Supervised Identification of Participant Slots in Contracts

This paper presents a technique for the identification of participant slots in English language contracts. Taking inspiration from unsupervised slot extraction techniques, the system presented here uses a supervised approach to identify terms used to refer to a genre-specific slot in novel contracts. We evaluate the system in multiple feature configurations to demonstrate that the best performing system in both genres of contracts omits the exact mention form from consideration---even though such mention forms are often the name of the slot under consideration---and is instead based solely on the dependency label and parent; in other words, a more reliable quantification of a party's role in a contract is found in what they do rather than what they are named.

Harms of Gender Exclusivity and Challenges in Non-Binary Representation in Language Technologies

Gender is widely discussed in the context of language tasks and when examining the stereotypes propagated by language models. However, current discussions primarily treat gender as binary, which can perpetuate harms such as the cyclical erasure of non-binary gender identities. These harms are driven by model and dataset biases, which are consequences of the non-recognition and lack of understanding of non-binary genders in society. In this paper, we explain the complexity of gender and language around it, and survey non-binary persons to understand harms associated with the treatment of gender as binary in English language technologies. We also detail how current language representations (e.g., GloVe, BERT) capture and perpetuate these harms and related challenges that need to be acknowledged and addressed for representations to equitably encode gender information.

Sarcasm Detection and Building an English Language Corpus in Real Time

This is a research proposal for doctoral research into sarcasm detection, and the real-time compilation of an English language corpus of sarcastic utterances. It details the previous research into similar topics, the potential research directions and the research aims.

mT5: A Massively Multilingual Pre-trained Text-to-Text Transformer

The recent Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer'' (T5) leveraged a unified text-to-text format and scale to attain state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of English-language NLP tasks. In this paper, we introduce mT5, a multilingual variant of T5 that was pre-trained on a new Common Crawl-based dataset covering 101 languages. We detail the design and modified training of mT5 and demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance on many multilingual benchmarks. We also describe a simple technique to prevent accidental translation'' in the zero-shot setting, where a generative model chooses to (partially) translate its prediction into the wrong language. All of the code and model checkpoints used in this work are publicly available.

Should we Stop Training More Monolingual Models, and Simply Use Machine Translation Instead?

Most work in NLP makes the assumption that it is desirable to develop solutions in the native language in question. There is consequently a strong trend towards building native language models even for low-resource languages. This paper questions this development, and explores the idea of simply translating the data into English, thereby enabling the use of pretrained, and large-scale, English language models. We demonstrate empirically that a large English language model coupled with modern machine translation outperforms native language models in most Scandinavian languages. The exception to this is Finnish, which we assume is due to inferior translation quality. Our results suggest that machine translation is a mature technology, which raises a serious counter-argument for training native language models for low-resource languages. This paper therefore strives to make a provocative but important point. As English language models are improving at an unprecedented pace, which in turn improves machine translation, it is from an empirical and environmental stand-point more effective to translate data from low-resource languages into English, than to build language models for such languages.

The Degree of Implementation of The Strategy of Mental Maps of The Teachers of English Language in The Province of Damascus

The aim of the research has aimed to identify the extent of the implementation of the strategy of mental maps in English teachers in Damascus governorate. In addition, it has aimed to identify the differences between the average grades of teachers in the application of the strategy of mental maps according to the variables (type of education and qualification). The survey has been applied on the second cycle of Basic Education in ( 2016-2017) . As for the study sample , it included (62) teachers , they have been chosen randomly .The researcher has followed the discriptive analytical approach in her survey and she has used the questionnaire as a means to achieve the objectives of the research after it was tested for its vadility and reliability. The questinnaire of mental maps has been applied to them , which is prepared by the researcher . -The research concluded the following results: - Implementation of the strategy of mental maps of English teachers in the schools of the second cycle of basic education was a medium degree. - There are statistically significant differences between the average grade of English teachers in the second cycle schools of the basic education level on the extent to which mental maps are applied according to the type of education variable in favor of special education. - There are statistically significant differences between the average grade of English teachers in the second cycle schools of the basic education level on the extent of applying mental maps strategy according to the variable of scientific qualification for teachers with the highest qualifications.

The Degree of Employment of Teachers of The First Cycle of Basic Education Of Mental Habits in The Teaching of English Language

The purpose of the research is to identify the degree of employment of teachers of the first cycle of basic education of mental habits in teaching English language, as well as knowledge of the differences in the employment of these habits according to the variables of the academic qualification and the number of years of teaching experience. The sample consisted of (303) teachers and teachers The first cycle of basic education was chosen randomly by the cluster of schools in the first cycle of basic education in Damascus Governorate. They were asked to identify the teachers' use of mental habits in the teaching of the English language by the researcher after verifying its validity and stability. The results indicate that there is a low degree of teachers in the use of mental habits when teaching the English language on the total score of the scale and in all mental habits except the habits of listening comprehension and sympathy, and control of arrogance, thinking about thinking, and finding humor that was a medium. The results showed that there were statistically significant differences between the average teachers on the scale of the use of mental habits in teaching English language according to the variable of scientific qualification for teachers with diploma and postgraduate qualifications. And the existence of statistically significant differences between the average teachers on the scale of the use of mental habits in the teaching of the English language according to the variable years of experience for teachers with (5) years of teaching experience and more except areas (thinking and communicating clearly and accuracy / mutual thinking / risk responsibility) The absence of differences between the members of the research sample according to the variable number of years of experience in these fields.

The Degree To Which English Teachers Practice The Skills Of Scientific Thinking In Their Classrooms

The purpose of the research The degree of practicing English teachers in Damascus is based on the skills of scientific thinking in their classrooms, as well as the differences in the degree of practicing these skills according to gender variables and the number of years of teaching experience. The sample consisted of (62) teachers, They were chosen by the sample of the sample from the schools in Damascus city and applied the measure of scientific thinking skills prepared by the researcher after verifying his sincerity and stability. The results indicated that: 1. The existence of a generally low degree in English teachers in the degree of exercise of the skills of scientific thinking in their classrooms, and the degree of practice of English teachers of the skills of scientific thinking subsidiary was as follows: - A high degree of teachers in the exercise of the skill of scientific thinking related to (gathering information). - A medium degree for teachers in the exercise of scientific thinking skills related to (concentration - memory - organization - analysis). - Low degree of teachers in the exercise of scientific thinking skills related to (obstetrics). - Very low degree of teachers in the exercise of scientific thinking skills related to (evaluation - integration). 2 - There are no statistically significant differences in the average grade of English teachers in the degree of practicing the skills of scientific thinking in their classes according to the gender variable. 3- There are statistically significant differences in the average grade of English teachers in the exercise of scientific thinking skills on the total score of the scale and its sub-fields according to the variable number of years of teaching experience for teachers with higher teaching experience except for the following fields (concentration skill / information gathering / analysis / integration / Evaluation), where differences were not statistically significant.

Autonomy in Distance English Language Learning

Open and distance learning is experiencing a rapid growth throughout the world and Syria is no exception. With the turn of the new millennium, Syria launched two state institutes for distance learning: The Open Learning Centre (opened in 2001) and the Syrian Virtual University (opened in 2002). The Syrian Virtual University (SVU), one of its kind in the whole Arab region, offers students the opportunity to gain education through an online learning environment based on the latest technology. Since Syria is a country where English has become an important educational requirement, the teaching of English as a foreign language has therefore entered the arena of distance learning.