--- title: "OtoBERT: Identifying Suffixed Verbal Forms — Shmidman 2024" description: "Modern Hebrew literature sometimes fuses a verb with its direct-object pronoun into one word. The fused form is often identical to a common verb with…" authors: ["Avi Shmidman", "Shaltiel Shmidman"] year: 2024 venue: "Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility and Readability (TSAR 2024)" source: "https://aclanthology.org/2024.tsar-1.2/" doi: "10.18653/v1/2024.tsar-1.2" licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aclbulk-2024-shmidman-otobert-identifying-suffixed-verbal-forms/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aclbulk-2024-shmidman-otobert-identifying-suffixed-verbal-forms/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2024](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2024/page/3/) / OtoBERT: Identifying Suffixed Verbal Forms in Modern Hebrew Literature # OtoBERT: Identifying Suffixed Verbal Forms in Modern Hebrew Literature **Authors:** [Avi Shmidman](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/avi-shmidman/), [Shaltiel Shmidman](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/shaltiel-shmidman/) · **Year:** 2024 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility and Readability (TSAR 2024) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/2024.tsar-1.2](https://aclanthology.org/2024.tsar-1.2/) · library `aclbulk-2024-shmidman-otobert-identifying-suffixed-verbal-forms` · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) [**0** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W4404780822) OpenAlex · 2026-10-14 · [Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility and Readability (TSAR 2024)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2024.tsar-1/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) - [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2024.tsar-1.2/) - [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2024.tsar-1.2.pdf) - [DOI 10.18653/v1/2024.tsar-1.2](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.tsar-1.2) - [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4404780822) **Authors (2)** 1. [Avi Shmidman](https://openalex.org/A5013212409) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/3361477) · h 5 · 114 citations · 53 works 2. [Shaltiel Shmidman](https://openalex.org/A5041361841) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1680059376) · h 3 · 27 citations · 21 works Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, 2026-10-14; authors with the same name are not always told apart. ## What it is about Modern Hebrew literature sometimes fuses a verb with its direct-object pronoun into one word. The fused form is often identical to a common verb with another meaning, so readers are misled until the sentence ends. Annotators found 222 suffixed verbs in 135K words of literature (17.76 per 10K) against 7 in 185K words of news and 2 in 43K words of another news source; 64 of the literary cases were ambiguous. The authors pretrain a BERT-base model from scratch with a 128K vocabulary in which each verb-plus-pronoun pair is one token. A form is flagged when at least N of the top K masked-language-model predictions are such tokens. Tested on 2,589 unsuffixed and 264 suffixed homographs, K = 1000 gives precision 100% at N = 25 (recall 19%), 84% at N = 10 (recall 52%) and 54% at N = 5 (recall 74%). Fine-tuned classifiers on mBERT, AlephBERT and DictaBERT reach F1 0.39–0.58, and the DictaBERT morphological tagger has recall of 24%. The model and dataset are public; the model is Apache-licensed as stated in the paper. ## Ideas - I1. Paired readings in the lexicon: for each ambiguous form, store both analyses (a bare verb, and a verb with a person-gender object clitic) with the clitic's features. The paper's examples ("they ordered" against "he ordered it") make good seed pairs. In UD this is a verb with a pronoun object merged in the surface form, so the segmenter has to split it. - I2. Confidence tiers with a stated precision: the paper's thresholds give three tiers (precision 100%, 84%, 54%), each with a fixed hedge in the gloss ("likely", "perhaps"). Mova can output the same three tiers with the rule that fired, so the gloss says why. - I3. A held-out test: the 264 suffixed and 2,589 unsuffixed homographs are a clean test for the Modern Hebrew parser, and the paper's own tagger result (recall 24%) is a baseline to beat. Check the dataset's licence before use, because the text does not state it. ## For Mova I1 goes into [languages/he/05b-verb-paradigms.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/05b-verb-paradigms/) (paired readings) and [languages/he/05-verbs.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/05-verbs/) (object clitics). I2 is an explanation rule in `prag`. I3 is a test for [languages/he/11-ud-analysis.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/11-ud-analysis/). ## Cite The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.18653/v1/2024.tsar-1.2](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.tsar-1.2) ```bibtex @inproceedings{shmidman2024otobert, title = {{OtoBERT: Identifying Suffixed Verbal Forms in Modern Hebrew Literature}}, author = {Shmidman, Avi and Shmidman, Shaltiel}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility and Readability (TSAR 2024)}, year = {2024}, doi = {10.18653/v1/2024.tsar-1.2}, url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.tsar-1.2} } ``` - [← previous OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/xie-2024-osworld-benchmarking-multimodal-agents-open/) - [next → Out-of-Domain Dependency Parsing for Dialects of Arabic: A Case Study](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aclbulk-2024-mokh-out-domain-dependency-parsing-dialects/) - [↑ back to papers of 2024](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2024/page/3/) ## References 10 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. S. Y. Agnon. 1953a. At the Handles of the Lock. Schocken Publishing House. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=S%2E+Y%2E+Agnon%2E+1953a%2E+At+the+Handles+of+the+Lock%2E+Schocken+Publishing+House%2E) 2. S. Y. Agnon. 1953b. Only Yesterday. Schocken Publishing House. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=S%2E+Y%2E+Agnon%2E+1953b%2E+Only+Yesterday%2E+Schocken+Publishing+House%2E) 3. Tuqa Bani Yaseen, Qusai Ismail, Sarah Al-Omari, Eslam Al-Sobh, and Malak Abdullah. 2021. JUST-BLUE at SemEval-2021 task 1: Predicting lexical complexity using BERT and RoBERTa pre-trained language models. In Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021), pages 661–666, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics. [↗](https://doi.org/10.60692/msawr-9j508) 4. Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova. 2019a. Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. Preprint, arXiv:1810.04805. [↗](https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805) 5. Shaltiel Shmidman, Avi Shmidman, Moshe Koppel, and Reut Tsarfaty. 2024. MRL parsing without tears: The case of Hebrew. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 4537–4550, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Shaltiel+Shmidman%2C+Avi+Shmidman%2C+Moshe+Koppel%2C+and+Reut+Tsarfaty%2E+2024%2E+MRL+parsing+without+tears%3A+The+case+of+Hebrew%2E+In+Findings+of+the+Association+for+Computational+Linguistics+ACL+2024%2C+pages+4537) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/findings-2024-shmidman-mrl-parsing-without-tears-case/) 6. Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova. 2019b. Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. Preprint, arXiv:1810.04805. [↗](https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805) 7. 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