Conference – Ixa Group. Language Technology.

Five papers accepted at 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

ITZIAR GONZALEZ DIOS — Tue, 05 May 2020 07:21:01 +0000

The members of the Ixa group and their collaborators will present five papers at 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). ACL is one of the most important conferences on Natural Language Processing. It was to be held in July in Seattle, but this year it will be online.

Following, we present the accepted papers:

– Selecting Backtranslated Data from Multiple Sources for improved Neural Machine Translation (Xabier Soto, Dimitar Shterionov, Alberto Poncelas, Andy Way): We analyse the impact that data backtranslated with diverse systems has on eu-es and de-en clinical domain NMT, and employ data selection (DS) to optimise the synthetic corpus. We further rescore the output of DS by considering the quality of the MT systems used for backtranslation and lexical diversity of the resulting corpora.

– On the Cross-lingual Transferability of Monolingual Representations (Mikel Artetxe, Sebastian Ruder, Dani Yogatama): We challenge common beliefs of why multilingual BERT works by showing that a monolingual BERT model can also be transferred to new languages at the lexical level.

– A Call for More Rigor in Unsupervised Cross-lingual Learning (Mikel Artetxe, Sebastian Ruder, Dani Yogatama, Gorka Labaka, Eneko Agirre): In this position paper, we review motivations, definition, approaches and methodology for unsupervised cross-lingual learning and call for a more rigorous position in each of them.

– DoQA – Accessing Domain-Specific FAQs via Conversational QA (Jon Ander Campos, Arantxa Otegi, Aitor Soroa, Jan Deriu, Mark Cieliebak, Eneko Agirre): We present DoQA, a dataset for accessing FAQs via conversational Question Answering, showing that it is possible to build high quality conversational QA systems for accessing FAQs without in-domain training data.

– A Methodology for Creating Question Answering Corpora Using Inverse Data Annotation (Jan Deriu, Katsiaryna Mlynchyk, Philippe Schläpfer, Alvaro Rodrigo, Dirk von Grünigen, Nicolas Kaiser, Kurt Stockinger, Eneko Agirre, Mark Cieliebak): We introduce a novel methodology to efficiently construct a corpus for question answering over structured data, with threefold manual annotation speed gains compared to previous schemes such as Spider. Our method also produces fine-grained alignment of query tokens to parsing operations. We train a state-of-the-art semantic parsing model on our data and show that our corpus is a challenging dataset and that the token alignment can be leveraged to increase the performance significantly.

Congratulations to all the authors!

European Parliament endorses the report on Language Equality in the Digital Age (2018-09-11)

Kepa Sarasola — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 16:12:26 +0000

This week, the report on Language Equality in the Digital Age that was presented by Jill Evans MEP of Wales was overwhelmingly endorsed by the European Parliament with 592 MEPs voting in favour, and with only 45 against and 44 abstentions. Find here a link to a press release about the vote: https://www.greens-efa.eu/en/article/press/victory-for-language-equality-in-the-european-parliament/

CONGRATULATIONS!

https://youtu.be/MqRBloVr5N4

The report endorsed by EuroParl

It is not a law, but it is a declaration made by the European Parliament, which can be a guiding reference for all countries. Today, as until now there were no laws or declarations of the European Parliament to protect the low resourced languages, everything remains in the hands of the local legislation of each country, which could without problems ignore these languages. It is not a law, but this Europarl report is a step forward.

Jill Evans MEP said:

“I am pleased that the European Parliament agrees with my view that action needs to be taken to address the digital gap between European languages.
“European citizens must be able to access and use the digital world in their own languages, including in minority languages. This will require investment and leadership at the EU level.
“This is a huge opportunity for the EU to demonstrate a real commitment to language equality, for the speakers of all of Europe’s languages, including Welsh.”

The report calls on the EU to:

improve the institutional frameworks for language technology policies,
create new research policies to increase the use of language technology in Europe,
use education policies in order to secure the future of language equality in the digital age,
increase the support for both private companies and public bodies to make better use of language technologies.

Last January, Maite Melero representing Catalan, Delith Prys representing Welsh, and Iñaki Irazabalbeitia and Kepa Sarasola representing Basque participated in the creation of the first draft of the report.

A conference with the same title Language equality in the digital age will be held on september 27th in the European Parliament to show to the MEPs the opportunities this technology is offering to European languages. Jill Evans, Maite Melero, Delith Prys and our colleague Montse Maritxalar from Ixa Group are going to participate. (See here the schedule)

Presentation: Research groups in the Faculty of Informatics (2017-10-10, 10:00-11:10)

Kepa Sarasola — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 12:49:57 +0000

Tomorrow morning the research groups in the Faculty of Informatics will present their work to the students.

Date: Tuesday, October 10
Time: 10:05-11:10
Where: Ada-Lovelace room
Audience: Students of 3rd & 4th levels
Subject: Presentation of research subjects and groups in the Faculty.
IXA Group’s collaboration with students: job opportunities for undergraduate students, scholarships…

Research groups in the Faculty of Informatics

Best paper award in SEPLN2017

Kepa Sarasola — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 11:34:35 +0000

Last week, our colleagues Begoña Altuna, María Jesús Aranzabe, and Arantza Diaz de Ilarraza were awarded in Murcia with the best paper award in the 33rd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE SPANISH SOCIETY FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING (SEPLN 2017)

CONGRATULATIONS!

The paper is available here: EusHeidelTime: Time Expression Extraction and Normalisation for Basque

Temporal information helps to organise the information in texts as it places the actions and states in time. It is therefore very important to identify the time points and intervals in the text, as well as what times they refer to. We developed EusHeidelTime for Basque time expression extraction and normalisation. For it, we analysed time expressions in Basque, we created the rules and resources for the tool and we built corpora for development and testing. We finally ran an experiment to evaluate EusHeidelTime’s performance. We achieved satisfactory results and we proved the adaptability of the tool for morphologically rich languages.

German Rigau keynote speaker in the JRC Conference TEXT MINING IN POLICY MAKING

Kepa Sarasola — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 19:10:19 +0000

IXA Group member German Rigau participated as keynote speaker last Monday in the JRC Conference “TEXT MINING IN POLICY MAKING” organised by the European Commission in Brussels to present the new JRC competence centre on text mining. This new JRC has been organized with a showcase of various success stories of JRC applied text mining solutions. German Rigau addressed challenges related to textual data.

“This conference was an opportunity for policy makers from EU institutions to understand better the benefits of text mining in policy making processes, and pave the way forward for a better use of these solutions in policy making.

Information needed by policy makers is increasingly embedded in large amounts of textual data available on the Internet, e.g. traditional or social media, or in large public or proprietary document sets.

Text mining, the automatic extraction of information from text, offers policy makers timely access to important information which would otherwise be inaccessible. Indeed, the sheer volume of data makes it nearly impossible to extract the available information manually.”

Our papers in Japan (COLING 2016)

Kepa Sarasola — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 14:12:18 +0000

Those are our six papers in COLING 2016, taking place in Osaka, Japan, on Dec 11 2016.

Machine Learning for Metrical Analysis of English Poetry
Manex Agirrezabal, Inaki Alegria and Mans Hulden
Using Linguistic Data for English and Spanish Verb-Noun Combination Identification
Uxoa Iñurrieta, Arantza Díaz de Ilarraza, Gorka Labaka, Kepa Sarasola, Itziar Aduriz and John Carroll
Improving Translation Selection with Supersenses
Haiqing Tang, Deyi Xiong, Oier Lopez de Lacalle and Eneko Agirre
The impact of simple feature engineering in multilingual medical NER
Rebecka Weegar, Arantza Casillas, Arantza Diaz de Ilarraza, Maite Oronoz, Alicia Pérez and Koldo Gojenola
Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop
A Preliminary Study of Statistically Predictive Syntactic Complexity Features and Manual Simplifications in Basque
Itziar Gonzalez-Dios, María Jesús Aranzabe and Arantza Díaz de Ilarraza
Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC)
Comparing two Basic Methods for Discriminating Between Similar Languages and Varieties

Pablo Gamallo, José Ramom Pichel, Iñnaki Alegria and Manex Agirrezabal

Third Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects

We have 14 papers at LREC

Kepa Sarasola — Tue, 24 May 2016 15:40:15 +0000

This week we present 14 papers/posters in LREC Conference (Language Resources and Evaluation Conference).

Three of them written in collaboration with Elhuyar.

The links for download of our papers:

14th International Conference on Parsing Technologies in Bilbao

Kepa Sarasola — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 11:00:26 +0000

14th International Conference on Parsing Technologies (IWPT 2015)
Wednesday, July 22, to Friday, July 24, 2015
University of the Basque Country (Bilbao)
FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS
(May 8, 2015: Deadline for paper submission)

IXA Group is the local organizer of IWPT 2015 and Koldo Gojenola is its Organizing Chair. The ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language Parsing (SIGPARSE) invites submissions to its biennual conference on parsing technologies. IWPT 2015 will be the 14th conference in a series that started in 1989. The conference will be held between July 22 and July 24, 2015, in the city center of beautiful Bilbao (Spain), hosted by the University of the Basque Country. There will be two invited keynotes:

Large-scale Semantic Parsing as Graph Matching. Mirella Lapata, University of Edinburgh, UK
Towards Universal Syntactic Processing of Natural Language. Slav Petrov, Google, USA

Interleaved with the main conference, there will be the 6th Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages (SPMRL).