En relaterad hobby om man vill vara lite mer social är förstås att spela Scrabble – även känt under det svenska namnet Alfapet, samt i olika digitala versioner, bland annat Wordfeud. För den som mot förmodan inte känner till spelet går det ut på att lägga ut bokstäver för att forma ord på en spelplan i ett korsordsliknande rutmönster. Olika bokstäver ger olika poäng, och vissa rutor …
Fortsätt läsa ”Vilket ord är bäst?”
Large-scale Swedish language models have long been missing. Recently, several such models have been developed (in particular, by KBLab, the datalab at the National Library of Sweden), and more are on the way. Language models are being trained on enormous quantities of text in order to learn to understand language and analyze texts. The models can perform various tasks, for instance, summarise texts, measure how similar texts are, or analyse the attitudes expressed in parts of the text. Language models can improve all applications of language technology to Swedish texts, making them useful in research and in the private and public sectors.
“While it’s great that we finally have Swedish language models, it is difficult to evaluate them. We have therefore now developed SuperLim, a suite of 13 resources that can be used as benchmarks for various tasks. Anybody can use the suite to test models and assess how well they understand the language,” explains Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, one of the project members.
The SuperLim project – a collaboration between Språkbanken Text, KBLab, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and AI Sweden – partly follows the approach of the English benchmark SuperGLUE.
One important element of evaluation is to identify whether the models have any bias, and if yes, to deal with them appropriately.
“Previous studies demonstrate that language models are sensitive to the data on which they are trained and often reflect human prejudices included in the training data. For example, it may pick up racism or assume that a doctor is a man and a nurse a woman. It is important to evaluate and improve language models so that we can counter the prejudices that get encoded into the models,” says project team member Yvonne Adesam.
Särskilt nu i isoleringstider när vi ändå inte bör umgås, vad är då bättre än att sitta i hammocken med en välvässad blyertspenna, ett bra sudd, SAOL-appen, och ett korsord? Det finns många tidningar att köpa med korsord av olika svårighetsgrader, för dig som tycker om att lösa korsord. Men det är lite svårare om du skulle vilja tillverka ditt alldeles egna korsord. Tills nu – som ett led i Språkbankens service …
Fortsätt läsa ”Gör ditt eget korsord!”
Language and how it changes is a matter of interest to both researchers and the public. One recent example of how language changes is the Swedish word grym, defined by the Swedish Academy Dictionary as meaning 'ruthless' or 'brutal', which has taken on a new, almost more dominant, positive meaning ('awesome') that is far removed from its original meaning. Another example in Swedish is the increasing use of the object-form of personal pronouns in comparative constructions (starkare än dig 'stronger than you' instead of the starkare än du with the subject-form).
“We know that languages are constantly changing, whether because we simplify the language in everyday use or because it evolves as it comes into contact with other languages. Our aim is to explain changes that have already occurred and at the same time see if it is possible to predict what will happen to the language in future,” explains Cassandra's principal investigator Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, who goes on:
“This question has received little attention in the field of linguistics, but we need to try and answer it in order to assess how plausible the existing explanations actually are. In Cassandra, we will also study what has gone wrong.”
The group will use large collections of text known as corpora, both in its quantitative study and to evaluate existing explanatory models.
“We will be using the data contained in our corpora, which consist of 20 years of social media posts from platforms such as Flashback, Familjeliv and Twitter,” says Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, who explains that when studying material from the first 15 years the researchers will pretend that they have no knowledge of what happened in the following five years.
“We will gather all of the data and all of the theories and then predict what will happen to the language over the coming five years. The results will not be one hundred per cent accurate; not all changes are dependent on the language, they may relate to things happening in society that we now have many words for, such as the coronavirus pandemic. That is difficult to predict.
Our hope and objective is to be able to predict some changes and that we can formalise those predictions,” says Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, who adds that the group will also be looking at interaction on social media and which social factors influence language change.
The goal of the Cassandra project is to provide both theoretical results – new language resources in which corpuses are enriched with information on both language changes and social networks and their structures – and methods.
“Hopefully these methods will be useful to all researchers with an interest in societal changes,” says Aleksandrs Berdicevskis.
Learn more on the project website >>
Here’s a sad story (it’s fictional, but sad nonetheless). Matthias, Pernilla and Ingvar were working as computational linguists, and within a certain project painstakingly created a ingenious dataset. The community, however, did not show much interest in the dataset and it was largely forgotten. Years went. Matthias died. Pernilla invented a clever algorithm and became a multi-billionaire. Ingvar moved to USA, happened to see a crime and …
Fortsätt läsa ”Documentation: a (fictional) sad story with a (real) happy ending”
– Idén att koppla ihop bibeltexter är inte ny – det har gjorts tidigare – men de flesta samlingar är inte offentligt tillgängliga. Vi hoppas på att det arbeta vi lagt på upphovsrättsfrågor ska göra att fler kan använda den här resursen, säger Evie Coussé, forskare på institutionen för språk och litteraturer vid Göteborgs universitet som leder arbetet.
Bibeltexterna har samlats in inom ramen för forskningsprojektet Uppkomsten av komplexa verbkonstruktioner i germanska språk och täcker sammanlagt fyra olika språk: engelska, nederländska, svenska och tyska. Gerlof Bouma på Språkbanken Text vid Göteborgs universitet har varit med och byggt den digitala textsamlingen.
Språkbanken Text, and the project Towards Computational Lexical Semantic Change Detection are organizing a second LChange workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change in August, 2021.
The workshop builds upon its first iteration in 2019, where we received over 50 submissions and had over 65 attendees. Just like the first one, the second LChange workshop will be co-located with ACL (2021).
The call for papers will be similar to last time: all aspects around computational approaches to historical language change with the focus on digital text corpora.
Like LChange'19, this edition will host two keynotes.
We are looking forward to your submission and participation!
More information on: https://languagechange.org/events/2021-acl-lchange/
Den nya preloadern i Sparv snabbar upp annoteringsprocessen om man annoterar många små filer. Utöver det har vi fixat många buggar samt jobbat på att förbättra användarupplevelsen, t.ex. genom att ge bättre återkoppling när någonting går snett och genom att förtydliga dokumentationen. För en komplett översikt över alla nya funktioner, förbättringar och buggfixar, se changeloggen här.
All information om hur man installerar och använder Sparv finns på https://spraakbanken.gu.se/sparv.
Three annotators have contributed to this work: Stellan Petersson (University of Gothenburg), Beatrice Silén (Helsinki university) and Maisa Lauriala (Helsinki university). Do you know how many prefixes or suffixes Swedish language has? Which ones? Different sources state different numbers, e.g Thorell (1984) lists approx. 90 derivational suffixes and about 50 derivatonal prefixes; Hultman (2003) names 200 derivationa affixes …
Fortsätt läsa ”Swedish derivational morphology with CoDeRooMor”
