Renfen Hu

Yuanchi Ma, Kaize Shi, Hui He et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in narrative generation. However, they often produce structurally homogenized stories, frequently following repetitive arrangements and combinations of plot events along with stereotypical resolutions. In this paper, we propose a novel theoretical framework for analysis by incorporating Proppian narratology and narrative functions. This framework is used to analyze the composition of narrative texts generated by LLMs to uncover their underlying narrative logic. Taking Chinese web literature as our research focus, we extend Propp's narrative theory, defining 34 narrative functions suited to modern web narrative structures. We further construct a human-annotated corpus to support the analysis of narrative structures within LLM-generated text. Experiments reveal that the primary reasons for the singular narrative logic and severe homogenization in generated texts are that current LLMs are unable to correctly comprehend the meanings of narrative functions and instead adhere to rigid narrative generation paradigms.

Ziliang Qiu, Renfen Hu

The evaluation of LLMs' creativity represents a crucial research domain, though challenges such as data contamination and costly human assessments often impede progress. Drawing inspiration from human creativity assessment, we propose PACE, asking LLMs to generate Parallel Association Chains to Evaluate their creativity. PACE minimizes the risk of data contamination and offers a straightforward, highly efficient evaluation, as evidenced by its strong correlation with Chatbot Arena Creative Writing rankings (Spearman's $ρ= 0.739$, $p < 0.001$) across various proprietary and open-source models. A comparative analysis of associative creativity between LLMs and humans reveals that while high-performing LLMs achieve scores comparable to average human performance, professional humans consistently outperform LLMs. Furthermore, linguistic analysis reveals that both humans and LLMs exhibit a trend of decreasing concreteness in their associations, and humans demonstrating a greater diversity of associative patterns.

Shen Li, Renfen Hu, Lijun Wang

General-purpose large language models demonstrate notable capabilities in language comprehension and generation, achieving results that are comparable to, or even surpass, human performance in many natural language processing tasks. Nevertheless, when general models are applied to some specific domains, e.g., Classical Chinese texts, their effectiveness is often unsatisfactory, and fine-tuning open-source foundational models similarly struggles to adequately incorporate domain-specific knowledge. To address this challenge, this study developed a large language model, AI Taiyan, specifically designed for understanding and generating Classical Chinese. Experiments show that with a reasonable model design, data processing, foundational training, and fine-tuning, satisfactory results can be achieved with only 1.8 billion parameters. In key tasks related to language processing of Classical Chinese such as punctuation, identification of allusions, explanation of word meanings, and translation between ancient and modern Chinese, this model exhibits a clear advantage over both general-purpose large models and domain-specific traditional models, achieving levels close to or surpassing human baselines. This research provides a reference for the efficient construction of specialized domain-specific large language models. Furthermore, the paper discusses the application of this model in fields such as the collation of ancient texts, dictionary editing, and language research, combined with case studies.

Zhiruo Wang, Renfen Hu

Recent NLP tasks have benefited a lot from pre-trained language models (LM) since they are able to encode knowledge of various aspects. However, current LM evaluations focus on downstream performance, hence lack to comprehensively inspect in which aspect and to what extent have they encoded knowledge. This paper addresses both queries by proposing four tasks on syntactic, semantic, commonsense, and factual knowledge, aggregating to a total of $39,308$ questions covering both linguistic and world knowledge in Chinese. Throughout experiments, our probes and knowledge data prove to be a reliable benchmark for evaluating pre-trained Chinese LMs. Our work is publicly available at https://github.com/ZhiruoWang/ChnEval.

Zhihui Yang, Yupei Wang, Kaijie Mo et al.

Despite significant progress in multimodal language models (LMs), it remains unclear whether visual grounding enhances their understanding of embodied knowledge compared to text-only models. To address this question, we propose a novel embodied knowledge understanding benchmark based on the perceptual theory from psychology, encompassing visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactory external senses, and interoception. The benchmark assesses the models' perceptual abilities across different sensory modalities through vector comparison and question-answering tasks with over 1,700 questions. By comparing 30 state-of-the-art LMs, we surprisingly find that vision-language models (VLMs) do not outperform text-only models in either task. Moreover, the models perform significantly worse in the visual dimension compared to other sensory dimensions. Further analysis reveals that the vector representations are easily influenced by word form and frequency, and the models struggle to answer questions involving spatial perception and reasoning. Our findings underscore the need for more effective integration of embodied knowledge in LMs to enhance their understanding of the physical world.

Yingying Wang, Cunliang Kong, Liner Yang et al.

Learner corpus collects language data produced by L2 learners, that is second or foreign-language learners. This resource is of great relevance for second language acquisition research, foreign-language teaching, and automatic grammatical error correction. However, there is little focus on learner corpus for Chinese as Foreign Language (CFL) learners. Therefore, we propose to construct a large-scale, multidimensional annotated Chinese learner corpus. To construct the corpus, we first obtain a large number of topic-rich texts generated by CFL learners. Then we design an annotation scheme including a sentence acceptability score as well as grammatical error and fluency-based corrections. We build a crowdsourcing platform to perform the annotation effectively (https://yaclc.wenmind.net). We name the corpus YACLC (Yet Another Chinese Learner Corpus) and release it as part of the CUGE benchmark (http://cuge.baai.ac.cn). By analyzing the original sentences and annotations in the corpus, we found that YACLC has a considerable size and very high annotation quality. We hope this corpus can further enhance the studies on Chinese International Education and Chinese automatic grammatical error correction.

Shen Li, Renfen Hu, Jinshan Wu

Word meaning has different aspects, while the existing word representation "compresses" these aspects into a single vector, and it needs further analysis to recover the information in different dimensions. Inspired by quantum probability, we represent words as density matrices, which are inherently capable of representing mixed states. The experiment shows that the density matrix representation can effectively capture different aspects of word meaning while maintaining comparable reliability with the vector representation. Furthermore, we propose a novel method to combine the coherent summation and incoherent summation in the computation of both vectors and density matrices. It achieves consistent improvement on word analogy task.

Shen Li, Chenhao Su, Renfen Hu et al.

Dropout is known as an effective way to reduce overfitting via preventing co-adaptations of units. In this paper, we theoretically prove that the co-adaptation problem still exists after using dropout due to the correlations among the inputs. Based on the proof, we further propose Self-Balanced Dropout, a novel dropout method which uses a trainable variable to balance the influence of the input correlation on parameter update. We evaluate Self-Balanced Dropout on a range of tasks with both simple and complex models. The experimental results show that the mechanism can effectively solve the co-adaption problem to some extent and significantly improve the performance on all tasks.

Hengru Xu, Shen Li, Renfen Hu et al.

Dropout is used to avoid overfitting by randomly dropping units from the neural networks during training. Inspired by dropout, this paper presents GI-Dropout, a novel dropout method integrating with global information to improve neural networks for text classification. Unlike the traditional dropout method in which the units are dropped randomly according to the same probability, we aim to use explicit instructions based on global information of the dataset to guide the training process. With GI-Dropout, the model is supposed to pay more attention to inapparent features or patterns. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the dropout with global information on seven text classification tasks, including sentiment analysis and topic classification.

Shen Li, Zhe Zhao, Renfen Hu et al.

Analogical reasoning is effective in capturing linguistic regularities. This paper proposes an analogical reasoning task on Chinese. After delving into Chinese lexical knowledge, we sketch 68 implicit morphological relations and 28 explicit semantic relations. A big and balanced dataset CA8 is then built for this task, including 17813 questions. Furthermore, we systematically explore the influences of vector representations, context features, and corpora on analogical reasoning. With the experiments, CA8 is proved to be a reliable benchmark for evaluating Chinese word embeddings.