Lotus at SemEval-2021 Task 2: Combination of BERT and Paraphrasing for English Word Sense Disambiguation

In this paper, we describe our proposed methods for the multilingual word-in-Context disambiguation task in SemEval-2021. In this task, systems should determine whether a word that occurs in two different sentences is used with the same meaning or not. We proposed several methods using a pre-trained BERT model. In two of them, we paraphrased sentences and add them as input to the BERT, and in one of them, we used WordNet to add some extra lexical information. We evaluated our proposed methods on test data in SemEval- 2021 task 2.

UoB\_UK at SemEval 2021 Task 2: Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Learning for Multi-lingual and Cross-lingual Word Sense Disambiguation.

This paper describes our submission to SemEval 2021 Task 2. We compare XLM-RoBERTa Base and Large in the few-shot and zero-shot settings and additionally test the effectiveness of using a k-nearest neighbors classifier in the few-shot setting instead of the more traditional multi-layered perceptron. Our experiments on both the multi-lingual and cross-lingual data show that XLM-RoBERTa Large, unlike the Base version, seems to be able to more effectively transfer learning in a few-shot setting and that the k-nearest neighbors classifier is indeed a more powerful classifier than a multi-layered perceptron when used in few-shot learning.

LIORI at SemEval-2021 Task 2: Span Prediction and Binary Classification approaches to Word-in-Context Disambiguation

This paper presents our approaches to SemEval-2021 Task 2: Multilingual and Cross-lingual Word-in-Context Disambiguation task. The first approach attempted to reformulate the task as a question answering problem, while the second one framed it as a binary classification problem. Our best system, which is an ensemble of XLM-R based binary classifiers trained with data augmentation, is among the 3 best-performing systems for Russian, French and Arabic in the multilingual subtask. In the post-evaluation period, we experimented with batch normalization, subword pooling and target word occurrence aggregation methods, resulting in further performance improvements.

Human-Model Divergence in the Handling of Vagueness

While aggregate performance metrics can generate valuable insights at a large scale, their dominance means more complex and nuanced language phenomena, such as vagueness, may be overlooked. Focusing on vague terms (e.g. sunny, cloudy, young, etc.) we inspect the behavior of visually grounded and text-only models, finding systematic divergences from human judgments even when a model's overall performance is high. To help explain this disparity, we identify two assumptions made by the datasets and models examined and, guided by the philosophy of vagueness, isolate cases where they do not hold.

MCL@IITK at SemEval-2021 Task 2: Multilingual and Cross-lingual Word-in-Context Disambiguation using Augmented Data, Signals, and Transformers

In this work, we present our approach for solving the SemEval 2021 Task 2: Multilingual and Cross-lingual Word-in-Context Disambiguation (MCL-WiC). The task is a sentence pair classification problem where the goal is to detect whether a given word common to both the sentences evokes the same meaning. We submit systems for both the settings - Multilingual (the pair's sentences belong to the same language) and Cross-Lingual (the pair's sentences belong to different languages). The training data is provided only in English. Consequently, we employ cross-lingual transfer techniques. Our approach employs fine-tuning pre-trained transformer-based language models, like ELECTRA and ALBERT, for the English task and XLM-R for all other tasks. To improve these systems' performance, we propose adding a signal to the word to be disambiguated and augmenting our data by sentence pair reversal. We further augment the dataset provided to us with WiC, XL-WiC and SemCor 3.0. Using ensembles, we achieve strong performance in the Multilingual task, placing first in the EN-EN and FR-FR sub-tasks. For the Cross-Lingual setting, we employed translate-test methods and a zero-shot method, using our multilingual models, with the latter performing slightly better.

Viola's Disguise in Twelfth Night

This research is concerned with the issue of Viola's – the heroine - disguise in Twelfth Night. This young woman, who has closed the sad chapters of her life, decides to begin a new life, as if she had not known desperation by disguising as a young man named ''Cesario''. In this play, we notice that disguise turns from a simple device to a complicated one. At the beginning, Viola's aim is to protect herself in a country where she knows no one. But later, disguise comes to mean more than this. Cesario begins to dominate Viola, the characters and the play. He teaches everyone lessons in life about true love, faithfulness, sacrifice for the happiness of the others, and selflessness. Also, he removes the false masks of the others. Sebastian's appearance gives Viola the strength to admit, before all people, her real identity. This is what helps to solve a lot of ambiguity and questions for us and the characters. Viola's strength does not lie in her disguise as a man but in the way that she uses disguise and directs it.

Types of Obscurity in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure and Maurice Blanchot's Thomas the Obscure

This study is an attempt to view the concept of 'obscurity' as reflected in two fictions belonging to two different writers with different intellectual ideologies and artistic backgrounds. As the present study shows, each novel betrays its own type of obscurity and careful inspection illuminates both the conscious and unconscious manifestations of this topic as well as their grounds.