HiTZ at VarDial 2025 NorSID: Overcoming Data Scarcity with Language Transfer and Automatic Data Annotation

In this paper we present our submission for the NorSID Shared Task as part of the 2025 VarDial Workshop (Scherrer et al., 2025), consisting of three tasks: Intent Detection, Slot Filling and Dialect Identification, evaluated using data in different dialects of the Norwegian language. For Intent Detection and Slot Filling, we have fine-tuned a multitask model in a cross-lingual setting, to leverage the xSID dataset available in 17 languages. In the case of Dialect Identification, our final submission consists of a model fine-tuned on the provided development set, which has obtained the highest scores within our experiments. Our final results on the test set show that our models do not drop in performance compared to the development set, likely due to the domain-specificity of the dataset and the similar distribution of both subsets. Finally, we also report an in-depth analysis of the provided datasets and their artifacts, as well as other sets of experiments that have been carried out but did not yield the best results. Additionally, we present an analysis on the reasons why some methods have been more successful than others; mainly the impact of the combination of languages and domain-specificity of the training data on the results.

XNLIeu: a dataset for cross-lingual NLI in Basque

XNLI is a popular Natural Language Inference (NLI) benchmark widely used to evaluate cross-lingual Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capabilities across languages. In this paper, we expand XNLI to include Basque, a low-resource language that can greatly benefit from transfer-learning approaches. The new dataset, dubbed XNLIeu, has been developed by first machine-translating the English XNLI corpus into Basque, followed by a manual post-edition step. We have conducted a series of experiments using mono- and multilingual LLMs to assess a) the effect of professional post-edition on the MT system; b) the best cross-lingual strategy for NLI in Basque; and c) whether the choice of the best cross-lingual strategy is influenced by the fact that the dataset is built by translation. The results show that post-edition is necessary and that the translate-train cross-lingual strategy obtains better results overall, although the gain is lower when tested in a dataset that has been built natively from scratch. Our code and datasets are publicly available under open licenses.

English Prompts are Better for NLI-based Zero-Shot Emotion Classification than Target-Language Prompts

Emotion classification in text is a challenging and subjective task, due to the involved cognitive inference processes that are required to interpret a textual stimulus. In addition, the set of emotion categories is highly domain-specific. For instance, literature analysis might require the use of aesthetic emotions (e.g., finding something beautiful), and social media analysis could benefit from fine-grained sets (e.g., separating anger from annoyance) in contrast to basic emotion categories. This renders the task an interesting field for zero-shot classifications, in which the label set is not known at model development time. Unfortunately, most resources for emotion analysis are English, and therefore, most studies on emotion analysis have been performed in English, including those that involve prompting language models for text labels. This leaves us with a research gap that we address in this paper: In which language should we prompt for emotion labels on non-English texts? This is particularly of interest when we have access to a multilingual large language model, because we could request labels with English prompts even for non-English data. Our experiments with natural language inference-based language models show that it is consistently better to use English prompts even if the data is in a different language.

Annotating Norwegian Language Varieties on Twitter for Part-of-Speech

Norwegian Twitter data poses an interesting challenge for Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. These texts are difficult for models trained on standardized text in one of the two Norwegian written forms (Bokm{\aa}l and Nynorsk), as they contain both the typical variation of social media text, as well as a large amount of dialectal variety. In this paper we present a novel Norwegian Twitter dataset annotated with POS-tags. We show that models trained on Universal Dependency (UD) data perform worse when evaluated against this dataset, and that models trained on Bokm{\aa}l generally perform better than those trained on Nynorsk. We also see that performance on dialectal tweets is comparable to the written standards for some models. Finally we perform a detailed analysis of the errors that models commonly make on this data.

Direct parsing to sentiment graphs

This paper demonstrates how a graph-based semantic parser can be applied to the task of structured sentiment analysis, directly predicting sentiment graphs from text. We advance the state of the art on 4 out of 5 standard benchmark sets. We release the source code, models and predictions.

The interplay between language similarity and script on a novel multi-layer Algerian dialect corpus

Recent years have seen a rise in interest for cross-lingual transfer between languages with similar typology, and between languages of various scripts. However, the interplay between language similarity and difference in script on cross-lingual transfer is a less studied problem. We explore this interplay on cross-lingual transfer for two supervised tasks, namely part-of-speech tagging and sentiment analysis. We introduce a newly annotated corpus of Algerian user-generated comments comprising parallel annotations of Algerian written in Latin, Arabic, and code-switched scripts, as well as annotations for sentiment and topic categories. We perform baseline experiments by fine-tuning multi-lingual language models. We further explore the effect of script vs. language similarity in cross-lingual transfer by fine-tuning multi-lingual models on languages which are a) typologically distinct, but use the same script, b) typologically similar, but use a distinct script, or c) are typologically similar and use the same script. We find there is a delicate relationship between script and typology for part-of-speech, while sentiment analysis is less sensitive.

Structured Sentiment Analysis as Dependency Graph Parsing

Structured sentiment analysis attempts to extract full opinion tuples from a text, but over time this task has been subdivided into smaller and smaller sub-tasks, e,g,, target extraction or targeted polarity classification. We argue that this division has become counterproductive and propose a new unified framework to remedy the situation. We cast the structured sentiment problem as dependency graph parsing, where the nodes are spans of sentiment holders, targets and expressions, and the arcs are the relations between them. We perform experiments on five datasets in four languages (English, Norwegian, Basque, and Catalan) and show that this approach leads to strong improvements over state-of-the-art baselines. Our analysis shows that refining the sentiment graphs with syntactic dependency information further improves results.

skweak: Weak Supervision Made Easy for NLP

We present skweak, a versatile, Python-based software toolkit enabling NLP developers to apply weak supervision to a wide range of NLP tasks. Weak supervision is an emerging machine learning paradigm based on a simple idea: instead of labelling data points by hand, we use labelling functions derived from domain knowledge to automatically obtain annotations for a given dataset. The resulting labels are then aggregated with a generative model that estimates the accuracy (and possible confusions) of each labelling function. The skweak toolkit makes it easy to implement a large spectrum of labelling functions (such as heuristics, gazetteers, neural models or linguistic constraints) on text data, apply them on a corpus, and aggregate their results in a fully unsupervised fashion. skweak is especially designed to facilitate the use of weak supervision for NLP tasks such as text classification and sequence labelling. We illustrate the use of skweak for NER and sentiment analysis. skweak is released under an open-source license and is available at: https://github.com/NorskRegnesentral/skweak

Large-Scale Contextualised Language Modelling for Norwegian

We present the ongoing NorLM initiative to support the creation and use of very large contextualised language models for Norwegian (and in principle other Nordic languages), including a ready-to-use software environment, as well as an experience report for data preparation and training. This paper introduces the first large-scale monolingual language models for Norwegian, based on both the ELMo and BERT frameworks. In addition to detailing the training process, we present contrastive benchmark results on a suite of NLP tasks for Norwegian. For additional background and access to the data, models, and software, please see http://norlm.nlpl.eu

NorDial: A Preliminary Corpus of Written Norwegian Dialect Use

Norway has a large amount of dialectal variation, as well as a general tolerance to its use in the public sphere. There are, however, few available resources to study this variation and its change over time and in more informal areas, \eg on social media. In this paper, we propose a first step to creating a corpus of dialectal variation of written Norwegian. We collect a small corpus of tweets and manually annotate them as Bokm{\aa}l, Nynorsk, any dialect, or a mix. We further perform preliminary experiments with state-of-the-art models, as well as an analysis of the data to expand this corpus in the future. Finally, we make the annotations and models available for future work.