Pin-Er Chen

Da-Chen Lian, Ri-Sheng Huang, Pin-Er Chen et al.

We propose LingBench++, a linguistically-informed benchmark and reasoning framework designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on complex linguistic tasks inspired by the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL). Unlike prior benchmarks that focus solely on final answer accuracy, LingBench++ provides structured reasoning traces, stepwise evaluation protocols, and rich typological metadata across over 90 low-resource and cross-cultural languages. We further develop a multi-agent architecture integrating grammatical knowledge retrieval, tool-augmented reasoning, and deliberate hypothesis testing. Through systematic comparisons of baseline and our proposed agentic models, we demonstrate that models equipped with external knowledge sources and iterative reasoning outperform single-pass approaches in both accuracy and interpretability. LingBench++ offers a comprehensive foundation for advancing linguistically grounded, culturally informed, and cognitively plausible reasoning in LLMs.

Pin-Er Chen, Da-Chen Lian, Shu-Kai Hsieh et al.

The recent advances in Legal Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the landscape of legal research and practice by automating tasks, enhancing research precision, and supporting complex decision-making processes. However, effectively adapting LLMs to the legal domain remains challenging due to the complexity of legal reasoning, the need for precise interpretation of specialized language, and the potential for hallucinations. This paper examines the efficacy of Domain-Adaptive Continual Pre-Training (DACP) in improving the legal reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Through a series of experiments on legal reasoning tasks within the Taiwanese legal framework, we demonstrate that while DACP enhances domain-specific knowledge, it does not uniformly improve performance across all legal tasks. We discuss the trade-offs involved in DACP, particularly its impact on model generalization and performance in prompt-based tasks, and propose directions for future research to optimize domain adaptation strategies in legal AI.

Po-Ya Angela Wang, Pin-Er Chen, Hsin-Yu Chou et al.

Multimodal corpora have become an essential language resource for language science and grounded natural language processing (NLP) systems due to the growing need to understand and interpret human communication across various channels. In this paper, we first present our efforts in building the first Multimodal Corpus for Languages in Taiwan (MultiMoco). Based on the corpus, we conduct a case study investigating the Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis (LRH), specifically examining whether the hand gestures co-occurring with speech constants facilitate lexical retrieval or serve other discourse functions. With detailed annotations on eight parliamentary interpellations in Taiwan Mandarin, we explore the co-occurrence between speech constants and non-verbal features (i.e., head movement, face movement, hand gesture, and function of hand gesture). Our findings suggest that while hand gestures do serve as facilitators for lexical retrieval in some cases, they also serve the purpose of information emphasis. This study highlights the potential of the MultiMoco Corpus to provide an important resource for in-depth analysis and further research in multimodal communication studies.

Pin-Er Chen, Po-Ya Angela Wang, Hsin-Yu Chou et al.

This paper explores the grounding issue regarding multimodal semantic representation from a computational cognitive-linguistic view. We annotate images from the Flickr30k dataset with five perceptual properties: Affordance, Perceptual Salience, Object Number, Gaze Cueing, and Ecological Niche Association (ENA), and examine their association with textual elements in the image captions. Our findings reveal that images with Gibsonian affordance show a higher frequency of captions containing 'holding-verbs' and 'container-nouns' compared to images displaying telic affordance. Perceptual Salience, Object Number, and ENA are also associated with the choice of linguistic expressions. Our study demonstrates that comprehensive understanding of objects or events requires cognitive attention, semantic nuances in language, and integration across multiple modalities. We highlight the vital importance of situated meaning and affordance grounding in natural language understanding, with the potential to advance human-like interpretation in various scenarios.