How much data is required to learn the structure of a language via next-token prediction? We study this question for synthetic datasets generated via a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG) -- a hierarchical generative model that captures the tree-like structure of natural languages. We determine token-token correlations analytically in our model and show that they can be used to build a representation of the grammar's hidden variables, the longer the range the deeper the variable. In addition, a finite training set limits the resolution of correlations to an effective range, whose size grows with that of the training set. As a result, a Language Model trained with increasingly many examples can build a deeper representation of the grammar's structure, thus reaching good performance despite the high dimensionality of the problem. We conjecture that the relationship between training set size and effective range of correlations holds beyond our synthetic datasets. In particular, our conjecture predicts how the scaling law for the test loss behaviour with training set size depends on the length of the context window, which we confirm empirically for a collection of lines from Shakespeare's plays.

We present an automatic text expansion system to generate English sentences, which performs automatic Natural Language Generation (NLG) by combining linguistic rules with statistical approaches. Here, "automatic" means that the system can generate coherent and correct sentences from a minimum set of words. From its inception, the design is modular and adaptable to other languages. This adaptability is one of its greatest advantages. For English, we have created the highly precise aLexiE lexicon with wide coverage, which represents a contribution on its own. We have evaluated the resulting NLG library in an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) proof of concept, both directly (by regenerating corpus sentences) and manually (from annotations) using a popular corpus in the NLG field. We performed a second analysis by comparing the quality of text expansion in English to Spanish, using an ad-hoc Spanish-English parallel corpus. The system might also be applied to other domains such as report and news generation.

In the domain of document AI, semi-structured form parsing plays a crucial role. This task leverages techniques from key information extraction (KIE), dealing with inputs that range from plain text to intricate modal data comprising images and structural layouts. The advent of pre-trained multimodal models has driven the extraction of key information from form documents in different formats such as PDFs and images. Nonetheless, the endeavor of form parsing is still encumbered by notable challenges like subpar capabilities in multi-lingual parsing and diminished recall in contexts rich in text and visuals. In this work, we introduce a simple but effective \textbf{M}ultimodal and \textbf{M}ultilingual semi-structured \textbf{FORM} \textbf{PARSER} (\textbf{XFormParser}), which is anchored on a comprehensive pre-trained language model and innovatively amalgamates semantic entity recognition (SER) and relation extraction (RE) into a unified framework, enhanced by a novel staged warm-up training approach that employs soft labels to significantly refine form parsing accuracy without amplifying inference overhead. Furthermore, we have developed a groundbreaking benchmark dataset, named InDFormBench, catering specifically to the parsing requirements of multilingual forms in various industrial contexts. Through rigorous testing on established multilingual benchmarks and InDFormBench, XFormParser has demonstrated its unparalleled efficacy, notably surpassing the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in RE tasks within language-specific setups by achieving an F1 score improvement of up to 1.79\%. Our framework exhibits exceptionally improved performance across tasks in both multi-language and zero-shot contexts when compared to existing SOTA benchmarks. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhbuaa0/layoutlmft.

A new family of categorial grammars is proposed, defined by enriching basic categorial grammars with a conjunction operation. It is proved that the formalism obtained in this way has the same expressive power as conjunctive grammars, that is, context-free grammars enhanced with conjunction. It is also shown that categorial grammars with conjunction can be naturally embedded into the Lambek calculus with conjunction and disjunction operations. This further implies that a certain NP-complete set can be defined in the Lambek calculus with conjunction. We also show how to handle some subtle issues connected with the empty string. Finally, we prove that a language generated by a conjunctive grammar can be described by a Lambek grammar with disjunction (but without conjunction).

Past work has established scaling laws that predict the performance of a neural language model (LM) as a function of its parameter count and the number of tokens it's trained on, enabling optimal allocation of a fixed compute budget. Are these scaling laws agnostic to training data as some prior work suggests? We generate training datasets of varying complexities by modulating the syntactic properties of a PCFG, finding that 1) scaling laws are sensitive to differences in data complexity and that 2) gzip, a compression algorithm, is an effective predictor of how data complexity impacts scaling properties. We propose a new data-dependent scaling law for LM's that accounts for the training data's gzip-compressibility; its compute-optimal frontier increases in dataset size preference (over parameter count preference) as training data becomes harder to compress.

Metrics are the foundation for automatic evaluation in grammatical error correction (GEC), with their evaluation of the metrics (meta-evaluation) relying on their correlation with human judgments. However, conventional meta-evaluations in English GEC encounter several challenges including biases caused by inconsistencies in evaluation granularity, and an outdated setup using classical systems. These problems can lead to misinterpretation of metrics and potentially hinder the applicability of GEC techniques. To address these issues, this paper proposes SEEDA, a new dataset for GEC meta-evaluation. SEEDA consists of corrections with human ratings along two different granularities: edit-based and sentence-based, covering 12 state-of-the-art systems including large language models (LLMs), and two human corrections with different focuses. The results of improved correlations by aligning the granularity in the sentence-level meta-evaluation, suggest that edit-based metrics may have been underestimated in existing studies. Furthermore, correlations of most metrics decrease when changing from classical to neural systems, indicating that traditional metrics are relatively poor at evaluating fluently corrected sentences with many edits.

This paper presents an approach to enhancing Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems by integrating Colourful Semantics (CS) with transformer-based language models specifically tailored for Brazilian Portuguese. We introduce an adapted BERT model, BERTptCS, which incorporates the CS framework for improved prediction of communication cards. The primary aim is to enhance the accuracy and contextual relevance of communication card predictions, which are essential in AAC systems for individuals with complex communication needs (CCN). We compared BERTptCS with a baseline model, BERTptAAC, which lacks CS integration. Our results demonstrate that BERTptCS significantly outperforms BERTptAAC in various metrics, including top-k accuracy, Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), and Entropy@K. Integrating CS into the language model improves prediction accuracy and offers a more intuitive and contextual understanding of user inputs, facilitating more effective communication.

Grammatical Error Correction has seen significant progress with the recent advancements in deep learning. As those methods require huge amounts of data, synthetic datasets are being built to fill this gap. Unfortunately, synthetic datasets are not organic enough in some cases and even require clean data to start with. Furthermore, most of the work that has been done is focused mostly on English. In this work, we introduce a new organic data-driven approach, clean insertions, to build parallel Turkish Grammatical Error Correction datasets from any organic data, and to clean the data used for training Large Language Models. We achieve state-of-the-art results on two Turkish Grammatical Error Correction test sets out of the three publicly available ones. We also show the effectiveness of our method on the training losses of training language models.

Log parsing, a vital task for interpreting the vast and complex data produced within software architectures faces significant challenges in the transition from academic benchmarks to the industrial domain. Existing log parsers, while highly effective on standardized public datasets, struggle to maintain performance and efficiency when confronted with the sheer scale and diversity of real-world industrial logs. These challenges are two-fold: 1) massive log templates: The performance and efficiency of most existing parsers will be significantly reduced when logs of growing quantities and different lengths; 2) Complex and changeable semantics: Traditional template-matching algorithms cannot accurately match the log templates of complicated industrial logs because they cannot utilize cross-language logs with similar semantics. To address these issues, we propose ECLIPSE, Enhanced Cross-Lingual Industrial log Parsing with Semantic Entropy-LCS, since cross-language logs can robustly parse industrial logs. On the one hand, it integrates two efficient data-driven template-matching algorithms and Faiss indexing. On the other hand, driven by the powerful semantic understanding ability of the Large Language Model (LLM), the semantics of log keywords were accurately extracted, and the retrieval space was effectively reduced. Notably, we launch a Chinese and English cross-platform industrial log parsing benchmark ECLIPSE- BENCH to evaluate the performance of mainstream parsers in industrial scenarios. Our experimental results across public benchmarks and ECLIPSE- BENCH underscore the superior performance and robustness of our proposed ECLIPSE. Notably, ECLIPSE both delivers state-of-the-art performance when compared to strong baselines and preserves a significant edge in processing efficiency.

In this paper, we introduce EHR-SeqSQL, a novel sequential text-to-SQL dataset for Electronic Health Record (EHR) databases. EHR-SeqSQL is designed to address critical yet underexplored aspects in text-to-SQL parsing: interactivity, compositionality, and efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, EHR-SeqSQL is not only the largest but also the first medical text-to-SQL dataset benchmark to include sequential and contextual questions. We provide a data split and the new test set designed to assess compositional generalization ability. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of a multi-turn approach over a single-turn approach in learning compositionality. Additionally, our dataset integrates specially crafted tokens into SQL queries to improve execution efficiency. With EHR-SeqSQL, we aim to bridge the gap between practical needs and academic research in the text-to-SQL domain.