computational research
Flexing in 73 Languages: A Single Small Model for Multilingual Inflection
Sourada, Tomáš, Straková, Jana
We present a compact, single-model approach to multilingual inflection, the task of generating inflected word forms from base lemmas to express grammatical categories. Our model, trained jointly on data from 73 languages, is lightweight, robust to unseen words, and outperforms monolingual baselines in most languages. This demonstrates the effectiveness of multilingual modeling for inflection and highlights its practical benefits: simplifying deployment by eliminating the need to manage and retrain dozens of separate monolingual models. In addition to the standard SIGMORPHON shared task benchmarks, we evaluate our monolingual and multilingual models on 73 Universal Dependencies (UD) treebanks, extracting lemma-tag-form triples and their frequency counts. To ensure realistic data splits, we introduce a novel frequency-weighted, lemma-disjoint train-dev-test resampling procedure. Our work addresses the lack of an open-source, general-purpose, multilingual morphological inflection system capable of handling unseen words across a wide range of languages, including Czech.
Probing Subphonemes in Morphology Models
Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in morphological inflection tasks, yet their ability to generalize across languages and morphological rules remains limited. One possible explanation for this behavior can be the degree to which these models are able to capture implicit phenomena at the phonological and subphonemic levels. We introduce a language-agnostic probing method to investigate phonological feature encoding in transformers trained directly on phonemes, and perform it across seven morphologically diverse languages. We show that phonological features which are local, such as final-obstruent devoicing in Turkish, are captured well in phoneme embeddings, whereas long-distance dependencies like vowel harmony are better represented in the transformer's encoder. Finally, we discuss how these findings inform empirical strategies for training morphological models, particularly regarding the role of subphonemic feature acquisition.
Measuring Mental Health Variables in Computational Research: Toward Validated, Dimensional, and Transdiagnostic Approaches
Shani, Chen, Stade, Elizabeth C.
Computational mental health research develops models to predict and understand psychological phenomena, but often relies on inappropriate measures of psychopathology constructs, undermining validity. We identify three key issues: (1) reliance on unvalidated measures (e.g., self-declared diagnosis) over validated ones (e.g., diagnosis by clinician); (2) treating mental health constructs as categorical rather than dimensional; and (3) focusing on disorder-specific constructs instead of transdiagnostic ones. We outline the benefits of using validated, dimensional, and transdiagnostic measures and offer practical recommendations for practitioners. Using valid measures that reflect the nature and structure of psychopathology is essential for computational mental health research.
Can a Neural Model Guide Fieldwork? A Case Study on Morphological Data Collection
Mahmudi, Aso, Herce, Borja, Amestica, Demian Inostroza, Scherbakov, Andreas, Hovy, Eduard, Vylomova, Ekaterina
Linguistic fieldwork is an important component in language documentation and preservation. However, it is a long, exhaustive, and time-consuming process. This paper presents a novel model that guides a linguist during the fieldwork and accounts for the dynamics of linguist-speaker interactions. We introduce a novel framework that evaluates the efficiency of various sampling strategies for obtaining morphological data and assesses the effectiveness of state-of-the-art neural models in generalising morphological structures. Our experiments highlight two key strategies for improving the efficiency: (1) increasing the diversity of annotated data by uniform sampling among the cells of the paradigm tables, and (2) using model confidence as a guide to enhance positive interaction by providing reliable predictions during annotation.
GlossLM: Multilingual Pretraining for Low-Resource Interlinear Glossing
Ginn, Michael, Tjuatja, Lindia, He, Taiqi, Rice, Enora, Neubig, Graham, Palmer, Alexis, Levin, Lori
Language documentation projects often involve the creation of annotated text in a format such as interlinear glossed text (IGT), which captures fine-grained morphosyntactic analyses in a morpheme-by-morpheme format. However, there are few existing resources providing large amounts of standardized, easily accessible IGT data, limiting their applicability to linguistic research, and making it difficult to use such data in NLP modeling. We compile the largest existing corpus of IGT data from a variety of sources, covering over 450k examples across 1.8k languages, to enable research on crosslingual transfer and IGT generation. We normalize much of our data to follow a standard set of labels across languages. Furthermore, we explore the task of automatically generating IGT in order to aid documentation projects. As many languages lack sufficient monolingual data, we pretrain a large multilingual model on our corpus. We demonstrate the utility of this model by finetuning it on monolingual corpora, outperforming SOTA models by up to 6.6%. We will make our pretrained model and dataset available through Hugging Face, as well as provide access through a web interface for use in language documentation efforts.
Recent advancements in computational morphology : A comprehensive survey
Computational morphology handles the language processing at the word level. It is one of the foundational tasks in the NLP pipeline for the development of higher level NLP applications. It mainly deals with the processing of words and word forms. Computational Morphology addresses various sub problems such as morpheme boundary detection, lemmatization, morphological feature tagging, morphological reinflection etc. In this paper, we present exhaustive survey of the methods for developing computational morphology related tools. We survey the literature in the chronological order starting from the conventional methods till the recent evolution of deep neural network based approaches. We also review the existing datasets available for this task across the languages. We discuss about the effectiveness of neural model compared with the traditional models and present some unique challenges associated with building the computational morphology tools. We conclude by discussing some recent and open research issues in this field.
OOVs in the Spotlight: How to Inflect them?
Sourada, Tomáš, Straková, Jana, Rosa, Rudolf
We focus on morphological inflection in out-of-vocabulary (OOV) conditions, an under-researched subtask in which state-of-the-art systems usually are less effective. We developed three systems: a retrograde model and two sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models based on LSTM and Transformer. For testing in OOV conditions, we automatically extracted a large dataset of nouns in the morphologically rich Czech language, with lemma-disjoint data splits, and we further manually annotated a real-world OOV dataset of neologisms. In the standard OOV conditions, Transformer achieves the best results, with increasing performance in ensemble with LSTM, the retrograde model and SIGMORPHON baselines. On the real-world OOV dataset of neologisms, the retrograde model outperforms all neural models. Finally, our seq2seq models achieve state-of-the-art results in 9 out of 16 languages from SIGMORPHON 2022 shared task data in the OOV evaluation (feature overlap) in the large data condition. We release the Czech OOV Inflection Dataset for rigorous evaluation in OOV conditions. Further, we release the inflection system with the seq2seq models as a ready-to-use Python library.
Code Ocean collaborates with Lantern Pharma
Code Ocean, the leading computational research environment for sharing scientific discoveries, today announced a collaboration that will power AI-driven computational research for oncology-focused drug discovery with Lantern Pharma (NASDAQ: LTRN), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company using its proprietary RADR artificial intelligence ("A.I.") platform to transform the cost, pace, and timeline of oncology drug discovery and development. By leveraging Code Ocean's Compute Capsule technology, the move will further power Lantern Pharma's RADR platform for faster, more collaborative discoveries from billions of RADR data points as well as from experimental results and insights from their network of collaborators. Computational researchers today are challenged with analysing big data with too many tools, lack of specialized coding experience, and challenging, cumbersome DevOps processes required to organize and securely share research. Through this collaboration Lantern Pharma is expected to benefit from significant efficiencies in development time and cost as well as increased reproducibility from Code Ocean's platform. The Code Ocean platform will offer an easy to use, collaborative research experience with an integrated development environment, secure repository, and portable Compute Capsule technology for guaranteed reproducibility.
Imagine All the People: Citizen Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Computational Research
Shanley, Lea A., Fortson, Lucy, Berger-Wolf, Tanya, Crowston, Kevin, Michelucci, Pietro
Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep learning have advanced significantly over the past decade. Nonetheless, humans possess unique abilities such as creativity, intuition, context and abstraction, analytic problem solving, and detecting unusual events. To successfully tackle pressing scientific and societal challenges, we need the complementary capabilities of both humans and machines. The Federal Government could accelerate its priorities on multiple fronts through judicious integration of citizen science and crowdsourcing with artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud strategies.
Scientists voice concerns, call for transparency and reproducibility in AI research
In an article published in Nature on October 14, 2020, scientists at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University of Toronto, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins, Harvard School of Public Health, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others, challenge scientific journals to hold computational researchers to higher standards of transparency, and call for their colleagues to share their code, models and computational environments in publications. "Scientific progress depends on the ability of researchers to scrutinize the results of a study and reproduce the main finding to learn from," says Dr. Benjamin Haibe-Kains, Senior Scientist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and first author of the article. "But in computational research, it's not yet a widespread criterion for the details of an AI study to be fully accessible. This is detrimental to our progress." The authors voiced their concern about the lack of transparency and reproducibility in AI research after a Google Health study by McKinney et al., published in a prominent scientific journal in January 2020, claimed an artificial intelligence (AI) system could outperform human radiologists in both robustness and speed for breast cancer screening.