carry out various studies in linguistics and language technology. The Zaza–Gorani language family is a linguistic subgroup of the Northwestern Iranian languages for which there is no significant corpus available. Motivated to create one, in this paper we present our endeavour to collect a corpus in Zazaki and Gorani languages containing over 1.6M and 194k word tokens, respectively. This corpus is publicly available.

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A Tokenization System for the Kurdish Language
Sina Ahmadi
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects

Tokenization is one of the essential and fundamental tasks in natural language processing. Despite the recent advances in applying unsupervised statistical methods for this task, every language with its writing system and orthography represents specific challenges that should be addressed individually. In this paper, as a preliminary study of its kind, we propose an approach for the tokenization of the Sorani and Kurmanji dialects of Kurdish using a lexicon and a morphological analyzer. We demonstrate how the morphological complexity of the language along with the lack of a unified orthography can be efficiently addressed in tokenization. We also develop an annotated dataset for which our approach outperforms the performance of unsupervised methods.

2019

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Developing a Fine-grained Corpus for a Less-resourced Language: the case of Kurdish
Roshna Abdulrahman | Hossein Hassani | Sina Ahmadi
Proceedings of the 2019 Workshop on Widening NLP

Kurdish is a less-resourced language consisting of different dialects written in various scripts. Approximately 30 million people in different countries speak the language. The lack of corpora is one of the main obstacles in Kurdish language processing. In this paper, we present KTC-the Kurdish Textbooks Corpus, which is composed of 31 K-12 textbooks in Sorani dialect. The corpus is normalized and categorized into 12 educational subjects containing 693,800 tokens (110,297 types). Our resource is publicly available for non-commercial use under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

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CoFiF: A Corpus of Financial Reports in French Language
Tobias Daudert | Sina Ahmadi
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing

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NUIG at the FinSBD Task: Sentence Boundary Detection for Noisy Financial PDFs in English and French
Tobias Daudert | Sina Ahmadi
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing