Grammatical error correction (GEC) is the task of correcting typos, spelling, punctuation and grammatical issues in text. Approaching the problem as a sequence-to-sequence task, we compare the use of a common subword unit vocabulary and byte-level encoding. Initial synthetic training data is created using an error-generating pipeline, and used for finetuning two subword-level models and one byte-level model. Models are then finetuned further on hand-corrected error corpora, including texts written by children, university students, dyslexic and second-language writers, and evaluated over different error types and error origins. We show that a byte-level model enables higher correction quality than a subword approach, not only for simple spelling errors, but also for more complex semantic, stylistic and grammatical issues. In particular, initial training on synthetic corpora followed by finetuning on a relatively small parallel corpus of real-world errors helps the byte-level model correct a wide range of commonly occurring errors. Our experiments are run for the Icelandic language but should hold for other similar languages, and in particular to morphologically rich ones.

Multilingual language models have pushed state-of-the-art in cross-lingual NLP transfer. The majority of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, however, use one and the same massively multilingual transformer (e.g., mBERT or XLM-R) to transfer to all target languages, irrespective of their typological, etymological, and phylogenetic relations to other languages. In particular, readily available data and models of resource-rich sibling languages are often ignored. In this work, we empirically show, in a case study for Faroese – a low-resource language from a high-resource language family – that by leveraging the phylogenetic information and departing from the ‘one-size-fits-all’ paradigm, one can improve cross-lingual transfer to low-resource languages. In particular, we leverage abundant resources of other Scandinavian languages (i.e., Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Icelandic) for the benefit of Faroese. Our evaluation results show that we can substantially improve the transfer performance to Faroese by exploiting data and models of closely-related high-resource languages. Further, we release a new web corpus of Faroese and Faroese datasets for named entity recognition (NER), semantic text similarity (STS), and new language models trained on all Scandinavian languages.

We train several language models for Icelandic, including IceBERT, that achieve state-of-the-art performance in a variety of downstream tasks, including part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, grammatical error detection and constituency parsing. To train the models we introduce a new corpus of Icelandic text, the Icelandic Common Crawl Corpus (IC3), a collection of high quality texts found online by targeting the Icelandic top-level-domain .is. Several other public data sources are also collected for a total of 16GB of Icelandic text. To enhance the evaluation of model performance and to raise the bar in baselines for Icelandic, we manually translate and adapt the WinoGrande commonsense reasoning dataset. Through these efforts we demonstrate that a properly cleaned crawled corpus is sufficient to achieve state-of-the-art results in NLP applications for low to medium resource languages, by comparison with models trained on a curated corpus. We further show that initializing models using existing multilingual models can lead to state-of-the-art results for some downstream tasks.

We present the first extractive question answering (QA) dataset for Icelandic, Natural Questions in Icelandic (NQiI). Developing such datasets is important for the development and evaluation of Icelandic QA systems. It also aids in the development of QA methods that need to work for a wide range of morphologically and grammatically different languages in a multilingual setting. The dataset was created by asking contributors to come up with questions they would like to know the answer to. Later, they were tasked with finding answers to each others questions following a previously published methodology. The questions are Natural in the sense that they are real questions posed out of interest in knowing the answer. The complete dataset contains 18 thousand labeled entries of which 5,568 are directly suitable for training an extractive QA system for Icelandic. The dataset is a valuable resource for Icelandic which we demonstrate by creating and evaluating a system capable of extractive QA in Icelandic.

It can be challenging to build effective open question answering (open QA) systems for languages other than English, mainly due to a lack of labeled data for training. We present a data efficient method to bootstrap such a system for languages other than English. Our approach requires only limited QA resources in the given language, along with machine-translated data, and at least a bilingual language model. To evaluate our approach, we build such a system for the Icelandic language and evaluate performance over trivia style datasets. The corpora used for training are English in origin but machine translated into Icelandic. We train a bilingual Icelandic/English language model to embed English context and Icelandic questions following methodology introduced with DensePhrases (Lee et al., 2021). The resulting system is an open domain cross-lingual QA system between Icelandic and English. Finally, the system is adapted for Icelandic only open QA, demonstrating how it is possible to efficiently create an open QA system with limited access to curated datasets in the language of interest.

We present Miðeind’s submission for the English→Icelandic and Icelandic→English subsets of the 2021 WMT news translation task. Transformer-base models are trained for translation on parallel data to generate backtranslations teratively. A pretrained mBART-25 model is then adapted for translation using parallel data as well as the last backtranslation iteration. This adapted pretrained model is then used to re-generate backtranslations, and the training of the adapted model is continued.