Lis Kanashiro Pereira

Lis Kanashiro Pereira, Ichiro Kobayashi

We propose a multilingual adversarial training model for determining whether a sentence contains an idiomatic expression. Given that a key challenge with this task is the limited size of annotated data, our model relies on pre-trained contextual representations from different multi-lingual state-of-the-art transformer-based language models (i.e., multilingual BERT and XLM-RoBERTa), and on adversarial training, a training method for further enhancing model generalization and robustness. Without relying on any human-crafted features, knowledge bases, or additional datasets other than the target datasets, our model achieved competitive results and ranked 6th place in SubTask A (zero-shot) setting and 15th place in SubTask A (one-shot) setting.

Wan Jou She, Lis Kanashiro Pereira, Fei Cheng et al.

This paper introduces EmplifAI, a Japanese empathetic dialogue dataset designed to support patients coping with chronic medical conditions. They often experience a wide range of positive and negative emotions (e.g., hope and despair) that shift across different stages of disease management. EmplifAI addresses this complexity by providing situation-based dialogues grounded in 28 fine-grained emotion categories, adapted and validated from the GoEmotions taxonomy. The dataset includes 280 medically contextualized situations and 4125 two-turn dialogues, collected through crowdsourcing and expert review. To evaluate emotional alignment in empathetic dialogues, we assessed model predictions on situation--dialogue pairs using BERTScore across multiple large language models (LLMs), achieving F1 scores of 0.83. Fine-tuning a baseline Japanese LLM (LLM-jp-3.1-13b-instruct4) with EmplifAI resulted in notable improvements in fluency, general empathy, and emotion-specific empathy. Furthermore, we compared the scores assigned by LLM-as-a-Judge and human raters on dialogues generated by multiple LLMs to validate our evaluation pipeline and discuss the insights and potential risks derived from the correlation analysis.

Shiho Matta, Lis Kanashiro Pereira, Peitao Han et al.

Modern vision-language models (VLMs) excel at many multimodal tasks, yet their grasp of temporal information in video remains weak and, crucially, under-evaluated. We probe this gap with a deceptively simple but revealing challenge: judging the arrow of time (AoT)-whether a short clip is played forward or backward. We introduce AoT-PsyPhyBENCH, a psychophysically validated benchmark that tests whether VLMs can infer temporal direction in natural videos using the same stimuli and behavioral baselines established for humans. Our comprehensive evaluation of open-weight and proprietary, reasoning and non-reasoning VLMs reveals that most models perform near chance, and even the best lag far behind human accuracy on physically irreversible processes (e.g., free fall, diffusion/explosion) and causal manual actions (division/addition) that humans recognize almost instantly. These results highlight a fundamental gap in current multimodal systems: while they capture rich visual-semantic correlations, they lack the inductive biases required for temporal continuity and causal understanding. We release the code and data for AoT-PsyPhyBENCH to encourage further progress in the physical and temporal reasoning capabilities of VLMs.

Peitao Han, Lis Kanashiro Pereira, Fei Cheng et al.

Existing in-context learning (ICL) methods for relation extraction (RE) often prioritize language similarity over structural similarity, which can lead to overlooking entity relationships. To address this, we propose an AMR-enhanced retrieval-based ICL method for RE. Our model retrieves in-context examples based on semantic structure similarity between task inputs and training samples. Evaluations on four standard English RE datasets show that our model outperforms baselines in the unsupervised setting across all datasets. In the supervised setting, it achieves state-of-the-art results on three datasets and competitive results on the fourth.

Felix Virgo, Fei Cheng, Lis Kanashiro Pereira et al.

We propose a voting-driven semi-supervised approach to automatically acquire the typical duration of an event and use it as pseudo-labeled data. The human evaluation demonstrates that our pseudo labels exhibit surprisingly high accuracy and balanced coverage. In the temporal commonsense QA task, experimental results show that using only pseudo examples of 400 events, we achieve performance comparable to the existing BERT-based weakly supervised approaches that require a significant amount of training examples. When compared to the RoBERTa baselines, our best approach establishes state-of-the-art performance with a 7% improvement in Exact Match.

Yuki Taya, Lis Kanashiro Pereira, Fei Cheng et al.

We propose an ensemble model for predicting the lexical complexity of words and multiword expressions (MWEs). The model receives as input a sentence with a target word or MWEand outputs its complexity score. Given that a key challenge with this task is the limited size of annotated data, our model relies on pretrained contextual representations from different state-of-the-art transformer-based language models (i.e., BERT and RoBERTa), and on a variety of training methods for further enhancing model generalization and robustness:multi-step fine-tuning and multi-task learning, and adversarial training. Additionally, we propose to enrich contextual representations by adding hand-crafted features during training. Our model achieved competitive results and ranked among the top-10 systems in both sub-tasks.