Even in the era of massive language models, it has been suggested that character-level representations improve the performance of neural models. The state-of-the-art neural semantic parser for Discourse Representation Structures uses character-level representations, improving performance in the four languages (i.e., English, German, Dutch, and Italian) in the Parallel Meaning Bank dataset. However, how and why character-level information improves the parser’s performance remains unclear. This study provides an in-depth analysis of performance changes by order of character sequences. In the experiments, we compare F1-scores by shuffling the order and randomizing character sequences after testing the performance of character-level information. Our results indicate that incorporating character-level information does not improve the performance in English and German. In addition, we find that the parser is not sensitive to correct character order in Dutch. Nevertheless, performance improvements are observed when using character-level information.

Assessing the capacity of numerical understanding of vision-and-language models over images and texts is crucial for real vision-and-language applications, such as systems for automated medical image analysis. We provide a visual reasoning dataset focusing on numerical understanding in the medical domain. The experiments using our dataset show that current vision-and-language models fail to perform numerical inference in the medical domain. However, the data augmentation with only a small amount of our dataset improves the model performance, while maintaining the performance in the general domain.

Recently, the Natural Language Inference (NLI) task has been studied for semi-structured tables that do not have a strict format. Although neural approaches have achieved high performance in various types of NLI, including NLI between semi-structured tables and texts, they still have difficulty in performing a numerical type of inference, such as counting. To handle a numerical type of inference, we propose a logical inference system for reasoning between semi-structured tables and texts. We use logical representations as meaning representations for tables and texts and use model checking to handle a numerical type of inference between texts and tables. To evaluate the extent to which our system can perform inference with numerical comparatives, we make an evaluation protocol that focuses on numerical understanding between semi-structured tables and texts in English. We show that our system can more robustly perform inference between tables and texts that requires numerical understanding compared with current neural approaches.