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Chinese input recommendation plays an important role in alleviating human cost in typing Chinese words, especially in the scenario of mobile applications. The fundamental problem is to predict the conditional probability of the next word…
We introduce a corpus of short texts in Mandarin, in which quantified expressions figure prominently. We illustrate the significance of the corpus by examining the hypothesis (known as Huang's "coolness" hypothesis) that speakers of East…
Speakers often face choices as to how to structure their intended message into an utterance. Here we investigate the influence of contextual predictability on the encoding of linguistic content manifested by speaker choice in a classifier…
Contextual influences on language often exhibit substantial cross-lingual regularities; for example, we are more verbose in situations that require finer distinctions. However, these regularities are sometimes obscured by semantic and…
Classifiers are an important and defining feature of the Chinese language, and their correct prediction is key to numerous educational applications. Yet, whether the most popular Large Language Models (LLMs) possess proper knowledge the…
Neural predictive models have achieved remarkable performance improvements in various natural language processing tasks. However, most neural predictive models suffer from the lack of explainability of predictions, limiting their practical…
Pro-drop is commonly seen in many languages, but its discourse motivations have not been well characterized. Inspired by the topic chain theory in Chinese, this study shows how character-verb usage continuity distinguishes dropped pronouns…
Sememes are minimum semantic units of concepts in human languages, such that each word sense is composed of one or multiple sememes. Words are usually manually annotated with their sememes by linguists, and form linguistic common-sense…
Previous work has predominantly focused on monolingual English semantic parsing. We, instead, explore the feasibility of Chinese semantic parsing in the absence of labeled data for Chinese meaning representations. We describe the pipeline…
Distributional semantics offers new ways to study the semantics of morphology. This study focuses on the semantics of noun singulars and their plural inflectional variants in English. Our goal is to compare two models for the…
Pretrained language models (PLMs) have shown marvelous improvements across various NLP tasks. Most Chinese PLMs simply treat an input text as a sequence of characters, and completely ignore word information. Although Whole Word Masking can…
Word meaning, representation, and interpretation play fundamental roles in natural language understanding (NLU), natural language processing (NLP), and natural language generation (NLG) tasks. Many of the inherent difficulties in these…
Abbreviation is a common phenomenon across languages, especially in Chinese. In most cases, if an expression can be abbreviated, its abbreviation is used more often than its fully expanded forms, since people tend to convey information in a…
Existing propositions often rely on logical constants for classification. Compared with Western languages that lean towards hypotaxis such as English, Chinese often relies on semantic or logical understanding rather than logical connectives…
While idiosyncrasies of the Chinese classifier system have been a richly studied topic among linguists (Adams and Conklin, 1973; Erbaugh, 1986; Lakoff, 1986), not much work has been done to quantify them with statistical methods. In this…
While pre-trained language models (LMs) have brought great improvements in many NLP tasks, there is increasing attention to explore capabilities of LMs and interpret their predictions. However, existing works usually focus only on a certain…
Neural machine translation (NMT), a new approach to machine translation, has been proved to outperform conventional statistical machine translation (SMT) across a variety of language pairs. Translation is an open-vocabulary problem, but…
Most Chinese pre-trained models take character as the basic unit and learn representation according to character's external contexts, ignoring the semantics expressed in the word, which is the smallest meaningful utterance in Chinese.…
Sentences with multiple quantifiers often lead to interpretive ambiguities, which can vary across languages. This study adopts a cross-linguistic approach to examine how large language models (LLMs) handle quantifier scope interpretation in…
Pronouns are often dropped in Chinese sentences, and this happens more frequently in conversational genres as their referents can be easily understood from context. Recovering dropped pronouns is essential to applications such as…