Linguistics holds unique characteristics of generality, stability, and nationality, which will affect the formulation of extraction strategies and should be incorporated into the relation extraction. Chinese open relation extraction is not well-established, because of the complexity of Chinese linguistics makes it harder to operate, and the methods for English are not compatible with that for Chinese. The diversities between Chinese and English linguistics are mainly reflected in morphology and syntax.
Lexical analysis is believed to be a crucial step towards natural language understanding and has been widely studied. Recent years, end-to-end lexical analysis models with recurrent neural networks have gained increasing attention. In this report, we introduce a deep Bi-GRU-CRF network that jointly models word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging and named entity recognition tasks. We trained the model using several massive corpus pre-tagged by our best Chinese lexical analysis tool, together with a small, yet high-quality human annotated corpus. We conducted balanced sampling between differen…
Web 2.0 has brought with it numerous user-produced data revealing one's thoughts, experiences, and knowledge, which are a great source for many tasks, such as information extraction, and knowledge base construction. However, the colloquial nature of the texts poses new challenges for current natural language processing techniques, which are more adapt to the formal form of the language. Ellipsis is a common linguistic phenomenon that some words are left out as they are understood from the context, especially in oral utterance, hindering the improvement of dependency parsing, which is of great …
State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence Production Technology and Systems（媒体融合生产技术与系统国家重点实验室）；MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, AI Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学人工智能研究院教育部人工智能重点实验室）
Chinese short text matching is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Existing approaches usually take Chinese characters or words as input tokens. They have two limitations: 1) Some Chinese words are polysemous, and semantic information is not fully utilized. 2) Some models suffer potential issues caused by word segmentation. Here we introduce HowNet as an external knowledge base and propose a Linguistic knowledge Enhanced graph Transformer (LET) to deal with word ambiguity. Additionally, we adopt the word lattice graph as input to maintain multi-granularity information. Our model…
A lot of prior work on event extraction has exploited a variety of features to represent events. Such methods have several drawbacks: 1) the features are often specific for a particular domain and do not generalize well; 2) the features are derived from various linguistic analyses and are error-prone; and 3) some features may be expensive and require domain expert. In this paper, we develop a Chinese event extraction system that uses word embedding vectors to represent language, and deep neural networks to learn the abstract feature representation in order to greatly reduce the effort of featu…
Zero-Shot End-to-End Relation Extraction in Chinese: A Comparative Study of Gemini, LLaMA and ChatGPT
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of California San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.（平安科技（深圳）有限公司）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Buddhism is an influential religion with a long-standing history and profound philosophy. Nowadays, more and more people worldwide aspire to learn the essence of Buddhism, attaching importance to Buddhism dissemination. However, Buddhist scriptures written in classical Chinese are obscure to most people and machine translation applications. For instance, general Chinese-English neural machine translation (NMT) fails in this domain. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to building a practical NMT model for Buddhist scriptures. The performance of our translation pipeline acquired highly p…
Human Language Technology Center of Excellence（人类语言技术卓越中心）；Center for Language and Speech Processing（语言与语音处理中心）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Named entity recognition, and other information extraction tasks, frequently use linguistic features such as part of speech tags or chunkings. For languages where word boundaries are not readily identified in text, word segmentation is a key first step to generating features for an NER system. While using word boundary tags as features are helpful, the signals that aid in identifying these boundaries may provide richer information for an NER system. New state-of-the-art word segmentation systems use neural models to learn representations for predicting word boundaries. We show that these same …
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Machine reading comprehension tasks require a machine reader to answer questions relevant to the given document. In this paper, we present the first free-form multiple-Choice Chinese machine reading Comprehension dataset (C^3), containing 13,369 documents (dialogues or more formally written mixed-genre texts) and their associated 19,577 multiple-choice free-form questions collected from Chinese-as-a-second-language examinations. We present a comprehensive analysis of the prior knowledge (i.e., linguistic, domain-specific, and general world knowledge) needed for these real-world problems. We im…
A GAN and LLM-Driven Data Augmentation Framework for Dynamic Linguistic Pattern Modeling in Chinese Sarcasm Detection
School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Sichuan University（四川大学网络空间安全学院）；State Key Laboratory of Fluid Power and Mechatronic Systems, Zhejiang University（浙江大学流体动力与机电系统国家重点实验室）；Law School, Sichuan University（四川大学法学院）
In the field of Japanese-Chinese translation linguistics, the issue of correctly translating attributive clauses has persistently proven to be challenging. Present-day machine translation tools often fail to accurately translate attributive clauses from Japanese to Chinese. In light of this, this paper investigates the linguistic problem underlying such difficulties, namely how does the semantic role of the modified noun affect the selection of translation patterns for attributive clauses, from a linguistic perspective. To ad-dress these difficulties, a pre-edit scheme is proposed, which aims …
In this paper, we focus on studying robustness evaluation of Chinese question matching. Most of the previous work on analyzing robustness issue focus on just one or a few types of artificial adversarial examples. Instead, we argue that it is necessary to formulate a comprehensive evaluation about the linguistic capabilities of models on natural texts. For this purpose, we create a Chinese dataset namely DuQM which contains natural questions with linguistic perturbations to evaluate the robustness of question matching models. DuQM contains 3 categories and 13 subcategories with 32 linguistic pe…
AI Nushu: An Exploration of Language Emergence in Sisterhood -Through the Lens of Computational Linguistics
Royal College of Art（皇家艺术学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Ubisoft（育碧）；New Drama Studio（新戏剧工作室）；University of London（伦敦大学）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）
Indiana University Bloomington（印第安纳大学伯明顿分校）；Brigham Young University（杨百翰大学）；Northwestern University（西北大学）；UNC Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；Shanghai Jiaotong Univ.（上海交通大学）
Multilingual transformers (XLM, mT5) have been shown to have remarkable transfer skills in zero-shot settings. Most transfer studies, however, rely on automatically translated resources (XNLI, XQuAD), making it hard to discern the particular linguistic knowledge that is being transferred, and the role of expert annotated monolingual datasets when developing task-specific models. We investigate the cross-lingual transfer abilities of XLM-R for Chinese and English natural language inference (NLI), with a focus on the recent large-scale Chinese dataset OCNLI. To better understand linguistic trans…
A Systematic Assessment of Language Models with Linguistic Minimal Pairs in Chinese
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group（通义实验室，阿里巴巴集团）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；New York University（纽约大学）
Linguistically informed analyses of language models (LMs) contribute to the understanding and improvement of these models. Here, we introduce the corpus of Chinese linguistic minimal pairs (CLiMP), which can be used to investigate what knowledge Chinese LMs acquire. CLiMP consists of sets of 1,000 minimal pairs (MPs) for 16 syntactic contrasts in Mandarin, covering 9 major Mandarin linguistic phenomena. The MPs are semi-automatically generated, and human agreement with the labels in CLiMP is 95.8%. We evaluated 11 different LMs on CLiMP, covering n-grams, LSTMs, and Chinese BERT. We find that …
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Tencent Cloud Xiaowei（腾讯云小微）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Sun-Yat Sen University（中山大学）
Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) is both a challenging NLP task and a common application in human daily life. Recently, many data-driven approaches are proposed for the development of CGEC research. However, there are two major limitations in the CGEC field: First, the lack of high-quality annotated training corpora prevents the performance of existing CGEC models from being significantly improved. Second, the grammatical errors in widely used test sets are not made by native Chinese speakers, resulting in a significant gap between the CGEC models and the real application. In this p…
Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院心理研究所）；University of Jinan（济南大学）；China Networking Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算机网络信息中心）；Institute of Population Research, Peking University（北京大学人口研究所）
If people with high risk of suicide can be identified through social media like microblog, it is possible to implement an active intervention system to save their lives. Based on this motivation, the current study administered the Suicide Probability Scale(SPS) to 1041 weibo users at Sina Weibo, which is a leading microblog service provider in China. Two NLP (Natural Language Processing) methods, the Chinese edition of Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) lexicon and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), are used to extract linguistic features from the Sina Weibo data. We trained predicting m…
To investigate the role of linguistic knowledge in data augmentation (DA) for Natural Language Processing (NLP), we designed two adapted DA programs and applied them to LCQMC (a Large-scale Chinese Question Matching Corpus) for a binary Chinese question matching classification task. The two DA programs produce augmented texts by five simple text editing operations (or DA techniques), largely irrespective of language generation rules, but one is enhanced with a pre-trained n-gram language model to fuse it with prior linguistic knowledge. We then trained four neural network models (BOW, CNN, LST…
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）
Recently, knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models (KEPLMs) improve context-aware representations via learning from structured relations in knowledge graphs, and/or linguistic knowledge from syntactic or dependency analysis. Unlike English, there is a lack of high-performing open-source Chinese KEPLMs in the natural language processing (NLP) community to support various language understanding applications. In this paper, we revisit and advance the development of Chinese natural language understanding with a series of novel Chinese KEPLMs released in various parameter sizes, namely CKBERT…
Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
Analogical reasoning is effective in capturing linguistic regularities. This paper proposes an analogical reasoning task on Chinese. After delving into Chinese lexical knowledge, we sketch 68 implicit morphological relations and 28 explicit semantic relations. A big and balanced dataset CA8 is then built for this task, including 17813 questions. Furthermore, we systematically explore the influences of vector representations, context features, and corpora on analogical reasoning. With the experiments, CA8 is proved to be a reliable benchmark for evaluating Chinese word embeddings.
To understand what kinds of linguistic knowledge are encoded by pretrained Chinese language models (LMs), we introduce the benchmark of Sino LINGuistics (SLING), which consists of 38K minimal sentence pairs in Mandarin Chinese grouped into 9 high-level linguistic phenomena. Each pair demonstrates the acceptability contrast of a specific syntactic or semantic phenomenon (e.g., The keys are lost vs. The keys is lost), and an LM should assign lower perplexity to the acceptable sentence. In contrast to the CLiMP dataset (Xiang et al., 2021), which also contains Chinese minimal pairs and was create…
In the age of large transformer language models, linguistic evaluation play an important role in diagnosing models' abilities and limitations on natural language understanding. However, current evaluation methods show some significant shortcomings. In particular, they do not provide insight into how well a language model captures distinct linguistic skills essential for language understanding and reasoning. Thus they fail to effectively map out the aspects of language understanding that remain challenging to existing models, which makes it hard to discover potential limitations in models and d…
Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zürich and ETH Zürich（苏黎世大学与苏黎世联邦理工学院神经信息学研究所）
Character-level Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have recently achieved impressive results on many language pairs. They mainly do well for Indo-European language pairs, where the languages share the same writing system. However, for translating between Chinese and English, the gap between the two different writing systems poses a major challenge because of a lack of systematic correspondence between the individual linguistic units. In this paper, we enable character-level NMT for Chinese, by breaking down Chinese characters into linguistic units similar to that of Indo-European language…
University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Academia Sinica（中央研究院）
Chinese dynastic histories form a large continuous linguistic space of approximately 2000 years, from the 3rd century BCE to the 18th century CE. The histories are documented in Classical (Literary) Chinese in a corpus of over 20 million characters, suitable for the computational analysis of historical lexicon and semantic change. However, there is no freely available open-source corpus of these histories, making Classical Chinese low-resource. This project introduces a new open-source corpus of twenty-four dynastic histories covered by Creative Commons license. An original list of Classical C…
The Education University of Hong Kong（香港教育大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）
Eye movements are known to reflect cognitive processes in reading, and psychological reading research has shown that eye gaze patterns differ between readers with and without dyslexia. In recent years, researchers have attempted to classify readers with dyslexia based on their eye movements using Support Vector Machines (SVMs). However, these approaches (i) are based on highly aggregated features averaged over all words read by a participant, thus disregarding the sequential nature of the eye movements, and (ii) do not consider the linguistic stimulus and its interaction with the reader's eye …
Yelp（Yelp公司）；University of Saarland（萨尔大学）；Brandeis University（布兰迪斯大学）
Inferring implicit discourse relations in natural language text is the most difficult subtask in discourse parsing. Surface features achieve good performance, but they are not readily applicable to other languages without semantic lexicons. Previous neural models require parses, surface features, or a small label set to work well. Here, we propose neural network models that are based on feedforward and long-short term memory architecture without any surface features. To our surprise, our best configured feedforward architecture outperforms LSTM-based model in most cases despite thorough tuning…
Neo-Classic: A Benchmark for Evaluating Linguistic-Aesthetic Reasoning in Classical Chinese Poetry
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）
The Expressions of Depression and Anxiety in Chinese Psycho-counseling: Usage of First-person Singular Pronoun and Negative Emotional Words
Hangzhou Normal University（杭州师范大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Hangzhou Polytechnic（杭州职业技术学院）
NYU（纽约大学）；Robotics at Google（谷歌机器人部门）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
In this work, we propose a computational framework in which agents equipped with communication capabilities simultaneously play a series of referential games, where agents are trained using deep reinforcement learning. We demonstrate that the framework mirrors linguistic phenomena observed in natural language: i) the outcome of contact between communities is a function of inter- and intra-group connectivity; ii) linguistic contact either converges to the majority protocol, or in balanced cases leads to novel creole languages of lower complexity; and iii) a linguistic continuum emerges where ne…
Saarland University（萨尔大学）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
In this paper, we aim to address the challenges surrounding the translation of ancient Chinese text: (1) The linguistic gap due to the difference in eras results in translations that are poor in quality, and (2) most translations are missing the contextual information that is often very crucial to understanding the text. To this end, we improve upon past translation techniques by proposing the following: We reframe the task as a multi-label prediction task where the model predicts both the translation and its particular era. We observe that this helps to bridge the linguistic gap as chronologi…
Semantic Prosody in Machine Translation: the English-Chinese Case of Passive Structures
Centre de Llenguatge i Computacio (CLiC), Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学语言与计算中心）；Institut de Recerca en Sistemes Complesos (UBICS), Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学复杂系统研究所）
Tilburg University（蒂尔堡大学）；University of Naples L’Orientale（那不勒斯东方大学）
Languages differ in terms of the absence or presence of gender features, the number of gender classes and whether and where gender features are explicitly marked. These cross-linguistic differences can lead to ambiguities that are difficult to resolve, especially for sentence-level MT systems. The identification of ambiguity and its subsequent resolution is a challenging task for which currently there aren't any specific resources or challenge sets available. In this paper, we introduce gENder-IT, an English--Italian challenge set focusing on the resolution of natural gender phenomena by provi…
The evolution of language follows the rule of gradual change. Grammar, vocabulary, and lexical semantic shifts take place over time, resulting in a diachronic linguistic gap. As such, a considerable amount of texts are written in languages of different eras, which creates obstacles for natural language processing tasks, such as word segmentation and machine translation. Although the Chinese language has a long history, previous Chinese natural language processing research has primarily focused on tasks within a specific era. Therefore, we propose a cross-era learning framework for Chinese word…
COIG-CQIA: Quality is All You Need for Chinese Instruction Fine-tuning
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, CAS（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；M-A-P；Institute of Automation, CAS（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Peking University（北京大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；HKUST（香港科技大学）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）
Coordinate relation refers to the relation between instances of a concept and the relation between the directly hyponyms of a concept. In this paper, we focus on the task of extracting terms which are coordinate with a user given seed term in Chinese, and grouping the terms which belong to different concepts if the seed term has several meanings. We propose a semi-supervised method that integrates manually defined linguistic patterns and automatically learned semi-structural patterns to extract coordinate terms in Chinese from web search results. In addition, terms are grouped into different c…
The learning trajectories of linguistic phenomena in humans provide insight into linguistic representation, beyond what can be gleaned from inspecting the behavior of an adult speaker. To apply a similar approach to analyze neural language models (NLM), it is first necessary to establish that different models are similar enough in the generalizations they make. In this paper, we show that NLMs with different initialization, architecture, and training data acquire linguistic phenomena in a similar order, despite their different end performance. These findings suggest that there is some mutual i…
