Open-domain semantic parsing remains a challenging task, as models often rely on heuristics and struggle to handle unseen concepts. In this paper, we investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) for this task and introduce Retrieval-Augmented Semantic Parsing (RASP), a simple yet effective approach that integrates external lexical knowledge into the parsing process. Our experiments not only show that LLMs outperform previous encoder-decoder baselines for semantic parsing, but that RASP further enhances their ability to predict unseen concepts, nearly doubling the performance of previous models on out-of-distribution concepts. These findings highlight the promise of leveraging large language models and retrieval mechanisms for robust and open-domain semantic parsing.

In reading garden-path sentences, people must resolve competing interpretations, though initial misinterpretations can linger despite reanalysis. This study examines the role of inhibitory control (IC) in managing these misinterpretations among Chinese-English bilinguals. Using self-paced reading tasks, we investigated how IC influences recovery from garden-path sentences in Chinese (L1) and its interaction with language proficiency during English (L2) processing. Results indicate that IC does not affect garden-path recovery in Chinese, suggesting reliance on semantic context may reduce the need for IC. In contrast, findings for English L2 learners reveal a complex relationship between language proficiency and IC: Participants with low L2 proficiency but high IC showed lingering misinterpretations, while those with high proficiency exhibited none. These results support and extend the Model of Cognitive Control (Ness et al., 2023). Moreover, our comparison of three Stroop task versions identifies L1 colour-word Stroop task as the preferred measure of IC in bilingual research.

Mis- and disinformation, commonly collectively called fake news, continue to menace society. Perhaps, the impact of this age-old problem is presently most plain in politics and healthcare. However, fake news is affecting an increasing number of domains. It takes many different forms and continues to shapeshift as technology advances. Though it arguably most widely spreads in textual form, e.g., through social media posts and blog articles. Thus, it is imperative to thwart the spread of textual misinformation, which necessitates its initial detection. This thesis contributes to the creation of representations that are useful for detecting misinformation. Firstly, it develops a novel method for extracting textual features from news articles for misinformation detection. These features harness the disparity between the thematic coherence of authentic and false news stories. In other words, the composition of themes discussed in both groups significantly differs as the story progresses. Secondly, it demonstrates the effectiveness of topic features for fake news detection, using classification and clustering. Clustering is particularly useful because it alleviates the need for a labelled dataset, which can be labour-intensive and time-consuming to amass. More generally, it contributes towards a better understanding of misinformation and ways of detecting it using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.

We explore the potential of pixel-based models for transfer learning from standard languages to dialects. These models convert text into images that are divided into patches, enabling a continuous vocabulary representation that proves especially useful for out-of-vocabulary words common in dialectal data. Using German as a case study, we compare the performance of pixel-based models to token-based models across various syntactic and semantic tasks. Our results show that pixel-based models outperform token-based models in part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing and intent detection for zero-shot dialect evaluation by up to 26 percentage points in some scenarios, though not in Standard German. However, pixel-based models fall short in topic classification. These findings emphasize the potential of pixel-based models for handling dialectal data, though further research should be conducted to assess their effectiveness in various linguistic contexts.

A construction that assigns a Boolean 1D TQFT with defects to a finite state automaton was recently developed by Gustafson, Im, Kaldawy, Khovanov, and Lihn. We show that the construction is functorial with respect to the category of finite state automata with transducers as morphisms. Certain classes of subregular languages correspond to additional cohomological structures on the associated TQFTs. We also show that the construction generalizes to context-free grammars through a categorical version of the Chomsky-Sch\"utzenberger representation theorem, due to Melli\`es and Zeilberger. The corresponding TQFTs are then described as morphisms of colored operads on an operad of cobordisms with defects.

Recent work has empirically shown that Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle to fully understand the compositional properties of the human language, usually modeling an image caption as a "bag of words". As a result, they perform poorly on compositional tasks, which require a deeper understanding of the different entities of a sentence (subject, verb, etc.) jointly with their mutual relationships in order to be solved. In this paper, we model the dependency relations among textual and visual tokens using a Causal Graphical Model (CGM), built using a dependency parser, and we train a decoder conditioned by the VLM visual encoder. Differently from standard autoregressive or parallel predictions, our decoder's generative process is partially-ordered following the CGM structure. This structure encourages the decoder to learn only the main causal dependencies in a sentence discarding spurious correlations. Using extensive experiments on five compositional benchmarks, we show that our method significantly outperforms all the state-of-the-art compositional approaches by a large margin, and it also improves over methods trained using much larger datasets.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieved strong performance on a variety of tasks (e.g., image-text retrieval, visual question answering). However, most VLMs rely on coarse-grained image-caption pairs for alignment, relying on data volume to resolve ambiguities and ground linguistic concepts in images. The richer semantic and syntactic structure within text is largely overlooked. To address this, we propose HIerarchically STructured Learning (HIST) that enhances VLM training without any additional supervision, by hierarchically decomposing captions into the constituent Subject, Noun Phrases, and Composite Phrases. Entailment between these constituent components allows us to formulate additional regularization constraints on the VLM attention maps. Specifically, we introduce two novel loss functions: (1) Subject Loss, which aligns image content with the subject of corresponding phrase, acting as an entailment of standard contrastive/matching losses at the Phrase level; (2) Addition Loss, to balance attention across multiple objects. HIST is general, and can be applied to any VLM for which attention between vision and language can be computed; we illustrate its efficacy on BLIP and ALBEF. HIST outperforms baseline VLMs, achieving up to +9.8% improvement in visual grounding, +6.3% in multi-object referring segmentation, +1.1% in image-text retrieval, and +0.2% in visual question answering, underscoring the value of structuring learning in VLMs.

We present GR-NLP-TOOLKIT, an open-source natural language processing (NLP) toolkit developed specifically for modern Greek. The toolkit provides state-of-the-art performance in five core NLP tasks, namely part-of-speech tagging, morphological tagging, dependency parsing, named entity recognition, and Greeklishto-Greek transliteration. The toolkit is based on pre-trained Transformers, it is freely available, and can be easily installed in Python (pip install gr-nlp-toolkit). It is also accessible through a demonstration platform on HuggingFace, along with a publicly available API for non-commercial use. We discuss the functionality provided for each task, the underlying methods, experiments against comparable open-source toolkits, and future possible enhancements. The toolkit is available at: https://github.com/nlpaueb/gr-nlp-toolkit

Document content extraction is crucial in computer vision, especially for meeting the high-quality data needs of large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technologies. However, current document parsing methods suffer from significant limitations in terms of diversity and comprehensive evaluation. To address these challenges, we introduce OmniDocBench, a novel multi-source benchmark designed to advance automated document content extraction. OmniDocBench includes a meticulously curated and annotated high-quality evaluation dataset comprising nine diverse document types, such as academic papers, textbooks, slides, among others. Our benchmark provides a flexible and comprehensive evaluation framework with 19 layout category labels and 14 attribute labels, enabling multi-level assessments across entire datasets, individual modules, or specific data types. Using OmniDocBench, we perform an exhaustive comparative analysis of existing modular pipelines and multimodal end-to-end methods, highlighting their limitations in handling document diversity and ensuring fair evaluation. OmniDocBench establishes a robust, diverse, and fair evaluation standard for the document content extraction field, offering crucial insights for future advancements and fostering the development of document parsing technologies. The codes and dataset is available in https://github.com/opendatalab/OmniDocBench.

Continual Semantic Parsing (CSP) aims to train parsers to convert natural language questions into SQL across tasks with limited annotated examples, adapting to the real-world scenario of dynamically updated databases. Previous studies mitigate this challenge by replaying historical data or employing parameter-efficient tuning (PET), but they often violate data privacy or rely on ideal continual learning settings. To address these problems, we propose a new Large Language Model (LLM)-Enhanced Continuous Semantic Parsing method, named LECSP, which alleviates forgetting while encouraging generalization, without requiring real data replay or ideal settings. Specifically, it first analyzes the commonalities and differences between tasks from the SQL syntax perspective to guide LLMs in reconstructing key memories and improving memory accuracy through a calibration strategy. Then, it uses a task-aware dual-teacher distillation framework to promote the accumulation and transfer of knowledge during sequential training. Experimental results on two CSP benchmarks show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods, even those utilizing data replay or ideal settings. Additionally, we achieve generalization performance beyond the upper limits, better adapting to unseen tasks.