Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Indonesian and Malay are underrepresented in the development of natural language processing (NLP) technologies and available resources are difficult to find. A clear picture of existing work can invigorate and inform how researchers conceptualise worthwhile projects. Using an education sector project to motivate the study, we conducted a wide-ranging overview of Indonesian and Malay human language technologies and corpus work. We charted 657 included studies according to Hirschberg and Manning's 2015 description of NLP, concluding that the field was dominated by exploratory corpus work, machine reading of text gathered from the Internet, and sentiment analysis. In this paper, we identify most published authors and research hubs, and make a number of recommendations to encourage future collaboration and efficiency within NLP in Indonesian and Malay

NusaCrowd: Open Source Initiative for Indonesian NLP Resources

We present NusaCrowd, a collaborative initiative to collect and unify existing resources for Indonesian languages, including opening access to previously non-public resources. Through this initiative, we have brought together 137 datasets and 118 standardized data loaders. The quality of the datasets has been assessed manually and automatically, and their value is demonstrated through multiple experiments. NusaCrowd's data collection enables the creation of the first zero-shot benchmarks for natural language understanding and generation in Indonesian and the local languages of Indonesia. Furthermore, NusaCrowd brings the creation of the first multilingual automatic speech recognition benchmark in Indonesian and the local languages of Indonesia. Our work strives to advance natural language processing (NLP) research for languages that are under-represented despite being widely spoken

VGCN-BERT : augmenting BERT with graph embedding for text classification : application to offensive language detection

Le discours haineux est un problème sérieux sur les média sociaux. Dans ce mémoire, nous étudions le problème de détection automatique du langage haineux sur réseaux sociaux. Nous traitons ce problème comme un problème de classification de textes. La classification de textes a fait un grand progrès ces dernières années grâce aux techniques d’apprentissage profond. En particulier, les modèles utilisant un mécanisme d’attention tel que BERT se sont révélés capables de capturer les informations contextuelles contenues dans une phrase ou un texte. Cependant, leur capacité à saisir l’information globale sur le vocabulaire d’une langue dans une application spécifique est plus limitée. Récemment, un nouveau type de réseau de neurones, appelé Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), émerge. Il intègre les informations des voisins en manipulant un graphique global pour prendre en compte les informations globales, et il a obtenu de bons résultats dans de nombreuses tâches, y compris la classification de textes. Par conséquent, notre motivation dans ce mémoire est de concevoir une méthode qui peut combiner à la fois les avantages du modèle BERT, qui excelle en capturant des informations locales, et le modèle GCN, qui fournit les informations globale du langage. Néanmoins, le GCN traditionnel est un modèle d'apprentissage transductif, qui effectue une opération convolutionnelle sur un graphe composé d'éléments à traiter dans les tâches (c'est-à-dire un graphe de documents) et ne peut pas être appliqué à un nouveau document qui ne fait pas partie du graphe pendant l'entraînement. Dans ce mémoire, nous proposons d'abord un nouveau modèle GCN de vocabulaire (VGCN), qui transforme la convolution au niveau du document du modèle GCN traditionnel en convolution au niveau du mot en utilisant les co-occurrences de mots. En ce faisant, nous transformons le mode d'apprentissage transductif en mode inductif, qui peut être appliqué à un nouveau document. Ensuite, nous proposons le modèle Interactive-VGCN-BERT qui combine notre modèle VGCN avec BERT. Dans ce modèle, les informations locales captées par BERT sont combinées avec les informations globales captées par VGCN. De plus, les informations locales et les informations globales interagissent à travers différentes couches de BERT, ce qui leur permet d'influencer mutuellement et de construire ensemble une représentation finale pour la classification. Via ces interactions, les informations de langue globales peuvent aider à distinguer des mots ambigus ou à comprendre des expressions peu claires, améliorant ainsi les performances des tâches de classification de textes. Pour évaluer l'efficacité de notre modèle Interactive-VGCN-BERT, nous menons des expériences sur plusieurs ensembles de données de différents types -- non seulement sur le langage haineux, mais aussi sur la détection de grammaticalité et les commentaires sur les films. Les résultats expérimentaux montrent que le modèle Interactive-VGCN-BERT surpasse tous les autres modèles tels que Vanilla-VGCN-BERT, BERT, Bi-LSTM, MLP, GCN et ainsi de suite. En particulier, nous observons que VGCN peut effectivement fournir des informations utiles pour aider à comprendre un texte haiteux implicit quand il est intégré avec BERT, ce qui vérifie notre intuition au début de cette étude.Hate speech is a serious problem on social media. In this thesis, we investigate the problem of automatic detection of hate speech on social media. We cast it as a text classification problem. With the development of deep learning, text classification has made great progress in recent years. In particular, models using attention mechanism such as BERT have shown great capability of capturing the local contextual information within a sentence or document. Although local connections between words in the sentence can be captured, their ability of capturing certain application-dependent global information and long-range semantic dependency is limited. Recently, a new type of neural network, called the Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), has attracted much attention. It provides an effective mechanism to take into account the global information via the convolutional operation on a global graph and has achieved good results in many tasks including text classification. In this thesis, we propose a method that can combine both advantages of BERT model, which is excellent at exploiting the local information from a text, and the GCN model, which provides the application-dependent global language information. However, the traditional GCN is a transductive learning model, which performs a convolutional operation on a graph composed of task entities (i.e. documents graph) and cannot be applied directly to a new document. In this thesis, we first propose a novel Vocabulary GCN model (VGCN), which transforms the document-level convolution of the traditional GCN model to word-level convolution using a word graph created from word co-occurrences. In this way, we change the training method of GCN, from the transductive learning mode to the inductive learning mode, that can be applied to new documents. Secondly, we propose an Interactive-VGCN-BERT model that combines our VGCN model with BERT. In this model, local information including dependencies between words in a sentence, can be captured by BERT, while the global information reflecting the relations between words in a language (e.g. related words) can be captured by VGCN. In addition, local information and global information can interact through different layers of BERT, allowing them to influence mutually and to build together a final representation for classification. In so doing, the global language information can help distinguish ambiguous words or understand unclear expressions, thereby improving the performance of text classification tasks. To evaluate the effectiveness of our Interactive-VGCN-BERT model, we conduct experiments on several datasets of different types -- hate language detection, as well as movie review and grammaticality, and compare them with several state-of-the-art baseline models. Experimental results show that our Interactive-VGCN-BERT outperforms all other models such as Vanilla-VGCN-BERT, BERT, Bi-LSTM, MLP, GCN, and so on. In particular, we have found that VGCN can indeed help understand a text when it is integrated with BERT, confirming our intuition to combine the two mechanisms

Natural Language Processing: Emerging Neural Approaches and Applications

This Special Issue highlights the most recent research being carried out in the NLP field to discuss relative open issues, with a particular focus on both emerging approaches for language learning, understanding, production, and grounding interactively or autonomously from data in cognitive and neural systems, as well as on their potential or real applications in different domains

Normalisasi Teks Media Sosial Menggunakan Word2vec, Levenshtein Distance, dan Jaro-Winkler Distance

Sebagian besar pengguna internet di Indonesia menggunakan media sosial untuk mendapatkan pembaruan informasi secara rutin. Namun, frekuensi penggunaan media sosial yang tinggi, tidak sebanding dengan ejaan kalimat tidak baku (informal) yang digunakan dalam mengisi konten media sosial dengan maksud untuk memudahkan komunikasi. Ejaan bahasa yang digunakan tidak hanya mengganggu pengguna media sosial namun juga mempengaruhi pengolahan terhadap data konten media sosial tersebut yang biasa disebut Natural Language Processing. Penelitian sebelumnya mencoba mengajukan konsep word2vec yang terbukti mampu menemukan cara untuk melakukan representasi vektor dari sebuah kata dengan waktu yang relative cepat dan dengan dataset yang cukup besar dan juga terdapat solusi berupa pembenaran/normalisasi teks menggunakan algoritma edit distance/levenshtein dan jaro-winkler distance. Hasil yang dari training model word2vec yang didapatkan adalah model ke-8 dengan hasil akurasi 25%. Selain itu parameter yang sangat menentukan proses training ialah learning algorithm. Untuk pengujian sampel perngoreksian data, akurasi paling baik adalah 79,56% dengan threshold sebesar 70%. ======================================================================== Most internet users in Indonesia use social media to obtain information regularly. However, high frequency of social media usage, is not comparable to non-standard (informal) sentences spelling that used in the social media content to facilitate communication nowadays. Those spelling language not only disrupts social media users but also updating process of social media content data that commonly called Natural Language Processing. Previous research tried to propose word2vec concept which is proved able to find a way to perform vector representation of a word fairly fast with a large enough data sets. And there is also a solution like justification / normalization of the text using long distance editing algorithm/levenshtein and jaro-winkler distance editing algorithms. The result of word2vec training model is the 8th model with 25% accuracy. In addition, the parameters that determine the training process is learning algorithm. For testing of data correction samples, the best accuracy is 79.56% with a threshold of 70%

An Urdu semantic tagger - lexicons, corpora, methods and tools

Extracting and analysing meaning-related information from natural language data has attracted the attention of researchers in various fields, such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), corpus linguistics, data sciences, etc. An important aspect of such automatic information extraction and analysis is the semantic annotation of language data using semantic annotation tool (a.k.a semantic tagger). Generally, different semantic annotation tools have been designed to carry out various levels of semantic annotations, for instance, sentiment analysis, word sense disambiguation, content analysis, semantic role labelling, etc. These semantic annotation tools identify or tag partial core semantic information of language data, moreover, they tend to be applicable only for English and other European languages. A semantic annotation tool that can annotate semantic senses of all lexical units (words) is still desirable for the Urdu language based on USAS (the UCREL Semantic Analysis System) semantic taxonomy, in order to provide comprehensive semantic analysis of Urdu language text. This research work report on the development of an Urdu semantic tagging tool and discuss challenging issues which have been faced in this Ph.D. research work. Since standard NLP pipeline tools are not widely available for Urdu, alongside the Urdu semantic tagger a suite of newly developed tools have been created: sentence tokenizer, word tokenizer and part-of-speech tagger. Results for these proposed tools are as follows: word tokenizer reports $F_1$ of 94.01\%, and accuracy of 97.21\%, sentence tokenizer shows F$_1$ of 92.59\%, and accuracy of 93.15\%, whereas, POS tagger shows an accuracy of 95.14\%. The Urdu semantic tagger incorporates semantic resources (lexicon and corpora) as well as semantic field disambiguation methods. In terms of novelty, the NLP pre-processing tools are developed either using rule-based, statistical, or hybrid techniques. Furthermore, all semantic lexicons have been developed using a novel combination of automatic or semi-automatic approaches: mapping, crowdsourcing, statistical machine translation, GIZA++, word embeddings, and named entity. A large multi-target annotated corpus is also constructed using a semi-automatic approach to test accuracy of the Urdu semantic tagger, proposed corpus is also used to train and test supervised multi-target Machine Learning classifiers. The results show that Random k-labEL Disjoint Pruned Sets and Classifier Chain multi-target classifiers outperform all other classifiers on the proposed corpus with a Hamming Loss of 0.06\% and Accuracy of 0.94\%. The best lexical coverage of 88.59\%, 99.63\%, 96.71\% and 89.63\% are obtained on several test corpora. The developed Urdu semantic tagger shows encouraging precision on the proposed test corpus of 79.47\%

Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial 2018)

Peer reviewe