0.4CLMay 18
From BERT to T5: A Study of Named Entity RecognitionMei Jia
Named entity recognition (NER) has been one of the essential preliminary steps in modern NLP applications. This report focuses on implementing the NER task on finetuning two pretrained models: (i) an encoder-only model (BERT) with a simple classification head, and (ii) a sequence-to-sequence model (T5) with few-shot prompts. Under the original 7-class tag and 3-class simplified tag schemes, BERT is applied a weighted cross-entropy for training loss, and T5 is fine-tuned with two validation strategies. It also conducted an ablation study with different hyperparameters. Moreover, the related analysis provides valuable insights into common errors in BERT and the two models' performance. Based on a bunch of performance metrics, this report aims to compare the above two architectures and explore their abilities in the sequence labelling task, laying the groundwork for further practical use cases.
1.4CLMay 18
FOL2NS: Generating Natural Sentences from First-Order LogicMei Jia
Translating formal language into natural language is a foundational challenge in NLP, driving various downstream applications in semantic parsing, theorem validation, and question answering. In this study, we introduce First-Order Logic to Natural Sentence (FOL2NS), a neurosymbolic framework designed to generate synthetic FOL formulas and convert them into natural human expressions. It handles deeply nested structures with varying quantifier depths (QD), which are rarely captured by existing corpora. By combining rule-driven modules with fine-tuned language models, FOL2NS enhances the diversity and coverage of the generated samples. In our experiments, we systematically evaluate the framework's capabilities through both character-level analysis and overall performance metrics. Experimental results show that FOL2NS can reliably produce well-formed templates and fluent statements, but it faces challenges in achieving precise semantic representations and natural generation as structural complexity increases.