KyungTae Lim

Yige Chen, Eunkyul Leah Jo, Yundong Yao et al.

In this study, we propose a morpheme-based scheme for Korean dependency parsing and adopt the proposed scheme to Universal Dependencies. We present the linguistic rationale that illustrates the motivation and the necessity of adopting the morpheme-based format, and develop scripts that convert between the original format used by Universal Dependencies and the proposed morpheme-based format automatically. The effectiveness of the proposed format for Korean dependency parsing is then testified by both statistical and neural models, including UDPipe and Stanza, with our carefully constructed morpheme-based word embedding for Korean. morphUD outperforms parsing results for all Korean UD treebanks, and we also present detailed error analyses.

Sungjoon Park, Jihyung Moon, Sungdong Kim et al.

We introduce Korean Language Understanding Evaluation (KLUE) benchmark. KLUE is a collection of 8 Korean natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, including Topic Classification, SemanticTextual Similarity, Natural Language Inference, Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, Dependency Parsing, Machine Reading Comprehension, and Dialogue State Tracking. We build all of the tasks from scratch from diverse source corpora while respecting copyrights, to ensure accessibility for anyone without any restrictions. With ethical considerations in mind, we carefully design annotation protocols. Along with the benchmark tasks and data, we provide suitable evaluation metrics and fine-tuning recipes for pretrained language models for each task. We furthermore release the pretrained language models (PLM), KLUE-BERT and KLUE-RoBERTa, to help reproducing baseline models on KLUE and thereby facilitate future research. We make a few interesting observations from the preliminary experiments using the proposed KLUE benchmark suite, already demonstrating the usefulness of this new benchmark suite. First, we find KLUE-RoBERTa-large outperforms other baselines, including multilingual PLMs and existing open-source Korean PLMs. Second, we see minimal degradation in performance even when we replace personally identifiable information from the pretraining corpus, suggesting that privacy and NLU capability are not at odds with each other. Lastly, we find that using BPE tokenization in combination with morpheme-level pre-tokenization is effective in tasks involving morpheme-level tagging, detection and generation. In addition to accelerating Korean NLP research, our comprehensive documentation on creating KLUE will facilitate creating similar resources for other languages in the future. KLUE is available at https://klue-benchmark.com.

ChangSu Choi, Yongbin Jeong, Seoyoon Park et al.

Large language models (LLMs) use pretraining to predict the subsequent word; however, their expansion requires significant computing resources. Numerous big tech companies and research institutes have developed multilingual LLMs (MLLMs) to meet current demands, overlooking less-resourced languages (LRLs). This study proposed three strategies to enhance the performance of LRLs based on the publicly available MLLMs. First, the MLLM vocabularies of LRLs were expanded to enhance expressiveness. Second, bilingual data were used for pretraining to align the high- and less-resourced languages. Third, a high-quality small-scale instruction dataset was constructed and instruction-tuning was performed to augment the LRL. The experiments employed the Llama2 model and Korean was used as the LRL, which was quantitatively evaluated against other developed LLMs across eight tasks. Furthermore, a qualitative assessment was performed based on human evaluation and GPT4. Experimental results showed that our proposed Bllossom model exhibited superior performance in qualitative analyses compared to previously proposed Korean monolingual models.

Minjun Kim, Seungwoo Song, Youhan Lee et al.

The current research direction in generative models, such as the recently developed GPT4, aims to find relevant knowledge information for multimodal and multilingual inputs to provide answers. Under these research circumstances, the demand for multilingual evaluation of visual question answering (VQA) tasks, a representative task of multimodal systems, has increased. Accordingly, we propose a bilingual outside-knowledge VQA (BOK-VQA) dataset in this study that can be extended to multilingualism. The proposed data include 17K images, 17K question-answer pairs for both Korean and English and 280K instances of knowledge information related to question-answer content. We also present a framework that can effectively inject knowledge information into a VQA system by pretraining the knowledge information of BOK-VQA data in the form of graph embeddings. Finally, through in-depth analysis, we demonstrated the actual effect of the knowledge information contained in the constructed training data on VQA.

Dongjae Shin, Hyeonseok Lim, Inho Won et al.

The impressive development of large language models (LLMs) is expanding into the realm of large multimodal models (LMMs), which incorporate multiple types of data beyond text. However, the nature of multimodal models leads to significant expenses in the creation of training data. Furthermore, constructing multilingual data for LMMs presents its own set of challenges due to language diversity and complexity. Therefore, in this study, we propose two cost-effective methods to solve this problem: (1) vocabulary expansion and pretraining of multilingual LLM for specific languages, and (2) automatic and elaborate construction of multimodal datasets using GPT4-V. Based on015 these methods, we constructed a 91K English-Korean-Chinese multilingual, multimodal training dataset. Additionally, we developed a bilingual multimodal model that exhibits excellent performance in both Korean and English, surpassing existing approaches.

Jungyeul Park, Yige Chen, Kyuwon Kim et al.

This paper introduces UniDive for Korean, an integrated framework that bridges Universal Dependencies (UD) and Universal Morphology (UniMorph) to enhance the representation and processing of Korean {morphosyntax}. Korean's rich inflectional morphology and flexible word order pose challenges for existing frameworks, which often treat morphology and syntax separately, leading to inconsistencies in linguistic analysis. UniDive unifies syntactic and morphological annotations by preserving syntactic dependencies while incorporating UniMorph-derived features, improving consistency in annotation. We construct an integrated dataset and apply it to dependency parsing, demonstrating that enriched morphosyntactic features enhance parsing accuracy, particularly in distinguishing grammatical relations influenced by morphology. Our experiments, conducted with both encoder-only and decoder-only models, confirm that explicit morphological information contributes to more accurate syntactic analysis.

Hyeonseok Lim, Dongjae Shin, Seohyun Song et al.

We propose the VLR-Bench, a visual question answering (VQA) benchmark for evaluating vision language models (VLMs) based on retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Unlike existing evaluation datasets for external knowledge-based VQA, the proposed VLR-Bench includes five input passages. This allows testing of the ability to determine which passage is useful for answering a given query, a capability lacking in previous research. In this context, we constructed a dataset of 32,000 automatically generated instruction-following examples, which we denote as VLR-IF. This dataset is specifically designed to enhance the RAG capabilities of VLMs by enabling them to learn how to generate appropriate answers based on input passages. We evaluated the validity of the proposed benchmark and training data and verified its performance using the state-of-the-art Llama3-based VLM, the Llava-Llama-3 model. The proposed VLR-Bench and VLR-IF datasets are publicly available online.

Inhyo Lee, Junhyeong Lee, Jongwon Park et al.

Double perovskites (DPs) are promising candidates for sustainable energy technologies due to their compositional tunability and compatibility with low-energy fabrication, yet their vast design space poses a major challenge for conditional materials discovery. This work introduces a multi-agent, text gradient-driven framework that performs DP composition generation under natural-language conditions by integrating three complementary feedback sources: LLM-based self-evaluation, DP-specific domain knowledge-informed feedback, and ML surrogate-based feedback. Analogous to how knowledge-informed machine learning improves the reliability of conventional data-driven models, our framework incorporates domain-informed text gradients to guide the generative process toward physically meaningful regions of the DP composition space. Systematic comparison of three incremental configurations, (i) pure LLM generation, (ii) LLM generation with LLM reasoning-based feedback, and (iii) LLM generation with domain knowledge-guided feedback, shows that iterative guidance from knowledge-informed gradients improves stability-condition satisfaction without additional training data, achieving over 98% compositional validity and up to 54% stable or metastable candidates, surpassing both the LLM-only baseline (43%) and prior GAN-based results (27%). Analyses of ML-based gradients further reveal that they enhance performance in in-distribution (ID) regions but become unreliable in out-of-distribution (OOD) regimes. Overall, this work provides the first systematic analysis of multi-agent, knowledge-guided text gradients for DP discovery and establishes a generalizable blueprint for MAS-driven generative materials design aimed at advancing sustainable technologies.

Eunkyul Leah Jo, Kyuwon Kim, Xihan Wu et al.

We present in this work a new Universal Morphology dataset for Korean. Previously, the Korean language has been underrepresented in the field of morphological paradigms amongst hundreds of diverse world languages. Hence, we propose this Universal Morphological paradigms for the Korean language that preserve its distinct characteristics. For our K-UniMorph dataset, we outline each grammatical criterion in detail for the verbal endings, clarify how to extract inflected forms, and demonstrate how we generate the morphological schemata. This dataset adopts morphological feature schema from Sylak-Glassman et al. (2015) and Sylak-Glassman (2016) for the Korean language as we extract inflected verb forms from the Sejong morphologically analyzed corpus that is one of the largest annotated corpora for Korean. During the data creation, our methodology also includes investigating the correctness of the conversion from the Sejong corpus. Furthermore, we carry out the inflection task using three different Korean word forms: letters, syllables and morphemes. Finally, we discuss and describe future perspectives on Korean morphological paradigms and the dataset.

Yige Chen, KyungTae Lim, Jungyeul Park

In the paper, we propose a novel way of improving named entity recognition in the Korean language using its language-specific features. While the field of named entity recognition has been studied extensively in recent years, the mechanism of efficiently recognizing named entities in Korean has hardly been explored. This is because the Korean language has distinct linguistic properties that prevent models from achieving their best performances. Therefore, an annotation scheme for {Korean corpora} by adopting the CoNLL-U format, which decomposes Korean words into morphemes and reduces the ambiguity of named entities in the original segmentation that may contain functional morphemes such as postpositions and particles, is proposed herein. We investigate how the named entity tags are best represented in this morpheme-based scheme and implement an algorithm to convert word-based {and syllable-based Korean corpora} with named entities into the proposed morpheme-based format. Analyses of the results of {statistical and neural} models reveal that the proposed morpheme-based format is feasible, and the {varied} performances of the models under the influence of various additional language-specific features are demonstrated. Extrinsic conditions were also considered to observe the variance of the performances of the proposed models, given different types of data, including the original segmentation and different types of tagging formats.