The theoretical code-switching (CS) literature provides numerous pointwise investigations that aim to explain patterns in CS, i.e. why bilinguals switch language in certain positions in a sentence more often than in others. A resulting consensus is that CS can be explained by the syntax of the contributing languages. There is however no large-scale, multi-language, cross-phenomena experiment that tests this claim. When designing such an experiment, we need to make sure that the system that is predicting where bilinguals tend to switch has access only to syntactic information. We provide such an experiment here. Results show that syntax alone is sufficient for an automatic system to distinguish between sentences in minimal pairs of CS, to the same degree as bilingual humans. Furthermore, the learnt syntactic patterns generalise well to unseen language pairs.

The ability to acquire latent semantics is one of the key properties that determines the performance of language models. One convenient approach to invoke this ability is to prepend metadata (e.g. URLs, domains, and styles) at the beginning of texts in the pre-training data, making it easier for the model to access latent semantics before observing the entire text. Previous studies have reported that this technique actually improves the performance of trained models in downstream tasks; however, this improvement has been observed only in specific downstream tasks, without consistent enhancement in average next-token prediction loss. To understand this phenomenon, we closely investigate how prepending metadata during pre-training affects model performance by examining its behavior using artificial data. Interestingly, we found that this approach produces both positive and negative effects on the downstream tasks. We demonstrate that the effectiveness of the approach depends on whether latent semantics can be inferred from the downstream task's prompt. Specifically, through investigations using data generated by probabilistic context-free grammars, we show that training with metadata helps improve model's performance when the given context is long enough to infer the latent semantics. In contrast, the technique negatively impacts performance when the context lacks the necessary information to make an accurate posterior inference.

While there exist strong benchmark datasets for grammatical error correction (GEC), high-quality annotated spoken datasets for Spoken GEC (SGEC) are still under-resourced. In this paper, we propose a fully automated method to generate audio-text pairs with grammatical errors and disfluencies. Moreover, we propose a series of objective metrics that can be used to evaluate the generated data and choose the more suitable dataset for SGEC. The goal is to generate an augmented dataset that maintains the textual and acoustic characteristics of the original data while providing new types of errors. This augmented dataset should augment and enrich the original corpus without altering the language assessment scores of the second language (L2) learners. We evaluate the use of the augmented corpus both for written GEC (the text part) and for SGEC (the audio-text pairs). Our experiments are conducted on the S\&I Corpus, the first publicly available speech dataset with grammar error annotations.

In this paper, we study a functional programming approach to natural language semantics, allowing us to increase the expressiveness of a more traditional denotation style. We will formalize a category based type and effect system to represent the semantic difference between syntactically equivalent expressions. We then construct a diagrammatic calculus to model parsing and handling of effects, providing a method to efficiently compute the denotations for sentences.

Structured decoding enables large language models (LLMs) to generate outputs in formats required by downstream systems, such as HTML or JSON. However, existing methods suffer from efficiency bottlenecks due to grammar compilation, state tracking, and mask creation. We observe that many real-world tasks embed strong prior knowledge about output structure. Leveraging this, we propose a decomposition of constraints into static and dynamic components -- precompiling static structures offline and instantiating dynamic arguments at runtime using grammar snippets. Instead of relying on pushdown automata, we employ a compositional set of operators to model regular formats, achieving lower transition latency. We introduce wgrammar, a lightweight decoding engine that integrates domain-aware simplification, constraint decomposition, and mask caching, achieving up to 250x speedup over existing systems. wgrammar's source code is publicly available at https://github.com/wrran/wgrammar.

We provide a mathematical argument showing that, given a representation of lexical items as functions (wavelets, for instance) in some function space, it is possible to construct a faithful representation of arbitrary syntactic objects in the same function space. This space can be endowed with a commutative non-associative semiring structure built using the second Renyi entropy. The resulting representation of syntactic objects is compatible with the magma structure. The resulting set of functions is an algebra over an operad, where the operations in the operad model circuits that transform the input wave forms into a combined output that encodes the syntactic structure. The action of Merge on workspaces is faithfully implemented as action on these circuits, through a coproduct and a Hopf algebra Markov chain. The results obtained here provide a constructive argument showing the theoretical possibility of a neurocomputational realization of the core computational structure of syntax. We also present a particular case of this general construction where this type of realization of Merge is implemented as a cross frequency phase synchronization on sinusoidal waves. This also shows that Merge can be expressed in terms of the successor function of a semiring, thus clarifying the well known observation of its similarities with the successor function of arithmetic.

We make the case for language models over logical forms (LFLMs), arguing that such models are more data-efficient than their textual counterparts. To that end, we introduce the Graph-based Formal-Logical Distributional Semantics (GFoLDS) prototype, a pretrained LM over graph representations of logical forms, as a proof-of-concept of LFLMs. Using GFoLDS, we present strong experimental evidence that LFLMs can leverage the built-in, basic linguistic knowledge inherent in such models to immediately begin learning more complex patterns. On downstream tasks, we show that GFoLDS vastly outperforms textual, transformer LMs (BERT) pretrained on the same data, indicating that LFLMs can learn with substantially less data than models over plain text. Furthermore, we show that the performance of this model is likely to scale with additional parameters and pretraining data, suggesting the viability of LFLMs in real-world applications.

Despite tremendous progress in neuroscience, we do not have a compelling narrative for the precise way whereby the spiking of neurons in our brain results in high-level cognitive phenomena such as planning and language. We introduce a simple mathematical formulation of six basic and broadly accepted principles of neuroscience: excitatory neurons, brain areas, random synapses, Hebbian plasticity, local inhibition, and inter-area inhibition. We implement a simulated neuromorphic system based on this formalism, which is capable of basic language acquisition: Starting from a tabula rasa, the system learns, in any language, the semantics of words, their syntactic role (verb versus noun), and the word order of the language, including the ability to generate novel sentences, through the exposure to a modest number of grounded sentences in the same language. We discuss several possible extensions and implications of this result.

Quantitative facts are continually generated by companies and governments, supporting data-driven decision-making. While common facts are structured, many long-tail quantitative facts remain buried in unstructured documents, making them difficult to access. We propose the task of Quantity Retrieval: given a description of a quantitative fact, the system returns the relevant value and supporting evidence. Understanding quantity semantics in context is essential for this task. We introduce a framework based on description parsing that converts text into structured (description, quantity) pairs for effective retrieval. To improve learning, we construct a large paraphrase dataset using weak supervision based on quantity co-occurrence. We evaluate our approach on a large corpus of financial annual reports and a newly annotated quantity description dataset. Our method significantly improves top-1 retrieval accuracy from 30.98 percent to 64.66 percent.

The CoNLL-2013 shared task was devoted to grammatical error correction. In this paper, we give the task definition, present the data sets, and describe the evaluation metric and scorer used in the shared task. We also give an overview of the various approaches adopted by the participating teams, and present the evaluation results.