Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Laurie Burchell, Catherine Arnett, Rafael Mosquera, Sara Hincapié Monsalve, Thom Vaughan, Damian Stewart, Malte Ostendorff, Idris Abdulmumin, Vukosi Marivate, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Hend Al-Khalifa, Nadia Ghezaiel Hammouda, Verrah Akinyi Otiende, Tack Hwa Wong, Jakhongir Saydaliev, Melika Nobakhtian, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Chalamalasetti Kranti, Carol Muchemi, Khang Nguyen, Faisal Muhammad Adam, Luis Frentzen Salim, Reem Alqifari, Cynthia Jayne Amol, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Ilker Kesen, Ahmad Mustafid, Pavel Stepachev, Leshem Choshen, David Anugraha, Hamada Nayel, Seid Muhie Yimam, Vallerie Alexandra Putra, My Chiffon Nguyen, Azmine Toushik Wasi, Gouthami Vadithya, Rob Van Der Goot, Lanwenn ar C’horr, Karan Dua, Andrew Yates, Mithil Bangera, Yeshil Bangera, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Shu Okabe, Fenal Ashokbhai Ilasariya, Dmitry Gaynullin, Genta Indra Winata, Yiyuan Li, Juan Pablo Martínez, Amit Agarwal, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, Raia Abu Ahmad, Esther Adenuga, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Weerayut Buaphet, Michael Anugraha, Sowmya Vajjala, Benjamin L Rice, Azril Hafizi Amirudin, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Srikant Panda, Yassine Toughrai, Bruhan Kyomuhendo, Daniel Ruffinelli, Akshata, Manuel Goulão, Ej Zhou, Ingrid Gabriela Franco Ramirez, Cristina Aggazzotti, Konstantin Dobler, Jun Kevin, Quentin Pagès, Nicholas Andrews, Nuhu Ibrahim, Mattes Ruckdeschel, Amr Keleg, Mike Zhang, Casper Rufaro Muziri, Saron Samuel, Sotaro Takeshita, Kun Kerdthaisong, Luca Foppiano, Rasul Dent, Tommaso Green, Ahmad Mustapha Wali, Kamohelo Makaaka, Vicky Feliren, Inshirah Idris, Hande Celikkanat, Abdulhamid Abubakar, Jean Maillard, Benoît Sagot, Thibault Clérice, Kenton Murray, Sarah K. K. Luger. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Pierre Andrews, Mikel Artetxe, Mariano Coria Meglioli, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Joe Chuang, David Dale, Mark Duppenthaler, Nathanial Paul Ekberg, Cynthia Gao, Daniel Edward Licht, Jean Maillard, Alexandre Mourachko, Christophe Ropers, Safiyyah Saleem, Eduardo Sánchez, Ioannis Tsiamas, Arina Turkatenko, Albert Ventayol-Boada, Shireen Yates. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2025.

A major impediment to the advancement of sign language translation (SLT) is data scarcity.Much of the sign language data currently available on the web cannot be used for training supervised models due to the lack of aligned captions.Furthermore, scaling SLT using large-scale web-scraped datasets bears privacy risks due to the presence of biometric information, which the responsible development of SLT technologies should account for.In this work, we propose a twostage framework for privacy-aware SLT at scale that addresses both of these issues.We introduce SSVP-SLT, which leverages selfsupervised video pretraining on anonymized and unannotated videos, followed by supervised SLT finetuning on a curated parallel dataset.SSVP-SLT achieves state-of-the-art finetuned and zero-shot gloss-free SLT performance on the How2Sign dataset, outperforming the strongest respective baselines by over 3 BLEU-4.Based on controlled experiments, we further discuss the advantages and limitations of self-supervised pretraining and anonymization via facial obfuscation for SLT. 1

Jean Maillard, Cynthia Gao, Elahe Kalbassi, Kaushik Ram Sadagopan, Vedanuj Goswami, Philipp Koehn, Angela Fan, Francisco Guzman. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Jean Maillard, Vladimir Karpukhin, Fabio Petroni, Wen-tau Yih, Barlas Oguz, Veselin Stoyanov, Gargi Ghosh. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2021.

Fabio Petroni, Aleksandra Piktus, Angela Fan, Patrick Lewis, Majid Yazdani, Nicola De Cao, James Thorne, Yacine Jernite, Vladimir Karpukhin, Jean Maillard, Vassilis Plachouras, Tim Rocktäschel, Sebastian Riedel. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.

Armen Aghajanyan, Jean Maillard, Akshat Shrivastava, Keith Diedrick, Michael Haeger, Haoran Li, Yashar Mehdad, Veselin Stoyanov, Anuj Kumar, Mike Lewis, Sonal Gupta. Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). 2020.

Recent years have seen a growing interest within the natural language processing (NLP) community in evaluating the ability of semantic models to capture human meaning representation in the brain. Existing research has mainly focused on applying semantic models to decode brain activity patterns associated with the meaning of individual words, and, more recently, this approach has been extended to sentences and larger text fragments. Our work is the first to investigate metaphor processing in the brain in this context. We evaluate a range of semantic models (word embeddings, compositional, and visual models) in their ability to decode brain activity associated with reading of both literal and metaphoric sentences. Our results suggest that compositional models and word embeddings are able to capture differences in the processing of literal and metaphoric sentences, providing support for the idea that the literal meaning is not fully accessible during familiar metaphor comprehension.

Recent work shows that distributional semantic models can be used to decode patterns of brain activity associated with individual words and sentence meanings.However, it is yet unclear to what extent such models can be used to study and decode fMRI patterns associated with specific aspects of semantic composition such as the negation function.In this paper, we apply lexical and compositional semantic models to decode fMRI patterns associated with negated and affirmative sentences containing hand-action verbs.Our results show reduced decoding (correlation) of sentences where the verb is in the negated context, as compared to the affirmative one, within brain regions implicated in action-semantic processing.This supports behavioral and brain imaging studies, suggesting that negation involves reduced access to aspects of the affirmative mental representation.The results pave the way for testing alternate semantic models of negation against human semantic processing in the brain.

Abstract We present two studies on neural network architectures that learn to represent sentences by composing their words according to automatically induced binary trees, without ever being shown a correct parse tree. We use Tree-Long Short-Term Memories (LSTMs) as our composition function, applied along a tree structure found by a differentiable natural language chart parser. The models simultaneously optimise both the composition function and the parser, thus eliminating the need for externally provided parse trees, which are normally required for Tree-LSTMs. They can therefore be seen as tree-based recurrent neural networks that are unsupervised with respect to the parse trees. Due to being fully differentiable, the models are easily trained with an off-the-shelf gradient descent method and backpropagation. In the first part of this paper, we introduce a model based on the CKY chart parser, and evaluate its downstream performance on a natural language inference task and a reverse dictionary task. Further, we show how its performance can be improved with an attention mechanism which fully exploits the parse chart, by attending over all possible subspans of the sentence. We find that our approach is competitive against similar models of comparable size and outperforms Tree-LSTMs that use trees produced by a parser. Finally, we present an alternative architecture based on a shift-reduce parser. We perform an analysis of the trees induced by both our models, to investigate whether they are consistent with each other and across re-runs, and whether they resemble the trees produced by a standard parser.

Metaphor is pervasive in our communication, which makes it an important problem for natural language processing (NLP).Numerous approaches to metaphor processing have thus been proposed, all of which relied on linguistic features and textual data to construct their models.Human metaphor comprehension is, however, known to rely on both our linguistic and perceptual experience, and vision can play a particularly important role when metaphorically projecting imagery across domains.In this paper, we present the first metaphor identification method that simultaneously draws knowledge from linguistic and visual data.Our results demonstrate that it outperforms linguistic and visual models in isolation, as well as being competitive with the best-performing metaphor identification methods, that rely on hand-crafted knowledge about domains and perception.

This article introduces RELPRON, a large data set of subject and object relative clauses, for the evaluation of methods in compositional distributional semantics. RELPRON targets an intermediate level of grammatical complexity between content-word pairs and full sentences. The task involves matching terms, such as “wisdom,” with representative properties, such as “quality that experience teaches.” A unique feature of RELPRON is that it is built from attested properties, but without the need for them to appear in relative clause format in the source corpus. The article also presents some initial experiments on RELPRON, using a variety of composition methods including simple baselines, arithmetic operators on vectors, and finally, more complex methods in which argument-taking words are represented as tensors. The latter methods are based on the Categorial framework, which is described in detail. The results show that vector addition is difficult to beat—in line with the existing literature—but that an implementation of the Categorial framework based on the Practical Lexical Function model is able to match the performance of vector addition. The article finishes with an in-depth analysis of RELPRON, showing how results vary across subject and object relative clauses, across different head nouns, and how the methods perform on the subtasks necessary for capturing relative clause semantics, as well as providing a qualitative analysis highlighting some of the more common errors. Our hope is that the competitive results presented here, in which the best systems are on average ranking one out of every two properties correctly for a given term, will inspire new approaches to the RELPRON ranking task and other tasks based on linguistically interesting constructions.

We present a compositional distributional semantic model which is an implementation of the tensor-based framework of Coecke et al. (2011). It is an extended skipgram model (Mikolov et al., 2013) which we apply to adjective-noun combinations, learning nouns as vectors and adjectives as matrices. We also propose a novel measure of adjective similarity, and show that adjective matrix representations lead to improved performance in adjective and adjective-noun similarity tasks, as well as in the detection of semantically anomalous adjective-noun pairs.