Entities, Dates, and Languages: Zero-Shot on Historical Texts with T0

Francesco De Toni*, Christopher Akiki, Javier de la Rosa, Clémentine Fourrier, Enrique Manjavacas, Stefan Schweter, Daniel van Strien

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In this work, we explore whether the recently demonstrated zero-shot abilities of the T0 model extend to Named Entity Recognition for out-of-distribution languages and time periods. Using a historical newspaper corpus in 3 languages as test-bed, we use prompts to extract possible named entities. Our results show that a naive approach for prompt-based zero-shot multilingual Named Entity Recognition is error-prone, but highlights the potential of such an approach for historical languages lacking labeled datasets. Moreover, we also find that T0-like models can be probed to predict the publication date and language of a document, which could be very relevant for the study of historical texts.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationChallenges & Perspectives in Creating Large Language Models
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings of BigScience Episode #5 Workshop
EditorsAngela Fan, Suzana Ilic, Thomas Wolf, Matthias Galle
Place of PublicationStroudsburg PA, USA
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages75-83
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-955917-26-1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Externally publishedYes
EventChallenges and Perspectives in Creating Large Language Models: BigScience Episode #5 – Workshop - Virtual, Dublin, Ireland
Duration: 27 May 202227 May 2022
https://aclanthology.org/2022.bigscience-1.pdf

Workshop

WorkshopChallenges and Perspectives in Creating Large Language Models
Country/TerritoryIreland
CityVirtual, Dublin
Period27/05/2227/05/22
OtherThis workshop is organized by the BigScience initiative and will also serve as the closing session of this one year-long initiative aimed at developing a multilingual large language model, which is gathering 1.000+ researchers from more than 60 countries and 250 institutions and research labs. Its goal is to investigate the creation of a large scale dataset and model from a very wide diversity of angles.
Internet address

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