Grammars & Parsing
Loss-Aware Curriculum Learning for Chinese Grammatical Error Correction
Zhang, Ding, Li, Yangning, Bai, Lichen, Zhang, Hao, Li, Yinghui, Lin, Haiye, Zheng, Hai-Tao, Su, Xin, Shan, Zifei
Chinese grammatical error correction (CGEC) aims to detect and correct errors in the input Chinese sentences. Recently, Pre-trained Language Models (PLMS) have been employed to improve the performance. However, current approaches ignore that correction difficulty varies across different instances and treat these samples equally, enhancing the challenge of model learning. To address this problem, we propose a multi-granularity Curriculum Learning (CL) framework. Specifically, we first calculate the correction difficulty of these samples and feed them into the model from easy to hard batch by batch. Then Instance-Level CL is employed to help the model optimize in the appropriate direction automatically by regulating the loss function. Extensive experimental results and comprehensive analyses of various datasets prove the effectiveness of our method.
The Text Classification Pipeline: Starting Shallow going Deeper
Siino, Marco, Tinnirello, Ilenia, La Cascia, Marco
Text Classification (TC) stands as a cornerstone within the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly when viewed through the lens of computer science and engineering. The past decade has seen deep learning revolutionize TC, propelling advancements in text retrieval, categorization, information extraction, and summarization. The scholarly literature is rich with datasets, models, and evaluation criteria, with English being the predominant language of focus, despite studies involving Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, and others. The efficacy of TC models relies heavily on their ability to capture intricate textual relationships and nonlinear correlations, necessitating a comprehensive examination of the entire TC pipeline. This monograph provides an in-depth exploration of the TC pipeline, with a particular emphasis on evaluating the impact of each component on the overall performance of TC models. The pipeline includes state-of-the-art datasets, text preprocessing techniques, text representation methods, classification models, evaluation metrics, current results and future trends. Each chapter meticulously examines these stages, presenting technical innovations and significant recent findings. The work critically assesses various classification strategies, offering comparative analyses, examples, case studies, and experimental evaluations. These contributions extend beyond a typical survey, providing a detailed and insightful exploration of TC.
Generating event descriptions under syntactic and semantic constraints
Cao, Angela, Holt, Faye, Chan, Jonas, Richter, Stephanie, Glass, Lelia, White, Aaron Steven
With the goal of supporting scalable lexical semantic annotation, analysis, and theorizing, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of different methods for generating event descriptions under both syntactic constraints -- e.g. desired clause structure -- and semantic constraints -- e.g. desired verb sense. We compare three different methods -- (i) manual generation by experts; (ii) sampling from a corpus annotated for syntactic and semantic information; and (iii) sampling from a language model (LM) conditioned on syntactic and semantic information -- along three dimensions of the generated event descriptions: (a) naturalness, (b) typicality, and (c) distinctiveness. We find that all methods reliably produce natural, typical, and distinctive event descriptions, but that manual generation continues to produce event descriptions that are more natural, typical, and distinctive than the automated generation methods. We conclude that the automated methods we consider produce event descriptions of sufficient quality for use in downstream annotation and analysis insofar as the methods used for this annotation and analysis are robust to a small amount of degradation in the resulting event descriptions.
Extracting triples from dialogues for conversational social agents
Vossen, Piek, Santamarรญa, Selene Bรกez, Bajฤetiฤ, Lenka, Belluci, Thomas
Obtaining an explicit understanding of communication within a Hybrid Intelligence collaboration is essential to create controllable and transparent agents. In this paper, we describe a number of Natural Language Understanding models that extract explicit symbolic triples from social conversation. Triple extraction has mostly been developed and tested for Knowledge Base Completion using Wikipedia text and data for training and testing. However, social conversation is very different as a genre in which interlocutors exchange information in sequences of utterances that involve statements, questions, and answers. Phenomena such as co-reference, ellipsis, coordination, and implicit and explicit negation or confirmation are more prominent in conversation than in Wikipedia text. We therefore describe an attempt to fill this gap by releasing data sets for training and testing triple extraction from social conversation. We also created five triple extraction models and tested them in our evaluation data. The highest precision is 51.14 for complete triples and 69.32 for triple elements when tested on single utterances. However, scores for conversational triples that span multiple turns are much lower, showing that extracting knowledge from true conversational data is much more challenging.
Acquisition of Recursive Possessives and Recursive Locatives in Mandarin
Fu, Chenxi, Wang, Xiaoyi, Man, Zaijiang, Yang, Caimei
Language is the cornerstone of human communication, and the complexity of language lies in the diversity and recursion of its structure. Chomsky (1957) introduced the concept of recursion into natural language, arguing that the grammar in human natural language was a finite set of recursive rules by which an infinite number of linguistic expressions could be generated. In Corballis' (2014) words, the claim that recursion is the essence of natural language has been a continuing theme of Chomsky's work since his 1957 book Syntactic Structures. This theme is reiterated in Hauser et al. (2002), proposing that the faculty of language in the narrow sense only includes recursion, the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language. This proposal is summarized as the "recursion-only hypothesis" in Jackendoff and Pinker (2005: 212), which highlights the importance of recursion in linguistics. In spited of the lack of a consistent definition of (linguistic) recursion in the literature, most literature involves category recursion, which is defined as the "embedding of a category inside another of the same category". For instance, Martins and Fitch (2014) claim that recursion has been used to characterize the process of embedding a constituent of a certain kind of category inside another constituent of the same kind. This "embedding" process naturally generates hierarchical structures that display similar properties across different levels of embedding, and, thus, the feature of "self-similarity" is a signature of recursive structures. To illustrate that, they hold that the compound noun [[student] committee] (which has the structure [[[A]A] ]) is recursive since a noun phrase (NP) is embedded inside another NP, while a sentence with a noun plus a verb such as [[trees] grow] (which has the structure [[[A]B] ]) is non-recursive since a constituent of a given type of category is not embedded within a constituent of that same type.
Semantic Role Labeling of NomBank Partitives
Meyers, Adam, Savant, Advait Pravin, Ortega, John E.
This article is about Semantic Role Labeling for English partitive nouns (5%/REL of the price/ARG1; The price/ARG1 rose 5 percent/REL) in the NomBank annotated corpus. Several systems are described using traditional and transformer-based machine learning, as well as ensembling. Our highest scoring system achieves an F1 of 91.74% using "gold" parses from the Penn Treebank and 91.12% when using the Berkeley Neural parser. This research includes both classroom and experimental settings for system development.
A Fusion Approach of Dependency Syntax and Sentiment Polarity for Feature Label Extraction in Commodity Reviews
This study analyzes 13,218 product reviews from JD.com, covering four categories: mobile phones, computers, cosmetics, and food. A novel method for feature label extraction is proposed by integrating dependency parsing and sentiment polarity analysis. The proposed method addresses the challenges of low robustness in existing extraction algorithms and significantly enhances extraction accuracy. Experimental results show that the method achieves an accuracy of 0.7, with recall and F-score both stabilizing at 0.8, demonstrating its effectiveness. However, challenges such as dependence on matching dictionaries and the limited scope of extracted feature tags require further investigation in future research.
Underutilization of Syntactic Processing by Chinese Learners of English in Comprehending English Sentences, Evidenced from Adapted Garden-Path Ambiguity Experiment
Many studies have revealed that sentence comprehension relies more on semantic processing than on syntactic processing. However, previous studies have predominantly emphasized the preference for semantic processing, focusing on the semantic perspective. In contrast, this current study highlights the under-utilization of syntactic processing, from a syntactic perspective. Based on the traditional garden-path experiment, which involves locally ambiguous but globally unambiguous sentences, this study's empirical experiment innovatively crafted an adapted version featuring semantically ambiguous but syntactically unambiguous sentences to meet its specific research objective. This experiment, involving 140 subjects, demonstrates through descriptive and inferential statistical analyses using SPSS, Graph Pad Prism, and Cursor that Chinese learners of English tend to under-utilize syntactic processing when comprehending English sentences. The study identifies two types of parsing under-utilization: partial and complete. Further exploration reveals that trial and error in syntactic processing contributes to both. Consequently, this study lays a foundation for the development of a novel parsing method designed to fully integrate syntactic processing into sentence comprehension, thereby enhancing the level of English sentence comprehension for Chinese learners of English.
Overview of the First Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM 2025)
Hettiarachchi, Hansi, Ranasinghe, Tharindu, Rayson, Paul, Mitkov, Ruslan, Gaber, Mohamed, Premasiri, Damith, Tan, Fiona Anting, Uyangodage, Lasitha
The first Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM 2025) was held in conjunction with the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2025) in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. This workshop mainly aimed to provide a forum for researchers to share and discuss their ongoing work on language models (LMs) focusing on low-resource languages, following the recent advancements in neural language models and their linguistic biases towards high-resource languages. LoResLM 2025 attracted notable interest from the natural language processing (NLP) community, resulting in 35 accepted papers from 52 submissions. These contributions cover a broad range of low-resource languages from eight language families and 13 diverse research areas, paving the way for future possibilities and promoting linguistic inclusivity in NLP.
Analysis and Visualization of Linguistic Structures in Large Language Models: Neural Representations of Verb-Particle Constructions in BERT
Kissane, Hassane, Schilling, Achim, Krauss, Patrick
This study investigates the internal representations of verb-particle combinations within transformer-based large language models (LLMs), specifically examining how these models capture lexical and syntactic nuances at different neural network layers. Employing the BERT architecture, we analyse the representational efficacy of its layers for various verb-particle constructions such as 'agree on', 'come back', and 'give up'. Our methodology includes a detailed dataset preparation from the British National Corpus, followed by extensive model training and output analysis through techniques like multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) and generalized discrimination value (GDV) calculations. Results show that BERT's middle layers most effectively capture syntactic structures, with significant variability in representational accuracy across different verb categories. These findings challenge the conventional uniformity assumed in neural network processing of linguistic elements and suggest a complex interplay between network architecture and linguistic representation. Our research contributes to a better understanding of how deep learning models comprehend and process language, offering insights into the potential and limitations of current neural approaches to linguistic analysis. This study not only advances our knowledge in computational linguistics but also prompts further research into optimizing neural architectures for enhanced linguistic precision.