Miroslav Blšták

Miroslav Blšták, Viera Rozinajová

Automatic question generation is one of the most challenging tasks of Natural Language Processing. It requires "bidirectional" language processing: firstly, the system has to understand the input text (Natural Language Understanding) and it then has to generate questions also in the form of text (Natural Language Generation). In this article, we introduce our framework for generating the factual questions from unstructured text in the English language. It uses a combination of traditional linguistic approaches based on sentence patterns with several machine learning methods. We firstly obtain lexical, syntactic and semantic information from an input text and we then construct a hierarchical set of patterns for each sentence. The set of features is extracted from the patterns and it is then used for automated learning of new transformation rules. Our learning process is totally data-driven because the transformation rules are obtained from a set of initial sentence-question pairs. The advantages of this approach lie in a simple expansion of new transformation rules which allows us to generate various types of questions and also in the continuous improvement of the system by reinforcement learning. The framework also includes a question evaluation module which estimates the quality of generated questions. It serves as a filter for selecting the best questions and eliminating incorrect ones or duplicates. We have performed several experiments to evaluate the correctness of generated questions and we have also compared our system with several state-of-the-art systems. Our results indicate that the quality of generated questions outperforms the state-of-the-art systems and our questions are also comparable to questions created by humans. We have also created and published an interface with all created datasets and evaluated questions, so it is possible to follow up on our work.

Lukas Radosky, Miroslav Blstak, Matej Krajcovic et al.

Semantic textual similarity (STS) plays a crucial role in many natural language processing tasks. While extensively studied in high-resource languages, STS remains challenging for under-resourced languages such as Slovak. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of sentence-level STS methods applied to Slovak, including traditional algorithms, supervised machine learning models, and third-party deep learning tools. We trained several machine learning models using outputs from traditional algorithms as features, with feature selection and hyperparameter tuning jointly guided by artificial bee colony optimization. Finally, we evaluated several third-party tools, including fine-tuned model by CloudNLP, OpenAI's embedding models, GPT-4 model, and pretrained SlovakBERT model. Our findings highlight the trade-offs between different approaches.

Matúš Pikuliak, Štefan Grivalský, Martin Konôpka et al.

We introduce a new Slovak masked language model called SlovakBERT. This is to our best knowledge the first paper discussing Slovak transformers-based language models. We evaluate our model on several NLP tasks and achieve state-of-the-art results. This evaluation is likewise the first attempt to establish a benchmark for Slovak language models. We publish the masked language model, as well as the fine-tuned models for part-of-speech tagging, sentiment analysis and semantic textual similarity.