jp-evalb: Robust Alignment-based PARSEVAL Measures

We introduce an evaluation system designed to compute PARSEVAL measures, offering a viable alternative to \texttt{evalb} commonly used for constituency parsing evaluation. The widely used \texttt{evalb} script has traditionally been employed for evaluating the accuracy of constituency parsing results, albeit with the requirement for consistent tokenization and sentence boundaries. In contrast, our approach, named \texttt{jp-evalb}, is founded on an alignment method. This method aligns sentences and words when discrepancies arise. It aims to overcome several known issues associated with \texttt{evalb} by utilizing the `jointly preprocessed (JP)' alignment-based method. We introduce a more flexible and adaptive framework, ultimately contributing to a more accurate assessment of constituency parsing performance.

Neural Automated Writing Evaluation with Corrective Feedback

The utilization of technology in second language learning and teaching has become ubiquitous. For the assessment of writing specifically, automated writing evaluation (AWE) and grammatical error correction (GEC) have become immensely popular and effective methods for enhancing writing proficiency and delivering instant and individualized feedback to learners. By leveraging the power of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms, AWE and GEC systems have been developed separately to provide language learners with automated corrective feedback and more accurate and unbiased scoring that would otherwise be subject to examiners. In this paper, we propose an integrated system for automated writing evaluation with corrective feedback as a means of bridging the gap between AWE and GEC results for second language learners. This system enables language learners to simulate the essay writing tests: a student writes and submits an essay, and the system returns the assessment of the writing along with suggested grammatical error corrections. Given that automated scoring and grammatical correction are more efficient and cost-effective than human grading, this integrated system would also alleviate the burden of manually correcting innumerable essays.

Frustratingly Simple Prompting-based Text Denoising

This paper introduces a novel perspective on the automated essay scoring (AES) task, challenging the conventional view of the ASAP dataset as a static entity. Employing simple text denoising techniques using prompting, we explore the dynamic potential within the dataset. While acknowledging the previous emphasis on building regression systems, our paper underscores how making minor changes to a dataset through text denoising can enhance the final results.

Evaluating Prompting Strategies for Grammatical Error Correction Based on Language Proficiency

The writing examples of English language learners may be different from those of native speakers. Given that there is a significant differences in second language (L2) learners' error types by their proficiency levels, this paper attempts to reduce overcorrection by examining the interaction between LLM's performance and L2 language proficiency. Our method focuses on zero-shot and few-shot prompting and fine-tuning models for GEC for learners of English as a foreign language based on the different proficiency. We investigate GEC results and find that overcorrection happens primarily in advanced language learners' writing (proficiency C) rather than proficiency A (a beginner level) and proficiency B (an intermediate level). Fine-tuned LLMs, and even few-shot prompting with writing examples of English learners, actually tend to exhibit decreased recall measures. To make our claim concrete, we conduct a comprehensive examination of GEC outcomes and their evaluation results based on language proficiency.

Word segmentation granularity in Korean

This paper describes word {segmentation} granularity in Korean language processing. From a word separated by blank space, which is termed an eojeol, to a sequence of morphemes in Korean, there are multiple possible levels of word segmentation granularity in Korean. For specific language processing and corpus annotation tasks, several different granularity levels have been proposed and utilized, because the agglutinative languages including Korean language have a one-to-one mapping between functional morpheme and syntactic category. Thus, we analyze these different granularity levels, presenting the examples of Korean language processing systems for future reference. Interestingly, the granularity by separating only functional morphemes including case markers and verbal endings, and keeping other suffixes for morphological derivation results in the optimal performance for phrase structure parsing. This contradicts previous best practices for Korean language processing, which has been the de facto standard for various applications that require separating all morphemes.

Extrinsic Factors Affecting the Accuracy of Biomedical NER

Biomedical named entity recognition (NER) is a critial task that aims to identify structured information in clinical text, which is often replete with complex, technical terms and a high degree of variability. Accurate and reliable NER can facilitate the extraction and analysis of important biomedical information, which can be used to improve downstream applications including the healthcare system. However, NER in the biomedical domain is challenging due to limited data availability, as the high expertise, time, and expenses are required to annotate its data. In this paper, by using the limited data, we explore various extrinsic factors including the corpus annotation scheme, data augmentation techniques, semi-supervised learning and Brill transformation, to improve the performance of a NER model on a clinical text dataset (i2b2 2012, \citet{sun-rumshisky-uzuner:2013}). Our experiments demonstrate that these approaches can significantly improve the model's F1 score from original 73.74 to 77.55. Our findings suggest that considering different extrinsic factors and combining these techniques is a promising approach for improving NER performance in the biomedical domain where the size of data is limited.

K-UniMorph: Korean Universal Morphology and its Feature Schema

We present in this work a new Universal Morphology dataset for Korean. Previously, the Korean language has been underrepresented in the field of morphological paradigms amongst hundreds of diverse world languages. Hence, we propose this Universal Morphological paradigms for the Korean language that preserve its distinct characteristics. For our K-UniMorph dataset, we outline each grammatical criterion in detail for the verbal endings, clarify how to extract inflected forms, and demonstrate how we generate the morphological schemata. This dataset adopts morphological feature schema from Sylak-Glassman et al. (2015) and Sylak-Glassman (2016) for the Korean language as we extract inflected verb forms from the Sejong morphologically analyzed corpus that is one of the largest annotated corpora for Korean. During the data creation, our methodology also includes investigating the correctness of the conversion from the Sejong corpus. Furthermore, we carry out the inflection task using three different Korean word forms: letters, syllables and morphemes. Finally, we discuss and describe future perspectives on Korean morphological paradigms and the dataset.

Korean Named Entity Recognition Based on Language-Specific Features

In the paper, we propose a novel way of improving named entity recognition in the Korean language using its language-specific features. While the field of named entity recognition has been studied extensively in recent years, the mechanism of efficiently recognizing named entities in Korean has hardly been explored. This is because the Korean language has distinct linguistic properties that prevent models from achieving their best performances. Therefore, an annotation scheme for {Korean corpora} by adopting the CoNLL-U format, which decomposes Korean words into morphemes and reduces the ambiguity of named entities in the original segmentation that may contain functional morphemes such as postpositions and particles, is proposed herein. We investigate how the named entity tags are best represented in this morpheme-based scheme and implement an algorithm to convert word-based {and syllable-based Korean corpora} with named entities into the proposed morpheme-based format. Analyses of the results of {statistical and neural} models reveal that the proposed morpheme-based format is feasible, and the {varied} performances of the models under the influence of various additional language-specific features are demonstrated. Extrinsic conditions were also considered to observe the variance of the performances of the proposed models, given different types of data, including the original segmentation and different types of tagging formats.

Yet Another Format of Universal Dependencies for Korean

In this study, we propose a morpheme-based scheme for Korean dependency parsing and adopt the proposed scheme to Universal Dependencies. We present the linguistic rationale that illustrates the motivation and the necessity of adopting the morpheme-based format, and develop scripts that convert between the original format used by Universal Dependencies and the proposed morpheme-based format automatically. The effectiveness of the proposed format for Korean dependency parsing is then testified by both statistical and neural models, including UDPipe and Stanza, with our carefully constructed morpheme-based word embedding for Korean. morphUD outperforms parsing results for all Korean UD treebanks, and we also present detailed error analyses.

Second-Order Belief Hidden Markov Models

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are learning methods for pattern recognition. The probabilistic HMMs have been one of the most used techniques based on the Bayesian model. First-order probabilistic HMMs were adapted to the theory of belief functions such that Bayesian probabilities were replaced with mass functions. In this paper, we present a second-order Hidden Markov Model using belief functions. Previous works in belief HMMs have been focused on the first-order HMMs. We extend them to the second-order model.