Gabriel Amaral

Diego Alves, Gaurish Thakkar, Gabriel Amaral et al.

With the ever-growing popularity of the field of NLP, the demand for datasets in low resourced-languages follows suit. Following a previously established framework, in this paper, we present the UNER dataset, a multilingual and hierarchical parallel corpus annotated for named-entities. We describe in detail the developed procedure necessary to create this type of dataset in any language available on Wikipedia with DBpedia information. The three-step procedure extracts entities from Wikipedia articles, links them to DBpedia, and maps the DBpedia sets of classes to the UNER labels. This is followed by a post-processing procedure that significantly increases the number of identified entities in the final results. The paper concludes with a statistical and qualitative analysis of the resulting dataset.

Gabriel Amaral, Alessandro Piscopo, Lucie-Aimée Kaffee et al.

Wikidata is one of the most important sources of structured data on the web, built by a worldwide community of volunteers. As a secondary source, its contents must be backed by credible references; this is particularly important as Wikidata explicitly encourages editors to add claims for which there is no broad consensus, as long as they are corroborated by references. Nevertheless, despite this essential link between content and references, Wikidata's ability to systematically assess and assure the quality of its references remains limited. To this end, we carry out a mixed-methods study to determine the relevance, ease of access, and authoritativeness of Wikidata references, at scale and in different languages, using online crowdsourcing, descriptive statistics, and machine learning. Building on previous work of ours, we run a series of microtasks experiments to evaluate a large corpus of references, sampled from Wikidata triples with labels in several languages. We use a consolidated, curated version of the crowdsourced assessments to train several machine learning models to scale up the analysis to the whole of Wikidata. The findings help us ascertain the quality of references in Wikidata, and identify common challenges in defining and capturing the quality of user-generated multilingual structured data on the web. We also discuss ongoing editorial practices, which could encourage the use of higher-quality references in a more immediate way. All data and code used in the study are available on GitHub for feedback and further improvement and deployment by the research community.

Diego Alves, Tin Kuculo, Gabriel Amaral et al.

We introduce the Universal Named-Entity Recognition (UNER)framework, a 4-level classification hierarchy, and the methodology that isbeing adopted to create the first multilingual UNER corpus: the SETimesparallel corpus annotated for named-entities. First, the English SETimescorpus will be annotated using existing tools and knowledge bases. Afterevaluating the resulting annotations through crowdsourcing campaigns,they will be propagated automatically to other languages within the SE-Times corpora. Finally, as an extrinsic evaluation, the UNER multilin-gual dataset will be used to train and test available NER tools. As part offuture research directions, we aim to increase the number of languages inthe UNER corpus and to investigate possible ways of integrating UNERwith available knowledge graphs to improve named-entity recognition.