Natural language processing (NLP) technologies and applications in legal text processing are gaining momentum. Being one of the most prominent tasks in NLP, named-entity recognition (NER) can substantiate a great convenience for NLP in law due to the variety of named entities in the legal domain and their accentuated importance in legal documents. However, domain-specific NER models in the legal domain are not well studied. We present a NER model for Turkish legal texts with a custom-made corpus as well as several NER architectures based on conditional random fields and bidirectional long-short-term memories (BiLSTMs) to address the task. We also study several combinations of different word embeddings consisting of GloVe, Morph2Vec, and neural network-based character feature extraction techniques either with BiLSTM or convolutional neural networks. We report 92.27% F1 score with a hybrid word representation of GloVe and Morph2Vec with character-level features extracted with BiLSTM. Being an agglutinative language, the morphological structure of Turkish is also considered. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first legal domain-specific NER study in Turkish and also the first study for an agglutinative language in the legal domain. Thus, our work can also have implications beyond the Turkish language.

Cyberbullying is the wilful and repeated infliction of harm on an individual using the Internet and digital technologies. Similar to face-to-face bullying, cyberbullying can be captured formally using the Routine Activities Model (RAM) whereby the potential victim and bully are brought into proximity of one another via the interaction on online social networking (OSN) platforms. Although the impact of the COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) restrictions on the online presence of minors has yet to be fully grasped, studies have reported that 44% of pre-adolescents have encountered more cyberbullying incidents during the COVID-19 lockdown. Transparency reports shared by OSN companies indicate an increased take-downs of cyberbullying-related comments, posts or content by artificially intelligen moderation tools. However, in order to efficiently and effectively detect or identify whether a social media post or comment qualifies as cyberbullying, there are a number factors based on the RAM, which must be taken into account, which includes the identification of cyberbullying roles and forms. This demands the acquisition of large amounts of fine-grained annotated data which is costly and ethically challenging to produce. In addition where fine-grained datasets do exist they may be unavailable in the target language. Manual translation is costly and expensive, however, state-of-the-art neural machine translation offers a workaround. This study presents a first of its kind experiment in leveraging machine translation to automatically translate a unique pre-adolescent cyberbullying gold standard dataset in Italian with fine-grained annotations into English for training and testing a native binary classifier for pre-adolescent cyberbullying. In addition to contributing high-quality English reference translation of the source gold standard, our experiments indicate that the performance of our target binary classifier when trained on machine-translated English output is on par with the source (Italian) classifier.

The tremendous amount of increase in the number of documents available on the Web has turned finding the relevant piece of information into a challenging, tedious, and time-consuming activity. Accordingly, automatic text summarization has become an important field of study by gaining significant attention from the researchers. Lately, with the advances in deep learning, neural abstractive text summarization with sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models has gained popularity. There have been many improvements in these models such as the use of pretrained language models (e.g., GPT, BERT, and XLM) and pretrained Seq2Seq models (e.g., BART and T5). These improvements have addressed certain shortcomings in neural summarization and have improved upon challenges such as saliency, fluency, and semantics which enable generating higher quality summaries. Unfortunately, these research attempts were mostly limited to the English language. Monolingual BERT models and multilingual pretrained Seq2Seq models have been released recently providing the opportunity to utilize such state-of-the-art models in low-resource languages such as Turkish. In this study, we make use of pretrained Seq2Seq models and obtain state-of-the-art results on the two large-scale Turkish datasets, TR-News and MLSum, for the text summarization task. Then, we utilize the title information in the datasets and establish hard baselines for the title generation task on both datasets. We show that the input to the models has a substantial amount of importance for the success of such tasks. Additionally, we provide extensive analysis of the models including cross-dataset evaluations, various text generation options, and the effect of preprocessing in ROUGE evaluations for Turkish. It is shown that the monolingual BERT models outperform the multilingual BERT models on all tasks across all the datasets. Lastly, qualitative evaluations of the generated summaries and titles of the models are provided.

Modelling the distributional semantics of such a morphologically rich language as Arabic needs to take into account its introflexive, fusional, and inflectional nature attributes that make up its combinatorial sequences and substitutional paradigms. To evaluate such word distributional models, the benchmarks that have been used thus far in Arabic have mimicked those in English. This paper reports on a benchmark that we designed to reflect linguistic patterns in both Contemporary Arabic and Classical Arabic, the first being a cover term for written and spoken Modern Standard Arabic, while the second for pre-modern Arabic. The analogy items we included in this benchmark are chosen in a transparent manner such that they would capture the major features of nouns and verbs; derivational and inflectional morphology; high-, middle-, and low-frequency patterns and lexical items; and morphosemantic, morphosyntactic, and semantic dimensions of the language. All categories included in this benchmark are carefully selected to ensure proper representation of the language. The benchmark consists of 45 roots of the trilateral, all-consonantal, and semivowel-inclusive types; six morphosemantic patterns (’af‘ala; ifta‘ala; infa‘ala; istaf‘ala; tafa‘‘ala; and tafā‘ala); five derivations (the verbal noun, active participle, and the contrasts in Masculine-Feminine; Feminine-Singular-Plural; Masculine-Singular-Plural); and morphosyntactic transformations (perfect and imperfect verbs conjugated for all pronouns); and lexical semantics (synonyms, antonyms, and hyponyms of nouns, verbs, and adjectives), as well as capital cities and currencies. All categories include an equal proportion of high-, medium-, and low-frequency items. For the purpose of validating the proposed benchmark, we developed a set of embedding models from different textual sources. Then, we tested them intrinsically using the proposed benchmark and extrinsically using two natural language processing tasks: Arabic Named Entity Recognition and Text Classification. The evaluation leads to the conclusion that the proposed benchmark is truly reflective of this morphologically rich language and discriminatory of word embeddings.

Fake news detection is an emerging topic that has attracted a lot of attention among researchers and in the industry. This paper focuses on fake news detection as a text classification problem: on the basis of five publicly available corpora with documents labeled as true or fake, the task was to automatically distinguish both classes without relying on fact-checking. The aim of our research was to test the feasibility of a universal model: one that produces satisfactory results on all data sets tested in our article. We attempted to do so by training a set of classification models on one collection and testing them on another. As it turned out, this resulted in a sharp performance degradation. Therefore, this paper focuses on finding the most effective approach to utilizing information in a transferable manner. We examined a variety of methods: feature selection, machine learning approaches to data set shift (instance re-weighting and projection-based), and deep learning approaches based on domain transfer. These methods were applied to various feature spaces: linguistic and psycholinguistic, embeddings obtained from the Universal Sentence Encoder, and GloVe embeddings. A detailed analysis showed that some combinations of these methods and selected feature spaces bring significant improvements. When using linguistic data, feature selection yielded the best overall mean improvement (across all train-test pairs) of 4%. Among the domain adaptation methods, the greatest improvement of 3% was achieved by subspace alignment.

Bilingual corpora are an essential resource used to cross the language barrier in multilingual natural language processing tasks. Among bilingual corpora, comparable corpora have been the subject of many studies as they are both frequent and easily available. In this paper, we propose to make use of formal concept analysis to first construct concept vectors which can be used to enhance comparable corpora through clustering techniques. We then show how one can extract bilingual lexicons of improved quality from these enhanced corpora. We finally show that the bilingual lexicons obtained can complement existing bilingual dictionaries and improve cross-language information retrieval systems.

Many fundamental tasks in natural language processing (NLP) such as part-of-speech tagging, text chunking, and named-entity recognition can be formulated as sequence labeling problems. Although neural sequence labeling models have shown excellent results on standard test sets, they are very brittle when presented with misspelled texts. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial training framework that enhances the robustness against typographical adversarial examples. We evaluate the robustness of sequence labeling models with an adversarial evaluation scheme that includes typographical adversarial examples. We generate two types of adversarial examples without access (black-box) or with full access (white-box) to the target model’s parameters. We conducted a series of extensive experiments on three languages (English, Thai, and German) across three sequence labeling tasks. Experiments show that the proposed adversarial training framework provides better resistance against adversarial examples on all tasks. We found that we can further improve the model’s robustness on the chunking task by including a triplet loss constraint.

Significant advances have been achieved in bilingual word-level alignment, yet the challenge remains for phrase-level alignment. Moreover, the need for parallel data is a critical drawback for the alignment task. This work proposes a system that alleviates these two problems: a unified phrase representation model using cross-lingual word embeddings as input and an unsupervised training algorithm inspired by recent works on neural machine translation. The system consists of a sequence-to-sequence architecture where a short sequence encoder constructs cross-lingual representations of phrases of any length, then an LSTM network decodes them w.r.t their contexts. After training with comparable corpora and existing key phrase extraction, our encoder provides cross-lingual phrase representations that can be compared without further transformation. Experiments on five data sets show that our method obtains state-of-the-art results on the bilingual phrase alignment task and improves the results of different length phrase alignment by a mean of 8.8 points in MAP.

Text usually suffers from typos which can negatively affect various Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing tasks. Although there is a wide variety of choices for tackling this issue in the English language, this is not the case for other languages. For the Greek language, most of the existing phonetic algorithms provide rather insufficient support. For this reason, in this paper, we introduce an algorithm for phonetic matching designed for the Greek language: we start from the original Soundex and we redesign and extend it for accommodating the Greek language’s phonetic rules, ending up to a family of algorithms, that we call ${\tt Soundex}_{GR}$. Then, we report various experimental results showcasing how the algorithm behaves in different scenarios, and we provide comparative results for various parameters of the algorithm for revealing the trade-off between precision and recall in datasets with different kinds of errors. We also provide comparative results with matching using stemming, full phonemic transcription, and edit distance, that demonstrate that ${\tt Soundex}_{GR}$ performs better (indicatively, it achieves F-Score over 95% in collections of similar-sounded words). The simplicity, efficiency, and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm make it applicable and adaptable to a wide range of tasks.

The quality of annotations in manually annotated hate speech datasets is crucial for automatic hate speech detection. This contribution focuses on the positive effects of manually annotating online comments for hate speech within the context in which the comments occur. We quantify the impact of context availability by meticulously designing an experiment: Two annotation rounds are performed, one in-context and one out-of-context, on the same English YouTube data (more than 10,000 comments), by using the same annotation schema and platform, the same highly trained annotators, and quantifying annotation quality through inter-annotator agreement. Our results show that the presence of context has a significant positive impact on the quality of the manual annotations. This positive impact is more noticeable among replies than among comments, although the former is harder to consistently annotate overall. Previous research reporting that out-of-context annotations favour assigning non-hate-speech labels is also corroborated, showing further that this tendency is especially present among comments inciting violence, a highly relevant category for hate speech research and society overall. We believe that this work will improve future annotation campaigns even beyond hate speech and motivate further research on the highly relevant questions of data annotation methodology in natural language processing, especially in the light of the current expansion of its scope of application.

In training deep learning networks, the optimizer and related learning rate are often used without much thought or with minimal tuning, even though it is crucial in ensuring a fast convergence to a good quality minimum of the loss function that can also generalize well on the test dataset. Drawing inspiration from the successful application of cyclical learning rate policy to computer vision tasks, we explore how cyclical learning rate can be applied to train transformer-based neural networks for neural machine translation. From our carefully designed experiments, we show that the choice of optimizers and the associated cyclical learning rate policy can have a significant impact on the performance. In addition, we establish guidelines when applying cyclical learning rates to neural machine translation tasks.

Understanding various historical entity information (e.g., persons, locations, and time) plays a very important role in reasoning about the developments of historical events. With the increasing concern about the fields of digital humanities and natural language processing, named entity recognition (NER) provides a feasible solution for automatically extracting these entities from historical texts, especially in Chinese historical research. However, previous approaches are domain-specific, ineffective with relatively low accuracy, and non-interpretable, which hinders the development of NER in Chinese history. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid deep learning model called “subword-based ensemble network” (SEN), by incorporating subword information and a novel attention fusion mechanism. The experiments on a massive self-built Chinese historical corpus CMAG show that SEN has achieved the best with 93.87% for F1-micro and 89.70% for F1-macro, compared with other advanced models. Further investigation reveals that SEN has a strong generalization ability of NER on Chinese historical texts, which is not only relatively insensitive to the categories with fewer annotation labels (e.g., OFI) but can also accurately capture diverse local and global semantic relations. Our research demonstrates the effectiveness of the integration of subword information and attention fusion, which provides an inspiring solution for the practical use of entity extraction in the Chinese historical domain.

Although Korean language education is experiencing rapid growth in recent years and several studies have investigated automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems, AWE for Korean L2 writing still remains unexplored. Therefore, this study aims to develop and validate a state-of-the-art neural model AWE system which can be widely used for Korean language teaching and learning. Based on a Korean learner corpus, the proposed AWE is developed using natural language processing techniques such as part-of-speech tagging, syntactic parsing, and statistical language modeling to engineer linguistic features and a pre-trained neural language model. This study attempted to determine how neural network models use different linguistic features to improve AWE performance. Experimental results of the proposed AWE tool showed that the neural AWE system achieves high reliability for unseen test data from the corpus, which implies metrics used in the AWE system can help differentiate different proficiency levels and predict holistic scores. Furthermore, the results confirmed that the proposed linguistic features–syntactic complexity, quantitative complexity, and fluency–offer benefits that complement neural automated writing evaluation.

It’s no secret that the commercial application of NLP technologies has exploded in recent years. From chatbots and virtual assistants to machine translation and sentiment analysis, NLP technologies are now being used in a wide variety of applications across a range of industries. With the increasing demand for technologies that can process human language, investors have been eager to get a piece of the action. In this article, we look at NLP startup funding over the past year, identifying the applications and domains that have received investment.

Moderators often face a double challenge regarding reducing offensive and harmful content in social media. Despite the need to prevent the free circulation of such content, strict censorship on social media cannot be implemented due to a tricky dilemma – preserving free speech on the Internet while limiting them and how not to overreact. Existing systems do not essentially exploit the correlatedness of hate-offensive content and aggressive posts; instead, they attend to the tasks individually. As a result, the need for cost-effective, sophisticated multi-task systems to effectively detect aggressive and offensive content on social media is highly critical in recent times. This work presents a novel multifaceted transformer-based framework to identify aggressive and hate posts on social media. Through an end-to-end transformer-based multi-task network, our proposed approach addresses the following array of tasks: (a) aggression identification, (b) misogynistic aggression identification, (c) identifying hate-offensive and non-hate-offensive content, (d) identifying hate, profane, and offensive posts, (e) type of offense. We further investigate the role of emotion in improving the system’s overall performance by learning the task of emotion detection jointly with the other tasks. We evaluate our approach on two popular benchmark datasets of aggression and hate speech, covering four languages, and compare the system performance with various state-of-the-art methods. Results indicate that our multi-task system performs significantly well for all the tasks across multiple languages, outperforming several benchmark methods. Moreover, the secondary task of emotion detection substantially improves the system performance for all the tasks, indicating strong correlatedness among the tasks of aggression, hate, and emotion, thus opening avenues for future research.

Metonymy resolution (MR) is a challenging task in the field of natural language processing. The task of MR aims to identify the metonymic usage of a word that employs an entity name to refer to another target entity. Recent BERT-based methods yield state-of-the-art performances. However, they neither make full use of the entity information nor explicitly consider syntactic structure. In contrast, in this paper, we argue that the metonymic process should be completed in a collaborative manner, relying on both lexical semantics and syntactic structure (syntax). This paper proposes a novel approach to enhancing BERT-based MR models with hard and soft syntactic constraints by using different types of convolutional neural networks to model dependency parse trees. Experimental results on benchmark datasets (e.g., ReLocaR, SemEval 2007 and WiMCor) confirm that leveraging syntactic information into fine pre-trained language models benefits MR tasks.

Abusive language is becoming a problematic issue for our society. The spread of messages that reinforce social and cultural intolerance could have dangerous effects in victims’ life. State-of-the-art technologies are often effective on detecting explicit forms of abuse, leaving unidentified the utterances with very weak offensive language but a strong hurtful effect. Scholars have advanced theoretical and qualitative observations on specific indirect forms of abusive language that make it hard to be recognized automatically. In this work, we propose a battery of statistical and computational analyses able to support these considerations, with a focus on creative and cognitive aspects of the implicitness, in texts coming from different sources such as social media and news. We experiment with transformers, multi-task learning technique, and a set of linguistic features to reveal the elements involved in the implicit and explicit manifestations of abuses, providing a solid basis for computational applications.

Large-scale transformer-based language models (LMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in open-text generation. However, controlling the generated text’s properties such as the topic, style, and sentiment is challenging and often requires significant changes to the model architecture or retraining and fine-tuning the model on new supervised data. This paper presents a novel approach for topical language generation (TLG) by combining a pre-trained LM with topic modeling information. We cast the problem using Bayesian probability formulation with topic probabilities as a prior, LM probabilities as the likelihood, and TLG probability as the posterior. In learning the model, we derive the topic probability distribution from the user-provided document’s natural structure. Furthermore, we extend our model by introducing new parameters and functions to influence the quantity of the topical features presented in the generated text. This feature would allow us to easily control the topical properties of the generated text. Our experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art results on coherency, diversity, and fluency while being faster in decoding.

Text-to-scene conversion systems map natural language text to formal representations required for visual scenes. The difficulty involved in this mapping is one of the most critical challenges for developing these systems. The current study mapped Persian natural language text as the headmost system to a conceptual scene model. This conceptual scene model is an intermediate semantic representation between natural language and the visual scene and contains descriptions of visual elements of the scene. It will be used to produce meaningful animation based on an input story in this ongoing study. The mapping task was modeled as a sequential labeling problem, and a conditional random field (CRF) model was trained and tested for sequential labeling of scene model elements. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no dataset for this task exists; thus, the required dataset was collected for this task. The lack of required off-the-shelf natural language processing modules and a significant error rate in the available corpora were important challenges to dataset collection. Some features of the dataset were manually annotated. The results were evaluated using standard text classification metrics, and an average accuracy of 85.7% was obtained, which is satisfactory.