On the role of textual connectives in sentence comprehension: A new dataset for Italian

In this paper we present a new evaluation resource for Italian aimed at assessing the role of textual connectives in the comprehension of the meaning of a sentence. The resource is arranged in two sections (acceptability assessment and cloze test), each one corresponding to a distinct challenge task conceived to test how subtle modifications involving connectives in real usage sentences influence the perceived acceptability of the sentence by native speakers and Neural Language Models (NLMs). Although the main focus is the presentation of the dataset, we also provide some preliminary data comparing human judgments and NLMs performance in the two task

EVALITA Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian - December 17th, 2020

Welcome to EVALITA 2020! EVALITA is the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian. EVALITA is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC, http://www.ai-lc.it) and it is endorsed by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA, http://www.aixia.it) and the Italian Association for Speech Sciences (AISV, http://www.aisv.it)

PRELEARN @ EVALITA 2020: Overview of the prerequisite relation learning task for Italian

The Prerequisite Relation Learning (PRELEARN) task is the EVALITA 2020 shared task on concept prerequisite learning, which consists of classifying prerequisite relations between pairs of concepts distinguishing between prerequisite pairs and non-prerequisite pairs. Four sub-tasks were defined: two of them define different types of features that participants are allowed to use when training their model, while the other two define the classification scenarios where the proposed models would be tested. In total, 14 runs were submitted by 3 teams comprising 9 total individual participants

ATE ABSITA @ EVALITA2020: Overview of the aspect term extraction and aspect-based sentiment analysis task

Over the last years, the rise of novel sentiment analysis techniques to assess aspect-based opinions on product reviews has become a key component for providing valuable insights to both consumers and businesses. To this extent, we propose ATE ABSITA: the EVALITA 2020 shared task on Aspect Term Extraction and Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. In particular, we approach the task as a cascade of three subtasks: Aspect Term Extraction (ATE), Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) and Sentiment Analysis (SA). Therefore, we invited participants to submit systems designed to automatically identify the”aspect term” in each review and to predict the sentiment expressed for each aspect, along with the sentiment of the entire review. The task received broad interest, with 27 teams registered and more than 45 participants. However, only three teams submitted their working systems. The results obtained underline the task's difficulty, but they also show how it is possible to deal with it using innovative approaches and models. Indeed, two of them are based on large pre-trained language models as typical in the current state of the art for the English language. (de Mattei et al., 2020)