The strategic impact of META-NET on the regional, national and international level

This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until 2015; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the funding situation for LT topics. The article documents the initiative's work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Corpus-based automatic detection of example sentences for dictionaries for Estonian learners

Väitekirja elektrooniline versioon ei sisalda publikatsiooneNäitelause täidab sõnastikus kindlat eesmärki, aidates aru saada sõna tähendusest ja illustreerides sõna erinevaid kasutuskontekste. Näitelausete põhiallikas on mahukas tekstikorpus, kust aga käsitsi on näitelauset leida väga keeruline. Elektroonilise leksikograafia arenguga on Eestisse jõudnud mitmed töövahendid, mis aitavad automaatselt tuvastada eri sõnastike jaoks vajalikku infot, sealhulgas näitelauseid. Väitekirjas uuritakse, missugused parameetrid iseloomustavad Eesti Keele Instituudis koostatud sõnastike "Eesti keele sõnaraamat 2019", "Eesti keele põhisõnavara sõnastik 2014", "Eesti keele naabersõnad 2019" näitelauseid ning "Eesti keele A1−C1 õpikute korpuse 2018" lauseid. Uurimuse eesmärk on välja töötada meetod, mis võimaldab neid parameetreid arvestades korpusest automaatselt tuvastada eesti keele õppijatele sobivaid lauseid. Töö keskmes on reeglipõhine lähenemine, mida rakendatakse korpuspäringusüsteemi Sketch Engine integreeritud tööriista GDEX ehk Good Dictionary Examples näitel. Parameetrite häälestamiseks on osaliselt kasutatud ka masinõppe elemente. Sõnastiku näitelausete ja õpikulausete analüüs näitas, et hea eesti keele näitelause peab olema täislause ja vastama muuhulgas järgmistele parameetritele: on 4–20 sõnet pikk; ei sisalda sõnesid, mis on pikemad kui 20 tähemärki; ei alga teatud sõnaliikidega (nt sidesõnaga) ega tagasi viitavate sõnade (nt sellepärast) või sõnapaaridega (nt sellisel puhul); ei sisalda vulgaarseid ja halvustavaid sõnu, madala sagedusega sõnu jmt. Uurimuse tulemusena on loodud "Eesti keele õppekorpus 2018 (etSkELL)", mis sisaldab ainult välja töötatud parameetritele vastavaid lauseid. Õppekorpus on omakorda aluseks eesti keele õppekeskkonnale Sketch Engine for Estonian Language Learning ehk etSkELL ja veebilausetele Eesti Keele Instituudi keeleportaalis Sõnaveeb.The function of an example sentence in a dictionary is to help the reader understand the meaning of the headword and illustrate its contexts of use. Nowadays, the main source of example sentences is a large text corpus, where suitable sentences are hard to find. Luckily, e-lexicography has generated automatic tools to help detect various information for dictionaries, including example sentences. The dissertation examines certain parameters of the example sentences presented in the Dictionary of Estonian (2019), Basic Estonian Dictionary (2014), Estonian Collocations Dictionary (2019), and Estonian Coursebook Corpus (2018); all four were compiled at the Institute of the Estonian language. The aim of my study is to elaborate an automatic method using parameters which identify sentences suitable for learners of Estonian. To that end, a rule-based approach was applied to the example of Good Dictionary Examples (GDEX) integrated in the Sketch Engine corpus query tool. Machine learning elements were also adopted to fine-tune the parameters. According to the analysis of the example sentences used in the dictionaries and coursebook sentences, a good Estonian example sentence should be a full sentence meeting, inter alia, the following parameters: length 4–20 tokens; no tokens longer than 20 characters; never begins with certain parts of speech (e.g., conjunction) or an anaphoric word (e.g., sellepärast ‘this is why’) or word pair (e.g., sellisel puhul ‘in such a case’); and vulgar or disparaging words, rare words, etc., are excluded. The study resulted in the compilation of the Estonian Corpus for Learners 2018 (etSkELL), which contains no other sentences but those corresponding to the developed parameters. The corpus, in turn, serves as the basis for the corpus-based web tool Sketch Engine for Estonian Language Learning (etSkELL) and the web sentences in the language portal Sõnaveeb of the Institute of the Estonian Language.https://www.ester.ee/record=b530293

CLARIN. The infrastructure for language resources

CLARIN, the "Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure", has established itself as a major player in the field of research infrastructures for the humanities. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the organization, its members, its goals and its functioning, as well as of the tools and resources hosted by the infrastructure. The many contributors representing various fields, from computer science to law to psychology, analyse a wide range of topics, such as the technology behind the CLARIN infrastructure, the use of CLARIN resources in diverse research projects, the achievements of selected national CLARIN consortia, and the challenges that CLARIN has faced and will face in the future. The book will be published in 2022, 10 years after the establishment of CLARIN as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium by the European Commission (Decision 2012/136/EU)

CLARIN

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – CLARIN – for the humanities. It covers a broad range of CLARIN language resources and services, its underlying technological infrastructure, the achievements of national consortia, and challenges that CLARIN will tackle in the future. The book is published 10 years after establishing CLARIN as an Europ. Research Infrastructure Consortium

CLARIN

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – CLARIN – for the humanities. It covers a broad range of CLARIN language resources and services, its underlying technological infrastructure, the achievements of national consortia, and challenges that CLARIN will tackle in the future. The book is published 10 years after establishing CLARIN as an Europ. Research Infrastructure Consortium

Low-Resource Unsupervised NMT:Diagnosing the Problem and Providing a Linguistically Motivated Solution

Unsupervised Machine Translation hasbeen advancing our ability to translatewithout parallel data, but state-of-the-artmethods assume an abundance of mono-lingual data. This paper investigates thescenario where monolingual data is lim-ited as well, finding that current unsuper-vised methods suffer in performance un-der this stricter setting. We find that theperformance loss originates from the poorquality of the pretrained monolingual em-beddings, and we propose using linguis-tic information in the embedding train-ing scheme. To support this, we look attwo linguistic features that may help im-prove alignment quality: dependency in-formation and sub-word information. Us-ing dependency-based embeddings resultsin a complementary word representationwhich offers a boost in performance ofaround 1.5 BLEU points compared to stan-dardWORD2VECwhen monolingual datais limited to 1 million sentences per lan-guage. We also find that the inclusion ofsub-word information is crucial to improv-ing the quality of the embedding