We introduce the syntactic formalism of the \textit{Cambridge Grammar of the English Language} (CGEL) to the world of treebanking through the CGELBank project. We discuss some issues in linguistic analysis that arose in adapting the formalism to corpus annotation, followed by quantitative and qualitative comparisons with parallel UD and PTB treebanks. We argue that CGEL provides a good tradeoff between comprehensiveness of analysis and usability for annotation, which motivates expanding the treebank with automatic conversion in the future.

We consider languages generated by weighted context-free grammars. It is shown that the behavior of large texts is controlled by saddle-point equations for an appropriate generating function. We then consider ensembles of grammars, in particular the Random Language Model of [1]. This model is solved in the replicasymmetric ansatz, which is valid in the high-temperature, disordered phase. It is shown that in the phase in which languages carry information, the replica symmetry must be broken. Keywords: context-free grammar, language, replicas Note: The body is this work is as published in J. Phys.

Humans can reason compositionally when presented with new tasks. Previous research shows that appropriate prompting techniques enable large language models (LLMs) to solve artificial compositional generalization tasks such as SCAN. In this work, we identify additional challenges in more realistic semantic parsing tasks with larger vocabulary and refine these prompting techniques to address them. Our best method is based on least-to-most prompting: it decomposes the problem using prompting-based syntactic parsing, then uses this decomposition to select appropriate exemplars and to sequentially generate the semantic parse. This method allows us to set a new state of the art for CFQ while requiring only 1% of the training data used by traditional approaches. Due to the general nature of our approach, we expect similar efforts will lead to new results in other tasks and domains, especially for knowledge-intensive applications.

A common recent approach to semantic parsing augments sequence-to-sequence models by retrieving and appending a set of training samples, called exemplars. The effectiveness of this recipe is limited by the ability to retrieve informative exemplars that help produce the correct parse, which is especially challenging in low-resource settings. Existing retrieval is commonly based on similarity of query and exemplar inputs. We propose GandR, a retrieval procedure that retrieves exemplars for which outputs are also similar. GandRfirst generates a preliminary prediction with input-based retrieval. Then, it retrieves exemplars with outputs similar to the preliminary prediction which are used to generate a final prediction. GandR sets the state of the art on multiple low-resource semantic parsing tasks.

In this paper, we provide a detailed description of our system at CAMRP-2022 evaluation. We firstly propose a two-stage method to conduct Chinese AMR Parsing with alignment generation, which includes Concept-Prediction and Relation-Prediction stages. Our model achieves 0.7756 and 0.7074 Align-Smatch F1 scores on the CAMR 2.0 test set and the blind-test set of CAMRP-2022 individually. We also analyze the result and the limitation such as the error propagation and class imbalance problem we conclude in the current method.

Most recent research on Text-to-SQL semantic parsing relies on either parser itself or simple heuristic based approach to understand natural language query (NLQ). When synthesizing a SQL query, there is no explicit semantic information of NLQ available to the parser which leads to undesirable generalization performance. In addition, without lexical-level fine-grained query understanding, linking between query and database can only rely on fuzzy string match which leads to suboptimal performance in real applications. In view of this, in this paper we present a general-purpose, modular neural semantic parsing framework that is based on token-level fine-grained query understanding. Our framework consists of three modules: named entity recognizer (NER), neural entity linker (NEL) and neural semantic parser (NSP). By jointly modeling query and database, NER model analyzes user intents and identifies entities in the query. NEL model links typed entities to schema and cell values in database. Parser model leverages available semantic information and linking results and synthesizes tree-structured SQL queries based on dynamically generated grammar. Experiments on SQUALL, a newly released semantic parsing dataset, show that we can achieve 56.8% execution accuracy on WikiTableQuestions (WTQ) test set, which outperforms the state-of-the-art model by 2.7%.

In natural language processing for machine learning models, semantic role labeling is associated with the predicate, where the action of the sentence is depicted. SRL or semantic role labeling does the crucial task of determining how different instances are related to the primary predicate. Semantic Role Labelling is also referred to as thematic role labeling and goes systematically for interpreting the syntactic expression of a sentence, ideally, with the parsing tree method. Semantic role labeling is appropriate for NLP tasks that involve the extraction of multiple meanings mentioned in a language and depends largely on the structure or scheme of the parsing trees applied. The semantic role labeling method is also used in image captioning for deep learning and Computer Vision tasks; herein, SRL is utilized for extracting the relation between the image and the background.

We present a syntactic dependency treebank for naturalistic child and child-directed speech in English (MacWhinney, 2000). Our annotations largely followed the guidelines of the Universal Dependencies project (UD (Zeman et al., 2022)), with detailed extensions to lexical/syntactic structures unique to conversational speech (in opposition to written texts). Compared to existing UD-style spoken treebanks as well as other dependency corpora of child-parent interactions specifically, our dataset is of (much) larger size (N of utterances = 44,744; N of words = 233, 907) and contains speech from a total of 10 children covering a wide age range (18-66 months). With this dataset, we ask: (1) How well would state-of-the-art dependency parsers, tailored for the written domain, perform for speech of different interlocutors in spontaneous conversations? (2) What is the relationship between parser performance and the developmental stage of the child? To address these questions, in ongoing work, we are conducting thorough dependency parser evaluations using both graph-based and transition-based parsers with different hyperparameterization, trained from three different types of out-of-domain written texts: news, tweets, and learner data.

Localizing a semantic parser to support new languages requires effective cross-lingual generalization. Recent work has found success with machine-translation or zero-shot methods although these approaches can struggle to model how native speakers ask questions. We consider how to effectively leverage minimal annotated examples in new languages for few-shot cross-lingual semantic parsing. We introduce a first-order meta-learning algorithm to train a semantic parser with maximal sample efficiency during cross-lingual transfer. Our algorithm uses high-resource languages to train the parser and simultaneously optimizes for cross-lingual generalization for lower-resource languages. Results across six languages on ATIS demonstrate that our combination of generalization steps yields accurate semantic parsers sampling $\le$10% of source training data in each new language. Our approach also trains a competitive model on Spider using English with generalization to Chinese similarly sampling $\le$10% of training data.

In hope of expanding training data, researchers often want to merge two or more datasets that are created using different labeling schemes. This paper considers two datasets that label part-of-speech (POS) tags under different tagging schemes and leverage the supervised labels of one dataset to help generate labels for the other dataset. This paper further discusses the theoretical difficulties of this approach and proposes a novel supervised architecture employing Transformers to tackle the problem of consolidating two completely disjoint datasets. The results diverge from initial expectations and discourage exploration into the use of disjoint labels to consolidate datasets with different labels.