The volume and diversity of digital information have led to a growing reliance on Machine Learning techniques, such as Natural Language Processing, for interpreting and accessing appropriate data. While vector and graph embeddings represent data for similarity tasks, current state-of-the-art pipelines lack guaranteed explainability, failing to determine similarity for given full texts accurately. These considerations can also be applied to classifiers exploiting generative language models with logical prompts, which fail to correctly distinguish between logical implication, indifference, and inconsistency, despite being explicitly trained to recognise the first two classes. We present a novel pipeline designed for hybrid explainability to address this. Our methodology combines graphs and logic to produce First-Order Logic representations, creating machine- and human-readable representations through Montague Grammar. Preliminary results indicate the effectiveness of this approach in accurately capturing full text similarity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to differentiate between implication, inconsistency, and indifference for text classification tasks. To address the limitations of existing approaches, we use three self-contained datasets annotated for the former classification task to determine the suitability of these approaches in capturing sentence structure equivalence, logical connectives, and spatiotemporal reasoning. We also use these data to compare the proposed method with language models pre-trained for detecting sentence entailment. The results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models, indicating that natural language understanding cannot be easily generalised by training over extensive document corpora. This work offers a step toward more transparent and reliable Information Retrieval from extensive textual data.

Despite recent advances in automated driving technology, impaired driving continues to incur a high cost to society. In this paper, we present a driving dataset designed to support the study of two common forms of driver impairment: alcohol intoxication and cognitive distraction. Our dataset spans 23.7 hours of simulated urban driving, with 52 human subjects under normal and impaired conditions, and includes both vehicle data (ground truth perception, vehicle pose, controls) and driver-facing data (gaze, audio, surveys). It supports analysis of changes in driver behavior due to alcohol intoxication (0.10\% blood alcohol content), two forms of cognitive distraction (audio n-back and sentence parsing tasks), and combinations thereof, as well as responses to a set of eight controlled road hazards, such as vehicle cut-ins. The dataset will be made available at https://toyotaresearchinstitute.github.io/IDD/.

Standard Verification Rule Format (SVRF) is essential for semiconductor applications like Design Rule Check (DRC), Layout Versus Schematic (LVS), and Optical Proximity Correction (OPC) and it faces challenges as advancing nodes create complex design rules that renders traditional SVRF development ineffective and highlight an expertise gap. This paper introduces a novel methodology integrating Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) embedding and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for enhanced SVRF code synthesis, ensuring semantic accuracy and error minimization through structural validation with domain-specific insights for precise code generation. We evaluate different T5-based models and propose an innovative SVRF-specific scoring framework that complements standard metrics like BLEU and ROUGE-L. In our approach, AST provides rigorous structural validation, while RAG infuses relevant domain knowledge, effectively enhancing the code generation workflow. Testing on a comprehensive benchmark of 740 DRC rule implementations, our methodology demonstrates up to a 40\% improvement in code generation accuracy compared to basic text-based fine-tuning process. This fusion of industry expertise with advanced coding strategies not only optimizes SVRF development under limited dataset constraints but also creates a more intuitive and efficient coding environment. Consequently, users can rapidly iterate through design cycles, reduce manual error correction, and significantly improve overall productivity.

Syntactic language models (SLMs) enhance Transformers by incorporating syntactic biases through the modeling of linearized syntactic parse trees alongside surface sentences. This paper focuses on compositional SLMs that are based on constituency parse trees and contain explicit bottom-up composition of constituent representations. We identify key aspects of design choices in existing compositional SLMs and propose a unified framework encompassing both existing models and novel variants. We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of all the variants in our framework across language modeling, syntactic generalization, summarization, dialogue, and inference efficiency. Based on the experimental results, we make multiple recommendations on the design of compositional SLMs. Our code is released at https://github.com/zhaoyd1/compositional_SLMs.

Scientific information expresses human understanding of nature. This knowledge is largely disseminated in different forms of text, including scientific papers, news articles, and discourse among people on social media. While important for accelerating our pursuit of knowledge, not all scientific text is faithful to the underlying science. As the volume of this text has burgeoned online in recent years, it has become a problem of societal importance to be able to identify the faithfulness of a given piece of scientific text automatically. This thesis is concerned with the cultivation of datasets, methods, and tools for machine understanding of scientific language, in order to analyze and understand science communication at scale. To arrive at this, I present several contributions in three areas of natural language processing and machine learning: automatic fact checking, learning with limited data, and scientific text processing. These contributions include new methods and resources for identifying check-worthy claims, adversarial claim generation, multi-source domain adaptation, learning from crowd-sourced labels, cite-worthiness detection, zero-shot scientific fact checking, detecting exaggerated scientific claims, and modeling degrees of information change in science communication. Critically, I demonstrate how the research outputs of this thesis are useful for effectively learning from limited amounts of scientific text in order to identify misinformative scientific statements and generate new insights into the science communication process

We propose STRuCT-LLM, a unified framework for training large language models (LLMs) to perform structured reasoning over both relational and graph-structured data. Our approach jointly optimizes Text-to-SQL and Text-to-Cypher tasks using reinforcement learning (RL) combined with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) supervision. To support fine-grained optimization in graph-based parsing, we introduce a topology-aware reward function based on graph edit distance. Unlike prior work that treats relational and graph formalisms in isolation, STRuCT-LLM leverages shared abstractions between SQL and Cypher to induce cross-formalism transfer, enabling SQL training to improve Cypher performance and vice versa--even without shared schemas. Our largest model (QwQ-32B) achieves substantial relative improvements across tasks: on semantic parsing, Spider improves by 13.5% and Text2Cypher by 73.1%. The model also demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization, improving performance on downstream tabular QA (TableBench: 8.5%) and knowledge graph QA (CR-LT-KGQA: 1.7%) without any QA-specific supervision. These results demonstrate both the effectiveness of executable queries as scaffolds for structured reasoning and the synergistic benefits of jointly training on SQL and Cypher (code available at https://github.com/bouv/ Listing order is random. 1 1 Introduction Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive fluency in open-domain generation but often falter on structured reasoning tasks involving tables and graphs [12, 6]. Structured reasoning requires models to ground entities, compose symbolic constraints, and follow logical paths--skills crucial for interacting with real-world data systems such as relational databases and knowledge graphs (KGs) [16, 24]. We view executable semantic parsing--specifically, Text-to-SQL and Text-to-Cypher--as a gateway to this broader capability [32, 23]. While Text-to-SQL is well-studied, Text-to-Cypher remains underexplored, offering a valuable testbed for graph reasoning.

If humans understood language by randomly selecting parsing actions, it might have been necessary to construct a robust symbolic system capable of being interpreted under any hierarchical structure. However, human parsing strategies do not seem to follow such a random pattern. Why is that the case? In fact, a previous study on emergent communication using models with hierarchical biases have reported that agents adopting random parsing strategies$\unicode{x2013}$ones that deviate significantly from human language comprehension$\unicode{x2013}$can achieve high communication accuracy. In this study, we investigate this issue by making two simple and natural modifications to the experimental setup: (I) we use more complex inputs that have hierarchical structures, such that random parsing makes semantic interpretation more difficult, and (II) we incorporate a surprisal-related term, which is known to influence the order of words and characters in natural language, into the objective function. With these changes, we evaluate whether agents employing random parsing strategies still maintain high communication accuracy.

Recent work has demonstrated that neural language models encode syntactic structures in their internal representations, yet the derivations by which these structures are constructed across layers remain poorly understood. In this paper, we propose Derivational Probing to investigate how micro-syntactic structures (e.g., subject noun phrases) and macro-syntactic structures (e.g., the relationship between the root verbs and their direct dependents) are constructed as word embeddings propagate upward across layers. Our experiments on BERT reveal a clear bottom-up derivation: micro-syntactic structures emerge in lower layers and are gradually integrated into a coherent macro-syntactic structure in higher layers. Furthermore, a targeted evaluation on subject-verb number agreement shows that the timing of constructing macro-syntactic structures is critical for downstream performance, suggesting an optimal timing for integrating global syntactic information.

Understanding and predicting video content is essential for planning and reasoning in dynamic environments. Despite advancements, unsupervised learning of object representations and dynamics remains challenging. We present VideoPCDNet, an unsupervised framework for object-centric video decomposition and prediction. Our model uses frequency-domain phase correlation techniques to recursively parse videos into object components, which are represented as transformed versions of learned object prototypes, enabling accurate and interpretable tracking. By explicitly modeling object motion through a combination of frequency domain operations and lightweight learned modules, VideoPCDNet enables accurate unsupervised object tracking and prediction of future video frames. In our experiments, we demonstrate that VideoPCDNet outperforms multiple object-centric baseline models for unsupervised tracking and prediction on several synthetic datasets, while learning interpretable object and motion representations.

Log files provide valuable information for detecting and diagnosing problems in enterprise software applications and data centers. Several log analytics tools and platforms were developed to help filter and extract information from logs, typically using regular expressions (RegExes). Recent commercial log analytics platforms provide domain-specific languages specifically designed for log parsing, such as Grok or the Dynatrace Pattern Language (DPL). However, users who want to migrate to these platforms must manually convert their RegExes into the new pattern language, which is costly and error-prone. In this work, we present Reptile, which combines a rule-based approach for converting RegExes into DPL patterns with a best-effort approach for cases where a full conversion is impossible. Furthermore, it integrates GPT-4 to optimize the obtained DPL patterns. The evaluation with 946 RegExes collected from a large company shows that Reptile safely converted 73.7% of them. The evaluation of Reptile's pattern optimization with 23 real-world RegExes showed an F1-score and MCC above 0.91. These results are promising and have ample practical implications for companies that migrate to a modern log analytics platform, such as Dynatrace.