Papers by Simon Clematide
Improving Occupational ISCO Classification of Multilingual Swiss Job Postings with LLM-Refined Training Data (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | 80% of job postings are German, 11% French, 8% English, and under 1% Italian. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that refines silver-standard ISCO labels by consolidating them with predictions from pre-fine-tuned models to resolve discrepancies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method raises Top-1 accuracy on silver data to 58.3% and reaches 80% precision on held-out data. |
Evaluation of HTR models without Ground Truth Material (2022.lrec-1)
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Phillip Benjamin Ströbel, Martin Volk, Simon Clematide, Raphael Schwitter, Tobias Hodel, David Schoch
| Challenge: | Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a well-established technique for digitising historical printed collections in libraries and archives. |
| Approach: | They propose to use masked language models to evaluate handwritten text recognition models . they propose to introduce GT-free metrics to evaluate models to ensure best results . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model evaluations are based on lexicon-based and masked language models. |
Information Representation Fairness in Long-Document Embeddings: The Peculiar Interaction of Positional and Language Bias (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that embedding models exhibit systematic positional and language biases when documents are longer and consist of multiple segments. |
| Approach: | They propose a permutation-based evaluation framework to quantify embedding biases . they propose an inference-time attention calibration method that redistributes attention more evenly across document positions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the positional and language biases in embedding models . the proposed framework improves the discoverability of later segments . |
Similar, but why? A Toolkit for Explaining Text Similarity (2026.eacl-demo)
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| Challenge: | XPLAINSIM is a Python package that explains textual similarity in an easy-to-use way. |
| Approach: | They propose a Python package that unifies three approaches to explain text similarity . they demonstrate the value of the package through intuitive examples and empirical research . |
| Outcome: | XPLAINSIM is a Python package that unifies three approaches to explain text similarity . the authors show that the package is useful for explaining text similarities in a simple way . |
Semi-supervised Contextual Historical Text Normalization (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Historical text normalization is the task of mapping historical word forms to their modern counterparts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a generative normalization model to obtain contextualization from the target-side language model. |
| Outcome: | et al., 2018) show that the most effective approach reduces manual normalization time and manual training costs. |
Neural Transition-based String Transduction for Limited-Resource Setting in Morphology (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Morphological string transduction involves mapping one word form into another, possibly given a feature specification for the mapping. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural transition-based model that uses a simple set of edit actions for morphological transduction tasks such as reinflection and reinflation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art systems on low and medium training-set sizes and is competitive in the high-resource setting. |
PARAPHRASUS: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Paraphrase Detection Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | prevailing notion of paraphrase is simplistic, offering only limited view of vast spectrum of paraphrasing phenomena. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking tool for paraphrase detection that provides a fine-grained evaluation lens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark enables rapid calibration of models to specific strictness levels. |
Interpretable Text Embeddings and Text Similarity Explanation: A Survey (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Text embeddings are a fundamental component in many NLP tasks, but their interpretation and explanation remain challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for interpretable text embeddings and text similarity explanation . they characterize the main ideas, approaches, and trade-offs and discuss lessons learned . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are compared with existing models and compare them with existing ones. |
Strategies and Challenges for Crowdsourcing Regional Dialect Perception Data for Swiss German and Swiss French (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | a crowdsourcing project in the field of Swiss German dialects and Swiss French accents collects linguistic data. |
| Approach: | a gamified crowdsourcing platform was set up to collect linguistic data on Swiss German and Swiss French accents. |
| Outcome: | a gamified crowdsourcing platform collects linguistic data on Swiss German and Swiss French accents . the platform has provided 470,000 localizations, with 7,500 registered users and 30,000 anonymous visitors . |
Language Resources for Historical Newspapers: the Impresso Collection (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | digitization efforts are slowly but steadily contributing an increasing amount of facsimiles of cultural heritage documents. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a collection of newspaper data sets composed of text and image resources, curated and published within the context of the ‘impresso - Media Monitoring of the Past’ project. |
| Outcome: | The aim of the impresso resource collection is to contribute to historical language resources, and strengthen approaches to non-standard inputs and foster efficient processing of historical documents. |
Imitation Learning for Neural Morphological String Transduction (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that neural transition-based models can be used for morphological tasks such as inflection generation and lemmatization without a character aligner or warm start. |
| Approach: | They propose to use imitation learning to train a neural transition-based string transducer for morphological tasks such as inflection generation and lemmatization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model eliminates the need for a character aligner or warm start and achieves state-of-the-art performance on several datasets. |
How Much Data Do You Need? About the Creation of a Ground Truth for Black Letter and the Effectiveness of Neural OCR (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Optical Character Recognition and Handwritten Text Recognition have led to more accurate text recognition of historical documents. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a ground truth for a German-language newspaper published in black letter . they also evaluate the performance of different OCR engines and estimate how much data is needed to achieve high-quality OCR results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can recognise black letter text and performs well on data they have not seen during training. |
Examining Multilingual Embedding Models Cross-Lingually Through LLM-Generated Adversarial Examples (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Cross-Lingual Semantic Discrimination (CLSD) is a lightweight evaluation task that requires only parallel sentences and a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate adversarial distractors. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight task that requires only parallel sentences and a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate adversarial distractors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task requires only parallel sentences and a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate adversarial distractors. |
Cheap Character Noise for OCR-Robust Multilingual Embeddings (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Optical character recognition (OCR) is a key component of the digitization of historical documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that fine-tunes existing multilingual models using noisy texts and a contrastive loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the training data of existing models using noisy texts and a contrastive loss. |
Evaluation of Transfer Learning and Domain Adaptation for Analyzing German-Speaking Job Advertisements (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | a paper presents text mining approaches on German-speaking job advertisements . transfer learning and domain adaptation are used to build text mining applications . |
| Approach: | They propose text mining approaches on German-speaking job advertisements . they use transfer learning and domain adaptation to build language models adapted to job ads . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches outperform general-domain language models pre-trained on ten times more data. |
Sentence Smith: Controllable Edits for Evaluating Text Embeddings (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Controllable and transparent text generation has been a long-standing goal in NLP . but previous approaches were hindered by parsing and generation insufficiencies . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for English that has three steps: 1. Parsing a sentence into a semantic graph. 2. Applying human-designed semantic manipulation rules. 3. Generating text from the manipulated graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework for English is based on a neural network and parsers. |
Mapping Work Task Descriptions from German Job Ads on the O*NET Work Activities Ontology (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | a new method for mapping job tasks to labor market ontologies is proposed . a top configuration of the method achieved a notable performance improvement . |
| Approach: | They use ontological data with Multiple Negatives Ranking loss to extract job tasks from job postings . they integrate labeled job advertisement data into training to improve their mapping . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the German job ads and their ontology . it can be used to map job tasks to established labor market ontologies or taxonomies . |