Bayesian phylolinguistics infers the internal structure and the time-depth of the Turkic language family

Despite more than 200 years of research, the internal structure of the Turkic language family remains subject to debate. Classifications of Turkic so far are based on both classical historical–comparative linguistic and distance-based quantitative approaches. Although these studies yield an internal structure of the Turkic family, they cannot give us an understanding of the statistical robustness of the proposed branches, nor are they capable of reliably inferring absolute divergence dates, without assuming constant rates of change. Here we use computational Bayesian phylogenetic methods to build a phylogeny of the Turkic languages, express the reliability of the proposed branches in terms of probability, and estimate the time-depth of the family within credibility intervals. To this end, we collect a new dataset of 254 basic vocabulary items for thirty-two Turkic language varieties based on the recently introduced Leipzig–Jakarta list. Our application of Bayesian phylogenetic inference on lexical data of the Turkic languages is unprecedented. The resulting phylogenetic tree supports a binary structure for Turkic and replicates most of the conventional sub-branches in the Common Turkic branch. We calculate the robustness of the inferences for subgroups and individual languages whose position in the tree seems to be debatable. We infer the time-depth of the Turkic family at around 2100 years before present, thus providing a reliable quantitative basis for previous estimates based on classical historical linguistics and lexicostatistics

Using Graph Mining Method in Analyzing Turkish Loanwords Derived from Arabic Language

الكلمات المستعارة هي الكلمات التي يتم نقلها من لغة إلى أخرى وتصبح جزءًا أساسيًا من لغة الاستعارة. جاءت الكلمات المستعارة من لغة المصدر إلى لغة المستلم لأسباب عديدة. على سبيل المثال لا الحصر الغزوات أو المهن أو التجارة. ان ايجاد هذه الكلمات المستعارة بين اللغات عملية صعبة ومعقدة نظرا لانه لايوجد معايير ثابتة لتحويل الكلمات بين اللغات وبالتالي تكون الدقة قليلة. في هذا البحث تم تحسين دقة ايجاد الكلمات التركية المستعارة من اللغة العربية. وكذلك سوف يساهم هذا البحث بايجاد كل الكلمات المستعارة باستخدام اي مجموعة من الحرووف سواءا كانت مرتبة او غير مرتبة ابجديا. عالج هذا البحث مشكلة التشويه في النطق وقام بايجاد الحلول للحروف المفقودة في اللغة التركية والموجودة في اللغة العربية. تقدم هذه الورقة طريقة مقترحة لتحديد الكلمات التركية المستعارة من اللغة العربية اعتمادًا على تقنيات التنقيب في المخططات والتي استخدمت لاول مرة لهذا الغرض. فقد تم حل مشاكل الاختلاف في الحروف بين اللغتين باستخدام لغة مرجعية وهي اللغة الانكليزية لتوحيد نمط وشكل الحروف. لقد تم اختبار هذا النظام المقترح باستخدام 1256 كلمة. النتائج التي تم الحصول عليها تبين ان الدقة في تحديد الكلمات المستعارة كانت 0,99 والتي تعتبر قيمة عالية جدا. كل هذه المساهمات تؤدي إلى تقليل الوقت والجهد لتحديد الكلمات المستعارة بطريقة فعالة ودقيقة. كما أن الباحث لا يحتاج إلى معرفة باللغة المستعيرة واللغة المأخوذ منها. علاوة على ذلك ، يمكن تعميم هذه الطريقة على أي لغتين باستخدام نفس الخطوات المتبعة في الحصول على الكلمات المستعارة التركية من العربية.Loanwords are the words transferred from one language to another, which become essential part of the borrowing language. The loanwords have come from the source language to the recipient language because of many reasons. Detecting these loanwords is complicated task due to that there are no standard specifications for transferring words between languages and hence low accuracy. This work tries to enhance this accuracy of detecting loanwords between Turkish and Arabic language as a case study. In this paper, the proposed system contributes to find all possible loanwords using any set of characters either alphabetically or randomly arranged. Then, it processes the distortion in the pronunciation, and solves the problem of the missing letters in Turkish language relative to Arabic language. A graph mining technique was introduced, for identifying the Turkish loanwords from Arabic language, which is used for the first time for this purpose. Also, the problem of letters differences, in the two languages, is solved by using a reference language (English) to unify the style of writing. The proposed system was tested using 1256 words that manually annotated. The obtained results showed that the f-measure is 0.99 which is high value for such system. Also, all these contributions lead to decrease time and effort to identify the loanwords in efficient and accurate way. Moreover, researchers do not need to have knowledge in the recipient and the source languages. In addition, this method can be generalized to any two languages using the same steps followed in obtaining Turkish loanwords from Arabic

Graph embedding approach to analyze sentiments on cryptocurrency

This paper presents a comprehensive exploration of graph embedding techniques for sentiment analysis. The objective of this study is to enhance the accuracy of sentiment analysis models by leveraging the rich contextual relationships between words in text data. We investigate the application of graph embedding in the context of sentiment analysis, focusing on it is effectiveness in capturing the semantic and syntactic information of text. By representing text as a graph and employing graph embedding techniques, we aim to extract meaningful insights and improve the performance of sentiment analysis models. To achieve our goal, we conduct a thorough comparison of graph embedding with traditional word embedding and simple embedding layers. Our experiments demonstrate that the graph embedding model outperforms these conventional models in terms of accuracy, highlighting it is potential for sentiment analysis tasks. Furthermore, we address two limitations of graph embedding techniques: handling out-of-vocabulary words and incorporating sentiment shift over time. The findings of this study emphasize the significance of graph embedding techniques in sentiment analysis, offering valuable insights into sentiment analysis within various domains. The results suggest that graph embedding can capture intricate relationships between words, enabling a more nuanced understanding of the sentiment expressed in text data

"Go eat a bat, {Chang!}": {A}n Early Look on the Emergence of Sinophobic Behavior on {Web} Communities in the Face of {COVID}-19

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lives in unprecedented ways. In the face of the projected catastrophic consequences, many countries have enacted social distancing measures in an attempt to limit the spread of the virus. Under these conditions, the Web has become an indispensable medium for information acquisition, communication, and entertainment. At the same time, unfortunately, the Web is being exploited for the dissemination of potentially harmful and disturbing content, such as the spread of conspiracy theories and hateful speech towards specific ethnic groups, in particular towards Chinese people since COVID-19 is believed to have originated from China. In this paper, we make a first attempt to study the emergence of Sinophobic behavior on the Web during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. We collect two large-scale datasets from Twitter and 4chan's Politically Incorrect board (/pol/) over a time period of approximately five months and analyze them to investigate whether there is a rise or important differences with regard to the dissemination of Sinophobic content. We find that COVID-19 indeed drives the rise of Sinophobia on the Web and that the dissemination of Sinophobic content is a cross-platform phenomenon: it exists on fringe Web communities like \dspol, and to a lesser extent on mainstream ones like Twitter. Also, using word embeddings over time, we characterize the evolution and emergence of new Sinophobic slurs on both Twitter and /pol/. Finally, we find interesting differences in the context in which words related to Chinese people are used on the Web before and after the COVID-19 outbreak: on Twitter we observe a shift towards blaming China for the situation, while on /pol/ we find a shift towards using more (and new) Sinophobic slurs

Transfer Learning in Natural Language Processing through Interactive Feedback

Machine learning models cannot easily adapt to new domains and applications. This drawback becomes detrimental for natural language processing (NLP) because language is perpetually changing. Across disciplines and languages, there are noticeable differences in content, grammar, and vocabulary. To overcome these shifts, recent NLP breakthroughs focus on transfer learning. Through clever optimization and engineering, a model can successfully adapt to a new domain or task. However, these modifications are still computationally inefficient or resource-intensive. Compared to machines, humans are more capable at generalizing knowledge across different situations, especially in low-resource ones. Therefore, the research on transfer learning should carefully consider how the user interacts with the model. The goal of this dissertation is to investigate “human-in-the-loop” approaches for transfer learning in NLP. First, we design annotation frameworks for inductive transfer learning, which is the transfer of models across tasks. We create an interactive topic modeling system for users to find topics useful for classifying documents in multiple languages. The user-constructed topic model bridges improves classification accuracy and bridges cross-lingual gaps in knowledge. Next, we look at popular language models, like BERT, that can be applied to various tasks. While these models are useful, they still require a large amount of labeled data to learn a new task. To reduce labeling, we develop an active learning strategy which samples documents that surprise the language model. Users only need to annotate a small subset of these unexpected documents to adapt the language model for text classification. Then, we transition to user interaction in transductive transfer learning, which is the transfer of models across domains. We focus our efforts on low-resource languages to develop an interactive system for word embeddings. In this approach, the feedback from bilingual speakers refines the cross-lingual embedding space for classification tasks. Subsequently, we look at domain shift for tasks beyond text classification. Coreference resolution is fundamental for NLP applications, like question-answering and dialogue, but the models are typically trained and evaluated on one dataset. We use active learning to find spans of text in the new domain for users to label. Furthermore, we provide important insights on annotating spans for domain adaptation. Finally, we summarize the contributions of each chapter. We focus on aspects like the scope of applications and model complexity. We conclude with a discussion of future directions. Researchers may extend the ideas in our thesis to topics like user-centric active learning and proactive learning

Crosslingual Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Languages Based on Multilingual Colexification Graphs

In comparative linguistics, colexification refers to the phenomenon of a lexical form conveying two or more distinct meanings. Existing work on colexification patterns relies on annotated word lists, limiting scalability and usefulness in NLP. In contrast, we identify colexification patterns of more than 2,000 concepts across 1,335 languages directly from an unannotated parallel corpus. We then propose simple and effective methods to build multilingual graphs from the colexification patterns: ColexNet and ColexNet+. ColexNet's nodes are concepts and its edges are colexifications. In ColexNet+, concept nodes are additionally linked through intermediate nodes, each representing an ngram in one of 1,334 languages. We use ColexNet+ to train \overrightarrow{\mbox{ColexNet+}}, high-quality multilingual embeddings that are well-suited for transfer learning. In our experiments, we first show that ColexNet achieves high recall on CLICS, a dataset of crosslingual colexifications. We then evaluate \overrightarrow{\mbox{ColexNet+}} on roundtrip translation, sentence retrieval and sentence classification and show that our embeddings surpass several transfer learning baselines. This demonstrates the benefits of using colexification as a source of information in multilingual NLP.Comment: EMNLP 2023 Finding

XTREME-UP: A User-Centric Scarce-Data Benchmark for Under-Represented Languages

Data scarcity is a crucial issue for the development of highly multilingual NLP systems. Yet for many under-represented languages (ULs) -- languages for which NLP re-search is particularly far behind in meeting user needs -- it is feasible to annotate small amounts of data. Motivated by this, we propose XTREME-UP, a benchmark defined by: its focus on the scarce-data scenario rather than zero-shot; its focus on user-centric tasks -- tasks with broad adoption by speakers of high-resource languages; and its focus on under-represented languages where this scarce-data scenario tends to be most realistic. XTREME-UP evaluates the capabilities of language models across 88 under-represented languages over 9 key user-centric technologies including ASR, OCR, MT, and information access tasks that are of general utility. We create new datasets for OCR, autocomplete, semantic parsing, and transliteration, and build on and refine existing datasets for other tasks. XTREME-UP provides methodology for evaluating many modeling scenarios including text-only, multi-modal (vision, audio, and text),supervised parameter tuning, and in-context learning. We evaluate commonly used models on the benchmark. We release all code and scripts to train and evaluate model