Abstract--WordNet offers rich supersense hierarchies for nouns and verbs, yet adverbs remain underdeveloped, lacking a systematic semantic classification. We introduce a linguistically grounded supersense typology for adverbs, empirically validated through annotation, that captures major semantic domains including manner, temporal, frequency, degree, domain, speaker-oriented, and subject-oriented functions. Results from a pilot annotation study demonstrate that these categories provide broad coverage of adverbs in natural text and can be reliably assigned by human annotators. Incorporating this typology extends WordNet's coverage, aligns it more closely with linguistic theory, and facilitates downstream NLP applications such as word sense disambiguation, event extraction, sentiment analysis, and discourse modeling. We present the proposed supersense categories, annotation outcomes, and directions for future work. As a primary lexical class, adverbs perform a range of semantic functions, from answering fundamental questions about an event, such as how it was performed (manner), when it occurred (temporal), or to what extent a property holds (degree), to expressing speaker attitude, discourse stance, and logical relations between propositions. Despite this semantic richness, adverbs have long occupied an ambiguous and often marginalized position in linguistic classification, frequently described as a "residual" or "wastebasket" category [9, 20]. Words are often assigned to this category not because they share definable grammatical properties, but because they fail to conform to the morphological and syntactic criteria of nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, or conjunctions.

Text-to-speech (TTS) systems have recently achieved more expressive and natural speech synthesis by scaling to large speech datasets. However, the proportion of expressive speech in such large-scale corpora is often unclear. Besides, existing expressive speech corpora are typically smaller in scale and primarily used for benchmarking TTS systems. In this paper, we introduce the LibriQuote dataset, an English corpus derived from read audiobooks, designed for both fine-tuning and benchmarking expressive zero-shot TTS system. The training dataset includes 12.7K hours of read, non-expressive speech and 5.3K hours of mostly expressive speech drawn from character quotations. Each utterance in the expressive subset is supplemented with the context in which it was written, along with pseudo-labels of speech verbs and adverbs used to describe the quotation (\textit{e.g. ``he whispered softly''}). Additionally, we provide a challenging 7.5 hour test set intended for benchmarking TTS systems: given a neutral reference speech as input, we evaluate system's ability to synthesize an expressive utterance while preserving reference timbre. We validate qualitatively the test set by showing that it covers a wide range of emotions compared to non-expressive speech, along with various accents. Extensive subjective and objective evaluations show that fine-tuning a baseline TTS system on LibriQuote significantly improves its synthesized speech intelligibility, and that recent systems fail to synthesize speech as expressive and natural as the ground-truth utterances. The dataset and evaluation code are freely available. Audio samples can be found at https://libriquote.github.io/.

- The field of natural language processing (NLP) has dramatically expanded within the last decade. Many human-being applications are conducted daily via NLP tasks, starting from machine translation, speech recognition, text generation and recommendations, Part-of-Speech tagging (POS), and Named-Entity Recognition (NER). However, low-resourced languages, such as the Central-Kurdish language (CKL), mainly remain unexamined due to shortage of necessary resources to support their development. The POS tagging task is the base of other NLP tasks; for example, the POS tag set has been used to standardized languages to provide the relationship between words among the sentences, followed by machine translation and text recommendation. Specifically, for the CKL, most of the utilized or provided POS tagsets are neither standardized nor comprehensive. To this end, this study presented an accurate and comprehensive POS tagset for the CKL to provide better performance of the Kurdish NLP tasks. The article also collected most of the POS tags from different studies as well as from Kurdish linguistic experts to standardized part-of-speech tags. The proposed POS tagset is designed to annotate a large CKL corpus and support Kurdish NLP tasks. The initial investigations of this study via comparison with the Universal Dependencies framework for standard languages, show that the proposed POS tagset can streamline or correct sentences more accurately for Kurdish NLP tasks.

We assess the difficulty of gender resolution in literary-style dialogue settings and the influence of gender stereotypes. Instances of the test suite contain spoken dialogue interleaved with external meta-context about the characters and the manner of speaking. We find that character and manner stereotypes outside of the dialogue significantly impact the gender agreement of referents within the dialogue.

Transformer-based neural networks have demonstrated remarkable performance in natural language processing tasks such as sentiment analysis. Nevertheless, the issue of ensuring the dependability of these complicated architectures through comprehensive testing is still open. This paper presents a collection of coverage criteria specifically designed to assess test suites created for transformer-based sentiment analysis networks. Our approach utilizes input space partitioning, a black-box method, by considering emotionally relevant linguistic features such as verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and nouns. In order to effectively produce test cases that encompass a wide range of emotional elements, we utilize the k-projection coverage metric. This metric minimizes the complexity of the problem by examining subsets of k features at the same time, hence reducing dimensionality. Large language models are employed to generate sentences that display specific combinations of emotional features. The findings from experiments obtained from a sentiment analysis dataset illustrate that our criteria and generated tests have led to an average increase of 16\% in test coverage. In addition, there is a corresponding average decrease of 6.5\% in model accuracy, showing the ability to identify vulnerabilities. Our work provides a foundation for improving the dependability of transformer-based sentiment analysis systems through comprehensive test evaluation.

Recent improvements in the quality of the generations by large language models have spurred research into identifying machine-generated text. Systems proposed for the task often achieve high performance. However, humans and machines can produce text in different styles and in different domains, and it remains unclear whether machine generated-text detection models favour particular styles or domains. In this paper, we critically examine the classification performance for detecting machine-generated text by evaluating on texts with varying writing styles. We find that classifiers are highly sensitive to stylistic changes and differences in text complexity, and in some cases degrade entirely to random classifiers. We further find that detection systems are particularly susceptible to misclassify easy-to-read texts while they have high performance for complex texts.

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.

This paper explores leveraging large language models for map-free off-road navigation using generative AI, reducing the need for traditional data collection and annotation. We propose a method where a robot receives verbal instructions, converted to text through Whisper, and a large language model (LLM) model extracts landmarks, preferred terrains, and crucial adverbs translated into speed settings for constrained navigation. A language-driven semantic segmentation model generates text-based masks for identifying landmarks and terrain types in images. By translating 2D image points to the vehicle's motion plane using camera parameters, an MPC controller can guides the vehicle towards the desired terrain. This approach enhances adaptation to diverse environments and facilitates the use of high-level instructions for navigating complex and challenging terrains. Keywords: Constrained map-free navigation, large language models, languagedriven semantic segmentation, preferred terrains, speech instruction, adverbs.

In the field of text data augmentation, rule-based methods are widely adopted for real-world applications owing to their cost-efficiency. However, conventional rule-based approaches suffer from the possibility of losing the original semantics of the given text. We propose a novel text data augmentation strategy that avoids such phenomena through a straightforward deletion of adverbs, which play a subsidiary role in the sentence. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed approach for not just single text classification, but also natural language inference that requires semantic preservation. We publicly released our source code for reproducibility.