Congratulations to one of our PhD students Tharindu Ranasinghe – who has had a paper accepted at ACL-IJCNLP 2021.

An Exploratory Analysis of Multilingual Word Level Quality Estimation with Cross-Lingual Transformers. 

Authors: Tharindu Ranasinghe, Constantin Orasan, Ruslan Mitkov. 

Abstract: Most studies on word level Quality Estimation (QE) of machine translation focus on language-specific models. The obvious disadvantages of these approaches are the need for labelled data for each language pair and the high cost required to maintain several language-specific models. To overcome these problems, we explore different approaches to multilingual word level QE. We show that these QE models perform on-par with the current language-specific models. In the case of zero-shot QE, we show that it is possible to accurately predict word level quality for any given new language pair from models trained on other language pairs. Our findings indicate that the word level QE models based on powerful pre-trained transformers we propose on this paper generalise well across languages, making them more useful in real-world scenarios.

We are working with BBC Arts and Faculty of Arts on a new engagement project to mark the 300th anniversary of the English Language Novel.

The interdisciplinary project unites research by Wolverhampton’s Research Group for Computational Linguistics, including Dr Sara Moze, Richard Evans and Dr Emad Mohamed, and from English and Creative Writing staff, led by Dr Aidan Byrne. The project is seeking support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

There is more information on the University website if you would like to find out more about the project: https://www.wlv.ac.uk/about-us/news-and-events/latest-news/2019/august-2019/wolverhampton-researchers-collaborate-on-bbcs-novels-that-shaped-our-world.php

Congratulations to Marcos Zampieri, whose paper has been accepted at NAACL 2019.

Reference:  Marcos  Zampieri,  Shervin  Malmasi,  Preslav  Nakov, Sara  Rosenthal,  Noura  Farra,  and  Ritesh  Kumar (2019)  Predicting the Type and Target of Offensive Posts in Social Media. 

You may access the NAACL paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09666

We are pleased to announce that the paper titled “Bridging the Gap: Attending to Discontinuity in Identification of Multiword Expressions” from researchers in RGCL has been accepted into the main track of the Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2019). This is joint work by Omid Rohanian, Shiva Taslimipoor, Le An Ha, Samaneh Kouchaki, and Prof. Ruslan Mitkov.

A preprint of this paper will soon be available on ArXiv.

Congratulations to Mireille Makary for completing her Viva Voce exam on 17th October. Mireille, a part-time distance RGCL student, was defending her thesis ‘Ranking retrieval systems using minimal human assessments’.

After the Viva, Mireille celebrated with the group in the traditional RGCL way!