We present and describe two language resources in this paper: CATalog 1.0, the largest text corpus in Catalan to date, and CURATE (Corpus Utility for RAting TExt), a modular, parallelizable pipeline used for processing and scoring documents based on text quality that we have optimised to run in High Performance Cluster (HPC) environments. In the coming sections we describe our data preprocessing pipeline at length; traditional pipelines usually implement a set of binary filters such that a given document is either in or out. In our experience with Catalan, in lower-resource settings it is more practical to instead assign a document a soft score to allow for more flexible decision-making. We describe how the document score is calculated and highlight its interpretability by showing that it is significantly correlated with human judgements as obtained from a comparative judgement experiment. We additionally describe the different subcorpora that make up CATalog 1.0.
We present the findings and results of our pseudonymisation system, which has been developed for a real-life use-case involving users and an informative chatbot in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Message exchanges between the two involve the former group providing information about themselves and their residential area, which could easily allow for their re-identification. We create a modular pipeline to detect PIIs and perform basic deidentification such that the data can be stored while mitigating any privacy concerns. The use-case presents several challenging aspects, the most difficult of which is the logistic challenge of not being able to directly view or access the data due to the very privacy issues we aim to resolve. Nevertheless, our system achieves a high recall of 0.99, correctly identifying almost all instances of personal data. However, this comes at the expense of precision, which only reaches 0.64. We describe the sensitive information identification in detail, explaining the design principles behind our decisions. We additionally highlight the particular challenges we’ve encountered.
Much work has gone into developing language models of increasing size, but only recently have we begun to examine them for pernicious behaviour that could lead to harming marginalised groups. Following Lin et al. (2022) in rooting our work in psychological research, we prompt two masked language models (MLMs) of different specialisations in English and Spanish with statements from a questionnaire developed to measure stigma to determine if they treat physical and mental illnesses equally. In both models we find a statistically significant difference in the treatment of physical and mental illnesses across most if not all latent constructs as measured by the questionnaire, and thus they are more likely to associate mental illnesses with stigma. We then examine their training data or data retrieved from the same domain using a computational implementation of the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) (Fiske et al., 2002; Fraser et al., 2021) to interpret the questionnaire results based on the SCM values as reflected in the data. We observe that model behaviour can largely be explained by the distribution of the mentions of illnesses according to their SCM values.