Grammars & Parsing
Enhancing Large Language Model Efficiencyvia Symbolic Compression: A Formal Approach Towards Interpretability
AI, Lumen, School, Tengzhou No. 1 Middle, Ji, Shihao, Song, Zihui, Zhong, Fucheng, Jia, Jisen, Wu, Zhaobo, Cao, Zheyi, Xu, Tianhao
This paper proposes a formal framework based on symbolic compression, integrating combinatory logic, information-theoretic optimal encoding, and context-aware inference techniques to achieve a step-change improvement in token efficiency while preserving semantic integrity. We establish a mathematical framework within a functional programming paradigm, derive the quantitative relationship between symbolic density and model interpretability, and propose a differentiable compression factor metric to evaluate encoding efficiency. Furthermore, we leverage parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques to achieve a low-cost application of the GAEL language. Experimental results show that this method achieves a 78.3% token compression rate in code generation tasks while improving logical traceability by 62% through structural explicitness. This research provides new theoretical tools for efficient inference in LLMs and opens a symbolic path for model interpretability research.
How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models
Futrell, Richard, Mahowald, Kyle
It's 1968, and Norm and Claudette are having lunch. Norm is explaining his position that all human languages share deep underlying structure and has worked out careful theories showing how the surface forms of language can be derived from these underlying principles. Claudette, whose favorite movie is the recently released 2001: A Space Odyssey and who particularly loves the HAL character, wants to make machines that could talk with us in any human language. Claudette asks Norm whether Norm thinks his theories could be useful for building such a system. Norm says he is interested in human language and the human mind, found HAL creepy, and isn't sure why Claudette is so interested in building chatbots or what good would come of that. Nonetheless, they both agree that it seems likely that, if Norm's theories are right (and he sure thinks they are!), they could be used to work out the fundamental rules and operations underlying human language in general--and that should, in principle, prove useful for building Claudette's linguistic machines. Claudette is very open to this possibility: all she wants is a machine that talks and understands. She doesn't really care how it happens. Norm and Claudette have very different goals, but they enjoy their conversations and are optimistic that they can both help each other.
Review for NeurIPS paper: Human Parsing Based Texture Transfer from Single Image to 3D Human via Cross-View Consistency
Weaknesses: - It's unclear if there is significant improvement over RSTG[33] from Figure 5. In particular, the results are only compared from the frontal view, the approach should be compared with [33] that shows multiple views of the image. The results of [33] is not compared on DeepFashion. In fact, CMR looks a lot worse perceptually than RSTG in Figure 5(a), however there is a significant difference in mask-SSIM which is a bit peculiar. For human body shpaes, the simple spherical UV mapping introduces quite a significant distortion.
Reviews: Program Synthesis and Semantic Parsing with Learned Code Idioms
Summary: This paper proposes a semantic parsing and program synthesis method. Code generation relies on low-level and high-level abstractions. High-level abstractions can be thought of as functions that are re-used in several programs. In order to model high-level abstraction, the authors propose using a code-idiom mining method from the literature. Once the code idioms are extracted, the program is generated. The generative process has the capability of spitting tokens or idioms.
Multi-View Attention Syntactic Enhanced Graph Convolutional Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Huang, Xiang, Peng, Hao, Sun, Shuo, Hao, Zhifeng, Lin, Hui, Wang, Shuhai
Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is the task aimed at predicting the sentiment polarity of aspect words within sentences. Recently, incorporating graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture additional syntactic structure information in the dependency tree derived from syntactic dependency parsing has been proven to be an effective paradigm for boosting ABSA. Despite GNNs enhancing model capability by fusing more types of information, most works only utilize a single topology view of the dependency tree or simply conflate different perspectives of information without distinction, which limits the model performance. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a new multi-view attention syntactic enhanced graph convolutional network (MASGCN) that weighs different syntactic information of views using attention mechanisms. Specifically, we first construct distance mask matrices from the dependency tree to obtain multiple subgraph views for GNNs. To aggregate features from different views, we propose a multi-view attention mechanism to calculate the attention weights of views. Furthermore, to incorporate more syntactic information, we fuse the dependency type information matrix into the adjacency matrices and present a structural entropy loss to learn the dependency type adjacency matrix. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/SELGroup/MASGCN.
ESGSenticNet: A Neurosymbolic Knowledge Base for Corporate Sustainability Analysis
Ong, Keane, Mao, Rui, Xing, Frank, Satapathy, Ranjan, Sulaeman, Johan, Cambria, Erik, Mengaldo, Gianmarco
Evaluating corporate sustainability performance is essential to drive sustainable business practices, amid the need for a more sustainable economy. However, this is hindered by the complexity and volume of corporate sustainability data (i.e. sustainability disclosures), not least by the effectiveness of the NLP tools used to analyse them. To this end, we identify three primary challenges - immateriality, complexity, and subjectivity, that exacerbate the difficulty of extracting insights from sustainability disclosures. To address these issues, we introduce ESGSenticNet, a publicly available knowledge base for sustainability analysis. ESGSenticNet is constructed from a neurosymbolic framework that integrates specialised concept parsing, GPT-4o inference, and semi-supervised label propagation, together with a hierarchical taxonomy. This approach culminates in a structured knowledge base of 44k knowledge triplets - ('halve carbon emission', supports, 'emissions control'), for effective sustainability analysis. Experiments indicate that ESGSenticNet, when deployed as a lexical method, more effectively captures relevant and actionable sustainability information from sustainability disclosures compared to state of the art baselines. Besides capturing a high number of unique ESG topic terms, ESGSenticNet outperforms baselines on the ESG relatedness and ESG action orientation of these terms by 26% and 31% respectively. These metrics describe the extent to which topic terms are related to ESG, and depict an action toward ESG. Moreover, when deployed as a lexical method, ESGSenticNet does not require any training, possessing a key advantage in its simplicity for non-technical stakeholders.
Who is the root in a syntactic dependency structure?
Ferrer-i-Cancho, Ramon, Arias, Marta
The syntactic structure of a sentence can be described as a tree that indicates the syntactic relationships between words. In spite of significant progress in unsupervised methods that retrieve the syntactic structure of sentences, guessing the right direction of edges is still a challenge. As in a syntactic dependency structure edges are oriented away from the root, the challenge of guessing the right direction can be reduced to finding an undirected tree and the root. The limited performance of current unsupervised methods demonstrates the lack of a proper understanding of what a root vertex is from first principles. We consider an ensemble of centrality scores, some that only take into account the free tree (non-spatial scores) and others that take into account the position of vertices (spatial scores). We test the hypothesis that the root vertex is an important or central vertex of the syntactic dependency structure. We confirm that hypothesis and find that the best performance in guessing the root is achieved by novel scores that only take into account the position of a vertex and that of its neighbours. We provide theoretical and empirical foundations towards a universal notion of rootness from a network science perspective.
Reviews: SPoC: Search-based Pseudocode to Code
Originality Improving the translation procedure by leveraging error detection on the target programming language is not a new idea, even though the authors do not seem to be aware of this. In semantic parsing, this has been used quite a bit over the last year, under the name of "execution-guided decoding" (see for example the WikiSQL leaderboard, where the top 4 entries currently use this). I believe this first appeared in "Execution-Guided Neural Program Decoding" (Wang et al, 2018); the idea is closest to the prefix-based pruning idea in this submission. This leaves the new "multiclass classification" error localization technique as original contribution, as well as the new dataset. Clarity The core contribution of the paper is a new algorithm, which is only described in prose; I would have preferred pseudo-code here, which would have been more concise.
Review for NeurIPS paper: Hierarchical Poset Decoding for Compositional Generalization in Language
The CFQ dataset designed for testing compositional generalization is really challenging. The presented results in this paper on CFQ are impressive. However, as pointed out by Reviewer #4, the proposed method relies on many dataset-specific design, and the technical novelty is incremental compared to prior work on semantic parsing. The work will be much more convincing if it can also be validated on another dataset.