LM-Critic: Language Models for Unsupervised Grammatical Error Correction

Grammatical error correction (GEC) requires a set of labeled ungrammatical / grammatical sentence pairs for training, but obtaining such annotation can be prohibitively expensive. Recently, the Break-It-Fix-It (BIFI) framework has demonstrated strong results on learning to repair a broken program without any labeled examples, but this relies on a perfect critic (e.g., a compiler) that returns whether an example is valid or not, which does not exist for the GEC task. In this work, we show how to leverage a pretrained language model (LM) in defining an LM-Critic, which judges a sentence to be grammatical if the LM assigns it a higher probability than its local perturbations. We apply this LM-Critic and BIFI along with a large set of unlabeled sentences to bootstrap realistic ungrammatical / grammatical pairs for training a corrector. We evaluate our approach on GEC datasets on multiple domains (CoNLL-2014, BEA-2019, GMEG-wiki and GMEG-yahoo) and show that it outperforms existing methods in both the unsupervised setting (+7.7 F0.5) and the supervised setting (+0.5 F0.5).

Controlled Evaluation of Grammatical Knowledge in Mandarin Chinese Language Models

Prior work has shown that structural supervision helps English language models learn generalizations about syntactic phenomena such as subject-verb agreement. However, it remains unclear if such an inductive bias would also improve language models' ability to learn grammatical dependencies in typologically different languages. Here we investigate this question in Mandarin Chinese, which has a logographic, largely syllable-based writing system; different word order; and sparser morphology than English. We train LSTMs, Recurrent Neural Network Grammars, Transformer language models, and Transformer-parameterized generative parsing models on two Mandarin Chinese datasets of different sizes. We evaluate the models' ability to learn different aspects of Mandarin grammar that assess syntactic and semantic relationships. We find suggestive evidence that structural supervision helps with representing syntactic state across intervening content and improves performance in low-data settings, suggesting that the benefits of hierarchical inductive biases in acquiring dependency relationships may extend beyond English.

Comparing Grammatical Theories of Code-Mixing

Code-mixed text generation systems have found applications in many downstream tasks, including speech recognition, translation and dialogue. A paradigm of these generation systems relies on well-defined grammatical theories of code-mixing, and there is a lack of comparison of these theories. We present a large-scale human evaluation of two popular grammatical theories, Matrix-Embedded Language (ML) and Equivalence Constraint (EC). We compare them against three heuristic-based models and quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of the two grammatical theories.

Disambiguating Grammatical Number and Gender With BERT

Accurately dealing with any type of ambiguity is a major task in Natural Language Processing, with great advances recently reached due to the development of context dependent language models and the use of word or sentence embeddings. In this context, our work aimed at determining how the popular language representation model BERT handle ambiguity of nouns in grammatical number and gender in different languages. We show that models trained on one specific language achieve better results for the disambiguation process than multilingual models. Also, ambiguity is generally better dealt with in grammatical number than it is in grammatical gender, reaching greater distance values from one to another in direct comparisons of individual senses. The overall results show also that the amount of data needed for training monolingual models as well as application should not be underestimated.

ELERRANT: Automatic Grammatical Error Type Classification for Greek

In this paper, we introduce the Greek version of the automatic annotation tool ERRANT (Bryant et al., 2017), which we named ELERRANT. ERRANT functions as a rule-based error type classifier and was used as the main evaluation tool of the systems participating in the BEA-2019 (Bryant et al., 2019) shared task. Here, we discuss grammatical and morphological differences between English and Greek and how these differences affected the development of ELERRANT. We also introduce the first Greek Native Corpus (GNC) and the Greek WikiEdits Corpus (GWE), two new evaluation datasets with errors from native Greek learners and Wikipedia Talk Pages edits respectively. These two datasets are used for the evaluation of ELERRANT. This paper is a sole fragment of a bigger picture which illustrates the attempt to solve the problem of low-resource languages in NLP, in our case Greek.

Comparison of Grammatical Error Correction Using Back-Translation Models

Grammatical error correction (GEC) suffers from a lack of sufficient parallel data. Studies on GEC have proposed several methods to generate pseudo data, which comprise pairs of grammatical and artificially produced ungrammatical sentences. Currently, a mainstream approach to generate pseudo data is back-translation (BT). Most previous studies using BT have employed the same architecture for both the GEC and BT models. However, GEC models have different correction tendencies depending on the architecture of their models. Thus, in this study, we compare the correction tendencies of GEC models trained on pseudo data generated by three BT models with different architectures, namely, Transformer, CNN, and LSTM. The results confirm that the correction tendencies for each error type are different for every BT model. In addition, we investigate the correction tendencies when using a combination of pseudo data generated by different BT models. As a result, we find that the combination of different BT models improves or interpolates the performance of each error type compared with using a single BT model with different seeds.

Predicting and Explaining French Grammatical Gender

Grammatical gender may be determined by semantics, orthography, phonology, or could even be arbitrary. Identifying patterns in the factors that govern noun genders can be useful for language learners, and for understanding innate linguistic sources of gender bias. Traditional manual rule-based approaches may be substituted by more accurate and scalable but harder-to-interpret computational approaches for predicting gender from typological information. In this work, we propose interpretable gender classification models for French, which obtain the best of both worlds. We present high accuracy neural approaches which are augmented by a novel global surrogate based approach for explaining predictions. We introduce auxiliary attributes' to provide tunable explanation complexity.

Grammar equations

Diagrammatically speaking, grammatical calculi such as pregroups provide wires between words in order to elucidate their interactions, and this enables one to verify grammatical correctness of phrases and sentences. In this paper we also provide wirings within words. This will enable us to identify grammatical constructs that we expect to be either equal or closely related. Hence, our work paves the way for a new theory of grammar, that provides novel grammatical truths'. We give a nogo-theorem for the fact that our wirings for words make no sense for preordered monoids, the form which grammatical calculi usually take. Instead, they require diagrams -- or equivalently, (free) monoidal categories.

On the Relationships Between the Grammatical Genders of Inanimate Nouns and Their Co-Occurring Adjectives and Verbs

Abstract We use large-scale corpora in six different gendered languages, along with tools from NLP and information theory, to test whether there is a relationship between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the adjectives used to describe those nouns. For all six languages, we find that there is a statistically significant relationship. We also find that there are statistically significant relationships between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the verbs that take those nouns as direct objects, as indirect objects, and as subjects. We defer deeper investigation of these relationships for future work.

Context of situation in the old linguistic lesson "significance and origin"

Meaning precision and fulfillment has been the sole aim of any researcher in language, and since meaning is the outcome of grammatical structure in one specific context, that researcher must not prefer one to the other In other words, all of the grammatical aspects fall in the trap of one controversial relation when it comes to meaning interpretation Therefore, I have tackled the concept of ' situation context ' in my research and the related terminologies and its impact in the field of language , the impact of the religious factor in attracting the old scientists to the significance of grammatical from and context, the outcome of both and to what extent those scientists have relied upon them when interpreting Qur'anic text, lines of poetry only to figure out of them some new rules.