Metadata and Content-Based Approaches to Resource Discovery

Machine learning techniques have long been the foundations of speech processing. Bayesian classiflcation, decision trees, unsupervised clustering, the EM algorithm, maximum entropy, etc. are all part of existing speech recognition systems. The success of statistical speech recognition has led to the rise of statistical and empirical methods in natural language processing. Indeed, many of the machine learning techniques used in language processing, from statistical part-of-speech tagging to the noisy channel model for machine translation have roots in work conducted in the speech fleld. However, advances in learning theory and algorithmic machine learning approaches in recent years have led to signiflcant changes in the direction and emphasis of the statistical and learning centered research in natural language processing and made a mark on natural language and speech processing. Approaches such as memory based learning, a range of linear classiflers such as Boosting, SVMs and SNoW and others have been successfully applied to a broad range of natural language problems, and these now inspire new research in speech retrieval and recognition. We have seen an increasingly close collaboration between voice and language processing researchers in some of the shared tasks such as spontaneous speech recognition and understanding, voice data information extraction, and machine translation. The purpose of this special issue was to invite speech and language researchers to communicate with each other, and with the machine learning community on the latest machine learning advances in their work. The call for papers was met with great enthusiasm from the speech and natural language community. Thirty six submissions were received; each paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers. Only ten papers were selected re∞ecting not only some of the best work on machine learning in the areas of natural language and spoken language processing but also what we view as a collection of papers that represent current trends in these areas of research both from the perspective of

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is now widely integrated into web and mobile applications, enabling natural interactions between humans and computers. Although there is a large body of NLP studies published in Information Systems (IS), a comprehensive review of how NLP research is conceptualised and realised in the context of IS has not been conducted. To assess the current state of NLP research in IS, we use a variety of techniques to analyse a literature corpus comprising 356 NLP research articles published in IS journals between 2004 and 2018. Our analysis indicates the need to move from semantics to pragmatics. More importantly, our findings unpack the challenges and assumptions underlying current research trends in NLP. We argue that overcoming these challenges will require a renewed disciplinary IS focus. By proposing a roadmap of NLP research in IS, we draw attention to three NLP research perspectives and present future directions that IS researchers are uniquely positioned to address.

It is necessary to build a large-scale online lexical-semantic network for the Vietnamese language because it fosters the research and applications in natural language processing, information retrieval, and other areas. The goal of this research is to propose an approach to create Vietnamese WordNet (VWN) automatically. The WordNet similarity was used in order to improve the accuracy of using English WordNet and translations when creating synsets for VWN. For experiment and evaluation, a sub VWN in IT area was generated by an implemented tool that takes input is a list of IT keywords. We compare the outputs with existing Vietnamese resources. The results show that 86.6% of synsets generated by our method is equivalent to synsets created by human.

Like any other science, research in natural language processing (NLP) depends on the ability to draw correct conclusions from experiments. A key tool for this is statistical significance testing: We use it to judge whether a result provides meaningful, generalizable findings or should be taken with a pinch of salt. When comparing new methods against others, performance metrics often differ by only small amounts, so researchers turn to significance tests to show that improved models are genuinely better. Unfortunately, this reasoning often fails because we choose inappropriate significance tests or carry them out incorrectly, making their outcomes meaningless. Or, the test we use may fail to indicate a significant result when a more appropriate test would find one. NLP researchers must avoid these pitfalls to ensure that their evaluations are sound and ultimately avoid wasting time and money through incorrect conclusions.This book guides NLP researchers through the whole process of significance testing, making it easy to select the right kind of test by matching canonical NLP tasks to specific significance testing procedures. As well as being a handbook for researchers, the book provides theoretical background on significance testing, includes new methods that solve problems with significance tests in the world of deep learning and multidataset benchmarks, and describes the open research problems of significance testing for NLP.The book focuses on the task of comparing one algorithm with another. At the core of this is the p-value, the probability that a difference at least as extreme as the one we observed could occur by chance. If the p-value falls below a predetermined threshold, the result is declared significant. Leaving aside the fundamental limitation of turning the validity of results into a binary question with an arbitrary threshold, to be a valid statistical significance test, the p-value must be computed in the right way. The book describes the two crucial properties of an appropriate significance test: The test must be both valid and powerful. Validity refers to the avoidance of type 1 errors, in which the result is incorrectly declared significant. Common mistakes that lead to type 1 errors include deploying tests that make incorrect assumptions, such as independence between data points. The power of a test refers to its ability to detect a significant result and therefore to avoid type 2 errors. Here, knowledge of the data and experiment must be used to choose a test that makes the correct assumptions. There is a trade-off between validity and power, but for the most common NLP tasks (language modeling, sequence labeling, translation, etc.), there are clear choices of tests that provide a good balance.Beginning with a detailed background on significance testing, the book then shows the reader how to carry out tests for specific NLP tasks. There is a mix of styles, with the first four chapters providing reference material that will be extremely useful to both new and experienced researchers. Here, it is easy to find the material related to a given NLP task. The next two chapters discuss more recent research into the application of significance tests to deep neural networks and for testing across multiple datasets. Alongside open research questions, these later chapters provide clear guidelines on how to apply the proposed methods. It is this mix of background material and reference guidelines that I believe makes this book so compelling and nicely self-contained.The introduction in Chapter 1 motivates the need for a comprehensive textbook and outlines challenges that the later chapters address more deeply. The theoretical background material begins in Chapter 2, which introduces core concepts, including hypothesis testing, type 1 and type 2 errors, validity and power, and p-values. The reader does not need to have any prior knowledge of statistical significance tests to follow this part. However, experienced readers could still benefit from reading this chapter, as concepts such as p-values are widely misunderstood and misused (Amrhein, Greenland, and McShane 2019).The significance tests themselves are introduced in Chapter 3, categorized into parametric and nonparametric tests. The chapter begins with the intuitively simple paired z-test, then builds up to more commonly-applied techniques, showing the connections and assumptions that each test makes. Step-by-step algorithms help the reader to implement each test. Although the chapter does cite uses of tests in NLP research, the main purpose is to present the theory behind each test and point out their differences.Chapter 4 provides perhaps the most handy part of the book for reference: a correspondence between common NLP tasks and statistical tests. Each task is discussed in terms of the evaluation metrics used, then a decision tree is introduced to guide the reader toward a choice between a parametric test, bootstrap or randomization test, or sampling-free nonparametric test. Section 4.3 then links each NLP evaluation measure to a specific significance test, presenting a large table that helps readers identify which test they need for a specific task. Particular considerations for each task are also pointed out to provide more detail about the appropriate options. The final part of this chapter describes the issue of p-hacking, in which dataset sizes are increased until a significance threshold is reached without consideration for biases in the data (discussed, for example, in Hofmann [2015]). The chapter proposes a simple solution to ensure robust significance testing with large datasets.Where Chapter 4 presents well-established methods, Chapter 5 introduces the current research question of how best to apply statistical significance testing to deep learning. Non-convex loss functions, stochastic optimization, random initialization, and a multitude of hyperparameters limit the conclusions we can draw from a single test run of a deep neural network (DNN). This chapter, which is based on the authors’ ACL paper (Dror, Shlomov, and Reichart 2019), explains how the comparison process can be overhauled to provide more meaningful evaluations. Beginning by explaining the difficulties of evaluating DNNs, the chapter then introduces criteria for a comparison framework, then discusses the limitations of current methods. Reimers and Gurevych (2018) have previously tackled this problem, but their approach has limited power and does not provide a confidence score. Other works, such as Clark et al. (2011), compare DNNs using a collection of statistics, such as the mean or standard deviation of performance across runs. This book shows how such an approach violates the assumptions of the significance tests. The authors propose almost stochastic dominance as the basis for a better alternative. The chapter explains how to use the proposed method, evaluates it in an empirical case study, and finally analyzes the errors made by each testing approach.Large NLP models are often tested across a range of datasets, which presents another problem for standard significance testing. Chapter 6 discusses the challenges of assessing two questions: (1) On how many datasets does algorithm A outperform algorithm B? (2) On which datasets does A outperform B? Applying standard significance tests individually to each dataset and counting the number of significant results is likely to overestimate the total number of significant results, as this chapter explains. The authors then present a new framework for replicability analysis, based on partial conjunction testing, and discuss two variants (Bonferroni and Fisher) for when the datasets are independent or dependent. They introduce a method based on Benjamini and Heller (2008) to count the number of datasets where one method outperforms another, then show how to use the Holm procedure (Holm 1979) to identify which datasets these are. Chapter 6 provides a lot of detailed background on the proposed replicability analysis framework, and the later sections again link the process to specific NLP case studies, and step-by-step summaries help the reader to apply the methodology. Extensive empirical results illustrate the very substantial differences in outcomes between the proposed approach and standard procedures.The final two chapters present open problems and conclude, showing that the topic has many interesting research questions of its own, such as problems when performing cross-validation, and the limited statistical power of replicability analysis.Overall, I highly recommend this book to a wide range of NLP researchers, from new students to seasoned experts who wish to ensure that they compare methods effectively. The book is excellent as both an introduction to the topic of significance testing and as a reference to use when evaluating your results. For anyone with further interest in the topic, it also points the way to future work. If one could level any criticism at this book at all, it is that it does not deeply discuss the basic flaws of significance testing or what the alternatives might be. For now, though, significance testing is an integral part of NLP research and this book provides a great resource for researchers who wish to perform it correctly and painlessly.

Cross language information retrieval (CLIR) is a retrieval process in which the user fires queries in one language to retrieve information from another (different) language. The diversity of information and language barriers are the serious issues for communication and cultural exchange across the world. To solve such barriers, Cross language information retrieval system, are nowadays in strong demand. CLIR is a subset of Information Retrieval (IR) system. Information Retrieval deals with finding useful information from a large collection of unstructured, structured and semi-structured data to a user query where the query is a set of keywords. Information Retrieval can be classified into different classes such as Monolingual information retrieval, Bi-Lingual Information Retrieval, Multilingual information retrieval and Cross language information retrieval. This paper focuses on the various IR variants and techniques used in CLIR system. Further, based on available literature, a number of challenges and issues in CLIR have been identified and discussed. It gives an overview of the advantages, limitations, tools available in CLIR research. It also describes new application areas of CLIR such as medical, multimedia, question answering system etc. The need for exploring and building more specialized information system that enable speakers of an Odia language to discover valuable information beyond linguistic and cultural barriers. This study is aimed at building an experimental CLIR system between one of the under-resourced language (i.e. Odia) and one of the most commonly used online language (i.e. English) in future.

Twitter messages are written in an informal style, which hinders many information retrieval and natural language processing applications. Existing normalization systems have two major drawbacks. The first is that these methods largely require large-scale annotated training data. The second is that these systems assume that a nonstandard token is recovered to one standard word. However, there are many nonstandard tokens that should be recovered to two or more standard words, so the problem remains to be highly challenging. To address the above issues, we propose an unsupervised normalization system based on the context similarity. The proposed system does not require any annotated data. Meanwhile, a nonstandard token will be recovered to one or more standard words. Results show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.

CLEF was initiated with intention of providing a catalyst to research in Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) and Multilingual Information Retrieval (MIR). Focusing principally on European languages, it initially provided CLIR benchmark tasks to the research community within an annual cycle of task design, conduct and reporting. While the early focus was on textual data, the emergence of technologies to enable collection, archiving and content processing of multimedia content led to several initiatives which sought to address search for spoken and visual content. Similar to the interest in multilingual search for text, interest arose in working multilingually with multimedia content. To support research in these areas CLEF introduced a number of tasks in multilingual search for multimedia content. While investigation of image retrieval has formed the focus of the ImageCLEF task over many years, this chapter reviews tasks examining speech and video retrieval carried out within CLEF during its first 10 years, and overviews related work reported at other information retrieval benchmarks.

The plethora of online content has paved the way for the development of sophisticated and advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) tools. However, such tools are only available for English and other high-resource languages while being unavailable for low-resource languages such as Urdu. In this regard, generally, cross-lingual transfer learning techniques are adopted to utilize tools developed for the English language for low resource languages. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of three word-level transfer learning methods: OrthoMap, VecMap-supervised, and VecMap unsupervised for Urdu text. We further test these transfer learning methods for three tasks: propaganda identification, topic classification, and sentiment analysis. For this purpose, we augment an English-Urdu word dictionary and three datasets of Ur-En Propaganda, Ur-En News Dataset, and Ur-En Sentiment Corpus. Our analysis shows that the transfer learning methods optimize better for the short-text of Ur-En Sentiment Corpus with a precision of 40.1%. While for propaganda detection, the classifier attained an accuracy of 83% after transfer learning which is competitive with the 87% accuracy achieved after training the model on Urdu text data. We believe that this work will be beneficial for NLP, IR, and computational linguistic researchers working on Urdu language content.

Determining the extent to which two text snippets are semantically equivalent is a well-researched topic in the areas of natural language processing, information retrieval and text summarization. The sentence-to-sentence similarity scoring is extensively used in both generic and query-based summarization of documents as a significance or a similarity indicator. Nevertheless, most of these applications utilize the concept of semantic similarity measure only as a tool, without paying importance to the inherent properties of such tools that ultimately restrict the scope and technical soundness of the underlined applications. This paper aims to contribute to fill in this gap. It investigates three popular WordNet hierarchical semantic similarity measures, namely path-length, Wu and Palmer and Leacock and Chodorow, from both algebraical and intuitive properties, highlighting their inherent limitations and theoretical constraints. We have especially examined properties related to range and scope of the semantic similarity score, incremental monotonicity evolution, monotonicity with respect to hyponymy/hypernymy relationship as well as a set of interactive properties. Extension from word semantic similarity to sentence similarity has also been investigated using a pairwise canonical extension. Properties of the underlined sentence-to-sentence similarity are examined and scrutinized. Next, to overcome inherent limitations of WordNet semantic similarity in terms of accounting for various Part-of-Speech word categories, a WordNet “All word-To-Noun conversion” that makes use of Categorial Variation Database (CatVar) is put forward and evaluated using a publicly available dataset with a comparison with some state-of-the-art methods. The finding demonstrates the feasibility of the proposal and opens up new opportunities in information retrieval and natural language processing tasks.

Named Entity Recognition is a subtask in Information Extraction. In Named Entity Recognition (NER) we try to identify each of the words provided into some categories predefined by us. These categories or classes can be organization, name, time, place etc. Named Entity Recognition is a part of Natural Language Processing which is aims at making human and computer interactions more meaningful and efficient. NLP is nowadays being effectively being used in the area of automatic text summarization, cross language information retrieval, speech recognition and query named entity recognition. This paper focuses on Named entity recognition, how it is performed and a how apply NER to web search queries so that correct and more user personalized results are displayed by the web search engines..

In Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) process, the translation effects have a direct impact o n the accuracy of follow-up retrieval results. In diction ary-based approach, we are dealing with the words t hat have more than one meaning which can decrease the retrieval performance if the query translation retur n an incorrect translations. These issues need to be ove rcome using efficient technique. In this study we p roposed a Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) method based on domain ontology using Quran concepts for disambiguating translation of the query and to improve the dictionary-based query translation. For experimentation, we use Quran ontology written in E nglish and Malay languages as a bilingual parallelcorpora and Quran concepts as a resource for cross- language query translation along with dictionary-ba sed translation. For evaluation, we measure the perform ance of three IR systems. IR 1 is natural language query IR, IR 2 is natural language query CLIR based on dictionary (as a Baseline) and IR 3 is the retrieval of this research proposed method using Mean Average Precision (MAP) and average precision at 11 points of recall. The experimental result shows that our prop osed method brings significant improvement in retri eval accuracy for English document collections, but defi cient for Malay document collections. The proposed CLIR method can obtain query expansion effect and improve retrieval performance in certain language.

A shareable repository of clinical notes is critical for advancing natural language processing (NLP) research, and therefore a goal of many NLP researchers is to create a shareable repository of clinical notes, that has breadth (from multiple institutions) as well as depth (as much individual data as possible). We aimed to assess the degree to which individuals would be to contribute their health data to such a repository. A compact e-survey probed willingness to share demographic and clinical data categories. Participants were faculty, staff, and students in two geographically diverse major medical centers (Utah and New York). 2,140 respondents completed useable surveys. 56% of respondents were somewhat/definitely willing to share clinical data with identifiers, while 89% of respondents were somewhat (17%) or definitely (72%) to share without identifiers. Results were consistent across gender, age, and education, but there were some differences by geographical region. Individuals were most reluctant (50-74%) sharing mental health, substance abuse, and domestic violence data.

The query-based on the result is less relevant documents results. In this study, a query has been improved in order to retrieve more relevant documents across language boundaries, a mechanism for query translation with semantic which is applied on as semantic query (SQ). Therefore, this study is conducted with the purposes to investigate semantic approach against the queries and vice versa. Furthermore, it is also conducted to investigate the performance query based on total retrieve and relevant. The retrieval however, included the irrelevant documents because of the translation polysemy. Results from the experiments suggest that semantic approach is most important process in cross language information retrieval (CLIR). It also found that semantic approach contributes to better performance in retrieving more relevant and related Quran document results.

Natural language inference (NLI) is a subfield of natural language processing (NLP) that aims to identify the contextual relationship between premise and hypothesis sentences. While high-resource languages like English benefit from robust and rich NLI datasets, creating similar datasets for low-resource languages is challenging due to the cost and complexity of manual annotation. Although translation of existing datasets offers a practical solution, direct translation of domain-specific datasets presents unique challenges, particularly in handling abbreviations, metric conversions, and cultural alignment. This study introduces a pipeline for translating a medical NLI dataset into Turkish, which is a low-resource language. Our approach employs fine-tuning the Llama-3.1 model with selected samples from the Medical Abbreviation dataset (MeDAL) to extract and resolve medical abbreviations. Consequently, NLI pairs are refined with extracted abbreviations and subjected to metric correction. Later, the processed sentences are then translated using Facebook's No Language Left Behind (NLLB) translation model. To ensure quality, we conducted comprehensive evaluations using both machine learning models and medical expert review. Our results show that BERTurk achieved 75.17% accuracy on TurkMedNLI test data and 76.30% on the normalized test set, while BioBERTurk demonstrated comparable performance with 75.59% accuracy on test data and 72.29% on the normalized dataset. Medical experts further validated the translations through manual assessment of sampled sentences. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of large language models in adapting domain-specific datasets for low-resource languages, establishing a foundation for future research in multilingual biomedical NLP.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a revolutionary discipline that resides at the crossroads of computer science and linguistics, with its primary emphasis on the interaction between computers and human language. With roots in artificial intelligence, NLP seeks to equip machines with the ability to comprehend, interpret, and respond to natural language, enabling more intuitive and meaningful communication between humans and computers. This multidisciplinary domain leverages advanced algorithms and models to tackle a range of linguistic challenges, from language translation and sentiment analysis to speech recognition. Recent breakthroughs, particularly in deep learning and neural networks, have propelled NLP to new heights, with applications spanning diverse sectors such as healthcare, finance, and education. As NLP continues to advance, its potential impact on enhancing human-machine interaction and information processing is increasingly evident, promising a future where technology seamlessly integrates with our natural modes of communication. The significance of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in research lies in its capacity to revolutionize human-computer interaction. NLP empowers machines to understand and generate human language, enabling advancements in sentiment analysis, language translation, and conversational AI. This transformative capability has profound implications across various industries, including healthcare, finance, and education. NLP research not only enhances the efficiency of information retrieval and processing but also holds the key to developing more intuitive and user-friendly technologies. As the frontier of NLP research expands, its potential to bridge the communication gap between humans and machines continues to shape the future of technology and information access. VIKOR functions as a multi-criteria decision-making technique that determines the best option by comparing it to the ideal option. The ranking procedure comprises determining distances concerning the optimal solution. VIKOR uses linear normalization to get the best possible outcomes. This technique was first presented by Opricovic in 1998 and was intended to optimize multi-attribute complex systems. Its main focus is on ranking lists that allow for flexibility in the strategy weight interval and incorporate compromise alternatives to obtain desired results. Alternative taken as Open AI GPT-4, Google BERT, Microsoft Azure Text Analytics, IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding, spaCy, NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit), Amazon Comprehend. Evaluation Parameter taken as Sentiment Analysis (F1 Score), NER Performance, Language Support, Processing Speed (Response Time) (ms), Translation Accuracy (BLEU Score), Data Privacy. The result it is seen that Amazon Comprehend is got the first rank where as is the IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding is having the lowest rank.