Non-lexical items are expressive devices used in conversations that are not words but are nevertheless meaningful. These items play crucial roles, such as signaling turn-taking or marking stances in interactions. However, as the non-lexical items do not stably correspond to written or phonological forms, past studies tend to focus on studying their acoustic properties, such as pitches and durations. In this paper, we investigate the discourse functions of non-lexical items through their acoustic properties and the phone embeddings extracted from a deep learning model. Firstly, we create a non-lexical item dataset based on the interpellation video clips from Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan. Then, we manually identify the non-lexical items and their discourse functions in the videos. Next, we analyze the acoustic properties of those items through statistical modeling and building classifiers based on phone embeddings extracted from a phone recognition model. We show that (1) the discourse functions have significant effects on the acoustic features; and (2) the classifiers built on phone embeddings perform better than the ones on conventional acoustic properties. These results suggest that phone embeddings may reflect the phonetic variations crucial in differentiating the discourse functions of non-lexical items.

Constructions are direct form-meaning pairs with possible schematic slots. These slots are simultaneously constrained by the embedded construction itself and the sentential context. We propose that the constraint could be described by a conditional probability distribution. However, as this conditional probability is inevitably complex, we utilize language models to capture this distribution. Therefore, we build CxLM, a deep learning-based masked language model explicitly tuned to constructions’ schematic slots. We first compile a construction dataset consisting of over ten thousand constructions in Taiwan Mandarin. Next, an experiment is conducted on the dataset to examine to what extent a pretrained masked language model is aware of the constructions. We then fine-tune the model specifically to perform a cloze task on the opening slots. We find that the fine-tuned model predicts masked slots more accurately than baselines and generates both structurally and semantically plausible word samples. Finally, we release CxLM and its dataset as publicly available resources and hope to serve as new quantitative tools in studying construction grammar.

Compounding, a prevalent word-formation process, presents an interesting challenge for computational models. Indeed, the relations between compounds and their constituents are often complicated. It is particularly so in Chinese morphology, where each character is almost simultaneously bound and free when treated as a morpheme. To model such word-formation process, we propose the Notch (NOnlinear Transformation of CHaracter embeddings) model and the character Jacobians. The Notch model first learns the non-linear relations between the constituents and words, and the character Jacobians further describes the character’s role in each word. In a series of experiments, we show that the Notch model predicts the embeddings of the real words from their constituents but helps account for the behavioral data of the pseudowords. Moreover, we also demonstrated that character Jacobians reflect the characters’ meanings. Taken together, the Notch model and character Jacobians may provide a new perspective on studying the word-formation process and morphology with modern deep learning.

Ever-expanding evaluative texts on online forums have become an important source of sentiment analysis. This paper proposes an aspect-based annotated dataset consisting of telecom reviews on social media. We introduce a category, implicit evaluative texts, impevals for short, to investigate how the deep learning model works on these implicit reviews. We first compare two models, BertSimple and BertImpvl, and find that while both models are competent to learn simple evaluative texts, they are confused when classifying impevals. To investigate the factors underlying the correctness of the model’s predictions, we conduct a series of analyses, including qualitative error analysis and quantitative analysis of linguistic features with logistic regressions. The results show that local features that affect the overall sentential sentiment confuse the model: multiple target entities, transitional words, sarcasm, and rhetorical questions. Crucially, these linguistic features are independent of the model’s confidence measured by the classifier’s softmax probabilities. Interestingly, the sentence complexity indicated by syntax-tree depth is not correlated with the model’s correctness. In sum, this paper sheds light on the characteristics of the modern deep learning model and when it might need more supervision through linguistic evaluations.

The rapid flow of information and the abundance of text data on the Internet have brought about the urgent demand for the construction of monitoring resources and techniques used for various purposes. To extract facets of information useful for particular domains from such large and dynamically growing corpora requires an unsupervised yet transparent ways of analyzing the textual data. This paper proposed a hybrid collocation analysis as a potential method to retrieve and summarize Taiwan-related topics posted on Weibo and PTT. By grouping collocates of 臺灣 ‘Taiwan’ into clusters of topics via either word embeddings clustering or Latent Dirichlet allocation, lists of collocates can be converted to probability distributions such that distances and similarities can be defined and computed. With this method, we conduct a diachronic analysis of the similarity between Weibo and PTT, providing a way to pinpoint when and how the topic similarity between the two rises or falls. A fine-grained view on the grammatical behavior and political implications is attempted, too. This study thus sheds light on alternative explainable routes for future social media listening method on the understanding of cross-strait relationship.

This work collects and studies Chinese readers’ veridicality judgments to news events (whether an event is viewed as happening or not). For instance, in “The FBI alleged in court documents that Zazi had admitted having a handwritten recipe for explosives on his computer”, do people believe that Zazi had a handwritten recipe for explosives? The goal is to observe the pragmatic behaviors of linguistic features under context which affects readers in making veridicality judgments. Exploring from the datasets, it is found that features such as event-selecting predicates (ESP), modality markers, adverbs, temporal information, and statistics have an impact on readers’ veridicality judgments. We further investigated that modality markers with high certainty do not necessarily trigger readers to have high confidence in believing an event happened. Additionally, the source of information introduced by an ESP presents low effects to veridicality judgments, even when an event is attributed to an authority (e.g. “The FBI”). A corpus annotated with Chinese readers’ veridicality judgments is released as the Chinese PragBank for further analysis.

The morphological status of affixes in Chinese has long been a matter of debate. How one might apply the conventional criteria of free/bound and content/function features to distinguish word-forming affixes from bound roots in Chinese is still far from clear. Issues involving polysemy and diachronic dynamics further blur the boundaries. In this paper, we propose three quantitative features in a computational model of affixoid behavior in Mandarin Chinese. The results show that, except for in a very few cases, there are no clear criteria that can be used to identify an affix’s status in an isolating language like Chinese. A diachronic check using contextualized embeddings with the WordNet Sense Inventory also demonstrates the possible role of the polysemy of lexical roots across diachronic settings.

Chinese characters are unique in its logographic nature, which inherently encodes world knowledge through thousands of years evolution. This paper proposes an embedding approach, namely eigencharacter (EC) space, which helps NLP application easily access the knowledge encoded in Chinese orthography. These EC representations are automatically extracted, encode both structural and radical information, and easily integrate with other computational models. We built EC representations of 5,000 Chinese characters, investigated orthography knowledge encoded in ECs, and demonstrated how these ECs identified visually similar characters with both structural and radical information.

Constructing semantic relations in WordNet has been a labour-intensive task, especially in a dynamic and fast-changing language environment. Combined with recent advancements of contextualized embeddings, this paper proposes the concept of morphology-guided sense vectors, which can be used to semi-automatically augment semantic relations in Chinese Wordnet (CWN). This paper (1) built sense vectors with pre-trained contextualized embedding models; (2) demonstrated the sense vectors computed were consistent with the sense distinctions made in CWN; and (3) predicted the potential semantically-related sense pairs with high accuracy by sense vectors model.

The present work seeks to make the logographic nature of Chinese script a relevant research ground in wordnet studies. While wordnets are not so much about words as about the concepts represented in words, synset formation inevitably involves the use of orthographic and/or phonetic representations to serve as headword for a given concept. For wordnets of Chinese languages, if their synsets are mapped with each other, the connection from logographic forms to lexicalized concepts can be explored backwards to, for instance, help trace the development of cognates in different varieties of Chinese. The Sinitic Wordnet project is an attempt to construct such an integrated wordnet that aggregates three Chinese varieties that are widely spoken in Taiwan and all written in traditional Chinese characters.

Classifiers are function words that are used to express quantities in Chinese and are especially difficult for language learners. In contrast to previous studies, we argue that the choice of classifiers is highly contextual and train context-aware machine learning models based on a novel publicly available dataset, outperforming previous baselines. We further present use cases for our database and models in an interactive demo system.

Automatic discovery of semantically-related words is one of the most important NLP tasks, and has great impact on the theoretical psycholinguistic modeling of the mental lexicon. In this shared task, we employ the word embeddings model to testify two thoughts explicitly or implicitly assumed by the NLP community: (1). Word embedding models can reflect syntagmatic similarities in usage between words to distances in projected vector space. (2). Word embedding models can reflect paradigmatic relationships between words.

This paper aims to examine and evaluate the current development of using Web-as-Corpus (WaC) paradigm in Chinese corpus linguistics. I will argue that the unstable notion of wordhood in Chinese and the resulting diverse ideas of implementing word segmentation systems have posed great challenges for those who are keen on building web-scaled corpus data. Two lexical measures are proposed to illustrate the issues and methodological discussions are provided.

We outline work performed within the framework of a current EC project. The goal is to construct a language-independent information system for a specific domain (environment/ecology/biodiversity) anchored in a language-independent ontology that is linked to wordnets in seven languages. For each language, information extraction and identification of lexicalized concepts with ontological entries is carried out by text miners (“Kybots”). The mapping of language-specific lexemes to the ontology allows for crosslinguistic identification and translation of equivalent terms. The infrastructure developed within this project enables long-range knowledge sharing and transfer across many languages and cultures, addressing the need for global and uniform transition of knowledge beyond the specific domains addressed here.

The measurement of conceptual similarity in a hierarchical structure has been proposed by studies such as Wu and Palmer (1994) which have been summarized and evaluated in Budanisky and Hirst (2006). The present study applies the measurement of conceptual similarity to conceptual metaphor research by comparing concreteness of ontological resource nodes to several prototypical concrete nodes selected by human subjects. Here, the purpose of comparing conceptual similarity between nodes is to select a concrete sense for a word which is used metaphorically. Through using WordNet-SUMO interface such as SinicaBow (Huang, Chang and Lee, 2004), concrete senses of a lexicon will be selected once its SUMO nodes have been compared in terms of conceptual similarity with the prototypical concrete nodes. This study has strong implications for the interaction of psycholinguistic and computational linguistic fields in conceptual metaphor research.

Corpus-based approaches and statistical approaches have been the main stream of natural language processing research for the past two decades. Language resources play a key role in such approaches, but there is an insufficient amount of language resources in many Asian languages. In this situation, standardisation of language resources would be of great help in developing resources in new languages. This paper presents the latest development efforts of our project which aims at creating a common standard for Asian language resources that is compatible with an international standard. In particular, the paper focuses on i) lexical specification and data categories relevant for building multilingual lexical resources for Asian languages; ii) a core upper-layer ontology needed for ensuring multilingual interoperability and iii) the evaluation platform used to test the entire architectural framework.