Judit Ács


2023

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TreeSwap: Data Augmentation for Machine Translation via Dependency Subtree Swapping
Attila Nagy | Dorina Lakatos | Botond Barta | Judit Ács
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing

Data augmentation methods for neural machine translation are particularly useful when limited amount of training data is available, which is often the case when dealing with low-resource languages. We introduce a novel augmentation method, which generates new sentences by swapping objects and subjects across bisentences. This is performed simultaneously based on the dependency parse trees of the source and target sentences. We name this method TreeSwap. Our results show that TreeSwap achieves consistent improvements over baseline models in 4 language pairs in both directions on resource-constrained datasets. We also explore domain-specific corpora, but find that our method does not make significant improvements on law, medical and IT data. We report the scores of similar augmentation methods and find that TreeSwap performs comparably. We also analyze the generated sentences qualitatively and find that the augmentation produces a correct translation in most cases. Our code is available on Github.

2021

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Subword Pooling Makes a Difference
Judit Ács | Ákos Kádár | Andras Kornai
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

Contextual word-representations became a standard in modern natural language processing systems. These models use subword tokenization to handle large vocabularies and unknown words. Word-level usage of such systems requires a way of pooling multiple subwords that correspond to a single word. In this paper we investigate how the choice of subword pooling affects the downstream performance on three tasks: morphological probing, POS tagging and NER, in 9 typologically diverse languages. We compare these in two massively multilingual models, mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa. For morphological tasks, the widely used ‘choose the first subword’ is the worst strategy and the best results are obtained by using attention over the subwords. For POS tagging both of these strategies perform poorly and the best choice is to use a small LSTM over the subwords. The same strategy works best for NER and we show that mBERT is better than XLM-RoBERTa in all 9 languages. We publicly release all code, data and the full result tables at https://github.com/juditacs/subword-choice .

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Evaluating Transferability of BERT Models on Uralic Languages
Judit Ács | Dániel Lévai | Andras Kornai
Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Computational Linguistics of Uralic Languages

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SIGMORPHON 2021 Shared Task on Morphological Reinflection: Generalization Across Languages
Tiago Pimentel | Maria Ryskina | Sabrina J. Mielke | Shijie Wu | Eleanor Chodroff | Brian Leonard | Garrett Nicolai | Yustinus Ghanggo Ate | Salam Khalifa | Nizar Habash | Charbel El-Khaissi | Omer Goldman | Michael Gasser | William Lane | Matt Coler | Arturo Oncevay | Jaime Rafael Montoya Samame | Gema Celeste Silva Villegas | Adam Ek | Jean-Philippe Bernardy | Andrey Shcherbakov | Aziyana Bayyr-ool | Karina Sheifer | Sofya Ganieva | Matvey Plugaryov | Elena Klyachko | Ali Salehi | Andrew Krizhanovsky | Natalia Krizhanovsky | Clara Vania | Sardana Ivanova | Aelita Salchak | Christopher Straughn | Zoey Liu | Jonathan North Washington | Duygu Ataman | Witold Kieraś | Marcin Woliński | Totok Suhardijanto | Niklas Stoehr | Zahroh Nuriah | Shyam Ratan | Francis M. Tyers | Edoardo M. Ponti | Grant Aiton | Richard J. Hatcher | Emily Prud’hommeaux | Ritesh Kumar | Mans Hulden | Botond Barta | Dorina Lakatos | Gábor Szolnok | Judit Ács | Mohit Raj | David Yarowsky | Ryan Cotterell | Ben Ambridge | Ekaterina Vylomova
Proceedings of the 18th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

This year’s iteration of the SIGMORPHON Shared Task on morphological reinflection focuses on typological diversity and cross-lingual variation of morphosyntactic features. In terms of the task, we enrich UniMorph with new data for 32 languages from 13 language families, with most of them being under-resourced: Kunwinjku, Classical Syriac, Arabic (Modern Standard, Egyptian, Gulf), Hebrew, Amharic, Aymara, Magahi, Braj, Kurdish (Central, Northern, Southern), Polish, Karelian, Livvi, Ludic, Veps, Võro, Evenki, Xibe, Tuvan, Sakha, Turkish, Indonesian, Kodi, Seneca, Asháninka, Yanesha, Chukchi, Itelmen, Eibela. We evaluate six systems on the new data and conduct an extensive error analysis of the systems’ predictions. Transformer-based models generally demonstrate superior performance on the majority of languages, achieving >90% accuracy on 65% of them. The languages on which systems yielded low accuracy are mainly under-resourced, with a limited amount of data. Most errors made by the systems are due to allomorphy, honorificity, and form variation. In addition, we observe that systems especially struggle to inflect multiword lemmas. The systems also produce misspelled forms or end up in repetitive loops (e.g., RNN-based models). Finally, we report a large drop in systems’ performance on previously unseen lemmas.

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BME Submission for SIGMORPHON 2021 Shared Task 0. A Three Step Training Approach with Data Augmentation for Morphological Inflection
Gábor Szolnok | Botond Barta | Dorina Lakatos | Judit Ács
Proceedings of the 18th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

We present the BME submission for the SIGMORPHON 2021 Task 0 Part 1, Generalization Across Typologically Diverse Languages shared task. We use an LSTM encoder-decoder model with three step training that is first trained on all languages, then fine-tuned on each language family and finally fine-tuned on individual languages. We use a different type of data augmentation technique in the first two steps. Our system outperformed the only other submission. Although it remains worse than the Transformer baseline released by the organizers, our model is simpler and our data augmentation techniques are easily applicable to new languages. We perform ablation studies and show that the augmentation techniques and the three training steps often help but sometimes have a negative effect. Our code is publicly available.

2020

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BME-TUW at SR’20: Lexical grammar induction for surface realization
Gábor Recski | Ádám Kovács | Kinga Gémes | Judit Ács | Andras Kornai
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Multilingual Surface Realisation

We present a system for mapping Universal Dependency structures to raw text which learns to restore word order by training an Interpreted Regular Tree Grammar (IRTG) that establishes a mapping between string and graph operations. The reinflection step is handled by a standard sequence-to-sequence architecture with a biLSTM encoder and an LSTM decoder with attention. We modify our 2019 system (Kovács et al., 2019) with a new grammar induction mechanism that allows IRTG rules to operate on lemmata in addition to part-of-speech tags and ensures that each word and its dependents are reordered using the most specific set of learned patterns. We also introduce a hierarchical approach to word order restoration that independently determines the word order of each clause in a sentence before arranging them with respect to the main clause, thereby improving overall readability and also making the IRTG parsing task tractable. We participated in the 2020 Surface Realization Shared task, subtrack T1a (shallow, closed). Human evaluation shows we achieve significant improvements on two of the three out-of-domain datasets compared to the 2019 system we modified. Both components of our system are available on GitHub under an MIT license.

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Better Together: Modern Methods Plus Traditional Thinking in NP Alignment
Ádám Kovács | Judit Ács | Andras Kornai | Gábor Recski
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We study a typical intermediary task to Machine Translation, the alignment of NPs in the bitext. After arguing that the task remains relevant even in an end-to-end paradigm, we present simple, dictionary- and word vector-based baselines and a BERT-based system. Our results make clear that even state of the art systems relying on the best end-to-end methods can be improved by bringing in old-fashioned methods such as stopword removal, lemmatization, and dictionaries

2019

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BME-UW at SRST-2019: Surface realization with Interpreted Regular Tree Grammars
Ádám Kovács | Evelin Ács | Judit Ács | Andras Kornai | Gábor Recski
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Multilingual Surface Realisation (MSR 2019)

The Surface Realization Shared Task involves mapping Universal Dependency graphs to raw text, i.e. restoring word order and inflection from a graph of typed, directed dependencies between lemmas. Interpreted Regular Tree Grammars (IRTGs) encode the correspondence between generations in multiple algebras, and have previously been used for semantic parsing from raw text. Our system induces an IRTG for simultaneously building pairs of surface forms and UD graphs in the SRST training data, then prunes this grammar for each UD graph in the test data for efficient parsing and generation of the surface ordering of lemmas. For the inflection step we use a standard sequence-to-sequence model with a biLSTM encoder and an LSTM decoder with attention. Both components of our system are available on GitHub under an MIT license.

2018

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BME-HAS System for CoNLLSIGMORPHON 2018 Shared Task: Universal Morphological Reinflection
Judit Ács
Proceedings of the CoNLL–SIGMORPHON 2018 Shared Task: Universal Morphological Reinflection

2016

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Evaluating embeddings on dictionary-based similarity
Judit Ács | András Kornai
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Evaluating Vector-Space Representations for NLP

2015

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Competence in lexical semantics
András Kornai | Judit Ács | Márton Makrai | Dávid Márk Nemeskey | Katalin Pajkossy | Gábor Recski
Proceedings of the Fourth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics

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MathLingBudapest: Concept Networks for Semantic Similarity
Gábor Recski | Judit Ács
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2015)

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A Two-level Classifier for Discriminating Similar Languages
Judit Ács | László Grad-Gyenge | Thiago Bruno Rodrigues de Rezende Oliveira
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Language Technology for Closely Related Languages, Varieties and Dialects

2014

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Pivot-based multilingual dictionary building using Wiktionary
Judit Ács
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

We describe a method for expanding existing dictionaries in several languages by discovering previously non-existent links between translations. We call this method triangulation and we present and compare several variations of it. We assess precision manually, and recall by comparing the extracted dictionaries with independently obtained basic vocabulary sets. We featurize the translation candidates and train a maximum entropy classifier to identify correct translations in the noisy data.

2013

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Building basic vocabulary across 40 languages
Judit Ács | Katalin Pajkossy | András Kornai
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora