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Researcher profile

Serge Sharoff

Serge Sharoff contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Computation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceSocial and Information Networks

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Published work

7 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Align and Shine: Building High-Quality Sentence-Aligned Corpora for Multilingual Text Simplification

Text simplification plays a crucial role in improving the accessibility and comprehensibility of written information for diverse audiences, including language learners and readers with limited literacy. Despite its importance, large-scale, high-quality datasets for training and evaluating text simplification models remain scarce for languages other than English. This paper reports an experimental study on the collection and processing of crowd-sourced simplification data from comparable corpora to construct a corpus suitable for both training and testing text simplification systems across multiple languages (Catalan, English, French, Italian and Spanish). We report mechanisms for sentence-level alignment from document-level data. The resulting dataset of the aligned sentence pairs is publicly available.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Estimating Confidence of Predictions of Individual Classifiers and Their Ensembles for the Genre Classification Task

Genre identification is a subclass of non-topical text classification. The main difference between this task and topical classification is that genres, unlike topics, usually do not correspond to simple keywords, and thus they need to be defined in terms of their functions in communication. Neural models based on pre-trained transformers, such as BERT or XLM-RoBERTa, demonstrate SOTA results in many NLP tasks, including non-topical classification. However, in many cases, their downstream application to very large corpora, such as those extracted from social media, can lead to unreliable results because of dataset shifts, when some raw texts do not match the profile of the training set. To mitigate this problem, we experiment with individual models as well as with their ensembles. To evaluate the robustness of all models we use a prediction confidence metric, which estimates the reliability of a prediction in the absence of a gold standard label. We can evaluate robustness via the confidence gap between the correctly classified texts and the misclassified ones on a labeled test corpus, higher gaps make it easier to improve our confidence that our classifier made the right decision. Our results show that for all of the classifiers tested in this study, there is a confidence gap, but for the ensembles, the gap is bigger, meaning that ensembles are more robust than their individual models.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Multimodal Pipeline for Collection of Misinformation Data from Telegram

The paper presents the outcomes of AI-COVID19, our project aimed at better understanding of misinformation flow about COVID-19 across social media platforms. The specific focus of the study reported in this paper is on collecting data from Telegram groups which are active in promotion of COVID-related misinformation. Our corpus collected so far contains around 28 million words, from almost one million messages. Given that a substantial portion of misinformation flow in social media is spread via multimodal means, such as images and video, we have also developed a mechanism for utilising such channels via producing automatic transcripts for videos and automatic classification for images into such categories as memes, screenshots of posts and other kinds of images. The accuracy of the image classification pipeline is around 87%.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Towards Arabic Sentence Simplification via Classification and Generative Approaches

This paper presents an attempt to build a Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) sentence-level simplification system. We experimented with sentence simplification using two approaches: (i) a classification approach leading to lexical simplification pipelines which use Arabic-BERT, a pre-trained contextualised model, as well as a model of fastText word embeddings; and (ii) a generative approach, a Seq2Seq technique by applying a multilingual Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer mT5. We developed our training corpus by aligning the original and simplified sentences from the internationally acclaimed Arabic novel "Saaq al-Bambuu". We evaluate effectiveness of these methods by comparing the generated simple sentences to the target simple sentences using the BERTScore evaluation metric. The simple sentences produced by the mT5 model achieve P 0.72, R 0.68 and F-1 0.70 via BERTScore, while, combining Arabic-BERT and fastText achieves P 0.97, R 0.97 and F-1 0.97. In addition, we report a manual error analysis for these experiments. \url{https://github.com/Nouran-Khallaf/Lexical_Simplification}

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Automatic Difficulty Classification of Arabic Sentences

In this paper, we present a Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) Sentence difficulty classifier, which predicts the difficulty of sentences for language learners using either the CEFR proficiency levels or the binary classification as simple or complex. We compare the use of sentence embeddings of different kinds (fastText, mBERT , XLM-R and Arabic-BERT), as well as traditional language features such as POS tags, dependency trees, readability scores and frequency lists for language learners. Our best results have been achieved using fined-tuned Arabic-BERT. The accuracy of our 3-way CEFR classification is F-1 of 0.80 and 0.75 for Arabic-Bert and XLM-R classification respectively and 0.71 Spearman correlation for regression. Our binary difficulty classifier reaches F-1 0.94 and F-1 0.98 for sentence-pair semantic similarity classifier.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Know thy corpus! Robust methods for digital curation of Web corpora

This paper proposes a novel framework for digital curation of Web corpora in order to provide robust estimation of their parameters, such as their composition and the lexicon. In recent years language models pre-trained on large corpora emerged as clear winners in numerous NLP tasks, but no proper analysis of the corpora which led to their success has been conducted. The paper presents a procedure for robust frequency estimation, which helps in establishing the core lexicon for a given corpus, as well as a procedure for estimating the corpus composition via unsupervised topic models and via supervised genre classification of Web pages. The results of the digital curation study applied to several Web-derived corpora demonstrate their considerable differences. First, this concerns different frequency bursts which impact the core lexicon obtained from each corpus. Second, this concerns the kinds of texts they contain. For example, OpenWebText contains considerably more topical news and political argumentation in comparison to ukWac or Wikipedia. The tools and the results of analysis have been released.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Sentence Level Human Translation Quality Estimation with Attention-based Neural Networks

This paper explores the use of Deep Learning methods for automatic estimation of quality of human translations. Automatic estimation can provide useful feedback for translation teaching, examination and quality control. Conventional methods for solving this task rely on manually engineered features and external knowledge. This paper presents an end-to-end neural model without feature engineering, incorporating a cross attention mechanism to detect which parts in sentence pairs are most relevant for assessing quality. Another contribution concerns of prediction of fine-grained scores for measuring different aspects of translation quality. Empirical results on a large human annotated dataset show that the neural model outperforms feature-based methods significantly. The dataset and the tools are available.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access