Japanese Lexical Complexity for Non-Native Readers: A New Dataset

Lexical complexity prediction (LCP) is the task of predicting the complexity of words in a text on a continuous scale. It plays a vital role in simplifying or annotating complex words to assist readers. To study lexical complexity in Japanese, we construct the first Japanese LCP dataset. Our dataset provides separate complexity scores for Chinese/Korean annotators and others to address the readers' L1-specific needs. In the baseline experiment, we demonstrate the effectiveness of a BERT-based system for Japanese LCP.

Second Language Acquisition of Neural Language Models

With the success of neural language models (LMs), their language acquisition has gained much attention. This work sheds light on the second language (L2) acquisition of LMs, while previous work has typically explored their first language (L1) acquisition. Specifically, we trained bilingual LMs with a scenario similar to human L2 acquisition and analyzed their cross-lingual transfer from linguistic perspectives. Our exploratory experiments demonstrated that the L1 pretraining accelerated their linguistic generalization in L2, and language transfer configurations (e.g., the L1 choice, and presence of parallel texts) substantially affected their generalizations. These clarify their (non-)human-like L2 acquisition in particular aspects.

Arukikata Travelogue Dataset with Geographic Entity Mention, Coreference, and Link Annotation

Geoparsing is a fundamental technique for analyzing geo-entity information in text. We focus on document-level geoparsing, which considers geographic relatedness among geo-entity mentions, and presents a Japanese travelogue dataset designed for evaluating document-level geoparsing systems. Our dataset comprises 200 travelogue documents with rich geo-entity information: 12,171 mentions, 6,339 coreference clusters, and 2,551 geo-entities linked to geo-database entries.

Arukikata Travelogue Dataset

We have constructed Arukikata Travelogue Dataset and released it free of charge for academic research. This dataset is a Japanese text dataset with a total of over 31 million words, comprising 4,672 Japanese domestic travelogues and 9,607 overseas travelogues. Before providing our dataset, there was a scarcity of widely available travelogue data for research purposes, and each researcher had to prepare their own data. This hinders the replication of existing studies and fair comparative analysis of experimental results. Our dataset enables any researchers to conduct investigation on the same data and to ensure transparency and reproducibility in research. In this paper, we describe the academic significance, characteristics, and prospects of our dataset.

N-best Response-based Analysis of Contradiction-awareness in Neural Response Generation Models

Avoiding the generation of responses that contradict the preceding context is a significant challenge in dialogue response generation. One feasible method is post-processing, such as filtering out contradicting responses from a resulting n-best response list. In this scenario, the quality of the n-best list considerably affects the occurrence of contradictions because the final response is chosen from this n-best list. This study quantitatively analyzes the contextual contradiction-awareness of neural response generation models using the consistency of the n-best lists. Particularly, we used polar questions as stimulus inputs for concise and quantitative analyses. Our tests illustrate the contradiction-awareness of recent neural response generation models and methodologies, followed by a discussion of their properties and limitations.

Instance-Based Neural Dependency Parsing

Interpretable rationales for model predictions are crucial in practical applications. We develop neural models that possess an interpretable inference process for dependency parsing. Our models adopt instance-based inference, where dependency edges are extracted and labeled by comparing them to edges in a training set. The training edges are explicitly used for the predictions; thus, it is easy to grasp the contribution of each edge to the predictions. Our experiments show that our instance-based models achieve competitive accuracy with standard neural models and have the reasonable plausibility of instance-based explanations.

Pseudo Zero Pronoun Resolution Improves Zero Anaphora Resolution

The use of pretrained masked language models (MLMs) has drastically improved the performance of zero anaphora resolution (ZAR). We further expand this approach with a novel pretraining task and finetuning method for Japanese ZAR. Our pretraining task aims to acquire anaphoric relational knowledge necessary for ZAR from a large-scale raw corpus. The ZAR model is finetuned in the same manner as pretraining. Our experiments show that combining the proposed methods surpasses previous state-of-the-art performance with large margins, providing insight on the remaining challenges.

An Empirical Study of Contextual Data Augmentation for Japanese Zero Anaphora Resolution

One critical issue of zero anaphora resolution (ZAR) is the scarcity of labeled data. This study explores how effectively this problem can be alleviated by data augmentation. We adopt a state-of-the-art data augmentation method, called the contextual data augmentation (CDA), that generates labeled training instances using a pretrained language model. The CDA has been reported to work well for several other natural language processing tasks, including text classification and machine translation. This study addresses two underexplored issues on CDA, that is, how to reduce the computational cost of data augmentation and how to ensure the quality of the generated data. We also propose two methods to adapt CDA to ZAR: [MASK]-based augmentation and linguistically-controlled masking. Consequently, the experimental results on Japanese ZAR show that our methods contribute to both the accuracy gain and the computation cost reduction. Our closer analysis reveals that the proposed method can improve the quality of the augmented training data when compared to the conventional CDA.

Corruption Is Not All Bad: Incorporating Discourse Structure into Pre-training via Corruption for Essay Scoring

Existing approaches for automated essay scoring and document representation learning typically rely on discourse parsers to incorporate discourse structure into text representation. However, the performance of parsers is not always adequate, especially when they are used on noisy texts, such as student essays. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised pre-training approach to capture discourse structure of essays in terms of coherence and cohesion that does not require any discourse parser or annotation. We introduce several types of token, sentence and paragraph-level corruption techniques for our proposed pre-training approach and augment masked language modeling pre-training with our pre-training method to leverage both contextualized and discourse information. Our proposed unsupervised approach achieves new state-of-the-art result on essay Organization scoring task.