Papers by John Pavlopoulos
Dialect Normalization using Large Language Models and Morphological Rules (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Natural language understanding systems struggle with low-resource languages, including many dialects of high-resourced ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines rule-based linguistically informed transformations and large language models with targeted few-shot prompting without any parallel data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to transform dialectal text into a standard variety while maintaining as much of the original meaning as possible. |
Learning to Align: Addressing Character Frequency Distribution Shifts in Handwritten Text Recognition (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Character sets change over time and character frequency distributions shift across historical periods or regions . character distribution alignment can improve existing models at inference time without requiring retraining . |
| Approach: | They propose a loss function that incorporates the Wasserstein distance between predicted and target distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and robustness under temporal and contextual shifts. |
Detecting Erroneously Recognized Handwritten Byzantine Text (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Handwritten text recognition (HTR) produces textual output that contains errors, which are much higher than recognised printed text. |
| Approach: | They investigate the properties of handwritten texts that lead post-correction systems to this adversarial behaviour in Byzantine Greek. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average precision score of 95% in Byzantine Greek and 97% in modern and ancient Greek. |
Dating Greek Papyri with Text Regression (2023.acl-long)
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John Pavlopoulos, Maria Konstantinidou, Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello, Holger Essler, Asimina Paparigopoulou
| Challenge: | a large number of Greek papyri documents can only be dated tentatively or in approximation due to the lack of decisive evidence. |
| Approach: | a new study trains regression models to estimate Greek papyri's date using a dataset of 389 transcriptions . the authors propose a method to estimate the date of 159 Greek pamphlets, which are only the upper limit known . |
| Outcome: | a new study predicts a date for Greek papyri with an average MAE of 54 years and an MSE of 1.17 . the model outperforms image classifiers and other baselines for 159 manuscripts, with only the upper limit known . |
Deciphering Emotional Landscapes in the Iliad: A Novel French-Annotated Dataset for Emotion Recognition (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Using an emotion-annotated dataset, we aim to provide a resource for the scientific community to study the emotional intricacies of classical literature. |
| Approach: | They propose to provide an emotion-annotated dataset for classical literature and Western mythology using a multivariate time series and a deep learning masked language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset reveals compelling patterns and phenomena within the Iliad's emotional landscape. |
Polarized Opinion Detection Improves the Detection of Toxic Language (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for estimating polarized annotations are un-normalized and difficult to exploit in machine learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for K-class text classification that exploits polarized texts in the dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits polarized texts in a dataset and can improve classification performance. |
Sentiment Analysis of Homeric Text: The 1st Book of Iliad (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Sentiment analysis studies focus more on online customer reviews and social media texts, but are less on literary studies. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the perceived sentiment of Iliad verses using a deep learning masked language model and a pre-trained model to estimate the sentiment of the poem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that sentiment estimators can be used as mechanical annotators, thus facilitating the distant reading of Homeric text. |
Handwritten Paleographic Greek Text Recognition: A Century-Based Approach (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | achieving high accuracy HTR results for Greek manuscripts is still a major challenge . Optical character recognition software is notoriously difficult to use for handwritten text . |
| Approach: | They propose to use Greek manuscripts as a source for a new model to assess HTR accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to improve the recognition rate of Greek manuscripts. |
Civil Rephrases Of Toxic Texts With Self-Supervised Transformers (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | et al., 2018a): a poor phrasing may make the conversation go awry. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that can help suggest rephrasings of toxic comments in a more civil manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates sentences that are more fluent and better at preserving the initial content compared to earlier systems and human evaluation. |
A Data-Driven Guided Decoding Mechanism for Diagnostic Captioning (2024.findings-acl)
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Panagiotis Kaliosis, John Pavlopoulos, Foivos Charalampakos, Georgios Moschovis, Ion Androutsopoulos
| Challenge: | Diagnostic Captioning (DC) systems receive one or more medical images of a patient, such as X-Rays or Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs). |
| Approach: | They propose a data-driven guided decoding method that incorporates medical information into the beam search of the diagnostic text generation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on two medical datasets and can be used in few- and zero-shot learning scenarios. |
Enriching Grammatical Error Correction Resources for Modern Greek (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Davidson and Kilgarriff, 2011) have focused on the English language, but there are limited efforts to expand GEC in other languages. |
| Approach: | They develop and test a multilingual text-to-text transformer for Greek . they provide a model that can be fully-fledged for Greek with annotation corrections . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 52.63% F0.5 on part of the Greek Native Corpus, 16% below the winning system on English GEC. |
FoodSafeSum: Enabling Natural Language Processing Applications for Food Safety Document Summarization and Analysis (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Juli Bakagianni, Korbinian Randl, Guido Rocchietti, Cosimo Rulli, Franco Maria Nardini, Salvatore Trani, Aron Henriksson, Anna Romanova, John Pavlopoulos
| Challenge: | a lack of structured datasets hinders natural language processing research . a new dataset of food safety documents and related metadata is presented . |
| Approach: | They present a dataset of human-written and Large Language Model (LLM)-generated food safety documents . they evaluate their utility on three NLP tasks directly reflecting food safety practices . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset performs comparably or better than human summaries on three NLP tasks . it also shows clustering of summary for event tracking and compliance monitoring . |
Toxicity Detection: Does Context Really Matter? (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing ‘toxicity’ detection datasets and models ignore the context of the posts, implicitly assuming that comments may be judged independently. |
| Approach: | They limit the notion of context to the previous post in the thread and the discussion title and focus on how it affects human judgement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can amplify or mitigate perceived toxicity of posts and a small but significant subset of manually labeled posts end up having the opposite toxicity labels if the annotators are not provided with context. |
A Study of Distant Viewing of ukiyo-e prints (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | ukiyo-e landscape prints feature diverse place-names, both man-made and natural formations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Japanese BERT-based Name Entity Recogniser to analyze a visual dataset that is hosted by the Art Research Center at the Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the work by fine-tuning and applying a Japanese BERT-based Name Entity Recogniser to a visual dataset hosted by the Art Research Center at the Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. |
Evaluation and Facilitation of Online Discussions in the LLM Era: A Survey (2025.emnlp-main)
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Katerina Korre, Dimitris Tsirmpas, Nikos Gkoumas, Emma Cabalé, Danai Myrtzani, Theodoros Evgeniou, Ion Androutsopoulos, John Pavlopoulos
| Challenge: | Recent advances in LLMs enable artificial facilitation agents to not only moderate content, but also actively improve the quality of interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy on discussion quality evaluation and a new taxonomies for intervention and facilitation strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods synthesize ideas from Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Social Sciences to provide a taxonomy on discussion quality evaluation, and a roadmap of good practices and future research directions. |
HoLM: Analyzing the Linguistic Unexpectedness in Homeric Poetry (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on the authorship of the Homeric poems has only been done at the level of lengthier excerpts, but not individual verses, at which most suspected interpolations occur. |
| Approach: | They present a corpus of Homeric verses with a score quantifying linguistic unexpectedness based on Perplexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus of Homeric verses is complemented with a score quantifying linguistic unexpectedness based on Perplexity. |
GR-NLP-TOOLKIT: An Open-Source NLP Toolkit for Modern Greek (2025.coling-demos)
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Lefteris Loukas, Nikolaos Smyrnioudis, Chrysa Dikonomaki, Spiros Barbakos, Anastasios Toumazatos, John Koutsikakis, Manolis Kyriakakis, Mary Georgiou, Stavros Vassos, John Pavlopoulos, Ion Androutsopoulos
| Challenge: | GR-NLP-TOOLKIT is an open-source natural language processing toolkit for modern Greek. |
| Approach: | They present GR-NLP-TOOLKIT, an open-source natural language processing toolkit for Greek. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit provides state-of-the-art performance in five core NLP tasks . it can be easily installed in Python and is accessible through a demonstration platform on HuggingFace . |
From the Detection of Toxic Spans in Online Discussions to the Analysis of Toxic-to-Civil Transfer (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a dataset of English posts with annotations of toxic spans is released . sequence labeling models perform best, but rationale extraction methods are promising . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for toxic spans detection that includes an annotation of toxic posts . they propose to add generic rationale extraction mechanisms to the model to obtain toxic span information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a dataset of English posts with toxic span annotations . it shows that sequence labeling models perform best, but that rationale extraction methods are promising . |
CICLe: Conformal In-Context Learning for Largescale Multi-Class Food Risk Classification (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Contaminated or adulterated food poses a substantial risk to human health. |
| Approach: | They present a dataset of 7,546 text messages describing public food recalls. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms RoBERTa and XLM-R on classes with low support while reducing energy consumption. |
Still All Greeklish to Me: Greeklish to Greek Transliteration (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Greeklish is a writing form that is used to avoid switching languages on multilingual keyboards . even native Greek speakers may struggle to understand Greeklished . |
| Approach: | They propose to use Greeklish to avoid switching languages on multilingual keyboards . they propose to train models on Greek datasets using the Greek alphabet . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on Greeklish data. |
Towards a Greek Proverb Atlas: Computational Spatial Exploration and Attribution of Greek Proverbs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study focuses on Greek proverbs, which carry wisdom and are still used today . it is the first large-scale machine-actionable dataset of Greek prowords quantifying their spatial distribution across different locations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a publicly-available and machine-actionable dataset of Greek proverbs to quantify their spatial distribution across different locations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is a publicly-available and machine-actionable dataset of Greek proverb variants. |