Grammatical Error Correction for Code-Switched Sentences by Learners of English

Code-switching (CSW) is a common phenomenon among multilingual speakers where multiple languages are used in a single discourse or utterance. Mixed language utterances may still contain grammatical errors however, yet most existing Grammar Error Correction (GEC) systems have been trained on monolingual data and not developed with CSW in mind. In this work, we conduct the first exploration into the use of GEC systems on CSW text. Through this exploration, we propose a novel method of generating synthetic CSW GEC datasets by translating different spans of text within existing GEC corpora. We then investigate different methods of selecting these spans based on CSW ratio, switch-point factor and linguistic constraints, and identify how they affect the performance of GEC systems on CSW text. Our best model achieves an average increase of 1.57 $F_{0.5}$ across 3 CSW test sets (English-Chinese, English-Korean and English-Japanese) without affecting the model's performance on a monolingual dataset. We furthermore discovered that models trained on one CSW language generalise relatively well to other typologically similar CSW languages.

Can We Catch the Elephant? The Evolvement of Hallucination Evaluation on Natural Language Generation: A Survey

Hallucination in Natural Language Generation (NLG) is like the elephant in the room, obvious but often overlooked until recent achievements significantly improved the fluency and grammatical accuracy of generated text. For Large Language Models (LLMs), hallucinations can happen in various downstream tasks and casual conversations, which need accurate assessment to enhance reliability and safety. However, current studies on hallucination evaluation vary greatly, and people still find it difficult to sort out and select the most appropriate evaluation methods. Moreover, as NLP research gradually shifts to the domain of LLMs, it brings new challenges to this direction. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the evolvement of hallucination evaluation methods, aiming to address three key aspects: 1) Diverse definitions and granularity of facts; 2) The categories of automatic evaluators and their applicability; 3) Unresolved issues and future directions.

Language Proficiency and F0 Entrainment: A Study of L2 English Imitation in Italian, French, and Slovak Speakers

This study explores F0 entrainment in second language (L2) English speech imitation during an Alternating Reading Task (ART). Participants with Italian, French, and Slovak native languages imitated English utterances, and their F0 entrainment was quantified using the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance between the parameterized F0 contours of the imitated utterances and those of the model utterances. Results indicate a nuanced relationship between L2 English proficiency and entrainment: speakers with higher proficiency generally exhibit less entrainment in pitch variation and declination. However, within dyads, the more proficient speakers demonstrate a greater ability to mimic pitch range, leading to increased entrainment. This suggests that proficiency influences entrainment differently at individual and dyadic levels, highlighting the complex interplay between language skill and prosodic adaptation.

ART: The Alternating Reading Task Corpus for Speech Entrainment and Imitation

We introduce the Alternating Reading Task (ART) Corpus, a collection of dyadic sentence reading for studying the entrainment and imitation behaviour in speech communication. The ART corpus features three experimental conditions - solo reading, alternating reading, and deliberate imitation - as well as three sub-corpora encompassing French-, Italian-, and Slovak-accented English. This design allows systematic investigation of speech entrainment in a controlled and less-spontaneous setting. Alongside detailed transcriptions, it includes English proficiency scores, demographics, and in-experiment questionnaires for probing linguistic, personal and interpersonal influences on entrainment. Our presentation covers its design, collection, annotation processes, initial analysis, and future research prospects.

Assessing the Efficacy of Grammar Error Correction: A Human Evaluation Approach in the Japanese Context

In this study, we evaluated the performance of the state-of-the-art sequence tagging grammar error detection and correction model (SeqTagger) using Japanese university students' writing samples. With an automatic annotation toolkit, ERRANT, we first evaluated SeqTagger's performance on error correction with human expert correction as the benchmark. Then a human-annotated approach was adopted to evaluate Seqtagger's performance in error detection using a subset of the writing dataset. Results indicated a precision of 63.66% and a recall of 20.19% for error correction in the full dataset. For the subset, after manual exclusion of irrelevant errors such as semantic and mechanical ones, the model shows an adjusted precision of 97.98% and an adjusted recall of 42.98% for error detection, indicating the model's high accuracy but also its conservativeness. Thematic analysis on errors undetected by the model revealed that determiners and articles, especially the latter, were predominant. Specifically, in terms of context-independent errors, the model occasionally overlooked basic ones and faced challenges with overly erroneous or complex structures. Meanwhile, context-dependent errors, notably those related to tense and noun number, as well as those possibly influenced by the students' first language (L1), remained particularly challenging.

An LLM-Enhanced Adversarial Editing System for Lexical Simplification

Lexical Simplification (LS) aims to simplify text at the lexical level. Existing methods rely heavily on annotated data, making it challenging to apply in low-resource scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel LS method without parallel corpora. This method employs an Adversarial Editing System with guidance from a confusion loss and an invariance loss to predict lexical edits in the original sentences. Meanwhile, we introduce an innovative LLM-enhanced loss to enable the distillation of knowledge from Large Language Models (LLMs) into a small-size LS system. From that, complex words within sentences are masked and a Difficulty-aware Filling module is crafted to replace masked positions with simpler words. At last, extensive experimental results and analyses on three benchmark LS datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Knowledge-to-SQL: Enhancing SQL Generation with Data Expert LLM

Generating accurate SQL for user queries (text-to-SQL) is a long-standing problem since the generation of the SQL requires comprehending the query and database and retrivale the accurate data from the database accordingly. Existing models rely on the comprehensive ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate the SQL according to the database schema. However, there is some necessary knowledge that is not explicitly included in the database schema or has been learned by LLMs. Thus, the generated SQL of the knowledge-insufficient queries may be inaccurate, which negatively impacts the robustness of the text-to-SQL models. To deal with this situation, we propose the Knowledge-to-SQL framework, which employs tailored Data Expert LLM (DELLM) to provide helpful knowledge for all types of text-to-SQL models. Specifically, we provide the detailed design of DELLM, in terms of table reading, and the basic fine-tuning process. We further provide a Reinforcement Learning via Database Feedback (RLDBF) training strategy to guide the DELLM to generate more helpful knowledge for LLMs. Extensive experiments verify DELLM can enhance the state-of-the-art LLMs on text-to-SQL tasks. The model structure and the parameter weight of DELLM are released for further research.

Multi-Behavior Collaborative Filtering with Partial Order Graph Convolutional Networks

Representing the information of multiple behaviors in the single graph collaborative filtering (CF) vector has been a long-standing challenge. This is because different behaviors naturally form separate behavior graphs and learn separate CF embeddings. Existing models merge the separate embeddings by appointing the CF embeddings for some behaviors as the primary embedding and utilizing other auxiliaries to enhance the primary embedding. However, this approach often results in the joint embedding performing well on the main tasks but poorly on the auxiliary ones. To address the problem arising from the separate behavior graphs, we propose the concept of Partial Order Graphs (POG). POG defines the partial order relation of multiple behaviors and models behavior combinations as weighted edges to merge separate behavior graphs into a joint POG. Theoretical proof verifies that POG can be generalized to any given set of multiple behaviors. Based on POG, we propose the tailored Partial Order Graph Convolutional Networks (POGCN) that convolute neighbors' information while considering the behavior relations between users and items. POGCN also introduces a partial-order BPR sampling strategy for efficient and effective multiple-behavior CF training. POGCN has been successfully deployed on the homepage of Alibaba for two months, providing recommendation services for over one billion users. Extensive offline experiments conducted on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that POGCN outperforms state-of-the-art multi-behavior baselines across all types of behaviors. Furthermore, online A/B tests confirm the superiority of POGCN in billion-scale recommender systems.

Prompting open-source and commercial language models for grammatical error correction of English learner text

Thanks to recent advances in generative AI, we are able to prompt large language models (LLMs) to produce texts which are fluent and grammatical. In addition, it has been shown that we can elicit attempts at grammatical error correction (GEC) from LLMs when prompted with ungrammatical input sentences. We evaluate how well LLMs can perform at GEC by measuring their performance on established benchmark datasets. We go beyond previous studies, which only examined GPT* models on a selection of English GEC datasets, by evaluating seven open-source and three commercial LLMs on four established GEC benchmarks. We investigate model performance and report results against individual error types. Our results indicate that LLMs do not always outperform supervised English GEC models except in specific contexts -- namely commercial LLMs on benchmarks annotated with fluency corrections as opposed to minimal edits. We find that several open-source models outperform commercial ones on minimal edit benchmarks, and that in some settings zero-shot prompting is just as competitive as few-shot prompting.

Pre-trained Model Guided Fine-Tuning for Zero-Shot Adversarial Robustness

Large-scale pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP have demonstrated impressive performance across various tasks, and exhibit remarkable zero-shot generalization capability, while they are also vulnerable to imperceptible adversarial examples. Existing works typically employ adversarial training (fine-tuning) as a defense method against adversarial examples. However, direct application to the CLIP model may result in overfitting, compromising the model's capacity for generalization. In this paper, we propose Pre-trained Model Guided Adversarial Fine-Tuning (PMG-AFT) method, which leverages supervision from the original pre-trained model by carefully designing an auxiliary branch, to enhance the model's zero-shot adversarial robustness. Specifically, PMG-AFT minimizes the distance between the features of adversarial examples in the target model and those in the pre-trained model, aiming to preserve the generalization features already captured by the pre-trained model. Extensive Experiments on 15 zero-shot datasets demonstrate that PMG-AFT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method, improving the top-1 robust accuracy by an average of 4.99%. Furthermore, our approach consistently improves clean accuracy by an average of 8.72%.