In this paper we present a corpus of Russian strategic planning documents, RuREBus. This project is grounded both from language technology and e-government perspectives. Not only new language sources and tools are being developed, but also their applications to e-goverment research. We demonstrate the pipeline for creating a text corpus from scratch. First, the annotation schema is designed. Next texts are marked up using human-in-the-loop strategy, so that preliminary annotations are derived from a machine learning model and are manually corrected. The amount of annotated texts is large enough to showcase what insights can be gained from RuREBus.
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a promising and rapidly evolving research area. Training a large number of neural networks requires an exceptional amount of computational power, which makes NAS unreachable for those researchers who have limited or no access to high-performance clusters and supercomputers. A few benchmarks with precomputed neural architectures performances have been recently introduced to overcome this problem and ensure more reproducible experiments. However, these benchmarks are only for the computer vision domain and, thus, are built from the image datasets and convolution-derived architectures. In this work, we step outside the computer vision domain by leveraging the language modeling task, which is the core of natural language processing (NLP). Our main contribution is as follows: we have provided search space of recurrent neural networks on the text datasets and trained 14k architectures within it; we have conducted both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation of the trained models using datasets for semantic relatedness and language understanding evaluation; finally, we have tested several NAS algorithms to demonstrate how the precomputed results can be utilized. We believe that our results have high potential of usage for both NAS and NLP communities.
In this paper, our focus is the connection and influence of language technologies on the research in neurolinguistics. We present a review of brain imaging-based neurolinguistic studies with a focus on the natural language representations, such as word embeddings and pre-trained language models. Mutual enrichment of neurolinguistics and language technologies leads to development of brain-aware natural language representations. The importance of this research area is emphasized by medical applications.
Applications such as machine translation, speech recognition, and information retrieval require efficient handling of noun compounds as they are one of the possible sources for out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. In-depth processing of noun compounds requires not only splitting them into smaller components (or even roots) but also the identification of instances that should remain unsplitted as they are of idiomatic nature. We develop a two-fold deep learning-based approach of noun compound splitting and idiomatic compound detection for the German language that we train using a newly collected corpus of annotated German compounds. Our neural noun compound splitter operates on a sub-word level and outperforms the current state of the art by about 5%.
Disambiguation of word senses in context is easy for humans, but is a major challenge for automatic approaches. Sophisticated supervised and knowledge-based models were developed to solve this task. However, (i) the inherent Zipfian distribution of supervised training instances for a given word and/or (ii) the quality of linguistic knowledge representations motivate the development of completely unsupervised and knowledge-free approaches to word sense disambiguation (WSD). They are particularly useful for under-resourced languages which do not have any resources for building either supervised and/or knowledge-based models. In this paper, we present a method that takes as input a standard pre-trained word embedding model and induces a fully-fledged word sense inventory, which can be used for disambiguation in context. We use this method to induce a collection of sense inventories for 158 languages on the basis of the original pre-trained fastText word embeddings by Grave et al. (2018), enabling WSD in these languages. Models and system are available online.
We explore the abilities of character recurrent neural network (char-RNN) for hashtag segmentation. Our approach to the task is the following: we generate synthetic training dataset according to frequent n-grams that satisfy predefined morpho-syntactic patterns to avoid any manual annotation. The active learning strategy limits the training dataset and selects informative training subset. The approach does not require any language-specific settings and is compared for two languages, which differ in inflection degree.
We investigate the performance of sentence embeddings models on several tasks for the Russian language. In our comparison, we include such tasks as multiple choice question answering, next sentence prediction, and paraphrase identification. We employ FastText embeddings as a baseline and compare it to ELMo and BERT embeddings. We conduct two series of experiments, using both unsupervised (i.e., based on similarity measure only) and supervised approaches for the tasks. Finally, we present datasets for multiple choice question answering and next sentence prediction in Russian.
In this paper we tackle multilingual named entity recognition task. We use the BERT Language Model as embeddings with bidirectional recurrent network, attention, and NCRF on the top. We apply multilingual BERT only as embedder without any fine-tuning. We test out model on the dataset of the BSNLP shared task, which consists of texts in Bulgarian, Czech, Polish and Russian languages.