Chu-Ren Huang

Yueyue Huang, Chu-Ren Huang

This study attempts to investigate cross-strait variations on two typical synonymous loanwords in Chinese, i.e. xie2shang1 and tan2pan4, drawn on MARVS theory. Through a comparative analysis, the study found some distributional, eventual, and contextual similarities and differences across Taiwan and Mainland Mandarin. Compared with the underused tan2pan4, xie2shang1 is significantly overused in Taiwan Mandarin and vice versa in Mainland Mandarin. Additionally, though both words can refer to an inchoative process in Mainland and Taiwan Mandarin, the starting point for xie2shang1 in Mainland Mandarin is somewhat blurring compared with the usage in Taiwan Mandarin. Further on, in Taiwan Mandarin, tan2pan4 can be used in economic and diplomatic contexts, while xie2shang1 is used almost exclusively in political contexts. In Mainland Mandarin, however, the two words can be used in a hybrid manner within political contexts; moreover, tan2pan4 is prominently used in diplomatic contexts with less reference to economic activities, while xie2sahng1 can be found in both political and legal contexts, emphasizing a role of mediation.

Jing Chen, Gábor Parti, Yin Zhong et al.

Understanding how conceptual knowledge is grounded in bodily experience, and to what extent machine systems can acquire such knowledge without direct sensorimotor experience, are central questions in both cognitive science and embodied artificial intelligence research. Large-scale normative resources are essential for investigating these questions empirically, yet such resources remain sparse for non-Indo-European languages. We present a novel normative database for 3,000 lexicalized concepts in Mandarin Chinese, comprising 11-dimensional sensorimotor ratings and unidimensional embodiment ratings collected from 378 native Mandarin speakers. The ratings demonstrate high reliability and strong cross-norm validity with existing Chinese resources, each of which covers fewer words and a subset of the 11 sensorimotor dimensions. In a validation study, we tested new variables derived from a theoretically motivated metric, Perceptual Strength of Embodiment (PSE) (Huang et al., 2025), together with seven common composite variables, on lexical decision tasks. The results suggest that PSE-Sensorimotor and Minkowski-3 are the strongest composite predictors of lexical decision performance, capturing the facilitatory effects of sensorimotor information on lexical processing. A further exploratory study showed that sensorimotor ratings are substantially recoverable from purely linguistic representations using simple regression models (mean Spearman r = .62 across dimensions), though recovery varied markedly: visual and auditory dimensions yielded higher correspondence than chemosensory ones. Representational similarity analysis further showed that the relational geometry of the sensorimotor space is also partially recoverable (r = .540), consistent with the view that distributional language use encodes aspects of embodied conceptual structure.

Yu Wang, Emmanuele Chersoni, Chu-Ren Huang

Do large language models (LLMs) truly acquire embodied cognition and cultural conventions from text? We introduce demonstratives, fundamental spatial expressions like "this/that" in English and "zhè/nà" in Chinese, as a novel probe for grounded knowledge. Using 6,400 responses from 320 native speakers, we establish a human baseline: English speakers reliably distinguish proximal-distal referents but struggle with perspective-taking, while Chinese speakers switch perspectives fluently but tolerate distal ambiguity. In contrast, five state-of-the-art LLMs fail to inherently understand the proximal-distal contrast and show no cultural differences, defaulting to English-centric reasoning. Our study contributes (i) a new task, based on demonstratives, as a new lens for evaluating embodied cognition and cultural conventions; (ii) empirical evidence of cross-cultural asymmetries in human interpretation; (iii) a new perspective on the egocentric-sociocentric debate, showing both orientations coexist but vary across languages; and (iv) a call to address individual variation in future model design.

Siyuan Liu, Jiahui Xu, Feng Jiang et al.

Achieving human-like responsiveness is a critical yet challenging goal for cascaded spoken dialogue systems. Conventional ASR-LLM-TTS pipelines follow a strictly sequential paradigm, requiring complete transcription and full reasoning before speech synthesis can begin, which results in high response latency. We propose the Discourse-Aware Dual-Track Streaming Response (DDTSR) framework, a low-latency architecture that enables listen-while-thinking and speak-while-thinking. DDTSR is built upon three key mechanisms: (1) connective-guided small-large model synergy, where an auxiliary small model generates minimal-committal discourse connectives while a large model performs knowledge-intensive reasoning in parallel; (2) streaming-based cross-modal collaboration, which dynamically overlaps ASR, LLM inference, and TTS to advance the earliest speakable moment; and (3) curriculum-learning-based discourse continuity enhancement, which maintains coherence and logical consistency between early responses and subsequent reasoning outputs. Experiments on two spoken dialogue benchmarks demonstrate that DDTSR reduces response latency by 19%-51% while preserving discourse quality. Further analysis shows that DDTSR functions as a plug-and-play module compatible with diverse LLM backbones, and remains robust across varying utterance lengths, indicating strong practicality and scalability for real-time spoken interaction.

Yiheng Yang, Yujie Wang, Chi Ma et al.

Dense large language models(LLMs) face critical efficiency bottlenecks as they rigidly activate all parameters regardless of input complexity. While existing sparsity methods(static pruning or dynamic activation) address this partially, they either lack adaptivity to contextual or model structural demands or incur prohibitive computational overhead. Inspired by human brain's dual-process mechanisms - predictive coding (N400) for backbone sparsity and structural reanalysis (P600) for complex context - we propose CLADA, a \textit{\textbf{C}ognitive-\textbf{L}oad-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{A}ctivation} framework that synergizes statistical sparsity with semantic adaptability. Our key insight is that LLM activations exhibit two complementary patterns: 1) \textit{Global statistical sparsity} driven by sequence-level prefix information, and 2) \textit{Local semantic adaptability} modulated by cognitive load metrics(e.g., surprisal and entropy). CLADA employs a hierarchical thresholding strategy: a baseline from offline error-controlled optimization ensures 40\%+ sparsity, dynamically adjusted by real-time cognitive signals. Evaluations across six mainstream LLMs and nine benchmarks demonstrate that CLADA achieves \textbf{~20\% average speedup with <2\% accuracy drop}, outperforming Griffin (5\%+ degradation) and TT (negligible speedup). Crucially, we establish the first formal connection between neurolinguistic event-related potential (ERP) components and LLM efficiency mechanisms through multi-level regression analysis ($R^2=0.17$ for sparsity-adaptation synergy). Requiring no retraining or architectural changes, CLADA offers a deployable solution for resource-aware LLM inference while advancing biologically-inspired AI design. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/Oldify/CLADA}{CLADA}.

Xuemei Tang, Chengxi Yan, Jinghang Gu et al.

Despite strong performance on many tasks, large language models (LLMs) show limited ability in historical and cultural reasoning, particularly in non-English contexts such as Chinese history. Taxonomic structures offer an effective mechanism to organize historical knowledge and improve understanding. However, manual taxonomy construction is costly and difficult to scale. Therefore, we propose \textbf{CHisAgent}, a multi-agent LLM framework for historical taxonomy construction in ancient Chinese contexts. CHisAgent decomposes taxonomy construction into three role-specialized stages: a bottom-up \textit{Inducer} that derives an initial hierarchy from raw historical corpora, a top-down \textit{Expander} that introduces missing intermediate concepts using LLM world knowledge, and an evidence-guided \textit{Enricher} that integrates external structured historical resources to ensure faithfulness. Using the \textit{Twenty-Four Histories}, we construct a large-scale, domain-aware event taxonomy covering politics, military, diplomacy, and social life in ancient China. Extensive reference-free and reference-based evaluations demonstrate improved structural coherence and coverage, while further analysis shows that the resulting taxonomy supports cross-cultural alignment.

Xuemei Tang, Chengxi Yan, Jinghang Gu et al.

Chinese information extraction (IE) involves multiple tasks across diverse temporal domains, including Classical and Modern documents. Fine-tuning a single model on heterogeneous tasks and across different eras may lead to interference and reduced performance. Therefore, in this paper, we propose Tea-MOELoRA, a parameter-efficient multi-task framework that combines LoRA with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design. Multiple low-rank LoRA experts specialize in different IE tasks and eras, while a task-era-aware router mechanism dynamically allocates expert contributions. Experiments show that Tea-MOELoRA outperforms both single-task and joint LoRA baselines, demonstrating its ability to leverage task and temporal knowledge effectively.

Xuemei Tang, Jun Wang, Qi Su et al.

Sequence labeling models often benefit from incorporating external knowledge. However, this practice introduces data heterogeneity and complicates the model with additional modules, leading to increased expenses for training a high-performing model. To address this challenge, we propose a two-stage curriculum learning (TCL) framework specifically designed for sequence labeling tasks. The TCL framework enhances training by gradually introducing data instances from easy to hard, aiming to improve both performance and training speed. Furthermore, we explore different metrics for assessing the difficulty levels of sequence labeling tasks. Through extensive experimentation on six Chinese word segmentation (CWS) and Part-of-speech tagging (POS) datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in enhancing the performance of sequence labeling models. Additionally, our analysis indicates that TCL accelerates training and alleviates the slow training problem associated with complex models.

Siyu Lei, Ruiying Yang, Chu-Ren Huang

English research articles (RAs) are an essential genre in academia, so the attempts to employ NLP to assist the development of academic writing ability have received considerable attention in the last two decades. However, there has been no study employing feature engineering techniques to investigate the linguistic features of RAs of different academic impacts (i.e., the papers of high/moderate citation times published in the journals of high/moderate impact factors). This study attempts to extract micro-level linguistic features in high- and moderate-impact journal RAs, using feature engineering methods. We extracted 25 highly relevant features from the Corpus of English Journal Articles through feature selection methods. All papers in the corpus deal with COVID-19 medical empirical studies. The selected features were then validated of the classification performance in terms of consistency and accuracy through supervised machine learning methods. Results showed that 24 linguistic features such as the overlapping of content words between adjacent sentences, the use of third-person pronouns, auxiliary verbs, tense, emotional words provide consistent and accurate predictions for journal articles with different academic impacts. Lastly, the random forest model is shown to be the best model to fit the relationship between these 24 features and journal articles with high and moderate impacts. These findings can be used to inform academic writing courses and lay the foundation for developing automatic evaluation systems for L2 graduate students.

Andreas Liesenfeld, Gábor Parti, Yu-Yin Hsu et al.

This paper examines gender and age salience and (stereo)typicality in British English talk with the aim to predict gender and age categories based on lexical, phrasal and turn-taking features. We examine the SpokenBNC, a corpus of around 11.4 million words of British English conversations and identify behavioural differences between speakers that are labelled for gender and age categories. We explore differences in language use and turn-taking dynamics and identify a range of characteristics that set the categories apart. We find that female speakers tend to produce more and slightly longer turns, while turns by male speakers feature a higher type-token ratio and a distinct range of minimal particles such as "eh", "uh" and "em". Across age groups, we observe, for instance, that swear words and laughter characterize young speakers' talk, while old speakers tend to produce more truncated words. We then use the observed characteristics to predict gender and age labels of speakers per conversation and per turn as a classification task, showing that non-lexical utterances such as minimal particles that are usually left out of dialog data can contribute to setting the categories apart.

Emmanuele Chersoni, Enrico Santus, Ludovica Pannitto et al.

Most compositional distributional semantic models represent sentence meaning with a single vector. In this paper, we propose a Structured Distributional Model (SDM) that combines word embeddings with formal semantics and is based on the assumption that sentences represent events and situations. The semantic representation of a sentence is a formal structure derived from Discourse Representation Theory and containing distributional vectors. This structure is dynamically and incrementally built by integrating knowledge about events and their typical participants, as they are activated by lexical items. Event knowledge is modeled as a graph extracted from parsed corpora and encoding roles and relationships between participants that are represented as distributional vectors. SDM is grounded on extensive psycholinguistic research showing that generalized knowledge about events stored in semantic memory plays a key role in sentence comprehension. We evaluate SDM on two recently introduced compositionality datasets, and our results show that combining a simple compositional model with event knowledge constantly improves performances, even with different types of word embeddings.

Chu-Ren Huang, Ting-Shuo Yo, Petr Simon et al.

A realistic Chinese word segmentation tool must adapt to textual variations with minimal training input and yet robust enough to yield reliable segmentation result for all variants. Various lexicon-driven approaches to Chinese segmentation, e.g. [1,16], achieve high f-scores yet require massive training for any variation. Text-driven approach, e.g. [12], can be easily adapted for domain and genre changes yet has difficulty matching the high f-scores of the lexicon-driven approaches. In this paper, we refine and implement an innovative text-driven word boundary decision (WBD) segmentation model proposed in [15]. The WBD model treats word segmentation simply and efficiently as a binary decision on whether to realize the natural textual break between two adjacent characters as a word boundary. The WBD model allows simple and quick training data preparation converting characters as contextual vectors for learning the word boundary decision. Machine learning experiments with four different classifiers show that training with 1,000 vectors and 1 million vectors achieve comparable and reliable results. In addition, when applied to SigHAN Bakeoff 3 competition data, the WBD model produces OOV recall rates that are higher than all published results. Unlike all previous work, our OOV recall rate is comparable to our own F-score. Both experiments support the claim that the WBD model is a realistic model for Chinese word segmentation as it can be easily adapted for new variants with the robust result. In conclusion, we will discuss linguistic ramifications as well as future implications for the WBD approach.

Yunfei Long, Mingyu Ma, Qin Lu et al.

In sentiment analysis (SA) of product reviews, both user and product information are proven to be useful. Current tasks handle user profile and product information in a unified model which may not be able to learn salient features of users and products effectively. In this work, we propose a dual user and product memory network (DUPMN) model to learn user profiles and product reviews using separate memory networks. Then, the two representations are used jointly for sentiment prediction. The use of separate models aims to capture user profiles and product information more effectively. Compared to state-of-the-art unified prediction models, the evaluations on three benchmark datasets, IMDB, Yelp13, and Yelp14, show that our dual learning model gives performance gain of 0.6%, 1.2%, and 0.9%, respectively. The improvements are also deemed very significant measured by p-values.

Enrico Santus, Emmanuele Chersoni, Alessandro Lenci et al.

In Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs), Vector Cosine is widely used to estimate similarity between word vectors, although this measure was noticed to suffer from several shortcomings. The recent literature has proposed other methods which attempt to mitigate such biases. In this paper, we intend to investigate APSyn, a measure that computes the extent of the intersection between the most associated contexts of two target words, weighting it by context relevance. We evaluated this metric in a similarity estimation task on several popular test sets, and our results show that APSyn is in fact highly competitive, even with respect to the results reported in the literature for word embeddings. On top of it, APSyn addresses some of the weaknesses of Vector Cosine, performing well also on genuine similarity estimation.

Emmanuele Chersoni, Enrico Santus, Alessandro Lenci et al.

Several studies on sentence processing suggest that the mental lexicon keeps track of the mutual expectations between words. Current DSMs, however, represent context words as separate features, thereby loosing important information for word expectations, such as word interrelations. In this paper, we present a DSM that addresses this issue by defining verb contexts as joint syntactic dependencies. We test our representation in a verb similarity task on two datasets, showing that joint contexts achieve performances comparable to single dependencies or even better. Moreover, they are able to overcome the data sparsity problem of joint feature spaces, in spite of the limited size of our training corpus.

Enrico Santus, Tin-Shing Chiu, Qin Lu et al.

In this paper, we claim that vector cosine, which is generally considered among the most efficient unsupervised measures for identifying word similarity in Vector Space Models, can be outperformed by an unsupervised measure that calculates the extent of the intersection among the most mutually dependent contexts of the target words. To prove it, we describe and evaluate APSyn, a variant of the Average Precision that, without any optimization, outperforms the vector cosine and the co-occurrence on the standard ESL test set, with an improvement ranging between +9.00% and +17.98%, depending on the number of chosen top contexts.

Enrico Santus, Tin-Shing Chiu, Qin Lu et al.

In this paper, we describe ROOT13, a supervised system for the classification of hypernyms, co-hyponyms and random words. The system relies on a Random Forest algorithm and 13 unsupervised corpus-based features. We evaluate it with a 10-fold cross validation on 9,600 pairs, equally distributed among the three classes and involving several Parts-Of-Speech (i.e. adjectives, nouns and verbs). When all the classes are present, ROOT13 achieves an F1 score of 88.3%, against a baseline of 57.6% (vector cosine). When the classification is binary, ROOT13 achieves the following results: hypernyms-co-hyponyms (93.4% vs. 60.2%), hypernymsrandom (92.3% vs. 65.5%) and co-hyponyms-random (97.3% vs. 81.5%). Our results are competitive with stateof-the-art models.

Enrico Santus, Alessandro Lenci, Tin-Shing Chiu et al.

ROOT9 is a supervised system for the classification of hypernyms, co-hyponyms and random words that is derived from the already introduced ROOT13 (Santus et al., 2016). It relies on a Random Forest algorithm and nine unsupervised corpus-based features. We evaluate it with a 10-fold cross validation on 9,600 pairs, equally distributed among the three classes and involving several Parts-Of-Speech (i.e. adjectives, nouns and verbs). When all the classes are present, ROOT9 achieves an F1 score of 90.7%, against a baseline of 57.2% (vector cosine). When the classification is binary, ROOT9 achieves the following results against the baseline: hypernyms-co-hyponyms 95.7% vs. 69.8%, hypernyms-random 91.8% vs. 64.1% and co-hyponyms-random 97.8% vs. 79.4%. In order to compare the performance with the state-of-the-art, we have also evaluated ROOT9 in subsets of the Weeds et al. (2014) datasets, proving that it is in fact competitive. Finally, we investigated whether the system learns the semantic relation or it simply learns the prototypical hypernyms, as claimed by Levy et al. (2015). The second possibility seems to be the most likely, even though ROOT9 can be trained on negative examples (i.e., switched hypernyms) to drastically reduce this bias.

Enrico Santus, Tin-Shing Chiu, Qin Lu et al.

In this paper, we claim that Vector Cosine, which is generally considered one of the most efficient unsupervised measures for identifying word similarity in Vector Space Models, can be outperformed by a completely unsupervised measure that evaluates the extent of the intersection among the most associated contexts of two target words, weighting such intersection according to the rank of the shared contexts in the dependency ranked lists. This claim comes from the hypothesis that similar words do not simply occur in similar contexts, but they share a larger portion of their most relevant contexts compared to other related words. To prove it, we describe and evaluate APSyn, a variant of Average Precision that, independently of the adopted parameters, outperforms the Vector Cosine and the co-occurrence on the ESL and TOEFL test sets. In the best setting, APSyn reaches 0.73 accuracy on the ESL dataset and 0.70 accuracy in the TOEFL dataset, beating therefore the non-English US college applicants (whose average, as reported in the literature, is 64.50%) and several state-of-the-art approaches.

Jia-Fei Hong, Kathleen Ahrens, Chu-Ren Huang

Module-Attribute Representation of Verbal Semantics (MARVS) is a theory of the representation of verbal semantics that is based on Mandarin Chinese data (Huang et al. 2000). In the MARVS theory, there are two different types of modules: Event Structure Modules and Role Modules. There are also two sets of attributes: Event-Internal Attributes and Role-Internal Attributes, which are linked to the Event Structure Module and the Role Module, respectively. In this study, we focus on four transitive verbs as chi1(eat), wan2(play), huan4(change) and shao1(burn) and explore their event structures by the MARVS theory.