This paper presents a solution to the GenChal 2022 shared task dedicated to feedback comment generation for writing learning. In terms of this task given a text with an error and a span of the error, a system generates an explanatory note that helps the writer (language learner) to improve their writing skills. Our solution is based on fine-tuning the T5 model on the initial dataset augmented according to syntactical dependencies of the words located within indicated error span. The solution of our team ‘nigula’ obtained second place according to manual evaluation by the organizers.

We present work in progress that aims to address the coverage issue faced by rule-based text generators. We propose a pipeline for extracting abstract dependency template (predicate-argument structures) from Wikipedia text to be used as input for generating text from structured data with the FORGe system. The pipeline comprises three main components: (i) candidate sentence retrieval, (ii) clause extraction, ranking and selection, and (iii) conversion to predicate-argument form. We present an approach and preliminary evaluation for the ranking and selection module.

As pointed out by several scholars, current research on hate speech (HS) recognition is characterized by unsystematic data creation strategies and diverging annotation schemata. Subsequently, supervised-learning models tend to generalize poorly to datasets they were not trained on, and the performance of the models trained on datasets labeled using different HS taxonomies cannot be compared. To ease this problem, we propose applying extremely weak supervision that only relies on the class name rather than on class samples from the annotated data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of a state-of-the-art weakly-supervised text classification model in various in-dataset and cross-dataset settings. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of the source of poor generalizability of HS classification models.

Recognizing and categorizing lexical collocations in context is useful for language learning, dictionary compilation and downstream NLP. However, it is a challenging task due to the varying degrees of frozenness lexical collocations exhibit. In this paper, we put forward a sequence tagging BERT-based model enhanced with a graph-aware transformer architecture, which we evaluate on the task of collocation recognition in context. Our results suggest that explicitly encoding syntactic dependencies in the model architecture is helpful, and provide insights on differences in collocation typification in English, Spanish and French.

Mainstream research on hate speech focused so far predominantly on the task of classifying mainly social media posts with respect to predefined typologies of rather coarse-grained hate speech categories. This may be sufficient if the goal is to detect and delete abusive language posts. However, removal is not always possible due to the legislation of a country. Also, there is evidence that hate speech cannot be successfully combated by merely removing hate speech posts; they should be countered by education and counter-narratives. For this purpose, we need to identify (i) who is the target in a given hate speech post, and (ii) what aspects (or characteristics) of the target are attributed to the target in the post. As the first approximation, we propose to adapt a generic state-of-the-art concept extraction model to the hate speech domain. The outcome of the experiments is promising and can serve as inspiration for further work on the task

An increasing amount of research tackles the challenge of text generation from abstract ontological or semantic structures, which are in their very nature potentially large connected graphs. These graphs must be “packaged” into sentence-wise subgraphs. We interpret the problem of sentence packaging as a community detection problem with post optimization. Experiments on the texts of the VerbNet/FrameNet structure annotated-Penn Treebank, which have been converted into graphs by a coreference merge using Stanford CoreNLP, show a high F1-score of 0.738.

A syllable-based language model reduces the lexicon size by hundreds of times. It is especially beneficial in case of highly inflective languages like Russian due to the abundance of word forms according to various grammatical categories. However, the main arising challenge is the concatenation of recognised syllables into the originally spoken sentence or phrase, particularly in the presence of syllable recognition mistakes. Natural fluent speech does not usually incorporate clear information about the outside borders of the spoken words. In this paper a method for the syllable concatenation and error correction is suggested and tested. It is based on the designed co-evolutionary asymptotic probabilistic genetic algorithm for the determination of the most likely sentence corresponding to the recognized chain of syllables within an acceptable time frame. The advantage of this genetic algorithm modification is the minimum number of settings to be manually adjusted comparing to the standard algorithm. Data used for acoustic and language modelling are also described here. A special issue is the preprocessing of the textual data, particularly, handling of abbreviations, Arabic and Roman numerals, since their inflection mostly depends on the context and grammar.