We describe our submissions to the 6th edition of the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) shared task. Our team (OGNLP) participated in the sub-task: Classification of tweets self-reporting potential cases of COVID-19 (Task 5). For ou
r submissions, we employed systems based on auto-regressive transformer models (XLNet) and back-translation for balancing the dataset.
To transcribe spoken language to written medium, most alphabets enable an unambiguous sound-to-letter rule. However, some writing systems have distanced themselves from this simple concept and little work exists in Natural Language Processing (NLP) o
n measuring such distance. In this study, we use an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model to evaluate the transparency between written words and their pronunciation, hence its name Orthographic Transparency Estimation with an ANN (OTEANN). Based on datasets derived from Wikimedia dictionaries, we trained and tested this model to score the percentage of false predictions in phoneme-to-grapheme and grapheme-to-phoneme translation tasks. The scores obtained on 17 orthographies were in line with the estimations of other studies. Interestingly, the model also provided insight into typical mistakes made by learners who only consider the phonemic rule in reading and writing.
