Information Access in a Multilingual World: Transitioning from Research to Real-World Applications

Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) is at a turning point wherein substantial real-world applications are being introduced after fifteen years of research into cross-language information retrieval, question answering, statistical machine translation and named entity recognition. Previous workshops on this topic have focused on research and small- scale applications. The focus of this workshop was on technology transfer from research to applications and on what future research needs to be done which facilitates MLIA in an increasingly connected multilingual world

A Survey on Awesome Korean NLP Datasets

English based datasets are commonly available from Kaggle, GitHub, or recently published papers. Although benchmark tests with English datasets are sufficient to show off the performances of new models and methods, still a researcher need to train and validate the models on Korean based datasets to produce a technology or product, suitable for Korean processing. This paper introduces 15 popular Korean based NLP datasets with summarized details such as volume, license, repositories, and other research results inspired by the datasets. Also, I provide high-resolution instructions with sample or statistics of datasets. The main characteristics of datasets are presented on a single table to provide a rapid summarization of datasets for researchers.Comment: 11 pages, 1 horizontal page for large tabl

Neural Natural Language Generation: A Survey on Multilinguality, Multimodality, Controllability and Learning

Developing artificial learning systems that can understand and generate natural language has been one of the long-standing goals of artificial intelligence. Recent decades have witnessed an impressive progress on both of these problems, giving rise to a new family of approaches. Especially, the advances in deep learning over the past couple of years have led to neural approaches to natural language generation (NLG). These methods combine generative language learning techniques with neural-networks based frameworks. With a wide range of applications in natural language processing, neural NLG (NNLG) is a new and fast growing field of research. In this state-of-the-art report, we investigate the recent developments and applications of NNLG in its full extent from a multidimensional view, covering critical perspectives such as multimodality, multilinguality, controllability and learning strategies. We summarize the fundamental building blocks of NNLG approaches from these aspects and provide detailed reviews of commonly used preprocessing steps and basic neural architectures. This report also focuses on the seminal applications of these NNLG models such as machine translation, description generation, automatic speech recognition, abstractive summarization, text simplification, question answering and generation, and dialogue generation. Finally, we conclude with a thorough discussion of the described frameworks by pointing out some open research directions.This work has been partially supported by the European Commission ICT COST Action “Multi-task, Multilingual, Multi-modal Language Generation” (CA18231). AE was supported by BAGEP 2021 Award of the Science Academy. EE was supported in part by TUBA GEBIP 2018 Award. BP is in in part funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF) grant 9063-00077B. IC has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 838188. EL is partly funded by Generalitat Valenciana and the Spanish Government throught projects PROMETEU/2018/089 and RTI2018-094649-B-I00, respectively. SMI is partly funded by UNIRI project uniri-drustv-18-20. GB is partly supported by the Ministry of Innovation and the National Research, Development and Innovation Office within the framework of the Hungarian Artificial Intelligence National Laboratory Programme. COT is partially funded by the Romanian Ministry of European Investments and Projects through the Competitiveness Operational Program (POC) project “HOLOTRAIN” (grant no. 29/221 ap2/07.04.2020, SMIS code: 129077) and by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) through the project “AWAKEN: content-Aware and netWork-Aware faKE News mitigation” (grant no. 91809005). ESA is partially funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) through the project “Deep-Learning Anomaly Detection for Human and Automated Users Behavior” (grant no. 91809358)

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems

Cross-language Information Retrieval

Two key assumptions shape the usual view of ranked retrieval: (1) that the searcher can choose words for their query that might appear in the documents that they wish to see, and (2) that ranking retrieved documents will suffice because the searcher will be able to recognize those which they wished to find. When the documents to be searched are in a language not known by the searcher, neither assumption is true. In such cases, Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) is needed. This chapter reviews the state of the art for CLIR and outlines some open research questions.Comment: 49 pages, 0 figure

Japanese/English Cross-Language Information Retrieval: Exploration of Query Translation and Transliteration

Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), where queries and documents are in different languages, has of late become one of the major topics within the information retrieval community. This paper proposes a Japanese/English CLIR system, where we combine a query translation and retrieval modules. We currently target the retrieval of technical documents, and therefore the performance of our system is highly dependent on the quality of the translation of technical terms. However, the technical term translation is still problematic in that technical terms are often compound words, and thus new terms are progressively created by combining existing base words. In addition, Japanese often represents loanwords based on its special phonogram. Consequently, existing dictionaries find it difficult to achieve sufficient coverage. To counter the first problem, we produce a Japanese/English dictionary for base words, and translate compound words on a word-by-word basis. We also use a probabilistic method to resolve translation ambiguity. For the second problem, we use a transliteration method, which corresponds words unlisted in the base word dictionary to their phonetic equivalents in the target language. We evaluate our system using a test collection for CLIR, and show that both the compound word translation and transliteration methods improve the system performance

Why Does Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Generation Fail? An Explanation and a Solution

Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is when a multilingual model is trained to perform a task in one language and then is applied to another language. Although the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer approach has achieved success in various classification tasks, its performance on natural language generation tasks falls short in quality and sometimes outputs an incorrect language. In our study, we show that the fine-tuning process learns language invariant representations, which is beneficial for classification tasks but harmful for generation tasks. Motivated by this, we propose a simple method to regularize the model from learning language invariant representations and a method to select model checkpoints without a development set in the target language, both resulting in better generation quality. Experiments on three semantically diverse generation tasks show that our method reduces the accidental translation problem by 68% and improves the ROUGE-L score by 1.5 on average.Comment: Findings of ACL 202