Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Grammars & Parsing


Graph Laplacian Wavelet Transformer via Learnable Spectral Decomposition

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce the Graph W avelet Transformer (GWT), a novel architecture that replaces this bottleneck with a learnable, multi-scale wavelet transform defined over an explicit graph Laplacian derived from syntactic or semantic parses. By parameterizing K N bandpass filters in the graph Fourier domain, GWT achieves a linear-time mixing operator that simultaneously captures local syntactic dependencies and global semantic context. We provide a rigorous mathematical formulation of the spectral filtering and mixing process, integrate GWT modules into a standard Graph Transformer backbone, and evaluate on the WMT14 English-German translation benchmark. Empirical results demonstrate that GWT outperforms the baseline Graph Transformer by 0.8 BLEU, reduces parameter count by 7 %, and speeds up inference by 15 %. Our analysis shows that multi-scale spectral decomposition offers an interpretable, efficient, and expressive alternative to quadratic self-attention for graph-structured sequence modeling.


Learning curves theory for hierarchically compositional data with power-law distributed features

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Recent theories suggest that Neural Scaling Laws arise whenever the task is linearly decomposed into power-law distributed units. Alternatively, scaling laws also emerge when data exhibit a hierarchically compositional structure, as is thought to occur in language and images. To unify these views, we consider classification and next-token prediction tasks based on probabilistic context-free grammars -- probabilistic models that generate data via a hierarchy of production rules. For classification, we show that having power-law distributed production rules results in a power-law learning curve with an exponent depending on the rules' distribution and a large multiplicative constant that depends on the hierarchical structure. By contrast, for next-token prediction, the distribution of production rules controls the local details of the learning curve, but not the exponent describing the large-scale behaviour.


Scaling Laws and Representation Learning in Simple Hierarchical Languages: Transformers vs. Convolutional Architectures

arXiv.org Machine Learning

How do neural language models acquire a language's structure when trained for next-token prediction? We address this question by deriving theoretical scaling laws for neural network performance on synthetic datasets generated by the Random Hierarchy Model (RHM) -- an ensemble of probabilistic context-free grammars designed to capture the hierarchical structure of natural language while remaining analytically tractable. Previously, we developed a theory of representation learning based on data correlations that explains how deep learning models capture the hierarchical structure of the data sequentially, one layer at a time. Here, we extend our theoretical framework to account for architectural differences. In particular, we predict and empirically validate that convolutional networks, whose structure aligns with that of the generative process through locality and weight sharing, enjoy a faster scaling of performance compared to transformer models, which rely on global self-attention mechanisms. This finding clarifies the architectural biases underlying neural scaling laws and highlights how representation learning is shaped by the interaction between model architecture and the statistical properties of data.


Attention on Multiword Expressions: A Multilingual Study of BERT-based Models with Regard to Idiomaticity and Microsyntax

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study analyzes the attention patterns of fine-tuned encoder-only models based on the BERT architecture (BERT-based models) towards two distinct types of Multiword Expressions (MWEs): idioms and microsyntactic units (MSUs). Idioms present challenges in semantic non-compositionality, whereas MSUs demonstrate unconventional syntactic behavior that does not conform to standard grammatical categorizations. We aim to understand whether fine-tuning BERT-based models on specific tasks influences their attention to MWEs, and how this attention differs between semantic and syntactic tasks. We examine attention scores to MWEs in both pre-trained and fine-tuned BERT-based models. We utilize monolingual models and datasets in six Indo-European languages - English, German, Dutch, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Our results show that fine-tuning significantly influences how models allocate attention to MWEs. Specifically, models fine-tuned on semantic tasks tend to distribute attention to idiomatic expressions more evenly across layers. Models fine-tuned on syntactic tasks show an increase in attention to MSUs in the lower layers, corresponding with syntactic processing requirements.


Survey of Abstract Meaning Representation: Then, Now, Future

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents a survey of Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), a semantic representation framework that captures the meaning of sentences through a graph-based structure. AMR represents sentences as rooted, directed acyclic graphs, where nodes correspond to concepts and edges denote relationships, effectively encoding the meaning of complex sentences. This survey investigates AMR and its extensions, focusing on AMR capabilities. It then explores the parsing (text-to-AMR) and generation (AMR-to-text) tasks by showing traditional, current, and possible futures approaches. It also reviews various applications of AMR including text generation, text classification, and information extraction and information seeking. By analyzing recent developments and challenges in the field, this survey provides insights into future directions for research and the potential impact of AMR on enhancing machine understanding of human language.


AdaParse: An Adaptive Parallel PDF Parsing and Resource Scaling Engine

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Language models for scientific tasks are trained on text from scientific publications, most distributed as PDFs that require parsing. PDF parsing approaches range from inexpensive heuristics (for simple documents) to computationally intensive ML-driven systems (for complex or degraded ones). The choice of the "best" parser for a particular document depends on its computational cost and the accuracy of its output. To address these issues, we introduce an Adaptive Parallel PDF Parsing and Resource Scaling Engine (AdaParse), a data-driven strategy for assigning an appropriate parser to each document. We enlist scientists to select preferred parser outputs and incorporate this information through direct preference optimization (DPO) into AdaParse, thereby aligning its selection process with human judgment. AdaParse then incorporates hardware requirements and predicted accuracy of each parser to orchestrate computational resources efficiently for large-scale parsing campaigns. We demonstrate that AdaParse, when compared to state-of-the-art parsers, improves throughput by $17\times$ while still achieving comparable accuracy (0.2 percent better) on a benchmark set of 1000 scientific documents. AdaParse's combination of high accuracy and parallel scalability makes it feasible to parse large-scale scientific document corpora to support the development of high-quality, trillion-token-scale text datasets. The implementation is available at https://github.com/7shoe/AdaParse/


Computational Identification of Regulatory Statements in EU Legislation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Identifying regulatory statements in legislation is useful for developing metrics to measure the regulatory density and strictness of legislation. A computational method is valuable for scaling the identification of such statements from a growing body of EU legislation, constituting approximately 180,000 published legal acts between 1952 and 2023. Past work on extraction of these statements varies in the permissiveness of their definitions for what constitutes a regulatory statement. In this work, we provide a specific definition for our purposes based on the institutional grammar tool. We develop and compare two contrasting approaches for automatically identifying such statements in EU legislation, one based on dependency parsing, and the other on a transformer-based machine learning model. We found both approaches performed similarly well with accuracies of 80% and 84% respectively and a K alpha of 0.58. The high accuracies and not exceedingly high agreement suggests potential for combining strengths of both approaches.


Enhancing Health Mention Classification Performance: A Study on Advancements in Parameter Efficient Tuning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Health Mention Classification (HMC) plays a critical role in leveraging social media posts for real-time tracking and public health monitoring. Nevertheless, the process of HMC presents significant challenges due to its intricate nature, primarily stemming from the contextual aspects of health mentions, such as figurative language and descriptive terminology, rather than explicitly reflecting a personal ailment. To address this problem, we argue that clearer mentions can be achieved through conventional fine-tuning with enhanced parameters of biomedical natural language methods (NLP). In this study, we explore different techniques such as the utilisation of part-of-speech (POS) tagger information, improving on PEFT techniques, and different combinations thereof. Extensive experiments are conducted on three widely used datasets: RHDM, PHM, and Illness. The results incorporated POS tagger information, and leveraging PEFT techniques significantly improves performance in terms of F1-score compared to state-of-the-art methods across all three datasets by utilising smaller models and efficient training. Furthermore, the findings highlight the effectiveness of incorporating POS tagger information and leveraging PEFT techniques for HMC. In conclusion, the proposed methodology presents a potentially effective approach to accurately classifying health mentions in social media posts while optimising the model size and training efficiency.


A Comprehensive Part-of-Speech Tagging to Standardize Central-Kurdish Language: A Research Guide for Kurdish Natural Language Processing Tasks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

- The field of natural language processing (NLP) has dramatically expanded within the last decade. Many human-being applications are conducted daily via NLP tasks, starting from machine translation, speech recognition, text generation and recommendations, Part-of-Speech tagging (POS), and Named-Entity Recognition (NER). However, low-resourced languages, such as the Central-Kurdish language (CKL), mainly remain unexamined due to shortage of necessary resources to support their development. The POS tagging task is the base of other NLP tasks; for example, the POS tag set has been used to standardized languages to provide the relationship between words among the sentences, followed by machine translation and text recommendation. Specifically, for the CKL, most of the utilized or provided POS tagsets are neither standardized nor comprehensive. To this end, this study presented an accurate and comprehensive POS tagset for the CKL to provide better performance of the Kurdish NLP tasks. The article also collected most of the POS tags from different studies as well as from Kurdish linguistic experts to standardized part-of-speech tags. The proposed POS tagset is designed to annotate a large CKL corpus and support Kurdish NLP tasks. The initial investigations of this study via comparison with the Universal Dependencies framework for standard languages, show that the proposed POS tagset can streamline or correct sentences more accurately for Kurdish NLP tasks.


SCALAR: A Part-of-speech Tagger for Identifiers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--The paper presents the Source Code Analysis and Lexical Annotation Runtime (SCALAR), a tool specialized for mapping (annotating) source code identifier names to their corresponding part-of-speech tag sequence (grammar pattern). SCALAR's internal model is trained using scikit-learn's GradientBoostingClassifier in conjunction with a manually-curated oracle of identifier names and their grammar patterns. This specializes the tagger to recognize the unique structure of the natural language used by developers to create all types of identifiers (e.g., function names, variable names etc.). SCALAR's output is compared with a previous version of the tagger, as well as a modern off-the-shelf part-of-speech tagger to show how it improves upon other taggers' output for annotating identifiers. The code is available on Github 1 Index T erms --Program comprehension, identifier naming, part-of-speech tagging, natural language processing, software maintenance, software evolution I. I NTRODUCTION The identifiers developers create represent a significant amount of the information other developers must use to understand related code. Given that identifiers represent, on average, 70% of the characters in a code base [1], and developers spend more time reading code than writing [2], [3], it is important for researchers to better understand of how identifiers convey information, and how they can be improved to increase developer reading efficiency.