Greek intellectual life and literary production in the context of Ioannis Metaxas's régime (1936-1941)
George Andreiomenos
The close monitoring of every artistic and intellectual movement by Metaxas's dictatorship has repeatedly been discussed. Th is monitoring was not achieved only in a direct way, i.e. through the imprisonment of intellectuals, book burnings or state censorship, but also by the implementation of various indirect tactics. All these tactics targeted to the limitation of negative reactions by the then Greek intelligentsia – or, at least, to stifle direct protest against the régime. Simultaneously, many bourgeois writers and artists seem either to had grown weary due to the very long political instability and social division, and to had become skeptical about the further strengthening of the left wing, or they were undoubtedly plunged into a greater confusion, viewing the development of a sharp patriotic (if not nationalistic) rhetoric which was identifi ed with the rise of totalitarian and authoritarian régimes throughout the world. In any case, any pertinent evidence needs to be carefully studied, on the one hand to explore the literary and intellectual interests of Metaxas himself, and on the other hand to clarify his personal views and the relationships of the 4th of August régime with intellectuals and artists, as well as of these latter with the dictator and the program of his administration. Furthermore, all this needs to be placed within the context of the actions of Metaxas's régime, the way it was ruthlessly harsh on followers of the left, especially the communists, thousands of whom were sent to prison or into exile. At the same time, the seeming support of those who took up public positions needs careful analysis: each individual writer and artist had mixed motives and often considerable ambivalence, and each case needs exploration in its own terms.
History of Greece, Translating and interpreting
Object Detection with Multimodal Large Vision-Language Models: An In-depth Review
Ranjan Sapkota, Manoj Karkee
The fusion of language and vision in large vision-language models (LVLMs) has revolutionized deep learning-based object detection by enhancing adaptability, contextual reasoning, and generalization beyond traditional architectures. This in-depth review presents a structured exploration of the state-of-the-art in LVLMs, systematically organized through a three-step research review process. First, we discuss the functioning of vision language models (VLMs) for object detection, describing how these models harness natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) techniques to revolutionize object detection and localization. We then explain the architectural innovations, training paradigms, and output flexibility of recent LVLMs for object detection, highlighting how they achieve advanced contextual understanding for object detection. The review thoroughly examines the approaches used in integration of visual and textual information, demonstrating the progress made in object detection using VLMs that facilitate more sophisticated object detection and localization strategies. This review presents comprehensive visualizations demonstrating LVLMs' effectiveness in diverse scenarios including localization and segmentation, and then compares their real-time performance, adaptability, and complexity to traditional deep learning systems. Based on the review, its is expected that LVLMs will soon meet or surpass the performance of conventional methods in object detection. The review also identifies a few major limitations of the current LVLM modes, proposes solutions to address those challenges, and presents a clear roadmap for the future advancement in this field. We conclude, based on this study, that the recent advancement in LVLMs have made and will continue to make a transformative impact on object detection and robotic applications in the future.
Enhancing Small Language Models for Cross-Lingual Generalized Zero-Shot Classification with Soft Prompt Tuning
Fred Philippy, Siwen Guo, Cedric Lothritz
et al.
In NLP, Zero-Shot Classification (ZSC) has become essential for enabling models to classify text into categories unseen during training, particularly in low-resource languages and domains where labeled data is scarce. While pretrained language models (PLMs) have shown promise in ZSC, they often rely on large training datasets or external knowledge, limiting their applicability in multilingual and low-resource scenarios. Recent approaches leveraging natural language prompts reduce the dependence on large training datasets but struggle to effectively incorporate available labeled data from related classification tasks, especially when these datasets originate from different languages or distributions. Moreover, existing prompt-based methods typically rely on manually crafted prompts in a specific language, limiting their adaptability and effectiveness in cross-lingual settings. To address these challenges, we introduce RoSPrompt, a lightweight and data-efficient approach for training soft prompts that enhance cross-lingual ZSC while ensuring robust generalization across data distribution shifts. RoSPrompt is designed for small multilingual PLMs, enabling them to leverage high-resource languages to improve performance in low-resource settings without requiring extensive fine-tuning or high computational costs. We evaluate our approach on multiple multilingual PLMs across datasets covering 106 languages, demonstrating strong cross-lingual transfer performance and robust generalization capabilities over unseen classes.
Rez. M. Mohr (Hg.): Sallust, De coniuratione Catilinae/Die Verschwörung des Catilina, Lateinisch/Deutsch, Ditzingen: Reclam 2021.
Nikolaus Mantel
Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature, Philology. Linguistics
Scaling up Multimodal Pre-training for Sign Language Understanding
Wengang Zhou, Weichao Zhao, Hezhen Hu
et al.
Sign language serves as the primary meaning of communication for the deaf-mute community. Different from spoken language, it commonly conveys information by the collaboration of manual features, i.e., hand gestures and body movements, and non-manual features, i.e., facial expressions and mouth cues. To facilitate communication between the deaf-mute and hearing people, a series of sign language understanding (SLU) tasks have been studied in recent years, including isolated/continuous sign language recognition (ISLR/CSLR), gloss-free sign language translation (GF-SLT) and sign language retrieval (SL-RT). Sign language recognition and translation aims to understand the semantic meaning conveyed by sign languages from gloss-level and sentence-level, respectively. In contrast, SL-RT focuses on retrieving sign videos or corresponding texts from a closed-set under the query-by-example search paradigm. These tasks investigate sign language topics from diverse perspectives and raise challenges in learning effective representation of sign language videos. To advance the development of sign language understanding, exploring a generalized model that is applicable across various SLU tasks is a profound research direction.
Emergent World Models and Latent Variable Estimation in Chess-Playing Language Models
Adam Karvonen
Language models have shown unprecedented capabilities, sparking debate over the source of their performance. Is it merely the outcome of learning syntactic patterns and surface level statistics, or do they extract semantics and a world model from the text? Prior work by Li et al. investigated this by training a GPT model on synthetic, randomly generated Othello games and found that the model learned an internal representation of the board state. We extend this work into the more complex domain of chess, training on real games and investigating our model's internal representations using linear probes and contrastive activations. The model is given no a priori knowledge of the game and is solely trained on next character prediction, yet we find evidence of internal representations of board state. We validate these internal representations by using them to make interventions on the model's activations and edit its internal board state. Unlike Li et al's prior synthetic dataset approach, our analysis finds that the model also learns to estimate latent variables like player skill to better predict the next character. We derive a player skill vector and add it to the model, improving the model's win rate by up to 2.6 times.
Self-Cognition in Large Language Models: An Exploratory Study
Dongping Chen, Jiawen Shi, Yao Wan
et al.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various applications, they also raise concerns regarding self-cognition. In this paper, we perform a pioneering study to explore self-cognition in LLMs. Specifically, we first construct a pool of self-cognition instruction prompts to evaluate where an LLM exhibits self-cognition and four well-designed principles to quantify LLMs' self-cognition. Our study reveals that 4 of the 48 models on Chatbot Arena--specifically Command R, Claude3-Opus, Llama-3-70b-Instruct, and Reka-core--demonstrate some level of detectable self-cognition. We observe a positive correlation between model size, training data quality, and self-cognition level. Additionally, we also explore the utility and trustworthiness of LLM in the self-cognition state, revealing that the self-cognition state enhances some specific tasks such as creative writing and exaggeration. We believe that our work can serve as an inspiration for further research to study the self-cognition in LLMs.
Scaling Behavior of Machine Translation with Large Language Models under Prompt Injection Attacks
Zhifan Sun, Antonio Valerio Miceli-Barone
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly becoming the preferred foundation platforms for many Natural Language Processing tasks such as Machine Translation, owing to their quality often comparable to or better than task-specific models, and the simplicity of specifying the task through natural language instructions or in-context examples. Their generality, however, opens them up to subversion by end users who may embed into their requests instructions that cause the model to behave in unauthorized and possibly unsafe ways. In this work we study these Prompt Injection Attacks (PIAs) on multiple families of LLMs on a Machine Translation task, focusing on the effects of model size on the attack success rates. We introduce a new benchmark data set and we discover that on multiple language pairs and injected prompts written in English, larger models under certain conditions may become more susceptible to successful attacks, an instance of the Inverse Scaling phenomenon (McKenzie et al., 2023). To our knowledge, this is the first work to study non-trivial LLM scaling behaviour in a multi-lingual setting.
Native vs Non-Native Language Prompting: A Comparative Analysis
Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi, Rakif Khan, Ali Ezzat Shahroor
et al.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in different fields, including standard Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. To elicit knowledge from LLMs, prompts play a key role, consisting of natural language instructions. Most open and closed source LLMs are trained on available labeled and unlabeled resources--digital content such as text, images, audio, and videos. Hence, these models have better knowledge for high-resourced languages but struggle with low-resourced languages. Since prompts play a crucial role in understanding their capabilities, the language used for prompts remains an important research question. Although there has been significant research in this area, it is still limited, and less has been explored for medium to low-resourced languages. In this study, we investigate different prompting strategies (native vs. non-native) on 11 different NLP tasks associated with 12 different Arabic datasets (9.7K data points). In total, we conducted 197 experiments involving 3 LLMs, 12 datasets, and 3 prompting strategies. Our findings suggest that, on average, the non-native prompt performs the best, followed by mixed and native prompts.
Leveraging Large Language Models to Measure Gender Representation Bias in Gendered Language Corpora
Erik Derner, Sara Sansalvador de la Fuente, Yoan Gutiérrez
et al.
Large language models (LLMs) often inherit and amplify social biases embedded in their training data. A prominent social bias is gender bias. In this regard, prior work has mainly focused on gender stereotyping bias - the association of specific roles or traits with a particular gender - in English and on evaluating gender bias in model embeddings or generated outputs. In contrast, gender representation bias - the unequal frequency of references to individuals of different genders - in the training corpora has received less attention. Yet such imbalances in the training data constitute an upstream source of bias that can propagate and intensify throughout the entire model lifecycle. To fill this gap, we propose a novel LLM-based method to detect and quantify gender representation bias in LLM training data in gendered languages, where grammatical gender challenges the applicability of methods developed for English. By leveraging the LLMs' contextual understanding, our approach automatically identifies and classifies person-referencing words in gendered language corpora. Applied to four Spanish-English benchmarks and five Valencian corpora, our method reveals substantial male-dominant imbalances. We show that such biases in training data affect model outputs, but can surprisingly be mitigated leveraging small-scale training on datasets that are biased towards the opposite gender. Our findings highlight the need for corpus-level gender bias analysis in multilingual NLP. We make our code and data publicly available.
Material 2 zu A. Ramos Lopes: Der 'Übersetzungssenat' als hortus disputandi
Alexander Ramos Lopes
Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature, Philology. Linguistics
"The White Whale" of Andreas Empeirikos as a poetic response to Herman Melville's Moby Dick
Athina Psaropoulou
The article discusses Andreas Empeirikos' poem titled "The White Whale" and examines it as a poetic response to Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick. In this poem, Empeirikos portrays an "epiphany of the past recaptured", which is experienced by Ishmael, the narrator of both Melville's and Empeirikos' works. Through his deep connection with the ocean and the world around him, Ishmael, Empeirikos' poetic persona, recaptures the emotional richness inspired by the sight of a re-enchanted world and seeks to glorify the white whale. This pursuit involves a rejection of materialism and an embrace of a visionary and idealised surreal world embodied by the white whale - a symbol of a New Jerusalem.
History of Greece, Translating and interpreting
Non scholae, sed vitae traducimus
Stefan Freund
Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature, Philology. Linguistics
Negated Complementary Commonsense using Large Language Models
Navid Rezaei, Marek Z. Reformat
Larger language models, such as GPT-3, have shown to be excellent in many tasks. However, we demonstrate that out-of-ordinary questions can throw the model off guard. This work focuses on finding answers to negated complementary questions in commonsense scenarios. We illustrate how such questions adversely affect the model responses. We propose a model-agnostic methodology to improve the performance in negated complementary scenarios. Our method outperforms few-shot generation from GPT-3 (by more than 11 points) and, more importantly, highlights the significance of studying the response of large language models in negated complementary questions. The code, data, and experiments are available under: https://github.com/navidre/negated_complementary_commonsense.
BioT5: Enriching Cross-modal Integration in Biology with Chemical Knowledge and Natural Language Associations
Qizhi Pei, Wei Zhang, Jinhua Zhu
et al.
Recent advancements in biological research leverage the integration of molecules, proteins, and natural language to enhance drug discovery. However, current models exhibit several limitations, such as the generation of invalid molecular SMILES, underutilization of contextual information, and equal treatment of structured and unstructured knowledge. To address these issues, we propose $\mathbf{BioT5}$, a comprehensive pre-training framework that enriches cross-modal integration in biology with chemical knowledge and natural language associations. $\mathbf{BioT5}$ utilizes SELFIES for $100%$ robust molecular representations and extracts knowledge from the surrounding context of bio-entities in unstructured biological literature. Furthermore, $\mathbf{BioT5}$ distinguishes between structured and unstructured knowledge, leading to more effective utilization of information. After fine-tuning, BioT5 shows superior performance across a wide range of tasks, demonstrating its strong capability of capturing underlying relations and properties of bio-entities. Our code is available at $\href{https://github.com/QizhiPei/BioT5}{Github}$.
Antarlekhaka: A Comprehensive Tool for Multi-task Natural Language Annotation
Hrishikesh Terdalkar, Arnab Bhattacharya
One of the primary obstacles in the advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies for low-resource languages is the lack of annotated datasets for training and testing machine learning models. In this paper, we present Antarlekhaka, a tool for manual annotation of a comprehensive set of tasks relevant to NLP. The tool is Unicode-compatible, language-agnostic, Web-deployable and supports distributed annotation by multiple simultaneous annotators. The system sports user-friendly interfaces for 8 categories of annotation tasks. These, in turn, enable the annotation of a considerably larger set of NLP tasks. The task categories include two linguistic tasks not handled by any other tool, namely, sentence boundary detection and deciding canonical word order, which are important tasks for text that is in the form of poetry. We propose the idea of sequential annotation based on small text units, where an annotator performs several tasks related to a single text unit before proceeding to the next unit. The research applications of the proposed mode of multi-task annotation are also discussed. Antarlekhaka outperforms other annotation tools in objective evaluation. It has been also used for two real-life annotation tasks on two different languages, namely, Sanskrit and Bengali. The tool is available at https://github.com/Antarlekhaka/code.
Spielerisch und künstlerisch die Antike kennenlernen
Deborah Zaus
Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature, Philology. Linguistics
Toward More Meaningful Resources for Lower-resourced Languages
Constantine Lignos, Nolan Holley, Chester Palen-Michel
et al.
In this position paper, we describe our perspective on how meaningful resources for lower-resourced languages should be developed in connection with the speakers of those languages. We first examine two massively multilingual resources in detail. We explore the contents of the names stored in Wikidata for a few lower-resourced languages and find that many of them are not in fact in the languages they claim to be and require non-trivial effort to correct. We discuss quality issues present in WikiAnn and evaluate whether it is a useful supplement to hand annotated data. We then discuss the importance of creating annotation for lower-resourced languages in a thoughtful and ethical way that includes the languages' speakers as part of the development process. We conclude with recommended guidelines for resource development.
MuLVE, A Multi-Language Vocabulary Evaluation Data Set
Anik Jacobsen, Salar Mohtaj, Sebastian Möller
Vocabulary learning is vital to foreign language learning. Correct and adequate feedback is essential to successful and satisfying vocabulary training. However, many vocabulary and language evaluation systems perform on simple rules and do not account for real-life user learning data. This work introduces Multi-Language Vocabulary Evaluation Data Set (MuLVE), a data set consisting of vocabulary cards and real-life user answers, labeled indicating whether the user answer is correct or incorrect. The data source is user learning data from the Phase6 vocabulary trainer. The data set contains vocabulary questions in German and English, Spanish, and French as target language and is available in four different variations regarding pre-processing and deduplication. We experiment to fine-tune pre-trained BERT language models on the downstream task of vocabulary evaluation with the proposed MuLVE data set. The results provide outstanding results of > 95.5 accuracy and F2-score. The data set is available on the European Language Grid.
Mariano Larsen y la filología. Aproximaciones lingüísticas a la historia americana
E. Battista
In this article we analyses three works of Mariano Larsen (1821-1894): teacher, translator, theologian and historian of broad participation in the Argentine intellectual sphere in the second half of the XIXth century. His publications –América Antecolombiana (1865), “Filología Americana. La lengua quichua y el doctor López” (1870) and “Apéndice sobre las lenguas quichua, aimara y pampa” (1882)– have historiographical value in at least three dimensions: first, because they are part of a series in which we identify Larsen’s philological work; second, because they show how the scientific world of nineteenth-century considered the rigorous methodology of historical-comparative linguistics; and, finally, because they are discursive practices that exhibit the way in what the science of language can be used for political purposes (Del Valle & Stheeman 2004, Ennis 2018, Battista 2019a). According to our observations, in order to explain the ethnic affiliations between the American Indians and the Asian and European peoples, Larsen resorted to linguistic comparison; specifically, through the reconstruction of Pelasgo-Greek, Sanskrit-Quichua and Araucano-Pampas words, he used the science of language to support his interpretations of the migrations. We consider that, by transforming “mythical names into words”, the philology practiced by Larsen was, following Agamben (1978) terminology, a kind of “critical mythology”.