One Homonym per Translation

The study of homonymy is vital to resolving fundamental problems in lexical semantics. In this paper, we propose four hypotheses that characterize the unique behavior of homonyms in the context of translations, discourses, collocations, and sense clusters. We present a new annotated homonym resource that allows us to test our hypotheses on existing WSD resources. The results of the experiments provide strong empirical evidence for the hypotheses. This study represents a step towards a computational method for distinguishing between homonymy and polysemy, and constructing a definitive inventory of coarse-grained senses.Comment: 8 pages, including reference

A Fast Method for Parallel Document Identification

We present a fast method to identify homogeneous parallel documents. The method is based on collecting counts of identical low-frequency words between possibly parallel documents. The candidate with the most shared low-frequency words is selected as the parallel document. The method achieved 99.96% accuracy when tested on the EUROPARL corpus of parliamentary proceedings, failing only in anomalous cases of truncated or otherwise distorted documents. While other work has shown similar performance on this type of dataset, our approach presented here is faster and does not require training. Apart from proposing an efficient method for parallel document identification in a restricted domain, this paper furnishes evidence that parliamentary proceedings may be inappropriate for testing parallel document identification systems in general

One Sense Per Translation

The idea of using lexical translations to define sense inventories has a long history in lexical semantics. We propose a theoretical framework which allows us to answer the question of why this apparently reasonable idea failed to produce useful results. We formally prove several propositions on how the translations of a word relate to its senses, as well as on the relationship between synonymy and polysemy. We empirically validate our theoretical findings on BabelNet, and demonstrate how they could be used to perform unsupervised word sense disambiguation of a substantial fraction of the lexicon

A Fast Method for Parallel Document Identification

We present a fast method to identify homogeneous parallel documents. The method is based on collecting counts of identical low-frequency words between possibly parallel documents. The candidate with the most shared low-frequency words is selected as the parallel document. The method achieved 99.96% accuracy when tested on the EUROPARL corpus of parliamentary proceedings, failing only in anomalous cases of truncated or otherwise distorted documents. While other work has shown similar performance on this type of dataset, our approach presented here is faster and does not require training. Apart from proposing an efficient method for parallel document identification in a restricted domain, this paper furnishes evidence that parliamentary proceedings may be inappropriate for testing parallel document identification systems in general

The Application of Chordal Graphs to Inferring Phylogenetic Trees of Languages

Phylogenetic methods are used to build evolutionary trees of languages given character data that may include lexical, phonological, and morphological information. Such data rarely admits a perfect phylogeny. We explore the use of the more permissive conservative Dollo phylogeny as an alternative or complementary approach. We propose a heuristic search algorithm based on the notion of chordal graphs. We test this approach by generating phylogenetic trees from three datasets, and comparing them to those produced by other researchers

Visually-Grounded Descriptions Improve Zero-Shot Image Classification

Language-vision models like CLIP have made significant progress in zero-shot vision tasks, such as zero-shot image classification (ZSIC). However, generating specific and expressive class descriptions remains a major challenge. Existing approaches suffer from granularity and label ambiguity issues. To tackle these challenges, we propose V-GLOSS: Visual Glosses, a novel method leveraging modern language models and semantic knowledge bases to produce visually-grounded class descriptions. We demonstrate V-GLOSS's effectiveness by achieving state-of-the-art results on benchmark ZSIC datasets including ImageNet and STL-10. In addition, we introduce a silver dataset with class descriptions generated by V-GLOSS, and show its usefulness for vision tasks. We make available our code and dataset

Don't Trust ChatGPT when Your Question is not in English: A Study of Multilingual Abilities and Types of LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional natural language understanding abilities and have excelled in a variety of natural language processing (NLP)tasks in recent years. Despite the fact that most LLMs are trained predominantly in English, multiple studies have demonstrated their comparative performance in many other languages. However, fundamental questions persist regarding how LLMs acquire their multi-lingual abilities and how performance varies across different languages. These inquiries are crucial for the study of LLMs since users and researchers often come from diverse language backgrounds, potentially influencing their utilization and interpretation of LLMs' results. In this work, we propose a systematic way of qualifying the performance disparities of LLMs under multilingual settings. We investigate the phenomenon of across-language generalizations in LLMs, wherein insufficient multi-lingual training data leads to advanced multi-lingual capabilities. To accomplish this, we employ a novel back-translation-based prompting method. The results show that GPT exhibits highly translating-like behaviour in multilingual settings.Comment: Paper accepted to EMNLP 202