Evaluating Compositional Approaches for Focus and Sentiment Analysis

This paper summarizes the results of evaluating a compositional approach for Focus Analysis (FA) in Linguistics and Sentiment Analysis (SA) in Natural Language Processing (NLP). While quantitative evaluations of compositional and non-compositional approaches in SA exist in NLP, similar quantitative evaluations are very rare in FA in Linguistics that deal with linguistic expressions representing focus or emphasis such as "it was John who left". We fill this gap in research by arguing that compositional rules in SA also apply to FA because FA and SA are closely related meaning that SA is part of FA. Our compositional approach in SA exploits basic syntactic rules such as rules of modification, coordination, and negation represented in the formalism of Universal Dependencies (UDs) in English and applied to words representing sentiments from sentiment dictionaries. Some of the advantages of our compositional analysis method for SA in contrast to non-compositional analysis methods are interpretability and explainability. We test the accuracy of our compositional approach and compare it with a non-compositional approach VADER that uses simple heuristic rules to deal with negation, coordination and modification. In contrast to previous related work that evaluates compositionality in SA on long reviews, this study uses more appropriate datasets to evaluate compositionality. In addition, we generalize the results of compositional approaches in SA to compositional approaches in FA.

Parsing the Switch: LLM-Based UD Annotation for Complex Code-Switched and Low-Resource Languages

Code-switching presents a complex challenge for syntactic analysis, especially in low-resource language settings where annotated data is scarce. While recent work has explored the use of large language models (LLMs) for sequence-level tagging, few approaches systematically investigate how well these models capture syntactic structure in code-switched contexts. Moreover, existing parsers trained on monolingual treebanks often fail to generalize to multilingual and mixed-language input. To address this gap, we introduce the BiLingua Parser, an LLM-based annotation pipeline designed to produce Universal Dependencies (UD) annotations for code-switched text. First, we develop a prompt-based framework for Spanish-English and Spanish-Guaran\'i data, combining few-shot LLM prompting with expert review. Second, we release two annotated datasets, including the first Spanish-Guaran\'i UD-parsed corpus. Third, we conduct a detailed syntactic analysis of switch points across language pairs and communicative contexts. Experimental results show that BiLingua Parser achieves up to 95.29% LAS after expert revision, significantly outperforming prior baselines and multilingual parsers. These results show that LLMs, when carefully guided, can serve as practical tools for bootstrapping syntactic resources in under-resourced, code-switched environments. Data and source code are available at https://github.com/N3mika/ParsingProject

Nested Named Entity Recognition as Single-Pass Sequence Labeling

We cast nested named entity recognition (NNER) as a sequence labeling task by leveraging prior work that linearizes constituency structures, effectively reducing the complexity of this structured prediction problem to straightforward token classification. By combining these constituency linearizations with pretrained encoders, our method captures nested entities while performing exactly $n$ tagging actions. Our approach achieves competitive performance compared to less efficient systems, and it can be trained using any off-the-shelf sequence labeling library.

Hierarchical Bracketing Encodings for Dependency Parsing as Tagging

We present a family of encodings for sequence labeling dependency parsing, based on the concept of hierarchical bracketing. We prove that the existing 4-bit projective encoding belongs to this family, but it is suboptimal in the number of labels used to encode a tree. We derive an optimal hierarchical bracketing, which minimizes the number of symbols used and encodes projective trees using only 12 distinct labels (vs. 16 for the 4-bit encoding). We also extend optimal hierarchical bracketing to support arbitrary non-projectivity in a more compact way than previous encodings. Our new encodings yield competitive accuracy on a diverse set of treebanks.

Better Benchmarking LLMs for Zero-Shot Dependency Parsing

While LLMs excel in zero-shot tasks, their performance in linguistic challenges like syntactic parsing has been less scrutinized. This paper studies state-of-the-art open-weight LLMs on the task by comparing them to baselines that do not have access to the input sentence, including baselines that have not been used in this context such as random projective trees or optimal linear arrangements. The results show that most of the tested LLMs cannot outperform the best uninformed baselines, with only the newest and largest versions of LLaMA doing so for most languages, and still achieving rather low performance. Thus, accurate zero-shot syntactic parsing is not forthcoming with open LLMs.

Grandes modelos de lenguaje: de la predicción de palabras a la comprensión?

Large language models, such as the well-known ChatGPT, have brought about an unexpected revolution in the field of artificial intelligence. On the one hand, they have numerous practical applications and enormous potential still to be explored. On the other hand, they are also the subject of debate from scientific, philosophical, and social perspectives: there are doubts about the exact mechanisms of their functioning and their actual capacity for language comprehension, and their applications raise ethical dilemmas. In this chapter, we describe how this technology has been developed and the fundamentals of its operation, allowing us to better understand its capabilities and limitations and to introduce some of the main debates surrounding its development and use. -- Los grandes modelos de lenguaje, como el conocido ChatGPT, han supuesto una inesperada revoluci\'on en el \'ambito de la inteligencia artificial. Por un lado, cuentan con multitud de aplicaciones pr\'acticas y un enorme potencial todav\'ia por explorar. Por otro lado, son tambi\'en objeto de debate, tanto desde el punto de vista cient\'ifico y filos\'ofico como social: hay dudas sobre los mecanismos exactos de su funcionamiento y su capacidad real de comprensi\'on del lenguaje, y sus aplicaciones plantean dilemas \'eticos. En este cap\'itulo describimos c\'omo se ha llegado a esta tecnolog\'ia y los fundamentos de su funcionamiento, permiti\'endonos as\'i comprender mejor sus capacidades y limitaciones e introducir algunos de los principales debates que rodean su desarrollo y uso.

Dependency Graph Parsing as Sequence Labeling

Various linearizations have been proposed to cast syntactic dependency parsing as sequence labeling. However, these approaches do not support more complex graph-based representations, such as semantic dependencies or enhanced universal dependencies, as they cannot handle reentrancy or cycles. By extending them, we define a range of unbounded and bounded linearizations that can be used to cast graph parsing as a tagging task, enlarging the toolbox of problems that can be solved under this paradigm. Experimental results on semantic dependency and enhanced UD parsing show that with a good choice of encoding, sequence-labeling dependency graph parsers combine high efficiency with accuracies close to the state of the art, in spite of their simplicity.

Grammar Assistance Using Syntactic Structures (GAUSS)

Automatic grammar coaching serves an important purpose of advising on standard grammar varieties while not imposing social pressures or reinforcing established social roles. Such systems already exist but most of them are for English and few of them offer meaningful feedback. Furthermore, they typically rely completely on neural methods and require huge computational resources which most of the world cannot afford. We propose a grammar coaching system for Spanish that relies on (i) a rich linguistic formalism capable of giving informative feedback; and (ii) a faster parsing algorithm which makes using this formalism practical in a real-world application. The approach is feasible for any language for which there is a computerized grammar and is less reliant on expensive and environmentally costly neural methods. We seek to contribute to Greener AI and to address global education challenges by raising the standards of inclusivity and engagement in grammar coaching.

Dancing in the syntax forest: fast, accurate and explainable sentiment analysis with SALSA

Sentiment analysis is a key technology for companies and institutions to gauge public opinion on products, services or events. However, for large-scale sentiment analysis to be accessible to entities with modest computational resources, it needs to be performed in a resource-efficient way. While some efficient sentiment analysis systems exist, they tend to apply shallow heuristics, which do not take into account syntactic phenomena that can radically change sentiment. Conversely, alternatives that take syntax into account are computationally expensive. The SALSA project, funded by the European Research Council under a Proof-of-Concept Grant, aims to leverage recently-developed fast syntactic parsing techniques to build sentiment analysis systems that are lightweight and efficient, while still providing accuracy and explainability through the explicit use of syntax. We intend our approaches to be the backbone of a working product of interest for SMEs to use in production.

The Unlikely Duel: Evaluating Creative Writing in LLMs through a Unique Scenario

This is a summary of the paper "A Confederacy of Models: a Comprehensive Evaluation of LLMs on Creative Writing", which was published in Findings of EMNLP 2023. We evaluate a range of recent state-of-the-art, instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) on an English creative writing task, and compare them to human writers. For this purpose, we use a specifically-tailored prompt (based on an epic combat between Ignatius J. Reilly, main character of John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces", and a pterodactyl) to minimize the risk of training data leakage and force the models to be creative rather than reusing existing stories. The same prompt is presented to LLMs and human writers, and evaluation is performed by humans using a detailed rubric including various aspects like fluency, style, originality or humor. Results show that some state-of-the-art commercial LLMs match or slightly outperform our human writers in most of the evaluated dimensions. Open-source LLMs lag behind. Humans keep a close lead in originality, and only the top three LLMs can handle humor at human-like levels.