Go Inoue


2024

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CAMERA³: An Evaluation Dataset for Controllable Ad Text Generation in Japanese
Go Inoue | Akihiko Kato | Masato Mita | Ukyo Honda | Peinan Zhang
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Ad text generation is the task of creating compelling text from an advertising asset that describes products or services, such as a landing page. In advertising, diversity plays an important role in enhancing the effectiveness of an ad text, mitigating a phenomenon called “ad fatigue,” where users become disengaged due to repetitive exposure to the same advertisement. Despite numerous efforts in ad text generation, the aspect of diversifying ad texts has received limited attention, particularly in non-English languages like Japanese. To address this, we present CAMERA³, an evaluation dataset for controllable text generation in the advertising domain in Japanese. Our dataset includes 3,980 ad texts written by expert annotators, taking into account various aspects of ad appeals. We make CAMERA³ publicly available, allowing researchers to examine the capabilities of recent NLG models in controllable text generation in a real-world scenario.

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EMAD: A Bridge Tagset for Unifying Arabic POS Annotations
Omar Kallas | Go Inoue | Nizar Habash
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

There have been many attempts to model the morphological richness and complexity of Arabic, leading to numerous Part-of-Speech (POS) tagsets that differ in terms of (a) which morphological features they represent, (b) how they represent them, and (c) the degree of specification of said features. Tagset granularity plays an important role in determining how annotated data can be used and for what applications. Due to the diversity among existing tagsets, many annotated corpora for Arabic cannot be easily combined, which exacerbates the Arabic resource poverty situation. In this work, we propose an intermediate tagset designed to facilitate the conversion and unification of different tagsets used to annotate Arabic corpora. This new tagset acts as a bridge between different annotation schemes, simplifying the integration of annotated corpora and promoting collaboration across the projects using them.

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Arabic Diacritics in the Wild: Exploiting Opportunities for Improved Diacritization
Salman Elgamal | Ossama Obeid | Mhd Kabbani | Go Inoue | Nizar Habash
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The widespread absence of diacritical marks in Arabic text poses a significant challenge for Arabic natural language processing (NLP). This paper explores instances of naturally occurring diacritics, referred to as “diacritics in the wild,” to unveil patterns and latent information across six diverse genres: news articles, novels, children’s books, poetry, political documents, and ChatGPT outputs. We present a new annotated dataset that maps real-world partially diacritized words to their maximal full diacritization in context. Additionally, we propose extensions to the analyze-and-disambiguate approach in Arabic NLP to leverage these diacritics, resulting in notable improvements. Our contributions encompass a thorough analysis, valuable datasets, and an extended diacritization algorithm. We release our code and datasets as open source.

2023

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CamelParser2.0: A State-of-the-Art Dependency Parser for Arabic
Ahmed Elshabrawy | Muhammed AbuOdeh | Go Inoue | Nizar Habash
Proceedings of ArabicNLP 2023

We present CamelParser2.0, an open-source Python-based Arabic dependency parser targeting two popular Arabic dependency formalisms, the Columbia Arabic Treebank (CATiB), and Universal Dependencies (UD). The CamelParser2.0 pipeline handles the processing of raw text and produces tokenization, part-of-speech and rich morphological features. As part of developing CamelParser2.0, we explore many system design hyper-parameters, such as parsing model architecture and pretrained language model selection, achieving new state-of-the-art performance across diverse Arabic genres under gold and predicted tokenization settings.

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Advancements in Arabic Grammatical Error Detection and Correction: An Empirical Investigation
Bashar Alhafni | Go Inoue | Christian Khairallah | Nizar Habash
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Grammatical error correction (GEC) is a well-explored problem in English with many existing models and datasets. However, research on GEC in morphologically rich languages has been limited due to challenges such as data scarcity and language complexity. In this paper, we present the first results on Arabic GEC using two newly developed Transformer-based pretrained sequence-to-sequence models. We also define the task of multi-class Arabic grammatical error detection (GED) and present the first results on multi-class Arabic GED. We show that using GED information as auxiliary input in GEC models improves GEC performance across three datasets spanning different genres. Moreover, we also investigate the use of contextual morphological preprocessing in aiding GEC systems. Our models achieve SOTA results on two Arabic GEC shared task datasets and establish a strong benchmark on a recently created dataset. We make our code, data, and pretrained models publicly available.

2022

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The Bahrain Corpus: A Multi-genre Corpus of Bahraini Arabic
Dana Abdulrahim | Go Inoue | Latifa Shamsan | Salam Khalifa | Nizar Habash
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

In recent years, the focus on developing natural language processing (NLP) tools for Arabic has shifted from Modern Standard Arabic to various Arabic dialects. Various corpora of various sizes and representing different genres, have been created for a number of Arabic dialects. As far as Gulf Arabic is concerned, Gumar Corpus (Khalifa et al., 2016) is the largest corpus, to date, that includes data representing the dialectal Arabic of the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Oman), particularly in the genre of “online forum novels”. In this paper, we present the Bahrain Corpus. Our objective is to create a specialized corpus of the Bahraini Arabic dialect, which includes written texts as well as transcripts of audio files, belonging to a different genre (folktales, comedy shows, plays, cooking shows, etc.). The corpus comprises 620K words, carefully curated. We provide automatic morphological annotations of the full corpus using state-of-the-art morphosyntactic disambiguation for Gulf Arabic. We validate the quality of the annotations on a 7.6K word sample. We plan to make the annotated sample as well as the full corpus publicly available to support researchers interested in Arabic NLP.

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Camelira: An Arabic Multi-Dialect Morphological Disambiguator
Ossama Obeid | Go Inoue | Nizar Habash
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

We present Camelira, a web-based Arabic multi-dialect morphological disambiguation tool that covers four major variants of Arabic: Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian, Gulf, and Levantine.Camelira offers a user-friendly web interface that allows researchers and language learners to explore various linguistic information, such as part-of-speech, morphological features, and lemmas. Our system also provides an option to automatically choose an appropriate dialect-specific disambiguator based on the prediction of a dialect identification component. Camelira is publicly accessible at http://camelira.camel-lab.com.

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Morphosyntactic Tagging with Pre-trained Language Models for Arabic and its Dialects
Go Inoue | Salam Khalifa | Nizar Habash
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

We present state-of-the-art results on morphosyntactic tagging across different varieties of Arabic using fine-tuned pre-trained transformer language models. Our models consistently outperform existing systems in Modern Standard Arabic and all the Arabic dialects we study, achieving 2.6% absolute improvement over the previous state-of-the-art in Modern Standard Arabic, 2.8% in Gulf, 1.6% in Egyptian, and 8.3% in Levantine. We explore different training setups for fine-tuning pre-trained transformer language models, including training data size, the use of external linguistic resources, and the use of annotated data from other dialects in a low-resource scenario. Our results show that strategic fine-tuning using datasets from other high-resource dialects is beneficial for a low-resource dialect. Additionally, we show that high-quality morphological analyzers as external linguistic resources are beneficial especially in low-resource settings.

2021

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The Interplay of Variant, Size, and Task Type in Arabic Pre-trained Language Models
Go Inoue | Bashar Alhafni | Nurpeiis Baimukan | Houda Bouamor | Nizar Habash
Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop

In this paper, we explore the effects of language variants, data sizes, and fine-tuning task types in Arabic pre-trained language models. To do so, we build three pre-trained language models across three variants of Arabic: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), dialectal Arabic, and classical Arabic, in addition to a fourth language model which is pre-trained on a mix of the three. We also examine the importance of pre-training data size by building additional models that are pre-trained on a scaled-down set of the MSA variant. We compare our different models to each other, as well as to eight publicly available models by fine-tuning them on five NLP tasks spanning 12 datasets. Our results suggest that the variant proximity of pre-training data to fine-tuning data is more important than the pre-training data size. We exploit this insight in defining an optimized system selection model for the studied tasks.

2020

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CAMeL Tools: An Open Source Python Toolkit for Arabic Natural Language Processing
Ossama Obeid | Nasser Zalmout | Salam Khalifa | Dima Taji | Mai Oudah | Bashar Alhafni | Go Inoue | Fadhl Eryani | Alexander Erdmann | Nizar Habash
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We present CAMeL Tools, a collection of open-source tools for Arabic natural language processing in Python. CAMeL Tools currently provides utilities for pre-processing, morphological modeling, Dialect Identification, Named Entity Recognition and Sentiment Analysis. In this paper, we describe the design of CAMeL Tools and the functionalities it provides.

2018

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A Parallel Corpus of Arabic-Japanese News Articles
Go Inoue | Nizar Habash | Yuji Matsumoto | Hiroyuki Aoyama
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2017

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Joint Prediction of Morphosyntactic Categories for Fine-Grained Arabic Part-of-Speech Tagging Exploiting Tag Dictionary Information
Go Inoue | Hiroyuki Shindo | Yuji Matsumoto
Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2017)

Part-of-speech (POS) tagging for morphologically rich languages such as Arabic is a challenging problem because of their enormous tag sets. One reason for this is that in the tagging scheme for such languages, a complete POS tag is formed by combining tags from multiple tag sets defined for each morphosyntactic category. Previous approaches in Arabic POS tagging applied one model for each morphosyntactic tagging task, without utilizing shared information between the tasks. In this paper, we propose an approach that utilizes this information by jointly modeling multiple morphosyntactic tagging tasks with a multi-task learning framework. We also propose a method of incorporating tag dictionary information into our neural models by combining word representations with representations of the sets of possible tags. Our experiments showed that the joint model with tag dictionary information results in an accuracy of 91.38% on the Penn Arabic Treebank data set, with an absolute improvement of 2.11% over the current state-of-the-art tagger.