This work explores the hypothesis that subjectively attributed meaning constitutes the phenomenal content of conscious experience. That is, phenomenal content is semantic. This form of subjective meaning manifests as an intrinsic and non-representational character of qualia. Empirically, subjective meaning is ubiquitous in conscious experiences. We point to phenomenological studies that lend evidence to support this. Furthermore, this notion of meaning closely relates to what Frege refers to as "sense", in metaphysics and philosophy of language. It also aligns with Peirce's "interpretant", in semiotics. We discuss how Frege's sense can also be extended to the raw feels of consciousness. Sense and reference both play a role in phenomenal experience. Moreover, within the context of the mind-matter relation, we provide a formalization of subjective meaning associated to one's mental representations. Identifying the precise maps between the physical and mental domains, we argue that syntactic and semantic structures transcend language, and are realized within each of these domains. Formally, meaning is a relational attribute, realized via a map that interprets syntactic structures of a formal system within an appropriate semantic space. The image of this map within the mental domain is what is relevant for experience, and thus comprises the phenomenal content of qualia. We conclude with possible implications this may have for experience-based theories of consciousness.

Effectively normalizing textual data poses a considerable challenge, especially for low-resource languages lacking standardized writing systems. In this study, we fine-tuned a multilingual model with data from several Occitan dialects and conducted a series of experiments to assess the model's representations of these dialects. For evaluation purposes, we compiled a parallel lexicon encompassing four Occitan dialects. Intrinsic evaluations of the model's embeddings revealed that surface similarity between the dialects strengthened representations. When the model was further fine-tuned for part-of-speech tagging and Universal Dependency parsing, its performance was robust to dialectical variation, even when trained solely on part-of-speech data from a single dialect. Our findings suggest that large multilingual models minimize the need for spelling normalization during pre-processing.

In programming education, providing manual feedback is essential but labour-intensive, posing challenges in consistency and timeliness. We introduce ECHO, a machine learning method to automate the reuse of feedback in educational code reviews by analysing patterns in abstract syntax trees. This study investigates two primary questions: whether ECHO can predict feedback annotations to specific lines of student code based on previously added annotations by human reviewers (RQ1), and whether its training and prediction speeds are suitable for using ECHO for real-time feedback during live code reviews by human reviewers (RQ2). Our results, based on annotations from both automated linting tools and human reviewers, show that ECHO can accurately and quickly predict appropriate feedback annotations. Its efficiency in processing and its flexibility in adapting to feedback patterns can significantly reduce the time and effort required for manual feedback provisioning in educational settings.

Assembly Calculus (AC), proposed by Papadimitriou et al., aims to reproduce advanced cognitive functions through simulating neural activities, with several applications based on AC having been developed, including a natural language parser proposed by Mitropolsky et al. However, this parser lacks the ability to handle Kleene closures, preventing it from parsing all regular languages and rendering it weaker than Finite Automata (FA). In this paper, we propose a new bionic natural language parser (BNLP) based on AC and integrates two new biologically rational structures, Recurrent Circuit and Stack Circuit which are inspired by RNN and short-term memory mechanism. In contrast to the original parser, the BNLP can fully handle all regular languages and Dyck languages. Therefore, leveraging the Chomsky-Sch \H{u}tzenberger theorem, the BNLP which can parse all Context-Free Languages can be constructed. We also formally prove that for any PDA, a Parser Automaton corresponding to BNLP can always be formed, ensuring that BNLP has a description ability equal to that of PDA and addressing the deficiencies of the original parser.

Language processing is at the heart of current developments in artificial intelligence, and quantum computers are becoming available at the same time. This has led to great interest in quantum natural language processing, and several early proposals and experiments. This paper surveys the state of this area, showing how NLP-related techniques have been used in quantum language processing. We examine the art of word embeddings and sequential models, proposing some avenues for future investigation and discussing the tradeoffs present in these directions. We also highlight some recent methods to compute attention in transformer models, and perform grammatical parsing. We also introduce a new quantum design for the basic task of text encoding (representing a string of characters in memory), which has not been addressed in detail before. Quantum theory has contributed toward quantifying uncertainty and explaining "What is intelligence?" In this context, we argue that "hallucinations" in modern artificial intelligence systems are a misunderstanding of the way facts are conceptualized: language can express many plausible hypotheses, of which only a few become actual.

Unsupervised cross-lingual transfer involves transferring knowledge between languages without explicit supervision. Although numerous studies have been conducted to improve performance in such tasks by focusing on cross-lingual knowledge, particularly lexical and syntactic knowledge, current approaches are limited as they only incorporate syntactic or lexical information. Since each type of information offers unique advantages and no previous attempts have combined both, we attempt to explore the potential of this approach. In this paper, we present a novel framework called "Lexicon-Syntax Enhanced Multilingual BERT" that combines both lexical and syntactic knowledge. Specifically, we use Multilingual BERT (mBERT) as the base model and employ two techniques to enhance its learning capabilities. The code-switching technique is used to implicitly teach the model lexical alignment information, while a syntactic-based graph attention network is designed to help the model encode syntactic structure. To integrate both types of knowledge, we input code-switched sequences into both the syntactic module and the mBERT base model simultaneously. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate this framework can consistently outperform all baselines of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, with the gains of 1.0 3.7 points on text classification, named entity recognition (ner), and semantic parsing tasks.

Current open-domain neural semantics parsers show impressive performance. However, closer inspection of the symbolic meaning representations they produce reveals significant weaknesses: sometimes they tend to merely copy character sequences from the source text to form symbolic concepts, defaulting to the most frequent word sense based in the training distribution. By leveraging the hierarchical structure of a lexical ontology, we introduce a novel compositional symbolic representation for concepts based on their position in the taxonomical hierarchy. This representation provides richer semantic information and enhances interpretability. We introduce a neural "taxonomical" semantic parser to utilize this new representation system of predicates, and compare it with a standard neural semantic parser trained on the traditional meaning representation format, employing a novel challenge set and evaluation metric for evaluation. Our experimental findings demonstrate that the taxonomical model, trained on much richer and complex meaning representations, is slightly subordinate in performance to the traditional model using the standard metrics for evaluation, but outperforms it when dealing with out-of-vocabulary concepts. This finding is encouraging for research in computational semantics that aims to combine data-driven distributional meanings with knowledge-based symbolic representations.

Unsupervised constituency parsing is about identifying word sequences that form a syntactic unit (i.e., constituents) in a target sentence. Linguists identify the constituent by evaluating a set of Predicate-Argument Structure (PAS) equivalent sentences where we find the constituent corresponds to frequent word sequences. However, such information is unavailable to previous parsing methods which identify the constituent by observing sentences with diverse PAS. In this study, we empirically verify that \textbf{constituents correspond to word sequence patterns in the PAS-equivalent sentence set}. We propose a frequency-based method \emph{span-overlap}, applying the word sequence pattern to computational unsupervised parsing for the first time. Parsing experiments show that the span-overlap parser outperforms state-of-the-art parsers in eight out of ten languages. Further discrimination analysis confirms that the span-overlap method can non-trivially separate constituents from non-constituents. This result highlights the utility of the word sequence pattern. Additionally, we discover a multilingual phenomenon: \textbf{participant-denoting constituents are more frequent than event-denoting constituents}. The phenomenon indicates a behavioral difference between the two constituent types, laying the foundation for future labeled unsupervised parsing.

Retrieval-augmented language models pose a promising alternative to standard language modeling. During pretraining, these models search in a corpus of documents for contextually relevant information that could aid the language modeling objective. We introduce an'ideal retrieval' methodology to study these models in a fully controllable setting. We conduct an extensive evaluation to examine how retrieval augmentation affects the behavior of the underlying language model. Among other things, we observe that these models: Figure 1: The aggregated absolute differences from i) save substantially less world knowledge in the baseline across three categories of benchmarks, the their weights, ii) are better at understanding models exhibit consistent differences for each category.

Parsing Computer-Aided Design (CAD) drawings is a fundamental step for CAD revision, semantic-based management, and the generation of 3D prototypes in both the architecture and engineering industries. Labeling symbols from a CAD drawing is a challenging yet notorious task from a practical point of view. In this work, we propose to label and spot symbols from CAD images that are converted from CAD drawings. The advantage of spotting symbols from CAD images lies in the low requirement of labelers and the low-cost annotation. However, pixel-wise spotting symbols from CAD images is challenging work. We propose a pixel-wise point location via Progressive Gaussian Kernels (PGK) to balance between training efficiency and location accuracy. Besides, we introduce a local offset to the heatmap-based point location method. Based on the keypoints detection, we propose a symbol grouping method to redraw the rectangle symbols in CAD images. We have released a dataset containing CAD images of equipment rooms from telecommunication industrial CAD drawings. Extensive experiments on this real-world dataset show that the proposed method has good generalization ability.