Meriem Beloucif


2023

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BERTie Bott’s Every Flavor Labels: A Tasty Introduction to Semantic Role Labeling for Galician
Micaella Bruton | Meriem Beloucif
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this paper, we leverage existing corpora, WordNet, and dependency parsing to build the first Galician dataset for training semantic role labeling systems in an effort to expand available NLP resources. Additionally, we introduce verb indexing, a new pre-processing method, which helps increase the performance when semantically parsing highly-complex sentences. We use transfer-learning to test both the resource and the verb indexing method. Our results show that the effects of verb indexing were amplified in scenarios where the model was both pre-trained and fine-tuned on datasets utilizing the method, but improvements are also noticeable when only used during fine-tuning. The best-performing Galician SRL model achieved an f1 score of 0.74, introducing a baseline for future Galician SRL systems. We also tested our method on Spanish where we achieved an f1 score of 0.83, outperforming the baseline set by the 2009 CoNLL Shared Task by 0.025 showing the merits of our verb indexing method for pre-processing.

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AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages
Shamsuddeen Muhammad | Idris Abdulmumin | Abinew Ayele | Nedjma Ousidhoum | David Adelani | Seid Yimam | Ibrahim Ahmad | Meriem Beloucif | Saif Mohammad | Sebastian Ruder | Oumaima Hourrane | Alipio Jorge | Pavel Brazdil | Felermino Ali | Davis David | Salomey Osei | Bello Shehu-Bello | Falalu Lawan | Tajuddeen Gwadabe | Samuel Rutunda | Tadesse Belay | Wendimu Messelle | Hailu Balcha | Sisay Chala | Hagos Gebremichael | Bernard Opoku | Stephen Arthur
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Africa is home to over 2,000 languages from over six language families and has the highest linguistic diversity among all continents. This includes 75 languages with at least one million speakers each. Yet, there is little NLP research conducted on African languages. Crucial in enabling such research is the availability of high-quality annotated datasets. In this paper, we introduce AfriSenti, a sentiment analysis benchmark that contains a total of >110,000 tweets in 14 African languages (Amharic, Algerian Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Moroccan Arabic, Mozambican Portuguese, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Swahili, Tigrinya, Twi, Xitsonga, and Yoruba) from four language families. The tweets were annotated by native speakers and used in the AfriSenti-SemEval shared task (with over 200 participants, see website: https://afrisenti-semeval.github.io). We describe the data collection methodology, annotation process, and the challenges we dealt with when curating each dataset. We further report baseline experiments conducted on the AfriSenti datasets and discuss their usefulness.

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Using Wikidata for Enhancing Compositionality in Pretrained Language Models
Meriem Beloucif | Mihir Bansal | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing

One of the many advantages of pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as BERT and RoBERTa is their flexibility and contextual nature. These features give PLMs strong capabilities for representing lexical semantics. However, PLMs seem incapable of capturing high-level semantics in terms of compositionally. We show that when augmented with the relevant semantic knowledge, PMLs learn to capture a higher degree of lexical compositionality. We annotate a large dataset from Wikidata highlighting a type of semantic inference that is easy for humans to understand but difficult for PLMs, like the correlation between age and date of birth. We use this resource for finetuning DistilBERT, BERT large and RoBERTa. Our results show that the performance of PLMs against the test data continuously improves when augmented with such a rich resource. Our results are corroborated by a consistent improvement over most GLUE benchmark natural language understanding tasks.

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Improving Translation Quality for Low-Resource Inuktitut with Various Preprocessing Techniques
Mathias Hans Erik Stenlund | Mathilde Nanni | Micaella Bruton | Meriem Beloucif
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing

Neural machine translation has been shown to outperform all other machine translation paradigms when trained in a high-resource setting. However, it still performs poorly when dealing with low-resource languages, for which parallel data for training is scarce. This is especially the case for morphologically complex languages such as Turkish, Tamil, Uyghur, etc. In this paper, we investigate various preprocessing methods for Inuktitut, a low-resource indigenous language from North America, without a morphological analyzer. On both the original and romanized scripts, we test various preprocessing techniques such as Byte-Pair Encoding, random stemming, and data augmentation using Hungarian for the Inuktitut-to-English translation task. We found that there are benefits to retaining the original script as it helps to achieve higher BLEU scores than the romanized models.

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Uppsala University at SemEval-2023 Task12: Zero-shot Sentiment Classification for Nigerian Pidgin Tweets
Annika Kniele | Meriem Beloucif
Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023)

While sentiment classification has been considered a practically solved task for high-resource languages such as English, the scarcity of data for many languages still makes it a challenging task. The AfriSenti-SemEval shared task aims to classify sentiment on Twitter data for 14 low-resource African languages. In our participation, we focus on Nigerian Pidgin as the target language. We have investigated the effect of English monolingual and multilingual pre-trained models on the sentiment classification task for Nigerian Pidgin. Our setup includes zero-shot models (using English, Igbo and Hausa data) and a Nigerian Pidgin fine-tuned model. Our results show that English fine-tuned models perform slightly better than models fine-tuned on other Nigerian languages, which could be explained by the lexical and structural closeness between Nigerian Pidgin and English. The best results were reported on the monolingual Nigerian Pidgin data. The model pre-trained on English and fine-tuned on Nigerian Pidgin was submitted to Task A Track 4 of the AfriSenti-SemEval Shared Task 12, and scored 25 out of 32 in the ranking.

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SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval)
Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad | Idris Abdulmumin | Seid Muhie Yimam | David Ifeoluwa Adelani | Ibrahim Said Ahmad | Nedjma Ousidhoum | Abinew Ali Ayele | Saif Mohammad | Meriem Beloucif | Sebastian Ruder
Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023)

We present the first Africentric SemEval Shared task, Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval) - The dataset is available at https://github.com/afrisenti-semeval/afrisent-semeval-2023. AfriSenti-SemEval is a sentiment classification challenge in 14 African languages: Amharic, Algerian Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Moroccan Arabic, Mozambican Portuguese, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Swahili, Tigrinya, Twi, Xitsonga, and Yorb (Muhammad et al., 2023), using data labeled with 3 sentiment classes. We present three subtasks: (1) Task A: monolingual classification, which received 44 submissions; (2) Task B: multilingual classification, which received 32 submissions; and (3) Task C: zero-shot classification, which received 34 submissions. The best performance for tasks A and B was achieved by NLNDE team with 71.31 and 75.06 weighted F1, respectively. UCAS-IIE-NLP achieved the best average score for task C with 58.15 weighted F1. We describe the various approaches adopted by the top 10 systems and their approaches.

2022

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Elvis vs. M. Jackson: Who has More Albums? Classification and Identification of Elements in Comparative Questions
Meriem Beloucif | Seid Muhie Yimam | Steffen Stahlhacke | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Comparative Question Answering (cQA) is the task of providing concrete and accurate responses to queries such as: “Is Lyft cheaper than a regular taxi?” or “What makes a mortgage different from a regular loan?”. In this paper, we propose two new open-domain real-world datasets for identifying and labeling comparative questions. While the first dataset contains instances of English questions labeled as comparative vs. non-comparative, the second dataset provides additional labels including the objects and the aspects of comparison. We conduct several experiments that evaluate the soundness of our datasets. The evaluation of our datasets using various classifiers show promising results that reach close-to-human results on a binary classification task with a neural model using ALBERT embeddings. When approaching the unsupervised sequence labeling task, some headroom remains.

2021

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Which is Better for Deep Learning: Python or MATLAB? Answering Comparative Questions in Natural Language
Viktoriia Chekalina | Alexander Bondarenko | Chris Biemann | Meriem Beloucif | Varvara Logacheva | Alexander Panchenko
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

We present a system for answering comparative questions (Is X better than Y with respect to Z?) in natural language. Answering such questions is important for assisting humans in making informed decisions. The key component of our system is a natural language interface for comparative QA that can be used in personal assistants, chatbots, and similar NLP devices. Comparative QA is a challenging NLP task, since it requires collecting support evidence from many different sources, and direct comparisons of rare objects may be not available even on the entire Web. We take the first step towards a solution for such a task offering a testbed for comparative QA in natural language by probing several methods, making the three best ones available as an online demo.

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Probing Pre-trained Language Models for Semantic Attributes and their Values
Meriem Beloucif | Chris Biemann
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Pretrained language models (PTLMs) yield state-of-the-art performance on many natural language processing tasks, including syntax, semantics and commonsense. In this paper, we focus on identifying to what extent do PTLMs capture semantic attributes and their values, e.g., the correlation between rich and high net worth. We use PTLMs to predict masked tokens using patterns and lists of items from Wikidata in order to verify how likely PTLMs encode semantic attributes along with their values. Such inferences based on semantics are intuitive for humans as part of our language understanding. Since PTLMs are trained on large amount of Wikipedia data we would assume that they can generate similar predictions, yet our findings reveal that PTLMs are still much worse than humans on this task. We show evidence and analysis explaining how to exploit our methodology to integrate better context and semantics into PTLMs using knowledge bases.

2020

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WikiBank: Using Wikidata to Improve Multilingual Frame-Semantic Parsing
Cezar Sas | Meriem Beloucif | Anders Søgaard
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Frame-semantic annotations exist for a tiny fraction of the world’s languages, Wikidata, however, links knowledge base triples to texts in many languages, providing a common, distant supervision signal for semantic parsers. We present WikiBank, a multilingual resource of partial semantic structures that can be used to extend pre-existing resources rather than creating new man-made resources from scratch. We also integrate this form of supervision into an off-the-shelf frame-semantic parser and allow cross-lingual transfer. Using Google’s Sling architecture, we show significant improvements on the English and Spanish CoNLL 2009 datasets, whether training on the full available datasets or small subsamples thereof.

2019

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Naive Regularizers for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation
Meriem Beloucif | Ana Valeria Gonzalez | Marcel Bollmann | Anders Søgaard
Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2019)

Neural machine translation models have little inductive bias, which can be a disadvantage in low-resource scenarios. Neural models have to be trained on large amounts of data and have been shown to perform poorly when only limited data is available. We show that using naive regularization methods, based on sentence length, punctuation and word frequencies, to penalize translations that are very different from the input sentences, consistently improves the translation quality across multiple low-resource languages. We experiment with 12 language pairs, varying the training data size between 17k to 230k sentence pairs. Our best regularizer achieves an average increase of 1.5 BLEU score and 1.0 TER score across all the language pairs. For example, we achieve a BLEU score of 26.70 on the IWSLT15 English–Vietnamese translation task simply by using relative differences in punctuation as a regularizer.

2018

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SRL for low resource languages isn’t needed for semantic SMT
Meriem Beloucif | Dekai Wu
Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

Previous attempts at injecting semantic frame biases into SMT training for low resource languages failed because either (a) no semantic parser is available for the low resource input language; or (b) the output English language semantic parses excise relevant parts of the alignment space too aggressively. We present the first semantic SMT model to succeed in significantly improving translation quality across many low resource input languages for which no automatic SRL is available —consistently and across all common MT metrics. The results we report are the best by far to date for this type of approach; our analyses suggest that in general, easier approaches toward including semantics in training SMT models may be more feasible than generally assumed even for low resource languages where semantic parsers remain scarce. While recent proposals to use the crosslingual evaluation metric XMEANT during inversion transduction grammar (ITG) induction are inapplicable to low resource languages that lack semantic parsers, we break the bottleneck via a vastly improved method of biasing ITG induction toward learning more semantically correct alignments using the monolingual semantic evaluation metric MEANT. Unlike XMEANT, MEANT requires only a readily-available English (output language) semantic parser. The advances we report here exploit the novel realization that MEANT represents an excellent way to semantically bias expectationmaximization induction even for low resource languages. We test our systems on challenging languages including Amharic, Uyghur, Tigrinya and Oromo. Results show that our model influences the learning towards more semantically correct alignments, leading to better translation quality than both the standard ITG or GIZA++ based SMT training models on different datasets.

2016

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Improving word alignment for low resource languages using English monolingual SRL
Meriem Beloucif | Markus Saers | Dekai Wu
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Hybrid Approaches to Translation (HyTra6)

We introduce a new statistical machine translation approach specifically geared to learning translation from low resource languages, that exploits monolingual English semantic parsing to bias inversion transduction grammar (ITG) induction. We show that in contrast to conventional statistical machine translation (SMT) training methods, which rely heavily on phrase memorization, our approach focuses on learning bilingual correlations that help translating low resource languages, by using the output language semantic structure to further narrow down ITG constraints. This approach is motivated by previous research which has shown that injecting a semantic frame based objective function while training SMT models improves the translation quality. We show that including a monolingual semantic objective function during the learning of the translation model leads towards a semantically driven alignment which is more efficient than simply tuning loglinear mixture weights against a semantic frame based evaluation metric in the final stage of statistical machine translation training. We test our approach with three different language pairs and demonstrate that our model biases the learning towards more semantically correct alignments. Both GIZA++ and ITG based techniques fail to capture meaningful bilingual constituents, which is required when trying to learn translation models for low resource languages. In contrast, our proposed model not only improve translation by injecting a monolingual objective function to learn bilingual correlations during early training of the translation model, but also helps to learn more meaningful correlations with a relatively small data set, leading to a better alignment compared to either conventional ITG or traditional GIZA++ based approaches.

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Driving inversion transduction grammar induction with semantic evaluation
Meriem Beloucif | Dekai Wu
Proceedings of the Fifth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics

2015

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Improving semantic SMT via soft semantic role label constraints on ITG alignmens
Meriem Beloucif | Markus Saers | Dekai Wu
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XV: Papers

2014

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Improving MEANT based semantically tuned SMT
Meriem Beloucif | Chi-kiu Lo | Dekai Wu
Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

We discuss various improvements to our MEANT tuned system, previously presented at IWSLT 2013. In our 2014 system, we incorporate this year’s improved version of MEANT, improved Chinese word segmentation, Chinese named entity recognition and dedicated proper name translation, and number expression handling. This results in a significant performance jump compared to last year’s system. We also ran preliminary experiments on tuning to IMEANT, our new ITG based variant of MEANT. The performance of tuning to IMEANT is comparable to tuning on MEANT (differences are statistically insignificant). We are presently investigating if tuning on IMEANT can produce even better results, since IMEANT was actually shown to correlate with human adequacy judgment more closely than MEANT. Finally, we ran experiments applying our new architectural improvements to a contrastive system tuned to BLEU. We observed a slightly higher jump in comparison to last year, possibly due to mismatches of MEANT’s similarity models to our new entity handling.

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Better Semantic Frame Based MT Evaluation via Inversion Transduction Grammars
Dekai Wu | Chi-kiu Lo | Meriem Beloucif | Markus Saers
Proceedings of SSST-8, Eighth Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Structure in Statistical Translation

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XMEANT: Better semantic MT evaluation without reference translations
Chi-kiu Lo | Meriem Beloucif | Markus Saers | Dekai Wu
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

2013

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Learning to Freestyle: Hip Hop Challenge-Response Induction via Transduction Rule Segmentation
Dekai Wu | Karteek Addanki | Markus Saers | Meriem Beloucif
Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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Improving machine translation into Chinese by tuning against Chinese MEANT
Chi-kiu Lo | Meriem Beloucif | Dekai Wu
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

We present the first ever results showing that Chinese MT output is significantly improved by tuning a MT system against a semantic frame based objective function, MEANT, rather than an n-gram based objective function, BLEU, as measured across commonly used metrics and different test sets. Recent work showed that by preserving the meaning of the translations as captured by semantic frames in the training process, MT systems for translating into English on both formal and informal genres are constrained to produce more adequate translations by making more accurate choices on lexical output and reordering rules. In this paper we describe our experiments in IWSLT 2013 TED talk MT tasks on tuning MT systems against MEANT for translating into Chinese and English respectively. We show that the Chinese translation output benefits more from tuning a MT system against MEANT than the English translation output due to the ambiguous nature of word boundaries in Chinese. Our encouraging results show that using MEANT is a promising alternative to BLEU in both evaluating and tuning MT systems to drive the progress of MT research across different languages.