Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques


2022

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On Language Spaces, Scales and Cross-Lingual Transfer of UD Parsers
Tanja Samardžić | Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques | Rob van der Goot | Max Müller-Eberstein | Olga Pelloni | Barbara Plank
Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)

Cross-lingual transfer of parsing models has been shown to work well for several closely-related languages, but predicting the success in other cases remains hard. Our study is a comprehensive analysis of the impact of linguistic distance on the transfer of UD parsers. As an alternative to syntactic typological distances extracted from URIEL, we propose three text-based feature spaces and show that they can be more precise predictors, especially on a more local scale, when only shorter distances are taken into account. Our analyses also reveal that the good coverage in typological databases is not among the factors that explain good transfer.

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TeDDi Sample: Text Data Diversity Sample for Language Comparison and Multilingual NLP
Steven Moran | Christian Bentz | Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques | Olga Pelloni | Tanja Samardzic
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We present the TeDDi sample, a diversity sample of text data for language comparison and multilingual Natural Language Processing. The TeDDi sample currently features 89 languages based on the typological diversity sample in the World Atlas of Language Structures. It consists of more than 20k texts and is accompanied by open-source corpus processing tools. The aim of TeDDi is to facilitate text-based quantitative analysis of linguistic diversity. We describe in detail the TeDDi sample, how it was created, data availability, and its added value through for NLP and linguistic research.

2021

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Interpretability for Morphological Inflection: from Character-level Predictions to Subword-level Rules
Tatyana Ruzsics | Olga Sozinova | Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques | Tanja Samardzic
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

Neural models for morphological inflection have recently attained very high results. However, their interpretation remains challenging. Towards this goal, we propose a simple linguistically-motivated variant to the encoder-decoder model with attention. In our model, character-level cross-attention mechanism is complemented with a self-attention module over substrings of the input. We design a novel approach for pattern extraction from attention weights to interpret what the model learn. We apply our methodology to analyze the model’s decisions on three typologically-different languages and find that a) our pattern extraction method applied to cross-attention weights uncovers variation in form of inflection morphemes, b) pattern extraction from self-attention shows triggers for such variation, c) both types of patterns are closely aligned with grammar inflection classes and class assignment criteria, for all three languages. Additionally, we find that the proposed encoder attention component leads to consistent performance improvements over a strong baseline.

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From characters to words: the turning point of BPE merges
Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques | Christian Bentz | Olga Sozinova | Tanja Samardzic
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

The distributions of orthographic word types are very different across languages due to typological characteristics, different writing traditions and potentially other factors. The wide range of cross-linguistic diversity is still a major challenge for NLP and the study of language. We use BPE and information-theoretic measures to investigate if distributions become similar under specific levels of subword tokenization. We perform a cross-linguistic comparison, following incremental merges of BPE (we go from characters to words) for 47 diverse languages. We show that text entropy values (a feature of probability distributions) tend to converge at specific subword levels: relatively few BPE merges (around 350) lead to the most similar distributions across languages. Additionally, we analyze the interaction between subword and word-level distributions and show that our findings can be interpreted in light of the ongoing discussion regarding different types of morphological complexity.

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Automatic Interlinear Glossing for Otomi language
Diego Barriga Martínez | Victor Mijangos | Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas

In linguistics, interlinear glossing is an essential procedure for analyzing the morphology of languages. This type of annotation is useful for language documentation, and it can also provide valuable data for NLP applications. We perform automatic glossing for Otomi, an under-resourced language. Our work also comprises the pre-processing and annotation of the corpus. We implement different sequential labelers. CRF models represented an efficient and good solution for our task. Two main observations emerged from our work: 1) models with a higher number of parameters (RNNs) performed worse in our low-resource scenario; and 2) the information encoded in the CRF feature function plays an important role in the prediction of labels; however, even in cases where POS tags are not available it is still possible to achieve competitive results.

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Findings of the AmericasNLP 2021 Shared Task on Open Machine Translation for Indigenous Languages of the Americas
Manuel Mager | Arturo Oncevay | Abteen Ebrahimi | John Ortega | Annette Rios | Angela Fan | Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques | Luis Chiruzzo | Gustavo Giménez-Lugo | Ricardo Ramos | Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz | Rolando Coto-Solano | Alexis Palmer | Elisabeth Mager-Hois | Vishrav Chaudhary | Graham Neubig | Ngoc Thang Vu | Katharina Kann
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas

This paper presents the results of the 2021 Shared Task on Open Machine Translation for Indigenous Languages of the Americas. The shared task featured two independent tracks, and participants submitted machine translation systems for up to 10 indigenous languages. Overall, 8 teams participated with a total of 214 submissions. We provided training sets consisting of data collected from various sources, as well as manually translated sentences for the development and test sets. An official baseline trained on this data was also provided. Team submissions featured a variety of architectures, including both statistical and neural models, and for the majority of languages, many teams were able to considerably improve over the baseline. The best performing systems achieved 12.97 ChrF higher than baseline, when averaged across languages.

2018

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Comparing morphological complexity of Spanish, Otomi and Nahuatl
Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques | Victor Mijangos
Proceedings of the Workshop on Linguistic Complexity and Natural Language Processing

We use two small parallel corpora for comparing the morphological complexity of Spanish, Otomi and Nahuatl. These are languages that belong to different linguistic families, the latter are low-resourced. We take into account two quantitative criteria, on one hand the distribution of types over tokens in a corpus, on the other, perplexity and entropy as indicators of word structure predictability. We show that a language can be complex in terms of how many different morphological word forms can produce, however, it may be less complex in terms of predictability of its internal structure of words.

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Challenges of language technologies for the indigenous languages of the Americas
Manuel Mager | Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques | Gerardo Sierra | Ivan Meza-Ruiz
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Indigenous languages of the American continent are highly diverse. However, they have received little attention from the technological perspective. In this paper, we review the research, the digital resources and the available NLP systems that focus on these languages. We present the main challenges and research questions that arise when distant languages and low-resource scenarios are faced. We would like to encourage NLP research in linguistically rich and diverse areas like the Americas.

2016

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Axolotl: a Web Accessible Parallel Corpus for Spanish-Nahuatl
Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques | Gerardo Sierra | Isaac Hernandez Pompa
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

This paper describes the project called Axolotl which comprises a Spanish-Nahuatl parallel corpus and its search interface. Spanish and Nahuatl are distant languages spoken in the same country. Due to the scarcity of digital resources, we describe the several problems that arose when compiling this corpus: most of our sources were non-digital books, we faced errors when digitizing the sources and there were difficulties in the sentence alignment process, just to mention some. The documents of the parallel corpus are not homogeneous, they were extracted from different sources, there is dialectal, diachronical, and orthographical variation. Additionally, we present a web search interface that allows to make queries through the whole parallel corpus, the system is capable to retrieve the parallel fragments that contain a word or phrase searched by a user in any of the languages. To our knowledge, this is the first Spanish-Nahuatl public available digital parallel corpus. We think that this resource can be useful to develop language technologies and linguistic studies for this language pair.

2015

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Bilingual lexicon extraction for a distant language pair using a small parallel corpus
Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop