Changbing Yang

Changbing Yang, Garrett Nicolai, Miikka Silfverberg

We investigate automatic interlinear glossing in low-resource settings. We augment a hard-attentional neural model with embedded translation information extracted from interlinear glossed text. After encoding these translations using large language models, specifically BERT and T5, we introduce a character-level decoder for generating glossed output. Aided by these enhancements, our model demonstrates an average improvement of 3.97\%-points over the previous state of the art on datasets from the SIGMORPHON 2023 Shared Task on Interlinear Glossing. In a simulated ultra low-resource setting, trained on as few as 100 sentences, our system achieves an average 9.78\%-point improvement over the plain hard-attentional baseline. These results highlight the critical role of translation information in boosting the system's performance, especially in processing and interpreting modest data sources. Our findings suggest a promising avenue for the documentation and preservation of languages, with our experiments on shared task datasets indicating significant advancements over the existing state of the art.

Changbing Yang, Garrett Nicolai

We introduce a transformer-based morpheme segmentation system that augments a low-resource training signal through multitask learning and LLM-generated synthetic data. Our framework jointly predicts morphological segments and glosses from orthographic input, leveraging shared linguistic representations obtained through a common documentary process to enhance model generalization. To further address data scarcity, we integrate synthetic training data generated by large language models (LLMs) using in-context learning. Experimental results on the SIGMORPHON 2023 dataset show that our approach significantly improves word-level segmentation accuracy and morpheme-level F1-score across multiple low-resource languages.

Yige Chen, Zelong Li, Cindy Zhang et al.

Chinese word segmentation is a foundational task in natural language processing (NLP), with far-reaching effects on syntactic analysis. Unlike alphabetic languages like English, Chinese lacks explicit word boundaries, making segmentation both necessary and inherently ambiguous. This study highlights the intricate relationship between word segmentation and syntactic parsing, providing a clearer understanding of how different segmentation strategies shape dependency structures in Chinese. Focusing on the Chinese GSD treebank, we analyze multiple word boundary schemes, each reflecting distinct linguistic and computational assumptions, and examine how they influence the resulting syntactic structures. To support detailed comparison, we introduce an interactive web-based visualization tool that displays parsing outcomes across segmentation methods.

Changbing Yang, Garrett Nicolai, Miikka Silfverberg

In this paper, we address the data scarcity problem in automatic data-driven glossing for low-resource languages by coordinating multiple sources of linguistic expertise. We supplement models with translations at both the token and sentence level as well as leverage the extensive linguistic capability of modern LLMs. Our enhancements lead to an average absolute improvement of 5%-points in word-level accuracy over the previous state of the art on a typologically diverse dataset spanning six low-resource languages. The improvements are particularly noticeable for the lowest-resourced language Gitksan, where we achieve a 10%-point improvement. Furthermore, in a simulated ultra-low resource setting for the same six languages, training on fewer than 100 glossed sentences, we establish an average 10%-point improvement in word-level accuracy over the previous state-of-the-art system.

Beilei Xiang, Changbing Yang, Yu Li et al.

Linguistically informed analyses of language models (LMs) contribute to the understanding and improvement of these models. Here, we introduce the corpus of Chinese linguistic minimal pairs (CLiMP), which can be used to investigate what knowledge Chinese LMs acquire. CLiMP consists of sets of 1,000 minimal pairs (MPs) for 16 syntactic contrasts in Mandarin, covering 9 major Mandarin linguistic phenomena. The MPs are semi-automatically generated, and human agreement with the labels in CLiMP is 95.8%. We evaluated 11 different LMs on CLiMP, covering n-grams, LSTMs, and Chinese BERT. We find that classifier-noun agreement and verb complement selection are the phenomena that models generally perform best at. However, models struggle the most with the ba construction, binding, and filler-gap dependencies. Overall, Chinese BERT achieves an 81.8% average accuracy, while the performances of LSTMs and 5-grams are only moderately above chance level.