This special issue focuses on the many roles that context plays in neural machine translation and the evaluation of machine translation. It includes a survey of the current state of research related to context in machine translation and machine translation evaluation, along with three papers that focus on a variety of topics related to evaluation. Together, these highlight the wide range of topics in this area, and its increasing relevance as high-quality machine translation becomes increasingly common in a variety of settings.

Hate speech against individuals and groups with certain demographics is a major issue in social media. Supervised models for hate speech detection mostly utilize labeled data collections to understand textual semantics. However, hate speech detection is a complex task that involves several aspects, including topic and writing style. The complexity of hate speech can be represented by an ensemble of models learned from different aspects of data. Moreover, ensemble members or base models can be modified to give attention to particular aspects of hate speech. In this study, we extract different aspects of hate speech to construct ensembles, thereby improving the performance of hate speech detection by ensemble learning. We conduct detailed experiments on five datasets in multiple languages to generalize our observations. The experimental results, supported by statistical significance tests, show that the performance of hate speech detection can be improved by capturing multiple aspects of hate speech. Our ensemble construction approach outperforms the baselines in terms of the F1 score of the Hate class in 80% of the cases, and the Offensive class in 75% of the cases. We also compare our approach with state-of-the-art ensemble methods from shared tasks and find that our highest-performing method can improve the performance of the Hate class in two out of three datasets. We further discuss our approach and experimental results in terms of ensemble parameters and writing style among ensemble members.

This paper addresses the optimization of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) processes by exploring various methodologies, including advanced RAG methods. The research, driven by the need to enhance RAG processes as highlighted by recent studies, involved a grid-search optimization of 23,625 iterations. We evaluated multiple RAG methods across different vectorstores, embedding models, and large language models, using cross-domain datasets and contextual compression filters. The findings emphasize the importance of balancing context quality with similarity-based ranking methods, as well as understanding tradeoffs between similarity scores, token usage, runtime, and hardware utilization. Additionally, contextual compression filters were found to be crucial for efficient hardware utilization and reduced token consumption, despite the evident impacts on similarity scores, which may be acceptable depending on specific use cases and RAG methods.

Natural language processing (NLP) has significantly advanced our ability to model and interact with human language through technology. However, these advancements have disproportionately benefited high-resource languages with abundant data for training complex models. Low-resource languages, often spoken by smaller or marginalized communities, need help realizing the full potential of NLP applications. The primary challenges in developing NLP applications for low-resource languages stem from the need for large, well-annotated datasets, standardized tools, and linguistic resources. This scarcity of resources hinders the performance of data-driven approaches that have excelled in high-resource settings. Further, low-resource languages frequently exhibit complex grammatical structures, diverse vocabularies, and unique social contexts, which pose additional challenges for standard NLP techniques. Innovative strategies are emerging to address these challenges. Researchers are actively collecting and curating datasets, even utilizing community engagement platforms to expand data resources. Transfer learning, where models pre-trained on high-resource languages are adapted to low-resource settings, has shown significant promise. Multilingual models like Multilingual Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (mBERT) and Cross Lingual Models (XLM-R), trained on vast quantities of multilingual data, offer a powerful avenue for cross-lingual knowledge transfer. Additionally, researchers are exploring integrating multimodal approaches, combining textual data with images, audio, or video, to enhance NLP performance in low-resource language scenarios. This survey covers applications like part-of-speech tagging, morphological analysis, sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, dependency parsing, language identification, discourse annotation guidelines, question answering, machine translation, information retrieval, and predictive authoring for augmentative and alternative communication systems. The review also highlights machine learning approaches, deep learning approaches, Transformers, and cross-lingual transfer learning as practical techniques. Developing practical NLP applications for low-resource languages is crucial for preserving linguistic diversity, fostering inclusion within the digital world, and expanding our understanding of human language. While challenges remain, the strategies outlined in this survey demonstrate the ongoing progress and highlight the potential for NLP to empower communities that speak low-resource languages and contribute to a more equitable landscape within language technology.

It is increasingly common to use chatbots as an interface to services. One of the main components of a chatbot is the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) model, which is responsible for interpreting the text and extracting the intent and entities present in that text. It’s possible to focus only on one of these tasks of NLU, such as intent classification. To train an NLU intent classification model, it’s generally necessary to use a considerable amount of annotated data, where each sentence of the dataset receives a label indicating an intent. Performing manually labeling data is arduous and impracticable, depending on the data volume. Thus, an unsupervised machine learning technique, such as data clustering, could be applied to find and label patterns in the data. For this task, it is essential to have an effective vector embedding representation of texts that depicts the semantic information and helps the machine understand the context, intent, and other nuances of the entire text. This paper extensively evaluates different text embedding models for clustering and labeling. We also apply some operations to improve the dataset’s quality, such as removing sentences and establishing various strategies for distance thresholds (cosine similarity) for the clusters’ centroids. Then, we trained some intent classification Models with two different architectures, one built with the Rasa framework and the other with a neural network (NN) using the attendance text from the Coronavirus Platform Service of Ceará, Brazil. We also manually annotated a dataset to be used as validation data. We conducted a study on semiautomatic labeling, implemented through clustering and visual inspection, which introduced some labeling errors to the intent classification models. However, it would be unfeasible to annotate the entire dataset manually. Nevertheless, results of competitive accuracy were still achieved with the trained models.

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) refers to the process of instructing machines to comprehend and respond to inquiries based on a provided text. There are two primary methodologies for achieving this: extracting answers directly from the text or predicting them. Extracting answers involves anticipating the specific segment of text containing the answer, pinpointed by its starting and ending indices within the paragraph. Despite the increasing interest in MRC, exploration within the framework of the Arabic language faces limitations due to various challenges. A significant impediment arises from the inadequacy of resources available for Arabic textual content, which impedes the development of effective models. Furthermore, the inherent intricacies of Arabic, manifesting in its diverse linguistic forms including classical, modern standard, and colloquial, present distinctive hurdles for tasks involving language comprehension. This paper proposes an enhanced version of the bidirectional attention flow (BIDAF) model for Arabic MRC, constructed upon the Arabic Span-Extraction-based Reading Comprehension Benchmark (ASER). ASER comprises 10,000 sets of questions, answers, and passages, partitioned into a training set constituting 90% of the data and a testing set making up the remaining 10%. By introducing a new input feature based on parts-of-speech (POS) word embeddings and replacing Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (bi-LSTM) with bidirectional gated recurrent unit, significant improvements were observed. Eight different POS word embeddings were generated using both Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) and Skip-gram methods, with varying dimensionalities. Evaluation metrics, including exact match (EM) and F1-measure, were utilized to assess model performance, with emphasis on the latter for its accuracy. The proposed enhanced BIDAF model achieved a remarkable accuracy of 75.22% on the ASER dataset, demonstrating its efficacy in Arabic MRC tasks. Additionally, rigorous statistical evaluation using a two-tailed paired samples t-test further validated the findings, highlighting the significance of the proposed enhancements in advancing Arabic language processing capabilities.

The question of context in neural machine translation often focuses on topics related to document-level translation or intersentential context. However, there is a wide range of other aspects that can be considered under the umbrella of context. In this work, we survey ways that researchers have incorporated context into neural machine translation systems and the evaluation thereof. This includes building translation systems that operate at the paragraph level or the document level or ones that translate at the sentence level but incorporate information from other sentences. We also consider how issues like terminology consistency, anaphora, and world knowledge or external information can be considered as types of context relevant to the task of machine translation and its evaluation. Closely tied to these topics is the question of how to best evaluate machine translation output in a way that is sensitive to the contexts in which it appears. To this end, we discuss work on incorporating context into both human and automatic evaluations of machine translation quality. Furthermore, we also discuss recent experiments in the field as they relate to the use of large language models in translation and evaluation. We conclude with a view of the future of machine translation, where we expect to see issues of context continue to come to the forefront.

Morphological analysis is a crucial preprocessing stage for building the state-of-the-art natural language processing applications. We propose a bidirectional LSTM (long short-term memory)-based approach to develop the morphological analyzer for the Gujarati language. Our morph analyzer predicts a root word and the morphological features for the given inflected word. We have experimented with two different methods for label representation for predicting morphological features: the monolithic representation method and the individual label representation method. We have also created the gold morphological dataset of 16,234 unique words for the Gujarati language. The dataset contains morpheme splitting and grammatical feature information for each inflected word. Due to the change in the label representation technique in the proposed model, the accuracy of the present baseline system is improved by a large margin. The proposed system performs very well across the POS categories without the knowledge of language-specific suffix rules.

A negated statement consists of three main components: the negation cue, the negation scope, and the negation reference. The negation cue is the indicator of negation, while the negation scope defines the extent of the negation. The negation reference, which may or may not be within the negation scope, is the part of the statement being negated. Although there has been considerable research on the negation cue and scope, little attention has been given to identifying negation references outside the scope, even though they make up almost half of all negations. In this study, our goal is to identify out-of-scope references (OSRs) to restore the meaning of truncated negated statements identified by negation detection systems. To achieve this, we augment the largest available Spanish clinical dataset by adding annotations for OSRs. Additionally, we fine-tune five robust BERT-based models using transfer learning to address negation detection, uncertainty detection, and OSR identification and linking with their respective negation scopes. Our best model achieves state-of-the-art performance in negation detection while also establishing a competitive baseline for OSR identification (Macro F1 = 0.56) and linking (Macro F1 = 0.86). We support these findings with relevant statistics from the newly annotated dataset and an extensive review of existing literature.

Text readability assessment aims to automatically evaluate the degree of reading difficulty of a given text for a specific group of readers. Most of the previous studies considered it as a classification task and explored a wide range of linguistic features to express the readability of a text from different aspects, such as semantic-based and syntactic-based features. Intuitively, when the external form of a text becomes more complex, individuals will experience more reading difficulties. Based on this motivation, our research attempts to separate the textual external form from the text and investigate its efficiency in determining readability. Specifically, in this paper, we introduce a new concept, namely textual form complexity, to provide a novel insight into text readability. The main idea is that the readability of a text can be measured by the degree to which it is challenging for readers to overcome the distractions of external textual form and obtain the text’s core semantics. To this end, we propose a set of textual form features to express the complexity of the outer form of a text and characterize its readability. Findings show that the proposed external textual form features can be used as effective evaluation indexes to indicate the readability of text. It brings a new perspective to the existing research and provides a new complement to the existing rich features.

Human evaluation of machine translation is considered the “gold standard” for evaluation, but it remains a challenging task for which to define best practices. Recent work has focused on incorporating intersentential context into human evaluation, to better distinguish between high-performing machine translation systems and human translations. In this work, we examine several ways that such context influences evaluation and evaluation protocols. We take a close look at annotator variation through the lens of calibration sets and focus on the implications for context-aware evaluation protocols. We then demonstrate one way in which degraded target-side intersentential context can influence annotator scores of individual sentences, a finding that supports the context-aware approach to evaluation and which also has implications for best practices in evaluation protocols.

Language processing systems such as part-of-speech (POS) tagging, named entity recognition, machine translation, speech recognition, and language modeling have been well-studied in high-resource languages. Nevertheless, research on these systems for several low-resource languages, including Bodo, Mizo, Nagamese, and others, is either yet to commence or is in its nascent stages. Language model (LM) plays a vital role in the downstream tasks of modern natural language processing. Extensive studies are carried out on LMs for high-resource languages. However, these low-resource languages are still underreprese. In this study, we first present BodoBERT, an LM for the Bodo language. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first such effort to develop an LM for Bodo. Second, we present an ensemble deep learning-based POS tagging model for Bodo. The POS tagging model is based on combinations of BiLSTM with conditional random field and stacked embedding of BodoBERT with BytePairEmbeddings. We cover several LMs in the experiment to see how well they work in POS tagging tasks. The best-performing model achieves an F1 score of 0.8041. A comparative experiment was also conducted on Assamese POS taggers, considering that the language is spoken in the same region as Bodo.

The aim of this article is to propose a new neural machine translation (NMT) evaluation method based on the non-inferiority principle. In order to do that, we evaluate raw machine translation (MT) in terms of naturalness, which for this research is defined as not just the lack of fluency errors but also meeting the linguistic expectations of Galician end users when reading original texts in Galician. Our main objective is, in the first place, to validate the new methodology presented in our previous study by evaluating an NMT engine from Spanish into Galician for the social media domain that was retrained with a new Twitter corpus. This new methodology and NMT engine were applied after analyzing the conclusions of a pilot survey conducted among Twitter users to evaluate their perception of tweets translated from Spanish into Galician with our NMT engine created with a corpus of tweets. As in our preliminary study, our aim is to propose a robust quality approximation method based on the reception parameters of end users’ perceptions. This new survey was conducted in December of 2022 with the participation of 228 Galician-speaking Twitter users. Among the main changes proposed are the inclusion of more information about the participant profile, so the non-inferiority principle can be also evaluated according to these parameters; the inclusion of a new typology of tweets, the threads; the provision of context by means of presenting the tweets in their original display as shown in the Twitter app; a change in the number of tweets evaluated and the number of different questionnaires; the change in the distribution of the questionnaires; and the inclusion of an error classification human evaluation conducted by professional linguists to correlate the findings. We will present the steps carried out following the conclusions of the pilot study, describe the new study’s design, analyze the new findings, and present the final conclusions regarding the engine and the evaluation method based on the non-inferiority principle. Finally, we will also provide some examples of the use of this new methodology in the translation industry.

When humans solve complex problems, they typically construct, reflect, and revise sequences of ideas, hypotheses, and beliefs until a final decision or conclusion is reached. Contrary to this, current machine learning models are mostly trained to map an input to one single and fixed output. In this paper, we investigate how we can equip models with the ability to represent, construct, and evaluate a second, third, and $k$-th thought within their prediction process. Drawing inspiration from Hegel’s dialectics, we propose and evaluate the thought flow concept which constructs a sequence of predictions. We present a self-correction mechanism which (a) is trained to estimate the model’s correctness and which (b) performs iterative prediction updates based on the gradient of the correctness prediction. We introduce our method focusing initially on question answering (QA) and carry out extensive experiments which demonstrate that (i) our method is able to correct its own predictions and that (ii) it can improve model performance by a large margin. In addition, we conduct a qualitative analysis of thought flow correction patterns and explore how thought flow predictions affect users’ human-AI collaboration in a crowdsourcing study. We find that (iii) thought flows improve user performance and are perceived as more natural, correct, and intelligent regarding single and/or top-3 predictions.

Datasets serve as crucial training resources and model performance trackers. However, existing datasets have exposed a plethora of problems, inducing biased models and unreliable evaluation results. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic dataset evaluation framework for automatic dataset quality evaluation. We seek the statistical properties of the datasets and address three fundamental dimensions: reliability, difficulty, and validity, following a Classical Test Theory (CTT). Taking the named entity recognition (NER) datasets as a case study, we introduce nine statistical metrics for a statistical dataset evaluation framework. Specifically, we investigate the reliability of a NER dataset with three metrics, including Redundancy, Accuracy, and Leakage Ratio. We assess the dataset difficulty through four metrics: Unseen Entity Ratio, Entity Ambiguity Degree, Entity Density, and Model Differentiation. For validity, we introduce the Entity Imbalance Degree and Entity-Null Rate to evaluate the effectiveness of the dataset in assessing language model performance. Experimental results validate that our evaluation framework effectively assesses various aspects of the dataset quality. Furthermore, we study how the dataset scores on our statistical metrics affect the model performance and appeal for dataset quality evaluation or targeted dataset improvement before training or testing models.

The overall translation quality reached by current machine translation (MT) systems for high-resourced language pairs is remarkably good. Standard methods of evaluation are not suitable nor intended to uncover the many translation errors and quality deficiencies that still persist. Furthermore, the quality of standard reference translations is commonly questioned and comparable quality levels have been reached by MT alone in several language pairs. Navigating further research in these high-resource settings is thus difficult. In this paper, we propose a methodology for creating more reliable document-level human reference translations, called “optimal reference translations,” with the simple aim to raise the bar of what should be deemed “human translation quality.” We evaluate the obtained document-level optimal reference translations in comparison with “standard” ones, confirming a significant quality increase and also documenting the relationship between evaluation and translation editing.

Part of speech (POS) tagging, though considered to be preliminary to any Natural Language Processing (NLP) task, is crucial to account for, especially in low resource language like Khasi that lacks any form of formal corpus. POS tagging is context sensitive. Therefore, the task is challenging. In this paper, we attempt to investigate a deep learning approach to the POS tagging problem in Khasi. A deep learning model called Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach (RoBERTa) is pretrained for language modelling task. We then create RoBERTa for POS (RoPOS) tagging, a model that performs POS tagging by fine-tuning the pretrained RoBERTa and leveraging its embeddings for downstream POS tagging. The existing tagset that has been designed, customarily, for the Khasi language is employed for this work, and the corresponding tagged dataset is taken as our base corpus. Further, we propose additional tags to this existing tagset to meet the requirements of the language and have increased the size of the existing Khasi POS corpus. Other machine learning and deep learning models have also been tried and tested for the same task, and a comparative analysis is made on the various models employed. Two different setups have been used for the RoPOS model, and the best testing accuracy achieved is 92 per cent. Comparative analysis of RoPOS with the other models indicates that RoPOS outperforms the others when used for inferencing on texts that are outside the domain of the POS tagged training dataset.

Semantic representation is the task of conveying the meaning of a natural language utterance by converting it to a logical form that can be processed and understood by machines. It is utilised by many applications in natural language processing (NLP), particularly in tasks relevant to natural language understanding (NLU). Due to the widespread use of semantic parsing in NLP, many semantic representation schemes with different forms have been proposed; Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation (UCCA) is one of them. UCCA is a cross-lingual semantic annotation framework that allows easy annotation without requiring substantial linguistic knowledge. UCCA-annotated datasets have been released so far for English, French, German, Russian, and Hebrew. In this paper, we present a UCCA-annotated Turkish dataset of 400 sentences that are obtained from the METU-Sabanci Turkish Treebank. We provide the UCCA annotation specifications defined for the Turkish language so that it can be extended further. We followed a semi-automatic annotation approach, where an external semantic parser is utilised for the initial annotation of the dataset, which is manually revised by two annotators. We used the same semantic parser model to evaluate the dataset with zero-shot and few-shot learning, demonstrating that even a small sample set from the target language in the training data has a notable impact on the performance of the parser (15.6% and 2.5% gain over zero-shot for labelled and unlabelled results, respectively).

Sharing ideas through communication with peers is the primary mode of human interaction. Consequently, extensive research has been conducted in the area of conversational AI, leading to an increase in the availability and diversity of conversational tasks, datasets, and methods. However, with numerous tasks being explored simultaneously, the current landscape of conversational AI has become fragmented. Consequently, initiating a well-thought-out model for a dialogue agent can pose significant challenges for a practitioner. Toward highlighting the critical ingredients needed for a practitioner to design a dialogue agent from scratch, the current study provides a comprehensive overview of the primary characteristics of a dialogue agent, the supporting tasks, their corresponding open-domain datasets, and the methods used to benchmark these datasets. We observe that different methods have been used to tackle distinct dialogue tasks. However, building separate models for each task is costly and does not leverage the correlation among the several tasks of a dialogue agent. As a result, recent trends suggest a shift toward building unified foundation models. To this end, we propose Unit, a Unified dialogue dataset constructed from conversations of varying datasets for different dialogue tasks capturing the nuances for each of them. We then train a Unified dialogue foundation model, GPT-2$^{\textrm{U}}$ and present a concise comparative performance of GPT-2$^{\textrm{U}}$ against existing large language models. We also examine the evaluation strategies used to measure the performance of dialogue agents and highlight the scope for future research in the area of conversational AI with a thorough discussion of popular models such as ChatGPT.