The CogALex shared task on monolingual and multilingual identification of semantic relations

Abstract

The shared task of the CogALex-VI workshop focuses on the monolingual and multilingual identification of semantic relations. We provided training and validation data for the following languages: English, German and Chinese. Given a word pair, systems had to be trained to identify which relation holds between them, with possible choices being synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy and no relation at all. Two test sets were released for evaluating the participating systems. One containing pairs for each of the training languages (systems were evaluated in a monolingual fashion) and the other one proposing a surprise language to test the crosslingual transfer capabilities of the systems. Among the submitted systems, top performance was achieved by a transformer-based model in both the monolingual and in the multilingual setting, for all the tested languages, proving the potentials of this recently-introduced neural architecture.