Amazigh Representation in the UNL Framework: Resource Implementation

AbstractThis paper discusses the first steps undertaken to create necessary linguistic resources to incorporate Amazigh language within the Universal Networking Language (UNL) framework for machine translation purpose. This universal interlanguage allows to any source text to be translated into different other related languages with UNL by converting the meaning of the source text into semantic graph. This encoding is considered as a pivot interlanguage used in translation systems. Thus in this work, we focus on presenting morphological, syntactical and lexical mapping stages needed for building an “Amazigh dictionary” according to the UNL framework and the “UNL-Amazigh Dictionary” that are both taking part in enconversion and deconversion processes

Representation of Universal Quantifier in Bulgarian Language with Universal Networking Language

AbstractThe paper presents interpretation of universal quantifier in Bulgarian language with Universal Networking Language (UNL). It analyzes semantic and linguistic properties of universal quantifier and describes the parts of speech which function as quantifiers. In UNL frameworks they are presented as a lexical database with related grammar and semantic features using idea of synonymic semantic representation. The formal approach presented may be used also to language learning and understanding

Main results of MONDILEX project

Main results of MONDILEX projectThe paper presents the results and recommendations of MONDILEX, a 7FP project that covered six Slavic languages: Bulgarian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, and Ukrainian. The paper summarizes the research undertaken on standardisation and integration of Slavic language resources and on the establishment of a virtual organisation supporting research infrastructure for Slavic lexicography. The results should be useful for an implementation of a research infrastructure in the coming years

New Developments in Tagging Pre-modern Orthodox Slavic Texts

Pre-modern Orthodox Slavic texts pose certain difficulties when it comes to part-of-speech and full morphological tagging. Orthographic and morphological heterogeneity makes it hard to apply resources that rely on normalized data, which is why previous attempts to train part-of-speech (POS) taggers for pre-modern Slavic often apply normalization routines. In the current paper, we further explore the normalization path; at the same time, we use the statistical CRF-tagger MarMoT and a newly developed neural network tagger that cope better with variation than previously applied rule-based or statistical taggers. Furthermore, we conduct transfer experiments to apply Modern Russian resources to pre-modern data. Our experiments show that while transfer experiments could not improve tagging performance significantly, state-of-the-art taggers reach between 90% and more than 95% tagging accuracy and thus approach the tagging accuracy of modern standard languages with rich morphology. Remarkably, these results are achieved without the need for normalization, which makes our research of practical relevance to the Paleoslavistic community.Peer reviewe

Cappadocian kinship

Cappadocian kinship systems are very interesting from a sociolinguistic and anthropological perspective because of the mixture of inherited Greek and borrowed Turkish kinship terms. Precisely because the number of Turkish kinship terms differs from one variety to another, it is necessary to talk about Cappadocian kinship systems in the plural rather than about the Cappadocian kinship system in the singular. Although reference will be made to other Cappadocian varieties, this paper will focus on the kinship systems of Mišotika and Aksenitika, the two Central Cappadocian dialects still spoken today in several communities in Greece. Particular attention will be given to the use of borrowed Turkish kinship terms, which sometimes seem to co-exist together with their inherited Greek counterparts, e.g. mána vs. néne ‘mother’, ailfó/aelfó vs. γardáš ‘brother’ etc. In the final part of the paper some kinship terms with obscure or hitherto unknown etymology will be discussed, e.g. káka ‘grandmother’, ižá ‘aunt’, lúva ‘uncle (father’s brother)’ etc

Paradigms regained

The volume discusses the breadth of applications for an extended notion of paradigm. Paradigms in this sense are not only tools of morphological description but constitute the inherent structure of grammar. Grammatical paradigms are structural sets forming holistic, semiotic structures with an informational value of their own. We argue that as such, paradigms are a part of speaker knowledge and provide necessary structuring for grammaticalization processes. The papers discuss theoretical as well as conceptual questions and explore different domains of grammatical phenomena, ranging from grammaticalization, morphology, and cognitive semantics to modality, aiming to illustrate what the concept of grammatical paradigms can and cannot (yet) explain

Theoretical and empirical arguments for the reassessment of the notion of paradigm

The volume discusses the breadth of applications for an extended notion of paradigm. Paradigms in this sense are not only tools of morphological description but constitute the inherent structure of grammar. Grammatical paradigms are structural sets forming holistic, semiotic structures with an informational value of their own. We argue that as such, paradigms are a part of speaker knowledge and provide necessary structuring for grammaticalization processes. The papers discuss theoretical as well as conceptual questions and explore different domains of grammatical phenomena, ranging from grammaticalization, morphology, and cognitive semantics to modality, aiming to illustrate what the concept of grammatical paradigms can and cannot (yet) explain

Type B Reflexivization as an Unambiguous Testbed for Multilingual Multi-Task Gender Bias

The one-sided focus on English in previous studies of gender bias in NLP misses out on opportunities in other languages: English challenge datasets such as GAP and WinoGender highlight model preferences that are "hallucinatory", e.g., disambiguating gender-ambiguous occurrences of 'doctor' as male doctors. We show that for languages with type B reflexivization, e.g., Swedish and Russian, we can construct multi-task challenge datasets for detecting gender bias that lead to unambiguously wrong model predictions: In these languages, the direct translation of 'the doctor removed his mask' is not ambiguous between a coreferential reading and a disjoint reading. Instead, the coreferential reading requires a non-gendered pronoun, and the gendered, possessive pronouns are anti-reflexive. We present a multilingual, multi-task challenge dataset, which spans four languages and four NLP tasks and focuses only on this phenomenon. We find evidence for gender bias across all task-language combinations and correlate model bias with national labor market statistics.Comment: To appear in EMNLP 202