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 Grammars & Parsing


The QCET Taxonomy of Standard Quality Criterion Names and Definitions for the Evaluation of NLP Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Prior work has shown that two NLP evaluation experiments that report results for the same quality criterion name (e.g. Fluency) do not necessarily evaluate the same aspect of quality, and the comparability implied by the name can be misleading. Not knowing when two evaluations are comparable in this sense means we currently lack the ability to draw reliable conclusions about system quality on the basis of multiple, independently conducted evaluations. This in turn hampers the ability of the field to progress scientifically as a whole, a pervasive issue in NLP since its beginning (Sparck Jones, 1981). It is hard to see how the issue of unclear comparability can be fully addressed other than by the creation of a standard set of quality criterion names and definitions that the several hundred quality criterion names actually in use in the field can be mapped to, and grounded in. Taking a strictly descriptive approach, the QCET Quality Criteria for Evaluation Taxonomy derives a standard set of quality criterion names and definitions from three surveys of evaluations reported in NLP, and structures them into a hierarchy where each parent node captures common aspects of its child nodes. We present QCET and the resources it consists of, and discuss its three main uses in (i) establishing comparability of existing evaluations, (ii) guiding the design of new evaluations, and (iii) assessing regulatory compliance.


Probability Distribution Collapse: A Critical Bottleneck to Compact Unsupervised Neural Grammar Induction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Unsupervised neural grammar induction aims to learn interpretable hierarchical structures from language data. However, existing models face an expressiveness bottleneck, often resulting in unnecessarily large yet underperforming grammars. We identify a core issue, $\textit{probability distribution collapse}$, as the underlying cause of this limitation. We analyze when and how the collapse emerges across key components of neural parameterization and introduce a targeted solution, $\textit{collapse-relaxing neural parameterization}$, to mitigate it. Our approach substantially improves parsing performance while enabling the use of significantly more compact grammars across a wide range of languages, as demonstrated through extensive empirical analysis.


DisCoCLIP: A Distributional Compositional Tensor Network Encoder for Vision-Language Understanding

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent vision-language models excel at large-scale image-text alignment but often neglect the compositional structure of language, leading to failures on tasks that hinge on word order and predicate-argument structure. We introduce DisCoCLIP, a multimodal encoder that combines a frozen CLIP vision transformer with a novel tensor network text encoder that explicitly encodes syntactic structure. Sentences are parsed with a Combinatory Categorial Grammar parser to yield distributional word tensors whose contractions mirror the sentence's grammatical derivation. To keep the model efficient, high-order tensors are factorized with tensor decompositions, reducing parameter count from tens of millions to under one million. Trained end-to-end with a self-supervised contrastive loss, DisCoCLIP markedly improves sensitivity to verb semantics and word order: it raises CLIP's SVO-Probes verb accuracy from 77.6% to 82.4%, boosts ARO attribution and relation scores by over 9% and 4%, and achieves 93.7% on a newly introduced SVO-Swap benchmark. These results demonstrate that embedding explicit linguistic structure via tensor networks yields interpretable, parameter-efficient representations that substantially improve compositional reasoning in vision-language tasks.


SCORE: A Semantic Evaluation Framework for Generative Document Parsing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Traditional document parsing architectures employ deterministic pipelines that sequentially combine optical character recognition (OCR), layout analysis, and rule-based table extraction to produce structured outputs. The evaluation of these systems has relied on well-established task-specific metrics including Character Error Rate (CER) and Word Error Rate (WER) [14, 20], Intersection-over-Union (IoU) [4, 16], and Tree Edit Distance-based Similarity (TEDS) [31]. These metrics operate under the assumption of unique ground truth representations, rewarding exact matches while systematically penalizing any structural deviations. The emergence of multi-modal generative document parsing systems has fundamentally transformed this landscape. Vision Language Models (VLMs) such as GPT-5 Mini, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Claude Sonnet 3.7/4 [22, 6, 1, 2], generate holistic document interpretations that integrate visual, textual, and structural signals in an end-to-end manner. Unlike their deterministic predecessors, these systems frequently produce outputs that are semantically correct yet structurally divergent. Consider a table containing merged cells: one system may represent it as a flattened token sequence preserving reading order, while another generates hierarchical HTML markup with explicit structural relationships. Both interpretations faithfully capture the semantic content, yet traditional evaluation frameworks treat them as fundamentally incompatible, systematically misclassifying valid alternative interpretations as parsing errors. This mismatch of the evaluation paradigm has significant practical implications.


HSGM: Hierarchical Segment-Graph Memory for Scalable Long-Text Semantics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Semantic parsing of long documents remains challenging due to quadratic growth in pairwise composition and memory requirements. We introduce \textbf{Hierarchical Segment-Graph Memory (HSGM)}, a novel framework that decomposes an input of length $N$ into $M$ meaningful segments, constructs \emph{Local Semantic Graphs} on each segment, and extracts compact \emph{summary nodes} to form a \emph{Global Graph Memory}. HSGM supports \emph{incremental updates} -- only newly arrived segments incur local graph construction and summary-node integration -- while \emph{Hierarchical Query Processing} locates relevant segments via top-$K$ retrieval over summary nodes and then performs fine-grained reasoning within their local graphs. Theoretically, HSGM reduces worst-case complexity from $O(N^2)$ to $O\!\left(N\,k + (N/k)^2\right)$, with segment size $k \ll N$, and we derive Frobenius-norm bounds on the approximation error introduced by node summarization and sparsification thresholds. Empirically, on three benchmarks -- long-document AMR parsing, segment-level semantic role labeling (OntoNotes), and legal event extraction -- HSGM achieves \emph{2--4$\times$ inference speedup}, \emph{$>60\%$ reduction} in peak memory, and \emph{$\ge 95\%$} of baseline accuracy. Our approach unlocks scalable, accurate semantic modeling for ultra-long texts, enabling real-time and resource-constrained NLP applications.


SongPrep: A Preprocessing Framework and End-to-end Model for Full-song Structure Parsing and Lyrics Transcription

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) is currently a popular research area. Among its various branches, song generation has attracted growing interest. Despite the abundance of available songs, effective data preparation remains a significant challenge. Converting these songs into training-ready datasets typically requires extensive manual labeling, which is both time consuming and costly. To address this issue, we propose SongPrep, an automated preprocessing pipeline designed specifically for song data. This framework streamlines key processes such as source separation, structure analysis, and lyric recognition, producing structured data that can be directly used to train song generation models. Furthermore, we introduce SongPrepE2E, an end-to-end structured lyrics recognition model based on pretrained language models. Without the need for additional source separation, SongPrepE2E is able to analyze the structure and lyrics of entire songs and provide precise timestamps. By leveraging context from the whole song alongside pretrained semantic knowledge, SongPrepE2E achieves low Diarization Error Rate (DER) and Word Error Rate (WER) on the proposed SSLD-200 dataset. Downstream tasks demonstrate that training song generation models with the data output by SongPrepE2E enables the generated songs to closely resemble those produced by humans.


Reasoning Core: A Scalable RL Environment for LLM Symbolic Reasoning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce Reasoning Core, a new scalable environment for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), designed to advance foundational symbolic reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on games or isolated puzzles, Reasoning Core procedurally generates problems across core formal domains, including PDDL planning, first-order logic, context-free grammar parsing, causal reasoning, and system equation solving. The environment is built on key design principles of high-generality problem distributions, verification via external tools, and continuous difficulty control, which together provide a virtually infinite supply of novel training instances. Initial zero-shot evaluations with frontier LLMs confirm the difficulty of Reasoning Core's tasks, positioning it as a promising resource to improve the reasoning capabilities of future models.


Text-Scene: A Scene-to-Language Parsing Framework for 3D Scene Understanding

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Enabling agents to understand and interact with complex 3D scenes is a fundamental challenge for embodied artificial intelligence systems. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved significant progress in 2D image understanding, extending such capabilities to 3D scenes remains difficult: 1) 3D environment involves richer concepts such as spatial relationships, affordances, physics, layout, and so on, 2) the absence of large-scale 3D vision-language datasets has posed a significant obstacle. In this paper, we introduce Text-Scene, a framework that automatically parses 3D scenes into textual descriptions for scene understanding. Given a 3D scene, our model identifies object attributes and spatial relationships, and then generates a coherent summary of the whole scene, bridging the gap between 3D observation and language without requiring human-in-the-loop intervention. By leveraging both geometric analysis and MLLMs, Text-Scene produces descriptions that are accurate, detailed, and human-interpretable, capturing object-level details and global-level context. Experimental results on benchmarks demonstrate that our textual parses can faithfully represent 3D scenes and benefit downstream tasks. To evaluate the reasoning capability of MLLMs, we present InPlan3D, a comprehensive benchmark for 3D task planning, consisting of 3174 long-term planning tasks across 636 indoor scenes. We emphasize clarity and accessibility in our approach, aiming to make 3D scene content understandable through language. Code and datasets will be released.


Refining Syntactic Distinctions Using Decision Trees: A Paper on Postnominal 'That' in Complement vs. Relative Clauses

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this study, we first tested the performance of the TreeTagger English model developed by Helmut Schmid with test files at our disposal, using this model to analyze relative clauses and noun complement clauses in English. We distinguished between the two uses of "that," both as a relative pronoun and as a complementizer. To achieve this, we employed an algorithm to reannotate a corpus that had originally been parsed using the Universal Dependency framework with the EWT Treebank. In the next phase, we proposed an improved model by retraining TreeTagger and compared the newly trained model with Schmid's baseline model. This process allowed us to fine-tune the model's performance to more accurately capture the subtle distinctions in the use of "that" as a complementizer and as a nominal. We also examined the impact of varying the training dataset size on TreeTagger's accuracy and assessed the representativeness of the EWT Treebank files for the structures under investigation. Additionally, we analyzed some of the linguistic and structural factors influencing the ability to effectively learn this distinction.


CL$^2$GEC: A Multi-Discipline Benchmark for Continual Learning in Chinese Literature Grammatical Error Correction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The growing demand for automated writing assistance in diverse academic domains highlights the need for robust Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) systems that can adapt across disciplines. However, existing CGEC research largely lacks dedicated benchmarks for multi-disciplinary academic writing, overlooking continual learning (CL) as a promising solution to handle domain-specific linguistic variation and prevent catastrophic forgetting. To fill this crucial gap, we introduce CL$^2$GEC, the first Continual Learning benchmark for Chinese Literature Grammatical Error Correction, designed to evaluate adaptive CGEC across multiple academic fields. Our benchmark includes 10,000 human-annotated sentences spanning 10 disciplines, each exhibiting distinct linguistic styles and error patterns. CL$^2$GEC focuses on evaluating grammatical error correction in a continual learning setting, simulating sequential exposure to diverse academic disciplines to reflect real-world editorial dynamics. We evaluate large language models under sequential tuning, parameter-efficient adaptation, and four representative CL algorithms, using both standard GEC metrics and continual learning metrics adapted to task-level variation. Experimental results reveal that regularization-based methods mitigate forgetting more effectively than replay-based or naive sequential approaches. Our benchmark provides a rigorous foundation for future research in adaptive grammatical error correction across diverse academic domains.