CreoleVal: Multilingual Multitask Benchmarks for Creoles

Creoles represent an under-explored and marginalized group of languages, with few available resources for NLP research. While the genealogical ties between Creoles and other highly-resourced languages imply a significant potential for transfer learning, this potential is hampered due to this lack of annotated data. In this work we present CreoleVal, a collection of benchmark datasets spanning 8 different NLP tasks, covering up to 28 Creole languages; it is an aggregate of brand new development datasets for machine comprehension, relation classification, and machine translation for Creoles, in addition to a practical gateway to a handful of preexisting benchmarks. For each benchmark, we conduct baseline experiments in a zero-shot setting in order to further ascertain the capabilities and limitations of transfer learning for Creoles. Ultimately, the goal of CreoleVal is to empower research on Creoles in NLP and computational linguistics. We hope this resource will contribute to technological inclusion for Creole language users around the globe.

Hybrid Neural Models For Sequence Modelling: The Best Of Three Worlds

We propose a neural architecture with the main characteristics of the most successful neural models of the last years: bidirectional RNNs, encoder-decoder, and the Transformer model. Evaluation on three sequence labelling tasks yields results that are close to the state-of-the-art for all tasks and better than it for some of them, showing the pertinence of this hybrid architecture for this kind of tasks.

Seq2Biseq: Bidirectional Output-wise Recurrent Neural Networks for Sequence Modelling

During the last couple of years, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) have reached state-of-the-art performances on most of the sequence modelling problems. In particular, the "sequence to sequence" model and the neural CRF have proved to be very effective in this domain. In this article, we propose a new RNN architecture for sequence labelling, leveraging gated recurrent layers to take arbitrarily long contexts into account, and using two decoders operating forward and backward. We compare several variants of the proposed solution and their performances to the state-of-the-art. Most of our results are better than the state-of-the-art or very close to it and thanks to the use of recent technologies, our architecture can scale on corpora larger than those used in this work.