arXiv Computation and Language

Generative Models Enhanced by Sequence Labelling and Aspect-Code Switching Improve Cross-lingual Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 19

Dependency Reasoning for Aspect Sentiment Quadruple Prediction

The paper introduces DRIFT, a method that linearizes dependency parse trees and injects them into large language model prompts to improve Aspect Sentiment Quadruple Prediction (ASQP). By providing explicit relational context, DRIFT enables the model to reason over aspect‑opinion dependencies rather than relying on token proximity. Experiments on SemEval Rest15, Rest16, and ACOS show that DRIFT outperforms other generative ASQP methods, achieving 54.47% and 64.10% F1 on Rest15 and Rest16, and demonstrating consistent gains across short- and medium‑distance aspect‑opinion configurations, while also revealing that exact‑match metrics underestimate semantically correct predictions.

By Shima Esfandyari, Seywan Soleymanbaigi, Fardin Akhlaghian Tab, Fatemeh Daneshfar, Mourad Oussalah
arXiv AI
Oct 1

BARRAC: Adaptation of an English Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Approach for Classification Tasks in Arabic Dialects

The paper introduces BARRAC, a method that adapts an English aspect‑based sentiment analysis framework for Arabic dialect classification tasks. It replaces English consumer‑review attribute pools with Arabic linguistic markers for sentiment, sarcasm, and dialect identification, and swaps noisy self‑training for a two‑stage training process. Evaluated on five Arabic dialect datasets, BARRAC achieves a mean macro‑F1 of 63.93%, surpassing the best few‑label state‑of‑the‑art by 3% and outperforming GPT‑4o on four of the five tasks, while error analysis highlights remaining challenges.

By Ali Almutairi, Gelareh Mohammadi, Imran Razzak, Aditya Joshi
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Improving Cross-Lingual Token Representations by Adding a Pinch of SALT

The paper introduces SALT, a lightweight post‑training technique that injects span‑level supervision into existing cross‑lingual sentence encoders to enhance token representations. Evaluated on five multilingual token‑level benchmarks, SALT achieves the best overall results on four tasks, surpassing alternative fine‑tuning methods and competitive encoders. Additionally, SALT improves sentence‑level performance on cross‑lingual retrieval and classification tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of span‑level supervision for both token and sentence representations.

By Guillem Ram\'irez
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Apples to Apples? Towards Comparable Crosslingual Language Model Evaluation

The paper investigates how to fairly compare language models across languages, noting that current evaluation methods vary widely and lack empirical validation. By training controlled monolingual models on parallel data and testing multilingual LLMs, the authors find that many normalized metrics suffer from biases due to tokenization, encoding, and orthographic differences. Instead, they recommend using sentence‑level negative log‑likelihood over semantically equivalent sequences for more reliable cross‑lingual comparisons.

By Xiulin Yang, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox, Catherine Arnett
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

IndicTriMix: Developing Language Identification Datasets and Models for Tri-Language Code-Mixing

IndicTriMix presents a new benchmark and models for token‑level language identification in tri‑language code‑mixed text involving Hindi, Gujarati, and Bengali. The authors reformulate the task as sequence labeling and fine‑tune transformer models MuRIL and XLM‑RoBERTa, evaluating them on manually annotated test sets. They also introduce two code‑mixing generation methods using parallel sentences and release the datasets and fine‑tuned models for public use.

By Pruthwik Mishra, Rudra Trivedi, Avi Patel, Ashok Urlana, Shrikant Malviya
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Feeding BabyLMs Macaroni: Code-Switching Curricula Cause Cross-Lingual Convergence

The paper investigates whether training small decoder-only transformers on code‑switched text can induce cross‑lingual alignment. Using two 100‑million‑word multilingual corpora—one a mix of English, Dutch, and Chinese BabyBabelLM data, and another generated by inserting word‑ and sentence‑level code‑switching via an LLM—the authors find that code‑switched training aligns representations of parallel text, especially across different scripts, and that this alignment persists when later training on monolingual documents. A curriculum that progresses from word‑level code‑switching to sentence‑level code‑switching and finally to monolingual data yields models that outperform baselines on the BabyLM evaluation suite, demonstrating that code‑switching curriculum learning is an effective data augmentation strategy for multilingual pretraining.

By Dries Rooryck, Alex Cai, Yonatan Belinkov, David Alvarez-Melis, Kiant\'e Brantley