Eduardo Cal


2023

pdf
Is Shortest Always Best? The Role of Brevity in Logic-to-Text Generation
Eduardo Cal | Jordi Levy | Albert Gatt | Kees Van Deemter
Proceedings of the The 12th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2023)

Some applications of artificial intelligence make it desirable that logical formulae be converted computationally to comprehensible natural language sentences. As there are many logical equivalents to a given formula, finding the most suitable equivalent to be used as input for such a “logic-to-text” generation system is a difficult challenge. In this paper, we focus on the role of brevity: Are the shortest formulae the most suitable? We focus on propositional logic (PL), framing formula minimization (i.e., the problem of finding the shortest equivalent of a given formula) as a Quantified Boolean Formulae (QBFs) satisfiability problem. We experiment with several generators and selection strategies to prune the resulting candidates. We conduct exhaustive automatic and human evaluations of the comprehensibility and fluency of the generated texts. The results suggest that while, in many cases, minimization has a positive impact on the quality of the sentences generated, formula minimization may ultimately not be the best strategy.

pdf
Mann” is to “Donna asis to Reine Adapting the Analogy Task for Multilingual and Contextual Embeddings
Timothee Mickus | Eduardo Cal | Lo Jacqmin | Denis Paperno | Mathieu Constant
Proceedings of the The 12th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2023)

How does the word analogy task fit in the modern NLP landscape? Given the rarity of comparable multilingual benchmarks and the lack of a consensual evaluation protocol for contextual models, this remains an open question. In this paper, we introduce MATS: a multilingual analogy dataset, covering forty analogical relations in six languages, and evaluate human as well as static and contextual embedding performances on the task. We find that not all analogical relations are equally straightforward for humans, static models remain competitive with contextual embeddings, and optimal settings vary across languages and analogical relations. Several key challenges remain, including creating benchmarks that align with human reasoning and understanding what drives differences across methodologies.